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Comment by triska | Hacker News Reader

I have not accepted it: I immediately close the tab almost every time I see the first pop-up on a website.

For example, I no longer use Stackoverflow since they started showing these pop-ups, ostensibly to force me to accept what I regard as an invasion of privacy. When reading a web page, I would like to be able to concentrate on the content without any distractions, and my feeling is that a site that shows pop-ups does not respect this sufficiently.

As to solutions: Wherever I can, I support all measures that let a website get rid of any existing pop-ups, for example by advocating for less tracking and more respect for users' privacy and ability to quickly obtain the information they want.

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I personally use the Tor Browser for such websites. Sure, track me and my non-unique fingerprint for the next minutes until i close my browser again and everything is deleted :)

How do you get any work done?

I've never used SO. Why are people so reliant on it?

Curious what kind of work you do?

Java development, mostly.

I've also built this search engine from scratch: https://search.marginalia.nu/ , not once did I consult SO.

While I don't remember if and how much I've used it, I have to actively restrict my searches not to give me SO results, but the reference material I am looking for.

So my guess is that SEO is what takes people to SO first, even if it might not get the best results. (And sure, some of that search ranking is due to people recommending it left and right for real: it is actually organic and not fake)

I've long ago accepted that my brain doesn't like learning how most others seem to (I also don't like flowcharts, and prefer dense reference material) — this is not to discredit their way of learning, just recognizing the differences.

SO is useful for entry level work mostly - topic that I'd be barely familiar with. At some point SO was so prevalent even w/o a search bubble that I had to exclude it from my searches...

I don’t use it often. Before SO, I’d read man pages and still do. But when I want to remember how to do something like sort in awk, seeing an example is a lot faster than than reading the man page again.

You could argue that if I sucked it up and read the man page a few more times, I’d stop needing awk. You’d be right. But I don’t have your aversion to SO, so it’s not so bad for me.

It's not that I hate SO, I just don't find it particularly helpful.

Feels like going to the 13th century catholic church for answers: The answers are as old as they are doctrinal and detached from practical reality, whereas my practical experience is that the honest answer to almost all programming related questions starts with "It depends".

The fact that the medium is set up for each question having a definitive answer just doesn't seem to be a great fit for the open-ended nature of programming questions.

Clearly you're just too clever for it.

The only time Stack Overflow is useful to me is when I'm trying to find something to do with Javascript which I barely touch. Even then it's barely useful because of how much browsers change.

Personally I haven't found Stack Overflow useful for anything in a looong time. At work, usually my problems are specific to whatever proejct I'm working on and my peers are the only real source of answers regarding that. At home, if I want to work on some cool new thing then a Wikipedia page or good write-up on someone's blog is the goto source for useful, structured information.

The few times I have seen SO recently have been from friends trying to do Linux things, looking for answers on SO, and finding some ludicrous answer that is either just wrong or an extremely roundabout (and overcomplicated) approach to solving it.

I used to think this way and then one day I realized I had gone years without visiting that site.

I think stack overflow is mostly a series of training wheels that you can simply grow out of.

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