IMO, this would be more ironic if the post was closed automatically by a bot. But that's not the vibe I'm getting from this.
this post was submitted on 31 May 2025
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I think the same people who run stackoverflow must run a ton of subs on reddit.
"Your post was removed because it uses "the" too much and doesn't contain enough w's and because the moon is in Pisces and it's Saturday. If you think this was done in error please message the moderators."
messages moderator about it, banned from subreddit for no reason given. Or at least that is how i imagine how it would go
INTERCAL's PLEASE Politesse Checking
That's hilarious. I do hope it gets evaluated at run time. That way you could have a program that works most of the time but if some rare circumstance caused it to execute commands in a sequence where the correct level of politeness was not maintained it would get the hump and crash
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In my time we didn't paste LLM-generated code we barely understand and hoped it compiled, let alone work. We pasted code from stack overflow we barely understood and hoped it compiled and let alone work, as god intended.
You're young. Back in my day, we bought a book called "Advanced Algorithms for C vol. 3", and we manually typed the code from it if it didn't come with a CD.
When I was a kid I remember copying entire games in BASIC printed in popular science magazines. They never worked because my dads computer had a slightly different BASIC dialect.
Good times.
I remember on the C64 they used to have 'pokes' which were written in assembler.
You'd have to manually typing 500 lines of it. Of course, it almost never worked. The times it did work I used to save it to a tape, I think I had about 9 cheats on it :)
As a teen, on my zx81 I remember typing line after line of hex numbers.
If the rampack didn't wobble and fail and I hadn't missed a line or entered one twice then I'd play something new.
I must have saved the thing somehow, but I can't remember...
On C64 you could just type rundot save I think, stick a tape in and press record. I had a little inlay with the counter numbers for each cheat on the tape written on it.
God has no hand in programming. He's just as confused as us.
I am a better programmer than God, peace be upon Him. This implementation of knees is Exhibit 1.
ok but real talk, knees are genuinely one of the most marvellous pieces of biomechanical engineering. They can withstand decades of constant movement, can allow extension (with a lot of force) even when bent 180°, can withstand - and move - hundreds of kg per knee (with enough practice) periodically also for decades, and can comfortably remain with your entire body weight resting on them at any angle from 0 to 180° for any length of time. It's amazing that everyone doesn't have constant knee pain or have their knees simply fail altogether.
It's just that sometimes they don't respond to input.
Oh there's definitely some elder gods involved with programming when I do it.
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Thanks Cloudflare for giving me a moment of reflection on why the fuck I am heading to Stack Overflow so I can close the tab before I get there.
CF: We defended your website from 69,420 bots today!
The 65,000 users: 👁️L👁️
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Stack overflow has always been ego and arrogance. Personally I'd love to see a federated version, we all host shards
You are correct. But without defending Stack Overflow, I feel the need to point out that the arrogance and condescension is by no means limited to their platform. I’ve been on several “support” pages that were the same or worse. For example Evernote’s “support”. It wasn’t “officially” hosted by Evernote, but had the Evernote logo everywhere . The most common phrases I remember from there are the equivalent of:
- “The Evernote devs don’t read this site, so you’re wasting your time trying to appeal to them here.”
- “That’s stupid, why do you have that problem?”
- “No, you don’t want to do that.”
- “No, you don’t want that feature and neither does anyone else.”
- etc.
I can only guess that asking moderators deal with the internet public for no pay is more than reasonable people are willing to do. So we wind up with unpaid people with people skills equivalent to 13 y.o. boys put in charge. Their only compensation being allowed to troll users and feel they have power over some small portion of other people. My guess is they eventually grow older and move on to being in charge of a homeowner association.
Yes please. I tried participating in some StackExchange communities many years ago, but they felt so hostile to new contributors. Like I asked an immigration-related question about my personal situation, and multiple people edited my question to change the grammar and take out the thanks and smiley at the end 🤦 Oh no, we can't have a bit of humanity in there... Multiple similar experiences left such a bitter taste, that I ended up deleting most of my sub-profiles. I found Reddit-style communities much more helpful. Even wikis are typically nowhere near this hostile.
SE seems too heavily focusing on helping a "generic public" rather than the actual people asking the questions. (Or even answering them, with all the reputation restrictions on accounts.) I'm sure I'm not the only contributor they pushed away :/
multiple people edited my question to change the grammar and take out the thanks and smiley at the end
Well, the Welcome Tour tells you that SO is about “just questions and answers”. This facilitates finding a question that’s written as concise as possible, checking its answer, and leaving. SO is deliberately not like a forum.
SE seems too heavily focusing on helping a “generic public” rather than the actual people asking the questions.
This is just another consequence of not being a forum. Of course SO wants questions to be helpful to as many people as possible. I don’t see how that is a bad thing.
If you want a laxer approach to handling quality, consider if you’ve ever found useful information on yahoo answers.
The big problem is that half the time the answer that you get is that you shouldn't be in the situation you're in so the question doesn't apply.
Well yeah, but here's the thing, if I ask the question it's because I am in the situation I'm in, and therefore need assistance. So telling me that the situation I'm in is not optimal is literally the least helpful thing one could do.
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Good riddance. Whenever I search for a programming question I'd always hope for a) an official documentation page or, failing that, b) a page on a dedicated forum for the tool that I was using that covered the problem. I'd only ever click on SO links if I had no other choice.
And, of course, I'd never search for a problem on SO itself.
I hate that so many projects are moving from public support forums to fucking Discord channels. God forbid a tech project be expected to maintain a public indexable forum and website. You can't search it unless you join the channel, it's not well organized at all, and the invite link probably expired 3 months ago. Fuck you if you didn't join while it still worked I guess.
Eh, I hate its culture, but I regularly find useful excel or regex answers on StackExchange.
The LaTeX SE is also very useful. The official documentation of LaTeX and especially of third party packages, is often hard to read and it's hard to find what you're looking for. You can end up on the documentation on Overleaf,but they don't go I to depth too much.
I almost always prefer SO answers because there was chance someone had the same issue I was seeing. Documentation only shows how things should work and dedicated forums are very hit or miss.
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I wouldn't call stackoverflow reliable. It is only partly reliable, if you are lucky.
Thread closed because that's a stupid question and you should feel bad about yourself.
I do. Let me delete my account and come back tomorrow with the same question.
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Not necessarily about stack overflow. But i just got myself in a situation where the first search result I found for a problem was clearly AI generated. And the solution it provided was not at all technically possible. The AI decline is really terrible...
That said, does anyone know of an extension or block list for those terrible AI slob websites? Or a way to filter it from duckduckgo?
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Mods be thinking that if they dig SO's grave deep enough it will emerge on the other side of the world.
Anybody remember what it was like 16+ years ago when "most questions" hadn't already been asked yet?
PS: lol https://web.archive.org/web/20090330211513/http://stackoverflow.com/
Yeah, that site was good before they started rejecting every useful question.
It used to be much better than anything else that came earlier. Nowadays the odds are even that you'll find your answer on the experts-one.
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