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

Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

651–660 of 881 posts

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#651

Post by olalonde »

dested wrote: post #11

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…

Same, I'm "top 0.20% overall" on askubuntu.com because of some simple questions I asked in 2010 (inactive since).

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#652

Post by mr_toad »

lordnacho wrote: post #276
dested wrote: post #11

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…

Something about how mean people are with voting keeps it this way. It's just very hard to get a vote at all. I happened to get a gold badge today for 10k views on an old question. Of those 10k people 17 decided to upvote.

I wonder how many of those 10,000 views were from logged in users? I’m guessing there are a lot of people who use Stack Overflow without ever creating an account.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#653

Post by jbb_hn »

chadlavi wrote: post #458
ddingus wrote: post #318

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…

"You've read 3 of your 5 free answers this month"

Sadly, I think you probably nailed it. Back in the day, “experts exchange” was the place to get answers to questions, and look where they’re at.

2 billion dollars. That’s a LOT of money even by 2021 standards. You better believe the investors will be looking for their ROI.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#654

Post by bhandziuk »

nickysielicki wrote: post #567
bhandziuk wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, since the very start. I'm 95% sure. That's been the big selling point from what I can remember: there is a very low barrier to entry (make an account)

Then I must be misremembering, but I'm unsure how. I'm sure that I've had the experience of wanting to contribute to SO to correct bad information and being unable to do so due to low karma, and that was enough to keep me off the site.

I don't get it really but I think a lot of people have a similar experience. So while technically you are allowed to post an answer/question the moment you join there must be something else standing in the way. I don't know what that could be but so many people wouldn't complain if there wasn't something.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#656

Post by CRConrad »

actuator wrote: post #200
bronson wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd probably also downvote all the pay-for-placement results on Google's search page now. That would lead to some difficult questions.

You mean ads? I don't think search results themselves are altered based on payments.

Depends. We have trained ourselves to be blind to garish pictures top and bottom, or over to the side... But when the top item in the search results column proper is distinguished from the others only by a laconic "sponsored result" label below it, is that perceived as what we usually call "an ad"? I'd say it's pretty reasonable to call that "pay for placement".

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#657

Post by notRobot »

bad_username wrote: post #381
sjclemmy wrote: post #346

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...

Raymond Chen answered my question. And then blogged about it in Old New Thing.

Link?

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#658

Post by CRConrad »

mitchdoogle wrote: post #163
cheschire wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the first couple months I couldn’t shake this feeling I was looking at a shady site. Then one day it dawned on me I had been subconsciously reading “expert sex change” the whole time. Terrible domain choice.

This comment reminds me of those kids in middle school who would tell you to write, "pen 15" on a piece of paper and then laugh like crazy when you did because it resembles the word "penis".

"Type 58008 into your calculator. Now turn it upside down!"

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#659

Post by thunderrabbit »

int_19h wrote: post #462
dstick wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most of it is really down to the quality of the answers you've given combined with the vast amount of users on SO. I'm user 537XXXX with an account that can't be more than 8 years old but I did spend a solid 6 months actively posting detailed solutions to problems I ran into - ~50 in total. And some more general answers. Which has amounted to ~4.900 points. Which isn't _that_ much. Just 490 upvotes. Or 10 per…

It's also very much about timing. If you happen to write a popular answer at the time when interest in some particular tech is high for whatever reason, that gets a lot of views and upvotes early on. And once it has those upvotes, people looking for related answers later are more likely to stumble onto it. I still get a steady rep trickle from a generic answer about WinRT back when Win8 was the hot new thing (or mess…

I'm chuckling at the idea that you could have possibly misinterpreted that post.

"No, int_19h, he said to NOT use regex to parse HTML!"

int_19h: wạ͈ͣ̿i̘̱͚̝̍̎ṱ̜̙ͯ̏̾̐̃ͮ,̿̑̓̒̇̄ ͈̺̯͙̰ͦ̐̎̂w̜̦̱͇̝͂̐̈́̄ͅh͚̞̯̰͑͑̐̋ͪa̩͕͑̂̒̔t̪̬̱̞̞̹͌̿́̆̑ͮͮ?͕̮͒̊̃͒̊̈

/s

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#660

Post by xur17 »

khuey wrote: post #599
ThomasRedstone wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't how a Ponzi scheme works, a Ponzi scheme directly uses fees taken from new members to pay out older ones, lying and saying it's from actual business activity. Crypto doesn't behave any differently than the stock market (except the fundamentals are a little shakier, okay, a lot shakier).

Cryptocurrency doesn't have dividends or share buybacks which are what make stocks have inherent value.

Yes it does. Proof of stake networks (Ethereum, Tezos, etc) pay dividends + transaction fees to stakers, decentralized exchanges pay a cut of fees to token holders (with decent P/E ratios), and the list goes on.

This is an out of date view that does not match the current reality.

Post reply on HN