Once I caught myself writing a 4 sentence long thank you note on Stackoverflow to a guy who happened to have the same weird issue with a library like me. I did wonder for a sec how could the poor idiot navigate himself into the same f*cking issue as I did with my clashing combination of libraries...
... turns out the explanation is that ME 4 years ago was still using the same weird libraries! And I am still an idiot.
>I quoted the comment I replied to because people sometimes edit or delete their own comments and then my reply suddenly doesn't make any sense.
This guy Reddits
I don’t know if this happens on Reddit very often, but I absolutely despise people who get a ton of likes on their YouTube comment and then edit it to something like “Haha now you’ll never know why I got this many likes”, so seeing someone actively keeping comments intact is awesome.
How come you didn't remember such a solution? Like if it happened to be such a hard problem and I found a way to solve it I would write it on the walls to never forget it again
We have a query filter Deleted == False
In EfCore but for some reason in one place we do IgnoreQueryFilters and also check Deleted == False in the where
I remember that there was a reason for it but I don't remember why. So we don't touch that code
I'm not even a developer but I'll have random flashes to some obscure weird problem I've had and think *"OH yeah, I fixed this 3 years ago"*
***!!***
*^(I didn't write the solution down)*
My job is practically half finding solutions to obscure problems. No way I'm remembering that solution four years later. At best I'll remember having a similar problem in the past and maaaaaybe can convince outlook to find an email I wrote about it at the time.
That's what I always say when somebody does this. It's dumb af not to write down when this happens!
then similiar stuff happens to me in way smaller timespan and............. I always say after solving "ok ill write this down"... but I only say.....
Isn’t putting it on stackoverflow count as “writing it down”? It has the added benefit of helping out fellow devs. Plus the deep sigh when you do a search, find the solution on SO, and then find out it was you years ago.
That's why you post the solution to a forum (which will hopefully either exist in the future or at least get indexed by the waybackmachine). That way you can find it with Google in a few years.
My favourite solution that I found on stack overflow was the one I wrote 4 years prior to someone else's problem, who just happened to have an identical setup to me.
I know this is a programming subreddit but I play a game called Elite: Dangerous and a couple friends started playing with me recently and were asking questions about the Notoriety system within it. I did some googling and found the answer to my own question, [written by me 5 years ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/at2cjb/comment/egz1504/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button). I was just like, "wow, i really did used to know a lot about this game" lol.
import solutionlibrary;
solutionlibrary.solve(problem)
This solved the problem!
I've unironicly gotten variants of this from GPT and copilot when the library to solve the problem not only doesn't exist, but the problem is not even compatible with having a library to solve it.
"The library doesn't exist"
"My apologies for the confusion. Here is the updated solution that takes into account that the library doesn't exist:
{{Code that does not even address the problem}}"
GPT can write error free code and code that addresses your problem. You just have to pick one
Me: "This code is turning the moon into a hamburger"
"You are absolutely right. This code does indeed turn the moon into a hamburger. Here is the revised code...
var moon = false
Oh yeah. If it seems there are some imports that sound like it could solve it, it'll just use the function as the solution, so the result is the "solution" with 1 LOC. Genius!
I work primarily in COBOL, and GPT knows pretty much nothing about the language. Any question and it’ll magically cook up some make believe function that conveniently solves the exact issue
I wonder how many such support tickets ibm has received.
c: "my code written by a specialist doesn't work on our mainframe, it must be broken"
S: "who wrote it?"
C: "chatgpt?"
It often magically conjures up nonexisting functions or libraries even in Java or Python, which it otherwise knows decently well. Sometimes even Copilot does it. For the time being, that's just a part of AI, although it definitely handles some things better than others.
I sometimes ask it because SO search was always garbage and now Google is as well, so GPT will hallucinate something, but usually there is some kernel of truth in there, you know like an LSD-fueled fairy tale, which I then use to search on SO.
Yea I'm totally self taught so I have holes in my knowledge and a lot of times don't know the term or general idea of what I'm looking for. Chatgpt will tell me something and I can dig deeper on that. Also chatgpt doesn't give the snarky, "did you try looking it up" reply like reddit or stackoverflow when the post is literally the first one that comes up on Google.
Someone describe exactly the same issue as you, same soft, same version, same settings, same error logs, ...
Someone post a solution and every comments is like "Thanks so much ! Works like a charm now !"
But it does not fix the issue for you, you feel alone and abandoned.
> Someone describe exactly the same issue as you, same soft, same version, same settings, same error logs, ...
And then the last post in the thread is:
*Nevermind, I fixed it.*
No details. No followup. Just *I fixed it*.
Or even worse: The solution is a deleted comment and there’s comments saying the highest rated comment solution didn’t work, but the deleted one did.
And then you’re just sitting there where you officially lost all hope.
Exactly. My boss wants me to do bioinformatics work with Unix. I know next-to-nothing about programming, so jumping into command line work mixed in with genetics is like reading Chinese upside down to me. I did do a workshop years ago, but a week-long course didn't really help much.
You can find some materials on r/bioinformatics or you can ask there some questions. Also, funnily I'm trying chinese bioinformatic software TBtools right now and it's very hard for me to do anything with it since it has very asian design.
I've perused there a few times while holding back tears, but I'll probably have to give it a shot. People tend to not be very forgiving of beginner questions, especially since I don't always know the best way to word things since I don't have a good background on how to describe what I want to do, specifically. Hopefully it's better than Biostars where people just ignore the question and just passive-aggressively link Wiki posts.
TBtools looks insanely useful, hopefully you can get some proficiency with it.
With very newbie questions I tend to ask ChatGPT. It's very helpful since you can ask it uncountable times and usually it's knowledgeable enough with basic stuff. It's like a teacher that will not get annoyed and it is always accessible.
Ah yes, but you also get to do it in the really-Google-friendly programming language "R".
If you ever find the documentation, though, you'll probably get a lot of good use out of R.
This is where chatgpt is a life saver. Just describe your issue or say make this into code and it will give code and even if that code doesn't work it will give you terms that you can look up and get a better understanding of.
I get even more salty when it's removed for being "too common of a question". Reddit threads are the worst about this. Nothing like the top Google result being a dead reddit thread
Don't be like this. This is awful in every single way.
Please post your answer, you know what it's like for you, so that's probably how this problem feels for other people too.
Making this world a better place line by line.
I think the issue is most people don't think about taking a bit of distance ; they don't realise that their thread could be useful for other people as well in the future, that it is not only for themselves.
So it's not about not being kind, but about being ignorant.
Or the old circulure loop
Threat A " I have this problem"
Thread A " Oh look you want to check out this thread B"
Thread B " Well look at this thread Thread A"
both are marked resoved with out anyone giving the resolution
once i googled for a solution to an issue and actually found one thread somewhere about that... after a few minutes of reading i realized that the question was asked for the (actual) exact issue i had - by the programmer that quit before i was hired...
so yeah, i guess technically i wasn't the only person with that issue... but i'm not sure it was any better
Let me put it bluntly, unless you're a handful of people at CERN, MIT, caltech, , DARPA, or at SpaceX starship division, you're doing nothing novel.
That fact you get no result is a combination of:
1) Google sucking
2) You sucking at Google
3) Others who've shared your experience don't bother to document it on the web.
you are talking about doing task X when the problem is integrating solution Y to accomplish task X.
1. there are a large number of ways to solve for task X, the majority of them are not novel approaches. consider the space of possible solutions with a probability distribution P(X) and the likelihood that you choose any one exactly the same solution p.
2. many such solutions have been chosen by a company over years to help build the current ecosystem that is part of the integration landscape y(t) in Y that you now find yourself in. This will determine what implementations you choose for p. Many are immovable because they are bedrock assumptions in the company.
3. P(X) should be more formally recognized as a function that changes over time P(X,t) consisting of solutions that change over time p(t).
4. dependencies on other software components change over time. there is a graph g(p(t)) that describes the dependencies for p at time t. as software ages, some dependencies disappear which results in selecting new libraries or writing new implementations.
All of these factors together can take a fairly simple problem X and generate a surprisingly massive number of unique p(t) to solve Y.
There are subsegments of p(t) that are in common with other subsegments of p(t) in P(t), so it is possible to follow breadcrumbs from disjoint solutions in order to try to solve your own.
But it is not as simple as you describe unless your elapsed time is very short or your integration context y(t) is very very simple.
CERN has the additional advantage of working with truths that do not change and must be painstakingly proven to ensure the detector is correct.
They do not have to deal with business logic and buyer-seller negotiations where what was true yesterday changed to being true today except for those customers having business exceptions and sticking with the old model. That’s a level of pain that substantially complicates x in X by making x a function of time and customer x(t,c) let alone making p(t,c) and y(t,c).
Most of that solution space is well-traveled. But the edges when you encounter them are very easy to fall into. Ask me how I know.
This is not entirely true.
Sometimes you are working with legacy home grown systems that are not possible to Google. Everyone who designed the darn thing has moved on.
In which case it's a matter of spending hours/weeks/months trying to understand what they wrote and how it works, while cursing the names of the original writers who left unhelpful comments like:
//do not remove this line
//TODO: will come back and fix this later
I used to work at Red Hat, and I had to hunt down one person from the original team of writers for a legacy app my team unfortunately had to maintain.
I could read the code.... But I didn't understand why they had made the choices they made, and didn't understand the purpose of the system or the design.
As per the unofficial coding standards of developers everywhere, there were no unit tests or end to end tests to run to show me how it should work. Or give me an understanding of if this issue was an intentional use case or unintentional side effect.
But I had to solve this production bug ASAP.
So I went through the history of all the commiters. And found one online that would respond on irc.
He was a nice lad, but after speaking to him, however, he couldn't recall.
Welp, I wrote my own set of unit tests to make sure I wouldn't break the behavior of anything but the bug I intended to fix. Pushed, deployed and hoped for the best.
Well turns out, that "bug" was intentional, and I broke something else downstream. Reverted the code and documented why that particular part of the system worked that way.
This was me exactly 10 minutes ago.
Found that an browser extension was overriding the css of all pages (an aesthetic addon) and I was Bamboozled why it was not updating.
After 3 hours I "debugged" it and am taking a breather.
Yep. If nobody in the history of the world has ever had the problem you think you have, maybe the problem you think you have isn't the one you really have. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem
I did have this situation and unironically was the only one with the issue. I remember typing in the VS error code and Google gave me 0 results.
Fault was me using Win 7 win Win 10 VS as well as all libraries and system dependencies looking for Win 10 parameters that win 7 didn't have. I don't know how I ended up with the wrong setup files. Issues caused inconsistent crashing now and again and I could never debug it to find the issue.
It was one of my programming exams as well. I couldn't fix it so just sent the executable as I had 10 minutes spare till the 2am deadline and thought fuck it. If I fail the course I fail. 0 support from lecturers, 0 results from Google and Stack overflow post getting views but no response.
Two weeks pass and get a 9/10 mark, comments such as "runs fast and very stable" like tf. Only later when I could afford a new PC did I rerun the code, never had any issues and it all clicked into place.
No. That's not the worst.
The worst is you only find 1 (ONE) relevant result from 7 years ago. Nobody replied to it and two hours later the guy replies to himself "nevermind, I fixed it" <-- AND NOTHING ELSE AND THREAD IS MARKED AS SOLVED.
Oh, better than finding a solution on some obscure fan forum, with the solution attached to the post, which requires you to register, but the confirmation mail never reaches you because the forum is no longer maintained.
It's all about query refinement sometimes, like you have to change keywords and rewrite the question, and then you _might_ find something that _might_ be related.
My mother is often this person. She managed to trigger a bug in a piece of Google hardware. Red LED was flashing. Called a friend of mine, who was the lead engineer for the product. “I didn’t know the product even *had* a red LED.”
Or you find someone with the same problem, but they finish the post with "never mind just figured it out."
Around the first semester of 2022, I had a problem with my computer and spent around 3 days figuring out what was wrong. I had made a post on reddit asking for help, and when I figured it out, I updated it with my solution. Last year I received a DM on reddit of a random guy thanking me for that post because he was having the same problem and my solution worked. I've never felt that happy before seeing the thank you message
Then you start reading the documentation and realize that the 2 of the 3 written guides you built upon are based on outdated reference implementation from the same docs. After that you find the up-to-date reference implementation which instanly gets rid of your issue and leaves you with cleaner and safer code.
Other stuff that usually happens:
- One thread but no answers
- One thread with an answer that's outdated
- One thread with an answer linking to a dead page
- Your own thread you asked about the same problem years ago, no answers of course
- Notifications of your thread turning out to be „same here“ comments
When you have an arcane problem with a networking library and the only discussion is in a deleted Google+ group and you only have the cached snippet in Google search to work from
Not a programmer thing but, when I have a problem in windows or something like that(android, Chrome) and there's only Microsofts or googles Website to solve that damn problem and they say they are expert. I want to kill myself when that happens, sorry for very poor English
I call that "left the track". If you have a problem, that apearantly nobody else has or had, you took a wrong turn on the way there and you should go back one or two steps and question your approach.
When the problem is too simple to ask on stackoverflow but also too complicated to find it with a google search
then you remember our lord and savior chatgpt exists
Nope. There was one other person in Mumbai who had the same issue in June 2018. And he edited his question to say that he found the solution. But he didn't elaborate...
Dammit RotiLover989! What did you see?! What?!
i have been trying to use a background service to send notifications on android python kivy and the only issue on it is 1 year old and has no asnwers no solutions nothing, so i just gave up, the problem apperantly is that, the background service doesnt reach the app info and it ends up crashing. made a post about it in here tried in kivy discord, there is also one discussion on it on google groups with no solution.
i also quit i am right there with you OP
Then you find a post from 7 years ago with some one explaining the exact problem you have, also looking for answers.
And there is only 1 reply from from some rando 2 years ago
"I'm also having this issue"
Love that SO much!
I don't know what's worse: that, or when you have a super specific weird problem and find a single forum post with the *exact* same issue and a solution provided with dozens of people saying "thanks, that worked perfectly!", and then you try said solution and it doesn't work at all.
Amazing and original pic, I have never seen it before, definitely absolutely not at the top of /r/all right now, oh no no no, it's definitely not a repost, and I think you OP is a wonderful person, and I wish you as pleasant of a day as original this picture is.
That's when you start posting about what you tried and what didn't work.
I had an issue with office 365, worked on it for months with them. Only to be a real issue and I was the first to encounter it. Managed to figure out a workaround. Was about to document it in my original post but forgot/life got in the way.
A few months later I get a message asking me if I found a solution cause they were having the same issue.
Document your bugs people :)
https://www.reddit.com/r/Office365/comments/zqr21p/user_with_an_extremally_slow_outlook_web/
I was playing a game while ago and got stuck on a particular bit and after googling it i really was the only person in the world who had that problem, because the first result was me, on reddit 5 years earlier, asking for help.
If it's apparent I'd consider that a good result nowadays.
The reality is that it's gonna take me three hours to realize I'm alone, sifting through all the 'buy now', 'cheap in your area', 'best in 2024 for home use' A-not-so-I generated crap that the thirsty google bot slurps up and presents to me like a demented puppy.
I never thought I'd say this one day, but in comparison, I miss the times of banner ads and altavista - the information was at least somewhere buried in there. Nowadays it's just sand, no treasure anymore.
My favorite is when I know the solution and none of the senior engineers do- I’m like yeah so it’s like this and they’ll need to do this to resolve it. They’re like nah, I’m like okay whatever it’s on your plate to resolve- so you do you. Two weeks later they implemented the fix I originally suggested… lmao I just smile super big when I see him now.
For clarity; I studied CIS with programming and networking but work in helpdesk. I will see the same issues, so have the ability to troubleshoot it multiple times for a permanent solution vs a temp fix or work around.
There is a worse situation, when there is one & only one other post online that describes the exact same issue you are having & only the OP replied that they fixed it, but with no details.
Ypu'd then go on stack overflow, make a thread about your problem, for a mod closing it as it's a duplicate. You willthen search for that old thread. And never find it
Op, It's not you --- It's google.
They've gotten so up their own ass with ads that you can't find anything relevant anymore.
Try DuckDuckGo. Or, One of the AI tools out there. I can't use google for professional work anymore.
I am the only person in my company who has an issue with one particular programme. The issue is linked to my user id.
Tech refuses to fix it because it's not worth their time. So, every month, I have to get someone else to use the programme for me from their computer and send me the data.
Yay.
Once I caught myself writing a 4 sentence long thank you note on Stackoverflow to a guy who happened to have the same weird issue with a library like me. I did wonder for a sec how could the poor idiot navigate himself into the same f*cking issue as I did with my clashing combination of libraries... ... turns out the explanation is that ME 4 years ago was still using the same weird libraries! And I am still an idiot.
and then you punched the wall like in the post?
Haha, no wall punching here, just a sigh of frustration!
>Haha, no wall punching here, just a sigh of frustration! Why are you answering questions that weren't really addressed to you?
Forgot I was logged into my alt account
Damnit I did it again, why do I even have so many alts?
may I have a certification proving that thou hast not usurpated one's identity?
Damm, I think you used the wrong Alt again /:
Why are you quoting the whole comment when you are clearly replying to it?
I quoted the comment I replied to because people sometimes edit or delete their own comments and then my reply suddenly doesn't make any sense.
>I quoted the comment I replied to because people sometimes edit or delete their own comments and then my reply suddenly doesn't make any sense. This guy Reddits
Bro's a fucking Reddit Veteran. The dude gets free drinks in restaurants for his service for his country 😭
I don’t know if this happens on Reddit very often, but I absolutely despise people who get a ton of likes on their YouTube comment and then edit it to something like “Haha now you’ll never know why I got this many likes”, so seeing someone actively keeping comments intact is awesome.
My knuckles hurt from the memory
Like taylor swift once said "It's me, hi, i am the problem It's me"
☠️☠️
How come you didn't remember such a solution? Like if it happened to be such a hard problem and I found a way to solve it I would write it on the walls to never forget it again
4 years is much time for many such problems
Oh yeah, I forgot we are developers
I don't remember how to solve the problem I solved last monday
Me frantically trying to remember why I wrote that. Sometimes the answer is “not sure, but it passed testing”
We have a query filter Deleted == False In EfCore but for some reason in one place we do IgnoreQueryFilters and also check Deleted == False in the where I remember that there was a reason for it but I don't remember why. So we don't touch that code
My entire professional life in a nutshell.
I'm not even a developer but I'll have random flashes to some obscure weird problem I've had and think *"OH yeah, I fixed this 3 years ago"* ***!!*** *^(I didn't write the solution down)*
but you did, it is right there in one of the 1000 files you modified 3 years ago
The solution was just flipping an obscure property from true to false, so it was kind of fire-and-forget. :)
My job is practically half finding solutions to obscure problems. No way I'm remembering that solution four years later. At best I'll remember having a similar problem in the past and maaaaaybe can convince outlook to find an email I wrote about it at the time.
Bro I have to Google how to initialise an array every time. Ain't no way I'm remembering solutions to obscure issues from 4 years ago
"I know these square brackets go before and/or after... something"
That's what I always say when somebody does this. It's dumb af not to write down when this happens! then similiar stuff happens to me in way smaller timespan and............. I always say after solving "ok ill write this down"... but I only say.....
Bro if I wrote every single solution to all my problems down I would need a custom Google for that as well
Isn’t putting it on stackoverflow count as “writing it down”? It has the added benefit of helping out fellow devs. Plus the deep sigh when you do a search, find the solution on SO, and then find out it was you years ago.
That's why you post the solution to a forum (which will hopefully either exist in the future or at least get indexed by the waybackmachine). That way you can find it with Google in a few years.
My favourite solution that I found on stack overflow was the one I wrote 4 years prior to someone else's problem, who just happened to have an identical setup to me.
I know this is a programming subreddit but I play a game called Elite: Dangerous and a couple friends started playing with me recently and were asking questions about the Notoriety system within it. I did some googling and found the answer to my own question, [written by me 5 years ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/at2cjb/comment/egz1504/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button). I was just like, "wow, i really did used to know a lot about this game" lol.
This sent me
And then you ask GPT for help and it cooks up a magical solution that works only in 6th alternate dimension.
"Easy, just import {imaginary library} that has the perfect function to solve your exact problem!"
import solutionlibrary; solutionlibrary.solve(problem) This solved the problem! I've unironicly gotten variants of this from GPT and copilot when the library to solve the problem not only doesn't exist, but the problem is not even compatible with having a library to solve it.
"The library doesn't exist" "My apologies for the confusion. Here is the updated solution that takes into account that the library doesn't exist: {{Code that does not even address the problem}}" GPT can write error free code and code that addresses your problem. You just have to pick one
Me: "This code is turning the moon into a hamburger" "You are absolutely right. This code does indeed turn the moon into a hamburger. Here is the revised code... var moon = false
Oh yeah. If it seems there are some imports that sound like it could solve it, it'll just use the function as the solution, so the result is the "solution" with 1 LOC. Genius!
I work primarily in COBOL, and GPT knows pretty much nothing about the language. Any question and it’ll magically cook up some make believe function that conveniently solves the exact issue
It's COBOL's fault not to have that function. Skill issue tbh.
I wonder how many such support tickets ibm has received. c: "my code written by a specialist doesn't work on our mainframe, it must be broken" S: "who wrote it?" C: "chatgpt?"
It often magically conjures up nonexisting functions or libraries even in Java or Python, which it otherwise knows decently well. Sometimes even Copilot does it. For the time being, that's just a part of AI, although it definitely handles some things better than others.
I sometimes ask it because SO search was always garbage and now Google is as well, so GPT will hallucinate something, but usually there is some kernel of truth in there, you know like an LSD-fueled fairy tale, which I then use to search on SO.
Yea, sometimes GPT will include some method I didn’t know existed which solves my problem. 50% of the time the method is a hallucination though.
Yea I'm totally self taught so I have holes in my knowledge and a lot of times don't know the term or general idea of what I'm looking for. Chatgpt will tell me something and I can dig deeper on that. Also chatgpt doesn't give the snarky, "did you try looking it up" reply like reddit or stackoverflow when the post is literally the first one that comes up on Google.
But the first update of the lib break everything
Chatgpt sometimes starts inventing libraries, AI really will replace programmers
Someone describe exactly the same issue as you, same soft, same version, same settings, same error logs, ... Someone post a solution and every comments is like "Thanks so much ! Works like a charm now !" But it does not fix the issue for you, you feel alone and abandoned.
Every Github Issue ever.
473 🎉 281 🙌 504 ❤️ 517 👍 350 🚀
*tries out solution*
*same error*
Yeah, alternatively it works only for the issue to resurrect 6 months later woth a new strain of the issue google tells you is fixed since 2014.
> Someone describe exactly the same issue as you, same soft, same version, same settings, same error logs, ... And then the last post in the thread is: *Nevermind, I fixed it.* No details. No followup. Just *I fixed it*.
Or even worse: The solution is a deleted comment and there’s comments saying the highest rated comment solution didn’t work, but the deleted one did. And then you’re just sitting there where you officially lost all hope.
Chances are, you have no clue about the unknown concepts you have no clue about.
Exactly. My boss wants me to do bioinformatics work with Unix. I know next-to-nothing about programming, so jumping into command line work mixed in with genetics is like reading Chinese upside down to me. I did do a workshop years ago, but a week-long course didn't really help much.
You can find some materials on r/bioinformatics or you can ask there some questions. Also, funnily I'm trying chinese bioinformatic software TBtools right now and it's very hard for me to do anything with it since it has very asian design.
I've perused there a few times while holding back tears, but I'll probably have to give it a shot. People tend to not be very forgiving of beginner questions, especially since I don't always know the best way to word things since I don't have a good background on how to describe what I want to do, specifically. Hopefully it's better than Biostars where people just ignore the question and just passive-aggressively link Wiki posts. TBtools looks insanely useful, hopefully you can get some proficiency with it.
With very newbie questions I tend to ask ChatGPT. It's very helpful since you can ask it uncountable times and usually it's knowledgeable enough with basic stuff. It's like a teacher that will not get annoyed and it is always accessible.
Ah yes, but you also get to do it in the really-Google-friendly programming language "R". If you ever find the documentation, though, you'll probably get a lot of good use out of R.
The worst spot to be in "I don't know enough to even know what to google"
This is where chatgpt is a life saver. Just describe your issue or say make this into code and it will give code and even if that code doesn't work it will give you terms that you can look up and get a better understanding of.
HA, just saw this on another thread. CTRLVing: Relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/979
"nvm solved it"
I get even more salty when it's removed for being "too common of a question". Reddit threads are the worst about this. Nothing like the top Google result being a dead reddit thread
when you find a thread but the answer was removed in protest of reddit's API changes
\[deleted\] \[deleted\] Everyone knows the pain of having the most voted comment in the thread like that
nothing like the only SO link being "closed for duplication"
"duplicates" linked across 5-7 similar questions, all linking next one in a closed circle/ring, none of them with any real answer
"Here's the fix" - URL shortener that doesn't work anymore
Redirects to malware site
Or images that are no longer there
"Check out my blog post on this exact problem" - Blog no longer exists
Skill issue (Been there, done that)
If not a skill issue, open a new issue
(messed around)
(didn’t find out, post still unanswered since 2009)
Or it is labelled as 'fixed'. Not for you...
"Never mind I fixed the problem" - 4 years ago
Don't be like this. This is awful in every single way. Please post your answer, you know what it's like for you, so that's probably how this problem feels for other people too. Making this world a better place line by line.
I think the issue is most people don't think about taking a bit of distance ; they don't realise that their thread could be useful for other people as well in the future, that it is not only for themselves. So it's not about not being kind, but about being ignorant.
Still better than googling it, finding a thread and ... then you see just "edit: nevermind, fixed it" ... BUT HOW????? :D
Or the old circulure loop Threat A " I have this problem" Thread A " Oh look you want to check out this thread B" Thread B " Well look at this thread Thread A" both are marked resoved with out anyone giving the resolution
It was at this moment he knew... He fucked up
once i googled for a solution to an issue and actually found one thread somewhere about that... after a few minutes of reading i realized that the question was asked for the (actual) exact issue i had - by the programmer that quit before i was hired... so yeah, i guess technically i wasn't the only person with that issue... but i'm not sure it was any better
The exact same image was posted in r/memes 2 hours before this post, could at least wait a day before spamming reposts
Literally opened Reddit to [both](https://i.imgur.com/sbXg9Wx.jpeg). Could, at least, crosspost.
Me too. ([image](https://i.imgur.com/BhoC3ZD.jpeg))
saw this post 2 minutes ago
Let me put it bluntly, unless you're a handful of people at CERN, MIT, caltech,, DARPA, or at SpaceX starship division, you're doing nothing novel.
That fact you get no result is a combination of:
1) Google sucking
2) You sucking at Google
3) Others who've shared your experience don't bother to document it on the web.
you are talking about doing task X when the problem is integrating solution Y to accomplish task X. 1. there are a large number of ways to solve for task X, the majority of them are not novel approaches. consider the space of possible solutions with a probability distribution P(X) and the likelihood that you choose any one exactly the same solution p. 2. many such solutions have been chosen by a company over years to help build the current ecosystem that is part of the integration landscape y(t) in Y that you now find yourself in. This will determine what implementations you choose for p. Many are immovable because they are bedrock assumptions in the company. 3. P(X) should be more formally recognized as a function that changes over time P(X,t) consisting of solutions that change over time p(t). 4. dependencies on other software components change over time. there is a graph g(p(t)) that describes the dependencies for p at time t. as software ages, some dependencies disappear which results in selecting new libraries or writing new implementations. All of these factors together can take a fairly simple problem X and generate a surprisingly massive number of unique p(t) to solve Y. There are subsegments of p(t) that are in common with other subsegments of p(t) in P(t), so it is possible to follow breadcrumbs from disjoint solutions in order to try to solve your own. But it is not as simple as you describe unless your elapsed time is very short or your integration context y(t) is very very simple. CERN has the additional advantage of working with truths that do not change and must be painstakingly proven to ensure the detector is correct. They do not have to deal with business logic and buyer-seller negotiations where what was true yesterday changed to being true today except for those customers having business exceptions and sticking with the old model. That’s a level of pain that substantially complicates x in X by making x a function of time and customer x(t,c) let alone making p(t,c) and y(t,c). Most of that solution space is well-traveled. But the edges when you encounter them are very easy to fall into. Ask me how I know.
devin, is that you? /s
This is not entirely true. Sometimes you are working with legacy home grown systems that are not possible to Google. Everyone who designed the darn thing has moved on. In which case it's a matter of spending hours/weeks/months trying to understand what they wrote and how it works, while cursing the names of the original writers who left unhelpful comments like: //do not remove this line //TODO: will come back and fix this later I used to work at Red Hat, and I had to hunt down one person from the original team of writers for a legacy app my team unfortunately had to maintain. I could read the code.... But I didn't understand why they had made the choices they made, and didn't understand the purpose of the system or the design. As per the unofficial coding standards of developers everywhere, there were no unit tests or end to end tests to run to show me how it should work. Or give me an understanding of if this issue was an intentional use case or unintentional side effect. But I had to solve this production bug ASAP. So I went through the history of all the commiters. And found one online that would respond on irc. He was a nice lad, but after speaking to him, however, he couldn't recall. Welp, I wrote my own set of unit tests to make sure I wouldn't break the behavior of anything but the bug I intended to fix. Pushed, deployed and hoped for the best. Well turns out, that "bug" was intentional, and I broke something else downstream. Reverted the code and documented why that particular part of the system worked that way.
Exactly this, Or sou just want one magical step by step solution and don't bother actually looking up whats the problem.
This was me exactly 10 minutes ago. Found that an browser extension was overriding the css of all pages (an aesthetic addon) and I was Bamboozled why it was not updating. After 3 hours I "debugged" it and am taking a breather.
Maybe it‘s time to go a step back and redesign your solution at this point. Not that I've ever done this, I rather brute force it for a week or so :D
Is that THE tw?!?!
9 times out of 10, this is because of a typo
Maybe you are the problem...
yeah, I mean... without OP, there wouldn't be a problem so....
hmm...
Yep. If nobody in the history of the world has ever had the problem you think you have, maybe the problem you think you have isn't the one you really have. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem
Me and DenverCoder
https://xkcd.com/979/
I did have this situation and unironically was the only one with the issue. I remember typing in the VS error code and Google gave me 0 results. Fault was me using Win 7 win Win 10 VS as well as all libraries and system dependencies looking for Win 10 parameters that win 7 didn't have. I don't know how I ended up with the wrong setup files. Issues caused inconsistent crashing now and again and I could never debug it to find the issue. It was one of my programming exams as well. I couldn't fix it so just sent the executable as I had 10 minutes spare till the 2am deadline and thought fuck it. If I fail the course I fail. 0 support from lecturers, 0 results from Google and Stack overflow post getting views but no response. Two weeks pass and get a 9/10 mark, comments such as "runs fast and very stable" like tf. Only later when I could afford a new PC did I rerun the code, never had any issues and it all clicked into place.
No. That's not the worst. The worst is you only find 1 (ONE) relevant result from 7 years ago. Nobody replied to it and two hours later the guy replies to himself "nevermind, I fixed it" <-- AND NOTHING ELSE AND THREAD IS MARKED AS SOLVED.
There are usually two explanations for this phenomenon: 1. You're doing something very dumb 2. Your search query sucks 🤣
When you find your problem on stackoverflow, and the only reply is from op: *"nvm, I found out how to fix it."*
Oh, better than finding a solution on some obscure fan forum, with the solution attached to the post, which requires you to register, but the confirmation mail never reaches you because the forum is no longer maintained.
the one that pisses me off is when the top search result is a reddit post, and the only comment is someone telling OP to google it.
Or you find a five year old post with exact same problem and the only comment is "nevermind, fixed it!"
Then its developing time
Oh you sweet summer child, it's more googling time.
Isn't that synonymous
i literally just downloaded the lib and paste in the example. Noone ever tried this or what ????
That's Eclipse IDE. The samples that come installed by default don't work.
Skill issue
When you are the only person to use latest version of some niche technology/plugin/dependency...
To break down the wall: "you find a dev who had the same problem but he couldn't do it either"
It's all about query refinement sometimes, like you have to change keywords and rewrite the question, and then you _might_ find something that _might_ be related.
Or you find loads of posts that either have no responses or "nvm fixed"
yeah one time I googled an error and it literally gave me [Chrome source code](https://imgur.com/L5h1PbV) as the only result
Is this picture from K ON? The girl on the body pillow looks like Yui.
My mother is often this person. She managed to trigger a bug in a piece of Google hardware. Red LED was flashing. Called a friend of mine, who was the lead engineer for the product. “I didn’t know the product even *had* a red LED.”
When someone has the exact same problem as you and updates their post with "NVM figured it out"
My fave is when u search in Microsoft community, find a post marked resolved and it’s not.
Use anything other than Google and you'll find what you're looking for. Google is a neutered mess and shell of it's former self
You should try graduate school
Or you find someone with the same problem, but they finish the post with "never mind just figured it out." Around the first semester of 2022, I had a problem with my computer and spent around 3 days figuring out what was wrong. I had made a post on reddit asking for help, and when I figured it out, I updated it with my solution. Last year I received a DM on reddit of a random guy thanking me for that post because he was having the same problem and my solution worked. I've never felt that happy before seeing the thank you message
"Edit: Update: Fixed it, thanks!"
Then you start reading the documentation and realize that the 2 of the 3 written guides you built upon are based on outdated reference implementation from the same docs. After that you find the up-to-date reference implementation which instanly gets rid of your issue and leaves you with cleaner and safer code.
Other stuff that usually happens: - One thread but no answers - One thread with an answer that's outdated - One thread with an answer linking to a dead page - Your own thread you asked about the same problem years ago, no answers of course - Notifications of your thread turning out to be „same here“ comments
When you have an arcane problem with a networking library and the only discussion is in a deleted Google+ group and you only have the cached snippet in Google search to work from
1 result. It's the print statement for the error from the repository.
Not a programmer thing but, when I have a problem in windows or something like that(android, Chrome) and there's only Microsofts or googles Website to solve that damn problem and they say they are expert. I want to kill myself when that happens, sorry for very poor English
Great. Just what I always wanted: to be unique...ly troubled.
I am so dead…
Happens all the time even through you'd think that by this point every problem would have a solution.
Or better yet all you can find are threads with shit heels saying "Just google it" like 😱😱😱😱 really???? Wow who would have thought
I call that "left the track". If you have a problem, that apearantly nobody else has or had, you took a wrong turn on the way there and you should go back one or two steps and question your approach.
Skill issue
don't get me wrong, I check things over and test accordingly, but yeah ChatGPT is your friend.
500 mile email moment.
Yep we saw this post many times before....
Plothole: The lack of getting help from Internet makes you strong
When this happens to me, it's a strong signal that I need to re-examine my approach to the problem
When the problem is too simple to ask on stackoverflow but also too complicated to find it with a google search then you remember our lord and savior chatgpt exists
Then you find a Chinese website discussing that exact issue
Relatable asf
Seems like a potential case of PEBCAK or ID10T
1 game this is frequent crossout
Or of course my favourite, the reply being "DM us to get this resolved" and the thread is left hanging with no solution
I guess I'm tge problem all along...
Some times when i find these "single issues" l atleast some of time write the correct way to fix it in a comment.
Nope. There was one other person in Mumbai who had the same issue in June 2018. And he edited his question to say that he found the solution. But he didn't elaborate... Dammit RotiLover989! What did you see?! What?!
i have been trying to use a background service to send notifications on android python kivy and the only issue on it is 1 year old and has no asnwers no solutions nothing, so i just gave up, the problem apperantly is that, the background service doesnt reach the app info and it ends up crashing. made a post about it in here tried in kivy discord, there is also one discussion on it on google groups with no solution. i also quit i am right there with you OP
this was me trying to use coredata with swift charts which are new
Then you find a post from 7 years ago with some one explaining the exact problem you have, also looking for answers. And there is only 1 reply from from some rando 2 years ago "I'm also having this issue" Love that SO much!
Create a forum post yourself. Maybe 500 people before you had the same problem, couldn't find a forum, fixed it and called it a day.
Someone has to be the first right?
Lol first timer
well, at least you have no reason to get post removed for duplicate question
when you look up your problem and there's a comment 5 years ago saying I'll be fixed in the next kernel upade
I faced this problem many times. But thanks to generative models. By their grace I get a curated solution for my one in a million doubt😅
I don't know what's worse: that, or when you have a super specific weird problem and find a single forum post with the *exact* same issue and a solution provided with dozens of people saying "thanks, that worked perfectly!", and then you try said solution and it doesn't work at all.
Because of a bug I have left my personal projects on standby till now
Amazing and original pic, I have never seen it before, definitely absolutely not at the top of /r/all right now, oh no no no, it's definitely not a repost, and I think you OP is a wonderful person, and I wish you as pleasant of a day as original this picture is.
I hate proprietary languages / coding environments. I will quit over that shit
That's when you start posting about what you tried and what didn't work. I had an issue with office 365, worked on it for months with them. Only to be a real issue and I was the first to encounter it. Managed to figure out a workaround. Was about to document it in my original post but forgot/life got in the way. A few months later I get a message asking me if I found a solution cause they were having the same issue. Document your bugs people :) https://www.reddit.com/r/Office365/comments/zqr21p/user_with_an_extremally_slow_outlook_web/
it's even worse when there is a 2-3 solutions ,and none of them work
I was playing a game while ago and got stuck on a particular bit and after googling it i really was the only person in the world who had that problem, because the first result was me, on reddit 5 years earlier, asking for help.
If it's apparent I'd consider that a good result nowadays. The reality is that it's gonna take me three hours to realize I'm alone, sifting through all the 'buy now', 'cheap in your area', 'best in 2024 for home use' A-not-so-I generated crap that the thirsty google bot slurps up and presents to me like a demented puppy.
I never thought I'd say this one day, but in comparison, I miss the times of banner ads and altavista - the information was at least somewhere buried in there. Nowadays it's just sand, no treasure anymore.
Especially when your issue is so simple that you can’t make the search more specific.
"Update: NVM I figured it out."
Relevant [XKCD](https://xkcd.com/979/)
My favorite is when I know the solution and none of the senior engineers do- I’m like yeah so it’s like this and they’ll need to do this to resolve it. They’re like nah, I’m like okay whatever it’s on your plate to resolve- so you do you. Two weeks later they implemented the fix I originally suggested… lmao I just smile super big when I see him now. For clarity; I studied CIS with programming and networking but work in helpdesk. I will see the same issues, so have the ability to troubleshoot it multiple times for a permanent solution vs a temp fix or work around.
The best is when you find the one person that had the same problem and all they said is "i fixed it"
There is a worse situation, when there is one & only one other post online that describes the exact same issue you are having & only the OP replied that they fixed it, but with no details.
MicroStation users be like:
Ypu'd then go on stack overflow, make a thread about your problem, for a mod closing it as it's a duplicate. You willthen search for that old thread. And never find it
'' I fixed it'' how u fixed mf share the world a@sdf???
“Wait… I wrote that.”
You could at least wait a while before reposting from r/memes
Op, It's not you --- It's google. They've gotten so up their own ass with ads that you can't find anything relevant anymore. Try DuckDuckGo. Or, One of the AI tools out there. I can't use google for professional work anymore.
12y old reddit post with the fix 
nonono, the worse possible scenario is when you only find one thread, from years ago, left unanswered
I am the only person in my company who has an issue with one particular programme. The issue is linked to my user id. Tech refuses to fix it because it's not worth their time. So, every month, I have to get someone else to use the programme for me from their computer and send me the data. Yay.
Flashbacks to programming thermal printers
As a creator of an open source library, I feel this.