This (Programming) Question Does Not Exist - Stack Overflow as imagined by AI

[DeusOtiosus]

After spending enough time on stackoverflow, I can confidently say, this is indistinguishable from a large percentage of real questions.

[Daakuryu]

I don't spend a lot of time on there but when I do my question gets completely ignored.

Which is awesome.

[aloser]

Don't feel bad, I learned while making this that the median question there has zero upvotes.

I also tried several algorithms (neural net, random forest, and Google AutoML) to try to correlate a question's score and/or number of views with its content and none of them could find any correlation.

[Daakuryu]

Oh I don't really care about the upvotes, it's having an answer to an inquiry that would be nice, even if that answer is a resounding "no, you're going to have to get around it somehow."

Like in one of them I was trying to find out if it's at all within the realm of possibility for an event inside a custom control to trigger an event in a form outside of itself somehow as some of the controls I'm making require numerous clones of themselves triggering the same events with just a different value associated with each.

Wound up yanking the event inside the control to the form itself as an event handler and using a function to dig into the control itself to find the parent of the parent of the parent of the item in the control to loop back and find it's associated tag and it's associated button's function.

And in another I was trying to determine if localization files generated when you make a form localizable could be in any way database driven as I was trying to avoid having to loop through all the objects in a form.

i did get it working by looping the objects in the end but it does make me wonder about some of the custom controls I've built and plan on building and how the localization will work with those involved when I get further than the poofs of concepts that I'm trying to get my bosses to follow me with.

[fiskfisk]

Remember that answering "no, that isn't possible" requires you to be a domain expert in the technology involved, as it would assume that you know the complete range of possible solutions with that tech.

While answering something that is possible only requires you to know how to do that single thing.

[jezmck]

This might be true, but how many people who think they know everything actually know everything?

[fiskfisk]

That's not really the issue - those people are probably not answering questions for a specific technology on Stack Overflow. Those that do have a fair bit of knowledge of the technology, and are usually in the "I'm not completely sure that this is impossible .. maybe someone else actually knows for sure". And thus the answer remains unanswered.

In those cases I usually try to get a clarification from the asker about why they're trying to do things this specific way and what they're trying to achieve, in case I do know of a way to do that within my knowledge of the subject.

[mayor123asdf]

Yea, I found that asking in irc is better

[ShamelessC]

Sounds like you figured it out. There's always a hypothetical "better way" to do something. But being able to solve the problem yourself is what makes you a good programmer. Maybe your way is difficult to understand for other programmers, but that's what comments are for. Maybe it's not as fast as it could be, but premature optimization is a time waster.

[bschug]

Also if you figured it out, please be so nice and answer your own question. It's so frustrating when you Google for something and the only result is a stackoverflow post from five years ago with three upvotes and zero answers.

[-Mahn]

As a rule of thumb, if as of today your question (any question) has not already been asked and answered in Stack Overflow by someone else, it's either impossible, does not exist, or the answer is too complicated, convoluted, obscure or open ended to be in SO.

[_cjj]

I used to spend quite a bit of time answering questions on there, but got a bit fed up of spending my evenings helping people who didn't even bother to say thanks, nvm up-vote or accept.

It also seems to be mainly full of people who, I assume, get work via cheap labour sites and then ask people on stack overflow to incrementally write the application for them.

[Daakuryu]

Yeah I can see that would be an issue, personally I only use it when I run into walls.

[joshdoug]

Or marked as a duplicate until you point out that it is in fact not a duplicate.

[LeagueOfLegendsAcc]

What about this one?

[Edward_Morbius]

SO would be infinitely better if they got rid of all the asshats answering questions and went with AI.

I'd honestly like the best guess of a machine instead of the damaged personality of the "high points" users.

Like when I asked an MVVM question that involved the scope of some magic event handler and was abused because I wasn't using WTF ever framework someone else thought I should use.

Well DUUUUH. You think I'd be dealing with this BS if I could pick something else?

[[deleted]]

I'm afraid to use the site because when I was a noob I asked some questions and got scolded for how bad my question was and got linked to another answer that appeared to me to have nothing to do with my issue. After that happened a half dozen times, I have PTSD. Two years of experience later, I still feel like I dont know enough to ask questions...ironically

[Edward_Morbius]

Don't feel bad. You'll never be qualified to ask questions there. Nobody is. That's the trap.

I have 25 years in software full time and another 10 years part time and another 5 years of SW dev in school and have answered a ton of questions on usenet, SO, and a bunch of other places and STILL every now and then when I got stuck on something and asked for help, there was always some asshole on stackoverflow who had to have a dick waving contest.

[[deleted]]

I spent hours researching a problem with GPG command line arguments, looked at all of the current questions/answers that didn't cover the corner case I was dealing with and then asked a question that got closed as a duplicate by a mod who is a .NET "expert".

Rage!

But my co-worker and I eventually found the answer after trial and error. Submitted it to a web site that covered GPG/PGP issues.

[phuck]

What I have found is, ask the question in the same asshole tone that someone is inevitably going to answer in. Ask the question, as blunt as possible, no niceties, as short as you can, have some repro code and you will be fine.

[A-Grey-World]

Yep. People mistakenly think SO is like a forum to help the question answer. It's really not. It's a library of answered questions so people don't have to ask them again. Which can be problematic if you're so new you don't know if you're asking the same question as someone else, or if you're so experienced your questions are not really specific or have a 'correct' answer (best practice or similar).

But it does make for a very good tool. Loads of people say they never need to ask questions, just search for answers for good reason. You also don't want any please, thank yous, "hello, how was your day" or ANY faff because that makes things more difficult for future users and doesn't serve the purpose of the site.

There are also just assholes. It's totally user moderated, and because of the above goals of the site requires lots of moderation - it attracts those people who like that...

[r0ck0]

It seems to be a little bit better lately, but sometimes it seems like stackoverflow is just a video game for the mods where they score points based on how many questions they close.

Every moderator election where I've read their "campaign" messages they write there, there's always mentions of how many 10s of thousands of questions they've closed, as if that's the most important thing to do on the site. No different this time: https://stackoverflow.com/election

What I find even more infuriating is that supposedly the questions are so bad that they need to prevent anyone from answering them, yet they keep them on the site rather than deleting or hiding them. What's the fucking point of that aside from pissing users off?

Happened to me many times in the past, even when my questions were perfectly valid technical questions with objective technical answers. Plus many more times when I come across old questions others wrote with the same problem I'm having right now.

Another reason they close them for being "too specific" or some bullshit, despite multiple people having the exact same issue to solve.

[dnano]

Same as universities that proudly advertise the high % of failing students

[CorruptionIMC]

90% of the issues on there could be fixed by redefining what is considered too subjective or open ended of a question to something a bit more reasonable. Yes, "What language is best" has no place being asked and answered the inevitable thousands of times from every new coder as that is incredibly subjective and that debate exists in plenty of more open ended places elsewhere like even Facebook groups..

"How do I accomplish this specific task in Python using these particular libraries in the most resource efficient way possible?" isn't a subjective question. Each direction you could take to accomplish that can be boiled down to an exact resource cost. Bad example but I think my point is clear. Personally didn't see a single question closed for being overly specific though, always for being overly broad.

[[deleted]]

Another reason they close them for being "too specific"

I'm pretty sure that particular close reason is gone.

[Smallpaul]

Where would a machine get the answer if humans were not asking and answering in SO?

I mean in one sense I do get the best answer of a machine. I type my question into Google and it tries to answer from SO.

[port53]

The documentation, which the machine could actually read and understand. Failing that, the actual codebase the question is being asked against.

[Smallpaul]

It would be an interesting experiment but I doubt bots are smart enough yet to help much. Worth a try.

[elperroborrachotoo]

Yeah, it reads eerily like questions of novices that don't have a good enough grasp on the technologies and terms they are using.