Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

jlericson.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 298 posts

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#191

Post by noelherrick »

bunga-bunga wrote: post #86
mrweasel wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not everything needs to be a damn unicorn. More people needs to understand this. It's fine being a small(ish) business that turns a profit and provides a service that's beneficial to society. You don't need to be a billion dollar company to be important or do great work. DHH talked about this 15 years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY

> > Not everything needs to be a damn unicorn. > More people needs to understand this. I sounds more like neither one of you has had that choice. Most people, given the chance, would rather add a zero to their savings rather than “doing the right thing for society”

I don't think that's true, and I think you're revealing something about yourself vs. the majority of people (besides the fact that most folks, especially in the US, don't have enough money for an extra 0 to mean much). I think of the teachers, social workers, public defenders, volunteers, and civil servants who sacrifice greater earning potential because they believe in what they're doing.

It's like folks who claim people are motivated only by money: no, you're only motivated by money. Most folks see money as a means to an end, namely, a safe, normal life lived with loved ones.

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#192

Post by jncfhnb »

camillomiller wrote: post #161
jncfhnb wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well… it’s not maximizing the length of life? I would not cite this as a success story. Europe does not seem to be heading in a good direction imo. The consequences are largely unrealized. Even pretending the war never happened and they continued slurping Russian gas.

Please be informed before commenting. Europe has undergone the hardest and most painful decoupling from Russian gas for quite a while. As of 2022 no gas in Europe is imported from Russia.

Yes, that is my point. That hurts a lot and is enough to derail Europe pretty severely.

But even had that not happened Europe wasn’t trending very well.

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#193

Post by Qem »

throwawaymobule wrote: post #184
Qem wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Thank god Wikimedia isn’t run like Stack Overflow. I wonder why didn't Wikimedia have a stackoverflow-like site before stackoverflow.

There's a lot of nuance to how SO and other sites they run work. Turning programmer focused FAQs into a collaborative site was the route it kind of had to take. Reading through the joelonsoftware blog was kind of eyeopening, since I didn't know he was one of its creators.

Yet, now that stackoverflow is becoming increasingly hostile to their contributors, I think it would be a good moment to the Wikimedia folks to venture in this area.

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#194

Post by noelherrick »

paxys wrote: post #129
starbugs wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's about time that we no longer accept this strategy as valid.

Who is "we"? Unless you have a large financial stake in the company you aren't part of the discussion at all.

We live in a society. If you want to build a company in international waters cut off from the rest of the world, by all means. I hear there was a nice anti-regulation company that has a boat they don't need anymore, so maybe you could take over the lease. There's a reason why we decided banks have to have be monitored and if they're insolvent they can be taken over, or why you have to IPO and provide a bunch of information to investors if you want to sell stock in your company. There's "private" transactions that create enough systemic risk so that we have to regulate them.

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#195

Post by starbugs »

paxys wrote: post #129
starbugs wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's about time that we no longer accept this strategy as valid.

Who is "we"? Unless you have a large financial stake in the company you aren't part of the discussion at all.

As SO contributors, _we_ have a say with regard to our future consideration of SO as a destination of our contributions.

Since SO is just a platform, it can't survive without _our_ content.

People have much more power than they think.

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#196

Post by endofreach »

janalsncm wrote: post #3

> In May I wrote about Stack Overflow's business, which lost $42 million over 6 months and had just laid off 10% of its employees. Since then, the company's fiscal year-end results came out. Despite growing revenue, it lost $84 million over the year ending on March 31, 2023. Thank god Wikipedia isn’t run like Stack Overflow. As an end user, they have pretty much the same value proposition: user generated answers to m…

Now that you write about the median user being a junior with trivial needs, i realize, i barely visit SO anymore. Not sure when that happened. I used to be a power-consumer on SO. I don‘t think i have even visited SO this year at all.

I did use GPT4 for a lot of the minor things that i am too lazy to remember and would have „relearned“ on SO every time… maybe others have a similar experience and management just sees visits dropping? Maybe they just focus on developing a target audience for a tailored product.

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#197

Post by palata »

agentgumshoe wrote: post #156
palata wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't need to be a billion dollar company to be important or do great work. And importantly: because you are a billion dollar company doesn't mean you bring good to the world. At all.

I think the simplest way to measure that is by asking 'what would we truly lose if this company disappeared tomorrow?'. With one follow-up question of 'how easily could the important bits actually be replaced?'

> 'what would we truly lose if this company disappeared tomorrow?'

I guess such a big company is here because they managed to create a need. The question may be: "were we really worse off before we had what this company built?".

Example: if GitHub disappears tomorrow, that's likely a pretty big problem. But we were fine before GitHub, we just had different (not worse) workflows. GitHub created a dependency.

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#198

Post by Bayart »

pragmatic wrote: post #163
mrtksn wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think that actions of these huge institutions are not impactful to the life quality of the Americans? Also, why do you think that the European live longer thanks to the medicine developed in the USA? Maybe the USA develops medicine thanks to the free and equal opportunity education culture in the Europe? If you look closely to the researchers, you will see that lot's of the people who develop these things…

I would love for this to be true. Europeans do seem to enjoy a higher quality of life among several axis. However the US subsidizes European defense (refer to current events) allowing European countries to spend less GDP on their military. Talent comes to the US from all over the world. That's how it works and has since almost the beginning of the country. Easier access to capital (and easy bankruptcy, etc), entrepre…

The US isn't so much subsidizing defense as it is exporting safety. And it's making bank on it.

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#199

Post by welshwelsh »

Dah00n wrote: post #38
qwertox wrote: post #18

I'd be fine with SO turning into the place where effectively useful AI based answers get posted, where humans have worked together with AI to obtain a valid result, proven to be correct. In that case I wouldn't care if someone posts an AI answer, as long as it is guaranteed to be valid. That's the place which SO can take in a world with AI assistants. SO should not use AI to generate content, but to organize it and m…

I wouldn't use it if it means AI will be trained on my code unless they pay me per answer or vote. I already removed everything from GitHub etc. AI on SO smells like how Google's business strategy is advertising first, search second. SO will be in the same position soon.

I don't understand this attitude. If your code is used to train AI, then it would be used to help more people in a wider variety of contexts. So assuming that your goal is to help people (which I assume it is since SO doesn't pay for answers), wouldn't you be excited about AI learning from you?

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#200

Post by charlieyu1 »

agentgumshoe wrote: post #152
charlieyu1 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hong Kong has one of the highest life expectancy of the world and a major contributing factor is high population density. Paramedics are able (and must) arrive within 12 minutes of an emergency call, which is probably the most important time to keep people alive. Doesn't mean Hong Kong is a decent place to live though.

Have you got a source for that? But your point is valid, life expectancy is not the same as quality of life. I'd personally rather live five years less and be in great general health than be slogging through pain and medical bingo for my last 10 years.

Sources of high life expectancy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...

Source of 12 minute arrival policy of ambulance:

https://www.hkfsd.gov.hk/eng/aboutus/performance.html

Post reply on HN