Is there a StackOverflow without retards?

Depends on your questions of interest.

Doing your own homework with search engine + reference books and then talk to developers directly via emails works the best.

websites dedicated to QnA will eventually degrade to namefagging cesspit of pseudo-meta-meta-experts.

As soon as you get the hang of the topic, ditch them and work with people that actually understand how things work.

I was there in the first 6 months. It's always been like this.

What I really can't fucking stand is the way any question that involves the OP being unable to do things the standard or accepted or default way, for whatever reason, is immediately flooded with smug bastards reminding OP how he really should be doing this the normal way, asking if he's tried it the default way, demanding that the question be closed because he should do it the accepted way, etc. Even if it was explained why that's impossible for technical reasons.

dumb illiterate smug pieces of shit

polite sage for whining and blogposting

Too bad their software is shit and they ask for a subscription. I'll give the free trial a shot though, you better not be shilling.

Where do you find the experts though? Project IRCs are always just full of smugness and bullshit, I've never had serious replies whenever I asked something. People don't seem to answer emails and all the FOSS forums I've seen through searches have been full of lazy condescending faggots.

Most SO users these days don't give a fuck about helping you. They just want the rep, and they get it same way redditors mine karma. In your case they know smugness=guaranteed upvotes from other smugs, more rep than one faggot like you could possibly give.

I don't know if they do it because they are gearing up to link to SO on their resume, or because they are just retarded pajeets but that's how it's been since maybe 2012-13.

Why can't people, or rather liberals, keep their professional lives out of their personal lives?

I don't care about a social cause, I just want to get some fucking help with problems I might have.

This, it used to be a great place to get help, but now not so much. Karma/Rep systems always sound like a good idea, but they eventually attract karma/rep whores.

It's best IMO to have it when something first starts out, and then disable it somewhere down the road.

Sadly, if you want quality, you probably will have to pay, which honestly in 2017 I thought wouldn't be a thing. Terrible shame humanity has devolved like this.

Good luck to you, every project is different. Sometimes you might find one that has a great community willing to help you, but they either die out eventually, or get overrun with mainstream fags.

I used to love Fuduntu because the community was great, real level headed people who took their time, even with the newest of newfags, and the most autistic of Linux fags. Now, good luck finding that. Every FOSS community has a smugness problem, and feels the need to inject personal bullshit, virtue-siginalling, etc, into every fucking post.

Wow, that sounds like they're a bunch of robots that repeat one standard answer and never deviate. Why the fuck have a Q&A site at that point?

Most ISPs give you access. I don't know much about it since I've never used usenet.

Some of the answers they have given are good and bug free or does your your autistic neet ass just gets triggered by them constantly.

If you keep needing to refer to Stackoverflow, perhaps you should spend more time learning on your own and practising. Is there an internet without retards like OP, liberals, muslims and niggers?

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God, Quora was actually good for a brief glimmer of internet history. Then it was designated as a shitting street.

I don't mean it like that, but the harder questions are not pajeet infested... those ones are going to be in the realm of "how do I create a multidimensional array" etc, and they are going to cluster around pajeet tier languages.

If you progress beyond a pajeet level, surprisingly enough, you won't find many pajeets.

That's a really interesting idea. Dunno if it would make a perfect community, but it certainly would be different from the karmawhore cesspits. It's unfortunate that disabling karma is precisely the opposite of what you should do to maximize usercount and that sweet ad revenue.

This is acceptable, and I'm not quite poor. But there's lots of sites that make you pay and they are crap, often recycled from free crap, so I'm very cynical about getting ripped off. But I guess the trial is not a big deal.

Seems like SO profiles are a qualification for tech jobs now. Never tried it myself but seems popular in resumes.

Sounds good on paper, but complex questions get closed/downvoted for being too complicated. The official reason will be something like off-topic or too broad, but the real reason is they want really basic, simple Q-As that make all programming seem a breeze so that SO can be a site that makes programming easy.

You have to consider that on SO, the actual person who has that problem gets only 1 vote. Most other participants are people who are cruising for rep opportunities, and they will not vote for whatever solves the problem, but whatever sounds nicest.

Fair enough, that's one solution. Except that there are useful languages like python which are pretty pajeet. And with obscure languages, it becomes common to have a question never be answered at all.

Oh that's alright, they find you.

In all seriousness though, you have some well thought out differences with how they run things. Perhaps that is the opportunity for you to come in and create something different. Ban the pajeets before they can even establish a beachhead.

I know this doesn't work all the time.

As a programmer I stick to project started by more technically oriented programmers who are known to be obtuse to hipsters but willing to provide greasy technical details when challenged.

I work with openbsd developers these days most of the time but when I first started unix programming as a student freebsd's hackers@ list really helped.

Also RTFM sometimes require you to excavate commit logs or mailng list archive. It takes some time to get used to, but after overcoming learning curve you save TONS of time and can troubleshoot things even google search cannot help.

For non-programmers who just want free as in free beer operating system with internet browser and steam support, best way forward is bleaching harddrive and installing windows.

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It is free, that's why it has been widely pirated for 3 decades and Microsoft doesn't care. Normalfags can't into Linux/Unix or anything not Windows/OS X on the desktop. Before you bring up the abortion that is android I'll remind you that a touch screen interface doesn't translate and no one is going to run it for serious tasks on a desktop. On top of all that it's the same problem different monopoly.

This user gets it. Go to the mailing lists and usenet. Go to the IRC and weasel your way into the small rooms where everyone of merit is hiding from the cancer. Those people you want to talk to are hard to find for a reason, they got burned out on dealing with hoards or fanboys and pajeets.

I was involved with a large project about a decade ago that everyone here has used at least once. My horrible code powers millions of websites to this day. I used to spend 12+ hours every day on the support forums teaching people what I knew. It became a popularity contest, it became frowned upon to show people non-standard ways of doing things, it got to the point where I couldn't teach anymore because so many faggots would come out of the wood work karma whoring (and we didn't even have a karma system). A lot of these same faggots would kiss my ass in private hoping for moderator powers and throw fits when I would promote sane people instead of them. I got so burned out I released all my code as open source and stopped giving support for it. Even releasing it as open source was something most didn't agree with and code I wrote and retained ownership to had to be stripped out and re-done because whinny faggots that didn't get their way managed to convince the company that I was giving away their work. Really, it was my own that had been rolled into their project and as I wasn't technically an employee and my contract said I retained my rights. Sadly back then I was poorfag but I wasn't about to be dragged into court over it and bled dry of shekels.

The experience left a bad taste in my mouth. I spent a few years contributing to open source projects only to find the same type of attitudes. These days I've left the industry all together and actually find joy in doing manual labor for a living. In my free time I work on things and hopefully one will make me rich some day.

I keep forgetting it'd the [current year]+2. It was 15-20 years ago now. I'm getting too old.

That does not mean it is free.

I don't really have anything useful to say but thanks for the story user, you motivated me to try and explore communities besides 8ch.

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All day, every day..

Tech is full of cucks, and I'm not even talking about webdev hipsters. I have been trying to get into SDL recently and I happened to come across the Twitter of Ryan C. Gordon, and it's full of "muh evil Trump" and "muh poor womynz". Gordon is not a shit hipster, he knows his shit, and yet he is a beta as well. I don't know what attracts such people to tech, maybe it's because of the lack of manual labour, you just sit at your desk all day and feel like a wizard casting spells instead of a craftsman building a machine.

I've felt like doing this for the past few years now. What kind of labor do you do?

Gordon doesn't even do shit. I sent him patches years ago and the bugs in his shitty code still exist.

Yeah, but these are the kinds of people who will if they can find out your real identity and either create vast fake profiles about you to ruin your image, because they didn't get their way, throw huge temper tantrums about how you are litteraly the next Hitler of software, spam you on every platform possible about when you plan on adopting their "Software Feminist Manifesto" or some shit, and I could on forever here.

Banning people like this used to work when people were mature, now, not so much. It's why I don't even put my real name on my code. I've gone through vast lengths to create a few identities just so these people don't try anything. Worst case, I'll tell them a fake story "Oh yeah I'm trans you bigot" if I really need them to fuck of.

tl;dr: Fuck normies.

I'm not getting into a debate about GNU user I know what he meant. In reality to a normalfag both versions of free mean the same thing. They don't give a fuck about software freedom or learning how anything works. The computer is the same as any other appliance to them. If it stops working they throw it out and get a new one or call a man to fix it.

Keep looking man. The best advice I can give you is to work on things in your free time and read other peoples code, plus manuals, plus the rare good book (avoid anything more politics than practical application). Even if your code is shit it makes it easier to help you, it shows how far a long you are and your understanding of core concepts. That means when someone further a long than you reads it they can point out your errors and give practical advice. Take the advice you get, get better, repeat. Eventually you've shown that you are worth spending time teaching and are willing to work and you'll find yourself getting invited into the in-group instead of searching for it.

Keep in mind that my advice is a bit dated on the social side of this. There might not be anything left for pajeets for all I know. I'm willing to bet that most projects still have a sane person in charge of them though. I don't see any other way for shit to get done.

It is and it depresses me. The web is already dominated by a handful of companies. It wasn't supposed to be this way.

I think your theory is mostly right. I grew up doing hard labor and was taught how to work on everything. Cars, TVs, refrigerators, HVAC, plumbing, roofing, I could go on and on. From the time I could walk I was working side by side with my father/grandfather on these things. I was a pretty damn good welder by 9 years old and I'd been driving tractors/cars/trucks for years by that point. So when I finally got into computers and later programming picking things up came natural and putting in the work to see them through to the end was something I never had a problem with.

Contrast that with the background of most people I was working with in the late 90s-early 2000s.

That attitude is cancer and it has gotten so much worse since my time. It was bad enough back then that they put a 14-16 year old boy in charge of running the show instead of guys that were finishing college. No one even knew I was that young until it came time to sign my contract and we had to go through a bunch of legal bullshit. They put up with all that because they knew out of the bunch I had more experience in management of work and wouldn't run things into the ground. I don't think it was a good idea looking back as I wasn't mature enough to handle some of the stress and burned out within 5 years. Most of my problems were my own team the customers I could put up with.

I'm a Brick Mason and roofer on the side. It isn't really hard work (to me) and I can skip working out. Plus I always have a tan. Honestly what I do to maintain my own property is more manual labor than most people do these days. I still do all that stuff I mentioned above, plus more, plus pick up stuff on the side. I'll even do a bit of programming or throw together a computer for someone if they're willing to pay my fees (which are pretty steep these days since I don't like doing that type of work anymore).

Apologizes for blog posting.

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"if you want to maintain political control, promote vice"

modern liberalism was founded by coorporate oligarchs using social justice to lower wages, prevent unions, and promote degenerate behaviour.
diversity training existed long before modern sjw nonsense.

homos can be manipulated because
1. they think sex is exploring a mans digestive system with your dick, yet they still call it sex; they are willing to redefine any word for their sake.
2. they cannot influence society in a natural way (parenting), thus seek coorporate, political, and religous positions of power
3. a man feels immense shame and disgust after being sodomized, leaving a gap in their soul ready for the first "tolerant" person to accept them
homos are the foot soldiers of globalist revolution because they have nothing worth defending, and are willing to adopt the first worldview that tolerates them.

now take the general immorality of a faggot and replace sodomy with some other vice (often sexual) what you get is the average gay-supporter.
no chaste man has ever supported sodomy.
youtube.com/watch?v=3cM5rWgeZxU

I've thought of the idea of making a new kind of web, but then I realized normalfags would come in and shit it up eventually.

They're focused on web, while Gopher and telnet BBS remain invisible.

I've actually hardly read any books about programming. My knowledge comes from random blogs, tutorials, and doc pages online. I feel like most exciting theory problems of CS are solved, and the ones that are left require a math aptitude far beyond what I have. I just like to make programs that solve some practical program and make life easier.

I know a fair bit about programming, and my work involves coding very boring things. I'm hoping I can change jobs soon. I try to do fun projects in my free time but since I was never taught properly I can only do toy programs. It seems like if I wanna do cutting edge stuff like phone apps or some webapp in the latest framework or whatever, there wouldn't be any books about it because it's so new, and by the time someone writes a book the tech would be obsolete. For instance I got into XNA just at the end of 3.0, and I was really starting to love it and develop some neat games, but MS abandoned it soon after and now I feel like I'd be wasting my time learning a dead platform.

Shit like SICP and Knuth that everyone always goes on about, I'm sure they're brilliant texts that teach you all sorts of things about designing programs, but the #1 problem I notice in my projects is "where do I find a library to do X that is well maintained, isn't shit, won't be abandoned tomorrow and has sane documentation". A book that is decades old couldn't help me with that, it's a matter of knowing the state of the community, today.

Man, sounds like you're living the dream. I'd love to move to the country and start a farm one day, but I feel like the income is too little to easily start from scratch unless you never fuck up. I'm planning to sell my soul in my tech-ish field for a decade or so, save money like a fiend, then when I have enough to buy land just fuck off out of this cancerous industry and never look back.

Knuth's TAOCP books will remain relevant for many decades to come, even centuries probably. All these web frameworks will be obsolete in a blink of an eye though. I don't see the appeal of them, seems pointless to invest lots of time into something so transient.

This is something that scares me too. It's a very depressing line of thought, by that logic you couldn't ever hope to escape the normalfags.

However I think it's not that hopeless. The first time the web started attracting normies, we were all naive. We thought it would be good. We thought the growing interest in the web and tech would bring solutions to all the bad things about it (in some cases it did, like the increase in speeds over the years) without ruining any of the good. Turns out we were wrong, and the normies don't respect what we respect, they're like pigs at a fancy banquet.

The second time around, if there is one, we will know better. Most people will have experienced the problem firsthand, so the culture will be far less inclusive. For instance, back around 2002 and earlier, I remember always feeling excited when I heard about my hobby/vidya/forum/software becoming popular and I'd tell people about it when appropriate. These days I don't ever mention shit like 8ch, cock.li, and so on without extreme vetting. I can't be the only one. This, plus a lack of willingness to spoonfeed the more complicated technical aspects, will keep normies at bay in future endeavors.

Well, it's not so transient that it's gone tomorrow. They can stay popular for 2-3 years, and linger around for another 5 give or take. On the one hand it's a waste to invest your time in something that won't last a decade, but on other hand it's long enough to push a project or two out the door so why not. Some of them (not all) do enable you to quickly produce applications that would otherwise be very labor/time-intensive to do.

What is the TAOCP way of building an ride sharing app with iOS, Android and WP support, for instance? Serious question, if this is a conceptual leap that I'm missing I'd love to learn.

As for "investing a lot of time" into them, not sure about that. A lot of people seem to learn them easily enough, so either these things aren't that hard to learn, or there's some real fast learners out there, or I dunno what else. One thing I know is that reading the docs doesn't ever work if you don't already have deep knowledge of software concepts, all the hipster frameworks like to pretend that they're easy and anyone can pick them up, but in practice the barrier for even comprehending the docs is high.

That's the price of gamification.

You seriously have no idea what you're talking about.

TAOCP isn't about how to apply data structures and algorithms to problems, it's how to solve or optimise such problems once you've reduced the application down to its constituent mechanics.

Well go ahead and give a concrete example.

If you don't rewrite all your apps in assembly using techniques you learned from reading the entire volume of TAOCP you're a fucking pleb and shouldn't even be allowed near a keyboard.

Real programmers code by flapping butterfly wings to etch the bytes with a magnetic pen amirite :)))))))))

Good things there's an emacs command for it lol

real programmers construct their own universe and control its evolution such that their hard drive has the pattern of bits they desire.

tl;dr

don't go to SO if you are not disgrace of humanity called javascript 'programmer'

t. php dev

This is why I never buy any books about frameworks of flavour-of-the-year languages. They will be obsolete very quickly. When I look at Cocoa I find that even most of the examples hosted online by Apple themself are out of date or even full of bad practice that wasn't even appropriate in OS X 10.0, and that OS was just a public beta. If you really want such a book just get it from the library. There are some rare exceptions line K&R C, but that's only because the C standard moves so slowly that you can easily catch up with new features.

In addition it has been getting easier and easier to publish a book over time. This has lead to a fuckton of books existing, where most of them don't have any real reason to be. How many books about JavaScript does the world really need?

The books that are actually worth having don't focus on one particular language or framework, they teach fundamentals. Even if SICP uses Scheme, you can still take the lessons and apply them to other languages. It won't be a 1:1 match, but the underlying principles will be the same.

You are asking the wrong question. The mark of a good craftsman is that he can use his old knowledge in new ways. You must take your high-level problem and break it into more basic pieces. These pieces are problems like sending and receiving data, interacting with a database, reading and writing according to protocols, etc. You solve these small problems to create small building blocks, you combine those blocks into larger blocks, and so on, until you have your ride sharing app.

It's like when you had to do math homework at school. First the exercises would be something like "compute the minimum of f", but later the exercises would become "at what point in time is the cooling rate of a hot beverage the fastest?"; that's more or less the same exercise, but the latter requires you to translate a real-life situation into a mathematical model first. If you want to write a ride-sharing app you will first have to translate you real-life problem into a computer science problem.

So what do you do if you want to learn a framework?

That sounds nice enough in theory, but if you want your program to fit into some other system, you still need to understand some details of that system.

There's no complicated CS problem there. The algorithm is basically "whenever user hails cab, find nearest idle driver, assign to user, when driver presses button start tracking distance, when driver presses end of ride button stop tracking, calculate price, bill user". If you actually try to build such an app, the things that will suck your time are

This isn't some complicated math problem, it's just a question of digging through the docs of the systems you're using and figuring out how you're expected to interface with them.

Those are all the easy parts. The parts that will suck and take up the most of your time are finding users and obtaining their shekels or (((VC))) shekels should your app find any sort of success.

Right, but I didn't say "start a business". I said make the app, regardless of who actually uses it.

So how will TAOCP help?

This.

Check if your ISP offers it. Otherwise you may need to pay a 3rd party for Usenet access. You can get free access through google but google's interface sucks and there are a lot of newsgroups and posts that are not indexed by google.

Experts Exchange is the stackoverflow before stackoverflow. IIRC it got overhauled and the new guys killed the whole fucking website. Otherwise SO would never have taken off. What's left is total trash. I don't think EE has been decent for a decade now.

SO and EE have never been great resources for me. Either they were too expensive or overrun with asshole pajeets that read a book on Active Directory once.

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The people on hashishoverload and related sites who actually have answers to hard questions are the ones who will have read fundamental books like TAOCP.
You can keep looking to them for answers, and keep looking for dumbed-down concensus, or you can just read some books and learn something.

I have my own reading list that I'm working on, user. I don't mean this as an argument that you shouldn't read, or you shouldn't read TAOCP. You misunderstand me.

Books have their specialties and you should read resources relevant to your goals. I am asking how this particular set of resources applies to a given goal, in case I was wrong and need to bump certain books to the front of my list. So far the explanations have not convinced me.

Seriously? It's a fucking temporary 90 day ban while they fix the system, and past presidents have done it too.

Fucking hell, I'm so sick of sites pushing this shit. Why can't a site just do one thing, do it well, and keep their personal lives to themselves on their own little blogs or some shit.