This article is like people in the early days of GUIs complaining that graphical interfaces make using a computer so much slower versus just typing the right command in console right away.
That was true at first… until it wasn’t.
AI is still in its infancy and a lot of the noise discussed in the article is real. But it will eventually create an Internet/OS interface we can barely fathom. Just project yourself 50 years from now: our current web pages will look archaic. Everything will be conversational, using language, vision, the whole spectrum.
> Just project yourself 50 years from now: our current web pages will look archaic. Everything will be conversational, using language, vision, the whole spectrum.
To what end?
We’ve interacted with the internet using the same text-oriented protocols, the same markup languages, and even the same layout elements for 36 years. What profit motive exists to upend that and standardize on a new format like conversational language?
And, based on the development trends of the internet over its entire history, what suggests that if the world were to commit to some radical shift in the foundational technology underpinning the web, it would move towards voice, or vision (what does this mean?) based interfaces.
I get that AI is cool, and it has legitimate use cases, but is it possible that we as technologists might be falling into that age-old trap of having a solution in search of a problem?
And yet some of us never asked for that. I didn't ask to come to a page and have a conversation about the data on it, I came to the page to read whatever that data was. I didn't ask to come to a page and have a conversation about filling in spreadsheet headers, I wanted to write out the dang headers and start populating my data. I never asked to downgrade to a lossy interpretation of human natural language, I already know how to get computers to do my bidding quite well, and quite quickly, if they stay out of my way.
30 min a day or 3hrs a week in a gym is all you need. I’ve been working out for 10 years, and if I can pull 3 hours in 1 week, it’s a great week! And it’ll keep me real strong. Plus, makes you sleep better, which means you probably need to sleep less. Working out is almost always a “you get more than what you gave” kinda deal.
The standard for employment-based permanent residency (green card) is extraordinarily high. As in, would likely place you in the top 1-5% of the most successful people in the country.
That, or you have to invest $800k and create 10 jobs.
No other country in the world requires foreigners to be significantly more qualified than its own population. You can move to France with a regular paying job no problem or just a few thousand euros in savings. Impossible in the US. You have to be extraordinary (they literally call their criteria, "extraordinary abilities") or you have to make top 5% money (so if you work in tech, that would be at least $500k-1M/year in many cases).
The only other way is to get married. This means there is a massive discrepancy between the qualifications of self made immigrants, versus those simply lucky enough to fall in love. It's pretty unfair, but that's how it works. But that's also the reason so many immigrants are so successful in the US, the bar is so high, that it creates a massive motivation to succeed to become eligible for the criteria.
> You can move to France with a regular paying job no problem or just a few thousand euros in savings
Unless something has changed dramatically in the last decade this is patently false. Getting an EU work permit was historically very hard with employers having to demonstrate that a position can't be filled by an EU citizen before a non-EU citizen candidate can be considered.
The difference in the US is that it's (comparably) extremely difficult to change status from a temporary visa to a permanent one. Even if you are highly qualified. For example the most common academic visa, the J1, is explicitly a temporary exchange program and you can't have immigrant intent (on application). Most universities won't give out academic H1Bs even though they're cap-free.
In most European countries, once you're in, you can find a way to stay. One exception I can think of is Switzerland, which can be pretty annoying for temporary visas because they don't count for time accrual.
Austria has a pretty good system (RWR) that lets you job seek and is a pathway to permanent residency as a 3rd country citizen. I think there are similar programs in France and Germany.
For example "very highly qualified" in Austria is satisfied by almost anyone with a STEM degree, being under 35 and (amazingly) being an English speaker. If you have that initial visa, companies can hire you without worrying about sponsorship.
You could also use that as a route to the Blue card I think. I wouldn't say the bar is exactly low, but a lot of mobile people are sufficiently educated and are paid enough. As in, a typical European STEM salary would cover it.
But also the grandparent's comment is out of touch. Of course countries want people who are more skilled than local labor, that's the whole point. Aside from the benefit of attracting talent and higher tax revenue, it's much harder for your voters to argue that immigrants are taking your jobs this way.
You are correct, however the criteria are a lot more relaxed in Europe comparatively. Most positions in tech, engineering and healthcare are often exempt from labor market tests. Also, there are plenty of options for "entrepreneurs" and self-employed digital nomads, often requiring some savings to prove sufficiency. I live in Portugal, and I believe the amount required when we moved was about 12k. In France, I believe it is closer to 21k (which is basically minimum wage multiplied by 12). Still dramatically easier than 800k in the US.
Indeed those are the rules but on a practical level it seems pretty simple to get a visa if the company had an even reasonably competitive process. Though I moved to Europe 12 years ago (and went through getting work permits twice), maybe it's gotten harder.
Nah it's still very easy. The logic is pretty simple. Europe could really use more talent... and the bar is quite low. Any developer/engineer of any grade will easily get a visa. Any retiree will also easily get a non-work long-term visa with just 1 year worth of minimum wage (around 20k in most of Western Europe) as savings to prove self-sufficiency. So it's extremely easy and almost a non-issue compared to the other side of the pond.
Maybe for instant green card you have to be extraordinary, but for regular employment-based immigration you don’t have to be.
The path is H1-B -> Green Card -> US citizen (I have done it), and to get H1-B your potential employer gotta post that $60-80k/year job and show that there were no qualifying US applicants for it.
Not related, but to add some woes of the american immigration system.
There is no instant green card.
If a truly extraordinary Indian-born person (say a Nobel laureate or olympic gold medalist) files for a green card today, they will be waiting for 7-10 years to get a green card. At this point, it may be worse too, because this category's priority date has not moved a single day in 8 months.
This is true, I have omitted this path because I am not so familiar with it. The trouble however is that this only works for employees, not for self-employed or startup founders. So in some way I guess they make it kind-of easier if you just get a job, versus try to create jobs... which is pretty strange?
Many countries have quite strict limitations on immigration for work. Many countries do not permit any immigration without visa sponsorship. The U.S. permits sponsored immigration with a quite reasonable bar (e.g: H1B, L-1). Many countries have similar lottery systems, quotas and minimum salary requirements. Given the demand for immigration into the U.S., it's not too surprising to see the limits (and restrictions) be more prominent.
I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is the extraordinary ability does not have to germane to your employment. I am aware of the the story of Gabby Franco - who appeared on a season of Top Shot years ago. She was on the Venezuela Olympic pistol team for the 2000 Summer Olympics in Australia. This status as an Olympian got her entry into the USA and eventually citizenship. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mar%C3%ADa_Gabriela_Franco
My heart goes to the stack overflow community which has always been very kind and helpful, essentially working for free.
As a self-taught developer since the age of 8, I literally grew up learning how to code through SO, asking hundreds of questions and answering many more.
So many bugs that would take 2-3 days to fix would eventually find their answer through it.
But now ChatGPT does that in minutes… so it’s for the best!
The presumption is that things will improve over time, but the big difference in my experience is the assistance I got from SO _worked_ the vast majority of the time, whereas various LLMs I have used generate unusable, misleading, or unreliable results pretty regularly, increasing as complexity or rarity arises. As human-driven knowledge bases backed by actual experience are replaced by inference from models who rely on such inputs, I am concerned about the medium to long term impact. A lot of people grew frustrated with SO for various reasons and went back to unhelpful behaviors that SO resolved at its zenith (rather than dead ends and flame wars in newslists and irc channels, they do it in random subreddits and discord servers instead). Now what if we circle back after degenerative LLM experiences only to find there’s nothing to circle back on?
I mean, we already know the answer to that: you should sell all the non-AI stocks that you own, and invest everything into AI companies. Because if you don't, a future benevolent AGI will torture your simulation for eternity. ~
But then you can just ask it to write that missing library! Some day in the future you can probably ask it to author the whole package and publish it itself.
"Oh sorry, that package doesn't exist yet, but it ought to. One moment... Ok, try installing it now."
I've run into this a few times and did just that. It hallucinates a js or python or micropython package, I get annoyed trying to find or use it because it lacks features I explicitly stated I needed, or it just doesn't exist, and then make it write the whole thing for me from scratch. I don't use ChatGPT anymore (the model they have on the free tier has become terrible in the past few months), but Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview free through AI Studio (ex-API) is generally up to the task here.
Most recently when this happened, I made it write an SF2 loader/parser/player and a MIDI parser/"relay" library compatible with it for javascript to use in a WebGL game. It's familiar enough with ABC notation that you can have it write a song and then write a converter from modified ABC notation to MIDI, too. It can generate coordinates for a xylophone model with individual keys in WebGL with no fuss and wire it up to the SF2 module to play notes based on which key was struck. We can do things like switch out instruments on tracks, or change percussion tracks, or whatever, based on user interactions without fuss.
It's not worth setting up a whole repo for and documenting, because when I make something with it, I inherently prove making it is trivial.
Are you implying he is running ChatGPT from his gaming machine?
State of the art models constantly generate bullshit, even if I find them generally useful. Your blind hype does nothing but make people more skeptical of it.
I think this is the first time I’ve ever heard someone describe the stack overflow community as “kind”. Usually it’s the exact opposite: “I asked a question and just got 30 questions asking why I’m trying to do this” or “my question was closed for seemingly no reason”.
It’s literally the most blunt and aggressive website I’ve ever been on that wasn’t a straight-up troll site like 4-Chan.
I answer questions for a few tags, know the styles of the other people who answer on those tags, and I do consider my fellow answerers as kind. All of them.
That doesn't mean that you will think we're kind to you personally. We're there to build a searchable Q&A knowledge base and spread knowledge. Some people who ask questions misunderstand and think we're there to help them, personally. To work for free for that single person, and we're not there for that. We write answers for the tens, hundreds, thousands of people who will search for it.
Askers who misunderstand will come across as overly entitled.
In terms of practical effects: People who misunderstand don't tag their questions, or tag them incorrectly. They post screenshots full of text. They don't look for similar older questions in the existing knowledge base, or they insist that even slightly different questions are significantly different. All rather offputting, and often puzzling. How can you ask for a subject expert's help and simultaneously insist that you know better than the expert whether your question is a duplicate of another?
Reading between the lines, this is extremely telling. Of course, nobody is a villain in their own story. Members of online communities who drive others away are often just simply blind to the impact they are having - an existential impact in the case of Stack Overflow sadly.
Bah. I volunteer to do x and if you try to read some duty to also volunteer for y between the lines, you can do y yourself. If you expect kindness to someone I don't care to help, go on, show that kindness by doing y yourself.
Nobody pays us answerers to do what we do. The key prerogative of a volunteer is that the volunteer alone chooses what to volunteer for.
When someone new comes to Stack Overflow, and tries to get something from it that it's explicitly not there to provide, and I politely say "hey here are some documents about what the site is and what we expect from questions, I'm sorry but we can't allow people to answer this without addressing these problems, because the purpose of questions here isn't actually to work with you one-on-one and get your code to work", and then that person swears at me and is never heard from again...
... No, I am not at all "blind" to the fact that I'm "driving" people like that away, or to the "impact" I'm having. I've read many of their off-site rants, too. It's a popular art form, even. So popular that sometimes people bring links to it back to the meta site. So popular that the company staff occasionally try to lecture us about it. After all, it's bad for the bottom line when people don't stick around and watch ads (and to hell with whatever else they do on the site).
But those documents objectively exist; the standards are established and thoroughly documented; the questions objectively are there to build a reference (this is even described right up front in https://stackoverflow.com/tour , although the wording is still lacking and we aren't empowered to fix it); as an objective matter we don't provide a help desk, debugging service or support forum; and swearing at me is a code of conduct violation.
I'm sorry you've been swore at, that's obviously not on.
I guess I would say: look at the big picture, Stack Overflow is almost dead. It's a bit like driving a car off a cliff because there's a post-it note on the wheel that describes that purpose of the car as to go inexorably in this one cardinal direction. At least the standards are established and thoroughly documented! The document objectively exists!
Also: I know several kind and smart people who have sworn off Stack Overflow forever, not because they misunderstand the purpose of the site, but because of the unkindness and nonsensical nature of the moderation. You are aware of the "popular art form" reporting these experiences - those with empathy pay attention to it.
> not because they misunderstand the purpose of the site, but because of the unkindness and nonsensical nature of the moderation.
I have read countless examples of this sort of thing, with people attesting to me that the people who wrote it do in fact understand the purpose of the site.
I have yet to see a single example where I was convinced they actually did.
They very frequently write in terms that imply complete ignorance of fundamentals (such as what a "moderator" is, and who has what privileges and responsibilities on the site).
> You are aware of the "popular art form" reporting these experiences - those with empathy pay attention to it.
I have paid attention. I have done close reading. I have been empathetic. I have spent many hours of my life on this.
> It's a bit like driving a car off a cliff because there's a post-it note on the wheel that describes that purpose of the car as to go inexorably in this one cardinal direction.
Your implication is that the purpose I describe for Stack Overflow is somehow invalid.
I disagree in the strongest possible terms, and find this implication actually offensive.
But even if it weren't valid, that doesn't entitle other people to come in and try to change it. It didn't entitle them in 2008, either, even though the vision wasn't fully fleshed out and communicated yet. (It probably started to become clear around 2012, but still not in a way that allowed curators to coordinate and describe clear policy.)
So you have paid attention and read countless examples of people's experiences with Stack Overflow, but have concluded that, in fact, they are all in the wrong?
Frankly, it just doesn't matter at this point. The time to have done something about it was several years ago, it's a lost cause at this point. Whether you reflect and recognise your part in that, and learn and grow from it, is up to you.
How can you ask for a subject expert's help and simultaneously insist that you know better than the expert whether your question is a duplicate of another?
this is easy part, I read the answer of that “duplicate” and it was not applicable to my problem :)
> I read the answer of that “duplicate” and it was not applicable to my problem
You are supposed to have a question in the first place, not just a problem. (In fact, you are not required to have had anything go wrong with your code, nor to need to know how to do something, in order to ask a question. You only need to ask a question that meets standards.)
If something was wrong with your code, and using Stack Overflow didn't enable you to fix the code, that is not Stack Overflow's concern, by design.
If you expect that your interaction with a website will enable you to fix broken code that you have, and the only standard by which you judge the website is "did I end up fixing my broken code", then Stack Overflow is not the site you want. And that's fine. There are millions of other websites out there that will also not help you fix your broken code. Why should Stack Overflow be required to do so? Just because it's about programming and accepts user-generated content? (Did you know about https://wiki.python.org/moin/ , by the way?)
If you analyzed some non-working code, and found a specific part that did something different from what you expected, and produced a MCVE (although we say https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example), then you have an acceptable question. Or if you figured out that you need to do something specific, and came up with a clear, precise specification for it, and there isn't a clear way to break the task down further into logical steps.
And when that question gets closed as a duplicate, you can bet that the accuracy rate is pretty high. You should try the answer, adapting it back to your own MCVE / specification, and then back to the original context.
The question is the problem, if I did not have a problem I wouldn’t be reaching out to a site named StackOverflow (one of the many problems I encountered over the years…). The problem is not just broken code, the problem is many different things like “how do I …?” or “I am trying to figure out how to …?” which is not about the broken code.
Stack Overflow has its own notion of what a question is. In short, a question has to be suitable as part of a searchable knowledge base.
If you want to post something that isn't SO's idea of a question, then you're really just posting off-topic. And if you then insist that people should help you with your off-topic posting, you're being overly presumptious.
I don’t disagree… However, that leads you to your eventual demise. They coasted for a long time being as toxic as they have been because there was virtually no alternatives. Now that we have alternatives it is no wonder the website is as dead as it gets. Make the bed, lie in it…
> The problem is not just broken code, the problem is many different things like “how do I …?” or “I am trying to figure out how to …?” which is not about the broken code.
> > Or if you figured out that you need to do something specific, and came up with a clear, precise specification for it, and there isn't a clear way to break the task down further into logical steps.
>And this is why stack overflow now has as many questions asked as it did in 2009
So now there is a manageable volume of new questions that allows for enough people to review them properly and apply question standards properly, instead of letting most things seep through and set bad examples for the next batch. And more time to sift through the existing questions to polish up the best.
Existing questions, by the way, that outnumber Wikipedia articles by more than 3:1. Even though they're only supposed to be specifically about programming rather than about literally anything notable.
> We're there to build a searchable Q&A knowledge base and spread knowledge. Some people who ask questions misunderstand and think we're there to help them, personally. To work for free for that single person, and we're not there for that. We write answers for the tens, hundreds, thousands of people who will search for it.
Why is any of this a "problem"? Why should we not create this knowledge base? Why should we help you, personally, for free? Why should we write answers for a single person who asks, instead of for arbitrarily many people who find it later?
It's almost comical. SO is increasingly useless for new questions precisely because so many top contributors left (because they don't agree with this approach), while the ones that remain have convinced themselves that not only this new state of affairs is fine, it's actually preferable, and what they are doing is somehow beneficial.
> while the ones that remain have convinced themselves that not only this new state of affairs is fine, it's actually preferable, and what they are doing is somehow beneficial.
None of you have done anything at all to explain why it somehow isn't, except perhaps to indicate that it isn't how you want the site to work. Or that the company is losing business. (As a reminder, the company has never paid any of us a red cent.)
Why is it "comical" for people you don't identify with to have a vision?
It's comical because it has been explained to you specifically dozens of times by several different people already right here in HN comments, but every time you do the equivalent of "la la la can't hear you" in response.
It's sad because most of us remember how much more useful SO used to be.
I know why one top contributor left (cancer) and I heard the same about another. I haven't heard what you say about any, except in sweeping statements like yours.
I can think of multiple users offhand with 500k+ rep that I think are more damaging to the site than any newcomer ever could be. (No, I will not name names.) And I previously showed you a link of someone with 60k+ rep (slightly more than me) who went 14 years without even trying to use the meta site for anything and demonstrated a complete failure to understand the basic standards for questions.
If I'm part of the problem, then that's because of something I do, or else something I don't do.
The thing I do is build a knowledge base. If that's it, can you explain why it's a problem? The thing I don't is something you also don't. If that's it, can you explain why you're not part of the problem?
If that's you're goal, you're going about it the wrong way. Thank you for introducing yourself and your fellow answerers. Let me introduce myself and my fellow questioners. I have a deadline and a problem. I've already spent 5 hours researching why what should work - according the the documentation and the conventional advice - doesn't. I've searched many sources, including SO. I've seen some articles which might have answered my problem. Tried the suggestions, but no joy. So now I'm six hour in, and my deadline is looming. It's probably around 1:00am. Between 1 and 2 I type up my problem and submit it to SO. I'm hopeful that perhaps in the morning someone who has successfully worked through my problem will have contributed a solution.
9:00am, I check SO. My reputation has decreased by 8 points, a number of self-styled enforcers have left negative comments comparing my issue to other issues which bear a superficial similarity to my posting, and my posting has been closed.
I'm not the most powerful contributor but over several years I've achieved upwards of 1,000 points. So I am by no means a nudnick. I've posted some good ones and I've helped some of my peers along the way. But recently, my experience has devolved to the point where the experience I describe above is the rule, rather than the exception. And when I tried to have the discussion we are having now, on the stack overflow meta site, your fellow enforcers shut down the discussion and deleted the posting. So I left. And now we can have the conversation here.
You can have all the justifications in the world for your approach, and you don't need to keep the audience you don't want. But if those of us voicing our displeasure here, are not simply a few malcontents, but a significant chunk of your former user base, you might want to look inward, and at the same time ask with a certain measure of humility - what are we doing wrong and how can we improve?
For starters, if you want a questioner to improve their posting or you have questions about why they posted, is it necessary to start off by immediately deducting from the poster's reputation? Ask your question, make your point, give the poster the opportunity to remediate or show you why you're the one who's off base (did you ever consider that possibility?) before decreasing someone's reputation.
Stop dehumanizing your knowledge base. Your resistance to AI is somewhat ironic, given all the effort you've devoted toward eliminating all courtesy and gratitude from your knowledge base. Do you want humans communicating on your platform? Let them. Perhaps after a question has been asked, answered, let the posting remain dormant for 30 days and then have some AI process go ahead and scrub the posting. Don't ding people for saying please and thank you and expect them to like you for it.
Just for starters. For now, I'm out of there. Change your game, maybe I'll be back one day.
If you come to Stack Overflow for this, you come to the wrong website.
If you expect Stack Overflow to help you with this, it is because you have failed to understand the purpose of Stack Overflow.
We do not provide technical support, a help desk, a debugging service, etc.
> I've already spent 5 hours researching why what should work - according the the documentation and the conventional advice - doesn't.
Instead of that: if you have code that doesn't work, you should debug the code and look for something specific that doesn't do what you expect it to. Then you should create a minimal, reproducible example of the issue - code that someone else can run directly, without adding or changing anything (i.e., hard-code any necessary input) to see the exact problem, right away (i.e., without interacting with the program any more than necessary; without waiting for other things to happen first unless they have to happen to reproduce the bug). And skip anything that comes after that.
The reason we expect this is because, pause for dramatic effect, answering your question is not about your deadline or the problem you are trying to solve. It's not about you.
It's about the site, and about having a question that everyone can find useful.
> And when I tried to have the discussion we are having now, on the stack overflow meta site, your fellow enforcers shut down the discussion and deleted the posting.
Feel free to share the link. I can see deleted posts there.
> but a significant chunk of your former user base, you might want to look inward, and at the same time ask with a certain measure of humility - what are we doing wrong and how can we improve?
We aren't doing anything wrong. The site is better off for the departure of people who have demonstrated a consistent refusal to use the site as intended. Because it is not about them.
> is it necessary to start off by immediately deducting from the poster's reputation?
It is necessary to mark the question as low quality, so that questions can be sorted by quality and people can prioritize their time, yes.
It is not about you.
> Stop dehumanizing your knowledge base.
A knowledge base inherently lacks humanity. When you look something up in the documentation, do you want the documentation to be written as if it were speaking to you directly? I think that's creepy. The documentation was written possibly years before I read it. It knows nothing about me. It didn't even know that I would use the software in the future.
> Do you want humans communicating on your platform?
No, in fact. It is not social media, either.
Perhaps you've noticed that the comments are not threaded, that you can't have another question post further down the page in between the answers, that all the answers are supposed address the question, and not the other answers. (And, crucially, they address the question, not the person who asked it.)
All of that is deliberate. 2008 wasn't that long ago. Many sites much older than Stack Overflow support all of those modes of interaction.
Stack Overflow does not. By design.
Not only that, but comments can be deleted at any time, because they are "no longer needed". They aren't supposed stick around unless they're explaining something that other people may need to see years later (and even then it may be better to edit into the answer).
By design.
> Don't ding people for saying please and thank you and expect them to like you for it.
You don't realistically get "dinged" for this. Whatever question of yours was downvoted to -4 (since your "reputation decreased by 8 points") certainly had other things wrong with it.
Sure, these things were edited out of your question; the post does not belong to you (in the terms of service, you license it to the community).
> Change your game, maybe I'll be back one day.
The site is what it is. Sites on the Internet are allowed to be what they want to be. You are not entitled to them changing to suit you.
There was a time when it was really good. Like legitimately good and useful. But over time it ended up becoming exactly what you describe. But there are still countless examples of the usefulness of SO in Google results. I stopped asking questions in 2012 and stopped answering questions in 2015. Before that though, it was a very useful tool.
I've closed like that. One asker complained that his question about base64 encoding in one language was not like the duplicate I identified because the language was another one. "Vaguely related", he thought, but he asked precisely because he didn't know.
Try answering some of the recently closed questions on SO, see how much time you're willing to spend on them. (As a practical matter: You can do it with the comment function, or search for questions that have two votes to close already.)
Any mode of answering is okay. If you find out that it's not deathly tiring, let us know how.
This seems to somehow work fine on discord, where people ask the dumbest of questions on project discords yet get prompt responses even if it's just a link to a faq or wiki. I don't know how this happens, maybe something about the chat format or SO not retaining responders as well as discords do, but you really can see this it on discord servers for projects.
"Having your problem addressed" is not a valid reason to post on Stack Overflow. You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself. When you are linked to a duplicate, it's because the person doing so believes in good faith that, to the extent that you have a question that meets the site's standards, answers to the other question will answer yours as well. This also means you are responsible for overlooking irrelevant details, reading the answers, making your own attempts to apply them, etc.
If the other question is actually different, you are expected to edit the question to make this clear - not by adding an "Edit:" section like in a forum post, but by fixing the wording such that it's directly clear what you're looking for and how it's different. This might mean fixing your specification of input or desired output.
But curators much more often get it right. Not only that, a few of us go out of our way to create artificial Q&A (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426205) for beginner issues that beginners never know how to explain, and put immense effort into both the question and answer. Some popular examples in the Python tag:
"Why does "a == x or y or z" always evaluate to True? How can I compare "a" to all of those?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20002503) was written largely as an alternative to the organic "How to test multiple variables for equality against a single value?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15112125) after the latter was found not to help beginners very well (the original example was quite unclear, although it's since been improved).
> "Having your problem addressed" is not a valid reason to post on Stack Overflow. You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself.
If I can solve the problem myself, why do you think I would ask a question?
It may sound a silly question, but what you are describing is the reason why I never actively interacted with SO (never asked, answered, nor upvoted). Either what I was looking for was already there, or I completely ignored the site.
Maybe it is the reason why it is dying. It's just not that useful after all.
>>You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself.
>If I can solve the problem myself, why do you think I would ask a question?
You are expected to be able to analyze the problem to the point where you have one specific question, get the answer, and solve the problem now that you have the answer.
That is: we will not do the analysis for you. We will fill in the gap in your knowledge. But you have to figure out where that gap is.
> Either what I was looking for was already there
The goal is to maximize the chance of this (and that you find what you're looking for promptly). When you don't find it, you can help by contributing the question part of what's missing. But, in turn, this is supposed to improve the chance that the next person can promptly find your question - and understand it, and be confident that you have the same question, and read the answer, and go on to solve a potentially very different problem.
> You are expected to be able to analyze the problem to the point where you have one specific question, get the answer, and solve the problem now that you have the answer.
> That is: we will not do the analysis for you. We will fill in the gap in your knowledge.
I see. That makes more sense, I misinterpreted your original reply.
That said, many times I did find the specific question I had, but the question was closed as duplicate (or whatever jargon you use), but the existing answered question was for whatever reason not exactly what I was looking for. Not really encouraging for me to interact with the site, and would probably just sink my time furter.
> The goal is to maximize the chance of this (and that you find what you're looking for promptly).
This used to be more common, many years ago. I can't orecise why, but it has been a while that I found the answer I was looking for on SO.
> When you don't find it, you can help by contributing the question part of what's missing. But, in turn, this is supposed to improve the chance that the next person can promptly find your question - and understand it, and be confident that you have the same question, and read the answer, and go on to solve a potentially very different problem.
I suppose I could. But asking a meaningful question takes effort, and I have no idea if the powers that be will share my idea that the question is meaningful, or if it will be marked as a duplicate to some similar issue. Not exactly encouraging to participation.
Not to dismiss you - but it's important to understand what the standard is for "duplication". This has changed over the years because the original (very narrow) interpretation turned out to be unviable - it doesn't scale. (And "it doesn't scale" is a big part of why Stack Overflow was created - where "it" is the traditional discussion forum model.)
>but it has been a while that I found the answer I was looking for on SO.
Because your search query is equally suited to find a bunch of garbage questions that should have been closed (and then deleted when they weren't improved) - often ones that are about something completely different, but click-bait because of the words in the title (often a result of OP completely misidentifying the problem and not producing a proper MRE).
>asking a meaningful question takes effort
It does. In fact, when I've written self-answered Q&A to share knowledge, I've often found the question harder than the answer.
The reputation system was very poorly conceived. It incentivizes terrible behaviours, while the best results will come from intrinsic motivation anyway. (Plus it carries the implicit assumption that answering questions demonstrates an understanding of site policy, when the opposite is often true: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357021 )
> my idea that the question is meaningful, or if it will be marked as a duplicate to some similar issue
Duplicates are not inherently bad. They help others find the original, and the duplicate count statistics help identify important questions and topics. Furthermore, it's 100% in keeping with policy to close something as a duplicate of a newer question (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/404535https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/258697 ). If you ask something well, and get a good answer, and then someone notices that it was asked before, your version is likely to stand instead. (And the target for a duplicate closure must have an accepted or upvoted answer.)
Your point makes totally sense and it also sounds like a robotic overlord from some SF dystopia: cold and following its own programmed rules to the painful detail. As the other commenter pointed out: you are definitely right and we see your point. But it's a also because of it that I stopped using SO years except for maybe causally searching. Let me draw an inaccurate parallel: security, if done perfectly, lets nobody achieve anything.
> "Having your problem addressed" is not a valid reason to post on Stack Overflow. You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself.
Your response to what was intended as a light-hearted joke tells me how passionate you are about the site. For what it's worth, thanks for all the time you've taken with a genuine interest in helping those in need.
Evaluating how much effort a user has put into their research before a post is really, really tricky, and difficult to quantify. I also know, first hand, the things that seem obvious with the experience I have aren't always the same way others (particularly beginners) see the same problem. For the (few) areas I feel remotely qualified to help in, there are hundreds of others that humble me. Getting a question effectively shut down as a duplicate (with seemingly little recourse) has been both frustrating and disheartening to the point I often just continued my journey elsewhere.
> Evaluating how much effort a user has put into their research before a post is really, really tricky, and difficult to quantify.
There's another common misconception here - one which I held myself for years, and one which the community expressed for years in poorly-conceived close reasons that eventually got fixed. Or you could say: over time, we realized that something didn't work right for the purpose.
As you say, you can't easily evaluate or quantify that research simply by looking at the question. But that's exactly why it doesn't actually matter: because it isn't seen in a properly written question.
The purpose of the research is not to earn the right to ask a question. The purpose, rather, is to optimize the question for the format. If the question meets standards, it meets standards; doing the research is a means to that end, and it's only "expected" because it's usually necessary.
So, for example, if your code doesn't work, you're expected to do your own debugging first, until you find the part that actually causes a problem that you don't know how to fix. And then you're expected to not talk about that debugging process, and not show irrelevant detail from your code. Instead, isolate non-working code as best you can manage into a MCVE, SSCCE or whatever else you like to call it (our documentation includes advice: https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example), and talk about the example, directly.
>Getting a question effectively shut down as a duplicate... has been both frustrating and disheartening
Why? Someone just directly pointed you at an already existing answer. You got helped even faster than if someone had to write that answer from scratch. Which is a big part of the point.
Yes, that does mean that you need to apply an explanation of the same problem from an abstracted context, to your specific need. But that was supposed to be part of the expectation anyway. Because we aren't interested in the problem that motivated you to ask - you are not required to have actually had a problem at all, in fact. We're interested in having a question whose answer can help everyone in a similar situation.
But we don't provide a discussion forum, help desk, or debugging service.
> (with seemingly little recourse)
As it happens, I once asked a question that was closed as a duplicate. Here's the advice I'm still shown if I go back and look, in the blue banner at the top:
> This question already has an answer here: (link to the other question)
> Your post has been associated with a similar question. If that question doesn’t answer your issue, edit your question to highlight the difference between the associated question and yours. If edited, your question will be reviewed and might be reopened.
Note that even the moderators don't get to control this form message - they can at most petition the company staff for a change. The "closed-questions" link tells me about the close reasons in a fair amount of detail, and eventually links to "What if I disagree with the closure of a question? How can I reopen it?" (https://stackoverflow.com/help/reopen-questions), which also mentions the option of taking the matter to the meta site.
If I were to edit the question, the form now has a checkbox to "Submit for review", with additional popup help including a link to https://stackoverflow.com/help/review-reopen . As described in the above documentation links, the question would be put in a review queue, giving it more attention for those who can cast reopen votes.
(The reveal: actually, I closed it myself, using my gold-badge privileges - either I eventually found what I couldn't before asking, or someone pointed it out to me in a chatroom or something. The title for the Q&A I wanted was reasonable, but very different from the title I came up with. So now it's easier to find.)
Even if you - and the stance SO takes/took - are correct, that doesn't erase the fact that the decorum is unpalatable to a vast majority of the user-base.
Being correct does not necessarily engender popularity or success. Often, humility, patience, and kindness are key.
I think the appeal of SO to its users (besides getting help for programming when you find someone willing) is that its also a source of narcissistic supply for the powerusers that can be maximized due to SO's gatekeeping policies.
It especially hurts to see words like "narcissistic" used to describe my friends who volunteer copious amounts of their time to try to be polite to hordes of others who clearly don't give a damn about what they're trying to accomplish and seem to assume that their usual way of interacting with web sites that have a submission form is the only way that exists.
My experience has overwhelmingly been that people object to being told that they can't just ask the question they want - not to the specific words used.
We don't allow anyone to use insults; we expect each other to be patient; we use our "please"s and "thank you"s in comments (even as we remove them from questions) - and if you see otherwise, please flag it; moderators take code of conduct violations seriously.
But none of this seems to make a difference. And people come to the site with expectations about politeness that simply aren't conducive to getting people to stop doing things they aren't supposed to do:
Meanwhile, a major reason why people aren't required to explain in a comment why they downvoted a question, is because of the history we've had with downright vitriolic replies from OPs who seem uninterested in the rules:
How ironic. For years you've been enforcing the dehumanization of human communications (e.g. basic gratitude and courtesy are taboo) and then you object when AI comes along and people prefer it to your dehumanizing platform.
> For years you've been enforcing the dehumanization of human communications (e.g. basic gratitude and courtesy are taboo)
This is so far from true that it's frankly insulting.
> and then you object when AI comes along and people prefer it to your dehumanizing platform.
I do not object in the slightest to people preferring to use an LLM. I have even explicitly suggested in threads like this that people who prefer to do so should continue to do so.
What I object to is the idea that other people should get to decide how Stack Overflow works, or should get to denigrate Stack Overflow on the basis of their idea of how it ought to work.
It's absolutely true. I've had my posts edited to remove phrases like "thanks for any advice which you can provide". I've had people leave comments and ding my reputation because I've expressed gratitude. Maybe you don't think eliminating gratitude from basic communications qualifies as "dehumanizing". OK, let's agree to disagree. (BTW - to the guy who called me a "troll". If you can't disagree with a fellow of your species, without branding them a troll, you've just made my point. Thank you.)
>I've had my posts edited to remove phrases like "thanks for any advice which you can provide"
Yes. Doing this makes your post better, because it means everyone who reads it later saves time. Your post is not there to talk to people. Your question is there to ask a question. Your answer is there to answer the question.
> Maybe you don't think eliminating gratitude from basic communications qualifies as "dehumanizing"
What you miss is that it is not communication between the person who asks and the person who answers. It is publication of a question and answer so that everyone can benefit.
When you see someone say "thanks for any advice which you can provide" directly to someone else, does that feel welcoming to you? It doesn't to me. It feels like suddenly I'm unintentionally eavesdropping on some conversation, and that I'm not supposed to be there. But I only came to learn (or teach) something.
> BTW - to the guy who called me a "troll". If you can't disagree with a fellow of your species, without branding them a troll, you've just made my point. Thank you
You appear to be making multiple throwaway accounts rather than risking your HN reputation. From the guidelines:
> Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
Stop assuming the worst. Someday you'll get on the wrong train before you check its destination. I happen to be signed in with two accounts on two different devices because I had forgotten my password and was having trouble with the recovery process. So ding me for it. It's what you do best.
If the entire internet is telling you you're hostile, aggressive and hard to work with it would pay to stop explaining why you're right and start looking inwards.
It's not my responsibility, as a Stack Overflow user, to make Stack Overflow a site that gets lots of users posting and viewing lots of content.
It is correct to be "hostile, aggressive and hard to work with" when you are inundated with requests from others to "work with" you on something that is radically different from what you are trying to accomplish.
I will not look inward because I am objectively doing nothing morally wrong here. It's fine if people think I'm "hostile" because I politely tell them what they aren't supposed to do while they think they should be entitled to do it anyway, because them doing it actively harms things I actually care about.
I disagree with the choice of "aggressive", though. This is a purely defensive posture.
Stack Overflow has a community which is trying to create something useful and is not trying to cause harm to anyone. As such, that community is entitled to have and pursue goals that aren't aligned with those of others, and should not be expected to change those goals simply because other people don't share them, or because they want to use Stack Overflow's time, space and other resources to do something different.
That community is a separate entity from the company (Stack Exchange, Inc.). The community owes nothing to the company, as it has been paid nothing, and is exploited to drive traffic and ad revenue while their content feeds AI.
You are a volunteer. You can stop volunteering. If the job is becoming corrosive to your mental health and you don't have the emotional energy to engage with the job in manner that involves empathy, then I think the healthier option for everyone is to stop volunteering and let someone new come in who still has the empathy to handle it.
The last time I used it I was asking a math question that was somewhat beyond me. I'd already spent hours researching it. Part of the problem was I knew I didn't know the right terminology but I could describe the problem in detail. I asked on SO, got one slightly snarky comment that answered the wrong problem. It did give me a clue to the right wording to look for though so in a way I got my answer. But the general attitude, and your attitude, is "why are you asking this question?"
SO didn't come about until I was already working as a programmer and I'm more used to using docs or reading source to find answers. I participated a lot on language specific mailing groups and IRC at one point and they were much friendlier. At least I treated no question as a stupid question.
Agree! A decade ago it wasn't like this. But it has devolved into a community of vandals who seem to take glee in criticizing the manner in which a question is asked, rather than contributing a solution.
Damaging a contributor's reputation because they didn't initially conform to your standard is vandalism. Why don't you make your suggestion for improvement and let the poster bring the post into compliance? If that's what you want, do you think that by damaging my reputation you are motivating me toward compliance with your standards? No, you're motivating me to stop contributing.
OK. I concede the point. Maybe it's not glee. Maybe it's just a misplaced conviction that punishment is the best way to motivate the behavior you are seeking.
> Damaging a contributor's reputation because they didn't initially conform to your standard is vandalism.
So, you tell me, vandalism is when you notice that someone's content doesn't meet standards, rate it accordingly using the system that was explicitly designed for that purpose, and it ends up incidentally (because of a system we don't get to change) "damaging the reputation" of its author... ?
By the way, the only thing those reputation points are good for is gatekeeping access to privileges that are supposed to be exercised by people who understand how the site is supposed to work, so that they can help keep the site working as intended.
So it's a little hard for me to get too bent out of shape about it. There are a ton of problems with the design (https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387356), but this is not one of them.
> Why don't you make your suggestion for improvement
I, personally, often do. But people are not required to, by policy, in part because they get cursed at when they try. Because most of these questions not conforming to standards come from people who don't give a damn about what the site is or what it's trying to accomplish, and feel entitled to a personalized answer about whatever it is.
But also because there is a relatively small, specific set of things that can be wrong with a question (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476/); when your question is closed, you are generally automatically told which applies (it comes from the system according to the close votes), and that's normally all the information you should need if you actually care about the site and have read the policy basics.
It's no wonder LLMs have taken off in this space. They provide that exact service, by design. Stack Overflow does not, by design.
> and let the poster bring the post into compliance?
Nobody has ever been prevented from doing this except for actual spammers and vandals. Even if your question is "deleted" you still have an interface to access it, edit it and nominate it for undeletion. When your question is merely closed, that is explicitly soliciting you to fix it.
> do you think that by damaging my reputation
Oh, the other thing is that your reputation starts at 1 and cannot go below 1. So this doesn't matter in the slightest for new users. (There are rate limits, intended to make you pay attention to the guidelines and read the explanations in the Help Center before trying to post again.)
> Maybe it's just a misplaced conviction that punishment is the best way to motivate the behavior you are seeking.
No, none of this is about punishment. Downvotes apply to the content, not to you.
My community is not special. It has the same right to decide and enforce its standards that everywhere else on the Internet does. The fact that you see a shiny button labelled "Ask a Question" and a text input box does not change what those standards are. You are the one coming to a new space on the Internet; therefore, you are the one responsible for understanding the basics of what is expected in that space.
I just gave you a tangible suggestion for how you might maintain your standards and, at the same time, preserve your audience. Your response is basically "shrug, that's the way the system works". Reminds me of Hal trying to talk to the onboard computer in 2001 Space Odyssey. "I can't do that, Hal. That's just the way I work, Hal."
>I just gave you a tangible suggestion for how you might maintain your standards
No, you did nothing of the sort. You asked why people don't do something, and I explained to you that they sometimes do, but aren't required to because, among other things, it attracts abuse from new users. There are more reasons I didn't elaborate upon, that are covered in the meta discussion I linked you.
Meta discussion from 2017 that we have rehashed repeatedly ever since.
Countless people before you have suggested all the exact same things. None of them ever bring any new argument (because there is a small set of coherent arguments that could possibly be made) and none ever show any evidence of having considered, or being aware of, the previous discussion.
Yep, believe it's a direct result of Atwood's iron-fisted no-bullshit policy. To some extent it is great... don't want it turning into Yahoo Answers, do we? I think folks forget about that part.
But, as you mention they just went too damn far with the medicine.
No, you can't fix this misspelling, isn't there something else (with more characters) that you can improve as well? WTF, for realz? :-/
>No, you can't fix this misspelling, isn't there something else (with more characters) that you can improve as well? WTF, for realz? :-/
I agree this complaint is legitimate. The problem is that the system expects unprivileged users to have their edits reviewed by three privileged users in a queue (so that people actually pay attention and vandalism doesn't just go unnoticed for months), so this is meant to limit the drain on that resource.
You may be interested in my answer to "Reviewer overboard! Or a request to improve the onboarding guidance for new reviewers in the suggested edits queue" on the meta site (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/420357/523612).
Mixed feelings on SO. It was helpful, but it was also a website you dread having to post on because it was filled with the most intolerable people of the internet who you just had to endure abuse from if you wanted help.
Now chatGPT gives you the same help without the abuse.
The next AI totally needs to be more snarky to make it feel more like we're dealing with actual "thinksperts", people that think they are experts even if their answers are demonstrably wrong.
"You are Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. You are very knowledgeable in the _____ language; in fact, you believe you are the foremost expert on it. You have taken time from your busy schedule to help the unwashed masses by answering the following question..."
>Oh, the pain... the sheer agony of having to explain basic React concepts to someone who likely thinks JSX is a new boy band. But fine. For the sake of humanity—or at least to preserve what little remains of good developer practices—I shall lower myself to answer your question.
Hooks and components in React are as different as a limited-edition issue of Radioactive Man and the garbage they stuff in the Sunday comics.
[...]
If you're writing React without understanding this distinction, please, for the love of all that is unholy in Springfield, step away from the keyboard and go read the official React docs. Twice. Maybe thrice.
But a priori you don't know if the code you find on Github is "good", plus it doesn't come with a handy explanation. The quality of the data is much, much worse.
Fair point, but large, popular and well maintained/healthy repos would likely be better to learn from than SO. Lots of stack overflow convos have moved to GitHub issues as well.
My point is that there won't even be any data to steal! The novel human-written and human-rated answers just won't exist anymore. Where will it get its answers on C++26 features from? Not the non-existing StackOverflow, that's for sure.
Ah in the training data sense, yeah that makes sense. My bet is that "code artisans" will see a revival in the 300k+ usd range that will drop into your codebase like a special forces team to unfuck the AI garbage all the prior "Seniors" implemented.
Why does any LLM need new information to do fundamentally the same thing?
And what makes the data outdated? New code? It can train on that. That, or there is simply nothing new to learn, just new ways to express the same thing.
> Why does any LLM need new information to do fundamentally the same thing?
What makes you think we will be doing fundamentally the same thing in the future? Language grow and change, systems change, operating systems change, hardware and specs change..
I've asked dozens of questions on SO, and never had a single one closed. I hear your sentiment often, but have no idea whether my experience or yours is more common.
I've had 3 deleted by Community bot as abandoned, but since they were over a year old when that happened, I couldn't care less.
I've got valuable advice from SO over the years. There's overlap with LLMs, sure, but it's frequent to have questions that have no answers published anywhere on the web; SO brings people who know out of the woodwork, who create an explanation that didn't exist before. A couple days ago, someone in retrocomputing got to bank-switch a 1983 Radio Shack box... that kind of stuff wasn't published anywhere, until a guy who used to write games for that box answered that question on SO.
These models can figure out syntax and language features they haven’t seen before. Try it with a few code snippets of your own made-up language. It’s a little freaky.
They can implicitly assume that your made-up language is designed to be easy to use by native language speakers, and thus apply their existing understanding of "code" to it, sure.
Yes, that’s part of it, but it can also correctly reason the language is designed to be hard to understand. If you try this exercise, it’ll list its reasoning for what it thinks each unfamiliar piece of syntax might be, and one of its approaches is to bring in analogues to other languages, including other esoterica attempts. If you give it something more inventive, it’ll reason its way to other academic fields to come up with solutions.
It’s a good check to make sure you haven’t accidentally made something too simple or similar to another language, too; that’ll be spotted immediately.
They can indeed, but 1) this takes up an inordinate amount of context, and 2) the more you force model to think about that, the less effective it is at actually writing code.
The point of an LLM is that it can take your problem as input, along with answers to previously asked questions (perhaps implicit) in its training data, and attempt to synthesize a solution to a problem as output. Here, a "question" is something that can be found with a search engine - something that directly presents the/a crux of an issue, which is identified after a debugging session (for a problem in existing code; for projects still in the design phase, a how-to question emerges after coming up with user stories and breaking tasks down into their logical steps). The point is that the question can be relevant to many different people who have written different code which encounters different problems - all caused fundamentally by the same conceptual misunderstanding (or non-understanding).
Stack Overflow is explicitly not designed or intended to solve problems or do the decomposition of the problem for you, nor the synthesis of answers. Because the result would never be useful to anyone else. The entire point is to have something searchable, and to allow answer-writers to keep their explanations DRY.
This has spectacularly failed, because no matter how frustrated people get with traditional discussion forums (https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/979:_Wisdom_of_th... among many other typical complaints), they apparently are much more suited to human nature.
Heaven knows how Wikipedia managed to avoid devolving into "Quora but even worse because you can scribble over someone else's post".
I just hope that we can continue to find sources of high quality training data like SO. If people don't publish their mutual learnings somewhere then there's no data to train on.
It was downvoted because the entire purported "threat" is based on a misconception.
It is not relevant to SO whether an LLM can provide personalized help, write with any particular tone, answer promptly, accept every input prompt as valid and try to make sense of it, discuss back and forth to figure out a problem, etc. Because Stack Exchange is explicitly and by design not for those things.
But also, downvotes work differently on meta anyway, and the community there generally takes a negative view of LLMs. Because, again, the point of SO is for the answer to come from a human expert, and be verified against subject matter expertise rather than simply being evaluated for coherence or generally sounding appropriate in context.
Early Christian teachings were deeply anti-wealth — but context matters. Back then, wealth mostly came from land grabs, tax farming, and debt slavery. The rich were rich because the poor were poor. Christianity started as a movement of the oppressed under empire, and its ethic of radical sharing was a way to survive a brutal, zero-sum system.
Fast-forward to today: most people aren’t living under that kind of direct economic violence. In fact, doing what early Christians did — selling everything and giving it away — would often create more suffering. Try paying for healthcare or your kid’s college without savings. In a modern context, investing, and wealth-building can be acts of love and protection — not greed. I don't think it'd make me a better man and father to just subject my entire family to poverty.
So maybe the point isn’t “money = evil,” but “systems that enrich some by grinding down others = evil.” The ethical challenge is still valid — just adapted for a world where your 401(k) isn’t funded by enslaving your neighbor.
It's not that we should interpret the Bible differently and make it say whatever we want; but that like any story, we need to look at the context within which it took place.
"Back then, wealth mostly came from land grabs, tax farming, and debt slavery. The rich were rich because the poor were poor."
With all due respect my friend. That is 100% how it still works right now. That is how it has always worked. The reason you think otherwise is because you are not poor.
If it's always been this way, can you explain why most people today live in far greater conditions than 2000 years ago, or even 100 years ago?
Or the dramatically declining global extreme poverty rate during that same period? If being rich always meant you took it from the poor, then you'd never have any improvement for anyone that does not result in worsening for someone else, mathematically.
It seems to me economic growth is the proof that money is not a zero-sum game, and that one can create value, that creates jobs, opportunities and a betterment in life across the board. A tide that lifts all boats.
You can validate that by looking at world economies. The countries with no innovation/entrepreneurship aren't better off for having less people building wealth: everybody is just poorer. In contrast, more capitalist wealth-oriented economies tend to create more opportunities.
Most of the greater conditions that people experience today have been the result of markedly pro-social discoveries and forces in medicine, agriculture etc. Likewise the rights and comforts we have are largely driven by
a) colonization that makes those of us in the West more comfy
b) violent labor movements and revolutions in the 20th cnetury, that means we get stuff like free healthcare, education and the like in more civilized places of the world.
There are no such countries with no innovation/enterpreneurship, its just countries with more material capabilities to enable these, and countries with less, and a big reason for this discrepancy is point a above.
None of this has much to do with economic growth, economic growth is an artificial construct on top of the material reality, used to justify a specific way of viewing the economy and the way things are structured.
> Try paying for healthcare or your kid’s college without savings. In a modern context, investing, and wealth-building can be acts of love and protection — not greed.
Only because the present (American) system is set up as such.
Exactly. But we're talking about the present, aren't we?
And with all its flaws, the present isn't all that bad. Capitalism has been a powerful instrument for economic growth and financial liberation. Declining global poverty rates, more opportunities, etc.
China’s economy has been responsible for approximately 75% of the global poverty reduction since the late 1970s [1]. It seems like we should credit socialism not capitalism with the reduction in poverty.
Today we enjoy countless benefits due to workers’ movements of the past. These benefits were fought every step of the way by the business class. It’s highly ironic to attribute all this to capitalism.
Are you going to back those wild claims with some facts, links or how-to's? I would very much like to go study a second degree, a Master's, or a PhD but I fear I can't take several years off work to just study (who'll pay for living expenses?).
Come to Europe.
PhD candidates are not treated as students.
They are treated as adults, and get the salary of an (entry-level) engineer with a master degree.
You get paid a living wage to do a PhD in most countries actually.
If this is about (your) kids?
Send them to Europe for higher education. Many universities with great international ranking have virtually no tuition. But they can be quite competitive in terms of getting a passing grade.
Thanks for the encouragement and sorry for my late reply!
Indeed. Chemical Engineer that has always loved programming + InfoSec to include it in some way, shape, or form on what I do...
I took a chance during Covid and was fortunate to land DevSecOps-y roles. Not a 10x engineer by any means, but I have been working my way through Knuth's TAoCP and slowly learning to love lower level.
Living now in the Netherlands, but didn't know that there were such types of benefits to studying a PhD.
I'll definitely need to have a good think (and budgetary assessments as well) ... having to pay rent in the Netherlands due to the (probably artificial) housing crisis feels like a seriously limiting factor to afford studying.
Of course not.
But you might get paid only a 50% salary for a PhD in the natural sciences (or liberal arts).
Different fields have different cultures in that regard.
> selling everything and giving it away — would often create more suffering
This is turning our eye to our own choices of wealth rather than looking to the wealthiest in our society and asking ourselves if such hoarding of wealth is just, while we are surrounded by things like homeless encampments. Surely such hoarding is “grinding others down.”
Blaming foreigners for housing prices is misdirected. The real culprit is slow bureaucracy & zoning laws making it impossibly slow to get a permit to build anything in both Spain and Portugal. Both of these countries for example have so many abandoned houses needing to be renovated, and so many foreigners coming in with money to do it - but they can never do it because you can't get a permit in literally forever... I don't know about Spain, but another problem in PT is the building companies too, are unreliable, and typically don't deliver houses in less than 3-5 years if you decide to build new. Increase the supply, and the prices will go down.
> every foreigner buying a house still results in 1 less house for Spaniards
In a very limited scope, sure. What that foreign capital also does is lower risk and thus capital costs for development and improvement. (In the event of a limited crisis, for lenders as well.) Whether the net effect goes one way or another is more complicated than what you describe.
Put another way, if foreigners could only buy unbuilt units, would you still say they're resulting in fewer houses for Spaniards? Do the countries shunned by foreign investors have affordable housing?
> Put another way, if foreigners could only buy unbuilt units, would you still say they're resulting in fewer houses for Spaniards? Do the countries shunned by foreign investors have affordable housing?
Exactly, and to further drive the point home the real estate investments driven by foreign investment are targeting entirely different markets, such as luxury homes and tourism, whereas the complains about lack of access to housing come from those who already struggle to buy the cheapest units in working class suburbs, where the foreign investments are clearly not being made.
So the question you should be asking is how come you're not seeing investments in affordable housing across the country at a time where you see foreign investment in luxury and tourist areas. Then you'd realize that you're discussing two entirely different things that bear no relationship.
Often, very often, foreign investment is directly correlated with tourism-gentrification, aka driving out the poor working class people from some location, because it looks "authentic" and is centrally located, into ugly looking places at the outskirts of the city.
But this can happen whether people from outside buy it or not. As long as there is demand for tourism, and some countries are richer than others, this will happen.
What is this contrarian sophistry? In Europe foreigners often buy the most expensive historical real estate they can lay their hands on.
If they do build something, it is office buildings for investment that take up space and often remain empty (Chinese are good at that). These investments still take up space and drive up real estate prices.
Where's the source for your assertion? You're making a claim that foreign investment is beneficial with no source, but then requiring one when someone disagrees with you?
A theoretical argument was countered with an assertion - it's plausible that investment -> lower risk, but there is no reasoning to get "foreign investment is focused on X area".
I mean, I can see a reason provided. Isn't that the whole point of foreign direct investing? That's more than an assertion - that's why I call it a theoretical argument. There's no need to debate semantics.
For a lot of foreign investment, the point is to hide money. A lot of investment provides negative value. Hidden money in residential real estate inflates the market and in most of these cases they also leave the units vacant, reducing housing stock. In some cases it isn't to hide money, but instead for speculation, and usually in those cases they also leave the units vacant, because occupied units can reduce value, and in those cases it's also reduced stock and inflated markets.
I'm not saying it has zero effect. I'm saying it's a misdirected effort that would cause them more harm than good. Spain isn't exactly in the fittest economic position. It needs to attract foreigners to cultivate its growth - hence their Beckham law and other benefits for foreigners. You can deter people from coming and see the country stagnate/go down, or you can actually match the demand and foreign dynamism, and use that as an opportunity for the whole place to grow and modernize.
This is a quick "fix" that has a lot of unintended consequences. I've seen it first hand and the only people it benefits are those who are already wealthy. Everyone else gets a lot poorer as their cost of living skyrockets. Homelessness explodes as rents and housing costs increase dramatically, people who were living a humble but decent life before are pushed into poverty, crime both non-violent and violent increases and so does drug use. As far as I can tell the only people that actually benefit from this scheme are landlords and housing developers who slow walk their projects so that they can charge the maximum price per unit. Compared to the previous fairly stable state (which you call stagnation) the locals are much worse off. It also tends to ruin the character of places that were previously seen as a vacation destination for a unique experience, all of that just gets paved over and turned into a bland tourist trap barely different from any other place. Count yourself lucky if you live somewhere that has been passed over by this horrid money making scheme.
Money invested from abroad is money coming inside the economy - whether the person lives there or not. That money goes to the seller, who'll then get taxed on it, spend it somewhere else... Or that money could be used, as I said, to build new buildings and rehabilitate old ones, thus creating jobs in the process. If the system was well set up for it, foreigners investing in a country is usually a good thing. The US is super foreign-investment friendly for example, doesn't hurt them.
Besides, if foreigners are investing solely to speculate - if they did fix the supply constraints, the opportunity for speculation would greatly decrease. It's only an attractive investment because the supply is so finite.
Alternatively, I got my current house because of KYC laws.
The house bidding was originally won by someone abroad. They overbid the house by a lot. However, because of the KYC laws, that person needed to proof their income is legitimate, which they couldn’t. Therefore, we got the house.
Building new houses costs 10 years in my country. So building new houses is not fast enough to create new affordable houses.
To be fair, you're referring to one of the largest and fastest-growing economies in Canada [1]. (It also has a massive affordability crisis despite a ban on non-student foreigners buying expensive real estate.)
Half the people in Vancouver are thinking about leaving and 25% want to leave within the next 5 years. People are leaving in droves largely because of costs. That seems to make the parents point - that the ecnomic benefits from immigration accrue to the few and the wealthy while making life harder for average people
I can sympathize with it because I live in Toronto and am also thinking about leaving. Do I hate immigrants, no there aren't actually that many immigrants in the city core where I live. But certaintly there is an affordability crsis that has gripped the city and the country and wages seemed to be supressed and there seems to be less job opportunities (likely due to all that extra labour coming in)
The benefit is that more people can afford to buy houses? Really surprising to see a country taking care of their people, and not just the wealthy ones!
All the hypotheses claiming that "the market pressure will improve things for all" have been proven false at this point. We have decades of data, and this is only widening the inequality gap.
> The benefit is that more people can afford to buy houses?
Can they? I mean, what is your plan to lower current housing prices? Cut off demand from foreigners with purchasing power and instead replace it with demand from people who cannot afford a home? They are not even the same housing market, are they?
I don't see why this is better than people renting and investing their savings elsewhere, which is how it works with apartments anyway. So you own a house, it makes basically no return, now what?
Living in a house doesn't consume it along with the land, hence the investment appeal. You can rent a house if you just want to live in it. I would totally rent a cabinet if that were a thing, but it's not because the value goes to 0 quickly.
where exactly does a house make no return, especially in say last decade/15 years? I bought three houses in the last 20 years, one doubled, one up 70% and one 40% (still occupying it)
I'm saying that if they find a way to keep houses affordable to buy, they can't be viable investments. The US makes for a decent home investment market. You usually see a house price double every ~10 years once it's in a desirable area.
Btw, was your 40% increased house purchased 20 years ago? If so, that's effectively a loss, and I'm not even sure about the one that doubled. 5-10 years would be different.
Exactly, it's like complaining that gold is unfairly expensive. Those lucky Boomers got to purchase it at $40/oz in 1970 ($350/oz in 2025 money), now it's $2600/oz. I should be allowed to buy gold for $350/oz so I can profit like they did.
give me some places where it is not and we’ll look at zillow or whatever public data there is for a given region. unless we are talking like rural-no-is-around-for-miles perhaps but otherwise properties over the last 10-15 years have appreciated
That comparison make sense in a world where the well being of a nation's citizens wasn't the priority of a nation.
However we live in a world where that isn't the case so a nation deciding to restrict immigration or economic activity by foreigners for the benefit of the domestic population is an acceptable position to take -- provided it actually have that desired outcome.
> Seems like an argument for internal visas like China's household registration system to prevent excessive migration to the cities
With the big difference being the Chinese citizen being denied Beijing hukou is still a Chinese citizen. Madrid should properly first concern itself with Spaniards' wellbeing. (This isn't an argument for or against this policy. Just clarifying why restricting non-EU home purchases is different from hukou.)
This is a very accurate take, to consider Canada a country when their own prime minister refers to it as a post nation state (ie. Internal economic zone) and nothing more says it all. I would suggest the reason for the high suicide rates seen in the west is connected to this transition.
> What other motivation do they have for selling out their own family and people then?
Not wanting to be the next Venezuela, for one. Reflexive protectionism is emotionally satisfying. It rarely delivers the promised relief.
I could absolutely see such a tax e.g. taking out a small Spanish bank or two, or, at best, knocking out develoopers' financing such that new-home construction contracts. More likely: it becomes the only thing this government can work on as Spain gets mired in years of EU litigation.
> It is trendy to participate in the destruction of your own descendants' homelands and future
To the extent anyone is trend following, it's the populists making these sort of black-and-white claims. Again, you're the only one arguing against this imagined anti-racist commenter. Policy written to annoy an imagined foe is going to be predictably bad.
> every foreigner buying a house still results in 1 less house for Spaniards
Absolutely not. For example my impression is that foreign demand has been great for the construction industry, both small and large, both in Spain and Portugal. Paying lots of people directly and still more indirectly. The presence of all these buildings that needed renovation (or demolition) shows that the population previously could not afford to use them. Dumping money in the economy causes some inflation, yes, but it also pays many people and allows still more to enter the field.
I have various thoughts. The rough one is that investors driving up the cost of housing increases the countries labor costs. Which harms it's competitiveness. Reduces workers standard of living. Which also causes headaches for political leaders.
Foreign investors rub salt in the wound by moving their gains outside the country. And the real risk that they will flee when there is any sort of downturn making it worse.
My opinion giving those guys the middle finger isn't unreasonable.
But the foreign investors are doing it because the housing market has an artificial supply shortage. They are buying into a cornered market.
Of course, full deregulation is not a fix as seen with the condos built in ridiculous locations back in the sub-prime mania.
It would be good to have a reasonable plan. Sadly the plans for making livable neighborhoods was hijacked by the "15 minute city" WEF-style politicians. The Netherlands had some very interesting projects that went pretty well.
> Even if the bureaucracy is the worst offender, every foreigner buying a house still results in 1 less house for Spaniards.
Just to be pedantic, it's not about foreigners buying property, it is about non-resident buying properties.
A foreigner that actually resides in Spain would not be taxed, if I understand correctly.
I don't think that limiting property ownership to residents is a bad thing. I do think, however, that it will not have that much impact in the properties the average people actually need and want.
Every foreigner buying a house is supplying capital for one additional house to be built, and some portion of those additional houses will be unoccupied by the foreigner most of the year and available on the rental market for locals.
Even if it's just short term rentals, that means more affordable vacations and temporary housing for the domestic population.
And your claim that it doesn't survive first contact with reality is based on you correlating high volumes of foreign investment with lack of housing affordability and assuming that the former is causing the latter, when the correlation is really due to a confounding factor.
While a unit sold does immediately reduce the supply by 1 unit, new demand and foreign funds can also stimulate more building and, especially important, can prevent areas falling into disrepair and becoming ghost towns. It really depends on the specific area and situation. My 2c.
If you have extra supply of houses needing renovation, as in the comment, and renovations require labor and/or materials to complete, having foreigners pay to renovate houses to be livable will decrease the ability of Spaniards to renovate houses to be livable.
For example, let's assume renovations are 100% completed by local crews. Any crew working for a foreigner is working for them because A) the foreigner is paying more than a local for the work B) the foreigner is paying enough to make a profit and the local isn't (which is a subset of A). There is no situation in which adding foreign money results in more houses for locals. If you eliminate the ability for foreigners to renovate, the renovation crews will take the money that the locals can pay. There will be fewer renovation crews, because some crew will not be profitable at the lower rate, but more crews working to renovate houses for Spaniards.
Similarly, for materials, given supply and demand curves (and assuming that the marginal units added won't cause economies of scale) eliminating the ability for foreigners to buy materials for renovations will move the curve intersection down to a lower price and volume.
> There is no situation in which adding foreign money results in more houses for locals
Assuming fixed supply, yes, it's (probably) a zero-sum game.
> eliminating the ability for foreigners to buy materials for renovations will move the curve intersection down to a lower price and volume
Assuming a frictionless market and no economies of scale, yes. In reality, you'll have a smaller set of options for locals at a slightly (but not dramatically) lower price. (Again, for an example look at all the markets foreign investors shun.)
> will be fewer renovation crews, because some crew will not be profitable at the lower rate, but more crews working to renovate houses for Spaniards
You absolutely cannot conclude this from first principles.
You make valid points. They just need to be followed up with data. The systems you're talking about are too sensitive to generalise like this.
So would you say it's fair game to blame "migrants" for crimes? After all, you can't steal something if you're not in a country, so letting someone into a country strictly increases the crime rate. Even if migrants commit crimes at a lower rate than the local population, unless it's exactly zero, it'll still increase the crime rate.
edit: downvoters, I'm not actually endorsing blaming migrants. It's only used as an example.
>But that assumes you do not count the person who commit the crime as part of the population count.
Sorry, meant to say "crime count", or more precisely, "native victimization count". Natavists by definition prioritize the native population over immigrants, so if some native got victimized by a migrant, I doubt a natavist would be convinced by "well actually, even though there was one extra crime committed by a migrant, there's also 10,000 (or whatever) more people, so the crime rate actually went down!"
>Even if the bureaucracy is the worst offender, every foreigner buying a house still results in 1 less house for Spaniards.
It's pretty clear that supply and demand isn't a consideration here, and the commenter is strictly focusing on the aspect that one house is being removed from the housing supply.
I donno if it entirely wrong to blame foreigners. If you have a bunch of silicon valley digital nomads flying to Spain and buing and selling houses to each other I can see how that could easily leave locals out of the housing market. That seems like something that government should control against if locals can't affording housing.
I imagine that if a bunch of rich people decided to treat Spanish homes like stocks (holding and flipping) it would be pretty easy to get high prices and bubbles. Doesn't it follow from suppy and demand?
>Increase the supply, and the prices will go down.
what's wrong with tackling both demand and supply. Why shouldn't spain do both - build more homes to tackle supply while also curbing foreign home ownership to tackle infalted demand
> Both of these countries for example have so many abandoned houses needing to be renovated, and so many foreigners coming in with money to do it - but they can never do it because you can't get a permit in literally forever...
Are these hypothetical houses located in the places these hypothetical foreigners want to live or invest? Because getting a small apartment in Barcelona is a small feat, and Soria is not exactly an alternative.
You gotta pick your battles. Part of being in a startup is to be comfortable with quick and dirty when necessary.
It’s when things get bigger, too corporate and slow that companies stop moving fast.
As a non-FAANGer Netflix has always intrigued me because of this. While Google, Facebook and others seem to have bogged themselves down in administrative mess, Netflix still seems agile. From the outside at least.
(also worth noting this post seems to be discussing an event that occurred many years ago, circa 2011, so might not be a reflection of where they are today)
Netflix is a much smaller enterprise. It got included because it was high growth at the time, not because it was destined to become a trillion dollar company.
Netflix isn’t trying to be a search engine, hardware manufacturer, consumer cloud provider (email, OneDrive, etc), cloud infrastructure provider, and an ad company at the same time. Or an Online Walmart who does all the rest and more.
The thing is you also can’t reduce psychedelics to science because they open an innately subjective (often called “mystical”) experience.
What is reproached to some of the parties here is to have a spiritual ideology, but that’s precisely what working with these medicines opens up. The healing that takes place is not so much physical, as it is psycho-spiritual, it’s the change in perception of the world - often in the direction of spiritual beliefs, that contributes to the betterment of the person’s mental health condition.
So you can’t isolate the two easily. It’s just tricky, and still this article raises important points.
For some people, psychedelic use leads to mystical/spiritual/religious thinking.
But that's not the main way in which they are able to treat mental health problems, specifically not in the majority (I suspect all) actual scientific research on this subject, but also just for people using them outside medical trials.
The key thing, it seems, is that psychedelics temporarily (while you're under the influence) increase the connectivity between different neurons in the brain, and between different areas of the brain. That can help in two ways, the first of which is that some new connections can become not temporary, and keep existing for the foreseeable future. The other is that, while under the influence, those additional neuron connections allow the person to think in different ways than they normally do, to see ideas or problems from a different angle/perspective. And this difference is what allows the therapy administered at the same time as the psychedelic drug (or the self-therapy version of using a drug and then thinking about the subjects that are causing you distress in life) to potentially have a better chance of making a stronger change to how the person thinks about certain things than if the same therapy were provided without psychedelics enabling greater levels of rewiring of the brain.
> The key thing, it seems, is that psychedelics temporarily (while you're under the influence) increase the connectivity between different neurons in the brain, and between different areas of the brain.
Couldn’t it be that this is what’s being experienced as mystical?
When people talk about psychedelic experiences being 'mystical' (or spiritual etc.) they're normally talking about the feelings, experience, and sometimes visions of the trip itself. Strong trips really can make you feel like you've communicated with God, or with mother nature, or make you feel like all people are connected on a spiritual plane, or... whatever. They're not talking about the science of how it affects your brain.
And all the studies (that I'm aware of, at least) using psychedelics and therapy to treat mental health conditions don't use doses high enough for the kind of trips they can create those experiences - the goal is to have a strong enough effect that the brain and its thought patterns are more malleable than usual, but not so strong that the patient focussed on the trip rather than on the talking therapy.
It's definitely possible a patient could walk away from a session so impressed with its effectiveness that they describe it as magical, or even mystical meaning that it worked and they can't understand how it worked, but that's not at all what psychedelic users normally mean when using those terms.
edit: Actually, it's worth mentioning that there are other non-Western cultures using psychedelics to treat mental health issues, such as Ayahuasca ceremonies in various South American countries. I don't really know enough about these to talk about them in any detail, but I do know it's common for the people to take strong enough doses of Ayahuasca to have full, intense trips, and while I think there usually is a leader of the group who probably does some sort of conversations to help people with their trips, it's not like Western countries' talking therapy, and I suspect it's likely that some, maybe m many, people who find benefit from that sort of psychedelic experience are indeed getting it from what they experienced, thought, and felt, while tripping.
>edit: Actually, it's worth mentioning that there are other non-Western cultures using psychedelics to treat mental health issues, such as Ayahuasca ceremonies in various South American countries.
South America is non-western culture now? Lmao ok. Also, practically nobody uses Ayahuasca to treat mental health issues over here. That kinda thing is an extremely niche and small practice of usually affluent people. Ayahuasca retreats are super expensive and half of the people you see there are rich Americans looking for some anecdata to share in sites like this. Everyone else is using standard medicine and therapy.
You're right I worded that badly, but as I acknowledged in my previous comment it's an area I know little about and only mentioned it as a known example that's not the same as the rest of what I explained.
I do however believe there are various cultures that do use ayahuasca unrelated to the sort of expensive retreats Americans might travel to.
And you're right that Western / non-Western was a poor way of explaining what I meant, but I'm not sure if there's a widely accepted good phrasing for what I meant which was really "countries or communities within countries whose cultures, including in healthcare, are more significantly unlike the cultures in Western Europe & North America than the cultural differences between countries & states within NA+EU".
In hindsight I probably should have just said "I believe there are completely different styles of psychedelic use for mental health such as with Ayahuasca but I don't know enough to say more about that"!
> And all the studies (that I'm aware of, at least) using psychedelics and therapy to treat mental health conditions don't use doses high enough for the kind of trips they can create those experiences - the goal is to have a strong enough effect that the brain and its thought patterns are more malleable than usual, but not so strong that the patient focussed on the trip rather than on the talking therapy.
I think you’re misinformed on this. Most modern psychedelic research is not focused on actively participating in therapy during the psychedelic experience itself. Typical doses used in trials are actually very large — verging on a “heroic dose” in some cases. E.g. see: https://bigthink.com/series/the-big-think-interview/psychede...
“My therapeutic research with psychedelics is primarily used 'psilocybin,' which is the agent in magic mushrooms. The dose we now give to patients is anywhere from 30 milligrams to 40 milligrams, which Terence McKenna, who's the famous psychedelic bard would refer to repeatedly as the "heroic dose."
Thanks for the new info, I hadn't heard of the study you linked.
I'm sceptical of your claim that "MOST (emphasis mine) modern psychedelic research is not focused on actively participating in therapy during the psychedelic experience"
I don't have time to look into what the split between the two approaches is now days, but it's an interesting enough question that I'll definitely find some time to get my knowledge caught up in the near future. Almost certainly not fast enough for this HN thread to still be alive by the time I have, but I'll reply to you if/when I'm able to either agree that you were right or explain why wrong, in case you're interested and in case you notice when someone replies to an older comment or yours (which can be achieved with the handy HN Replies, built by a longtime HN reader, which I personally think is a great tool filling a gap that HN should have had as a default feature - https://www.hnreplies.com/ )
A quick scan of the literature appears to confirm this trend, also showing the increased effectiveness of a large dose, however there certainly are studies using a lower dose as you described.
I'm French. It's important to understand that France has been very bitter about missing the tech train with its failed "Minitel." And since, instead of making necessary changes to become more business-friendly and technologically relevant, they've just remained bitter and try to tax/punish US giants any way they can.
Thus, instead of becoming the type of places where the next Google or OpenAI could be incorporated, they're promoting the brand of a country that loves playing the Robinhood for its corporate friends in the newspaper business. I get the logic of the fine, and it's also sad to see them be proud of fining these foreign companies, instead of actually doing anything to change the fact that the country is becoming increasingly irrelevant in the modern technological age.
punishing tech giants for breaking the laws can be done regardless of creating a better less bureaucratic tech environment in france. Why you are trying to correlate both? Tbh I think the fine for google for this case is too small.
I doubt they'll be able to survive in the long term to be honest.
They'll either be forced to cooperate with the slow IT movers megacorps like Orange or Capgemini or buried in the legal framework by the copyright mafias. (Or a mix of both)
I'd love to be proven wrong of course but I know too much how it works there to be optimistic.
Misleading title - from what I gather, the raw DNA data wasn't hacked. It's the interpretation (racial percentages and family links) that were obtained.
Indeed, and while it is the original title, the original title itself is highly misleading. The actual figure is 14K and supposedly all of them reused passwords on other, compromised, services.
Then the media ran away with the 6M figure because the shared profiles of anyone in the Family DNA thing were also available to those 14K users.
I'd love to pretend that HN can see right through that, but if you read any of the threads about it they fell for it hook-line-and-sinker. You wouldn't even know from those threads that 23AndMe wasn't even itself compromised nor DNA for "6M" people weren't stolen.
Yep. Don’t get me wrong, I think 23andme deserves the heat. Mostly for allowing so many relatives from being visible on their page. If 14K accounts were compromised and 6M relatives were downloaded, that’s 428 per account.
I can’t imagine anyone would benefit from finding relatives beyond sharing a great-great-great grandparent. It seems to be a mistake to allow for hundreds if not thousands of matches to be displayed.
Cause although the DNA data wasn’t hacked. You could quite accurately infer what a relative’s raw DNA could look like if you had the raw DNA of the compromised account AND the percentage of shared DNA.
