Slashdot Mirror
StackOverflow For Any Topic
RobinH writes "StackOverflow, the successful question-and-answer website for programmers, is now over a year old and its top user has just passed 100,000 reputation points. Now one of the creators of StackOverflow, Joel Spolsky, and his company Fog Creek, are developing a software-as-a-service form of the StackOverflow engine called StackExchange to support any topic you want. The software is currently in private beta, but the first few beta sites have surfaced. Topics include business travel, the home, parenthood, the environment, finance, and iPhone game development."
While I wholey appreciate the community and efforts of people involved in StackOverflow, I believe that Joel is subject to entirely too much fanfair and hero worship. I'd line him up right next to Dvorak in the grouping of "Right about as often as the sun shines on my dog's ass."
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Anyone remember the short lived Ask Slashdot section on sex? No one had any answers, so they had to shut it down.
StackOverflow is really impressive, and useful. I find myself adding "site:stackoverflow.com" to google queries when I'm troubleshooting some code problem. If there's an answer on there, it's almost always better than the answers on other sites. With none of the horrible multi-page answers, scribd paper, navigation hell that plagues other sites.
Great idea to branch this into other areas, but I wonder how many dedicated users you'll see like jon skeet when it comes to a parenthood advice website.
You drank my drink, you drunk!
Joel Spolsky, and his company Fog Creek, are developing a software-as-a-service form of the StackOverflow engine called StackExchange to support any topic you want.
There are already many BB and wiki systems available. By the way, a little obvious on the Slashvert.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
It is good to know that the parenting forum is asking the most important questions.
over a year old and its top user has just passed 100,000 reputation points.
That can't be right. I've been posting on 4chan for years and I don't have 1 reputation point, let alone 100,000.
First, I never heard of the site before. Is it really popular? Am I just out of the loop? It's not come up in my daily searches for technical info.
I mean, it looks good, like somebody finally created a replacement for the community in usenet and what Expertsexchange was before they turned into a nag-site. It's not original, just re-creating stuff which was destroyed in the past by spammers and misguided business models
But looking closer, it seems to be a showcase for their business selling the software to run the site. Could it really be any different?
This is the most obvious Slashvertisement I've ever seen.
http://blog.ricodigo.com/2009/09/18/shapado-a-foss-replacement-for-stackoverflow
Wow. The new generation has turned to privately-owned web sites in search for answers, instead of Usenet.
I didn't know karma-whoring could be so powerful. Weee! 100.000 points! I must be *great!* (My mom loves me...)
But, hey! What happens when StackOverflow folds (which it will, eventually)?
Then, suddenly, all the knowledge contracts and contracts to a single point until it goes "POOF!" - nada, zero.
It's called the Inverse Topological Asshole Theorem. Otherwise knows as the You've Been Suckered Theorem. The Advertisement Industry Underground Sex Ring knows *all* about it (you can find them on Facebook, did you know?). Wet dreams...
Is it true what they say about under-30s in America, thinking they are so smart when in fact, they're not?
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
Ah, yeah!
I thought yahoo answers was where you could ask any question and get a well thought out informative response?
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
WOW WHAT A GREAT IDEA!
THAT WONT BE OVERRUN BY COMPLETE MORONS!1!!!
</sarcasm> morons... do they seriously think this is going to be more effective thank yahoo answers?
Seriously, what mouth-breather decided you should only be able to search tags instead of a full-text search?
It's also likely that the apparent (I've only skimmed the site) quality of the questions and answers there are because of the subject matter. What works for programming questions probably won't work for a lot of other domains -- just look at the dreck that is wiki.answers.com, yahoo answers etc.
This reminds me of the times when securityportal.com had a Question/Answer session about various similar topics. It was moderated, and went with the byline: "Ask Buffy, by Buffy Overflow". It was never dull, and there was always something new to be gleaned from the millions of problems that occasionally happened to software.
Don't kick the baby.
There are plenty of questions with obvious answers.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
/.'s karma system and stack's rep. points both have real web uses. It would be cool to see a standardization of this idea and have it follow you across the net. Granted it could be abused, gamed, misused and just worthless to some. But no system is 100% useful. I could easily see where a standardized web karma could be very useful.
I'm still trying to figure out if this would be make for a utopian or dystopian internet.
The problem with StackOverflow is that people will ask a question there rather than more appropriate forums. So rather than asking on the forum dedicated to Open Source package XYZ where there are going to be other people with very detailed knowledge about the topic, they ask on StackOverflow where you get people who quite often know little to nothing about the topic answering. Consequence is you get half assed responses which are often wrong, ill informed or don't give the full picture. This can be frustrating from the point of view of the authors of said package XYZ, because to stop the proliferation of the bogus information, they need to start monitoring StackOverflow as well as their own on topic forums and either answer the questions or waste time correcting the provided answers. End result is authors end up wasting more time than if people just asked on the correct forum to begin with.
That said, StackOverflow is at least a better forum than IRC, which is where many would otherwise end up. IRC can be even more of a PITA as people expect to be able to get solutions to complex issues based on a single line question, and with subsequent response in a matter of lines as well.
FWIW, there are some Open Source versions of StackOverflow being developed which you could install on your own systems, rather than having to pay someone else for a managed service. For example, see:
http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2009/9/2/plurk-solace-released
http://opensource.plurk.com/Solace/
I love it !! iPhone anything is just swell with me !! Add more iPhone - NO !! IPHONE !! and I love it EVEN MORE !! It's sooo seeexy !!
Or will it become like Yahoo Answers?
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
It's very well designed. Compared to anything else in the same category, it's like the iPhone to a generic WinMo phone. It's easy to use, it's intuitive, it's powerful, it's fast, it's obvious and yet nobody comes close.
I've heard many people make fun of Joel, and I would have been a bit skeptical but stackoverflow is an undeniable success.
About the only time I don't preferentially use google to search on any site (e.g. {site:stackoverflow.com words I want to search for}) is when I want to search for all posts by a given user. That's the only case I can think of where google isn't superior.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Even the commercially supported and very expensive ones are *terrible*. They're full of distracting and useless information, their design is full of lines and tables and outlines that serve no purpose whatsoever, they don't present information in a sensible manner (usually signatures, dates, names and navigation take 5 times more space than the actual messages, for instance), and they just simply suck.
Look at stackoverflow. What do you see? Pure information. Navigation is the bare minimum. There is no useless labels. Things work as expected, along the principle of least surprise. The site is snappy. It uses Ajax where it's useful, not for the sake of it. It uses OpenID. It does tag quite well. The wiki markup is one of the most sensible around, and the editor is the best trade-off I've seen between unreadable markup and slow, clunky wysiwyg.
Check out Vanilla for a better BB experience: http://vanillaforums.org/discussions
I really like their site and have used it for a number of questions in the past, so I'm happy they're branching out and using their engine to generate revenue. Isn't what they're asking, though, a bit too much? The minimum price point is $130 a month! When there are a dozen open source CMS packages, and countless other sites charging nothing or very little for monthly fees for similar functionality, I can't imagine someone using Stack's engine at that price.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
I know slashdot likes to fling poo every new internet phenomenon, but I am really excited by this and wish Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky good luck. StackOverflow is amazing and their mission to destroy those shitty phpBB-forums with their clean and organized interfaces is very noble to say the least.
they're trying to get your kids to become dirty faggots too.
is because it's based on really nerdy, objective, technical pursuits where there are usually pretty discrete and/or black and white answers.
I'd be really interested to see how well it'll work on things that are more subjective.
The question that I think is more interesting about SO is what happens when 80%+ of the basic answers are already in there (how do I do x in y), and every answer will be RTFM (after about a year I think this is already starting to creep in). Will the site have less activity generally? Will the technology be providing us with so many more new questions it will off-set the decrease in questions about old tech available to ask? Will it become a big newb-on-newb-on-wiki-style-admin-person* fest?
*ie those who know the system well enough to game it to get mega-rep to the exclusion of all normal, helpful punters.
Though for the record I don't think it'll ever go as low as yahoo answers.
The problem with stackoverflow is that the answer most likely to get modded up is the first answer. There are a lot of times when the very first answer is completely wrong. Another example of how stupid Joel is.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
How much would you pay? For this forum / QA software?
With Stack Exchange? A THOUSAND DOLLARS A MONTH.
If I felt like I had an idea that would have a good community around it, yes. StackOverflow is simply the best forum software I have ever used for a site oriented around questions and answers (for general discussion I do not think it would work as well, for instance it could not replace Slashdot). The motivational system between badges and voting and scores is well thought out, the software works really well on whatever browser I use it on, and the site has remained very stable even under heavy load.
After having used it for a while, and having developed server side software for a long time, I know the amount of work it would take to replicate all the good things Stack Overflow would be tremendous, and frankly I'm not sure I could really improve on it.
There's nothing wrong with paying for quality and a proven solution. Something is only "expensive" if it provides no value for what you pay.
I'm not sure if all the stack exchange ideas are really winners, but if I had something that I felt would work well I would not hesitate to use that as a solution - and furthermore I would hesitate to build any solution going against an equivalent Stack Exchange site.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Jeff Atwood has said a number of times one of the reasons Stack Overflow came about is because he hated all of the BB systems around. And he was right, the existing BB systems are terrible to use, especially so for a Q&A site.
The site is also better than a wiki for Q&A, because it has really well thought out community moderation aspects. You get more duplication than you would with a wiki, but it works out because you also get heavy user moderation redirecting you to better questions. And because it's a cross between a wiki and a forum, you have a much better ability to have different viewpoints of solutions expressed - for instance a user asking a question can accept an answer as valid, but other users can all vote up other answers as being more correct and those get prominent placement too.
If BB software and wikis are all so good, why is it nothing with the popularity and update of Stack Overflow has existed until now? I've never seen a programming site with such traction and quick uptake, never mind one that covered such a gamut of subjects! It's not just at the top of the list for C# (which is to be expected given the pedigree) but also iPhone development, and is the first place I would go for Emacs elisp questions... even Java.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Nine times out of ten, the correct answer to a question posted to stackoverflow is "quit your job and go back to something you're qualified for, like working the register at McDonalds".
In programming, the correctness of an answer is easily definable and verifiable.
But if you were to ask "when should my 8 year old kid go to bed?", the answers aren't that clear anymore.
With a statement like that, I'd have to wonder how long you had actually been programming.
Should you use singletons? What is the "best" development process? Is test-first the best thing ever or the spawn of satan?
VI or Emacs - or IDE?
These are all easily questions as the same level as "when should my eight year old go to bed" because just like the answers to those questions, it can vary based on the team (the team being the family). Just like those questions, you can share conditions and how something worked out for you even when there's no obviously correct answer.
Furthermore even for questions with a more correct answer even possible, there are in fact instant solutions at hand because you have things people have tried on kids who are "fully processed" for want of a better term. It's not like parents don't like sharing advice even after kids are grown. I read elsewhere some response claiming you couldn't determine how some piece of advice had worked out and it's nonsense - there's a wealth of advice from former parents and people have been parenting a lot longer than computers have been around. I still am not sure the family idea is one of the best extensions to Stack Overflow but I think it has potential just based on the similarity to programming in terms of questions asked and the ability for the community to upvote sets of answers each subgroup finds most correct.
One thing to look out for, is how well they have described the meta-tags - it helps people a lot if they can pay special attention to a subset of the data they care about (and this would I think not be by age so much as by subject).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
However, the difference is programmers usually know how to -ask- questions that make sense to other programmers.
That's more true than average. But it's not wholly true, as another poster noted you get plenty of ill-formed questions on Stack Overflow.
So why does stack overflow work so well? Because unlike the site you mentioned, the community can upvote good questions, and close or cancel bad ones. Users who have gained a lot of credibility with the system by way of points awarded for good questions or answers, can edit a question they feel in fundamentally decent but badly worded.
So a good question is important if you are asking, because it's more likely to be answered or voted up (which again makes it more likley to be answered), but the bad questions will generally fall of the map and not really matter to the system as a whole. It's a great system for discarding the noise which is ever-present in any forum.
Furthermore, people who post good questions and good answers, get rewarded for doing so via points and badges, which keeps them coming back to offer more good questions and answers. The Stack Overflow model is very good at retaining exactly the members of the community that offer the most value, while subtly deflecting those who are not as useful by lack of reward. If you've listened to the Stack Overflow podcast much, you'd realize every part of the system is designed to encourage healthy behavior on the part of users and generally the approach pretty much scales.
Never as there been a more civil programming website, with very little in the way of language wars and so on because people are more motivated to help than to hinder.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Seriously, what mouth-breather decided you should only be able to search tags instead of a full-text search?
First of all, the site search searches on subject and question text as well. If you search for "If you're using PCRE" for example (no quotes), one question that comes up is only tagged "qt".
Secondly, what mouth-breather (hint: that's a subtle slam at your own cognitive abilities since you seem willing to belittle others) doesn't realize Google is your full text search? Honestly, when is the last time you used full-text search on a site itself? The only time I do so is when the content is behind a wall Google cannot cross.
If you listen to the podcasts they have stated even from the beginning that the site is designed exactly so that people searching on Google will end up with a Stack Overflow question/answer. And the model has worked very well for them, because just as planned a large percentage of traffic is from google. When I search I still start with Google, and if Stack Overflow answers my issue great - if not I've found something else (though almost without fail a Stack Overflow response is going to have a more targeted question with better answers).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Someone please start one of these sites for Linux questions, particularly with regard to questions about install, graphics, sound, and drivers. It could actually make the Linux experience much smoother for someone just getting started.
I appreciate sites such as LinuxQuestions.org, but the StackOverflow approach could really bring some improvements. Looking at the highest ranked answer is a much nicer approach than scanning through 14 pages of comments.
While I would generally agree, StackOverflow is the place for immediate questions you have problems with, not general bullshit.
No, it is a place for both. It is just as valid to discuss the pros and cons of methodology as it is to ask how to copy a string in C. I have found over time that programming is really more about esoteric issues than practical immediate ones.
In parenting the same is true, there will be some questions needing very near term answers that others will have had prior experience with, and others that are more opinion oriented without any clear single answer.
In Perl, how can I concisely check if a $variable is defined and contains a non zero length string?
Although there's nothing currently with exactly that level of specificity (although there are of course multiple ways to accomplish that so there are multiple "right" answers even there), moms4moms currently has this question on the front page:
How do I know if my child is lactose intolerant?
A question with a direct question that can have a few distinct answers and can be important for the near term.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
First, I never heard of the site before. Is it really popular?
Yes, there are a lot of people that go there now, for just about any language you can name there are a decent set of users there (take a look at the tags).
It's not come up in my daily searches for technical info.
That is strange, as I have seen it come up a number of times. It's not always at the top but often on the first page.
The next time you have a question search there (you can try google site specific, or the site has a search bar that looks through summary and questions) and if you don't find an answer try asking. The community is highly motivated to answer questions quickly, the better your question (in terms of clarity and brevity) the more likely someone will answer.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The original search term "cvs branch advice" did not yield a Stack Overflow hit, but there's a lot of good looking questions when you search StackOverflow via google:
Stack Overflow Results
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Umm, stackoverflow is free; and doesnt bomb Google with it's completely obnoxious results.
#!/bin/csh cat $0
Jon Skeet - the "top user who just passed 100k" - is an awesome guy, and that score is well-deserved. I had a pleasure of discussing things with him back when he was inhabiting microsoft.public.dotnet.* newgroups, before he moved on to StackOverflow, and he was already very helpful back then. On SO, with his nigh-unreachable (and steadily growing) score, he quickly got a kind of a cult following.
An interesting background, too. He's working in Google (mostly developing in Java, so far as I know), and at the same time he's the author of one of the best advanced books on C#, and most of his SO answers tend to be C#/.NET related. That book is well worth the read of everyone who has to deal with the tech.
How ironic that you should mention expertsexchange.com, because StackOverflow was designed in response to that site (and others of its ilk). If expertsexchange wasn't such an obnoxious piece of shit in the first place, StackOverflow wouldn't even exist!
dom
More illiterates too apparently, you can't even copy and paste the URL correctly.
http://shapado.com/ is an AGPL "StackOverFlow clone", just recently started, but has some neat features ( http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9mzjg/hey_reddit_checkout_my_agpl_stackoverflow_like/ ).
Of course, the _community_ is what makes StackOverFlow great, so no matter how many neat features Shapado has, they're gonna have trouble getting as big...
Vanilla is excellent. Another lightweight BB project I like is FluxBB
Thanks for the link, this looks very nice indeed. I've heard from a PHP developer that the Garden framework is great.
What are you talking about?
I've blacklisted it from my google results along with sex change expert. It's so ugly and hard to read, the superfluous cognitive load is too much too bear when you're already trying to solve a complex problem.
It uses OpenID.
Good. Thanks for this, I didn't realise - maybe I'll therefore add an answer if it pops up in a Google search, which for every other forum I am unable to, and I can't be arsed to faff about making an account (at least Slashdot allows anonymous comments, but even then, I don't see why it would be a worse thing to allow OpenID, as you could then at least have a better chance of telling AC's apart).
I entirely disagree. The average Stack Overflow poster seems to have a low level of expertise and knowledge in the topics that they comment upon.
But it is far from useless. It's a very useful site when used and exploited correctly.
StackOverflow is essentially a mechanical turk, similar to various other attempts to "pay" people for spending their time doing your legwork. In this case the pay is ribbons and badges and points (similar to Slashdot points, only imagine that it has no limit and comes with a myriad of cute icons and designations).
I could go and waste valuable time searching all around to try to find out how to do X, or I could just post it to StackOverflow, letting hoardes of trying-to-get-acknowledged devs rabble to earn some reputation points. Until the crowd gets wise, the latter is a very efficient (for me) choice.
Because I use only Linux and it's a bitch to sync with an iPhone.
The fact remains that the iPhone is simply twice as good as the next best phone OS I've tried, which is Android. And it in turns is 10x better than CrapBerry I have from work or any crashy kludgy clanky winmo phone. The Palm Pre is supposedly coming very close to the iPhone but I haven't tried it yet.
I'm talking from a usability point of view. How easy it is to get shit done, how easy it is to understand, how confused or not you get when you're trying to do something simple, how fast it reacts and how logically it does.
Here there is one for ubuntu question answers http://www.ubun2.com/
And how many reliable answers you will find on that subject...
This submission needs more links.
Ah yeah!
Why would StackOverflow would succeed in a space that the likes of Yahoo Answers already occupies?
Deal with reality - the world as it is - rather than ideality - the world as you would like it to be.
It's questionable to call it a success, with out stating the criteria used to measure it.
It was supposed to be the fount of all knowledge for complex IT issues. However it's rapidly devolved into the fount of home work answers. It is experiencing a dumbing down and race to the bottom. It's riddled with fan boys and script kiddies with limited knowledge and no depth of experience. So it suffers a massive problem with group think. This is probably why they are trying to leverage it into other subject domains. As a platform for community content creation it will probably succeed. As an authoritative source of technical/developer advice it's failing.
If you've ever tried browsing the site with NoScript, it does helpfully remind you of its inability to crash your browser.
But seriously, way too much forum software makes no use of javascript except for the text editing boxes. The listing of "topics" within a forum is never useful. Most people I know only pick two options: Recent posts (if you want to respond to anything), or a search box (if you have a question). Stack Overflow provides exactly those two operations (plus tags, but those never seem useful to me). Which commercially supported software are you talking about?