Top all-time · #27
Stack Overflow Blog
Company blog · stackoverflow.blogprogrammingcareer
Stack Overflow Blog is the company blog at stackoverflow.blog, writing about programming and career. Since 2016, 783 different Hacker News readers have linked it 1,443 times, most often “The Incredible Growth of Python”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 2 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link the Stack Overflow blog for company announcements and internal data: how developers copy code, the tech stack, ad policy, salaries and moderation history.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Essays, opinions, and advice on the act of computer programming, from Stack Overflow.
Most-linked posts?
- The Incredible Growth of Python16 people · 16 mentions · first linked 2017-09-06
- Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim14 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2017-05-23
- Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs12 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2017-06-15
- Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change11 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2018-04-26
- Generative AI Is Not Going to Build Your Engineering Team for You11 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2024-06-10
- My Most Embarrassing Mistakes as a Programmer (So Far)9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2019-10-29
- We still believe in private offices (2015)8 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2017-08-10
- /2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/7 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2017-11-03
- Open source has a funding problem7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2021-01-08
- Insights into Stack Overflow’s Traffic7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2023-08-08
What Hacker News says?
This looks awesome! And I'd really like to try it out. 2 security thoughts that I couldn't find answers to: 1. how does the input fed into OpenAI codex filter out malicious code pollution? or even benign but incorrect code pollution (relevant research on stackoverflow for example - https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/11/26/copying-code-from-stac... ) 2. In an enterprise setting, what does the feedback loop look like? Ho…
Comment linking /2019/11/26/copying-code-from-stack-overflow-you-might-be-spreading-security-vulnerabilities/
on “GitHub Copilot”Submitted How Dwarf Fortress is built as a story · 1130 points
HN discussionRecent discussion about their tech stack: https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/03/30/roberta-arcoverde-stac... Summary: simple as possible, maintainable, no micro-service hell - just a bunch of boxes serving with the cache and highly optimized SQL queries. Know your storage engine. This is yet another example that not getting bogged down in cargo cults, micro-services, and instead solving problems you have will result in…
Comment linking /2021/03/30/roberta-arcoverde-stack-overflow-teams-building-tests-best-practices/
on “Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B”Submitted Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs as a story · 881 points
HN discussionHere's the article de-paywalled: https://archive.is/IYMAm I'm guessing it's the whole shebang. They renamed Stack Exchange to Stack Overflow back in 2015: https://stackoverflow.blog/2015/09/15/were-changing-our-name... Stack Exchange appears now to just be a brand for the whole network of Q&A sites, but stackoverflow.com is the golden goose.
Comment linking /2015/09/15/were-changing-our-name-back-to-stack-overflow/
on “Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B”Submitted What programming languages are used most on weekends? as a story · 782 points
HN discussionThis is the official announcement from Stack Overflow: https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/06/02/prosuss-acquires-stack... As you may have seen in the news this morning, Prosus (PROSY) has announced its intention to acquire Stack Overflow for 1.8 billion dollars. This is tremendously exciting news for our employees, our customers, our community members, and for our shareholders, and I will share a bit more about what it…
Comment linking /2021/06/02/prosuss-acquires-stack-overflow
on “Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B”Submitted Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim as a story · 775 points
HN discussionThis have come now https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/06/02/prosuss-acquires-stack...
Comment linking /2021/06/02/prosuss-acquires-stack-overflow/
on “Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B”Submitted Why is Kubernetes getting so popular? as a story · 755 points
HN discussionProsus’s Acquisition of Stack Overflow: Our Exciting Next Chapter: https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/06/02/prosuss-acquires-stack...
Comment linking /2021/06/02/prosuss-acquires-stack-overflow/
on “Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B”Submitted Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information as a story · 657 points
HN discussion> correct me if wrong Stack Overflow is built on ASP.NET: https://stackoverflow.blog/2008/09/21/what-was-stack-overflo...
Comment linking /2008/09/21/what-was-stack-overflow-built-with/
on “Serverless: slower and more expensive”Submitted How We Make Money at Stack Overflow as a story · 578 points
HN discussionThe USPTO and Stack Exchange teamed up a while ago to crowd-source prior art for patents: https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/09/20/askpatents-com-a-stack... https://patents.stackexchange.com/?tags=prior-art-request It seems like that hasn't really got off the ground. Perhaps Cloudflare etc could do their prior art appeals through Ask Patents? It would help build its profile and userbase, which would help the process of…
Comment linking /2012/09/20/askpatents-com-a-stack-exchange-to-prevent-bad-patents/
on “We Stood Up to a Patent Troll and Won”Submitted Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change as a story · 558 points
HN discussionUS tax codes prevent hiring software devs. No one is going to hire US software devs ever again. (Good voting guys!). https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/12/19/the-tax-change-that-s-...
Comment linking /2023/12/19/the-tax-change-that-s-hurting-startups-and-developers/
on “Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week”Submitted How to talk about yourself in a developer interview as a story · 441 points
HN discussionCassandra was just an example, but most databases can be scaled either vertically or horizontally via sharding. You are right if misconfigured performance can be hindered, but this is also true for a database which is being scaled vertically. Generally speaking you will get better performance if you have a large dataset by growing horizontally then you would by growing vertically. https://stackoverflow.blog/2022/03/…
Comment linking /2022/03/14/how-sharding-a-database-can-make-it-faster/
on “Use one big server”Submitted What programming languages are used late at night? as a story · 424 points
HN discussionRails' extensive use of monkey patching to implement features is currently out of favor, from what I understand. Also, by merging Merb in Rails 3, Rails got a fresh lease of life. This is similar to how Struts lived on by rebranding WebWork as itself. Finally, Ruby shows up prominently as a language developers dislike: https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/10/31/disliked-programming-l...
Comment linking /2017/10/31/disliked-programming-languages/
on “Goodbye Microservices: From 100s of problem children to 1 superstar”Submitted Sequencing your DNA with a USB dongle and open source code as a story · 398 points
HN discussionThere's an old(ish) episode of the Stack Overflow podcast where they interview a couple folks from the site reliability engineering team. I think this is the one: https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/06/12/podcast-111-sre-occasi... Somewhere in there, one of the SREs said something that's stuck with me. Roughly, he said that the concept of human error is useless. Every time a human error escalates into a real problem, th…
Comment linking /2017/06/12/podcast-111-sre-occasionally-maintaining-infrastructure-hate/
on “Judge: Citibank isn't entitled to $500M it sent to various creditors last August”Submitted I followed my dreams to get demoted to software developer as a story · 354 points
HN discussionThey use multiple servers for redundancy, but they are using only 5-10% capacity per [1], so they say they could run on a single server given these numbers. Seems like they've since moved to the cloud though [2]. [1] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/stack-overflow-st... [2] https://stackoverflow.blog/2025/08/28/moving-the-public-stac...
Comment linking /2025/08/28/moving-the-public-stack-overflow-sites-to-the-cloud-part-1/
on “Migrating from AWS to Hetzner”Submitted Requirements volatility is the core problem of software engineering as a story · 346 points
HN discussionThe two biggest rants on HN are 1) Why doesn't this site work without JavaScript? It's inaccessible. and 2) Why doesn't this app work offline? It invades my privacy. Maybe I'm wrong, but as far as I can tell, you can't have both. Sorry folks. You are right, JS is not needed if the site truly is static content. But if you try to make an interactive app that could be implemented client-side (AKA javascript) and attach…
Comment linking /2021/01/25/a-deeper-dive-into-our-may-2019-security-incident/
on “The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML”Submitted Prashanth Chandrasekar Replacing Joel Spolsky as Stack Overflow CEO as a story · 333 points
HN discussionAnd, if we’re being honest, makes Perl an even better fit. https://stackoverflow.blog/2022/07/06/why-perl-is-still-rele... https://stackoverflow.blog/2022/09/08/this-is-not-your-grand...
Comment linking /2022/09/08/this-is-not-your-grandfathers-perl/
on “Shell script best practices, from a decade of scripting things”Submitted The Incredible Growth of Python as a story · 333 points
HN discussion
