161–170 of 243 posts
Why?
Because:
a) I love contributing with the online developer community and sharing back all that I've taken since I started freshman year of college.
b) Writing it out step by step solidifies the knowledge within me.
It's a win-win!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many good questions do you see that are "CLOSED AS NOT A REAL QUESTION"? The site is fine for what it is, but there's definitely a market for building a better StackOverFlow.
Closed as not a real question. 150 question upvotes.
Popularity does not mean a question is within the scope of the site guidelines.
The author's main problem stems from his desire to use Stack Overflow as a mechanism for gaining internet points - as is illustrated by his confession that "I saw a simple Java question, hit Google, read briefly, then synthesized an original answer." Why bother? Instead, I use Stack Overflow predominantly for three reasons -- 1. To ask interesting questions that I think will get a better answer there than anywhere el…
"In well over two years I have contributed nothing to StackOverflow: no questions, no answers, nothing. (Well, that's not true. When my score went over 10,000 I tried out the moderator powers for a couple of edits, just to test them out.) Over one third of my reputation was "earned" from me doing absolutely nothing for over two years." So what? Apparently his answers were valuable enough and saved the time (and nerve…
>OMG, I didn't realize this issue was so serious.
It's actually a fairly big jump. If you look at a distribution of Stack Exchange users[0], it follows a power law distribution, where many users have few points and a handful have a lot[1]. Once you reach the 96th percentile, it takes a fairly large jump in reputation to get to 97.
If I ran Stack Exchange, this might bother me because it suggests that many high-reputation users are no longer contributing. (Otherwise, other contributors would overtake the OP as they gain after-the-fact upvotes plus upvotes from new answers.) An alternate possibility is that the OP wrote answers that are unusually long-lived, garnering enough extra upvotes to make up for his lack of posting.
(All of this is not to pick on you. I just thought this was an interesting statistical point.)
Finally, it looks like percentile is calculated based on users with more than 200 or something similar. Otherwise, the OP would be in the 99.9th percentile based on his rank and the total number of users.
Data: http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/15710...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law
EDIT: Here's a better distribution of users' reputations: http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/90233/repu....
StackOverflow is a machine designed to do one thing: make it so that, for any given programming question, you will get a search engine hit on their site and find a good answer quickly. And see some ads. That's really it. Everything it does is geared toward that, and it does it quite well. I have lots of SO points. A lot of them have come from answering common, basic questions. If you think points exist to prove merit…
Now people are starting to hate SO, for very different reasons. At last! They've become the new expertsexchange in every way.
If the Author is an expert then answer/discuss questions on your level and most of the issues will be gone...
Not for me. It's my go to place to find syntax equivalent examples for languages I don't typically use. If Google has a universal translator for code, I'd probably use that instead.
The author's main problem stems from his desire to use Stack Overflow as a mechanism for gaining internet points - as is illustrated by his confession that "I saw a simple Java question, hit Google, read briefly, then synthesized an original answer." Why bother? Instead, I use Stack Overflow predominantly for three reasons -- 1. To ask interesting questions that I think will get a better answer there than anywhere el…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He doesn't even recognize that he's using two separate accounts, but other people are supposed to recognize him and his accounts should have mod powers? Again, if he had just used his original account to edit his answer, he wouldn't have needed any of that.
Yes. He's a world class expert in compilers and high performance, low level programming on modern hardware. This addresses the core point of the article, being that the SO "meritocracy" is badly implemented, and conflates heavy site usage with maturity and technical ability. Edit: If not a mod status, a VIP status. SO would gain a lot if its staff were to individually recruit people as talented as he is.
Please everybody, please post your "obscure" questions to Stack Overflow. Yes, it's unlikely that you'll get a good answer in any sort of useful timeframe for many of the reasons the OP lists. Sometimes you do get a good answer quickly, saving you hours of frustrating searching. But most times you will have to spend hours figuring it out yourself or you'll end up giving up. Answering your own question won't get you a…
That's simply not fixable.