Stack Overflow is the best programmers’ resource to hit the Internet in quite some time. Online help forums for programmers are nothing new, but this one works better than anything else I’ve seen. I’m continually impressed by the variety and quality of the content there.

I’m also amazed by some of the questions. For example, this was posted today:

I work on my graduation thesis connected with image compression and I’m looking for algorithms, which use some mathematical methods (i.e. Discrete Cosine Transform) to achieve maximum compression ratio in minimum time and with minimal losses of quality.

Thank you in advance.

I find it difficult to believe that somebody who’s about to graduate from college doesn’t even know where to start researching his final project. As one commenter put it, “You really should be embarrassed that you’re asking for help googling for your graduation thesis.” His instructor should be embarrassed, too. In fact, the college should be embarrassed that they’re about to graduate a complete moron.

It really is amazing how many Stack Overflow questions can be answered by just typing the question into Google. For example, somebody asked today about using TBB for non-parallel tasks. The question had something to do with parallel processing, so out of curiosity I did a Google search for “TBB,” the first result of which was a link to Intel’s Thread Building Blocks library. Less than two minutes later, I had the answer. I guarantee that it took the person who asked longer to post the question than it took for me to find the answer, and I didn’t even know what TBB was!

Another one. Somebody asked how to force Windows to reboot into safe mode. I’d never needed to do that, so I didn’t know how. But a quick Google search turned up this duplicate question, which contains the answer to the question.

I’m unable to find any data that says what percentage of questions on Stack Overflow are closed as duplicates. It looks to me to be in the single digits, meaning that it probably isn’t a huge problem. Plus, duplication isn’t necessarily bad. As Jeff Atwood points out in Dr. Strangedupe: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love Duplication, some duplication is okay. Search isn’t perfect, and it’s quite possible to ask semantically identical questions that are syntactically very different. But in many cases, including the two that I pointed out above, a quick Google search revealed the answer much more quickly than I would have obtained it by posting a question and waiting for somebody knowledgeable in that topic to respond.