Surely the author would oppose a law banning a protest within 200 feet of the mosque that was just shot up in San Diego then. Or is that different than the NY law for some reason?
What does protests have to do with Mosque shootings? What does it have to do with those protesting the sales of illegal Israeli settlements in NY City buildings?
You know exactly what point I'm making and your fatuous attempt at playing coy makes my point for me.
Those "NY City Buildings" were what. What do you call them, exactly? Changing what they're called doesn't change what they are yet you want different rules. That's my point exactly and you've confirmed it.
The NY law, which has analogs everywhere no one had a problem with until it came up there, came up after a protest on Nov 19 (and May 5) at Park East __________.
Fill in that blank for me.
Careful arguing a carveout for what event is there, it won't work for mosques or islamic centers (or buddhist, christian, etc.) either. Surely you aren't arguing that the United States doesn't have enough Islamophobes to do some Westboro Church like shenanigans there, are you?
To be clear in case anyone else wants to do this rhetorical trick of playing innocent, the commenter above wants you to be able to protest outside of the religious buildings of only one religion. Apparently by just changing what they're called.
My mom's a teacher at one of these schools, we still have friends sending their kids to them, and I'm still in contact with my HS teachers at that school.
In wealthier areas of the Bay like Saratoga, Cupertino, Campbell, Fremont, Palo Alto, Tri-Valley, Lamorindia, etc the school districts are only paying lip service to common core and still teaching as they were during my time.
Most students take multiple AP classes (and the HSes usually offer 15-20 APs) as well as attend the local CC, UC Berkeley, or Stanford to take additional classes.
The schools that are militantly common core and trying to remove classes are also (frankly) in crap school districts like SFUSD or OUSD where school board elections are dominated by local activists who oftentimes don't even have kids but are using the board as a stepping stone into local politics, and due to their reputations and low pay are unable to hire teachers for more advanced classes anyhow.
There's a reason the kind of house that would go for $1.5M in Sunset would go for $2.5M in the Peninsula or Tri-Valley.
I am a teacher and I write education software for math as a side gig, which I must have because I'm a teacher.
It's rare for any teacher to just discard the standards. And anyone who says "common core" is talking about something from 20 years ago. The new math framework--already years old--has sparked the latest wave of UC revolts and NO standardized testing is part of it.
"Common core" is the exact opposite. When people say that they are referring to the standards and the tests that go with them. Standards are just standards you can teach them or not, but the framework, something entirely different, give schools guidance on what courses to offer and how to approach it.
The latest framework poo-pooed Calculus and Algebra for advanced middle schoolers in the name of "equity." And dissing admissions tests is part of this movement, that gave us the "Data Science" class that UCs rejected. That was supposed to replace Algebra 2 and therefore make students UC-ready. As someone who taught that class, I can tell you it was a joke. And it had zero, nothing to do with common core. Finding a way to link it to those existing standards was difficult at best.
And I promise your mom's school at least gives the CAASPP. Every school in the Bay Area is not not doing that for decades out in the open. Sorry.
> And I promise your mom's school at least gives the CAASPP...
Yes, but their CASSPP participation rates have fallen from 95-100% to 70s range as some people started explaining to parents how to use section 60615 to withdraw from CASSPP as it clashed with AP and SAT prep schedules - this is a public school where AP participation is in the 70-90% range.
> Every school in the Bay Area is not not doing that for decades out in the open...
Note how in my earlier response I said wealthier school districts.
This is how it is in the Tri-Valley and richer Peninsula and South Bay school districts. There is some basic malicious compliance with CA standards, but all the households use "Advancement Via Outside Institutions" in 8th grade and get back onto the "AP Calc by 11th/12th grade" track, and most students end up almost entirely taking AP classes by 10th grade so they aren't really impacted by CA standards changes.
Again, you keep using that word. The standards haven't changed. It's not the standard, this isn't about California's math standards. You're talking about standards, but this is about the framework.
Wealth also correlates with higher test scores. Why? because they are ignoring the framework and doing well with the standards.
This isn't about common core and nothing I have said or you have said changes that.
Even San Francisco rejected the basic premise of that framework's approach to algebra. So it's not just your mom's school either.
Anyway, I'm tired of arguing with your mom indirectly. If any other teachers want to discuss this directly and tell me how I'm wrong, please do.
Thanks for this post. Unfortunately, you used the wrong word choice here and this question has 13 other answers that have some of the same words but don't really answer your particular question so it has been deleted. Also, if this remains posted, my not-on-point answer will get less views.
Everyone loves to say this when the death of Stack Overflow is discussed, but it always was that way. Strict moderation, love it or hate it, was part of the platform. And it could have kept going that way for many more years if not for LLMs 99.9% obviating the need for a coding Q&A forum.
Everyone loves to say this... because it's everyone's experience. I stopped using SO as a resource years ago (well before the advent of LLMs) because it got to the point where almost invariably, when I found a post that managed to perfectly articulate my question, it was closed as a duplicate of some other, distinctly unhelpful question. But it wasn't always that way. There's a fine line between strict moderation and draconian moderation, and at some point they crossed from the former to the latter.
I rarely posted questions on SO but I largely stopped using it as a resource because of exactly this. I got tired of searching for answers only to find closed-as-dupe questions.
I feel like in their search for “quality” they completely forgot that they needed engagement to deliver value. The whole premise was that the correct answers would bubble to the top, but their system ended up pushing everyone to old questions that had a highly upvoted but either out of date or not applicable answers.
What’s crazy is with the current gen of LLMs you could 100% rein in the abusive mods. SO could reinvent itself as a place for coding agents to get clankermotiomal support after they ‘hear’ ‘WHY THE F DID YOU DO THAT’. (Seriously a hook could draft a submission and then set up a listener for responses. Who would be answering is an interesting question tho)
Ah yes, programming: the discipline which famously only has singular right answers to problems, such that programmers never get in arguments with each other about the correct approach to solving a given problem, and there are no long running disputes that have ossified into intractable disagreements.
That basic 90's sitcom level-1 sarcasm is not helpful in any adult discussion, it's very common on engineers and technical people, and it's probably the reason SO and similar sites were being abandoned by the regular internet users before LLMs.
Just say what you intent to communicate, dude. If funny is not your forte, don't force it.
Don't forget the other way of sidetracking what you're asking for: "Why are you doing this, do something else instead."
I think most of my questions ended up with this, when I had very good reasons for doing it the way I was doing it. I typically wasn't showing it because I had isolated the problem I was facing into the minimal amount of code to duplicate it, or I was stuck with the particular tech I was using and we had 12 years of code built on top of it and I couldn't switch.
Oh, yes, I remember these kinds of answers distinctly frustrating. But it was not singular to SO. Reddit had a similar vibe at times. I remember I was studying some C things back when and asked about speed and what was essentially loop unrolling. Tip answer was why do you care about speed. Bruh, I am trying to get a mental model of how this thing works.
They also neglected to solve the problem of differentiating answers to previous generations of software. How many python2 answers does one have to sift through to get a python3 answer - maybe the weight of answers finally tilted over the probabilities. Even just adding the right tags would have made it easier, but it wasn't ever solved in any way as far as I could tell. And the old answers are there like potholes to fall into.
Is it possible this is survivorship bias? Maybe other forums with much less strict moderation simply wouldn’t have survived long enough to complain about.
Ironically i'm probably a better dev purely because after a few experiences on SO, I would rather waste days/weeks banging my head against problems and learning from them than to actually post on SO. It was a miserable experience generally. For context this was probably ~15 years ago now.
This isn't necessarily to say that SO made me a better developer. Rather i'm just saying that i value (correctly or not) those extremely hard fought lessons. Those lessons where it was considerable pain, effort, time, misery, etc. Are they efficient ways to learn? I doubt it. But in my many trips down that road i developed intuition that i'd probably not have otherwise.
So ironically i guess SO made me a better developer by avoiding using SO at all cost. Conversely, i imagine i'd lack this value that i speak of entirely if i was 20 years younger and starting fresh today. Not sure i'd be better off though.
edit: By "using SO" i should be saying posting on SO. I of course searched and used data found on SO as often as i could. So to that end i am grateful for SO existing.
Sure, the mods were not always the best on SO. But even if you did ask a question, you had to deal with a userbase that was more pedantic and judgy than Reddit. Usually you would get an answer if it was obvious, other times you would have to defend your question against some guy whose newfound obsession was whether you had an XY Problem. Or who was personally offended you weren't using whatever the fad library of the day was (e.g. jQuery).
> Against some volunteer who's encountering their fourteenth clear XY problem of the day.
Fourteenth clear as imagined in their head XY problem of the day.
By far most of the "XY problems" I saw, on SO or elsewhere, were actually "XY problem problems" - i.e. a responder having so limited imagination and character (or, to be charitable, just running very low on energy and focus), that upon coming across a question they couldn't comprehend, they would assume the person asking the question must be confused instead.
If it isn't fun to do, and simply causes frustration, that hypothetical person constructed in the comment could just step away for the day.
I get that dealing with low quality questions wasn't great, but imagine spending an afternoon researching a weird thing using some tools your organization mandates, writing it up, only for that person to skim it and just assume you really wanted to do $otherThing.
Again: the "less abrasive alternative" is built off the labor and knowledge of those abrasive folks. They're a large part of the reason it knows what to less-abrasively suggest.
Being book-smart or correct is only half of the skill in sharing knowledge. While often overlooked, the voice in which the knowledge is delivered matters.
This is arguably more important than the the actual depth knowledge, given how many people have flocked to soft-spoken random text generators in comparison.
For better or for worse, people are cursed with ego, and we need to account for that when communicating with others. It is a failing of the platform (and a tragedy, because it is healthier to learn from a human) that it was unable to foster a positive environment.
> This is arguably more important than the the actual depth knowledge, given how many people have flocked to soft-spoken random text generators in comparison.
People flock to heroin, too.
> Being book-smart or correct is only half of the skill in sharing knowledge. While often overlooked, the voice in which the knowledge is delivered matters.
This. And it's even starting to be a problem with LLMs - noticed that with Claude and Gemini this week.
Yes, I am specifically asking if it's possible to do X with Y. No, I'm not interested in how to do ${unrelated except for name} thing A with Y, or ${manual variant of X} by hand to ${subset of Y}, nor do I want to use tool Q instead. I specifically want to know how to do X with Y, for reasons that are my own and borne of frustration with Y being a toy I'm trying to use for productive work, which apparently means pushing it past its operational envelope, but I have a deadline...
Closing a question as a duplicate because there is already a question with similar wording (but assuming an entirely different tech stack, architecture, coding style, and goal) is a frequent enough experience that it became shorthand for the site's problems.
There was kind of a fatal mis-match between the questions being asked and the intended kind of questions that were being answered. The actual asks were often incomplete diagnostics of the questioner's current problem, frequently focusing on the wrong thing (because if you don't have the full knowledge of the thing you're going to be prone to incorrect assumptions of the diagnosis). SO's intent, though, was a more mathematical "here's the question, here's the programming concept that explains it" so you get the best explanation of how a linked list works under a completely unrelated problem. Which is fine, but the site's culture and design only partially acknowledged the disconnect.
The whole site developed a reputation of being something approximating the reverse of the comments under recipes that substitute lard for cream and wonder why their cake tastes funny. Lots of questions of "How do I implement this functionality in Y? We can't change our tech stack because of other factors, so it has to be Y" questions answered by "If you just use Z instead you wouldn't have these problems" and "closed as a duplicate of this question for how to implement the non-Y version" when there was a perfectly fine way to do it in Y.
In my experience, the problem wasn't the user base, it was the moderators. I would be getting useful answers (or questions) from the users, when out of the blue the moderators would shut my question down for some reason. I once complained to the management (literally), explaining why I thought the moderator was wrong, and got my question restored. But that was too much like work.
X in an XY problem is almost always possible, like "how do we make ship canals and harbors with nukes" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare) or "I'd like to amputate my hand to fix a hangnail".
I don't think that's true. I remember the very early days of Stack Overflow and it felt much more fun and friendly than it did 6-7 years later. I have so many 15+ years question/answer that somehow get revisited by a "moderator" that decides that maybe we should close this.
But was that the cause of Stack Overflow's demise? I agree that it most likely isn't. It's most definitely because of LLMs.
A sink that has large but finite capacity to absorb something can reach an irreversible tipping point when an additional shock happens.
There are many examples of this in nature. (And in Nature [1].) One interesting one that I think is unknown to many people is limnic eruption. A lake can absorb quite a lot of CO₂, for example from volcanic gases. Dissolved CO₂ is invisible, so the lake can look quite ordinary, but the build-up turns the lake into something approximating an unopened carbonated soft drink. If the lake is deep enough and the layers don't mix frequently enough to relieve the pressure, it can build up to the tipping point where the lake will suddenly explode, flooding the nearby landscape and releasing an invisible CO₂ cloud, which will proceed to kill the surrounding life by asphyxiation.
The conditions required for a limnic eruption are rare, though there were two incidents in Cameroon in the 20th century.
It's entirely possible that the build-up of hostility on Stack Overflow were survivable as long as it didn't build up to a level that exceeded the community's ability to absorb it. But an exogenous shock or the community shrinking could upset the balance, with hysteresis making the change difficult to reverse.
It was not always part of the platform. Moderation got increasingly aggressive on SO as time went on. There was an inflection point around 2014 where lots of people gave up on using the site. SO was in slow decline for most of a decade before AI showed up to finish the job.
if early stackoverflow moderation was strict it was strict in a way that was invisible to people who genuinely needed the help. later on it got people who thought the strictness was the main point, and that they had to be vigilant defenders of the purity of the site (wikipedia had a similar malaise).
I personally gave up on the site entirely when I saw a very valid question from an inexperienced programmer closed as a duplicate and redirected to a question about a similar problem that did not actually address what they were asking.
I found this often for C# (and sometimes Typescript) related stuff... redirected to a question with a wrong/useless answer.
For Java/Python/Javascript it was also the case, but often the answer (proper way of doing things) would be in the comments lower down, probably the size of community was larger.
I'm all for a heavily moderated forum (that's why I like HN) but SO was clearly on the decline (from the graphs in this post) before LLMs came onto the scene. It peaked around 2017 (not counting COVID numbers) and was in a steady decline. ChatGPT just pushed it off the cliff (figuratively and literally).
Not to go off topic, but there's some similarities between that and the way that Hacker News is run/moderated. But I believe they've found a pretty ideal balance. Even though they occasionally annoy me with with fun things taken down, I understand the need to have some consistency.
Perhaps they need to take a page out of dang (and team)'s book.
Yeah sure but in the past there was no viable alternative so people tolerated the crazy moderation. As soon as AI offered an alternative people left in droves.
It's definitely plausible that if it hadn't been such a hostile place to ask questions (sorry ItS nOt a Q&a SiTe) that it would have survived AI better.
Everyone loves to say it because it's true. Asking questions on SO was always at best an adversarial process, but it got really bad in the last decade or so.
It was quite simply a profoundly unpleasant "community" to interact with.
Yeah, as I understand it, they wanted to optimize for Google search. This meant having "canonical" answers. This killed the site in the long term. In the short term, it worked wonderfully, and the founders made a (well deserved) killing.
Agree. But I asked a couple questions about a year ago and got zero response. It's not just people asking questions who deserted SO, it is also people answering them (probably a chicken and egg problem - reversal of network effects).
I had a work SO account with many questions/answers - everything fine. Later I created a SO account for use with my private projects and happened to have answered a couple questions without getting upvotes. The algorithm banned me from answering questions with the remark that I should improve the quality of my answers. You can bet that I never answered a question again on SO with any account.
if the mismoderation did not kill stackoverflow, it at the least made people who might otherwise have supported the site feel like nothing of value was lost.
I am having a different experience than a lot of other commenters here vibe coding with Rust. I am not a Rust programmer or evangelist. I have implemented a drop-in Bash replacement/clone in Rust that passes the upstream Bash test suite and a whole battery of its own. It is a tiny bit faster than Bash itself but consumes a bit more memory. But Codex and Claude both did a great job with it.
I also had it implement a wasm geodesic calculator in Rust and it's amazing and in my use case is better than geodesiclib using the same updated algorithm.
I'm a "C-nile" Rust folks love to hate and did my first hacking in C Deep Blue C on Atari 8-bits. But I'm very impressed with these products and with the ability to leverage some features of Rust with them. (e.g. audit every unsafe instance and define its invariants, etc.)
I also agree with the commenter who said these LLMs are today, at the present moment, good at Go. The only language I notice it seems to be really good above and beyond others at is javascript, I assume because there's so much of it.
Yeah, so they are worried about things like CAS that let you use lots of CLI agents from different companies. The fork I'm using lets me use Claude and Codex, and Gemini if I want, but I haven't much lately. Anyway, that sounds like what's happening. Is that wrong?
I think we will need to move to workarounds based on MCP going forwards.
> run CLI agent with an initial prompt
> tell the agent it isn't allowed to directly reply to the user and must use your tool instead. also all of the CLI's original interactive tools are blocked and it has to use your alternatives
> when the agent uses tools in the MCP, it redirects to your GUI's prompt editor
Don't know why this was downvoted, Musk is appealing. I'm not expecting people to be civil procedure experts, but it's pretty much high school Government that there are appeals after trials.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/18/musk-altman-openai-trial-ver...
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