I stopped contributing to stackoverflow, but it's not declining - <AUTHOR> http://techblog.bozho.net/i-stopped-contributing-to-stackoverflow-but-its-not-declining/ <comment><USER3> Stackoverflow works great for me, and I don't know why more people don't appear to use it like I do.

1) When you've got a problem, Google it. 98% of the time the answer will be in top 5 links to stackoverflow or documentation. You upvote the answer and question.

2) 1.5% of the time, stackoverflow will have a related question, but either it doesn't have an answer, or the answer has issues.

You figure it out yourself, so you post a comment or answer or just the crappy workaround you used because you ran out of time to figure it out completely.

3) The remaining 0.5% of the time, you get nothing. You post a question, but of course nobody answers because it's an esoteric, hard question. 24 hours later you post an answer to your own question, or more likely a crappy workaround.

And eventually somebody posts a great answer to your question. (Once this happened to me >3 years after I posted it!) It's way too late for you, but it will help the next person with the same problem.

You don't get a lot of karma quickly this way since you're posting esoteric stuff, but you do tend to pick up some badges that are designed to reward this sort of behaviour, like "Populist" and "Necromancer". You do pick up karma slowly and steadily, though. What's satisfying is seeing an answer tick over from zero to one ~12 months after you posted it, realising that you saved somebody hours of frustration.

If you answer an easy question, you've saved somebody a few minutes. When you answer a hard one, you've saved hours or days.

<comment><USER4> One issue I run into is finding a Stack Overflow question that exactly matches the issue I've run into, find that it's been closed for being a duplicate, click the link to the question it's supposed to be a duplicate of, and find that the other question is completely unrelated. Not only can I not find the answer from SO at this point, but if I find the answer on my own I can't even help others.

Another issue I've run into is the minimum numbers of characters needed to edit an answer. Once I found the answer that was chosen and upvoted had code that didn't make any sense. It was something like an instance of a point object "point1" and an instance "newpoint" and they wrote "point1 = newpoint;" but actually meant "point1 = new point();". When I realized the problem I tried to change it but wasn't able to because I wasn't changing the answer enough (I think there's a minimum 6 character limit). I didn't want to make random changes elsewhere just to make the minimum needed to fix it, so I let it be.

I find Stack Overflow useful, but I don't try to participate in it anymore and don't stay signed in.

<comment><USER5> The ones that really get my gripe are the ones that are flagged for being off topic.. Off what topic? This is a place where technical questions are asked and answered and this is a technical question that needs answering - Why is it closed?

<comment><USER6> I have flagged many questions for being off topic. You could say I'm part of the "problem" but from my standpoint, someone will ask a question that can be answered so many ways that the scope is too broad. Many times the person asking doesn't know enough to understand just how broad the question they've asked is. That's why I also leave a comment telling them _why_ I just voted to close.

This is, unfortunately, an unsolvable problem. They're asking the question precisely because they don't understand what they're asking enough to get a meaningful answer.

<comment><USER7> Maybe some questions are just not "too broad" but simply broad, and that one may wish to have a number of possible solutions to a problem and pick the one that fits one's case best ("one" being possibly someone else in the future that has a not precisely similar but close enough problem that the set of proposed solutions can help in finding the right path).

So maybe, just maybe a slightly broad question with a couple answers _may_ be better that an theoretically ideal set of a thousand (question, answer) tuples each trying to fit a very restricted case. Unfortunately some mods seem hell- bent on promoting the latter, possibly in hope of writing bots that solve-by- Google (see stacksort[0]).

[0]: [https://gkoberger.github.io/stacksort/](https://gkoberger.github.io/stacksort/)

<comment><USER8> > Maybe some questions are just not "too broad" but simply broad, and that one > may wish to have a number of possible solutions to a problem and pick the > one that fits one's case best

I think there are two kinds of "broad":

1\. There are multiple ways to solve a specific problem with a specific expected outcome. "How do I sort an array?", for example, is a broad question in that it can be solved in many ways, but you can definitively say whether any given solution is correct or not.

2\. The problem is not specific, and there is no clear way to determine whether any given answer is actually a "solution". For example, a single question with only the text, "How do you write a game?"

Most "broad" questions fall on some spectrum between these two, but the closer a question is to the latter category, the less likely it is to generate any sort of helpful feedback. The community does sometimes label the former as "too broad", but 95% of the time the given close reasons are correct, and when they are wrong the site provides documentation on how to get your question re- opened.

It's hard to maintain a proper balance between moderating the inundation of terrible questions and avoiding the false-negative closing of legitimate questions.

<comment><USER9> I'd love to see the SO community's answers to "How do you write a game?".

<comment><USER8> I think this is an interesting and common response to the policies. As if the "Too Broad" close policy is the only thing stopping volunteer contributors from writing a 10 page thesis "How To Write A Video Game" for every questioner that asks for it.

<comment><USER9> Isn't this alleviated somewhat by marking duplicates? If nobody ever writes any good answers on the original question, oh well! It's just annoying when nobody _can_ write a good answer to a broad question.

But hey, it's their site, and I'm just some rando on the internet - they get to make whatever policies they want.

<comment><USER8> My emphasis was less on the replication of effort, which duplicate tagging definitely resolves, and more on the idea that broad open-ended questions raise the bar for a well-qualified high-quality answer far above and beyond that needed for a simple and concise question of limited scope.

Allowing such questions effectively lowers the percentage of questions that get good answers, thereby training users NOT to expect an answer to a posted question, and leading to decreased engagement.

On the other hand, by disallowing such questions, the questions that do get asked are more likely to be answered, and this encourages repeat visits and increased engagement.

<comment><USER9> Hey, by the way, in case you happen to come back and see this after the fact: I've found your perspectives in this thread compelling, and while I'm not completely convinced, I'll definitely be incorporating your arguments into my thinking in the future.

Just thought I'd let you know you haven't been shouting into the wind!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> SO is another area where I feel "out of sync" with the rest of the "programming world", in that I've...

* ...never posted a question to SO (because I've never found it either necessary or helpful to do so),

* ...only ever "copy-pasted" from SO once (it was a CSS polyfill for iOS having broken "support" for vh/vw)

* ...only attempted to answer questions on SO twice, exclusively out of a feeling of "am I missing something?"

I've been programming for 16 years, and doing so professionally for 7 of those. I've always seen StackOverflow as like a worse version of MDN or something: obscure API-specific stuff that should be in documentation for libXYZ or XYZService but for some reason isn't, with answers supplied by random internet people and "graded" by other, less-knowledgeable random internet people.

For more advanced stuff (like "what are higher-kinded types" or "how do monads help simplify concurrency"), online articles, tutorials, or IRC channels have always been a sufficient supplement to just trying stuff myself.

I must be missing something, given the "reverence" SO seems to get.

<comment><USER11> I don't think you are missing anything.

I also have never asked anything on SO, and never used SO as a reference. SO only seems to work for factual simple answers that are found in the documentation or manual pages.

For higher level discussion SO is not appropriate; mailing lists and IRC work best for that.

I suspect most people don't like reading reference material so asking random stuff on SO works for them

<comment><USER12> > I suspect most people don't like reading reference material so asking random > stuff on SO works for them

This is probably true.

I'm not a Windows developer and on a recent project I had to use their IDE (which turns out to quite nice, if you are an IDE person) and a set of their APIs. I read, but did not understand, some pretty fundamental/basic MS- authored documentation. I found a few answers to questions related to other people not understanding it either, and was on my way again.

To be fair to MS, it _was_ documented, completely and accurately. I just wasn't accustomed to some of their calling conventions and was getting yelled at by the linker.

EDIT: Outside of embedded systems, where there are a lot fewer moving parts than on your typical MS OS box, it's been a while (20 years?) since I was thrown at an environment where _everything_ changed from what I am accustomed to. OS. Language. CPU architecture target. IDE. IDE configuration for project build. Build process. SDKs. Calling convention. Oh, and the 2M line code-base that I had just been introduced to (and where none of the MS Visual Studio project files had been checked into version control - so I'm fumbling in the dark there). Googling for the error message and landing on SO at least gets you to the point that you know you have a configuration problem vs a calling convention problem. That tells you where you need to start looking in the documentation.

<comment><USER13> One of the weird things about MS documentation is how _slow_ MSDN is. It's often faster to find the answer through Google->Stackoverflow than it is starting at the top and drilling down MSDN.

<comment><USER12> Now that you mention it, I've noticed that. The pages seem to load quickly enough, but take a while to appear. I might be some funky client-side JS rendering "stuff". It reminds me of how a lot of material design web- component/apps take forever to change after you "load" or "click" (for example).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I would love to use stackoverflow actively, but wasn't very successful so far.

It's great to use as a passive user. It's a great encyclopedia. But all my attempts to ask questions were unsuccessful.

I posted 3 questions where I did not receive any answers or clues at all. The questions seem to have a lot of views, so I tried to answer them myself later (in cases I found one). Which is ok, but makes it like an encyclopedia.

On two other occasions I needed help to figure out which way to attack a problem (which systems to use). I wrote a detailed description of my data, use case, restrictions, etc. Both questions were heavily downvoted as they're too subjective and not specific enough. Apart from downvotes I received some unhelpful spam so that I deleted the questions after a while. Luckily, I got more helpful answers on Reddit.

I understand that SO wants to keep discussions on topic, but why can't I ask questions about how to implement a problem, or which design to use best for a given data set?

So the problem is, I cannot use it for too specific questions (often receive no answer) but also not for too general ones (receive downvotes as being too subjective). Everything in the middle is covered already.

Some communities in the network seem to handle that much better, GIS for example has been a great help to me (as they allow open questions).

<comment><USER3> "But all my attempts to ask questions were unsuccessful."

Sure. But all the times you had questions that were answered on stackoverflow even before you asked them on Google, you were successful.

And by answering your own questions on SO you're helping out the next guy.

Post your question hoping you'll get an answer, but recognizing that you probably won't, and that you'll probably come back 24 hours later and post an answer to your own question.

You will accumulate karma for these, slowly but steadily. But more importantly, you're helping out those who follow.

<comment><USER14> Yes, answering questions is great, I totally agree with that. But I would love if SO could allow more open questions as well. I'm not a huge fan of Reddit, but it seems the only place where I can ask those questions (plus some IRC channels perhaps).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm the author of the article "The Decline of Stack Overflow". I initially published it in July 2015, when it got ±65,000 views in two days. I republished it @ Hackernoon this weekend at their request, which resulted in ±125,000 additional page views, bringing the total page views of the article since its publication in 2015 to ±245,000. The fact that this article went viral TWICE (while none of my other articles even got to 5000 views) illustrates how many people experience the same frustrations.

On SO, I currently have 11,914 rep, 9 gold badges, 66 silver badges and 73 bronze badges. I've posted 492 answers and 6 questions (that haven't been deleted). I've been programming since 1999 and I've worked as an IT professional since 2006, and my experience ranges from PHP and JS to SAP and PL/SQL. I also released my own open source frontend framework and several other open source projects on Github. So I know how to program and understand many of SO's intricate workings!

Those rare times I'm stuck on a programming issue, I find it impossible to find any useful answer on SO. My questions either get no answers at all or downvoted and/or closed (for arbitrary reasons) by people who clearly lack the experience to even remotely understand what I'm talking about.

During my time on SO, I've been bullied by 20+k users several times and even got a temporary ban by one of them moderators for no other reason but pointing out that another user was acting like "a little Hitler"… in a private conversation with moderation.

Yes, other communities have similar problems, but never have I been a member of a community where bullying and trolling was so common among the most privileged segments of its membership.

Considering the popularity of my article, I'm considering writing a follow-up and go in greater detail on my experiences with SO and how SO could be improved.

However, I'm quite busy these days, so it may take a while before it actually gets published… if it ever gets published.

Nevertheless, these are my 5 cents I'd like to add here…

<comment><USER16> > The fact that this article went viral TWICE (while none of my other articles > even got to 5000 views) illustrates how many people experience the same > frustrations.

I disagree. Many people simply view an article to understand the author's opinion (my case). IMO the "new user" experience on StackOverflow really depends on the topic addressed.

Maybe that's just programmer personality speaking, I wish someone would do a study on the traits of programmers depending on their language / line of work...

<comment><USER17> Taking article views as acceptance for the article's viewpoints is quite the fallacy. That headline alone will generate many thousands of views because people are curious, not because they agree -- this is a problem with the internet as a whole these days, so many people have news and topics filtered and curated to their own beliefs, they are unaware that they are living in their own "filter bubble" and thus we assume if I click on article a it means I like article a, so news algorithm xyz will proceed to show me more like a.

I've read the article. It has some legitimate claims, I've even experienced some of them, but I am not so thin-skinned as some people are about internet points, and these issues aren't exclusive to StackOverflow. They are gripes about internet behavior, and human behavior as a whole. It all has to be taken into context, as many point out, the situation was much worse before Stack Overflow.

In the article,

> Quora might seem like an obvious choice, but it shares many of the issues > common at Stack Overflow,

Exactly. You can take Stackoverflow and substitute Quora, or reddit in some cases and get the same exact situations described. It's a people problem. Anything led by a curated community of imaginary points will naturally produce elitist behavior. Heck you have this problem in real life (opposed to virtual life) in Academia, a.k.a the "academic elite," what makes you think it is going to be any different on the internet?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I never even STARTED contributing to Stack Overflow, because of the high barrier to entry for new users. Since now you essentially can't post a question without answering several yourself, I didn't bother asking questions about certain thorny technical issues. I tried a couple of times, ran into the barrier, and gave up. Maybe some of these could have been the kind of thought- provoking questions that the blog post's author would have enjoyed. Who knows how many other would-be Stack Overflow users have had a similar experience. Could Stack Overflow be cutting off its own long tail by having such restrictive barriers to entry for casual, minor would-be contributors like myself?

Fortunately, many of the questions I've needed help with have already asked and answered by others on S.O. But I've had to find help for my more exotic questions elsewhere.

<comment><USER19> I don't know if you were being hyperbolic but asking a question requires no previous community engagement. There is no barrier to entry.

This is part of the issue with SO though in that so many people ask questions without trying to figure things out for themselves or because it is their first time asking a question on the internet they have a very hard time with it. Veteran users are frustrated by new user's attitude and new user's attitude is often that they are asking a question because they are hitting a wall. They've stalled out on their task and are frustrated and the question they end up posting shows this. It will lack context, enough information to reproduce, be an XY problem or some issue like that. These questions are either difficult or impossible to answer. Making them stop is a very hard problem, unfortunately.

<comment><USER18> No, I was not being hyperbolic. When I tried asking a question, the site told me I had to answer a number of other people's questions first (or something along those lines) before I could post my question. It happened on a couple of separate occasions, and then I just stopped trying. Maybe they've removed this restriction since then, but it was sure annoying (and discouraging).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't quite agree as someone with few points on StackOverflow the mods can be quite hostile and inflexible when it comes to the rules.

For instance I found a browser bug in the code submitted on a stack overflow answer [1] and I edited it and it got rejected because it wasn't in the spirit of what the original author intended or something like that.

I also had no way of replying to the rejection motivating what my reasoning was and maybe reinstating it luckily the original author got in touch and fixed it himself later on.

At that point I wasn't even able to comment on the reply since I didn't have enough points so I would ague the barrier to entry is quite high if all you want to do is just fix a few mistakes you spot while using the site.

Also there are multiple communities like Ask Ubuntu, Server Fault each with their own points which means I run into the same problem over and over again even though I have proven myself on anther sister community.

[1]([http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12131273/twitter- bootstra...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12131273/twitter-bootstrap- tabs-url-doesnt-change/36179228#36179228))

<comment> guard-of-terra They actually give you 101 points on every new site if you're a proven user, which lets you comment.

<comment><USER20> How many points do you need to be a proven user then?

<comment><USER21> 200

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> There are three ways to use stackoverflow - ask, answer and lurk.

Asking is hard as the admins are quite intolerant of anything that doesn't abide by the rules, in _their_ opinion. That said, small quick queries, those that would get shot down when posted as questions, are best asked in chat rooms and you will get a useful answer. The notification comes in handy when a chat room question is answered after an extended period of time.

Answering is harder, as questions are usually highly problem specific (due to the rules), mostly particular framework or domain related, and only those who have faced similar issues can make meaningful posts. Often times the multi hundred thousand rep kings can get away with non answers (some even get accepted) in spite of a lesser rep king complaining about that in the comments.

That leaves with lurking. Lurking has benefited me immensely. It seems every problem you have is already answered in like 2010.

The programmers.stackexchange is much better as it allows opinion based, discussion oriented posts although the admins seem to be getting intolerant there lately, which is a bit odd.

<comment><USER23> To be fair, asking on SO isn't all that difficult. It just requires a little patience, to read and understand the guidelines, and to craft a high quality question. Unfortunately, when someone's blocked on some tricky programming task they've already been banging their head against for hours, it's probably a time when patience is in short supply. But, that patience is often rewarded with a solution.

I'm amused to see _programmers.stackexchange_ get a positive call out, because it used to be the paragon of moderator intolerance. Perhaps that culture has changed for the better.

<comment><USER24> I agree, I actually really like that there's a high bar for asking. It makes it more likely someone will be able to fully understand and give a good answer. And I would say probably 50% of the questions I start typing on SO, I actually figure out on my own by the time I've written it. I'll notice that I've glossed over the details of one part so I'll stop to dig in further and sure enough I had been making a bad assumption and fixing it leads to the answer.

<comment><USER23> > And I would say probably 50% of the questions I start typing on SO, I > actually figure out on my own by the time I've written it.

The live search for related Q&As has been particularly useful for me for this. Do I sometimes feel bad I did all that typing first? Sure. But that's vastly outweighed by happiness at getting a solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I've recently began using SO more actively (providing answers).

Most of the questions I've found and tried to answer were duplicates, but since I didn't have enough reputation to mark it as duplicate. (or enough rep to comment on a post to ask for more information on a poorly asked question)

It's fairly depressing to attempt to try to be active on a site like SO when it's setup for failure in the beginning. It's irritating when users with 10k+ reputation can more easily gain reputation by commenting, editing, and "moderating" new questions.

The other issue I have is that for new questions it's more about being first to answer a question rather than what is actually correct.

I also dislike providing answers to new questions, and the OP is a brand new user asking a question and never marks an answer as correct...

I wish it was easier and less frustrating to be active, but I suppose I'll keep trying.

<comment><USER26> One of my least favorite SO patterns is seeing a top answer with ~150 points that's simply wrong, and then a second or third answer with ~20 points that's actually correct.

For high-profile questions this gets sorted out eventually, but it sometimes persists indefinitely for niche questions, and it's really unfortunate. I know "first mover advantage" is hard to solve (cf. Reddit), but it's a really big deal for SO.

<comment><USER25> It's frustrating as well when the question that was asked gets answered by me, and I receive a slew of down-votes since I answered it first.

The next few answers are essentially copy/paste of my answers or other answers on the question...but I'm still negatively impacted by the down-votes since I only have ~39 rep and wow has getting started been a pain.

<comment><USER26> A weird observation: starting with SO is particularly punishing if you come to it as an established programmer.

The karma restrictions don't chafe much if you're a novice who mostly asks questions, and occasionally answers a simple topic they recognize. If you're experienced, you want to give more complex answers, and perhaps comment on other answers that you think are suboptimal. Doing that, you feel the new users restrictions (and the sting of uninformed downvotes) constantly.

50 karma is big, because the option to comment on other people's posts is core to giving relevant answers ("Did you want it to do X, or Y?") and using the site properly.

Honestly, I'd just ask a few questions (if your domain is uncommon enough that they won't be duplicates) and let that karma carry you until the site becomes usable.

<comment><USER27> Huh. Maybe the site has changed in the past 5 years, but when I started - <USER2> gave answers on stuff I knew (basic JS, advanced SQL) and asked questions about stuff I didn't know (Obj-C, advanced JS/jQuery, Ruby).

<comment><USER26> This is still viable, but it's gotten a bit trickier because "closed as duplicate" has slowly become a more common outcome. So it's possible to have the stuff you know well be largely covered, and you lose gained karma if the post with your answer gets deleted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> top 2% here

i can understand the reasoning but i left SO when they broke it into pieces with StackExchange network

i actually enjoyed stuff like code golfs, joke questions (minus endless flow of repetitive xkcd references)

have always been interested in THAT programming part where problem meets consciousness meets technology. spent a lot of time puzzling around questions on design, patterns - more ethereal side of programming

nowadays stuff like that gets quickly eliminated

and more technical questions often gets spammed with shallow bullshit i've already checked couple of times

<comment><USER29> interestingly I thought that breaking things up helped a lot and that they could do better by continuing that trend..

For me a big part of the problem of SO (as opposed to other SE sites) is that it's too big for the mods to really have much option other than applying blanket rules without exception.

On the smaller sites there seems to be more scope for a more flexible approach to moderation as the question/answer flow is more manageable.

Also I think it lets more people get engaged by feeling to be a key part of a smaller community where on SO their contribution would be very unlikely to be noticed as the site is soo big..

<comment><USER27> The only problem with the break-up is that it results in the moderations of "not appropriate for this forum" when e.g. you ask about effects of say SSD cloud storaage on your app performance and you're asking on stackoverflow instead of serverfault or soemthing.

And the moderation is not helpful in migrating your question to the other forum either.

One analogy might be if the US were split into 50 states with their own, strict, immigration policies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's easy to nitpick and find fault with Stack Overflow, but it is hard to argue with the results. The site has done something amazing: it has harnessed the wild democracy that is the internet and produced something of great and lasting value to a lot of people.

It didn't do that by being a wild-west open-to-anything community. If that's what you want, go to Reddit. But you'll be hard pressed to find quality content that goes beyond "16 Animal Memes That Speed Up Your PHP And Improve Your Sex Life". It's the structure that allows Stack Overflow to succeed.

Cut the string from the kite and it doesn't fly up to the clouds, it comes streaking down to the ground.

</comment><comment><USER30> For me the biggest problem with SO is that it's hard to get answers to advanced questions in some areas. Not a lot of people could answer the question in the first place, because it's about some obscure and rarely encountered problem, and these experts are constantly spammed with basic questions from inexperienced programmers. Though it depends on the area you're interested in - I've got almost no answers to advanced Rails-related questions and got pretty good responses to Scala-related stuff I'm interested in (but maybe it's because Scala questions were about more basic stuff)

<comment><USER31> Yeah, unfortunately looking for advanced Rails answers means sifting through lots of silt: answers that were correct for version X but no longer, answers that avoid the question by doing something else, cargo cult solutions.

<comment><USER32> That's a good indicator of the quality of the software.

A piece of software is only as good as its documentation and compatibility to itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I don't think you're looking at it from the right angle. SO is a great resource that's amassed a lot of simple questions. My personally favourite use of it is to find boiler plate code, or to get answers to simple questions in languages I'm not an expert in, but unfortunately get forced to use for whatever reason. The same is true for sysadmining tasks. I'm wearing far too many hats to remember how to change hostname on 4 different operating systems - it's far easier to just google and click the SO link than to read manuals every time I have a simple task.

Additionally, your answer regarding:

> On the other hand, even the simplest questions are not closed just because > they are simple. One of my favourite examples is the question whether you > need a null check before calling an instanceof. My answer is number 2, with > a sarcastic comment that this could be tested in an IDE for a minute. And a > very good comment points out that it takes less than that to get the answer > on Stackoverflow.

Is particularly bad. "Test in an IDE" is not a valid response when the question pertains to a JVM implementation. Your Sun JVM may be different than my Apache JVM, different than JoeShmoe JVM. A better answer might be to refer to lines in the official JVM specification, and note if there's an ambiguity, and that most implementations follow X, but not necessarily...

</comment><comment><USER34> I still use SO every day, and also have enough rep to be an editor, and I don't think it's in decline. But I have also stopped answering to questions. Mostly because the race to be the first to answer easy questions to get rep stopped being fun very early on, and there are only a few interesting questions among all the "do my homework for me" and barely comprehensible questions.

As for editing, editors come in all shape and form, and let's be honest, developers can often be opinionated so and so's who can spend hours debating tabs vs. spaces. I think the moderating reflects what we are as a community, I'm afraid. For example, I always reject any edit that only changes the format of the code because I find it a complete waste of time. I am sure there are other mods who would do the opposite, and actually go and reformat code in as many questions as they can find. Who's to say one approach is right and the other wrong? There aren't actually any guidelines in the modding pages.

It does get annoying sometimes; for example, I was refused the tag vanilla-js because of reasons by someone who didn't even seem to be a js developer. Had a few heated discussions, in the end the mods won. But hey, you know what? Who cares, the site is still useful

What are the realistic alternatives? Quora?

</comment><comment><USER35>
      Stackoverflow is a little more boring for contributors now than
      it was before (which is why I gradually stopped answering),
      simply because most of the general questions have already been
      answered.

This sums it up. I'd not find it fun to answer the same questions over and over. Doesn't imply that no-one should answer those; just that it leads one to wonder the value being added.

</comment><comment><USER36> BTW: Do competition sites have an army of downvoters to bury leaked questions (it's kind of frustrating when one spends time answering one of the rare more interesting questions and it gets downvoted into oblivion because of a duplicate that wasn't answered properly and then also disappears...)

</comment><comment><USER37> I agree, most normal questions are answered on Stackoverflow already. There is a lot of opportunity in the edge cases though. And it's true that these are the answers that take experts and time. Maybe SO should advertise more experienced people to share their knowledge as well.

</comment><comment><USER38> Hold on what the hell - I just skimmed through the 'decline of...' article referenced by the above article to look for the one of the reason for those 2013 stats being that there are users that can find the answers to the questions they need without asking and without answering. I am within the 8% that have answered more than 5 questions but I don't have time to actively contribute but do use it everyday and am voting on questions and answers everyday. If there are more like me then how is it in decline?

That the referenced article doesn't cover this then undermines the other arguments about its attitude to users (arguments I largely disagree with).

</comment><comment><USER35>
      you can't easily ask a question without having it downvoted,
      marked as duplicate, or commented on in a negative way

I wouldn't really agree. If the question is clear and even if it is a FAQ, then you'd not receive answers but also upvotes (for posting a FAQ) especially in popular tags such as python, regex, java.

That said, there are several other problems with SO:

\- too many poor quality questions

\- too many poor quality _accepted_ and _highly upvoted_ answers

\- activity in a limited number of _tags_

\- the _reputation_ (apparently virtual bitcoins) cause the overall answer quality to decline (search for "Fastest gun in the west problem" on meta SE)

</comment><comment><USER39> I have 851 reputation (top 39% of all users), I have answered 15 questions, about 50% haven't received any points, a few have received a minimal amount, and two or three have received a bunch of points.

My answers are generally to quite niche topics, I have never gone out of my way to answer questions, I typically post an answer when I have invested a good chunk of time to find the solution to something and then see a question about the same issue. I sometimes see questions I could answer (or improve existing answers), but do not provide an answer as I find it hard to justify the time, I feel that if I wanted to rack up points on stackoverflow it wouldn't be that hard to post several answers a day.

My reputation has gone up pretty much steadily, for the last three years, with an average of about 3 or 4 posts per year. I am a pretty light user, and being in the top 39%, if anything, surprises me as I could easily imagine being in the top 80%.

I find stackoverflow very useful, I work in games development which is quite a broad subject, in an ideal world I'd have very in depth knowledge about hundreds of topics, but in reality stackoverflow allows me to get quick answers to a huge amount of questions/problems, which in turn gives me more time to devote on area which I feel are most important. I haven't noticed stackoverflow going down hill in the time I have used it.

</comment><comment><USER40> This is my experience as well. I'm in the top percentile and I almost never answer any more. The points keep coming though, for a handful of popular questions/answers.

Answering is way less rewarding than a few years ago, but SO is working fine. From the opposite point of view, I have asked one question on SO to which I never received an answer, probably because it's not possible (it had to do with Flash streaming).

</comment><comment><USER41> I believe one of the features of StackOverflow's design is that people quit the site when they become burned out answering repetitive/uninteresting/homework/etc questions. Because the alternative is that they hang around the site and entertain themselves by treating people badly...despite the design, I believe that the way in which 'homework' questions are used as an excuse for unhelpful behavior illustrates the general problem that concerned Spolsky [1] when designing the site.

[1] and perhaps Atwood to a lesser degree based on their difference of opinion regarding 'how do I move the turtle in Logo'. [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move- th...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-the-turtle- in-logo)

</comment><comment><USER42> I stopped getting answers in SO. These days I see that the answer could be there in SO, Github, Gists, blogs and Google is the first place I go to. A few years back, I could go to SO for practically anything to do with coding. And I was doing Ruby and Rails.

</comment><comment><USER43> I rarely have the sort of experiences on SO that some seem to have. From my witnessing the kind of frustration friends have had with SO, and from experiencing my own occasional mistakes, I think some people are just poor at stating an actual question, but can describe their problem in detail, which is fine except often just talking about a problem without conveying the direction one is looking to go towards isn't helpful to others. Some people also just get offended really easily. Perhaps it comes from a past of spending time on very Machiavellian BBSes, but my skin is rather thick and I've only once run into a complete jerk on the Stack Exchange system, though not on Stack Overflow.

It's easy to complain about any system, but what do we really have that's better than Stack Exchange? Quora? Yahoo Answers? lol Maybe Experts Exchange, but the userbase hasn't been nearly as large as SE in years. I personally like the fact that SO/SE is so strict because, for all the power of the internet, there is _mostly_ incorrect information on it. I'd much rather some people get dissatisfied with it, and that some of my questions get closed or downvoted easily, than have to wade through a ton of duplicate questions with answers that appear to be written by 12 year olds.

The only thing that I wish SO would implement is mandatory explanations for downvotes. Upvotes help a question get attention so there really isn't a big need for an explanation, but a negative score from a few voters early on can prevent a perfectly valid question from ever being taken seriously. This has happened to me on a couple occasions where I knew that the question was valid and the body properly formatted, but someone just didn't like the question for whatever reason. It's a good thing that a bounty can fix this, but I shouldn't have to spend 100+ of my points just because one or two people didn't like that I was asking a question that supposedly every programmer should know and I'm an idiot for asking it.

I have no clue what people are talking about when it comes to a "signal to noise" ratio; Stack Exchange is one of the least noisy sites I've ever seen.

</comment><comment><USER44> Stackoverflow is a waste dump of crap questions that need to be put on old (and permanently deleted).

This is not the case with some other SE sites, which run a "tigher ship". For instance, the moderation review queues on the Electronics SE site are kept small; everything gets processed.

The moderation queue on SO is huge. Currently, 8.8K questions with close votes need review. Hundreds of low-quality posts. In Electronics SE: 6 close votes need review at the moment, 3 First Posts and 1 re-open. That's it.

I clicked on Review in SO just now to start reviewing close votes. The very first question that comes up is from 6 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER45> I want to contribute but there's some reputation barrier. About 1/4 of the time, the best answer isn't chosen but I don't have the ability to help vote up the best answer.

</comment><comment><USER46> Biggest problem on SO is the constant need by the moderators to mark a question as 'not a question', when it's actually a really question and gets a lot of good answers.

<comment><USER43> How were these questions stated? Whenever I have seen this happen, it's because the user was behaving like they were posting on a vBulletin help forum.

For example, the title might be "question about rails" and the body might say something like "Uploads don't work. Here's my controller code."

There are two problems here. First, no actual question is being asked. There may be an implicit question, but that's not what SO is about as it isn't terribly helpful to those searching for answers. Second, the user may be missing so much fundamental knowledge about the subject that a sufficient answer would require more work than is worth anyone's time, and would contain more information than is in the scope of a single specific question. SO is meant for answers to precise problems, and isn't a tutorial site. Sure, some people may post good answers, but the question may be too nebulous if it exists at all.

I really don't see that kind of thing happen often enough to be a big deal, but that's the only sort of case I have seen get the treatment that you describe. As I have said before, I would rather have some of my questions be rejected on some basis than have SO be a complete garbage dump. In contrast to other sites in general, SO/SE is very clean.

<comment><USER27> Maybe better moderation responses would help - ie, recommendations, links to guidelines, etc. Have those improved recently?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Stack overflow, like a lot of the forums out there, suffers from the same pathology:

it is very easy to stumble upon an answer which answers the question, and is correct in a very wide context, but is actually bad advice (low quality correct answer, which without experience is bad practice).

And now comes the catch-22: if I do not have enough experience to recognize the correct-correct answer, the answer presented will actually propagate some solution, implementation, or practice, which is bad in the long term.

EXAMPLES

Example 1: new user asking a system administration / configuration management question

"how do I change DNS settings on my system?"

"oh, just edit /etc/resolv.conf by hand."

(When the correct-correct answer would be "learn how to create an OS package which delivers the correct /etc/resolv.conf, or create an OS package which configures the system to be a DHCP client, and then keep that under revision control.")

Example 2: a developer asking how to link properly

"I compiled abc and linked with def only to find that abc cannot find the def shared library. How do I fix this?"

"Use ldconfig or set LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/shared/library." (When the correct-correct answer would be "when compiling abc, set -R'$ORIGIN:$ORIGIN/../lib:/path/to/lib' or -R'$ORIGIN:$ORIGIN/../lib64:/path/to/lib64', depending on whether you're compiling 32- or 64-bit, and always use the compiler's front end to link as well.")

<comment><USER47> Plus, for specialized topics, a good portion (10-15%?) of the top-voted answers are just wrong or misleading.

About once every few weeks in reviewing one of my team's code, I see something strange. I ask them about it, and they say they did it that way because of SO. Then, I have to explain why it's not a good idea to do in our code. Then, I have to spend a couple hours showing them why, because clearly 'everything on the Internet is correct.'

Overall though, SO has saved me a TON of time over the years. But, lately I have been more often reading user mailing lists or looking at the source code.

<comment><USER32> Stack overflow can save a lot of time, but only if perused by someone with experience who is just looking for their next clue, and will know how to turn a low quality but correct answer into a clean solution. In such a case, stack overflow can be very useful, but then the same goes for any random Linux forum.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I don't think SO is declining either. I myself don't contribute that much anymore either, but I used to. Mostly because of reasons stated in this article.

There are some valid points though for both contributing and not contributing to SO. The fact that you need to be 'really fast' to answer questions does indeed hold mostly for the simple answers. And actually there I found that it's best to write a short, concise answer to the question and post that - more chance of being first - and then alter your question to add additional information that was not crucial, but still nice to have.

Anyway, SO is still a good resource for problems that are not that esoteric. With esoteric questions, the odds of someone finding your question and being able to answer it in reasonable time is smaller, and you're probably better of either looking through the docs yourself or, if possible, looking at the open- source code.

That it's hostile to newbies could be true. But it can also be hostile to people who have been using the site for quite some time. That is, unfortunately, part of the internet these days. Trolls are hard to avoid on websites with a big community.

</comment><comment><USER49> SO is problematic when combined with the current trend towards CADT release models. The "non-duplicate" question you get pointed to was seven releases ago, and the solution in the answer has been deprecated. Doesn't matter, though: still marked as "duplicate".

</comment><comment><USER50> Hi Bozho, thanks so much for your help over the years. SO might be in decline, but it's one of those few products that makes you realise that better product design can change things for the better.

</comment><comment><USER51> Why has SO entered the hiring market? Are they losing focus? I use SO profile as part of my hiring process but does the world really need another job-board?

</comment><comment><USER52> I work in emergent technology and R&D.

My questions don't have a SO question, let alone an answer. I get that in general programming, SO is great. Or if you need to know how to generate a N-dimensional array and initialize it for floats -- sure.

But what about: How can the Hololens be used in an Academic sports setting as training hardware? I'm brainstorming rapidly, then digging in what the Hololens can do (by experimentation, no less), and then investigating the API for what's exposed.

The API is the easy part, as it the simple programming.

<comment><USER53> The closer you are to actual research, the less helpful anything in print or online will be in answering your question.

SO is for questions that have known solutions or quickly knowable solutions.

Sounds like you're actually looking for a collaboration tool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> SO mods are some of the most toxic people I have encountered on the internet.

</comment><comment><USER55> I cannot even start to contribute to Stackoverflow, because it is way too complicated ladder to become helpful.</comment>


Show HN: WikiOverland.org, the encyclopedia of Overland Travel  - <AUTHOR> http://wikioverland.org

<comment><AUTHOR> There has been a lot of talk around here recently about "work while traveling", etc. So I thought some HNers would be interested in my latest project:

\----

Introducing WikiOverland.org, the encyclopedia of Overland Travel (For everyone that's dreamed of traveling Overland with a car/4x4/motorbike)

First of all - Yes, you can drive around the entire world with your own 4x4 or motorbike.

If you are traveling with a vehicle across a couple of countries, a continent, or the entire world, <http://wikioverland.org> contains everything you need to know to successfully get around.

Some of the important topics covered for each country are:

* Crossing the border - paperwork requirements, insurance requirements, costs and permitted length of stay.

* Gas prices, quality and frequency. Prices are converted in real time to any currency and unit you prefer.

* Roads, Bribery and checkpoints.

* Camping - both paying and "wild".

* Navigation - with paper maps and GPS co-ordinates. * Vehicle maintenance.

* Buying and selling vehicles.

* much more.

More general topics covered include

* Popular Overland routes.

* Vehicle shipping.

* Bribery tips and advice.

* General Paperwork requirements explained.

To start out, checkout the <http://wikioverland.org/Overland_Frequently_Asked_Questions>

For anyone interested, there are some things you can do to help make WikiOverland better for everyone:

* If you know a thing or two about the country you live in (like gas prices), please take the time to add or update that information.

* If you are passing through a country, please take 5 minutes and update sections that have changed. If nothing has changed, you can just update the "last updated date" for those sections so we know it's still good as of now.</comment>


100 Supercharger Stations - <AUTHOR> http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/100-supercharger-stations <comment><USER2> I don't live in America and haven't seen a Tesla charging station, so maybe some of these obvious ideas are already happening, but:

* You'll have at least 20 minutes of waiting for your car to charge, during which time Tesla could be selling you snacks and/or fast food. Filling stations in most countries already follow that proven business model.

* These charging stations have solar panels on the roof, so they presumably already have the necessary inverters and whatever other infrastructure to pump electricity back to the grid. Tesla could make some deals to put panels up on nearby buildings who could save on capital costs by just piggybacking off Tesla. They could become a power utility company over time.

* Teslas are quite expensive, so Tesla owners (and therefore drivers) are generally affluent, which are the kind of customers local businesses would want to attract. So having a charging station nearby could be something malls might even pay for or want to subsidise. Similarly the land around a supercharger station in what is otherwise "the middle of nowhere" could become significantly more valuable, so if Tesla purchases extra cheap land around stations placed along interstate highways they could stand to make quite a bit of money selling that to property developers afterwards.

I guess what I'm saying is if Tesla plays their cards right, then Tesla cars could be like giving away razor handles for cheap.

<comment><USER3> Variations on your second point are definitely in the plans. The Tesla charging stations are being put up in conjunction with Solar City, a solar panel leasing company, which was founded by Elon Musk's cousins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Cumulative total energy delivered to date: 4.9 million kWh_

That works out to about $250,000, or about $10 per Tesla Model S sold to date. Early days and all, but it looks like about $100† tacked on to the selling price of the car covers lifetime supercharger network power use. Capital expenditures to build them probably dwarf their electric bills.

␄

† To the limits of Fermi Estimation

<comment><USER5> I suspect the energy cost is a little higher than that because a commercial electricity customer (like Tesla) will often be subject to 'demand charges,' which are assessed based on the highest power used in a billing period. Since the point of a supercharger is to deliver a lot of power, the demand charge may be quite high.

I still agree with your conclusion though... Capital still dwarfs energy, even if they pay several times what you estimated.

<comment><USER6> I doubt that any individual super-charger station is a large enough load to be charged for their peak usage. It's a big load but nothing like a smelter or even a small factory.

<comment><USER7> Definitely more power than a small factory. A six station supercharger could be pulling 500 kW.

Up until 2012, demand charges from Souther California Edison kicked in at 20 kW at a rate of $17 per kW. One of the first 50 kW quick-chargers in LA county was shut down for months after the owner realized that operating it would tack on an extra $1000 to his monthly bill.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow, I had no idea their network was already this good:

> The network is already robust enough to support long-distance drives on the > most popular routes across America, wherever it be a cross country trip from > Los Angeles to New York, an East Coast jaunt from Rhode Island to the > southern tip of Florida, or an epic 12,000-mile journey to every corner of > the United States.

I'm not sure if I've just been out of the loop, or if they aren't doing a good enough job pimping their supercharger network. This removes one of the perceived problems with electric cars - long road trips. Does anyone here have real world experience doing a long road trip with a Tesla S, using the supercharger network?

<comment><USER9> You would think they would be convincing magazine editors to doing a long-form 'we drove a tesla across the US' type article. I'd be very interested in reading something like that - what its really like to string together a long trip using supercharger stations.

<comment><USER10> Any objective magazine would pair it with a gas or diesel car and do a "Top Gear" style race, and compare and contrast the tradeoffs.

<comment><USER9> Well, from a purely 'distance covering' point of view, clearly a liquid fuel car would win because of faster refueling, higher range and speed limits.

I was more thinking of a road trip article, where the travel itself is the focus of the article. Is the car comfortable on long trips? Are the superchargers always easy to find? What sort of characters and people do you meet at supercharger stations? Did the forced longer stops make the journey better or worse?

It's a big difference to 'who got there faster'. That would be a foregone conclusion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Tesla is interesting, but there may be an upcoming battle between EV and fuel cells since it seems Toyota, Honda, and Hyundai are supporting fuel cells instead of EV. But Tesla is not alone (Nissan, BMW) so this may be a battle that will split the industry. A big part of this fight will be infrastructure. Currently, gas powered cars have these advantages:

\- Fast refuel time (Only a few minutes to fill a tank)

\- Ubiquitous (Gas stations everywhere)

\- Standardized (Gas station nozzle works in any car)

EV is currently very weak in these areas. Recharge time is orders of magnitude longer than filling a gas tank. The common expected use case is to charge at home overnight, but this excludes a huge fraction of the population (anyone living in an apartment/condo). Apartment owners have little incentive to install chargers. And there's a standardization problem. Nissan Leafs cannot charge at Superchargers. There's a lot of fragmentation in this field.

The fuel cell cars are avoiding these issues and they may take a lot of the market that EV currently doesn't serve well. Hydrogen stations are often publicly funded and not tied to a specific auto manufacturer. Refuel time is similar to gas stations. And they are slowly building more and more hydrogen stations (in California). It seems California is being used as a test market for fuel cell cars. If it succeeds, then there could be a strong nationwide push. To someone living in an apartment/condo, fuel cell cars have a lot of advantages.

Many assume that the EV is the successor to the ICE vehicle. But that may not be true.

<comment><USER12> The petrochemical industry would absolutely love for hydrogen fuel cells to become viable instead of EVs because they already have a massive amount of infrastructure and the easiest/cheapest way of getting hydrogen is to capture it from hydrocarbons.

Musk is right though, steam reforming hydrocarbons to generate hydrogen doesn't make any sense, nor does electrolysis. Using that amount of energy to generate a fuel so that you can fill up at the pump quickly is just plain nuts. We're better off using higher voltages, better batteries and super capacitors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I notice the 100th station is in New Jersey, one of the two states that bans self-serve gas stations. I'm hoping Tesla owners don't have to ask an on-duty attendant to plug-in their vehicles there.

<comment><USER14> Technically it is not a gas station. What does the law say?

<comment><USER15> [http://lwd.dol.state.nj.us/labor/lsse/laws/Retail_Gasoline_A...](http://lwd.dol.state.nj.us/labor/lsse/laws/Retail_Gasoline_Act_and_Regs.html#19613)

If you scroll up, you can see the definitions of terms. It's just gasoline and doesn't even apply to diesel.

So, no, it wouldn't apply to Tesla.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Here's a map of the stations, if anyone is interested: [http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger](http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger)

<comment><USER17> So within ~20 months it'll be possible to drive almost anywhere in the USA in a Tesla S, and back to a Supercharger charging station? That's pretty impressive! As demand for vehicle based electricity use increases the demand for new electricity generation capacity will increase. All this in a protracted economic depression. Interesting times.

<comment><USER18> Thank heavens its possible to charge at places other than these stations otherwise it would be pretty annoying to have to drive a couple hundred miles to recharge. But this is great for long journeys.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder if using the supercharger deteriorates the battery more than a more gentle charge (I am warned about this for fast charging my Leaf). Find it interesting that they ask that question on the supercharger FAQ but don't answer it:

"How often can I Supercharge? Is it bad for my battery? Supercharging does not alter the new vehicle warranty. Customers are free to use the network as much as they like."

<comment><USER20> I am not a battery scientist, but from everything I've read, using the supercharger should have no effect on battery life long-term. So long as it's kept within certain charge and temperature ranges, the only thing that counts down the lifetime of the battery cells are actual charge cycles, which you can pretty conveniently measure in miles of normal driving use (expected up to 30% loss after 100K miles, and the 5+ year old Roadsters actually averaged just 15% loss after 100K miles with older battery tech). The supercharger doesn't do anything that would reduce that life expectancy; it communicates with the battery about its health and charging speed begins to slow progressively after about 50%.

<comment><USER21> Not really true, there's many variables including how 'full' you charge the battery, how much you discharge it, what the charge and run temps are, it's not a simple equation.

For example, if you don't charge and discharge the battery fully, you can get many many times more cycles out of them.

Charging quickly does release more heat, which can reduce the lifecycle of the battery, but there are workarounds to minimize this.

I am not an expert at battery chemistries, but I work with EV charging systems quite a bit.

<comment><USER20> What part is "not really true"? Despite only writing three sentences, I touched on every factor you just mentioned. The Tesla charger and battery system keep the battery within the safe charge and temperature ranges at all times, even when supercharging. It has active heating and cooling, even when the car is turned off, and will neither fully discharge nor fully charge the battery pack even if left unattended. There's nothing inherently damaging about temporarily charging faster AFAIK as long as you control for all those variables, which Tesla's tech does.

<comment><USER22> It must damage the battery somehow. If it didn't, Tesla would have said so in the FAQ, instead of trying to sidestep the question.

<comment><USER21> Truth is, the type of use these batteries get isn't well understood yet. No one really knows the long term effects, we can make educated guesses but until a lot of them are in the field with average use cases for years, we won't see much of the nuance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> So I can't buy a Tesla in New Jersey, but now I can charge one there.

<comment><USER24> My coworker lives in NJ and owns a Tesla, seems to have no problem getting service or anything. I believe he ordered it from the website directly.

<comment><USER25> He likely 'took delivery' in another state and then transferred the title/registration into NJ. At least this is how it is done in Texas where Tesla sales are also banned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> When's the hyperloop coming?</comment>


Ethereum's DAO Wars Soft Fork Is a Potential DoS Vector - <AUTHOR> http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/06/28/ethereum-soft-fork-dos-vector/ <comment><USER2> > and buy the community some additional time to debate longer term strategy.

There is no long-term strategy. Ethereum and the DAO are dead. No one would dare put money in after this disaster.

</comment><comment><USER3> > One alternative is to avoid forking at all. Depending on how events play > out, this would lead The DAO investors to lose somewhere between 30% to 100% > of their investment

What determines how much investors actually recover?

<comment><USER4> I think this is in reference to the attacker already have 'stolen' 30% of the available funds. Without a fork, the remainder of the DAO is at risk, so the same attacker or copycat attackers could take the remaining 70% leading to the 30% - 100% range.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Experience with Interview Coaches? - <AUTHOR> I'm curious if anyone has had a good experience with a coach / some kind of service to improve your interviewing. Possibly this include a bit on coding screens, but I'd be more curious if there's anything out there that can improve more discussion based interviews (ie architecture, past experience). <comment><USER2> Architecture is best understood from experience making architectural decisions. That being said this is immediately a danger moment during an interview.

Many developers, including those conducting interviews, have not taken the time to learn architecture by going through the rigorous numerous failures to flesh an idea out into a simplistic data structure that scales with a primitive API and is independently reusable. These things seem obvious once completed but take practice and vision to formulate, and of course several rounds of refactoring. When you are interviewing for an architect position it's that vision that you want to look for, but many interviewers are clearly looking for patterns (code and/or behaviors) they are already familiar with.

My guidance is if you have some experience with architecture be original, right or wrong, but indicate that you are flexible and respond well to criticism. If you are not confident enough to be original be very clear about that without hesitation.

This guidance way result in disqualification from an interview, but that is probably a good thing unless you are financially insecure and just need any job. Reasons this could disqualify a candidate is employer fear of internal original code and fear of challenges to an insecure interviewers credibility or authority.</comment>


Ask HN: iOS MVVM tutorial using Swift - <AUTHOR> I'm new to iOS and relatively new to programming in general. Can anyone point me to (or create) a beginner level tutorial for getting a grip on MVVM using swift? There are a couple that exist for ObjC but they are mostly targeted toward advanced developers with a history working in MVC.<p>It would also be really helpful to get some direction on using ReactiveCocoa vs. not for working with MVVM as RAC seems to be 'suggested' in most cases but not all. <comment><USER2> I personally find ReactiveUI to be the best MVVM framework for iOS, Android, and Windows. It's in C# as opposed to Swift or Java, so you'll need Xamarin for this.

[http://reactiveui.net/](http://reactiveui.net/)

<comment><USER3> aka the framework behind GitHub for Windows and various other applications. #FRP.

[https://github.com/reactiveui/ReactiveUI/issues/687](https://github.com/reactiveui/ReactiveUI/issues/687)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I found this one in Swift which is pretty good and definitely targeted to nubes like me:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCAHFKL5FtU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCAHFKL5FtU)

Ran into some issues with Swift 1 vs. 2.1 (error handling) but i'll try and post a solution when I get one :)</comment>


The Art of Travel (1872) - <AUTHOR> https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14681/14681-h/14681-h.htm <comment><USER2> Travel must have been a much bigger deal 100 years ago. You could not get shots for the area you're going. It would be so slow. On the other hand, with fewer travelers there wouldn't be areas over run by tourists.

<comment><USER3> You can still go to very inaccessible areas that have little to no tourists. Much of Canada is wilderness for one to dig a hole to put a roof over and fell trees with one of your sharpened soft axe.

If you want a warmer clime you could venture up the Amazon river into the forests and fend off Jaguars with your rifle loaded with bullets made in your bullet mold.

Australia is pretty much empty too.

You can still roam wild places in the Steppes of Mongolia, wonder for weeks in search of Shangri-La in the Himalayas without seeing anyone. There are many, many places you can go travelling in the wilds.

Point being, there is a difference between touring and the kind of adventure travel the author is talking about. Both touring and adventuring style of travel existed in the 1800s and today. You can still do it! But I agree, it is relatively easier to get to places, and medically one can be much more prepared for disease and infection. That said, it is surprising how quickly you might need to revert to the practices described in The Art of Travel once you are outside of modern life. It's still the stone age when you are on your own, injured, and in the middle of no where.

<comment><USER4> > You can still roam wild places in the Steppes of Mongolia, wonder for weeks > in search of Shangri-La in the Himalayas without seeing anyone.

But others will see you. I traveled through Mongolia with some locals, and one of the things that was striking to me is how few people were there. At some point, I mentioned this, and was laughed at by the locals. They were surprised that I thought it was empty when there were plenty of people around. They pointed out someone on a horse on a hill several ranges over. They said that if we got closer they would make sure to stop us to ask why we were there. There were also gers far away in other ranges. And everyone knew where everyone else was. It was like their personal bubbles had a 2 km radius

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The author: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton)

<comment><USER6> A very complicated, fascinating man. On the one hand, statistics owes a lot to this man. On the other hand, he was the man who popularized eugenics.

<comment><USER5> Having just briefly skimmed the article, I suspect he would have been horrified at how things developed on that front throughout the 20th century. He very specifically railed against "the nonsensical sentiment of the present day, that goes under that name [pride of race]".

<comment><USER6> I fear he would have a lot in common with the far-right, populist parties in present day Europe though. In the same paragraph that contains your quote, you also find this:

"Where the weak could find a welcome and a refuge in celibate monasteries or sisterhoods, and lastly, where the better sort of emigrants and refugees from other lands were invited and welcomed, and their descendants naturalised."

<comment><USER7> Judged with our modern standard, most of people who lived more than 100 years before are barbarians/far right/populists/whatever else you want to call them.

Guess how we will be judged in 100 year from now?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to Create Buzz Before You Even Have a Prototype - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedailymuse.com/entrepreneurship/17235/

<comment><USER2> The eaziest way to create buzz before you have a prototype is to work on being internet famous.

All it takes is some writing talent, a blog and a time investment. Because, you know, launching things is _much_ easier when you have a blog with 20k monthly uniques ... even easier when it's 100k monthlies.

That is to say, before there is a prototype, the buzz should be about _you_.

<comment><USER3> Totally agree with this, and I believe you can benefit a lot by _always_ putting time into yourself.

Your startups will come and go, so always work on yourself and build up your own reputation. Then each one is easier to launch and validate quicker.

My previous startup failed, but during the process I built up my following on Twitter, and launched Buffer from that platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's an easier way to create buzz in just 2 simple steps:

1\. Be Notch.

2\. Release docs.

<comment><USER5> 3\. Talk about being Notch

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why do you need a buzz before you release? Why not wait until you have your MVP before trying to sell it?

<comment><USER7> Setting up a landing page and doing a few basic things to draw attention to it should take you a day or less. You can either spend that time right away and have 500 people that care when you launch, or you can spend that time when you finish your MVP and launch and have no one that cares.

It's time you have to spend anyway, do it early, let it sit there and attract interest.

One thing you can't do when you finish your MVP is go back 3 months and have a landing page that attracted interest.

<comment><USER6> But that interest will arrive, whether it is to the landing page or to the actual application. Wouldn't it be better for the people to arrive at an actual product rather that a page requesting email addresses? I know that I never add my email address to landing pages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 1\. Purchase bees.

<comment><USER9> 2\. Cackle maniacally

<comment><USER10> 3\. Profit!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> ..how is this on the front page right now?</comment>


Google at their best. Facebook at their best. - <AUTHOR> http://bryce.vc/post/3789090127

<comment><USER2> Facebook is so much younger than Google so it's a bit unfair to compare them this way. Facebook is still in such a crazy growth so they simply focus on their core business.

Google started launching their great non-search products (maps, mail) around 2004-2005 when it was at the same age as Facebook is today. And these products were or turned out to be supportive to their core search business as well. There were another couple of years before we've seen some great technologies from Google which weren't supposed to support their search business. So please, give Facebook couple more years before you judge.

Technical problems that Facebook solves in building and scaling their platform are enough challenging to require and attract the best minds in the industry. Let's see what these people will do when the dust settles a bit.

That said, I'm across the globe from the action and know nothing about these companies culture or attitude. But I still wouldn't judge Facebook yet.

<comment><USER3> The thing is that Facebook has already started branching out, and they're doing it wrong. When Google started adding things, your account was secondary, and the tool was first. Most of the tools to this day can be used with or without any sort of registration.

Facebook in contrast seems desperate to retain users. Nothing they create is useful without a Facebook account. Rather than pushing out the best products they can, they rely on the strength of vendor lock-in as a crutch.

I'm not even saying this is necessarily the result of some evil plan to take over the web. It's just that when you have the kind of lock-in they have you're loathe to give it up, and it makes you lazy since there are lots of places where you have nothing to measure yourself against but your previous performance.

<comment><USER4> > "Facebook in contrast seems desperate to retain users. ..."

As well they should be. Born by, and live by, the social network, die by the social network. "You still using the old Facebook?" said with derision by the cool kids is probably what echos in their nightmares. Not the name Diaspora.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Back in the day, I had a Facebook app called Quiz Monster that was utilized by lots of people all over the world. The app had international appeal because quizzes could be written in any language. For fun I coded an internal translation app heavily inspired by Facebook translations. I would type in an English phrase, select a target language. Then user's of that target language would see a dialog box asking "Do you speak english?" If they clicked yes they would be asked to translate the english phrase into their native language. After 25 submissions the program would stop prompting users. This usually took less than 5 seconds. The end result was a list of 25 translations of said phrase. I found the submissions far more reliable than Google Translate and used them to translate my app into many many languages.

<comment><USER6> I don't see what you are trying to say. Google translate is a machine translator, it could be less accurate, but it scales very well. It is probably translating millions of pages per day. You are comparing a system to generate voluntary translators for your quiz application to Google translate, these things are very different and technology wise Google translate is a few orders of magnitude more complex.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The comparison doesn't make much sense.

Google has a wide range of services in multiple fields, while Facebook has a single product, a social networking platform.

<comment><USER8> I think that is part of the problem he was trying to point out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great article and relatively well timed. While it kind of seems like there can only be "one" internet giant at a time, and with Facebook "catching up" to Google, they are fundamentally very, very different companies. Clearly there will be some overlap, like with Gmail and Facebook messages, but considering Google's focus is technology and Facebook's is the social graph there's plenty of room for both of them to continue to flourish.

I still hate Facebook though.

</comment><comment><USER10> Is there a reason why the font/css settings on that page make it practically impossible to read the text?

<comment><USER11> What wrong with it? It looks perfectly readable to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I guess if Facebook uses their huge valuation to buy startups which use Facebook's API, they don't have to invent their own products, and thus they make income by buying those startups which DO turn a profit.

<comment><USER13> Buying _profitable_ startups requires lot of money. Just buying them and living off their profits, wont be sustainable.</comment></comment>


What No One Told You About Z-Index (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://philipwalton.com/articles/what-no-one-told-you-about-z-index/ <comment><USER2> I think the problem is not that few people reads the spec, but having picked a name that was now declarative. Something like 'context-order' would give a better hint that the stacking is not as simple as one might think. Choosing css property names is like designing the UI of css

<comment><USER3> vertical-align is another example of the "this is not as simple as you might think" problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good article. I've had that one bookmarked for a while, and it has saved me more than one headache. If you don't understand stacking context and z-index is not working as you expect, you need to go read this.

<comment><AUTHOR> This saved my ass, and my head from exploding. I found it while dealing with an obnoxious situation where a sibling element's background was causing background-color to not work at all when positioned behind said background- color having element. And it was fascinating to read about how z-index works. One of those little-known quirks to CSS that everybody really should know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> In modern CSS we have even _more_ ways to do this, specifically many values of "transform:" will also create a new context.

</comment><comment><USER6> So, is Firefox breaking the spec, then? The `opacity:0.99` edit doesn't change the appearance of the boxes at all in Firefox 45 on Linux. [https://ipfs.pics/ipfs/QmeuVESo8gBmsuPY7S1TaqBjfzSch8Wu3nJ2J...](https://ipfs.pics/ipfs/QmeuVESo8gBmsuPY7S1TaqBjfzSch8Wu3nJ2JK983EUTNG)

<comment><USER3> Firefox 45 on Windows, the boxes are displayed as expected: [http://i.imgur.com/HaKqrcG.png](http://i.imgur.com/HaKqrcG.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Another solution of to the problem is to change the background-color property, which isn't against his rules ;)

<comment><USER8> Also allowing for breaking the rules, rules that don't exist in 'real life', was just to move the z-index property to the block defining all 3 colours. But it was breaking the rules that were there to illustrate the problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is pretty rough, but I created a Chrome extension to help look up the closest parent stacking context: [https://github.com/gwwar/z-context](https://github.com/gwwar/z-context)

</comment><comment><USER10> Oh wow, this is great! Definitely pulled some hairs out regarding z-index more than once. What a great read.

</comment><comment><USER11> There is another way to solve this using just CSS transform property!

</comment><comment><USER12> Ha ha ha what a great and simple markup language we have

<comment><USER13> Do you have a proposal for a system that properly integrates alpha and layering without the notion of a stacking context?

<comment><USER14> If by "stacking context" you mean "one global context," then no. But if you mean stacking contextS as described by the article, then Win32, Cocoa, Swing, Qt, wxWidgets, and probably Gtk are all examples of a system where z-index doesn't involve reading an article.

I've come to the conclusion that HTML is great for content that looks like 1999. But in 2016, every time I use HTML and CSS I end up dealing with some subset of

\- width/height are ignored for div/span, so I have to make a div or span, set display:inline-block to completely undo that. Nothing like '<div style="display: inline-block;"> to suggest your language needs help.

\- Actually, it turns out that width is still ignored for inline-block if you have no content in the tag, but if you put any content, then it is honored. (Unless you have more content than fits, in which case it is ignored again, but at least that is somewhat sensible)

\- vertical centering? That should be pretty easy, right? Hahahaha!

\- to get z-indexing to work, you need an absolutely positioned outer element with relatively positioned inner elements. Win32, Cocoa, Qt, Swing, despite their flaws aren't that user-unfriendly (and by "user" that would be the developer). I get why it has to be that way, but a language where it has to be that way is no end of frustration.

\- don't want to duplicate your CSS colors all over the place? Great, use CSS vars. Want your variables to be accessible to all your classes? No problem, just use the :root class, totally obvious. Oh, need support for slightly older browsers? Bummer.

\- Well, you could put all your colors in a separate class. Great, I'll just have my classes inherit or mixin that color class. Actually, no, I'll be putting that class all over my HTML, which kind of violates separation of concerns, which was the whole point of CSS.

\- Want borders on the cells of your table, but not "3D" borders that looked terrible even in 1996? Oh, that's fun!

It's like HTML fights me at every turn. It's high time we take the ideas that UI libraries have had for decades and make an HTML that is actually usable.

(Probably some of the details here are inaccurate, because they are so convoluted that it's hard to actually remember them)

<comment><USER13> Most of your comments are addressed by the fact that CSS2 was designed originally for documents, while the other widget systems never were and simply don't support that type of layout. Nowadays, with flexbox, CSS fully supports natural UI layouts too.

If we adopted your suggestion of using a legacy toolkit like Win32 as the basis of a new HTML/CSS and throwing out the old, it would be much worse than HTML and CSS as they exist today. Win32, Cocoa, Swing, Qt, wxWidgets, and GTK are _much worse_ than CSS for rendering, as far as both performance and layout are concerned.

You didn't address the z-index issue either, as none of these toolkits have things like opacity, which is what causes stacking contexts. To the extent that they do, it's backed by Core Animation as in Cocoa, and that in fact _does_ have the notion of stacking contexts, just as CSS does. The Web isn't significantly more complex in this area. (CSS 2.1 Appendix E _is_ too complex, to be sure, but not in the area you describe.)

<comment><USER14> Yeah, I think a lot of the problems are because HTML was designed for documents. But it obviously wasn't designed well. I'm not sure how to do it better, but I know that I like using real UI toolkits, and I hate fighting with HTML.

I don't know what benchmarks say about Win32, Cocoa, or Qt rendering, but I'd be surprised if they were "much worse" performance than CSS. Layout isn't great with Win32 or Cocoa, but I love Qt's Layouts (except until you figure out how to change the default margins), and Swings seem okay from what little I've used.

Win32 has had opacity since Windows 2000, Qt has opacity since about then. Cocoa has had NSView.alphaValue since OS X 10.5.

<comment><USER13> They do have much worse performance when compared to an optimized rasterizer like WebRender (disclaimer: I work on WebRender). That's because they use legacy immediate mode APIs like GDI for painting, which are a poor match for modern GPUs. By contrast, CSS is fully declarative, which allows for much better batching, global culling, etc. Native toolkits _cannot_ fix this without breaking backwards compatibility: their programmatic CPU drawing is fundamental to how they work. The best they can be is GPU-assisted rather than GPU-accelerated.

HTML _was_ designed well for documents overall. It's remarkable how it's "obvious" that HTML is terrible, but every single proposed document-based replacement for it has been significantly worse. Take LaTeX, for example (sometimes brought up as a system "designed right"): you basically can't do floats _at all_ in the system. All packages that simulate them are hacks. If the Web used a system designed like that, the volume of complaints would be deafening at this point.

I'm the first to admit that CSS has a lot of problems. But they're not the problems people always cite. The core model of downward width dependencies and upward height dependencies, with floats as a first-class citizen positioned during line breaking, is sound. Where CSS went wrong is in all the complexity like margin-collapse, border-collapse, mismatched border styles, CSS 2.1 Appendix E painting order, etc. These are the biggest flaws in the design, but nobody cites them as problems: in fact, frequently authors want more and more features that don't make sense and would make CSS worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I just found this article on google after struggling with some z-index issues today, came to hacker news, and it's on the front page. The last time I read it was three years ago. What a coincidence.</comment>


Show HN: Using GraphQL to publish REST-like endpoints (WP plugin) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/GraphQLAPI/graphql-api-for-wp/blob/master/docs/en/modules/persisted-queries.md <comment> jun-e I have seen that WPGraphQL also has an extension for persisted queries, but I haven't used it. Is this one different?</comment>


Has anyone evaluated Tray.io vs. Workato? - <AUTHOR> Looking to understand these two solutions vs. one another <comment><USER2> Workato does a really good of integration recipies for known use cases. Time to value is really short with them.

Tray does a really good job as a general purpose automation platform. It's really extensible and allows technical users to pull the covers off and do a lot more and semi-technical business users to get by without code.

At a high level: I'd go with workato if I had an acute problem that I needed fixed quickly. I'd go with tray if I saw automation being a long term strategy at my company where I know I'm going to need lots of flexibility integrating legacy applications with SaaS, etc.</comment>