Tried Stack Overflow, but got nothing. Normal? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: rx8pilot
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 21, 2020, 12:54:32 am
content: I have been a long time lurker on Stack Overflow looking for and getting snippets of understanding here and there. In general, I find that it takes longer to search through the enormous amount of muck (poor information and/or 'know-it-alls') than to use more structured sources of answers like books, documentation, and perhaps nicely packaged tutorials on the relevant topics. Periodically, I get some credible and useful information.Today, I posted my first question trying to be very specific and described my troubleshooting efforts leading up to the post. It got a response about 2 minutes later claiming it was a duplicate and already answered in another thread. When I went to that thread, it was only slightly related and completely unhelpful - but my thread was now closed.Is this normal Stack Exchange?

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 21, 2020, 01:15:10 am
content: Yes.

author: rx8pilot
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 21, 2020, 01:33:59 am
content: Quote from: SiliconWizard on January 21, 2020, 01:15:10 amI guess I am not alone.When I tried to re-frame the question and post a new thread - I was greeted with the error.Code:'You can only post once every 90 minutes.'I continued to search existing threads, and have come up empty handed. Nothing seems to even be close.

author: Nominal Animal
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 21, 2020, 01:37:36 am
content: Quote from: rx8pilot on January 21, 2020, 12:54:32 amIt is typical, unfortunately. There are a lot of "reputation" gamers, who post answers and close questions as duplicates even when they're not (and often also close questions because they themselves do not understand the question, especially when the question is hard). They do not really do it to help others, but to get more "reputation". The entire site is based on the idea that "best answers get voted to the top", but popularity and quality do not correlate much (and causate even less).

author: T3sl4co1l
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 21, 2020, 02:23:17 am
content: So you're going to post it here so we can possibly answer it, or any of us with SE accounts can downvote the guilty, right?Tim

author: rx8pilot
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 21, 2020, 02:59:42 am
content: Quote from: Nominal Animal on January 21, 2020, 01:37:36 amStruggling to understand such a motivation. BizarreUPDATE:The person that closed the thread is now responding via comments to the original thread. Since is it closed, he is the only one that can participate I am guessing.Not sure why he simply does not open it back up for a public discussion.Quote from: T3sl4co1l on January 21, 2020, 02:23:17 amlol, I will start a new thread.

author: Nominal Animal
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 21, 2020, 04:03:35 am
content: Quote from: rx8pilot on January 21, 2020, 02:59:42 amIt's a downside of gamification: people start treating the reputation points as their score, and the reason they participate is the dopamine release that occurs when you increase your score.Quote from: rx8pilot on January 21, 2020, 02:59:42 amMembers with high enough reputation score can see and comment on it. Members with even higher can vote to reopen. Members with even higher can insta-reopen, and so on.

author: rx8pilot
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 21, 2020, 05:02:47 am
content: Quote from: Nominal Animal on January 21, 2020, 04:03:35 amOooooh, now it is starting to make sense. It really creates a 'My points are bigger than your points' culture. There was a lecture I watched a while back and the guy introduced himself and immediately began putting his Stack Overflow credentials out there - presumably to qualify himself to teach the audience something.

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 21, 2020, 02:17:24 pm
content: I have never fully understood the Stack Overflow model. It's kind of an "elitist" board, but I've never really seen very interesting or at least helpful contributions. A large number of them seem to consist of stating that the question is redundant, idiotic, ill-formulated, etc. Others are just often very general answers, barely helpful.You could say that they have very effective moderation in itself, but that's about it. It's almost like moderation just serves its own purpose there.So, I personally don't get it. I guess it attracts people due to its "elitist" model (which would implicitly imply that the quality of posts must be very good), but in practice it doesn't seem to live up to its reputation. Don't know. Maybe people just feel "safe" there. Or maybe they like being called idiots. Who knows.

author: rstofer
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 22, 2020, 04:02:04 pm
content: In my view, Stack Overflow is the least useful site on the Internet. When I post a query to Google, I avoid all responses from SO. Their replies are usually "Already answered" or something even less helpful and more insulting. Of course the question was "already answered", there are no original questions. Somebody has already discovered the answer and all I need is a link.

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 22, 2020, 06:33:51 pm
content: Yup. It almost looks like SO is some kind of S&M web board or something. A few elite people keep beating users, and the mass of users keep getting beaten up.

author: aix
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: January 22, 2020, 06:40:51 pm
content: As a reasonably high-ranking and long-tenured contributor, I can't say I have any evidence of reputation gaming. It's not even clear how voting to close a question could help someone game the system to their advantage.That said, I do see a fair amount of questions getting closed as duplicates where they aren't really. Those instances generally come across as a person or, more commonly, multiple people (since closure generally requires multiple votes) misinterpreting some nuance in a question and marking it as a duplicate of another, similar question. When I see that, I re-open the question.There is astaggeringnumber of duplicates getting posted all the time, and it's not surprising to me that some false positive get caught up in the flood of closures.(It is also true that the average quality of a question as posted is shockingly poor, though that's a separate problem; I am in no way implying that this applies to your case.)

author: magic
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 22, 2020, 07:13:36 pm
content: I'm not even entirely sure what the problem is with dupes and dumb question. If somebody else answers them...volenti non fit iniuriaQuote from: aix on January 22, 2020, 06:40:51 pmI don't know either, maybe to limit inflation

author: Nominal Animal
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 22, 2020, 08:30:47 pm
content: Quote from: aix on January 22, 2020, 06:40:51 pmIstopped contributing a year ago because "high-ranking and long-tenured contributors" typically refuse to acknowledge or correct their errors, and instead either delete their answer, or let it stand, whichever yields them the most reputation points.The quality of the information does not matter to them; their reputation rank overrides any such considerations.This is the reputation game.It gets more egregious the higher-ranking member that makes the error. With some notable exceptions, of course, like Jonathan Leffler, chux, R.., and others.Simply put, too many higher-ranking contributors are more worried about their reputation score than the correctness and usefulness of their answers.Which I hate, because being wrong is understandable, but knowingly letting misinformation stand, leading others astray, is evil.Quote from: aix on January 22, 2020, 06:40:51 pmYou have severely misunderstood the argument here. It is not that some people game the system; it is about gamification of advice and help.By using "reputation" as a score, contributors will pursue higher scores, regardless of the quality of the answers. This happens because of the human dopamine system; we're biologically wired to react that way to positive reinforcement -- even if it is just a number on the screen. The exact same thing happens on social media, with "likes" and so on.These score-seeking contributors are especially keen to close questions they cannot answer, because a secondary tactic is to stop others from gaining "score" when they themselves cannot. They do not do so consciously, it is more like emotional bias to treat hard questions as "because I cannot answer that, the question must be stupid, so it should be closed".

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 22, 2020, 09:29:07 pm
content: Stack overflow seams pretty useful to me tho.Tho i don't use the site directly, like search trough it, post questions or answer them. I just open up Stack Overflow pages when they show up in google results and they are offten pretty good. The questions i usually resort to it are along the lines of "How to best/easily do X in language Y?" and among the top 3 answers is usually a short snippet of code that does what i need, so i just copy paste it, tweak it a bit and done. Gets the job done much faster than reading trough the piles of Python documentation arranged as looong pages where you have to scroll trough forever to find the thing you need, only to have it explained in a very generalized way so you still have no idea how exactly to use it. Another thing i like it for is the question "Is X faster than Y?" where the official documentation often won't tell you that but you might find a SO post where someone tested both methods and benchmarked them, while sometimes also explaining the reason why X is so much faster.Another website for quickly grabbing snippets of code is the Roseta Code site:http://www.rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_CodeIt has commonly used code snippets written in pretty much any reasonably common language(plus sometimes very obscure ones).What i don't use the site for is more specific questions of like "I downloaded github project X and it keeps throwing error Y when compiling" or "Im using MCU X and peripheral Y is locking up when in do Z". People probably don't feel like putting in a lot of effort to answering these narrow questions that are actually sometimes really difficult to answer properly.What sort of questions do you look to be answered by stack overflow?

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 22, 2020, 11:07:26 pm
content: Stack overflow is at best and by design useful for "which button do I press to cause the floggle to snurf" questions.The answers are usually of the form "my fluggle snarfed when I pressed Z at the full moon", spelling differences intended, and note the absence of cause and effect.There is very littleunderstandingofprinciplesvisible; instead monkey-see-monkey-do responses are preferred.There is very littlediscussionofsubtlepoints, for the same reasons.If I was interviewing people for a job and somebody touted their stack exchange credentials in their CV, it is highly unlikely that I would bother to interview them.

author: aix
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: January 22, 2020, 11:50:12 pm
content: I personally don't much care about my reputation score. To me, it's merely a proxy for the amount of time I spent on the site genuinely trying to help people (on and off, as I have time, over the course of nearly a decade or so).As far as the quality of questions and answers goes, it's highly variable. However, the better-quality stuff is often great, and upvotes are a great way to discover such stuff. So much so that I often scan the top-voted questions across the Stack Exchange network, and read those that catch my eye. It's amazing what you learn.Each to their own I suppose.

author: Nominal Animal
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 23, 2020, 12:39:32 am
content: Quote from: aix on January 22, 2020, 11:50:12 pmGiven that only one third of my answers at stackoverflow have more than two upvotes, and one fifth has zero, by that logic my answers are utter shit, not worth reading.According to the people that I've helped (I get about one email per week about various StackOverflow/LinuxQuestions stuff I've discussed, even though I haven't answered any questions or comments in a year), likethisorthisorthis, I do not believe so. I don't claim they are great; I only claim that their score does not match their usefulness.My highest voted answer starts with"Why does everyone insist on reinventing the wheel again and again?", and isn't the accepted answer.(It's about using POSIX.1nftw()to walk directory trees, instead of opendir()/readdir()/closedir(), as the latter is hard to implement in a robust way, correctly handling e.g. files that are added, deleted, renamed, or moved during the walk. If you care more about BSD than POSIX compatibility, usefts()instead; me, I like POSIX.)It would be much better if instead of "reputation" it was called "popularity", because that is what it reflects: popularity, not quality or reputation.I've only ever askedonequestion at the StackExchange network, related to perfect binary search trees; otherwise I've just trawled for unpopular but interesting questions, and answering those. So, perhaps the set of questions and answers I've dealt with is particularly skewed. It is definitely true that the "atmosphere" differs a lot on different StackExchange sites, like math.stackexchange.com vs stackoverflow.com.

author: Bud
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 23, 2020, 12:49:40 am
content: In terms of quality of answers i do not see how SO differs from any other forums.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 23, 2020, 09:59:25 am
content: Quote from: Bud on January 23, 2020, 12:49:40 amThere is very littleunderstandingofprinciplesvisible; instead monkey-see-monkey-do responses are preferred.There is very little discussion ofsubtleand/orcomplexpoints - such discussions are actively discouraged by making it very difficult (if not impossible) to include multiple levels of context. Instead they favour simple linear statements, as found in most (un)social media venues.Others have noted that some people chopother people'sdiscussions that they misunderstand or find boring.Is that sufficient difference?

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 23, 2020, 11:36:41 am
content: Quote from: tggzzz on January 22, 2020, 11:07:26 pmExactly, and the "stack overflow coding" (well described earlier in this thread) works the same. I resort to "SO programming" paradigm when I have a problem that1) is small2) I hate3) I have to get done quickly4) Exactness, quality and maintainability are of no interest whatsoeverSurprisingly often, copypasting together 100 lines of code from Stack Overflow seemingly does the job I hate and I can go on to something I like to do properly.But indeed, if I needed to hire a programmer, I would look very carefully if someone is marketing their stack overflow reputation.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 23, 2020, 12:32:32 pm
content: Quote from: Siwastaja on January 23, 2020, 11:36:41 amThat sums it up, except I can't remember the last time I used it for programming.Occasionally I've used it for linux box configuration. Even then I usually get the feeling there's too many necessary preconditions the poster didn't include, probably because they didn't realise they existed.

author: blacksheeplogic
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: January 23, 2020, 08:49:49 pm
content: Quote from: Nominal Animal on January 22, 2020, 08:30:47 pmI've thought about answering or adding to existing answers but the community feels hostile and dismissive to harder questions. My assumption is that there's a lot of weekend code warriors on the site with a high opinion of their ability who actually don't understand the complexity of the question being asked.However, having said that, the site does seem useful to the same weekend code warriors and novices as although a the questions are simple in nature and the answers are obtainable in the documentation/IDE it's maybe not written in novice friendly terms with novice friendly code examples.

author: rstofer
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 24, 2020, 06:20:08 pm
content: Somebody said "There are no stupid questions!" - obviously, they were wrong. To be fair to SO, some of the questions are easily answered by a simple Google search. Since all of human knowledge is on Google and their question is unlikely to be cutting edge, there is a Google reply out there. All the user has to do is look.What happens is that SO comes up fairly high on the Google replies and the unsuspecting user clicks there and somehow decides to post a question. Probably not a cutting edge question so the universe crashes in on them. If it was a cutting edge question, I don't know why they would be searching SO.In the end, I see no purpose for SE or SO (for me). I can get more appropriate responses almost anywhere else.

author: RomDump
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: January 24, 2020, 08:12:33 pm
content: Quote from: rx8pilot on January 21, 2020, 12:54:32 amPretty Much.My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow: Arthur S., Arthur T., and the Soup NaziStaging: What Stack Overflow Can Learn from Git and Garbage Collection

author: blacksheeplogic
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: January 24, 2020, 09:14:12 pm
content: Quote from: rstofer on January 24, 2020, 06:20:08 pmSometimes Google gives you thousands of results that don't answer the question, or thousands of similar but not the same, or thousands of wrong answers, or worse still vague answers that don't actually tell you what the answer are just that your stupid for asking etc. Then there's the thousands of answers from morons quoting documentation they don't understand etc....Mr Google has it's uses but sometimes a generic search engine is not what you need.

author: rstofer
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 24, 2020, 10:39:37 pm
content: Quote from: blacksheeplogic on January 24, 2020, 09:14:12 pmGoogle can certainly lead you astray, no question about it. Yet, for all of it, I have been retired and playing with various projects for 16 years. I seem to find the information I want by way of Google, even though I may have to manipulate the search string, but I have never gotten an answer from SO. Every single time I click there all I get is "Already answered" without so much as a hint as to where. Of course it's already answered, there are no new questions! I want to know WHERE it is answered.Others have a different experience, no doubt, but for me SO is a complete waste of pixels.And, yes, some of the links from Google have outright wrong answers. Some of the stuff is not worth the storage space it consumes and filtering the replies is often an exercise in futility. Wikipedia can be a lot like that.I can understand a bit of frustration on the part of SO contributors. Questions are asked that are clearly spelled out in a User Manual which, obviously, the poster hasn't bothered to read. Others relate to programming where it is clear the poster has not a clue as to how the constructs are supposed to work. It's like "Hey, I found this site, I'm going to post a truly stupid question and see what happens!" Well, what happens is that the universe crashes in on them. And maybe that's exactly what should happen. Do your own homework, I did mine! Something like that...In the meantime, for me, SO is my absolute last choice for a useful response to any query I may post. But that's just me! I'm old, I'm cranky and I don't want people wasting my time with "Already answered".

author: Nominal Animal
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 24, 2020, 10:42:03 pm
content: I completely lost my shit when a self-professed "MPI expert" on StackOverflow with high reputation score told new MPI programmers that asynchronous sends/receives (MPI_Isend(),MPI_Irecv()) should not be used, because they tend to cause deadlocks.This is one of my buttons, because not using asynchronous communications is a huge waste of resources in current distributed simulations: they compute, then transfer data, then compute, and so on, even when in most cases, the simulation can easily compute and transfer data at the same time. Depending on the simulation, the time spent transferring data and not computing anything can be a significant fraction (like 10-25% in the real world, even when using fast InfiniBand) of the total simulation wall clock time. Wasted.There obviously are caveats to using asynchronous communications, but those are really about cases where computing and data transfers cannot be mixed.If you have a regular lattice of computing nodes, then asynchronous comms with neighbours is easy: just use a separate tag per neighbor direction (so six tags for a regular cubic lattice; 28 if you include second and third neighbors in the diagonal directions), and one pending asynchronous receive and one send per neighbor. The tag is set based on the direction the message flows in the lattice. So, if you use tag L when sending to "left" neighbor, and tag R when sending to "right" neighbor, you receive a message from your "left" neighbor using tag R (because the message flows "right"), and a message from your "right" neighbor using tag L (because the message flows "left"). With this scheme, you won't have a deadlock using any current MPI implementation. Then, you just need to partition your data so that you'll immediately send the data your neighbors receive, calculate the data you can without the data from the neighbors, then wait for the neighbors to send the data you need, and finally calculate the data you needed the neighbor data for. If the internal data set is large enough compared to the data shared with the neighbors, you end up doing communications and calculations at the same time, and not waste real world time and resources.

author: rstofer
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 24, 2020, 11:12:41 pm
content: Quote from: Nominal Animal on January 24, 2020, 10:42:03 pmBut, for a new user, lacking a great deal of insight into messages, that might be a perfectly reasonable answer.Take a simple example: Serial IO. We can have polled input or interrupt driven input with a queue. If a new user came by and asked "how do I implement serial IO", we probably wouldn't give the interrupt driven answer. The topic seems to be too advanced for the question posted. If the question was "what's the proper way to implement interrupt driven serial IO" then maybe the more advanced answer is more appropriate.That's a problem with forums: How much does the poster know? Where are they on the learning curve?

author: Nominal Animal
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2020, 01:30:11 am
content: Quote from: rstofer on January 24, 2020, 11:12:41 pmI forgot to mention that the original asker was specifically trying to learn about async messaging using MPI_Irecv()/MPI_Isend(), and the response from that high-score dude was "don't do that, it's bad; I'm a high-reputation MPI expert, and we never do that in practice".(I was trying to find the question, but I think the asker or moderators deleted it. My own comments needed a bit of moderator intervention, I got so heated up.)It's when high reputation score, or otherwise trusted/popular people talk garbage and refuse to acknowledge any errors, that I get angry.I don't mind people being wrong -- I'm often wrong myself --; it's the unwillingness to acknowledge an error when you must know better, willingly leading others astray with known incorrect advice, that yanks my chains too much.I would not push async transfers on a new user, of course. Getting initial tests and calculations going with normal synchronous sends and receives with MPI is hard enoughStep by step, getting visible progress, while climbing the learning curve, works.Quote from: rstofer on January 24, 2020, 11:12:41 pmRight. I would probably write a three-stage answer: use a library; examine existing implementations to understand blocking I/O, nonblocking I/O or polled I/O, interrupt driven, and DMA driven; then implement your own from scratch. Progress as deep into the rabbit hole as you wish, forking into the different approaches, or stay with the library approach if that part is not a key point in the learning experience yet.For new users, it is important to get some visible/tangible examples done from the get go, no matter how simple, because the suckage at the beginning of the learning curve hurts, but the newness and even simple achievements make it bearable, often fun. The trick is to not lie to them and say "this is how you do it" if you don't really do stuff that way in real life, but explain that this is a simple way to get going, although harder ways that can be more efficient do exist, and one might wish to learn about them at a later date.It's like when a student asks a chemistry teacher whether electrons really orbit nuclei like planets orbit a sun. No, they don't; but what they do is pretty odd (to anyone not familiar with particle-wave dualism or quantum mechanics), and the orbits or orbitals are a pretty good approximation of their observed behaviour.

author: Mr. Scram
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2020, 01:42:30 am
content: I thought it was fairly commonly accepted that Stack Overflow is closing threads for supposed duplicates to such an extreme degree it's comedic. It seems similar to how people on Wikipedia squat certain articles they wrote and reverse any helpful changes made for vague reasons until the helpful people just give up. It seems some people have made these sites their playground for reasons other than the intended purpose.