71–80 of 107 posts
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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 =)
I'm surprised/impressed at how quickly they're moving on this whole Stack Overflow concept. There are YC startups that don't seem to be as nimble as Atwood's team. What's the long-term relationship between Atwood and Fog Creek?
SO is only, I think, 3 programmers including Atwood. So I should hope they're nimble. Why they should be any less nimble than a YC startup would never even occur to me. Spolsky is really more of a silent partner in this (maybe not so silent publicly, but the impression I get from their podcasts is that he is involved only on the business end).
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Why pay $999/mo, when you can have a few hackers code it up in a couple of weeks for a few grand. The long road of our industry is littered with the corpses of projects which would only take a few programmers a couple of weeks to program. But technical risk isn't the big worry here for a startup. Hell, someone should do it here, would be a decent startup idea, copy them, but charge $29.99/$59.99/$99.99 for your plans…
The first part, I wasn't talking about building it. I was talking about a customer, who is stuck paying $999-2500 a month, for a product that can be built by a few programmers in a few weeks. That hypothetical startup wouldn't need to give customer service. You want customer service and like paying large fees? Go to stackexchange, you want a working solution at a huge discount? You come to the hypothetical startup. B…
3 programmers * 2 weeks * $100/h = $24k
Or, the ability to run this right now for 10m to 2 years.
I've long thought that a StackOverflow for photographers would be a great resource... but not a business. Unfortunately, the StackExchange pricing assumes that you will be a revenue-generating because no one can justify $129/month on running a free resource.
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When I first saw it, I liked the clean look and feel, but hated the "DAVE, I CAN'T LET YOU DO THAT" approach to permissions with regards to comments, votes, and the like. As a beginning user, you had (have? don't know if they've changed it) all these links and buttons that are displayed, but don't let you do anything; they just give you a lame message about requiring N gold stars before you can do that.
"Dave, I can't let you do that?" You do know that SO allows questions and answers from people without even requiring them to log in? They allow content from essentially anonymous users. The restrictions are along the "meta" parts (voting to indicate the quality of an answer), I think it is entirely sensible to restrict these actions to users who have built up a currency of trust within the SO community. That being sa…
That would be really annoying, because you wouldn't know that these options exist, until you could use them (i.e. you're possibly confused and you don't know what the reward for collecting reputation is.)
Better grey out the things you aren't allowed to do yet, so you can see them and see that you're not there yet - preferably with an explanation of when you will be.
I forgot what the term for this is, but I think it's very often a good way to do it. Stable interface? Something like that.
Oh, wait, did you say "3" talented developers?
Please, less than a week then. Drupal already has ready-made modules for this type of functionality. All you need is to throw 'em together. The price is too high, sorry.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The first part, I wasn't talking about building it. I was talking about a customer, who is stuck paying $999-2500 a month, for a product that can be built by a few programmers in a few weeks. That hypothetical startup wouldn't need to give customer service. You want customer service and like paying large fees? Go to stackexchange, you want a working solution at a huge discount? You come to the hypothetical startup. B…
Conservatively: 3 programmers * 2 weeks * $100/h = $24k Or, the ability to run this right now for 10m to 2 years.