[brudgers]

I've listened to pretty much all the back catalog of Stackoverflow podcasts. From the early days the big idea was to surface information. The answer to a question may be in the documentation, but MSDN, for example, is a really big site and the dependency graph to understand any particular page can be enormous. Reading the documentation is a long term solution, but it is not always a useful one in the near and medium term.

On the other hand, there's always been a tension over how simple a question is appropriate. Spolsky and Atwood fell on different ends of the spectrum...See Spolsky's "How do I move a turtle in LOGO?" [1].

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-the...