Screaming into the void of the blogosphere is catharsis for getting my SO question closed.
And because I know you're all nosy, the SO question is here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79605462/high-cpu-usage-... . Please feel free to point out more ways in which I screwed up asking my SO question.
1) clearly technical
2) reproducible
3) has a clear failure condition
Not be a suitable candidate for S/O?
Did we step into a dimension where only "How do I print('hello world')?" is a valid question while I wasn't watching, because it has a trivial one-line answer?
Hard questions doesn't mean they're bad, it just means many people aren't competent answer them. The same goes for obscure questions; there might just not be many people who care, but the question itself is entirely valid.
Does that mean they're not suitable for S/O?
I... can't believe anyone seriously believes that hard niche problems are too obscure or too hard for S/O to be bothered to grace themselves with.
It's absurd.
It just baffles me that a question that might take some effort to figure an answer out to might 'not be suitable' to S/O.
I will say, this is a level of question that is too sophisticated for SO, and likely will only have an answer once you figure it out and go back and answer your question.
Are you confident the code is the issue--have you repro'd it consistently with different versions of .NET? What about reproing on different machines? Locally?
With pleasure! SO is definitely more of a distinct Q&A site and not a discursive, open-ended collaborate and problem-solve site.
Is it? What hardware and OS version should I use to reproduce the server?
(Edit: it seems people do care about CoreWCF ITT. That's nice to see.)
> Screaming into the void of the blogosphere is catharsis for getting my SO question closed.
That's fine. Almost everyone who comes to SO, in my experience, has a fundamentally wrong idea about how the site is intended to work. That includes people who don't have a question and only want to post answers. Unfortunately, it's difficult to explain because people find the model unintuitive - the UI affords using the place just like many others, even though the site was created exactly to get away from frustrations caused by older models (https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107). And the real objective is a synthesis of many not-always-compatible ideas (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770). My personal sense is that the community didn't really get a handle on "what SO is" until around the time that new question volume peaked (way back in 2014).
Even then, people can hang around for years and not really get it (e.g. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/427224) - in large part because the policies have been inconsistently applied on a volunteer basis, and the people who are allowed to e.g. cast close votes are vastly outnumbered.
We generally don't care about people not liking the Stack Overflow model while discussing it off-site. There's far too much of that to worry about. But that doesn't mean we'll change to accommodate everyone else. The entire point is to provide something that isn't available everywhere you look: a polished artifact, an organized repository of commonly-needed, high-quality answers to clear, focused, practical questions.
Do we accomplish that goal? Hell no, not by a long shot. But there are some real gems in there - and a few of them have millions of views. And as the rate of new questions slows, users who put on the "curator" hat become able to keep on top of the incoming queue, filter through for what's of value (and not a duplicate), and even turn attention towards the old Q&A to improve it (incidentally, a lot of that work is rounding up old duplicates that went unnoticed).
> I had forgotten that any external links are a big no-no in SO land, so my question immediately attracted 2 close votes.
The problem isn't simply including an external link (we'll happily just edit those out if they aren't necessary). The problem occurs when a question appears to depend upon the externally linked content. We can't accept that (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254428) because of link rot and licensing issues (someone who wants to answer you often needs to be able to cite the code; posting on-site automatically licenses the content appropriately, per the terms of service) but mainly because of scope - a question that's suitable for the Stack Exchange format would fit neatly within the actual question text.
We don't want to do detailed analysis of the problem you encountered, even if we're capable of it, because questions are for everyone. They need to be able to reflect a problem that other people could a) have; b) plausibly search for; and c) recognize if they found it. Answers to a question need to make sense in general to people who would ask - not just in the specific context of one person's original problem. In short, we want a question, not a problem - and extracting a proper question starts with (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/261592) your own analysis.
"How do I do X?" questions are usually much easier to ask in the format, and are very valuable and can end up very well regarded, even when they're on very basic topics. But "what went wrong with Y code?" is not fully refined. What we're really looking for is more like "why does Y' code construct do Z?" - where the specific, exact cause of failure (https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example) is extracted from your own debugging session (along with reproducing input and actual vs expected output).
> Two days later my question got it's third vote for closure, and remains unanswered and now closed forever.
This is literally not how Stack Overflow works. The OP has at least (https://stackoverflow.com/help/auto-deleted-questions) 9 days to fix the question and nominate it for reopening until it gets "deleted"; but even then it's a soft deletion (delisting) which is still reversible - you can find the question from your personal listing (https://stackoverflow.com/users/deleted-questions/current while logged in; or replace 'current' with your user ID), edit and nominate for undeletion.
The established policy is that we intentionally close questions that don't meet standards (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476) as quickly as possible (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260263). The main point of this is to prevent the sort of people (notice that https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/271684 is over 10 years old; and the original complaint https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9731 is from before the official launch, during the private beta) who would otherwise hang out on a traditional discussion forum 12 hours a day from trying to read the OP's mind, repost the same basic explanation of the same basic idea dozens of times, etc.
(Unfortunately, the incentive system is completely broken - https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387356 - and the company's interests are not aligned with the community, so this is a losing battle.)
And, in fact, your question has been reopened, as of about 3/4 of an hour after your comment that I'm replying to. Stack Overflow is not at all immune to external pressure - after all, many regulars there are also on HN and other usual-suspect sites.
It also looks like your edits have actually improved the question. In particular, adding in a definite conclusion from your profiling attempt.
(We understand that a lot of people in a situation like yours wouldn't necessarily know how to use a profiler and wouldn't necessarily be able to come up with a theory about what's wrong. That isn't our problem. We aren't offering tech support. It's a bitter pill for almost everyone, but Stack Overflow by design is not there to make your code work. It's there to answer questions that arise during your attempt. And a question like yours, properly refined, can help those other people.)
The problem is complexity and scope.
We don't debug code for others. We expect them to find the specific part of the code that is causing a problem and showcase a minimal reproducible example. For performance issues, we expect them to profile code and isolate bottlenecks - and then they can ask a hard, obscure question about the bottleneck. Or a very easy one, as long as it's something that could make sense to ask after putting in the effort.
In short: we're looking for a question, not a problem. Stack Overflow "can't be bothered to grace itself with" hard niche problems, or with easy common problems. But it is about answering the question that results from an analysis of a problem. Whether that's understanding the exact semantics of argument passing, or just wanting to know how to concatenate lists.
And we're looking for one question at a time. If there are multiple issues in a piece of code, they need to be isolated and asked about separately. If the task clearly breaks down into a series of steps in one obvious way, then you need to figure out which of those steps is actually causing a problem first, and ask about whichever steps separately. (Or better yet, find the existing Q&A.)
(Questions seeking to figure out an algorithm are usually okay, but usually better asked on e.g. cs.stackexchange.com. And usually, an algorithm worth asking about isn't just "do X, then do Y, then do Z".)
Stack Overflow is full of highly competent people who are yearning for questions that demand their specific expertise - recently, not just in the 2010s.
Most questions I've asked since 2020 were deliberate hooks to deal with common beginner-level issues or close FAQs that didn't already have a clear duplicate target. (I've stopped contributing new Q&A, but still occasionally help out with curation tasks like editing.) But I asked https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75677825 because I actually wanted an answer, and it's an instructive example here.
Answering it required detailed expert-level knowledge of modern CPU architectures and reverse engineering of the Python implementation. Asking it required noticing a performance issue, then putting extensive effort into simplifying the examples as much as possible and diagnosing the exact qualities of the input that degrade performance - as well as ruling out other simple explanations and citing the existing Q&A about those.
But demonstrating it requires nothing more than a few invocations of the `timeit` standard library module.
Or at least that is my guess, since I stopped working with WCF about 2016 probably.
Anyway in newer version of .net you CancellationToken everywhere what would do exactly that: tell your server that client disconnected. That would be my first try on fixing it.
Use token that is sent via HTTP implementation to the endpoint, pass it to your stream and when it is cancelled, end the stream. Stream ends, endpoint finishes, not CPU load.
If S.O. believes that deleting everything users post there is somehow improving their site and going to make it relevant again, more power to them. It's their site. Let's see how that goes for them.
Tangentially, one thing I think StackOverflow misses in its policy is in not allowing questions that ask for help to evaluate libraries and products in the developer space. There are many questions on SO where someone has asked what is the best library for X, and the question is closed due to site policy, but I think a discussion of what library is best for a use case is a very useful thing to have on SO. The answer to the question can change over time, and multiple alternative solutions can be presented. This is the kind of thing that Reddit has taken over for many different product recommendations, but reddit answers are just comments, they don't have the UI of SO's for commenting on questions and answers.
True. I quit trying to do anything there once I realized that SO was fundamentally not useful to me. It advertised as a gamified Q&A platform, but was actually a knowledge base psudeo wiki thing structured in way that didn't lend itself to answering the questions I needed answered.
So, I think a lot of the negative reactions are deserved, because SO looks like something it isn't.
People want a place to get help. SO looks like a place to get help. But SO is a place to ask for help only if your problem fits a specific set of requirements. And since most problems will never meet said requirements, most people can never actually get help on SO.
I post this in part because I'm still saltly about how much time I wasted trying to get help only to get downvoted, but also because if SO actually wants to do what they say, they really need to restructure into something that actually looks like what they want to be.
My suggestion would be to have two sites, one that is actually a general Q&A site like what everyone is after, the other is the kind of knowledge repository that SO wants to be. Then you just promote the really good questions from the Q&A site into the other site.
I'd also recommend ending the whole "downvote" idea. I have yet to see it not result in cliques and in discriminating against viewpoints the people with downvote permissions don't like. Let a lack of upvotes cause poor content to drop to the bottom.
I recommend looking for alternatives, because this problem can't really be fixed and the site owners seem intent on making it worse. I personally use and recommend (and am a moderator at, full disclosure) Codidact Software: https://software.codidact.com/ . But at Codidact we're still fundamentally using the same "Q&A site" (I don't think this means the same thing you appear to think it means) model . We just have proper community involvement (the site is owned by a non-profit foundation and committed to community sovereignty; see https://codidact.org/), new site software, and newly conceived site scope.
> My suggestion would be to have two sites, one that is actually a general Q&A site like what everyone is after, the other is the kind of knowledge repository that SO wants to be.
The problem is that there are already countless sites "like what everyone is after". If you try to split a Q&A site like Stack Overflow that way without changing the actual UI, the problem just repeats itself: people try to use the knowledge repository part as if it were yet another traditional forum.
And it turns out, people often think they're after that model, then get fed up with it over time.
I think an idea like yours can be done, but it would require radically different site software. (In early 2023 - I think - I kept myself busy with contemplating a design for exactly this, but I didn't really write anything down.)
It was immediately closed as off-topic with 3 votes. One commenter asked "can't you figure that out using developer tools?"
It was eventually reopened, but I'm never asking a question there again. FWIW one of the governing web bodies essentially says "If you have technical questions, ask them on SO and not here" - I take this to mean that they don't care if you are able to answer your question, they just want you to go away.
I had the same suspicion though, which is that if the question is too difficult it triggers some reflex...
Using has similar problems with things like database connections remaining open.
The current state of SO is what it is, but saying this is how it was intended to be is 100% revisionist history.
Also "we" "our"... do you work at SO?
The complete source code of the server is in the question.
Could it be that, for years, they've been selecting for things like:
- Low friction onboarding
- Upvoting “easy wins” and thought experiments over real-world, in-the-trenches problems
- Penalizing questions that didn’t fit the format—even when those of us around since the early days knew they’d likely get good answers within a few days
- Incentivizing moderators to strictly enforce rules that, frankly, weren’t necessarily great to begin with
Just a thought.
I'm not really asking where .NET runs; I'm asking what is the environment to reproduce it in? If it only affects certain ones it's a waste of time to just make people guess.
> The complete source code of the server is in the question.
Yes, I saw.
Was it so important for the quality of the site to delete a reply thanking someone for their OSS contribution? Is SO a better site now? Meanwhile they have 10 year old answers still up, with no way to indicate they are outdated unless the author themselves goes through the trouble of updating their answer.
Yes, lots of people did, including myself.
When I got tired of it, and then came back years later and seen what had happened to the Q&A, I understood that it had been a mistake to do so, and eventually realized - through extensive research on the site meta, Stack Exchange meta, etc. - that it was the same mistake that the site had originally specifically sought to avoid.
And I saw that there had been years of arguing over the labels for close reasons - leading for example to the retirement of "not a real question", and the more or less direct replacement of "too broad" with "needs more focus", and the rather more approximate replacement of "too localized" with "not reproducible or caused by a typo" - because of a collective realization of the real purpose of closing questions, and of the value of being selective. Not just in terms of answer-writers getting frustrated - because we also discovered that some people just don't, and are happy to spend amazing amounts of time trying to read the minds of people who can barely put together a coherent sentence and turn out to be asking about the same common issue for the N+1th time.
And I saw that there had been years of arguing over whether expecting a "minimum level of understanding" was the right phrasing (it's really about the effect that has on question-writing, not just on whether the OP is likely to be able to understand a correctly-written answer - although that does weigh in the calculation), which led to a trial close reason being implemented for a couple of weeks in 2013.
And I saw that there had been years of arguing over whether question difficulty (in either direction) is a disqualifying factor (it isn't, but we won't write a tutorial instead of answering a concrete question, nor will we complete multi-part coding work to order), or the reason why the OP wants an answer (generally not relevant, but see e.g. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/334822 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/284236 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/326569 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/329321).
And I saw that by the time I got back, quite a few things had been more or less settled and reasoned out, but that the general community was not on the same page as the people who had been actually thinking about these things. Obviously I didn't agree with everything immediately, and obviously there are still disagreements among those who are broadly speaking on the same page. But I could see the vision.
And I realized that before I left, I had been using the site without putting any effort into trying to understand it. Like most users, I had been "the general community".
(And then I saw that there was tons of unpleasantness between users and the company itself, and unfit-for-purpose site software, and a totally broken reputation system that had never been properly reconsidered. Which is how I ended up checking out Codidact as an alternative. But most of what I say about Stack Overflow isn't really about Stack Overflow; it's about "the Stack Exchange model" - the "Q&A site" as I understand it - which alternative sites still implement.)
We didn't get here spontaneously. Everything was extensively discussed and the discussion is extensively documented, with carefully considered rationale where possible.
> If that is the current culture on SO, that's very unfortunate.
Obviously I disagree.
I'm all over this thread explaining how Stack Overflow is supposed to work, and how almost everyone who comes to it has broad misconceptions, and about how we're very deliberately gatekeeping in a specific way for a specific purpose, and why I think that purpose is legitimate.
I've also expressed quite a bit of AI skepticism on HN before.
And I absolutely agree with you - assuming that by "use Stack Overflow" you mean "post a new question".
Most questions are fundamentally simple, even if they're tedious. If you're implementing something "complex", usually it really just involves following a straightforward series of steps, and it just takes a little bit of experience to see what the steps are. That breakdown is probably not useful to anyone else, and is hard to turn into a searchable artifact for others. If you're tearing out your hair troubleshooting something, most of the time one of the "standard" fixes really will work, and you just need to be talked through them.
If you like reading professional/academic sounding prose extensively trained to be inoffensive (even if it isn't always to the point), you have much better odds now with an LLM than with a random person who happens to be an expert on whatever it is you're trying to do.
If you're trying to figure out a thorny problem and it would benefit you to have a back-and-forth communication - or ask multiple questions on a theme and get all the responses from the same place - Stack Overflow can't do that for you. In fact, traditional forums can't, either, except accidentally (because they're too small to expose you to more voices). But the Stack Exchange Q&A model is explicitly about preventing back-and-forth communication, because it degrades the experience for third parties.
If you take downvotes personally (they aren't meant personally) or expect that your questions should be answered simply because you ask them, then of course you should prefer a system that doesn't rate what you say (unless you explicitly ask) and is directly tasked with responding (even if you prompt with complete nonsense).
And if you want a system that tries to adapt code to your personal circumstances and minimize the editing you need to do, then you obviously shouldn't use one that specifically tries to show demonstration code relevant to everyone with the same problem.
----
But the LLM is trained in part on Stack Overflow content. And if everyone using Stack Overflow used it as intended (and as took years to properly figure out, and is taking much longer to communicate), the LLM would be trained on much better Stack Overflow content. And would also not need the LLM a lot of the time, because a traditional search engine would find you high-quality Stack Overflow content directly.
(Actually, despite everything that's gone wrong, traditional search engines still do a reasonable job a lot of the time. Granted, it's extremely frustrating when they fail. I know because I've experienced this failure when trying to find a good target to close an obvious duplicate.)
And sometimes the LLM will be wrong; and it will be absolutely abysmal at introspecting whether it's wrong.
My statement that the site was intended to be this way is based on literally years spent trawling through old meta discussions and discussing how the site is supposed to work with other regulars who care(d) about figuring that out - a discussion informed both by statements made by Atwood and Spolsky themselves, as well as years of experience seeing what was and wasn't working. The fact that the site didn't actually initially work as intended, doesn't in any way negate that vision. Basically nothing works as intended out of the gate, especially not when the "thing" is an attempt to organize a community around a piece of software.
Personally, I have reproduced the bug on Windows 10 running on AMD64 processor. BTW, the code in the question only communicates to localhost address i.e. doesn’t need any networking on the computer.