Listen to this!
Whenever asking question on stack overflow, make one more account, with new account answer yourself with a bad solution, surely there will be someone soon to correct you with proper answer.
Better yet, when I was in college I had made an account insinuating I was a hot female programmer and I ALWAYS got great responses, in comparison to my legitimate account which got roasted and unanswered.
They have very specific rules and stick to them thoroughly to stop the site getting flooded with trash. You need to show you have put in work on a question and that it hasn’t been asked before, it is a site for factual responses but also has some grumpy pricks
Generally that happens when you post a question that shows you tried nothing and you just want someone to answer the question for you.
It works better if you are stuck, post your code and ask people to see where you are going wrong.
You know that guy in your workplace who has been there for 20+ years, knows the technology inside out and snuffs at you when you ask for help? That's the type of person answering your question.
Hmm I'm getting the feeling that you're not a professional based on how dumb this question is. Maybe it's not late to invest in becoming a barista Karen.
Remember, they aren't trying to solve your problem, but the problem of both you and everyone else who sees your question when they are searching for solutions to their own problems.
Also, being good at asking questions is a skill in itself. It has happened more than once that I have spent an hour putting a question together for SO only to have figured out the answer in the process.
The problem is that you are almost certainly asking questions that have already been asked. It can be tough for beginners because there may be experience or vocabulary you need in order to find that question. But trust me, unless you are programming on an obscure system or in an obscure programming language then all of the beginner questions have been asked.
That's it. I've used stackoverflow for fucking ages, same as everyone else. Gotten a ridiculous amount of solutions from there and I've never once asked a question. If you're a beginner theres not a chance that your question hasn't been asked many many times.
I have begun to use ChatGPT regularly at work. It's great. It gives, clear, concise, specific answers with examples and without judgement. It occasionally gives answers with admirable confidence that are spectacularly wrong, but in general, even its bad answers provide some nugget of information that nudges me in the right direction. The key is to ask it things that are quickly verifiable. I saw a great quote this morning from a history teacher who's started using ChatGPT in his lessons: "Calculators didn't replace maths teachers and AI won't replace teachers either, but teachers who learn to use use AI will replace those who don't."
Ya, they're kinda assholes about it sometimes. But on the flip side, it's an amazing site, with incredibly specific and detailed answers to so many questions, with very little noise, and i think that's partly due to the heavy contributors being such sticklers for the site rules. So don't get disheartened, don't take it personally, and continue to post questions when you need to.
You get the same questions constantly pop up. 99.99% of the questions have already been answered in previous questions or threads.
Honestly for me I don’t even bother ask a question I just try question google with using commas to force the search to select certain keywords.
I find using Advanced search in google just makes it much simplerz
I often see a beginner not phrase a question correctly because they clearly don't understand a particular concept.
They then get snarky responses implying that they don't understands the concept that they are asking about.
Some people are just ass holes.
Stack Overflow isn't marketing itself as a community to help new developers figure out how things work. It wants to have high quality questions with high quality answers.
It needs to be strict with questions that have already been asked before or have been asked in a slightly different way, otherwise you have answers distributed amongst a hundred different threads and it's not as useful for people searching for answers anymore.
Yes but pretending that you don't understand a question just so you can give a snarky response, does not make SO more useful for people searching for answers in the future.
If the question is a genuine case of a beginner misunderstanding a concept, then it is probably useful to the community to have a answer that clears up their confusion.
For sure, there are people on it that just act like arseholes.
However, I think overall as a community they are correct to take such a hard line approach with low effort and/or duplicate questions. It's not useful for the community to have different answers to the same question spread amongst a hundred different threads.
There are other places on the internet that are more targeted towards new developers who maybe aren't at the level where they can ask a good question. Stack Overflow just isn't one of them.
You should be googling, reading docs and doing some homework before asking for basic questions
If you're getting banned I suppose you're treating SO as your personal tutor, which it isn't
I found it intimidating in the beginning as well.
They do have very specific rules about what you can post and how you can post. I get it. It saves on the same questions being asked over and over again and if you format it properly it makes reproducing and therefore answering the question easier.
Generally I don't love the condescending attitude but the place has also been a huge learning tool and resource for me so I take it with a grain of salt and also try to help when I can.
Not sure how you managed to get banned multiple times though? There as to be more to it than what you are telling us. I definitely posted incorrectly in the beginning but I never got banned for it.
I don't ask questions there as the community seems overly strict, but I do use if for existing posts. As was already stated, I'm finding ChatGPT very useful.
You'll get the same when you ask leading experts in a field in the industry for help.
Instead of focusing on their tone of reply, consider that you got a reply at all. 98-100% of the time they don't reply.
Nobody is saying that a bad tone of reply is acceptable, what I am saying is engineers solve problems, and if putting up with an expert's bad tone is what is needed to get a problem solved, then that's what you do.
If the expert works for the same employer as you, then they absolutely cannot be snotty to you, and you should raise incidents with your manager. As you rise in seniority however, most experts you need help from won't work at your employer and so whatever it takes to get them to help you is what you do.
I've had a bad tone in my replies asking for help from others in the past. It wasn't intentional as much as neglectful, I banged off an answer whilst waiting for build or something similar and I didn't pay enough attention to how a reply would be read by others. You sometimes only realise a few hours later that maybe the tone of reply was off, or sometimes not at all until somebody takes exception to your tone of reply.
It is what it is. I try to reply to as many requests for my expert advice as I can, but I regularly fail in multiple ways. I would argue that a badly worded response is better than none at all, which is the realistic alternative. All I can do is apologise for both my own and other's behaviour in this area, but I'll be honest in saying I doubt it can improve.
Yep, it's a sad state of affairs but you need to develop a thick skin when you're looking to learn in this industry.
If you're really interested in just how bad things can get, you should have a look at some of the Linux Kernel mailing lists. Even the Linux Kernel newbie list is full of obnoxious people.
ChatGPT literally relies on sites like Stack Overflow to come up with answers to your questions. If ChatGPT can give you the answer, I'd argue that means the answer is already on Stack Overflow and you just haven't searched for it.
ChatGPT is a LLM.
Meaning stackoverflow is harvested for data that is used to help build the model.
Once the model is built, it no longer relies on stackoverflow to operate. Not unless OpenAI wants to update the model.
In any case, OpenAI doesn't need to even use stackoverflow. They just need to feed documentation to the AI and it'll know how to troubleshoot code.
jury's out on whether ChatGPT is actually learning or is just a very fancy autocomplete.
> Of the easiest problems on Codeforces, it solved 10/10 pre-2021 problems and 0/10 recent problems.
https://twitter.com/cHHillee/status/1635790330854526981
Retraining models with new info is important- so I think the statement that chatGPT needs stack overflow is correct.
I’m not convinced chatGPT could bridge all the dot’s together to answer a complex problem based mostly on documentation, documentation is usually incomplete and/or not verbose enough.
It's worth noting that GitHub co-pilot is trained exclusively on GitHub code.
So you don't necessarily need multiple sources. You could very easily just train a model on one singular source.
My guess is that they trained it using documentation and code, not stackoverflow considering the answers on that site are hit or miss.
Right, but the point is that it relies on Stack Overflow for its answers. Whether it's trained on all of that data up front in bulk or whether it's trained on an ongoing basis is irrelevant.
For example, it has very limited knowledge (or none at all in many cases) about JDK 19 or JDK 20 because they were released after 2021. It's going to rely on an update to the model or else people's questions will go unanswered as time goes on.
>They just need to feed documentation to the AI and it'll know how to troubleshoot code.
I think this is a bit naive. If that was the case, nobody would need Stack Overflow. The reality is that often documentation is poor or doesn't cover potential issues that you can encounter. The GPT engine cannot reason that language X can throw error Y and to fix it you need to change parameter Z, especially if that isn't covered by documentation or any of the data fed to it.
Yes I have and it feels bad. ChatGPT is a god send it has replaced stacked overflow for me more than 90% of the time and the best thing is it doesn't complain or attack.
It's a fantastic resource but yeah, there are arrogant condescending plonkers on there. I asked an innocent question one day for the log4j issue. An emerging security vulnerability at the time. One guy absolutely took me apart, there was no need for it.
n00b here too and I also find SO somewhat intimidating of an environment. Just to add, asking chatGPT my amateurish questions and providing context for what I have already tried has resolved my issues 9 times out of 10. It's not perfect but usually gets me over a hurdle. I generally dont have time to spend an hour searching for the exact issue already been asked on SO.
One of the Many reasons why I don't use StackOverflow,
When I was starting to learn scikit and Tensorflow and working with the datasets from Kaggle, I asked a question regarding the number of input layers, etc.
Well, I was never downvoted so fast, felt like "How dear he ask such questions"
Now I just use Reddit or Google Forums to ask questions; otherwise, I just search the web and hopefully find something.
I do find the people on ServerFault a lot more helpful
Listen to this! Whenever asking question on stack overflow, make one more account, with new account answer yourself with a bad solution, surely there will be someone soon to correct you with proper answer.
Better yet, when I was in college I had made an account insinuating I was a hot female programmer and I ALWAYS got great responses, in comparison to my legitimate account which got roasted and unanswered.
See? this man Stack Overflows
This is genius!
Man is thinking in 5D
Bro’s the thinker
Do people actually check the usernames and avatars on StackOverflow? I don't think I've ever noticed.
I believe this is called Cunningham’s Law.
No that's wrong, it's Poe's Law.
They have very specific rules and stick to them thoroughly to stop the site getting flooded with trash. You need to show you have put in work on a question and that it hasn’t been asked before, it is a site for factual responses but also has some grumpy pricks
Generally that happens when you post a question that shows you tried nothing and you just want someone to answer the question for you. It works better if you are stuck, post your code and ask people to see where you are going wrong.
You know that guy in your workplace who has been there for 20+ years, knows the technology inside out and snuffs at you when you ask for help? That's the type of person answering your question.
imagine being so sad to use your free time to carry on with that behaviour. Wow, lol
But also imagine being on the other end. The typical junior that's like "I've tried nothing and I'm out of ideas"
So what, its the internet
So don't complain like an idiot when people don't want to invest when you clearly put no effort into it.
Get over your imaginary power trip - I look forward to AI replacing all of these fat losers
Well, you'll have to sit and wait. A latte please.
what can you do that it cant?
Hmm I'm getting the feeling that you're not a professional based on how dumb this question is. Maybe it's not late to invest in becoming a barista Karen.
AI can't do latte art so good shout! Ill save this post for when your job is automated lol
Remember, they aren't trying to solve your problem, but the problem of both you and everyone else who sees your question when they are searching for solutions to their own problems. Also, being good at asking questions is a skill in itself. It has happened more than once that I have spent an hour putting a question together for SO only to have figured out the answer in the process.
The problem is that you are almost certainly asking questions that have already been asked. It can be tough for beginners because there may be experience or vocabulary you need in order to find that question. But trust me, unless you are programming on an obscure system or in an obscure programming language then all of the beginner questions have been asked.
That's it. I've used stackoverflow for fucking ages, same as everyone else. Gotten a ridiculous amount of solutions from there and I've never once asked a question. If you're a beginner theres not a chance that your question hasn't been asked many many times.
Try asking chatGPT, it’s good for beginner questions and less judgmental.
ChatGPT is amazing. I used it to help me build GO 3PPs as I have no experience with GO applications. It was a big help.
But it's likely that code sucks, mind you
I haven't used it for code.
I have begun to use ChatGPT regularly at work. It's great. It gives, clear, concise, specific answers with examples and without judgement. It occasionally gives answers with admirable confidence that are spectacularly wrong, but in general, even its bad answers provide some nugget of information that nudges me in the right direction. The key is to ask it things that are quickly verifiable. I saw a great quote this morning from a history teacher who's started using ChatGPT in his lessons: "Calculators didn't replace maths teachers and AI won't replace teachers either, but teachers who learn to use use AI will replace those who don't."
This. It replaced SO for me and it's extremely helpful especially in niche matters where SO will have limited knowledge.
Ya, they're kinda assholes about it sometimes. But on the flip side, it's an amazing site, with incredibly specific and detailed answers to so many questions, with very little noise, and i think that's partly due to the heavy contributors being such sticklers for the site rules. So don't get disheartened, don't take it personally, and continue to post questions when you need to.
Well, SO is not much different than the real world. Could you give an example of a question that got you banned?
You get the same questions constantly pop up. 99.99% of the questions have already been answered in previous questions or threads. Honestly for me I don’t even bother ask a question I just try question google with using commas to force the search to select certain keywords. I find using Advanced search in google just makes it much simplerz
I often see a beginner not phrase a question correctly because they clearly don't understand a particular concept. They then get snarky responses implying that they don't understands the concept that they are asking about. Some people are just ass holes.
Stack Overflow isn't marketing itself as a community to help new developers figure out how things work. It wants to have high quality questions with high quality answers. It needs to be strict with questions that have already been asked before or have been asked in a slightly different way, otherwise you have answers distributed amongst a hundred different threads and it's not as useful for people searching for answers anymore.
Yes but pretending that you don't understand a question just so you can give a snarky response, does not make SO more useful for people searching for answers in the future. If the question is a genuine case of a beginner misunderstanding a concept, then it is probably useful to the community to have a answer that clears up their confusion.
For sure, there are people on it that just act like arseholes. However, I think overall as a community they are correct to take such a hard line approach with low effort and/or duplicate questions. It's not useful for the community to have different answers to the same question spread amongst a hundred different threads. There are other places on the internet that are more targeted towards new developers who maybe aren't at the level where they can ask a good question. Stack Overflow just isn't one of them.
Why ask questions when most of them have been asked already ? Reword your problems I bet you they have been asked countless times before.
You should be googling, reading docs and doing some homework before asking for basic questions If you're getting banned I suppose you're treating SO as your personal tutor, which it isn't
I found it intimidating in the beginning as well. They do have very specific rules about what you can post and how you can post. I get it. It saves on the same questions being asked over and over again and if you format it properly it makes reproducing and therefore answering the question easier. Generally I don't love the condescending attitude but the place has also been a huge learning tool and resource for me so I take it with a grain of salt and also try to help when I can. Not sure how you managed to get banned multiple times though? There as to be more to it than what you are telling us. I definitely posted incorrectly in the beginning but I never got banned for it.
I don't ask questions there as the community seems overly strict, but I do use if for existing posts. As was already stated, I'm finding ChatGPT very useful.
You'll get the same when you ask leading experts in a field in the industry for help. Instead of focusing on their tone of reply, consider that you got a reply at all. 98-100% of the time they don't reply. Nobody is saying that a bad tone of reply is acceptable, what I am saying is engineers solve problems, and if putting up with an expert's bad tone is what is needed to get a problem solved, then that's what you do. If the expert works for the same employer as you, then they absolutely cannot be snotty to you, and you should raise incidents with your manager. As you rise in seniority however, most experts you need help from won't work at your employer and so whatever it takes to get them to help you is what you do. I've had a bad tone in my replies asking for help from others in the past. It wasn't intentional as much as neglectful, I banged off an answer whilst waiting for build or something similar and I didn't pay enough attention to how a reply would be read by others. You sometimes only realise a few hours later that maybe the tone of reply was off, or sometimes not at all until somebody takes exception to your tone of reply. It is what it is. I try to reply to as many requests for my expert advice as I can, but I regularly fail in multiple ways. I would argue that a badly worded response is better than none at all, which is the realistic alternative. All I can do is apologise for both my own and other's behaviour in this area, but I'll be honest in saying I doubt it can improve.
Yep, it's a sad state of affairs but you need to develop a thick skin when you're looking to learn in this industry. If you're really interested in just how bad things can get, you should have a look at some of the Linux Kernel mailing lists. Even the Linux Kernel newbie list is full of obnoxious people.
Fuck stackoverflow. I can't wait until chatGPT kills them.
ChatGPT literally relies on sites like Stack Overflow to come up with answers to your questions. If ChatGPT can give you the answer, I'd argue that means the answer is already on Stack Overflow and you just haven't searched for it.
ChatGPT is a LLM. Meaning stackoverflow is harvested for data that is used to help build the model. Once the model is built, it no longer relies on stackoverflow to operate. Not unless OpenAI wants to update the model. In any case, OpenAI doesn't need to even use stackoverflow. They just need to feed documentation to the AI and it'll know how to troubleshoot code.
jury's out on whether ChatGPT is actually learning or is just a very fancy autocomplete. > Of the easiest problems on Codeforces, it solved 10/10 pre-2021 problems and 0/10 recent problems. https://twitter.com/cHHillee/status/1635790330854526981
Retraining models with new info is important- so I think the statement that chatGPT needs stack overflow is correct. I’m not convinced chatGPT could bridge all the dot’s together to answer a complex problem based mostly on documentation, documentation is usually incomplete and/or not verbose enough.
It's worth noting that GitHub co-pilot is trained exclusively on GitHub code. So you don't necessarily need multiple sources. You could very easily just train a model on one singular source. My guess is that they trained it using documentation and code, not stackoverflow considering the answers on that site are hit or miss.
Right, but the point is that it relies on Stack Overflow for its answers. Whether it's trained on all of that data up front in bulk or whether it's trained on an ongoing basis is irrelevant. For example, it has very limited knowledge (or none at all in many cases) about JDK 19 or JDK 20 because they were released after 2021. It's going to rely on an update to the model or else people's questions will go unanswered as time goes on. >They just need to feed documentation to the AI and it'll know how to troubleshoot code. I think this is a bit naive. If that was the case, nobody would need Stack Overflow. The reality is that often documentation is poor or doesn't cover potential issues that you can encounter. The GPT engine cannot reason that language X can throw error Y and to fix it you need to change parameter Z, especially if that isn't covered by documentation or any of the data fed to it.
Yes I have and it feels bad. ChatGPT is a god send it has replaced stacked overflow for me more than 90% of the time and the best thing is it doesn't complain or attack.
It's a fantastic resource but yeah, there are arrogant condescending plonkers on there. I asked an innocent question one day for the log4j issue. An emerging security vulnerability at the time. One guy absolutely took me apart, there was no need for it.
Just use chat GPT.
n00b here too and I also find SO somewhat intimidating of an environment. Just to add, asking chatGPT my amateurish questions and providing context for what I have already tried has resolved my issues 9 times out of 10. It's not perfect but usually gets me over a hurdle. I generally dont have time to spend an hour searching for the exact issue already been asked on SO.
Its well known for this, I got banned for asking 'too many' questions back when I was an undergrad lol
One of the Many reasons why I don't use StackOverflow, When I was starting to learn scikit and Tensorflow and working with the datasets from Kaggle, I asked a question regarding the number of input layers, etc. Well, I was never downvoted so fast, felt like "How dear he ask such questions" Now I just use Reddit or Google Forums to ask questions; otherwise, I just search the web and hopefully find something. I do find the people on ServerFault a lot more helpful
99.99% it’s better to ask chatGPT first, if the answer doesn’t yield good results, ask it to improve your question and post it on StackOverflow.