Thread

1. pech0rin · 1790486019 · focus · HN ↗

   Stack overflow was one of the best ways to learn and mature as an engineer “back in the day”. The meme is that devs would copy and paste and hope it worked. The reality was more like you had an obscure bug, you wrote a detailed and cohesive question, and you connected with people who were more knowledgable and would help you.

   It also sharpened your writing and thinking. By responding to questions you solidified your understanding of topics.

   It got a lot of hate for the moderation but I think that was mainly in huge communities where literally “dumb” questions got bombarded every minute. Smaller tech like Docker when it first arrived on the scene had communities that learned together.

   Spent a lot of time there when I was a few years out of school and still trying to figure out what it meant to be a software eng. It’s sad to see it become a ghost town and I think it’s a net negative for young engineers to have an all knowing entity spit out every answer.

   1. noduerme · 1790488167 · focus · HN ↗

      You touched on what made it great, along with other forums where devs helped each other: It was a pleasure to read and try to answer other people's questions. NOT for the points! Because you found out so much about the problems other people were trying to solve, parallel to your own. The good questions forced you think what would I do in that situation and become a better coder yourself.

      I may have asked 20 questions on Stack Overflow in 20 years. But I probably answered several thousand. Whatever I was deeply interested in at the moment, there was no better way to learn more than to try to answer those tough questions. It was like a hobby, during a few minutes of downtime, to just cruise around looking for database optimization problems... the way some people might pick up a Sudoku puzzle. It would keep me in the zone.

      A lot of the mods sucked, and they had to deal with deluges of spam from kids asking for answers to CS exam questions... but hunting for the really juicy questions that couldn't be answered with a search was part of the fun.

      I mourn for the generations that will never get to use their brains.

      1. fartfeatures · 1790488580 · focus · HN ↗

         > I mourn for the generations that will never get to use their brains.

         If you aren't using the incredible technology we have around us right now to accelerate your learning then it is us that should be mourning your loss of imagination.

         1. happymellon · 1790493312 · focus · HN ↗

            > accelerate your learning

            Thats a pretty bold position to take.

            I find asking a question about whether an application should be doing what it is doing, and getting someone's braindead response of "Claude says it does this..." shows that people aren't learning. I know what it is doing, I can read an IF statement, I don't need someone to spit out 3 paragraphs of unrelated nonsense.

            With Claude people aren't learning. They aren't even reading their copy/pasta response to see if it relates to the question.

            1. noduerme · 1790494784 · focus · HN ↗

               It makes me really sad that my brother, a bit of a celebrity lawyer and one of the smartest people I know, now frequently responds to texts with long-form garbage he gets from ChatGPT. it's somehow both smug and braindead simultaneously, and it's cost a lot of my respect for him.

               1. JKCalhoun · 1790508314 · focus · HN ↗

                  What did he do before? Paste something from a Google search? I mean it might be endemic for this guy…

                  1. noduerme · 1790571068 · focus · HN ↗

                     To be honest, he used to paste a lot of links to articles that were only obliquely related to the topic at hand, and which I often suspected he hadn't fully read.

                     Thinking about it now, I think the new thing of copying LLM output is worse for a couple of reasons. Although both are a sort of vampirism that sucks all the oxygen out of a text chain, at least pasting articles implies that one has read that article and agrees. Someone can be held responsible ror the selection. With LLM output, there's an implied shrugging off of any responsibility... it's not "here's something I read and agreed with," it's just "here's what ChatGPT said." There's less implicit effort, and less risk of staking one's credibility on something, because saying "hey, that article is junk science and these studies disprove it" would require a response beyond "well, ChatGPT can be wrong".

                     Secondly, and maybe more metaphysically or epistemologically, there's a certain decline in cognitive function that I associate with pasting LLM answers that goes beyond what was previously considered a lazy pasting of articles someone had speed-read or skimmed. (It also doesn't help interpersonally that my brother is a speed-reader who can form eloquent opinions on a document within seconds, although apparently it's fabulous in trial).

                     So you're right to point that out, but it's also a red flag to me that some sort of mass lead/heavy metal poisoning is happening to our society, to see both credulity and shirking of responsibility from one of the smartest people I know.

                     I'm just rambling now, but I also have a cousin who was an engineer for years on the Supercollider in Texas. Also a very intelligent guy. But during covid, he had retired by then, he started spamming the whole family with emails insisting that covid was actually caused by 5G radio waves and that vaccines were poison. I outright attacked him in a full family-wide email, telling him that I had lost all respect for his once-great mind, which I had formerly looked up to.

                     Somehow I feel like the lack of analytical discrimination, logic, and above all effort is the common thread here.

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.