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Re:Ask HN: Where does one search development advice these days? by kristopolous on Sunday December 20, 2020 @07:18AM (#25485763)
Recently I've found it to be mostly pages of incorrect answers and nonsense.

It's not that I know the correct answer, that's why I'm reading, but I do know what does not work, and all too often that's all I see, just pages of things that are obviously not right.

I've found I just have to abandon the internet entirely these days and start reading the source code. It's really time consuming but it's starting to become also the fastest way. :-/

And yes, I usually go back and add an additional answer if I find things out, usually starting with "none of these are correct."

It's eternal septembered. What a hard system to fight off. I think wikipedia has done it but that's about it.

Re:Ask HN: Where does one search development advice these days? by II2II on Sunday December 20, 2020 @12:34PM (#25487933)
> It's not that I know the correct answer, that's why I'm reading, but I do know what does not work, and all too often that's all I see, just pages of things that are obviously not right.

A similar situation is when you have a working answer, you know that it is not particularly good (inefficient, poor handling of edge cases, etc.), yet all of the answers are along the lines of your existing solution.

Programming problems are quite often a case of how something can be better solved. Consider the textbook example of sorting. The problem itself was always quite easy to solve, yet considerable amount of research were put into finding efficient algorithms since naive approaches are quite inefficient. We are lucky today since languages or libraries typically provide both the data structures and algorithms, but I cringe at the thought of how inept my code would be if I was relying on SO quality answers while learning how to program in the late '80s and early '90s (since there were many cases when you had to roll your own).