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

StackExchange- The Stack Overflow Knowledge Exchange Platform

stackexchange.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 107 posts

Re: StackExchange- The Stack Overflow Knowledge Exchange Platform

#61

Post by Jem »

ktharavaad wrote: post #50
lucraft wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Link?

I'll update here as I make progress: http://code.google.com/p/hackerexchange/ I'm aware of the chinese solutions done in Django but after looking it over, I think I can do better. I'll prolly write it in PHP too ( gasp ) so any n00b can basically rip it off and throw it unto shared hosting! ahh, gotta love opensource =)

"A clone of stackoverflow.com to be done over the course of the weekends"

Weekends plural? I thought this was only going to take 1?

Re: StackExchange- The Stack Overflow Knowledge Exchange Platform

#63

Post by teej »

jasonkester wrote: post #52
ktharavaad wrote: post #14

Seems really pricey for a relatively simple software like this. Someone write an opensource alternative? it looks like something that can be thrown together in a weekend.

A weekend? Really? We have documented evidence in the form of podcasts that it took a team of 3 talented developers about 6 months to build StackOverflow. If you're looking for an order of magnitude estimate for how long it would take to reproduce it, that's it. How exactly are you planning to reduce an 18 man-month project down to a single weekend of your time? More generally, why is this attitude so common among pr…

> More generally, why is this attitude so common among programmers? How, in the face of documented proof to the contrary could an intelligent person like the parent still consider a site of the complexity of StackOverflow to be a "weekend job"?

"Shit's easy syndrome" http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009_04_01_archive.html

Re: StackExchange- The Stack Overflow Knowledge Exchange Platform

#64

Post by raganwald »

davidw wrote: post #56
jasonkester wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A weekend? Really? We have documented evidence in the form of podcasts that it took a team of 3 talented developers about 6 months to build StackOverflow. If you're looking for an order of magnitude estimate for how long it would take to reproduce it, that's it. How exactly are you planning to reduce an 18 man-month project down to a single weekend of your time? More generally, why is this attitude so common among pr…

I think it's certainly longer than a weekend, but recreating something that exists is usually easier than doing it the first time. You don't really have to worry so much about how things ought to fit together - you just copy.

And I can't tell you how many doomed Death March projects started with this assumption. "The requirements are done, the design is done, we know it can be done, simply copy what we see there."

The boil it down to a cliché, copying what someone else has built is exactly the same problem as rewriting an existing application from scratch, without the benefit of being able to read the source code.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

Re: StackExchange- The Stack Overflow Knowledge Exchange Platform

#65

Post by biohacker42 »

ktharavaad wrote: post #14

Seems really pricey for a relatively simple software like this. Someone write an opensource alternative? it looks like something that can be thrown together in a weekend.

Right, but the version meant for you is free. This stuff is for sale to people who are NOT programmers.

Re: StackExchange- The Stack Overflow Knowledge Exchange Platform

#66

Post by davidw »

raganwald wrote: post #64
davidw wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's certainly longer than a weekend, but recreating something that exists is usually easier than doing it the first time. You don't really have to worry so much about how things ought to fit together - you just copy.

And I can't tell you how many doomed Death March projects started with this assumption. "The requirements are done, the design is done, we know it can be done, simply copy what we see there." The boil it down to a cliché, copying what someone else has built is exactly the same problem as rewriting an existing application from scratch, without the benefit of being able to read the source code. http://www.joelonsoftwar…

Rewriting a cross platform browser in C++ is way more difficult than writing something that took a small team 6 months to do. I'm not trying to say that it's a weekend, but have a look at SO. Unless there's something I'm missing, it's not "deep hacking", but more "crank it out" (not to take anything away from that team - they certainly did nice work!). Scaling might be an issue sooner or later, and that would take some more thinking, but the basic thing just doesn't strike me as some Big Hairy Problem.

So, yeah, be wary of "hey, that looks easy!", but don't think things are impossible either.

Re: StackExchange- The Stack Overflow Knowledge Exchange Platform

#67

Post by jussij »

ankhmoop wrote: post #23
mikedouglas wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that business model worked so well for Google Answers?

On the other hand, Stack Overflow is racing to the bottom, so to speak, on the quality of questions and the people answering them. Either way, money is what would entice me to answer questions on the web. Currently I do it for free on IRC, but only because standing community helps ensure that the quality of questions is reasonable on the channels I frequent.

I stopped answering questions on SO after Mr Atwood himself decide to delete three of my replies.

Call me stupid, but I though the SO down vote button was designed to do the message filtering and not Mr Atwood super SO user ID.

Re: StackExchange- The Stack Overflow Knowledge Exchange Platform

#68

Post by raganwald »

davidw wrote: post #66
raganwald wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I can't tell you how many doomed Death March projects started with this assumption. "The requirements are done, the design is done, we know it can be done, simply copy what we see there." The boil it down to a cliché, copying what someone else has built is exactly the same problem as rewriting an existing application from scratch, without the benefit of being able to read the source code. http://www.joelonsoftwar…

Rewriting a cross platform browser in C++ is way more difficult than writing something that took a small team 6 months to do. I'm not trying to say that it's a weekend, but have a look at SO. Unless there's something I'm missing, it's not "deep hacking", but more "crank it out" (not to take anything away from that team - they certainly did nice work!). Scaling might be an issue sooner or later, and that would take so…

Rewriting a browser isn't impossible either, as Firefox proves. Perhaps SO is an order of magnitude easier than a browser, but I stand by my suggestion that copying an existing application you didn't actually write is often much more difficult than expected and has led many teams to their doom.

Re: StackExchange- The Stack Overflow Knowledge Exchange Platform

#69

Post by [deleted] »

patio11 wrote: post #27
orph wrote: post #17

Here is a half-completed django implementation of StackOverflow called soclone: http://code.google.com/p/soclone/ . No changes since 2008 though.

I think this is going in my next essay about OSS vs. proprietary software. Proprietary software: OK, so technically it both exists and works, but it costs money. OSS: It has only had one man-week of labor in it. The software is not feature complete. However, if it actually worked, it would be awesome because you'd be able to browse your corporate knowledge base on your Wii . Also, it would support browsers without Ja…

[deleted]

Re: StackExchange- The Stack Overflow Knowledge Exchange Platform

#70

Post by davidw »

raganwald wrote: post #68
davidw wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rewriting a cross platform browser in C++ is way more difficult than writing something that took a small team 6 months to do. I'm not trying to say that it's a weekend, but have a look at SO. Unless there's something I'm missing, it's not "deep hacking", but more "crank it out" (not to take anything away from that team - they certainly did nice work!). Scaling might be an issue sooner or later, and that would take so…

Rewriting a browser isn't impossible either, as Firefox proves. Perhaps SO is an order of magnitude easier than a browser, but I stand by my suggestion that copying an existing application you didn't actually write is often much more difficult than expected and has led many teams to their doom.

My comparison was "writing something from scratch" vs "copying". If a team has trouble with copying, wouldn't "writing it from scratch" be even more likely to end in failure?

Also, with something like SO - you can pretty much see the models, and how they interact. That's already giving you a lot.

Post reply on HN