News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Stack Overflow announces 28% headcount reduction by red-iron-pine on Monday October 16, 2023 @10:34AM (#37900401)
> 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

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

Re:Stack Overflow announces 28% headcount reduction by Decabytes on Monday October 16, 2023 @11:50AM (#37901584)
I wonder if a GPT powered SO would be helpful to cut down on newbie questions. I've found a lot of success ingesting an internal FAQ/documentation and wrapping it up in a little chatbot. Then asking the bot questions about it. It works better than control-f or some sort of fuzzy searching, and allows you to ask more general questions but still get specific answers. If the bot doesn't know then you can safely assume the question hasn't been asked, or the question is different enough to warrant asking it on SO
Re:Stack Overflow announces 28% headcount reduction by sprynr on Monday October 16, 2023 @01:21PM (#37903106)
Re:Stack Overflow announces 28% headcount reduction by conor- on Monday October 16, 2023 @03:28PM (#37905028)
When I was starting out learning to program I found ESR's how to ask questions[0] guide invaluable.

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