
I No Longer Need StackOverflow - toumorokoshi
http://toumorokoshi.github.io/i-no-longer-need-stackoverflow.html
======
samizdatum
I no longer need the Internet.

My hamster chewed through a CAT cable last week; it took me three days to
notice, so complete was my Zen immersion in creating a period-accurate replica
of the first Galilean telescope, using only Haskell lenses.

When it finally dawned on me I had attained a sophistication that transcended
the internet, I felt the inessentials fall away from my craft in an instant,
and I was left in an affectless state of pure, actualized _creation_.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the Internet isn't a great tool- I
remember when I, too, used the Internet on a regular basis, daily even, and
perhaps even relied on it. If you have no idea about anything whatsoever, it
can be a fantastic resource. But when I want to know something, I don't look
up the documentation, or download the source code. I _am_ the source code, the
documentation, the alpha build, the omega build. The Seraphic gatekeeper of
the NANDs. The bit stops here.

So I ask you- are you ready to unplug? Because I already did.

~~~
nunodonato
how did you post?

~~~
lclarkmichalek
Butterflies, I imagine

~~~
mvikramaditya
I presume you mean this? [http://xkcd.com/378/](http://xkcd.com/378/)

~~~
unfamiliar
Do we really need every reference spelled out explicitly?

------
wfunction
It's not always a question of "needing" something, it's a question of whether
you spend 5 minutes searching for the answer or 50 minutes, or 5 hours.

It's a tool. Use it.

~~~
Fuxy
Convenience is good but i have to agree with him on this one.

Understanding the technology in a deeper way is a lot more useful in the long
run.

And once you understand it answering other questions you may have gets a lot
easier and arguably that 5 hour investment in the beginning may be a bargain.

He spends 5 hours to understand it first you spend 5-10 minutes on each
question and you may run into dozens if not hundreds of questions depending on
what you're doing at the end of the day you may just come out even but do that
long enough and you're worse off using SO for shortcuts instead of just
learning how it works.

~~~
wfunction
Easy solution:

1\. Look up the first 60 questions on StackOverflow. That amounts to 5 hours
you would've spent on just the first one.

2\. If you still have more questions, spend another 5 hours learning the ins
and outs of the darn thing.

Problem solved: now you're not sacrificing latency for throughput.

~~~
zaptheimpaler
This is exactly the rent-or-buy problem!
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ski_rental_problem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ski_rental_problem)

You just described the best deterministic algorithm, but it turns out there
are even better randomized algorithms, where you "flip a coin" when deciding
to look up StackOverflow or keep learning (of course, that may or may not be
practical :p).

~~~
TeMPOraL
Thanks for the link!

Hmm... given that you stated that the best randomized algorithms we have beat
our best deterministic ones, isn't there a place for even better deterministic
algorithm?

~~~
zaptheimpaler
Nope. Thats really the point - if we find the best deterministic algorithm, it
means we have found the one with the best deterministic running time. By
loosening our criteria of running time to _expected_ running time and allowing
randomness, we can sometimes do better than deterministic algorithms.

~~~
TeMPOraL
It doesn't square well with my intuition - if we understand how allowing
randomness improves expected running time, then surely we must be able to
create a deterministic algorithm that is at least as good as the randomized
one.

Am I missing some critical piece of understanding here?

~~~
zaptheimpaler
Well keep in mind that the inputs to the algorithm can vary. Randomization can
help avoid a bad input from throwing your algorithm off. A simple example of
how randomization helps is quicksort:

if we pick the pivot to always be the first element, then any sorted array
will cause worst-case running time. But by randomizing the pivot, we can do
well (in expectation) for any input.

------
mcv
Is not using something for a single day a sign you never need it? I sometimes
don't refer to SO for weeks, simply because I'm dealing with problems I can
figure out without it.

But sometimes I'm dealing with something I'm totally unfamiliar with, and docs
and tutorials are badly written, and then some example on Stackoverflow can be
a great help.

And more importantly, sometimes I'm stuck on something really obscure. Doesn't
happen a lot; once every few months or so, but when it happens, putting a
bounty on Stackoverflow is a really nice option to have.

Are there really people who check Stackoverflow every single day of
programming?

~~~
garethadams
> Are there really people who check Stackoverflow every single day of
> programming?

[http://stackoverflow.com/help/badges/83/fanatic](http://stackoverflow.com/help/badges/83/fanatic)

~~~
benihana
Please, that's the easiest gold badge to get and probably not a good indicator
of anything. For a user interested in badges, this is the easiest way to get a
gold without having interesting content.

------
fs111
Some guy in his early 20ies thinks he has it all figured out. News at 11.

~~~
cristianpascu
I'm in my early 30' and I desperately need stackoverflow and anything that
shows up in a quick Google search. I need to spend time on deciding what
problems to solve and on what's the proper solution. Not how to implement the
solution.

------
nathell
When SO's down, all the programmers grind to a halt. When HN's down, all of
them accelerate to levels normally unseen.

~~~
TeMPOraL
So what happens when both SO and HN are down? Where does that spontaneously
unleashed energy go?

~~~
hartator
Suicide rate went up or people running in circle very quickly. #ScienceFact

------
highace
I'm capable of debugging stuff myself, but I still always go to SO as my first
port of call when I hit a roadblock. If I can find a comprehensive answer in 1
or 2 minutes of searching around, which I normally can unless it's really
niche, that's far better than wracking my brains looking through somebody
else's unfamiliar code.

------
noonespecial
You have reached the inflection point. This is when you start contributing to
StackOverflow.

~~~
VLM
closed as not constructive by VLM Feb 17 '14 at 07:54 EST

As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We
expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this
question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended
discussion.

------
barrkel
Now you've finally matured into the kind of developer who can ask interesting
questions - the type that are not easily answered by studying docs or source
code. Sometimes because you're not asking the right questions, sometimes
because your problem is obscure, sometimes because it's a little bit
"subjective" \- but above all, it should be interesting to other people who
also know how to read docs and source.

~~~
andreasvc
So ... the type of question that gets rejected on StackOverflow.

~~~
VLM
There's (click arrows to navigate) always (click arrows to navigate)
wiki.answers.com (click arrows to navigate)

I believe that site exists solely to punish me for doing google searches like
"wiki something" to find a relevant related topic, and also to make me swear
at google for removing the "block results from this site" feature from search,
which, however temporarily, was awesome.

------
bagosm
Well looks like the poster doesn't use SO quite well on a normal day then.

What you describe as a newfound way to program is actually what should be
considered normal. SO isn't about getting an answer to some code problem or
your homework or something like that.

To benefit from SO you should have an informed question that displays a good
degree of personal research. THEN it's time to tap for the collective
developer mind and be enlightened.

~~~
eterm
Or you know, you can't remember if Find is find(needle, haystack) or
find(haystack, needle) and SO is the first result when you google.

Or any of the other "everyday" queries which are quicker to resolve via google
+ SO than the "real" documentation.

------
coldtea
> _Whenever a library behaved in an unexpected way, I started digging into the
> code to really understand what was going on. Instead of asking StackOverflow
> if an API exists or a library has a particular feature, I read the docs
> instead. Instead of asking if my theory will work, I figure out a way to
> test it, and try it on my own machine._

Yes. Or you could use Stack Overflow, and also learn something you didn't know
by reading the answers.

~~~
garethadams
The difference here is the difference between just _seeing_ how something
works and _feeling_ how it works. There are a lot of people who are able to
just read things and absorb them into their mindspace, but I feel that for the
majority the 'click' doesn't happen until you try it yourself.

------
V-2
"Instead of asking StackOverflow if an API exists or a library has a
particular feature, I read the docs instead."

That's what you're supposed to do :) Ask the question only after you do the
homework, not INSTEAD of it

~~~
drchaos
In my experience, just googling a (simple) question is much faster than trying
to browse any documentation by some other means. One could say that the web is
the docs nowadays and Google is just the frontend.

~~~
p4bl0
You can consider googling as searching the documentation, even if the said
documentation is an answer on SO.

What V-2 rightly said is that you should do that before _asking_ on SO, not
before looking through it for an answer.

Anyway, this whole article is pointless, and senseless. I fail to see why
people would upvote it.

------
einhverfr
On one hand, I don't need SO much either. I mostly go there to answer
questions, not to ask them or research them.

On the other hand, SE has some really great sites where I can get really good
reviews of stuff I am working on by other people other people who know their
stuff (I use dba.stackexchange.com this way).

~~~
stinos
_I mostly go there to answer questions, not to ask them or research them_

2nd. After getting so many good answers from there (which is btw not exactly
the same as _needing_ SO, there are other sites and resources out there, SO is
just by far the fastest and most convenient way out there), I feel a need to
give things back. I admit in the beginning that feel was driven by rep. But
once there was more than 10k next to my name I stopped caring that much and
just wanted to help people. Especially those with weird hard to figure out
problems in some specialized domains.

~~~
troels
I find that answering questions on SO or some other forum, is actually a good
way to get smarter about a topic. Or just keep sharp. So it doesn't have to be
an all altruistic effort.

------
V-2
The guy hardly ever contributed to StackOverflow anyway - he's linking to his
SO profile on his website. He only asked 8 questions and answered 5, in 4
years. Kinda like me and my mother-in-law.

So it's a bit like a bloke who hardly ever has a drink blogging how he "no
longer needs alcohol" because he went through a whole weekend without sipping
a beer : )

I know that you can use SO passively - only by searching - but the real power
of the forum lies in the cases where your problem is original and you have to
summon the community to give you a hand.

~~~
jaredsohn
>but the real power of the forum lies in the cases where your problem is
original and you have to summon the community to give you a hand.

Every time I have had an original problem, much of SO's value was similar to a
stuffed animal that I could explain my problem to, with an occasional tip of
something I should look into.

I personally get much more value out of SO by passively reading other peoples'
questions/answers. I think that is the real power of the service.

------
pjc50
I learnt from electronics.stackexchange in the other direction: I applied my
fragmentary knowledge to _answering_ questions, as a hobby. A combination of
googling, helping the questioner improve their question, and basic thinking
has resulted in me getting about 10k rep and broadening my knowledge quite a
bit.

My top-voted answers are surprisingly general:
[http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/97277/when-
ca...](http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/97277/when-can-fpgas-be-
used-and-microcontrollers-dsps-not/97307#97307) and
[http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/67598/how-
are...](http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/67598/how-are-
integrated-circuits-fabricated/67602#67602) (the top-voted answer by Olin
Lanthrop is one of the highest-voted answers on the site and well worth a
read). But I got 16 upvotes by translating assembler to English:
[http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/86744/from-c-...](http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/86744/from-
c-to-assembly/86746#86746) which I hadn't realised was such a rare skill in
this area.

~~~
VLM
The how to make an IC question is a good example of group-think on SO. The
question was general and very wide open, but everyone jumped on "how to
discourage someone from making a modern processor fab plant in their basement"
bandwagon. Or not answering the question in a tangent, or going all snarky.
The best 5 minute answer to the actual question is probably just to look it up
in wikipedia as at

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit#Manufacturin...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit#Manufacturing)

The commentary about fab at home was not very interesting, either. The true
answer is its very much like making a rocket engine, high performance, cheap,
and safe all at the same time requires a nation-state, 2 outta 3 is going to
take some engineering skill, only 1 achieved is actually pretty easy at home
for an experimenter. Ditto the fab. Twenty people repeating that you're not
going to make a ARM proc anytime soon is not terribly insightful, but
mentioning the work of the "instruments of amplification" guys and insinuating
that once you obtain double digit betas, the logical next step of on die bias
networks for a simple class A amp or perhaps a RTL (R, not DTL or TTL)
inverter...

SO is notoriously good at groupthink. Sometimes what you need is groupthink,
so thats OK. Sometimes not.

~~~
pjc50
Note: that question has been edited considerably from how it was originally
posted, and some of the author's original comments below deleted, in which the
questioner was determined to do it at home.

EE.SO is very negative about "bad" questions, partly because it's small and
can be run for the convenience of the dozen or so people who answer half the
questions. I don't entirely approve but I see their point.

------
nicholassmith
I've been a developer professionally for over 7 years, I still use SO on a
regular basis. I can dig through APIs, pull library code apart and do the
research, but SO often speeds that process up. The chance of you having a
completely unique question is small, but if you do then some incredibly smart
developers are there to help. Why delay yourself from solving a problem and
moving on?

------
mpermar
There is nothing wrong in needing SO.

I totally agree with the article that the initial source of documentation
should not be SO though. Want to learn something? Yeah, then SO is not the
starting place. Grab the tool, read the docs, browse the forums, engage with
the community.

But sometimes there is no forums, or they are almost dead. Sometimes you want
to know how other people are using that tool. Sometimes you don't find the
answer to your question in the tool's forums and sometimes you got into
trouble and can't figure out the issue by yourself. Even sometimes you've come
up with a wonderful solution and that solution might actually be a mess but
you haven't found out yet.

SO is an awesome and thrilling community that can help in all the above
situations. So, in my opinion there is nothing wrong in using it to validate
what you are doing or to find a solution to that annoying issue you are having
or to simply help others. But yes, not really the starting point for learning
something in my opinion. I don't think that is its intent either.

~~~
McUsr
I agree in that it is nothing wrong, and everything about every aspect of it
has been said.

I am a great fan of using SO when I get those "W t f " (ha ha ha I discovered
some word completion) moments. So, then I at least get some pointers in the
right direction, and if the issue is something to learn more about, then I
learn more about it.

------
mikeash
Maybe I'm weird, but I end up in an SO page perhaps one a week, and maybe 50%
of that time is it actually useful. I really had no idea it had taken on such
importance (real or imagined) for others.

~~~
lugg
I have a feeling there is a growing number of people that are using it the way
we used to use google. Or if you're really that old, books.

As in, there is a number of people out there who literally taught them selves
programming with the help of SO. Thats pretty cool imo.

Sure beats wading through forum posts of old, answers dead linking to nowhere,
elitist derps claiming OP should just google for the answer (which that same
forum post is returned as the top result)

It sounds like this guy just finally figured out how to teach himself without
going straight for the answers at the back of the book. Not a bad thing.

------
hmsimha
While I agree with the premise, I think no one has touched on why SO has lost
its crowned place among programmers.

Simply put, search has gotten much better, and programmers have mass adopted
blogging.

I wasn't aware of StackOverflow's existence when it was first gaining
traction; in fact, I think I first discovered it around the time that it
ceased to be as necessary as, from what I've gathered, it once was.

Nowadays, when I do a search, 80% of the time there's a blog post that gives
me a detailed answer to my question with an in-depth explanation of why.
StackOverflow is _often_ useful for answering my questions, but seldom really
scratches the itch of _why_ (with exceptionally insightful answers comprising
a minority). I think most programmers that have achieved mastery gain more
satisfaction by blogging and having their insights centralized, publicized,
and monetized to their liking than they do from accruing points on SO.

------
CmonDev
"Instead of asking if my theory will work, I figure out a way to test it, and
try it on my own machine." \- this is what you are _expected_ to do before
posting on SO.

------
andrey-p
I often find I spend 20 minutes trying to formulate a good SO question, only
to discover the solution just before pressing submit.

Further reading:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging)

~~~
46Bit
When learning a new and difficult topic I do this a lot. For the topics I have
difficulties with it takes 20 minutes to build a workable test case, and
perhaps a lot more than 20 lines of code alone.

It's not always that however. Most recently I spent 4 hours debugging
socket.io disconnecting before I remembered nefarious DPI/crawling done by the
house ISP [https://nodpi.org/2010/08/07/talktalk-becomes-
stalkstalk/](https://nodpi.org/2010/08/07/talktalk-becomes-stalkstalk/)

------
kolme
I fail to see how is this somewhat interesting, useful or insightful.

Pretty pointless, senseless article.

------
coldcode
I've been programming professionally since 1981 and I actually remember having
to figure out everything myself. No internet, no SO, no email, I had to go to
a library to find algorithms. Sure I succeeded in doing complicated work. But
why, today my brain can be expanded by the cumulative knowledge of the entire
planet. I'd rather go to a grocery store and buy food than go out each day and
hunt for critters. It's a tool and people are tool using, so why knock tools?
Hope you enjoy eating skunk every day.

------
inglor
Very often Stack Overflow _is_ the documentation. Library recommendations are
off topic in Stack Overflow anyway...

------
matt__rose
Some of us remember learning to program before SO existed. Hell, when I
started to learn to program the WWW was still pretty new, and still looked on
as something of a fad. You had to read books, and man pages to figure anything
out.

------
moretti
I no longer need Stack Overflow, but I was in Stack Overflow 4 hours ago :-)
[http://stackoverflow.com/users/288570](http://stackoverflow.com/users/288570)

------
zimbatm
That's one of the thing that surprises me: how does StackOverflow keep quality
answers since people who are knowledgeable enough don't need to be there on
the first place.

~~~
joshvm
People will do anything for imaginary internet points.

------
spacemanmatt
And the entire beginner community went to
[http://www.downforeveryone.com/](http://www.downforeveryone.com/) at the same
time

------
jscheel
Hmm, this is fine when you really need a deeper understanding of something,
but sometimes you just need to get some code out to fix a bug, hit a deadline,
etc.

------
troels
I consider my self an experienced programmer, but I would estimate that I use
SO at least a few times a day, when programming. It's usually through a Google
search, but nonetheless. I also find information in other places of course,
but I really think that site heightened the quality of available information
remarkably.

------
vijucat
Hmm, that's a superb piece of self-promotion. Most experienced developers make
the cross-over from needing SO to contributing answers on SO, but it never
occurred to me to write about it. I envy the marketing chops this dev acquired
in the process; it can make a huge difference to your salary / career.

~~~
err4nt
Really? It came across very arrogant and elitist to me. The piece seems to
presuppose how _I_ write code and that always rubs me the wrong way.

------
zapf
Maybe we should run an experiment. Block SO from our routers/browsers
(whatever works) and then see how we feel coding without SO. The time frame
for this block should at least be a week.

I have a feeling we'd feel better about reading the proper documentations as
opposed to trying out random answers from SO.

------
nathanvanfleet
And to think that I was turned down as a candidate for a programming job
because I wasn't visible enough on the internet (contribute to trending github
projects or write a blog). This is the exact style of blog you see all the
time and I couldn't bring myself to even parody it.

------
adamconroy
What a strange thing to say. He is obviously planning to work with his current
stack forever. He has decided to be dogmatic at the expense of his project
team. Basically, he will be unemployed within 5-10 years.

------
enscr
There are downsides of stackoverflow like the high karma bullies who love to
moderate & flag at the drop of a hat.

However, it's still an awesome community. Too bad it's not for you.

------
peter_l_downs
Congratulations!

