[erikig]

The various admonitions to publish to a personal blog, while encouraging, don't really get at the 0xfaded's request which I'd summarize as follows:

With no one asking questions these technical questions publicly, where, how and on what public platform will technical people find the problems that need solving so they can exercise their creativity for the benefit of all?

[Aurornis]

> The various admonitions to publish to a personal blog, while encouraging, don't really get at the 0xfaded's request

They also completely missed the fact that 0xfaded did write a blog post and it’s linked in the second sentence of the SO post.

> There is a relatively simple numerical method with better convergence than Newtons Method. I have a blog post about why it works http://wet-robots.ghost.io/simple-method-for-distance-to-ell...

[keepamovin]

Clearly we need something in between the fauxpen-access of journals and the wilde west of the blogosphere, probably. Why wouldn't the faded ox publish in a paper? Idk, but I guess we need things similar to those circulars that British royal society members used to send to each other...except not reserved for a club. The web should be a natural at this. But it's either centralized -> monetized -> corrupted, or decentralized -> unindexed/niche -> forgotten fringe. What can come between?

[Nition]

I wonder if there could be something like a Wikipedia for programming. A bit like what the book Design Patterns did in 1994, collecting everyone's useful solutions, but on a much larger scale. Everyone shares the best strategies and algorithms for everything, and updates them when new ones come about, and we finally stop reinventing the wheel for every new project.

To some extent that was Stack Overflow, and it's also GitHub, and now it's also LLMs, but not quite.

May I suggest "PASTE": Patterns, Algorithms, Solutions, Techniques, and Examples. "Just copy PASTE", they'll say.

[fabianholzer]

Ward Cunningham once, of all places in an Github issue [0], explained how the original C2 Wiki was seeded.

> Perhaps I should explain why wiki worked. > I wrote a program in a weekend and then spent two hours a day for the next five years curating the content it held. For another five years a collection of people did the same work with love for what was there. But that was the end. A third cohort of curators did not appear. Content suffered.

A heroic amount effort of a single person, and later the collective effort of a small group, worked in the mid-90es. I'm skeptical that it will be repeatable 30 years later. Despite this, it would be the type of place, that I'd like to visit on the web. :(

[0] https://github.com/WardCunningham/remodeling/issues/51#issue...

[Voklen]

Great idea! https://paste.voklen.com/wiki/Main_Page If people start using it I'll get a proper domain name for it.

[nyargh]

An algolwiki is a great idea, but I just wanted to say I got a good chuckle from this, thanks :)

> May I suggest "PASTE": Patterns, Algorithms, Solutions, Techniques, and Examples. "Just copy PASTE", they'll say.

[oneeyedpigeon]

> To some extent that was Stack Overflow

Yup, that was always very much the plan, from the earliest days. Shame it soured a bit, but since the content is all freely reusable, maybe something can be built atop the ashes?

[__patchbit__]

There is https://grokipedia.com which encourages you to suggest an article and you may submit improvements to an existing article.

[lobsterthief]

This is _not_ at all the same thing. Grok just ripped off Wikipedia as its base and then applied a biased spin to it. Check out the entry on Grok owner Elon Musk; it praises his accomplishments and completely omits or downplays most of his better-known controversies.

[latexr]

And everything is “fact checked” by the Grok LLM. Which… Yeah…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok_(chatbot)#Controversies

[bambax]

Yes exactly! It would need some publicity of some kind to get started but it's the best solution, certainly? And all of the tools and infrastructure already exist.

[progval]

There is https://www.wikifunctions.org/

[lelanthran]

> Clearly we need something in between the fauxpen-access of journals and the wilde west of the blogosphere, probably.

I think GP's min-distance solution would work well as an arxiv paper that is never submitted for publication.

A curated list of never-published papers, with comments by users, makes sense in this context. Not sure that arxiv itself is a good place, but something close to it in design, with user comments and response-papers could be workable.

Something like RFC, but with rich content (not plain-text) and focused on things like GP published (code techniques, tricks, etc).

Could even call it "circulars on computer programming" or "circulars on software engineering", etc.

PS. I ran an experiment some time back, putting something on arxiv instead of github, and had to field a few comments about "this is not novel enough to be a paper" and my responses were "this is not a publishable paper, and I don't intend to submit it anywhere". IOW, this is not a new or unique problem.

(See the thread here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44290315)

[knolan]

There is the Journal of Open Source Software perhaps:

https://joss.theoj.org/

[zahlman]

You can (and always were encouraged to) ask your own questions, too.

And there are more sites like this (see e.g. https://codidact.com — fd: moderator of the Software section). Just because something loses popularity isn't a reason to stop doing it.

[eastbound]

StackOverflow is famously obnoxious about questions badly asked, badly categorized, duplicated…

It’s actually a topic on which StackOverflow would benefit from AI A LOT.

Imagine StackOverflow rebrands itself as the place where you can ask the LLM and it benefits the world, whoch correctly rephrasing the question behind the scenes and creating public records for them.

[rerdavies]

And famously obnoxious about rejecting questions that are properly asked, properly categorized, and not actually duplicated.

[eastbound]

SO is not obnoxious because the users are wrong!

[wizzwizz4]

The company tried this. It fell through immediately. So they went away, and came back with a much improved version. It also fell through immediately. Turns out, this idea is just bad: LLMs can't rephrase questions accurately, when those questions are novel, which is precisely the case that Stack Overflow needs.

For the pedantic: there were actually three attempts, all of which failed. The question title generator was positively received (https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/388492/308065), but ultimately removed (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/424638/5223757) because it didn't work properly, and interfered with curation. The question formatting assistant failed obviously and catastrophically (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/425167/5223757). The new question assistant failed in much the same ways (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/432638/5223757), despite over a year of improvements, but was pushed through anyway.

[eastbound]

This is an excellent piece of information that I didn’t have. If the company with most data can’t succeed, then it seems like a really hard problem. On the side, they can understand why humans couldn’t do it either.

[Forgeties79]

Seriously where will we get this info anymore? I’ve depended on it for decades. No matter how obscure, I could always find a community that was talking about something I needed solved. I feel like that’s getting harder and harder every year. The balkanization of the Internet + garbage AI slop blogs overwhelming the clearly declining Google is a huge problem.

[nerusskyhigh]

My genuine impression is that communities moved from forums to discord. Maybe that's why they are harder to find

[nyargh]

And discord is a terrible tool for knowledge collection imo. Their search is ok, but then I find myself digging through long and disjointed message threads, if replies/threading are even used at all by the participants.

[roncesvalles]

Not to mention, it's not indexed by search engines. It's the "deep web".

[nyargh]

Yes, its a treasure hunt every single time when some project has most of their discussions on discord. It's awful imo.

[seb1204]

Keep using SO?

[Forgeties79]

When I grew up shakes fist at clouds I had a half dozen totally independent forums/sites to pull on for any interest or hobby no matter how obscure. I want it back!

[hattmall]

It's true though, and the information was so deep and specific. Plus the communities were so legitimate and you could count on certain people appearing in threads and waiting for their input. Now the best you have are subreddits or janky Facebook groups .

[wiether]

The discoverability, both from the outside and within is absolute trash, but the closest I find of those old forums nowadays are Discord servers.

[Forgeties79]

Agreed, it’s the discoverability that’s the real problem here at the end of it all. All the veterans are pulling up the drawbridges to protect their communities from trolls, greedy companies, AI scraping, etc. which means new people can’t find them. Which then means these communities eventually whither and stop being helpful resources for us all.

[HumblyTossed]

Usenet?

[Forgeties79]

I guess? I feel like it’s too small now. It can’t cover all my interests

[0xbadcafebee]

> where, how and on what public platform will technical people find the problems that need solving so they can exercise their creativity for the benefit of all?

The same place people have always discovered problems to work on, for the entire history of human civilization. Industry, trades, academia, public service, newspapers, community organizations. The world is filled with unsolved problems, and places to go to work on them.

Einstein was literally a patent clerk.