11–20 of 130 posts
Understanding why we don't have flying cars will tell you how the entire world works. It turns out that "progress" has nothing to do with "want", and more to do with need, availability, and timing.
> They lack the structure to make the data they contain readily accessed programatically, so step one is miserable screen scraping and data cleanup. That’s where a lot of people give up.
> We think we have an interesting way to fix this.
RDF? OWL? SKOS?
Is it just me or is the intro relating to COM a bit off the mark?
not to us old farts, who get a great feeling of nostalgia when we read about those win32 APIesque topics.
My primary use of Win32 APIs now is to scare people away from making anything that byzantine. If the APIs don't do the trick, I start telling back compat stories. [shudder]
I remember the "Days Before Stack Overflow" and Joel is giving himself a bit too much credit here. Before SO, when I googled a problem I would often find a solution on a blog, personal website, or some community's PHPBB/vBulletin forum. Remember, this was 2008 we're talking about. The UX was undoubtedly less consistent, but it's not like we were rushing off to the library to look up PHP functions and CSS 3-column layouts.
The net effect of stack overflow was to spam the search engines with non-answers like "you asked in the wrong forum", "you didn't ask nicely", etc.
Long ago I learned to route around it.
> almost anyone I talk to is too young to imagine The Days Before Stack Overflow, when the bookstore had an entire wall of Java and the way you picked a Rich Text Editor was going to Barnes and Noble and browsing through printed books for an hour, in the Rich Text Editor Component shelf. I remember the "Days Before Stack Overflow" and Joel is giving himself a bit too much credit here. Before SO, when I googled a prob…
Is it just me or is the intro relating to COM a bit off the mark?
not to us old farts, who get a great feeling of nostalgia when we read about those win32 APIesque topics.
Stack Overflow destroyed a lot of its social capital and pissed off its own community in the wake of the Monica Cellio affair a little under 2 years ago. (This one was touched off by the Judaism Stack Exchange moderators asking questions about pronoun policy, but ended up with basically every community involved up in arms, including many in their LGBTQ+ community.) One hopes the new owners will do a better job of man…
They've done other things to cause various 'controversies' with their base... changing the license answers are under, hiding controversial questions, etc... but their amazingly unprofessional treatement of Cellio caused more lasting damage than any of that.
> almost anyone I talk to is too young to imagine The Days Before Stack Overflow, when the bookstore had an entire wall of Java and the way you picked a Rich Text Editor was going to Barnes and Noble and browsing through printed books for an hour, in the Rich Text Editor Component shelf. I remember the "Days Before Stack Overflow" and Joel is giving himself a bit too much credit here. Before SO, when I googled a prob…
Stack Overflow destroyed a lot of its social capital and pissed off its own community in the wake of the Monica Cellio affair a little under 2 years ago. (This one was touched off by the Judaism Stack Exchange moderators asking questions about pronoun policy, but ended up with basically every community involved up in arms, including many in their LGBTQ+ community.) One hopes the new owners will do a better job of man…
This is very true. It sidetracked nearly all the communities for a full year, triggered resignations, and caused lawyers to get involved. They've done other things to cause various 'controversies' with their base... changing the license answers are under, hiding controversial questions, etc... but their amazingly unprofessional treatement of Cellio caused more lasting damage than any of that.
I only mention this because seemingly major events in online communities don't always have the impact that people involved or following closely think they do.
> almost anyone I talk to is too young to imagine The Days Before Stack Overflow, when the bookstore had an entire wall of Java and the way you picked a Rich Text Editor was going to Barnes and Noble and browsing through printed books for an hour, in the Rich Text Editor Component shelf. I remember the "Days Before Stack Overflow" and Joel is giving himself a bit too much credit here. Before SO, when I googled a prob…
Even more likely, you would get links to Experts Exchange, which was ad-riddled with the actual answer behind a paywall. I'm glad that SO was able to at least kill that business model. Someone should do the same for Pintrest and their dominance of Google Images.