I ended up losing access to my ancient account (it was using the OpenID providers that they don't even support anymore and the provider I used isn't around). I had gone fairly inactive, but recently wanted to contribute some content. This was on the DIY stackoverflow, there's a fairly common problem on my stove, but an easy, low/no cost fix, it's just very involved. The DIY SO had a good discussion of the problem. To…
Similar to me. Only when I actually needed to ask a question a while ago, I signed up again and found I no longer had enough points?!
There's a wealth of knowledge in old questions on that site, but UX for occasional users is poor!
I always thought Microsoft would be a natural buyer given the tech stack and Microsoft's support for developers. Unrelated story, I have a day one Stack Overflow account. I don't remember how I found it but I'm sure it was posted on digg or slashdot or something at the time. I had a lot of posts in the first few years about some generally broad concepts, and completely inactive since. In spite of this, I am in the to…
> In spite of this, I am in the top 7% of accounts on the site, which is a nice reminder on the power of compound interest! That's how I'm in the top 5%. My old posts that are still relevant get votes. Every time I log in there is a new notification about how many more points I have.
In 2013, I asked a question that I then answered myself. It turned out to be a fairly common question and my response now has more than 101k views.
It's remarkable as perhaps the lowest effort/highest benefit to others online action in my life.
While I'm happy for the people who made a lot of money in this transaction, I always read these announcements with a bit of angst. From a user point of view, I expect this to go like Reddit has, for example. Everyone building that value saw high use value, returns on their investment in the form of information they need, lean, easy to find, high signal to noise. Now there is a debt to be paid. The new owner needs to…
They'll double-down on the enterprise offer I would think. I don't think jobs was the money-maker they planned on, and the public individual site doesn't have a lot of revenue approaches that justify ~2B purchase price. I'm sure they original VCs made money but not sure it's their typical unicorn multiple.
Great take. You're very likely to be proven in that observation.
Fun fact and one of my dinner party anecdotes; I have the accepted answer for one of Ross Ulbricht’s (Silk Road’s Dread Pirate Roberts) SO questions that got him busted. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9563675/destroying-a-spe...
I remember being obsessed with that trial when it was going on, Ars Technica in particular had excellent coverage.
The fact that his SO question led to his demise is particularly nuts IMHO.
I always thought Microsoft would be a natural buyer given the tech stack and Microsoft's support for developers. Unrelated story, I have a day one Stack Overflow account. I don't remember how I found it but I'm sure it was posted on digg or slashdot or something at the time. I had a lot of posts in the first few years about some generally broad concepts, and completely inactive since. In spite of this, I am in the to…
The vast majority of users never post an answer or a question, and most of those that post only once or twice never get upvoted (or get downvoted more than upvoted), so their reputation stays at 1. I think they said a couple years ago that over 50 or 60% of registered users have 1 reputation.
After all those years of being merely a reader I felt like transitioning from reader to contributor recently and the amount of roadblocks you get at reputation one is simply too much. There's an answer you think could become more useful with your comment warning of a pitfall to be aware of? Sorry kid, no can do, you need to grind away with top level answers before you can spread you finite wisdom in the small print. This level of gamification puts the subset of contributing users through a heavy self-selection filter and I would expect that the subset that makes through would turn out far worse (spammy, eager to game the system) than what we see. Have the thresholds always been this high or did the walls grow higher over time?
I always thought Microsoft would be a natural buyer given the tech stack and Microsoft's support for developers. Unrelated story, I have a day one Stack Overflow account. I don't remember how I found it but I'm sure it was posted on digg or slashdot or something at the time. I had a lot of posts in the first few years about some generally broad concepts, and completely inactive since. In spite of this, I am in the to…
> In spite of this, I am in the top 7% of accounts on the site
This isn't hard since the majority of people are just browsing the site instead of contributing to it, e.g. I'm in top 0.09% from just answering support questions for our product from a minority of users who prefer asking on StackOverflow instead of our Customer Forums.
Of course you can invest at random and it will sometimes work. But it does not explain the realities of the industry. Even just one of the top funds has an infinitesimally small chance of existing randomly, let alone a glut of them.
The impeccable track record of index funds suggests that "Even just one of the top funds has an infinitesimally small chance of existing randomly" is not actually correct.
Well index funds aren't 'the top funds', they're the benchmark against which the alpha of the top funds is measured. If we change the framing to over/underperforming the S&P500 I don't see how the argument changes. RenTec is up 66% per year since 1988, how could that possibly be random?