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Comment by glossyscr | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes when googling answers I end up on some odd PHP written forum site from ten years ago--ad heavy, huge profile pics, blinking emoticons, endless user signatures after every comment, answers and useless comments spread over multiple pages. Then I realize what wonderful system StackOverflow has created.

StackOverflow has its flaws but compared to the competition it's heaven. Moreover, when reading OP's 'Computer systems are designed to be figured out from their manuals or APIs' I stop reading. Sometimes systems are so new there isn't a manual yet (eg when Node started) or you just deal with complex matters where multiple systems are interweaved.

I learned tons of stuff on SO I would have never figured out myself. Also, how comments and answers are conceptually and visually separated is just very smart and the pain point of every other Q&A site.

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I'm dealing with Azure at work right now you would not believe how much of their API is undocumented or unexplained.

My company is being courted by MS a bit, because they want us on Azure, so I was able to talk to some of their developers on the phone when I hit roadblocks. The amount of things they admitted to me were undocumented was enormous.

That's pretty par for the course, I've found. I do a lot of work with Skype for Business/Lync, and besides it seeming like there's about fifty people in the world that regularly work with this stuff, the documentation tends to be a trainwreck. Thank goodness for Reflector and dotPeek.

Is any of this news? This company always hypes stuff that is years away or unfinished and buggy for years, there API documentation is deliberately incomplete to have an competitive advantage in case they want to change private API bits in front of their competition, etc. It was bad, it got better and now it is worse.

To be fair, that's because the stuff they hype is invariably humongous. From win32 onwards, all their solutions involved inordinate amounts of libraries and features, pandering to absolutely everyone and his dog. No wonder they also had tons of undocumented nooks and crannies...

All considered, MSDN has always had a huge amount of content, which was pruned only sporadically. It has long been the gold standard for technical docs; good luck finding that sort of detail for mainstream projects like KDE, Gnome, or even the Linux kernel.

Fair? Is the truth uncomfortable? Yes. Deal with it. And this company was never fair, at any time, to anyone. With Steve's stint as CEO after a few years he got softer and that was the best era of the company and for everyone else. But the current CEO [edited] turned the ship to be pretty end-user hostile (forced monthly updates on recent products, spying on user), the crude bribing of enterprise CTOs and their products are buggier and less documented then ever before. Devs run away, mobile market share is <1%. The trust is gone.

Holy crap, dude, calm down. "India-born Bill 2.0 from a high caste", really? I hope someone flags it. I may or may not agree with some of your points, but there is no need to pepper your argument with gratuitous racism.

MS has always been an aggressive company doing some bad things. I'm far from a MS apologist (where were you in 2000? I was in a social squat learning about Linux...), but I'm old enough to give props where props are due regardless of my "religious beliefs". MS docs are still way better than Oracle docs, to mention but one "bad" corp doing "bad" things. That's all there is.

Not sure they were being racist, you seem to trigger a bit prematurely.

If the CEO happened to be of Bavarian Aristocratic heritage, would pointing that out be racist?

Satya Nadella is of the Brahmin caste, there is not one thing racist in noting it.

Those were the days.

I remember moderators pointing everyone to the search-function of the board and if you used it the first 3 pages of the search where threads where the moderators are pointing people to the search-function.

This behavior shaped my opinion about moderators permanently...

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