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Spolsky's Software Q-and-A Site
guzzibill writes "Joel Spolsky has announced the beta release of Stack Overflow, intended to be a high-quality source of answers to software questions. Post a software question and watch the answers flow in. Popularity voting is very much woven into the site, where both questions and answers can be edited for clarity and voted up or down for correctness. Correctly posed questions and insightful answers float to the top. This site has reached critical mass." From Joel's description, he was envisioning a source of technical Q&A about programming. So far, many of the questions are broader and less technical, such as advice on the best book about software development. It will be interesting to see where the community that's forming takes it.
Q. Which is better? i++ or i+1?
A. Either way you are wrong, and I'm a genius you fool. If you don't grasp this, then you're doing it wrong. In fact, you're doing it wrong either way.
Would it be any different from expertsexchange.com?
I.e. is it going to be _really_ useful?
Seriously.
---- Liquid was a patriot ----
How do they ensure high quality? Meaning, how does this not evolve into just another programming Q/A web forum?
As as aside, the no-registration-required attribute is nice.
To be fair, Joel had very little to do with the actual implementation or development of the site. The majority of the credit for the idea and actual creation should go to Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror.
Personally I think it's a great idea, if for no other reason than to put the screws to Expert Sexchange. Their stupid referrer sniffing and page layout designed to make people pay to see answers has gone on long enough.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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This site is a joint venture with Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror.
Who would want to answer such question that one can look up in 2 or 3 google queries? That's a rhetorical question.
when the site relies on input from people who have the time to provide feedback, and I don't think there's any credentials system to verify that people know what they are talking about.
I'm not trying to shoot down this goal, just noting some points brought up by sites that seem to already dislike this effort.
I've been using it for the past day or so, and although there are lots of decent questions, there are also a lot of people who post things that could easily be answered by with Google or RTFM, a lot of students posting homework questions (and getting answers!), and a lot of people posting bad code as answers. Time will tell whether they can build a community that can resolve these problems, but in my experience, the quality of these types of communities only goes down.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
vim or emacs? Has anyone asked *that* yet?
Do you have ESP?
Even for Windows issues. Everyone is very helpful.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Another slashvertisement. Just what we needed.
But really, what's the point? What do I get from this site I can't find with usenet and Google groups?
With the issue of researching a question regarding foo v3 and getting burried with out of date data on foo v1, what is being done here to resolve that issue?
For the moment I expect the site to have details of the latest and greatest, but only because it is a new site. If it lasts a few years, it will be full of the same stale information as other sites.
Will they remove any questions/responses regarding old releases? If so, what about folks who don't update every system on every release?
Other than being a new Q-and-A site, how is this different than any old Q-and-A site?
"to linebreak use 2 spaces at end"
Who ordered that? That's a huge headache if you want to paste in something.
Nope. You didn't RTFA. It has Wikipedia-like editing of questions and answers. If you get enough reputation in the site, you can edit and update things as needed.
about.com and expertexchange.com come to mind. Thanks for TFA, though, I can pre-emptively block the domain at the router and modify my Google scripts to exclude results from there.
...in Usenet's coffin.
We're the reason Usenet is dying. What goes on here at Slashdot, experts-exchange, etc. used to take place there. For whatever reason we have chosen to avoid collaboration on Usenet, so don't fret about it when it finally vanishes.
I think the most interesting thing about StackOverFlow is the reputation system. The more good questions and answer you create, the more power you get. From the FAQ:
"Is this site good, or crap?"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Like many sites, you are given geek powers the more you use the sight and the more helpful you are, ultimately giving you lots of mod powers. Addictive, but will the people that attain the powers use them for good?
Only time will tell...
Dear Sir,
Give me a codes that can flow an object through arrays. I need it soonest. Can u do it?
The site is now out of beta. I was one of the original beta testers and I can attest that this application is truly revolutionary from the other BBS/Q&A sites that exist out there. First off, it is totally free. Secondly, all of the stupid answers and questions get voted down and disappear very quickly. (Like the guy wanting you to "send me teh codez for class assignment"). Thirdly, the user interface is superb for a web-based app as well as the search functionality. It takes all of the new fangled web features and combines them into this site. You can even get 'badges' sort of like slashdot karma. Way to go Jeff and Joel!
I've used Devshed for more than a decade. Usually I've been able to at least find people to point me in the right direction. Okay, layout and ads are a pain, but it's free.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
The C FAQ is the result of content being gated through a few very high level C users. If a particular question becomes too obtuse on StackOverflow, then a new one will be created - but in reality what would happen is that you would get some simple answers, some complex answers, the good ones from both sets would be modded up and the reader could choose. It's not like just anyone can edit, there are rules around who can edit what when designed to bring more control than Wikipedia has but still allowing an answer to grow.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
...from posting on slashdot.
Seriously, looks aren't everything. In fact, unless the content is compelling enough even the prettiest design won't keep people coming back. Look at sites like craigslist.
And it's not like their competition (experts-exchange) is setting the aesthetic bar that high, ya know?
The openID authentication isn't working for me. Anyone else having problems?
- Reputation system that actually matters (see Nerdposeur's post above) - Specific focus on functionality to drive user behaviour patterns - wiki approach to QnA - focus on community-driven content. - focus on keeping it free Experts Exchange has maybe 2 of the above, and nobody is really doing it the way that this site is doing it. Listen to the Stack Overflow podcast to understand a lot more about what they're doing that makes this site significantly different from the "other" answer sites.
Content s not hidden behind a gated wall, and is community edited - by responsible community members, in that there are complex rules around who can edit what to keep things open but still controlled from random vandalism.
In addition, despite the layout being sort of ugly, it has a really great feature - badges. These are Trophies or Achivements, that make it fun to keep using the site and reward you for improving things in various way.
Even just in the beta period there were a lot of pretty good questions and answers. It's harder to see that now that the general public is in but there still are good questions and informative answers, and searches should yield some pretty useful results there.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
can you summarize?
100s of other more diverse cites out there?
I ahven't ahd to look past page one for a good answer to any technical question in years, perhaps Joel needs to figure out how to use google better?
Oh, you're going to add a ranking system, great that's only been done many times. And we know ranking systems always bring the cream to the top~
Good luck. Considering the poor advice that is already being ranked up, you are going to need it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Aside from being possibly one of the most annoying layouts I know of when I do navigate to a answer I generally do find a higher quality of responses then a lot of the average googled answers (yahoo answers, random forum, spam, etc).
I hated them for a long time, but it wasn't until after I was out of school that I even realized that they actually had the answers (but ever since I've I've ignored the minor annoyance and generally appreciated the slightly higher quality of response).
Anyway, it's pretty useful having resources like this and as I get older (and my job gets more serious) I find from time to time that I simply want to ask a grown up question and get a grown up response and for whatever reason I don't always seem to have a peer I can ask.
Quack, quack.
Ok, what the GP was trying to express was:
The first rule of TimeCube is you can talk about anything as long as you include the expression "snot for brains".
I asked a moderately hard Perl question (there's a problem in Date::Manip that seems to be configuration dependent), and within two minutes, I had a wrong answer. No useful replies yet.
Mod this guy down. Nothing but a flame thrower.
I was going to say Bot-farms and Scripts, but that'll do too.
I've been betatesting the site for about 1 month..and I seems to be working just fine, really.
Lets hope the community makes something good out of it. Big expectations are set on the reputation and voting system in order to make it something useful instead of something full of crappy questions and sub-standard answers rated high.
How is this any different then daniweb.com?
awesome website.... expert-exchange is a mistake in today's social networking approach.....
cyneruon
My experience so far has been that the majority of moderators are not equipped to judge answers on correctness (else they'd have answered themselves), so they score based on tone.
So if you google the question and post a 2-para precis of the top hit in a friendly tone, you get lots of points. Post a correct answer in a curt tone, and you go -ve very quickly.
Well I like helping people out as much as any geek, but I'll be buggered if I have to suck up while I'm doing it. And if you think karma-whoring is bad on Slashdot, try giving people a power-based incentive for doing it and then see what happens.
Knowledgeable programmers don't hang around sites like Experts Exchange or Stack Overflow answering newbie questions.
I think rather than saying "Knwledgeable Programmers" you meant to say "assholes".
Because the experts I knw are happy to help newbies on occasion. And the reason you'd otherwise hang around stack overflow at other times is to see the more interesting and difficult questions, and answers. And to develop a public reputation for expertise. So at any time there is a helthy enough set of experts aorund willing to help newbies that questions get answered (or they get told where to look if they had just used search, also an acceptable response).
And the truth is Experts Exchange did have some very good content, it was just hell to get to.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Spolsky shines at PR and marketspeak (may be its a competent businessman) but i have read enought of him to know he cares more about IT fashion that CS. Its not a trustworthy reference in my opinion.
Gay niggers? On my Slashdot?
As they say, I have karma to burn ... you donkey raping shit eater, you fucked your uncle.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
1. Use the "site:" operator when Googling your question:
mfc how draw transparent bitmap site:experts-exchange.com
2. View desired search result.
3. SCROLL DOWN THE PAGE past all the bogus "All comments and solutions are available to Premium Service Members only" crap, to the very bottom of the page.
Note: this only works with Google (or possibly only with any search engine). Accessing their "answers" pages directly from their own site doesn't work. (For that you DO have to pay.)
But since most(?) people use a search engine to find their answers, knowing about the above provides a whole new source of high quality technical information.
"Fish" (David B. Trout)
How is babby formed? How girl get pragnent?
I'm not going to say it was perfect, but it was a fairly minimalist site, completely free, that had people answering questions, in a not unreasonable percentage of the cases actually good answers. I'm not actually sure what happened in the meantime, only that I forgot about it entirely, probably around 1999 or so, stumbled upon it a few years later (2003? 2004?), and sometime in between it had morphed into total crap.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The real question is: nano vs notepad?
I'm happy to help anyone, newbie or not, but I can do all of the above on public forums and Usenet newsgroups (for the record, I lurk at comp.lang.c++.moderated and microsoft.public.dotnet.*). The advantage of the latter is that I only read (and reply) to questions that I know are within my areas of competence.
That's why I often browse by tag on Stack Overflow. I can search for Objective C or Java and help the most in those areas. But a lot of times just browsing new questions I can hit on something I know which is a little off the language access, like xslt, and be of help there. That's why I greatly prefer perusing Stack Overflow to help rather than just hanging out in a single topic newsgroup getting more ossified and set in my current language of heavy use.
It's also cool to be able to read answers to questions every now and then about languages you have little familiarity with.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You do realize that there's no real gated wall, right? Scroll down to the bottom of the page... the answers are there.
The gate is the inability for later users to come and edit older content. All you can do is append...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley