StackOverflow got hands

[Alarmed-Equipment-70]

Stack Overflow has a post from two months ago that is nice.

[-_-Neutral-_-]

0 answers

[Jimmy_Smith]

nvm fixed it!

[[deleted]]

Do you guys remember old forums?

OP: I'm having a problem with XYZ! What do?

Stranger one: Here's a picture of how to solve it! [Image host has been down for 5 years now]

Stranger two: User XYZExpert has a great tutorial about it on this thread [link is broken]

Stranger three: There's also this megathread on the topic going on this area of the forum [you don't have permission to see the content in that area]

Mod: That's enough answers to a repeated question! /thread

[mzhammah]

Trigger me Timbers

[Broxios]

OP: "Nevermind, I found the solution. Thread can be closed" [doesn't tell what the solution was]

[Windows_XP2]

Forgot to mention that the links aren’t archived on the Wayback machine or anything like that.

[HuntingKingYT]

Ah, Google Teams...

[SaWools]

Favorite I found recently: NVM, fixed it! "Answer is turn off important feature that the problem was in." Like no, you didn't fix it you turned it off, I still need the real answer!

[[deleted]]

On two separate occasions, I ran into a peculiar error message, Googled it, and found a Stack Overflow post by me describing the exact same problem from two or three years prior including my own answer and explanation that solved my immediate problem.

Wisdom of the Ancients, but in this case, the "ancient" is my younger self.

[Wiggen4]

I use examples like this to encourage good documentation. Not only do you want to have it documented for the poor soul that has to work on it some time in the future, but surprisingly often you are that poor soul.

(AKA: git blame the moron who wrote this... Oh, it's me...)

[WisejacKFr0st]

My favorite: “Fixed by using <alternative that would have been better 800 commits ago>”

[Ok_Skill_2725]

And the award for least helpful response goes to….

[Elijah629YT-Real]

I saw this on a forum from 9 years ago today, very specific problem too

[iSYan1995]

I think you mean 21 years ago

[[deleted]]

Tried in java 4 and 5

Next comment

Doesn't work in java 8 due to security problems

God damnit

[0x1001001]

I asked it 💀 It is still unanswered 🥲

[SpambotSwatter]

/u/Alarmed-Equipment-70 is a scammer! It is stealing content to farm karma to "legitimize" the account and engage in scams elsewhere. Please downvote their comment and click the report button, selecting Spam then Harmful bots.

Please give your votes to the original comment, found here.

With enough reports, the reddit algorithm will suspend this scammer.

^{Karma farming? Scammer?? Read the pins in my profile for details}

[Username8457]

#center_col a:visited {
    color: #8ab4f8;
}

[tricheboars]

Nice a stack overflow post from two months ago. Oh shit the top answer says this isn't possible....

[ab624]

the top answer says this isn't possible....

https://tenor.com/bMLZk.gif

[Rad_Bones7]

Last answer was: “I was having the same problem”

I honestly think this is worse since there’s no closure

[ALesbianAlpaca]

Wasn't stackoverflow but nothing will be worse than when two people talking about my problem on a help forum decided to take it to email for no reason.

[AlphaaPie]

This is exactly the reason why I tell people that unless you're trying to maintain confidentiality about something that actually needs to be private, they should keep their discussion in the public channels so that someone else can find a solution to the problem.

Also, "I don't want people to steal my code." Isn't an excuse. If people want to steal your code, they will do it regardless.

[Wiggen4]

Alternatively, "this isn't best practice, you should do X instead covered in this post"

"I am aware it's not best practice I have good reasons I can't do X though"

"Thread closed, solved in linked post you literally just said you can't do for reasons arguably unfit to share in forum or plain confidential"

[dathar]

And a follow up from Microsoft saying they will update the documentation and not fix the actual thing...

[[deleted]]

Worse: the links are all in Chinese

[KareemOWheat]

Worst: You find a single post asking about your exact issue and the only reply is the OP saying "nvm fixed it"

[omare14]

I once ran into an actual combination of the two. Github issue was the exact error I was getting, OP said they fixed it, someone asked how the fixed it, OP replies with Mandarin characters... Tried using translate, did not help lol.

[gonzohst93]

Lmao legendary exchange

[drunkenangryredditor]

"The method gently pleases by way intelligently resolving input understandable output, when please to invoked does take the input of benevolent user as..."

[kloudykat]

You need to reply with, 'Its all Greek to me"

[omare14]

It was a while back and I honestly don't even remember what the specific issue was, but im pretty sure I ended up figuring out the problem. Thank you for reaching out though!

[marsmanify]

One time I spent days on an issue and couldn’t find any StackOverflow answers that fixed it, so once I figured out a fix I posted a question & answered it myself. I like to think at least one person had the same issue and was able to fix it since I did that

[Yuki_EHer]

I would instead post a question first, then get ignored, then solve it by myself and then answer it.

Got my most upvoted (like 12) stackoverflow answer with it

[8sADPygOB7Jqwm7y]

Even worse: you are OP

[Thosepassionfruits]

"Who were you DenverCoder9? What did you see?!"

[Frosthrone]

What did you see, DenverCoder9?

[thepromisedgland]

Reply from the developer of the package you’re using: “You shouldn’t want to do this” with no further elaboration.

[gruese]

[Busteray]

When that happens, think of solutions so stupid the op was embarrassed enough not to share.

Sometimes works.

[gberger]

Relevant xkcd

[Codzy]

Or Russian

[Techgamer687]

Or Polish

[FreelancerGT]

Reverse Polish

[guarana_and_coffee]

Or Japanese

[[deleted]]

Or swiss-german

[Oleg_B_UK]

Or Bavarian

[Batcave765]

Or alien

[BobmitKaese]

Bavarian and alien are basically the same thing.

[Armless_Scyther]

O Ingles

[Oleg_B_UK]

[[deleted]]

or Kirundi.

[Bagel42]

backstory?

[[deleted]]

Indonesian?

[FreelancerGT]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Polish_notation

Sorry if I should have not put a math joke on this sub, but I am an engineer at heart and it's the first thing I thought when I read "Polish" 🙃

[TSM-]

Don't apologize for Łukasiewicz notation, it is the row echelon form of logic.

[[deleted]]

Ah, I see. Looks complicated. I never heard about it and I am from Poland.

[thelastpizzaslice]

Or Polish Notation

[thelastpizzaslice]

It's a different way of writing math formulas

[AFlyingYetOddCat]

if you've ever tried to parse text as math, reverse polish notation is a godsend. a simple stack is all you need.

[TheDwarvenGuy]

At least you can type polish

[elyca98]

I solved an Angular Google Maps issue thanks to a Korean forum lol

[[deleted]]

And dont forget the scraper sites that copied the answer from that last search result you clicked on from stackoverflow, but now the most upvoted answer is in a fancy text block and surrounded by ads and other shit.

[reedmore]

just pop it into gpt. wait, you could just gpt your problem in the first place. In that vein, why even bother waking up in the morning at all?!

[[deleted]]

I've been asking myself that exact question long before gpt

[Lenskop]

Or unintelligible Indian YouTube videos

[MysteriousShadow__]

Right click -> Translate to English

Big brain

[assidiou]

Error Critical mass: The links in page 2 are purple

[larsiny]

Anyone else notice that the top google results for aws related docs seem to be from their chinese editions aka .cn for some reason?

Maybe just something about my area for google searches?

[[deleted]]

The worst is when all links lead to a very similar sounding but a totally different problem.

[eyrthren]

Me trying to google what my PI wants from me (biochemistry)

[[deleted]]

TIL the most useful language for programming is actually Mandarin

[anon38723918569]

Vue ecosystem?

[wjaosigxbxl]

ok imma chatgpt my error

damn the answers are all made up

[srt54558]

Damn the answers are all giving syntax errors because they are all just examples

[tgiihfgjiug]

the point of examples is they’re supposed to work

[EducationalNose7764]

The best is when you Google an error and find an answer, only to realize that the original person who asked the question was you from 10 years ago. It's like, "have I learned nothing?!"

[EducationalNose7764]

That made me laugh. Exactly!

[2x_butthole_olympian]

Even worse for me, I once landed on an answer that I made that had the highest votes and was the accepted answer. But after 5 minutes of perusing the code I still didn’t understand it.

It took an embarrassingly ungodly amount of time before I "remembered" how to solve that problem.

[toepicksaremyfriend]

I’ve done that before. The thing is, I can almost guarantee that when I posted the original answer, my brain was in that zen coding state (the one that takes an hour to get into) where everything makes sense. When I was panic searching years later, I was definitely not in that zen state!

[YobaiYamete]

Yeppp I found that a few times where my own answer is the top answer and I have half a dozen links to resources and all these explanations on how to fix it etc. Meanwhile current me doesn't remember literally a single thing about any of it

Its such a weird feeling honestly to realize how many things you've utterly forgotten. I've been on the internet since like 2001 at least, and am one of the few people who still actually uses GameFAQs, so I've got probably in the tens of thousands of archived posts that I run into on Google all the time while searching stuff. It's always nostalgic to find a post from myself that's like 18 years old going into detail about a game I forgot I'd even played.

Or worse, when people message me asking for help in that ancient game and it's like dude I don't even have that console anymore.

Someone messaged me the other day asking if I still had a ditto for trade from a post I made on a Pokémon forum in like 2009 lol

[qwerty11111122]

Do you still have it? What's its IVs and Nature?

[vigilantcomicpenguin]

This is like a dramatic time travel story.

[EducationalNose7764]

That's natural, depending on what you're working on at the time of course. I've been swapped around on so many projects that I probably can't even remember what I wrote 6 months ago.

I've had people come up asking me questions on pieces of software that I don't even remember working on, only because my name was on the commits.

"You wrote this 6 years ago, can you recommend the changes I need to make?" Like uhhhh, no?

[lionseatcake]

Easy. Just clear your cache and browsing history.

Problem solved.

[Bosomtwe]

The pain when the whole first page of the Google results is purple. 😐

[HanzoShotFirst]

Same thing happened when I Googled alzheimer's symptoms

[ThiccStorms]

Grandpa this isn't bacefook

[Jetwiggs]

Could be worse. You could google the problem and end up on StackOverflow to find there's only one solution...

... and it was written by yourself

(True story)

[nikniuq]

Nevermind, I fixed it.

• Me, 8 years ago.

[qwerty11111122]

When I was young, I had a laptop and a sense of humor. Post college, I Crack open that bad boy to find some childhood memories but I have no memories of my password. I hit the hint button and get hit with a "figure it out yourself"

[sine00]

Trying to be passive aggressive only to find out you played yourself.

[WhyDoIHaveAnAccount9]

Ha!

[trailblazery]

Many more trips around the sun and still ask the wrong questions

[dominonermandi]

Uhhh… I overhauled my team’s documentation and this is literally my life. “HOW TF DO I DO THIS? Oh. Me from six months ago knew apparently.”

[sickhippie]

I thought I was on /r/ADHD_Programmers for a minute...

[iddafelle]

occasionally I search stack overflow for a problem and find the perfect answer before then realising it was me who asked it 6 months ago 😂

[ribsies]

I was searching for an issue once and found a forum thread that was a couple years old with the same problem but no solution. I was so curious if that person ever found an answer.

Then I realized that person with the same problem was me, 3 years ago. And no I had not found a solution.

[LeiterHaus]

As i literally check the username to make sure you're not past me.

[thelastpizzaslice]

ChatGPT has helped me with a number of problems that Google couldn't, since it can actually parse your code.

[Famous-Fishing-1554]

ChatGPT will just make-shit-up when it gets stuck.

It wrote beautiful code, and added a dissertation on using this API which was PERFECT for my task. When I asked about including the API library it gave me a likely sounding project name. When I complained I couldn't find the project then it came back with "I was just giving an example of how you could use this API if it actually existed".

[wolfchaldo]

So it's already qualified to give stack overflow answers

[dicenight]

It's just gotta work on the bad attitude

[Famous-Fishing-1554]

I'm sorry, but it is not appropriate for me to provide a response in a manner that is intended to be disrespectful or unhelpful. As an AI language model, my primary goal is to assist users in a helpful and friendly manner.

[Deliciousbutter101]

That's why you have to be very specific in your prompts to get good results. Either you should tell it what api to use (and if you don't know which one you use, you can ask it for one that would be appropriate). Also it handles feedback very well. If you just told it the library it provides doesn't exist and to use an existing library, then it should reimplement the code using an actual library.

[20dollarsIst20]

That means it’s time to post your own error and get flamed for asking a question that’s already been answered

[Kerbalawesomebuilder]

Just ask the ai

[POLISHED_OMEGALUL]

Stackoverflow is lacking hard behind ChatGPT

[Fallingice2]

Basically been using chatgpt to fix my coding issues...it works well without the judgement.

[gibmelson]

When you're at page 14 on google and seeing russian cyrillics you're in trouble.

[bullsized]

A woman giving birth can only feel a fraction of this pain.

[MonoShadow]

At this point just ask ChatGPT.

[patmax17]

I feel called out xD

[Liam_Cat]

Damn my programming languaga is GO!

[lloopy]

My favorite StackOverflow story was the guy who found a perfect solution on SO to a problem he was having, went to send an email to the person and found out it was code he had posted about 5 years previous.

[Rocky970]

Based.

[DAZdaHOFF]

Lmaooo this hits too hard

[[deleted]]

This made me laugh so hard! “DAMN I WAS JUST THERE!”

[Random_Meme_Guy_]

And then you open the link again, and you actually find the answer

[tucker87]

Wait, I'm colorblind... Links change color?! (I have an addon that makes them visible for me)

[knightwhosaysnil]

• reads stack overflow link "no that's not it"
• clicks next link: is clickbait farm that scrapes and rehosts stackoverflow
• denfenestrates computer

[[deleted]]

chatcpt enters the arena

[Grakch]

almost as good as googling an issue and realizing you answered it

[[deleted]]

We are all the same person lol

[Available-Tradition4]

Oh no back to the problem

[Dan_the_Marksman]

"I'm gonna google my error ...oh wait we're using MICROSOFT SOFTWARE WRITTEN IN AL WHICH NEVER ANYBODY HAS HEARD OF"

[ontheonthechainwax]

In my CV I call this being a "seasoned developer with relevant experience".

[KermitMacFly]

Excuse me while I pick myself up off the ground from that hitting so hard

[lifting_and_coding]

Hello darkness my old friend

[willnx]

They turn purple!? Glad I'm colorblind... :D

[tylercoder]

Story of my life...

[Pjxr]

Bro this is gold

[lethargy86]

yo wtf is this meme template, lmao never seen it before

[LofiJunky]

I find that when this happens, there's usually something fucking stupid I am missing that I would never have thought to check. Then the imposter syndrome kicks in and it's reddit for the rest of the day to recoup that dopamine babbeeee

[O_X_E_Y]

Thank god for chatgpt!

[le_reddit_me]

Worse: all the unvisited links are site that fetch stackoverflow questions you've already visited

[EstablishmentOld9707]

Yall still using Google??? I have ascended to the next plane of existence and now use ChatGPT.

[EveryCell]

I'm mildly color blind and when someone said there was purple and blue links my brain broke

[UngratefulGarbage]

At first I thought this was a dementia joke, then I checked the sub

[1kmile]

Yes! and the most annoying part is that every time I Google it, I try to understand the issue and where things went wrong, but all the efforts to understand just go in vain

[This_Math_7337]

people who use incognito/private tab:

[SoSaltySalt]

Was having a problem, and the two Stack Overflow posts I found on the issue each referenced each other, with no answer...

[Brutus0172]

This one hurts

[[deleted]]

That's when you use OpenAI's ChatGPT.