Check out 6:05 and 6:25 in this Andreas Kling video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mxubNQC5O8

That's where Copilot shines, not for locating and copypasting answers from Stack Overflow.

Pay for your tools? This is not exactly a community of low-income people here.

I think the real benefit of local models lies elsewhere.

Especially the people who need a better Stack Overflow, are likely not to have huge employee salaries.

The prices of such tools are often oriented towards people who have high-paying job in Silicon Valley. Not everybody who reads or posts on Hacker News belongs to this group. :-(

Working it out yourself is always going to be a good way, IMO

My main use of SO is figuring out badly documented DSLs or configurations or magic annotations that have nothing to do with programming per se.

I can dig into a language I don't actually know and change a value or fix a trivial bug, as long as it has variables, methods and loops.

But I can't guess if @Zorpify is the magic incantation on a method that does something I don't know the name of.

Discord sucks as a community for open source/software development for more than those reasons. The major one, I find, is the population of gamer/anime users that dominate it - I feel alot of serious developers stick to slack or mailing lists for that reason. Slack's identity is clear - enterprise/business chat and communication. Discord's is a bit more confused and alot of people straight up haven't even heard of it.

Yeah see this is the problem. Fuck that man. The vast majority of people who want to ask questions are very new. They barely know how to phrase the question they’re trying to ask. If they knew how to ask it, they probably wouldn’t need to post a question. They could search for it. SO is full of elitist pricks who are very rude to people who are trying to ask a question and don’t know how and are feeling frustrated. It’s a beginner hostile environment. And that’s not intuitive. Because you DO end up hitting stack overflow for a lot of basic questions from 10 years ago, and that’s nice, but it is bad for people who lack the expertise to navigate that historical index.

Discord is not indexed, but it’s largely full of people who are willing to help newbies construct their question and then answer it. It’s night and day a better experience. Same for chat gpt.

I have spent a fair amount of time on the unreal engine discord helping what I assume are kids who have never done any programming before realize that their questions make no sense and that they don’t know what a variable is. They are extremely thankful.

SO just makes people feel bad for not being experts on the topic for which they are seeking help to learn.

this is a big one. often you know what you need to do, but knowing what to search is hard.

Half of the time just thinking about trying to ask a good question will usually lead you to a solution, or if nothing else if you're not finding an answer through searching you're probably just asking the wrong questions because the odds you're solving some novel, undocumented problem is pretty much 0.

So usually it's more of thinking one knows what they need to do, just to learn that they didn't actually know what they needed to do at all once unknown unknowns are unearthed. That's where something like Discord shines because it provides an avenue where extremely patient people will do some prodding of a newbie to help figure out what it is they're actually trying to do so they can be pushed in the right direction. But that's also a double-edged sword because searching Discord is extremely difficult and has a high barrier to entry so you're often going to be faced with the same questions being asked over and over.

[0] http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Besides that, the answers you do find are often not helpful. For example, “just use this function in jQuery” - I’m asking about JavaScript, not jQuery.

Since jQuery is open source, I do consider this to be at least a helpful step, since you can then simply look at the source code of the respective jQuery function.

But I doubt this is a value prop people want.

Edit: sufficient to sustain SO in light of new competitors

They got so uptight about moderating content that they seem to have forgotten their actually user value. Instead of focusing on helping users find more relevant content, they’ve decided they must reduce any possible duplicate or overlapping content.

For me, I’ve found most of my issues are complex and nuanced. I want the duplicate content. I want to read 5 posts with slightly different variations of the same issue. They all provide contextual clues and variations that are useful for solving my specific issue. Instead, they all get forced into the same post, resulting in a bunch of absolutely useless junk. Top that with the fact that some information is actually stale, it’s basically impossible to find a solution now.

ChatGPT often gives me solutions that are mostly correct. Even when they’re wrong, they often get me close enough that I can read the docs.

I don't think you can say this is a community with opinions. Rather, there are various subgroups of people with strong opinions and certain posts attract one subgroup and certain posts will attract others. You can find a whole lot of people telling you building an app "on top of" an LLM is a dumb plan because they aren't reliable. And you can find a lot of people telling you to delegate all your drudgery to an LLM. That might seem a bit contradictory but it's really slightly different topics pulling in slightly different people.

And in the this case, there are lots of people willing to tell you bad things about SO. The story for such bad feelings is that SO was fun to do answers for and now it's really miserable. It may or may not sometimes still be useful in an objective but it's accumulated massive bad feelings. So just about any SO thread attracts the SO-hating subgroup rather than any other subgroup.