91–100 of 107 posts
This is great. I was hoping this would happen since so much microdocumentation is only ever shared between team members on large projects and is not easily available to new members. On the other hand, I guess the idea they mooted early on of going open source is dead now.
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That's not being fair, that's being contrary. If StackOverflow was a stupid idea or poorly executed, no one would use it. Yes, they announced it from a pretty tall pulpit, but if no one cared what either of them had to say--for or against--no one would care to read their blogs, either.
Sure, it's being fair. Before we go off and pronounce that "Jeff Atwood has proven everyone wrong," let's keep a few things in mind. Also, having a lot of readership does not prove someone is a top shelf programmer. To be honest, this is not even something that Joel and, perhaps, Jeff haven't said themselves.
I'd say its possible to do this using Drupal in 2 weeks. 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.
Oh ok. Come back in a week with your site that parallels SO in features and activity then. And "I'm too busy working on other projects" doesn't count as an excuse.
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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).
Many people in this community think Atwood is a retard because he writes about stuff he's not an expert in, and because he uses Microsoft products. I venture to guess that many people here think he's not of the caliber of programmer that YC invests in. He has clearly proven them wrong.
None of that means he can't be a brilliant programmer. I'll admit to being a little surprised that SO took off as it did, and I certainly don't think that being relentlessly hyped again and again by both blogs explains all of that success. But I'm not sure why that proves me wrong; am I supposed to start liking Atwood's blog now? I opened it to have another look; the top post starts with a pronouncement that "abstractions are powerful things" (oh God), and then goes on to tediously argue that they invariably leak, but are still powerful things. No thanks.
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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.
That's interesting. However, there are already several clones of SO and a couple that reproduce the vast majority of the functionality.
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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 =)
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.
So you wanna write StackOverflow in a weekend. Let's assume, for sake of argument, that you decide it's okay to write it in ASP.NET MVC, and that I've decided to hand you the StackOverflow source code, page by page, so you can retype it verbatim. We'll also assume you type like me, at a cool 100 WPM (five characters per second[1]), and unlike me, make zero mistakes. StackOverflow's .cs, .sql, .css, .js, and .aspx fil…
Well from one of the recent podcasts it sounds like Jeff is set against doing internationalization. And Joel is showing admirable restraint in not strangling him.
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If it's just need a weekend, why not do it yourself? PS: Don't forget to open source it.
Alright, This will be my project this coming weekend! I'll try to live up to the challenge!
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If it's just need a weekend, why not do it yourself? PS: Don't forget to open source it.
Alright, This will be my project this coming weekend! I'll try to live up to the challenge!