As the title says, what would happen if Stack Overflow decides to interrupt the service? Realistically speaking how much damage could that do to everyday work?
The US intelligence community actually keeps a clone of Stack Overflow that is updated every 12 hours and copied to servers on the classified version of the Internet so that people developing classified software can use it without needing to turn around to their unclassified workstations. I'm sure they're not alone in this, so the entirety of the answers there could be restored from mirrors or just used from the mirrors if the main site disappeared.
Nearly all of the information there is also available in the public documentation of whatever the question asker is asking about anyway. Forcing developers to use real documentation instead of Stack Overflow would not likely hurt everyday work. It might become harder to find literal worked examples, but even those are mostly duplicated elsewhere and SO is just making it easier on search engines to find it.
> Nearly all of the information there is also available in the public documentation of whatever the question asker is asking about anyway.
That's really not true in any meaningful way. Maybe the information is somewhere, but some Stackoverflow answers are so good that they are the best resource on a specific narrow topic that you will find online.
See for example something like [0]. That's the type of answer you would get from a good book or teacher, good luck finding something comparable in the often terse official python docs.
Sure, there are a lot of lazy SO Q/As that sound like someone wasn't doing their homework, but that's far from the only type of content there.
(Edit: another great example is basically anything that concerns advanced usage of matplotlib. That library is so weird and the docs so terrible that working off of SO examples really is the most efficient way to use it.)
> Forcing developers to use real documentation instead of Stack Overflow would not likely hurt everyday work.
For beginner-level stuff maybe, but there's so much on StackOverflow about bugs, pitfalls, caveats, breaking changes, rationales, use cases, background, etc. that you can't find easily (if at all) in software documentation, if the documentation even pops up in your searches.
On top of that security, it'd also be interesting to monitor what someone (based on their IP and browser fingerprint) was looking up on SO, you could probably figure out what they were working on that way.
Although I guess when you work for the spooks, they could figure out how to mask your IP that each query would come from a different IP from the world (basically I'm describing Tor, I wonder if they have their own Tor network).
> On top of that security, it'd also be interesting to monitor what someone (based on their IP and browser fingerprint) was looking up on SO, you could probably figure out what they were working on that way.
When the security incident happened last year on SO, SO team monitored what information the attacker searched in SO. So I guess some people want some privacy in searching information in SO.
>>> The US intelligence community actually keeps a clone of Stack Overflow
I feel this is a prudent idea. Not necessarily for a full blown start-up, but a community-funded resource. If you stripped out all the extras. And just cloned the questions and top 2 answers. The text based data set itself is very managable. Several gigabytes in scale. Not to mention its applicability for ML/NLP/codegen research ;)
> Nearly all of the information there is also available in the public documentation of whatever the question asker is asking about anyway.
In the absolute that may be true, but even if a low percentage of those are not available elsewhere, they are absolutely crucial. At least, they have been crucial to me.
I'm too young to know if it's a recent development, but documentation this day ain't worth much.
Oh, no; it has always been that way. Either too much information (needle in haystack), or undocumented (think Apple's latest Swift). The best documentation I've seen is the PHP site that not only has all function listed, but gives official examples, with user comments that can be voted on.
Dash on macOS also lets you download StackOverflow for offline use. It was my goto for working on airplanes, way back when traveling on airplanes was a thing.
It worked for me when I tried it but it was so slow that unless you are running from an SSD it's not worth it (I had it on an external disk). Don't download everything, only get what you really need, the phone app was (maybe still is) a bit buggy.
The Q&A have a very permissive license, so anyone can try to host a static version. (This was on purpose, the idea is that people would have been less prone to answer, if the answers were trapped in SO.)
Moreover, there are a few spammer sites that already does this, and one of the problem of SO is to compete with them to be higher in the Google results.
So ... probably you will be able to read the Q&A in other sites, and after a while there will appear SO-likes site for niches.
In my opinion the usefulness of Stack Overflow is vastly overstated. It's nice to find a few examples to get started in a new framework that lacks documentation (when there's documentation at all...) but generally speaking non-trivial questions never get answered anyway.
I haven't used it in at least 6 months, maybe even a year if my memory serves me well.
My experiences with Stack Overflow until recently:
- Using it as a useful resource for small issues
- Seeing memes about how programmers essentially just copy/paste code from Stack Overflow all day long
- Reading comments about how Stack Overflow is severely outdated and any question will be shut down immediately
And then I had an issue with library A which was using library B but had a small inconsistency in how it used it that made my use case very difficult. So I posted a question. The developer of library B appeared, agreeing that it's a problem. Followed by the developer of library A, who agreed as well and said the fix would be in the next release. 2-3 days later, my bug was fixed by updating library A.
With a sample of one, that doesn't really say anything, my view of that website is a bit biased now.
When programming in Haskell or Rust, going into SO is basically a waste of time, and the documentation or some specific search engine (yeah, hoogle) are the place to go.
When programming in C#, SO is basically irreplaceable, the knowledge there is extremely important and you just won't find it anywhere else.
When programming in Python or Javascript, it completely depends on what libraries and frameworks you are using.
I say this somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but I suspect it would probably result in more netsplits on freenode, owed to the inevitable influx of programmers who would now seek assistance on IRC like the good old days.
I've definitely noticed a downward trend of activity in the assorted programming chat channels I've frequented over the last 25 years or so, which I guess could be a result of the growing popularity of Q&A sites like stackoverflow.
But I still think it's one of the best places to seek assistance - plus, helping out programmers on IRC in real time is a good way to stay sharp and on top of the continuously evolving software landscape.
I also just simply enjoy lurking on IRC to assist other programmers in need. I learnt so much in those channels when first starting out, and these days I have a bit more spare time, so I enjoy "paying it forward" by helping others much like I was helped back in the day.
Plus there are a bunch of really nice programmers hanging out there, so there's a social aspect to it as well.
The key offering of stack overflow these days is less the ability to ask a stupid question and get told that you’re an idiot, and more the existing wealth of answers to questions that may be found by a search engine. I don’t think irc really produces answers which are easy to find.
I remember something Jeff talked about during the original Stack Overflow podcasts, that Google was the main interface for Stack Overflow. As in, your entry into Stack Overflow would for the majority of people be through search. And to speak for myself, this is how I use Stack Overflow 99% of the time.
This makes me wonder. Just having a copy of the SO data without the Google algorithms to bring you to the right question, the experience would probably be different when working of a copy.
I think it would have had more of an impact five years ago. Most of the best content is on blogs now not so. Most of the best so answers were really blog posts anyway
It would be nice if those blog posts were as easily aggregated as stack. I know many have tried to solve the problem, but it always feels like great luck when I find a good blog post
Depends. General language questions are amazing on stack overflow. Once you starting getting into the quirks and bugs of individual frameworks, GitHub issues can start to be more helpful.
I wonder if we could implement a decentralized version of SO. It can be a CLI app since it is used by developers only. The app can keep all question/answers of topic relevant to the developer locally. This will allow developer to find answers offline as well. Since it is only text data it should not take more than a GB.
There's a lot of metadata not being caputred by MetaData which would be insanely useful for a lot of purposes. It would be kind of neat if a lot more of that was captured... and if SO answers had more programatic access.
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Nearly all of the information there is also available in the public documentation of whatever the question asker is asking about anyway. Forcing developers to use real documentation instead of Stack Overflow would not likely hurt everyday work. It might become harder to find literal worked examples, but even those are mostly duplicated elsewhere and SO is just making it easier on search engines to find it.
That's really not true in any meaningful way. Maybe the information is somewhere, but some Stackoverflow answers are so good that they are the best resource on a specific narrow topic that you will find online.
See for example something like [0]. That's the type of answer you would get from a good book or teacher, good luck finding something comparable in the often terse official python docs.
Sure, there are a lot of lazy SO Q/As that sound like someone wasn't doing their homework, but that's far from the only type of content there.
[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/100003/what-are-metaclas...
(Edit: another great example is basically anything that concerns advanced usage of matplotlib. That library is so weird and the docs so terrible that working off of SO examples really is the most efficient way to use it.)
Nowadays questions must be much more specific, what has the consequence that the answers are much less generally useful.
For beginner-level stuff maybe, but there's so much on StackOverflow about bugs, pitfalls, caveats, breaking changes, rationales, use cases, background, etc. that you can't find easily (if at all) in software documentation, if the documentation even pops up in your searches.
this question is closed as off-topic.
On top of that security, it'd also be interesting to monitor what someone (based on their IP and browser fingerprint) was looking up on SO, you could probably figure out what they were working on that way.
Although I guess when you work for the spooks, they could figure out how to mask your IP that each query would come from a different IP from the world (basically I'm describing Tor, I wonder if they have their own Tor network).
When the security incident happened last year on SO, SO team monitored what information the attacker searched in SO. So I guess some people want some privacy in searching information in SO.
https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/01/25/a-deeper-dive-into-our...
I feel this is a prudent idea. Not necessarily for a full blown start-up, but a community-funded resource. If you stripped out all the extras. And just cloned the questions and top 2 answers. The text based data set itself is very managable. Several gigabytes in scale. Not to mention its applicability for ML/NLP/codegen research ;)
Source is here, https://archive.org/details/stackexchange
In the absolute that may be true, but even if a low percentage of those are not available elsewhere, they are absolutely crucial. At least, they have been crucial to me.
I'm too young to know if it's a recent development, but documentation this day ain't worth much.
I’m just curious to know
There's also Zeal: https://zealdocs.org/
And DevDocs: https://devdocs.io/about
Moreover, there are a few spammer sites that already does this, and one of the problem of SO is to compete with them to be higher in the Google results.
So ... probably you will be able to read the Q&A in other sites, and after a while there will appear SO-likes site for niches.
- Using it as a useful resource for small issues
- Seeing memes about how programmers essentially just copy/paste code from Stack Overflow all day long
- Reading comments about how Stack Overflow is severely outdated and any question will be shut down immediately
And then I had an issue with library A which was using library B but had a small inconsistency in how it used it that made my use case very difficult. So I posted a question. The developer of library B appeared, agreeing that it's a problem. Followed by the developer of library A, who agreed as well and said the fix would be in the next release. 2-3 days later, my bug was fixed by updating library A.
With a sample of one, that doesn't really say anything, my view of that website is a bit biased now.
When programming in Haskell or Rust, going into SO is basically a waste of time, and the documentation or some specific search engine (yeah, hoogle) are the place to go.
When programming in C#, SO is basically irreplaceable, the knowledge there is extremely important and you just won't find it anywhere else.
When programming in Python or Javascript, it completely depends on what libraries and frameworks you are using.
Not even in the official documentation? Wow.
I've definitely noticed a downward trend of activity in the assorted programming chat channels I've frequented over the last 25 years or so, which I guess could be a result of the growing popularity of Q&A sites like stackoverflow.
But I still think it's one of the best places to seek assistance - plus, helping out programmers on IRC in real time is a good way to stay sharp and on top of the continuously evolving software landscape.
Personally, I find both of these options have less friction than starting a new question on SO.
I also just simply enjoy lurking on IRC to assist other programmers in need. I learnt so much in those channels when first starting out, and these days I have a bit more spare time, so I enjoy "paying it forward" by helping others much like I was helped back in the day.
Plus there are a bunch of really nice programmers hanging out there, so there's a social aspect to it as well.
This makes me wonder. Just having a copy of the SO data without the Google algorithms to bring you to the right question, the experience would probably be different when working of a copy.
- https://math.stackexchange.com/
- https://stats.stackexchange.com/
- https://3dprinting.stackexchange.com/
- https://ai.stackexchange.com/
- https://apple.stackexchange.com/
- https://serverfault.com/
- https://superuser.com/
- https://drupal.stackexchange.com
There’s a ton more of these.
https://archive.org/details/stackexchange