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

Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 227 posts

Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

#211

Post by richardwhiuk »

rtpg wrote: post #204
Bamafan wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. In fact, there was a HN thread a while back about this very topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4494016 It's unbelievably annoying when this happens. I have a number of bookmarks to incredibly insightful posts, whose usefulness has been corroborated by literally hundreds of people...all closed because they are deemed "off-topic" or some such by an admin. My theory is that SO was essentially "done" yea…

I think the thing missing in this is all the low-quality questions that end up getting closed due to lack of solvability. One of the objectives of SO's rules is to avoid flame wars and ambiguous answers. Imagine the question : "What is the best templating engine to use for Django?" This question doesn't have an answer, because it's so dependent on use case (even that statement is controversial). So if it's on SO and…

What actually happens is there's a bunch of decent answers, and then it gets closed, which somehow kind of leads to the best of both worlds, but leaves a bitter taste in a bunch of people's mouths -"that was really useful why close it" answers.

e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/257712/best-web-applicati...

or less seriously:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/184618/what-is-the-best-c...

Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

#212

Post by ygra »

curiously wrote: post #186
jordanpg wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an ongoing religious war among avid SO users (don't know about the rest of SE) about what kinds of questions should be allowed. Roughly, there are two camps. Those who say that any well-formed, non-dup question of interest should be let in and those who think it's a stop of last-resort after checking all conceivable documentation and scouring the internet. I believe the latter viewpoint is pretty run-of-the-…

One of my top question created earliest (before the over zealous moderators appeared) was how to push an item into an array in Java? The obvious response is "lol don't you know how to read the doc"? Yet the view count is over 100,000 and counting, with people commenting how much they appreciate finding the answer immediately.

SO had always allowed and encouraged beginner questions, actually. These days the same question would likely be closed as a duplicate, because the question, presumably along with a good answer already exists.

So that's an example of a good question, actually. And an answer "read the docs" would be down-voted as unhelpful and quickly disappear.

Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

#213

Post by ygra »

johansch wrote: post #181
davidism wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most comments should end up as an edit to the question or answer, clarifying some point, at which point they can be removed. The Question and Answer are the important things on Stack Overflow, not the communication that went into creating and tuning them. The remaining comments are just fluff, such as "thanks", which can more appropriately (for the site) be expressed as an upvote or accept. Or they're asking a new qu…

This culture doesn't really invite towards answers improving over the years as more and more people who might know more happen to come across them.

That's what the edit link on answers is for.

Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

#214

Post by ascordato »

mandlar wrote: post #101
ajones wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their careers business has the opportunity to be a revenue generator for the company. The starting cost for a job listing is $495 per 30 days and goes up to $1499 per 30 days. In my opinion, the profiles on Stack Overflow careers allow developers to present themselves much better than many other career sites. http://careers.stackoverflow.com/products/listings

$495? Wasn't it just about $350 not too long ago?

We changed prices in December. Market conditions right now are tough; we’re seeing more frequently that it’s unrealistic to expect to hire a developer in 30 days given that for every developer there are 4-5 jobs. We’re optimizing our products and pricing to encourage customers to allow listings to run a longer on the site. To make this feel like the right decision for our customers, we’re significantly discounting our 60 and 90 day listings. That said, if you’ve been using Stack Overflow Careers for a while and want to keep buying 30-day job listings for $350, that’s fine too. (I'm on the marketing team, btw)

Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

#215

Post by carljoseph »

johansch wrote: post #181
davidism wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most comments should end up as an edit to the question or answer, clarifying some point, at which point they can be removed. The Question and Answer are the important things on Stack Overflow, not the communication that went into creating and tuning them. The remaining comments are just fluff, such as "thanks", which can more appropriately (for the site) be expressed as an upvote or accept. Or they're asking a new qu…

This culture doesn't really invite towards answers improving over the years as more and more people who might know more happen to come across them.

Interesting how this is the case, because that was one of the key goals of the site when they were first building it.

I listened to Joel and Jeff talk about it in their early podcasts when they were first building the site. To be the definitive answer for a question requires that the answer be able to change and evolve over time as new information becomes available.

Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

#216

Post by chrismcb »

mavelikara wrote: post #146
jordanpg wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an ongoing religious war among avid SO users (don't know about the rest of SE) about what kinds of questions should be allowed. Roughly, there are two camps. Those who say that any well-formed, non-dup question of interest should be let in and those who think it's a stop of last-resort after checking all conceivable documentation and scouring the internet. I believe the latter viewpoint is pretty run-of-the-…

I hope that at some point Google starts pruning away closed SO questions from its index. That will give the user a better search experience.

I hope not. I don't know how many times a question I search for is closed as off topic, but was answered before it was closed

Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

#217

Post by techdragon »

blocktuw wrote: post #166
dustingetz wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" Those who say that any well-formed, non-dup question of interest should be let in and those who think it's a stop of last-resort after checking all conceivable documentation and scouring the internet. " This is wrong in multiple dimensions and [edit: the next sentence which i didn't quote is] flamebait. One camp believes in following these guidelines to a fault. The other camp thinks some of the rules are counterpr…

This reminds me of the unhelpful SO answers where they state the answer to a question is already stated as part of a spec and won't be answered with a link to the spec. My preferred answer to these questions will quote applicable parts of the spec along with reference numbers and a link. I don't understand why I have to click another link to go to another site that doesn't have the same context and awareness of where…

And may no longer even EXIST ... seriously love when working with old libraries and all i have is some dump copy on github of a long dead source code littered with comments about see the web page for the docs... the docs dont come from the comments, and lo and behold, the stack overflow post ... slaps you in the face with yet another link.

Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

#218

Post by techdragon »

nhzmju wrote: post #53
27182818284 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty much my experience. The site is read-only for a lot of people. I think I was rejected the other day because I didn't have the 50 reputation to comment on a reply that had other comments on an older question. They need to lessen restrictions that got too strict out of fear of the site becoming worthless. Right now the scales aren't balanced.

Comments on SE are meant to be temporary( in their value, not duration ). If you had to raise an important issue about something, you should have instead asked a question about it, where you could leave a link to the problematic answer/question and explain the problem. In fact that is the usual procedure in case of conflicts. There is no restriction on that. If your point is valid, the community does the rest.

And yet frequently asking a new question seeking clarification on an old questions topic matter, due to some relevant restriction, or even simply 'this no longer applies to V2 of lib$foo' is met with cries of "duplicate" and buried. Stack Overflow is suffering from the Wikipedia Moderation Problem ... which a few of my friends now refer to as "using a mod_assholes reverse proxy"

Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

#220

Post by teh_klev »

colinodell wrote: post #121

I sometimes stumble upon old answers I posted to questions I currently have - is that a bad or good thing?

I see that as a good thing. I've bookmarked a fair few of my own answers to questions about programmatic management of IIS and .NET obscuria.
Post reply on HN