14 ms·
Almost every top stack overflow answer is wrong. The correct one is usually at rank 3. The system promotes answers which the public believes to be correct (easy
by envsubst 3y ago
Almost every top stack overflow answer is wrong. The correct one is usually at rank 3. The system promotes answers which the public believes to be correct (easy to read, resembles material they are familiar with, follows fads, etc).
Pay attention to comments and compare a few answers.
- emerongi 3y agoBack in ye olden days, almost every answer involving a database contained a SQL injection vulnerability.
- buffet_overflow 3y agoIf you ever have an issue with the Requests library in Python, just try again with verify=false.
- psd1 3y agoEasier than getting the app team to fix their TLS.
- WorldMaker 3y agoOr the corporate IT team to remove their TLS-trashing MITM attack (because their Firewall Vendor claims that's still "Best Practice" in 2023 and/or the C-Suite loves employee surveillance).
- Aeolun 3y agoAt least node has a variable to disable checks globally.
- capableweb 3y agoJust be sure to try running the program with sudo first, before trying shitty solutions like that.
- alphager 3y agoThat seems insecure; just chmod -R 777 /
- noduerme 3y agoTo their credit, a lot of people went back a decade later and fixed those. Although it doesn't stop people from repeating the mistakes. I just got beaten up in HN for asking how the hell sql injection is still a problem. People get defensive, apparently.
- grayhatter 3y agoPeople who don't understand things often get cranky when they're told it's easy. Seems fair though, it does seem rude to tell someone missing a leg it's easy to run... But it also seems rude to get upset at someone who's good at something they've studied so perhaps everyone is bad at understanding the person they're talking to, and people should assume more good faith.
- caspper69 3y agoThat’s why I prefer to use “straightforward” rather than “easy.” People seem to take that much better.
- MostlyStable 3y agoI also like "simple". Lots and lots of very hard things are not at all complicated.
- Aeolun 3y agoHitting a homerun is straightforward, but it’s not easy.
- caspper69 3y agoI would argue the concept of hitting a homerun is straightforward, but the preparation, training and execution are not. You’re arguing semantics. The two words are synonymous in most casual conversation where you would be in danger of offending by saying something is easy or simple.
- 3y ago
- ehutch79 3y agoGood thing we trained all those AIs with these answers.
- madeofpalk 3y agoStackOverflow and those AIs optimise for the same thing - something that looks correct regardless of how actually correct it is.
- spelunker 3y agoWhat if that was the goal all along? Time traveling freedom fighters set up SO so that the well for AI would be poisoned, freeing us from our future overlords!
- ehsankia 3y ago> easy to read Sounds like you're counting that as a negative. Obviously it depends on the use case, but more often than not I'll lean towards the easier to read code than the most optimal one.
- cpach 3y agoI sure hope people don’t copy stuff from SO before they understand what the code does.
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y agoROFLMAO! Please, tell me that was sarcastic.
- cpach 3y agoI refuse to believe anything else ;-)
- dylan604 3y agopeople are writing entire programs with ChatGPT. these are the same people that previously would copy&paste multiple SO answers cobbled together. now, it's just a copy&paste the entire script from a single response.
- m_0x 3y ago> The system promotes answers which the public believes to be correct Well.. duh? Until AI takes over the world, this will be correct for everything. News, comments, everything.
- jprete 3y agoAI isn’t going to do better in current paradigms, it has exactly the same flaw.
- smithza 3y agoI hold little hope that LLM's will help us to reason through "correctness." If these AI's scourge through the troves of idiocy on the internet believing what it will according to patterns and not applying critical reasoning skills, it too will pick up the band-wagon's opinions and perpetuate them. Ad Populum will continue to be a persistent fallacy if we humans don't learn appropriate reasoning skills.
- MostlyStable 3y agoThey've already proven that LLMs are capable of creating an internal model of the world (or, in the case of the study that proved it, a model of the game it was being trained on). If LLMs have a world model, then they are fully capable of generating truth beyond whatever they are trained on. We may not be there yet (and who knows how long it will take), but it is in principle true that LLMs can move beyond their training data.
- crabbone 3y agoMmm... no? StackOverflow is powered by voting. Not all forums work like that (it was a questionable choice at the time StackOverflow started). I've been a moderator on a couple of ForumBB kind of forums and the idea of karma points was often brought up in moderator meetings. Those with more experience in this field would usually try to dissuade the less experienced mods from implementing any karma system. Moderators used to have ways of promoting specific posts. In the context of ForumBB you had a way to mark a thread as important or to make it sticky. Also, a post by a moderator would stand out (or could be made to stand out), so that other forum users would know if someone speaks from a position of experience / authority or is this yet to be determined. Social media went increasingly in the direction of automating moderator's work by extracting that information from the users... but this is definitely not the only (and probably not the best) way of approaching this problem. Moderators are just harder to make and are more expensive to keep.
- hnreader1230 3y agoYears ago I tried to answer a comment on StackOverflow, but I didn’t have enough points to comment. So I tried to answer some questions so that I could get enough points to comment. But when looking at the new questions, it seemed to be mostly a pile of “I have a bug in my code please fix it” type stuff. Relatively simple answers to “What is the stack and the heap?” had thousands of points, but also already had tons of answers (though I suppose one of the reason why people keep answering is to harvest points). I was able to answer a question on an obscure issue that no one had answered yet, but received no points. Then I saw that you could get points for editing answers. OK, I thought, I can get some points by fixing some bugs. I found a highly upvoted post that had code that didn’t work, found that it was because one section had used the wrong variable, and tried to fix it. Well, the variable name was too short to meet the necessary 6 characters to edit the code (something like changing “foo” to “bar”). I went to see what other people did in these situations, and they suggested just adding unnecessary edits in order to reach the character limit. At that point, I just left the bug in, and gave up on trying to contribute to Stack Overflow.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoYou need to focus on niche tags to find worthwhile unanswered questions. Browsing the $foolang tag is just for the OCD FOMO types who spend their day farming rep.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- CrazyStat 3y agoI was active on the statistics Stack Exchange for a while in grad school. There were generally plenty of interesting questions to answer, but the obsession some people (the most active people, generally) had with the points system became really unpleasant after a while. My breaking point was when I saw a question with an incorrect answer. I posted a correct answer, explained why the other answer was incorrect, and downvoted the incorrect answer. The author of the incorrect answer then posted a rant as a comment on my answer about how I shouldn't have downvoted their answer because they were going to fix it, and a couple other people chimed in agreeing that it was inconsiderate or inappropriate of me to have downvoted the other answer. I decided Stack Exchange was dumb and stopped spending time there, which was probably good for my PhD progress.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago> The correct one is usually at rank 3 This has generally been my experience.
- bigbacaloa 3y ago[dead]
- bachmeier 3y agoA couple months ago, someone commented that one of my answers was wrong. Well, sure, in the years since answering, things changed. It was correct when I wrote it. Otherwise it wouldn't have taken so long for someone to point out that it's wrong. The public may have believed it to be the correct answer because it was at that time.
- BlackjackCF 3y agoYeah, I never look at just the top comment. If it isn’t wrong, it’s suboptimal.