https://interviewcop.com - let me know what you think. The idea is that we have so many cheating apps that it hurts both businesses and legit software engineers like myself. I'm trying to solve this problem and make interviews great again. I'm looking for sales cofounder and funding. I have a demo that works like a charm, and I'm very close to rolling this out.
Many users left because they had had overly strict moderation for posting your questions. I have 6k reputation, multiple gold badges and I will remember StackOverflow as a hostile place to ask a questions, honestly. There were multiple occasions when they actually prevented me from asking, and it was hard to understand what exactly went wrong. To my understanding, I asked totally legit questions, but their asking policy is so strict, it's super hard to follow.
So "I'm not happy he's dead, but I'm happy he's gone" [x]
I have around 2k points, not something to brag about, but probably more than most stackoverflow users. And I know what I am talking about given over a decade of experience in various tech stacks.
But it requires 3,000 points to be able to cast a vote to reopen a question, many of which incorrectly marked as duplicate.
I was an early adopter. Have over 30k reputation because stack overflow and my internship started at the same time. I left because of the toxic culture, and that it's less useful the more advanced you get
Please feel free to cite examples. I'll be happy to explain why I think they're duplicates, assuming I do (in my experience, well over 90% of the time I see this complaint, it's quite clear to me that the question is in fact a duplicate).
But more importantly, use the meta site if you think something has been done poorly. It's there for a reason.
If I had kept a list of such questions I would have posted it (which would be a very long one). But no, I don't have that list.
> use the meta site if you think something has been done poorly.
Respectfully, no. It is meaningless. If you just look at comments in this thread (and 20 other previous HN posts on this topic) you should know how dysfunctional stackoverflow management and moderation is. This (question being incorrectly closed) is a common complaint, and the situation has not changed for a very long time. Nobody should waste their time and expect anything to be different.
> This (question being incorrectly closed) is a common complaint, and the situation has not changed for a very long time.
The problem is that people come and say "this question is incorrectly closed", but the question is correctly closed.
Yes, the complaints are common, here and in many other places. That doesn't make them correct. I have been involved in this process for years and what I see is a constant stream of people expecting the site to be something completely different from what it is (and designed and intended to be). People will ask, with a straight face, "why was my question that says 'What is the best...' in the title, closed as 'opinion-based'?" (it's bad enough that I ended up attempting my own explainer on the meta site). Or "how is my question a duplicate when actually I asked two questions in one and only one of them is a duplicate?" (n.b. the question is required to be focused in the first place, such that it doesn't clearly break down into two separate issues like that)
> Yes, the complaints are common, here and in many other places.
If almost every developer-centric forum is constantly complaining about you have enough of a broad sampling of a userbase that there's something rotten underneath is it not? Another ref: See the Reddit thread, also rejoicing at StackOverflow's demise. There's definitely something that they did wrong, and to call it "incorrect" IMO is reductive especially when you have almost every developer practically breaking out champagne at the news.
Communities don’t lose goodwill at that scale by accident.
And full disclosure, I am one of those. I hate StackOverflow with a passion. The holier-than-thou attitude of the moderation playing a major role for sure (and the design that screams QA when they want to be a knowledge-base instead)
> I have been involved in this process for years
Maybe your proximity to the system has made the moderation decisions feel natural when you know the underlying rationale, you can argue that the site is "working as designed", but if the design no longer serves the community it depends on, correctness becomes beside the point, and that's not to say half of what decisions the overzealous moderators make are even correct.
> Or "how is my question a duplicate when actually I asked two questions in one and only one of them is a duplicate?" (n.b. the question is required to be focused in the first place, such that it doesn't clearly break down into two separate issues like that)
Or how about a valid question being closed as a duplicate for a completely different unrelated question? These styles of questions are not uncommon to see: "How do I get red apples?" Closed as a duplicate of "Here's how you make applesauce."
It's also was a bit frustrating for me to answer. There was time when I wanted to contribute, but questions that I could answer were very primitive and there were so many people eager to post their answer that it demotivated me and I quickly stopped doing that. Honestly there are too many users and most of them know enough to answer these questions. So participating as "answerer" wasn't fun for me.
Once StackOverflow profiles, brief as they were, became a metric they ceased to be worth a helluva lot. Back in the early 2010s I used to include a link to my profile. I had a low 5-figure score and I had more than one interviewer impressed with my questions and answers on the site. Then came point farmers.
I remember one infamous user who would farm points by running your questions against some grammar / formatting script. He would make sure to clean up an errant comma or a lingering space character at the end of your post to get credit for editing your question, thereby “contributing.”
To their early credit, I once ran for and nearly won a moderator slot. They sent a nice swag package to thank me for my contributions to the community.
I spent a lot of time answering rather primitive questions, but since it was on a narrow topic (Logstash, part of the ELK stack), there wasn't many other people eager to post answers. Though it often ended up with the same type of issues, not necessarily duplicates, but similar enough that I got bored with it.
25k here, stopped posting cause you'd spend 10m on a reply to a question just to have the question closed on you by some mod trying to make everything neat.
Maybe it was a culture clash but I came from newsgroups where the issue was is that someone needed help. However SO had the idea that the person who needed help wasn't as important as the normalisation of the dataset.
I sometimes wonder how much time I could have saved for those whose questions got closed before I could answer them. But yeah, that and the swearing culture clash were issues I struggled with, and ultimately meant I stopped contributing.
> Maybe it was a culture clash but I came from newsgroups where the issue was is that someone needed help. However SO had the idea that the person who needed help wasn't as important as the normalisation of the dataset.
Yes, because doing things that way was explicitly part of the goal, from the beginning. There are countless other places where you can directly respond to people who need help (and if you like doing that, you should stick to those places). Doing things that way has negative consequences in terms of making something that's useful for on-lookers, and causing a lot of experts to burn out or get frustrated. This is stuff that Jeff Atwood was pointing out when explaining the reason for creating SO in the first place.
> I sometimes wonder how much time I could have saved for those whose questions got closed before I could answer them.
SO had an opportunity to branch out into a thriving community of people helping each other, I can't state with any authority if that would have been a better end goal as they had a nice exit, but maybe if it did then it could have better maintained its energy in the wake of AI.
You say I should have stuck to newsgroups but SO sucked all the energy out of those spaces. I have 25k rep on the site so its not like I wasn't activately engaged and helped a lot of people on there, I just wish it had been more than what it was.
Not sure why you are always posting the same regurgitated answer to the legitimate concerns here.
There is clearly a big issue with the way SO handles moderation, which many people complain about and why these SO threads always get so much attention.
Also its now very clear that the current status quo isnt working since the site is in a death spiral now.
If the “goal” doesnt work, you have to change and fix the “goal” and not force people to “understand” it.
Frankly you are posting here in the same way the usual SO mod acts.
I was also once a contributor, but I have the same opinions about the harsh rules and points system.
> Not sure why you are always posting the same regurgitated answer to the legitimate concerns here.
I have more reach here than blogging about it, unfortunately.
But, ironically, it also helps illustrate the point about duplicate questions.
> If the “goal” doesnt work, you have to change and fix the “goal” and not force people to “understand” it.
No, that's literally the opposite of how communities work. There is no "force"; there are only conditions on having your contributions welcomed. Having your question closed on Stack Overflow is no more "force" than having your PR rejected on GitHub. You aren't the one who gets to decide whether the goal is "working", because the site is not there to provide you a service of asking questions, any more than Wikipedia is there to provide you a service of sharing opinions on real-world phenomena.
There's no reason that the Stack Overflow community should give, or ever have given, a damn about "the site being in a death spiral". Because that is an assessment based on popularity. Popular != good; more importantly, valuing popularity is about valuing the ability of the site to make money for its owners, but none of the people curating it see a dime of that. They (myself included) are really only intrinsically motivated to create the thing.
The thing is demonstrably useful. Just not in the mode of interaction that people wanted from it.
The meta site constantly gets people conspiracy theorizing about this. Often they end up asserting things about the reputation system that are the exact opposite of how it actually works. For example, you can gain a maximum of 1000 reputation, ever, from editing posts, and it only applies to people whose edits require approval. The unilateral edits are being done by someone who sees zero incentive beyond the edited text appearing for others. They're done because of a sincere belief that a world where third parties see the edited text is better than a world where third parties see the original text.
> Frankly you are posting here in the same way the usual SO mod acts.
You're talking about people who, in almost every case, as an objective matter of fact, are not moderators. The overwhelming majority of "moderation actions" of every stripe are done by the community, except for the few that actually require a moderator (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/432658).
Funny story: in 2025 I interviewed with multiple Ruby/Rails companies in San Francisco. I performed really well in the interviews. For one company, I went through a full on-site interview at their office. And still — no offer. The interview went great.
I have ~20 years of experience. I wrote a book about Ruby. I have GitHub repositories with thousands of stars. I have my own successful projects written in Ruby/Rails. I’ve spoken at conferences and contributed a lot to the Ruby/Rails community. I was a perfect match — and I still wasn’t hired.
This wasn’t a one-off. The same thing happened with several Ruby/Rails startups.
You know what I did next? I switched to Gen/Applied AI. And the difference was huge. The feedback became much better, and salaries were 25–50% higher. The tech itself wasn’t that different — mostly dynamic languages. I had to learn new things, but it took months, not years.
I also pushed myself deeper toward understanding AI properly. I genuinely enjoy this space. I started learning the fundamentals and even built my own learning materials (for example, howllmworks.com). You don’t need to go that deep to get hired, but I wanted to. The field is fascinating.
What’s funny is that many companies hiring “AI engineers” don’t really know what they’re doing. I’ve had interviews where they openly said: “We don’t really have AI expertise, but we know we need AI.” That’s how things are right now. It’s both good and bad. They can’t really judge your skills properly — but that also means your chances of passing are higher.
As for the Ruby/Rails world — I’m honestly very disappointed. The market feels completely saturated. There are too many experienced engineers competing for too few roles. Being good is no longer enough.
One company literally told me my interview performance was too good. They suspected I was using AI. That was the feedback. Twenty years of experience, open-source work, a published book — none of that mattered. “You’re too good, and there are too many candidates like you.” That’s how I understood it.
I’ve seen this happen repeatedly. It’s not just one bad experience.
At this point, I genuinely believe the Ruby/Rails ecosystem is shrinking. The whole “one-person framework” idea that DHH has been promoting made sense years ago, but not anymore. The problems it was solving simply don’t exist in the same way today.
With LLMs, the world changed. You take the best tools available. Next.js with standardized React components instead of Stimulus and Turbo. Hosted auth instead of rolling your own. When I needed to integrate something like Clerk, I just dropped in a component and moved on. There are tons of ready-made solutions in the React ecosystem.
Now compare that to Ruby. Are there modern AI libraries? Yes, technically. Are they well-maintained? Not really. You’re often dealing with abandonware. LangChain officially supports Python and TypeScript — not Ruby. And like it or not, AI today is happening in Python.
The more time you spend clinging to Ruby/Rails, the further behind you get. That’s just reality. My advice is simple: if you can, move on. The opportunity window in AI is wide open right now, but it won’t stay that way forever. 2026 is probably the last really good entry point.
> What’s funny is that many companies hiring “AI engineers” don’t really know what they’re doing. I’ve had interviews where they openly said: “We don’t really have AI expertise, but we know we need AI.” That’s how things are right now. It’s both good and bad. They can’t really judge your skills properly — but that also means your chances of passing are higher.
A lot of money is being thrown around at AI, it's a good time to open a company :) I agree.
> As for the Ruby/Rails world — I’m honestly very disappointed. The market feels completely saturated. There are too many experienced engineers competing for too few roles. Being good is no longer enough.
Ruby/Rails, and other platforms NEED deep AI integration. That wave is coming.
I am surprised that people don't do a rails new for their new startups. I still see it as the king of web frameworks.
> With LLMs, the world changed. You take the best tools available. Next.js with standardized React components instead of Stimulus and Turbo. Hosted auth instead of rolling your own. When I needed to integrate something like Clerk, I just dropped in a component and moved on. There are tons of ready-made solutions in the React ecosystem.
Show me those ready made solutions? I haven't used them commercially so I can't vouch for them
> Now compare that to Ruby. Are there modern AI libraries? Yes, technically. Are they well-maintained? Not really. You’re often dealing with abandonware. LangChain officially supports Python and TypeScript — not Ruby. And like it or not, AI today is happening in Python.
True, I should probably ship something in Python and just add that to my inventory.
> The more time you spend clinging to Ruby/Rails, the further behind you get. That’s just reality. My advice is simple: if you can, move on. The opportunity window in AI is wide open right now, but it won’t stay that way forever. 2026 is probably the last really good entry point.
> I am surprised that people don't do a rails new for their new startups.
Technology never matters, but marketing does. Traditionally you had to use 'esoteric' technologies to attract top talent, which has long been held as an important factor in startup success. Rails had that moment in the sun, but that was decades ago.
Granted, it remains to be seen if the talent differential still matters in the AI era, but hiring norms haven't caught up either way.
The next step should be to send enthusiasts there, get samples of this mushroom from that market, and introduce it to the underground for personal research. That’s normally what happens when something interesting is discovered.
For example, members of a famous forum recently found, analyzed for alkaloid content, and re-cultivated a strain of Phalaris Aquatica because of its notable alkaloid content. Some other mushrooms became popular this way as well — for example, Psilocybe Natalensis, first found in Natal, Africa. Or the now famous Tamarind Tree British Virgin Islands (TTBVI) Panaeolus Cyanescens that’s widely cultivated at home.
So IMO it's not only scientists, but often enthusiasts who end up gifting these discoveries to everyone else!
The natalensis story is even stranger: the underground was growing what they thought was natalensis for many years, until someone finally did the sequencing and found out that what everyone had grown and loved was actually new to science. At this point last year, their "natalensis" received its proper scientific name, ochraceocentrata. The underground then had to go out and fetch some actual natalensis, which is only just now being introduced to those circles (eg by Yoshi Amano). I haven't yet tried true natalensis, but ochras are definitely distinguishable from the usual cubensis, experentially, and I'd heartily recommend them to anyone that likes that kind of thing.
The issue is lanmaoa asiatica is ectomycorrhizal, meaning it grows exclusively on the roots of certain plant species in a symbiotic relationship. This is not like TTBVI or p. ochraceocentrata (misclassified as p. natalensis until recently) where amateurs can produce grain spawn with relative ease. Cultivation would involve planting or having access to the correct host species (Yunnan pine) which is a prohibitive barrier for most.
It's also not yet known if the active compound can survive dehydration like psilocybin. If not, it would mean even experiencing l. asiatica will be very difficult to impossible for enthusiasts not residing in its native region.
You might be getting a good _recall_ rate, since vectorize search is ANN, but the _precision_ can be low, because reranker piece is missing. So I would slightly improve it by adding 10 more lines of code and introducing reranker after the search (slightly increasing topK). Query expansion in the beginning can be also added to improve recall.
I'm happy to see v4.0, but 2025 was the year I switched from Ruby to Python after gradually drifting back to it more and more. The tipping point was when I had Claude Code automatically convert one of my Ruby projects to 100% Python - and after that, I just had no Ruby left.
I spent over a decade enjoying Ruby and even wrote a book about it. At this point, though, Python has won for me: fastapi, pytorch, langchain, streamlit, and so on and on.
It's a bit sad, but I'll always remember the Christmas gifts, and the syntax that is always so much better than Python.
> fastapi, pytorch, langchain, streamlit, and so on and on
It's telling that your reasons for switching are all features of Python's ecosystem, not of the language itself. A lot of developers are moving to Python because of its libraries, and in many cases they don't care for the language at all.
That's causing a problem for Python: many of these developers who'd rather be using different languages seem to want to morph Python into their language of choice. The result is that the Python language is pulled in many different directions, and with each release gets increasingly bloated and strays further from its foundations.
Ruby, on the other hand, has a community that's mostly made up of people who actually like the language. That allows it to do a much better job of staying true to its core philosophy.
> It's telling that your reasons for switching are all features of Python's ecosystem, not of the language itself.
Right, because ecosystem beats syntax any day of the week. Plus many of us also think the Python language is nicer anyway. For me I can't get past Ruby's free wheeling approach to import scoping and tolerance for magic.
Sure ecosystem beats syntax. Ecosystem also beats semantics, but less so. Python has an amazing ecosystem and a pretty nice syntax. Pity about the semantics...
That core philosophy is a focus on aesthetics which means that API design in Ruby is much more driven by developer taste than practical considerations (for better or worse)
None of what you say about Python is true. It’s not even plausible. The Python language hasn’t even had any significant syntax changes for four versions now; versions 3.11-3.14 are basically all internals optimizations.
Both are true. Different camps meant that any significant change to the language was scrutinised loudly. If my memory doesn't fail me, the last significant changes from the time Guido was still in charge, and he mostly abandoned the BDFL because of backlash. Since then python has been on a constant "analysis paralysis" state, with only efforts about performance pushing through (no one complains about a faster horse).
> If my memory doesn't fail me, the last significant changes from the time Guido was still in charge, and he mostly abandoned the BDFL because of backlash
I think Guido left the BDFL role in 2018, and we’ve gotten walrus operators, structured matching, and exception groups since then (just off the top of my head). There’s also been significant language/grammar accommodations towards type annotations.
Overall, I’m of the opinion that Python’s language evolution has struck a pretty nice balance — there’s always going to be something new, but I don’t feel like the syntax has stagnated.
The other poster said “The result is that the Python language is pulled in many different directions, and with each release gets increasingly bloated and strays further from its foundations.” Which is directly contradictory to your (more correct) notion that language changes have slowed and only changes with low or no additions of complexity are worked on.
The falsehood is the phrase "with each release gets increasingly bloated and strays further from its foundations."
It hasn't had any such language-changing release for at least six years. The implication that this is an ongoing process attributable to newer adopters is simply false. It is a process that has stopped, and when it was happening, it was attributable to longtime Python developers.
This year I also switched from Ruby to Kotlin on my hobby/light commercial backends. I just can't stand the way Ruby is not statically typed, and the resulting insecurity around if everything is actually doing what it should do. Kotlin gives me joy, and performance is actually better (trading memory requirements ofcourse, but that's not a big problem anymore). I still love Ruby, but only use it for simple scripts now.
This has sort of been my issue with Elixir. I've been doing Scala for years but I think Phoenix is really the best web story at the moment for how I want to be building web apps. And while I believe that the benefits of static typing somewhat decrease in the web arena, it's still frustrating to have to manage type relationships in my head.
I'm hopeful that the incoming type system work makes me happier there, though I'd also prefer a nicer editor experience than is currently available.
> I believe that the benefits of static typing somewhat decrease in the web arena
I’ve seen this sentiment expressed numerous times and have never found it to be true in my own work (e-comm), do you mind mentioning _what_ type of domain your web apps are in?
Edit: or if not domain, what do you mean by “web arena”
I find that if most of my logic is relatively gluey, then the fields in my API boundaries are heavily optional, at which point types add a lot less than they do when most of my logic is more internal, and in cases where what I'm doing is just getting some JSON and doing something with it, I'd rather just have the dynamic shape of the JSON in a lot of cases than have to declare an entire schema/codec.
We have so much boilerplate and tooling to share request/response types between services and it's just... heavy. The same feeling arises when I'm sitting here trying to share a shape between a web app and the backend service, where FINALLY I just want the types to get out of my way instead of having to go through all this ceremony.
And my domain is relatively precise and typeable - streaming video with a deterministic set of parameters.
Generally though I'm more likely to agree with the value of types than to undersell them; I just can't find a ways to describe the above experiences such that they reflect that perspective.
I think it's not that I don't want types, it's that I want simple types that play slightly more dynamically - maps of <string, heterogeneous values>, for example, and reasonable means of interacting with them (like various "safe traversal" operators that some languages have added).
what advantage/disadvantages does Scala/jvm have over Elixir/otp/beam?
i am learning Elixir and liking the concepts.
i am coming from kotlin/jvm and i like kotlin, apart from kotlin-coroutines.
planning to migration all threading code to virtual threads. but biggest problem is threadlocal.
I think they're pretty different, but there are some places where you can compare them:
1. Hiring and job market - the JVM is simply more employable
2. Ecosystem - in general you can expect the JVM to have library support for most things you're going to need.
3. Typing - if you like static types, you're probably going to miss that in Elixir/Erlang. They're working on a gradual type system for Elixir that looks quite pragmatic, so I'm excited to see how that works out.
The Elixir side of things has some real advantages, though. Runtimes like the JVM are slowly adding threading paradigms that start to look like how the beam works, if you squint enough. Naturally, Elixir already has that, and already has technologies that work very well with it. Virtual threads on the JVM are a smart effort that will take a long time to be complete and will always have to take backwards-compatibility into account, especially if you're in Java itself.
Phoenix is also IMO a best-in-class web framework. I don't think it's universally applicable, but if any JVM language had something like Phoenix I doubt I'd be considering Elixir nearly as strongly (due to my affection for types). So while the JVM ecosystem is broader, it's not uniformly stronger.
I also think that "domain" is much broader for JVM stuff. The web technologies there feel pretty baroque rather than empowering, but you can still do web on the JVM, and Kotlin or Scala in particular IMO serve better for systems where the bulk of the code is internal business logic. I think that even if I adopted Elixir entirely, I'd probably retain some "second language" for deeper systems.
How do you know it? Today you have to re-assess what you've learnt in the past. If you think JVM is "simply more employable" and haven't tested the waters in last 1-2 years, chances are you're just wrong.
The feeling I have: more simpler the tech is (and JVM/Ruby/other CRUD), the highest salary cuts you're getting. And you're actually less employable.
It is that counter-intuitive, because it's one person with a coding agent vs a team in the past.
This is patronizing. I'm a professional and am constantly hiring and being hired. The JVM has far more jobs and engineers willing to do those jobs, _and_ in terms of your own employment, a better salary market, and this is not only self-evident, but reinforced by even a cursory investigation into the trends. In fact, your claim is so outrageous (that I'm wrong and that somehow Elixir has more to offer on either side of the hiring bar) that I think the onus is on you to somehow prove it.
Langchain? I tried using/learning langchain then I found out that it was evolving so fast that even the latest ai models didn't have even remotely up to date information on it! Not to mention the hundreds of Google search results for ---- why do langchain docs suck?
I finally switched to haystack and I have been really happy. (Don't work on corporate ai software this is just for personal use)
Used Ruby for a decade, knew about it for more than that. I still sometimes use ruby syntax to communicate ideas with friends and colleagues.
For me, the killer feature of Python was the typing module and the intellij pycharm community edition being free and RubyMine having a subscription fee.
Nothing beats a MacBook Air if you’re not chasing raw performance.
I ended up with two machines:
- MacBook Air (16GB)
- MINISFORUM UM870 with 48GB RAM
The Air is unbeatable for portability and battery life. The MinisForum is still “portable enough” and gives me real horsepower when I need it.
I flew SF -> NY -> SF with the MinisForum and a portable monitor as carry-on. Everything fit in a Trader Joe’s tote bag. I even presented a conference talk using that setup.
For ~$2k total, you can buy:
- a MacBook Air
- a small PC + one or two portable monitors
- and still have money left
IMO the era of $2-3–4k “do-everything” laptops is over. I don't see how and why they're competitive.
