6 ms·

scale.metaoptimize - A StackOverflow-like site about high scalability and NoSQL

74 points by alextp 16y ago

cont4gious 16y ago
since you are clearly ripping off the stackoverflow idea and design, why not submit this to area 51? this would not only save you any kind of hosting/bandwidth costs, but would probably get the word out faster.
- joshfinnie 16y ago
  I really don't like what stackoverflow is doing with the area 51 project. For example, the GIS version has 400+ people committed to it and I don't think it will see the light of day. This only has seven questions, but it is living and breathing. Isn't that is what is important about a website?
  - alextp 16y ago
    Yes, the area51 process seems very broken. I'm not sure why they ask for so much focus and bureaucracy for the new projects, given that stackoverflow is so broad, open-ended and easy to use. Until they fix it I guess the solution is to use external alternatives. I'm not sure I like the stackoverflow copying done by OSQA, but it's open source and easy to set up. I'm not the creator of this site, btw, just a user who thought it would be interesting to the HN community.
  - mhp 16y ago
    webapps went into public beta today. gaming went into private beta today. GIS will be out soon enough. The point in the democratic process we're pushing is so the site doesn't have seven questions on day one and someone checks it out and goes "Gee neat..." and never comes back again. The 400 people committed to the GIS proposal have committed "to visit at least three times per week, to ask at least three questions during the beta phase, and to answer as many questions as I can for at least three months." That's a pretty good head start for a site where you want expert answers to your questions and you want them fast. We're still tweaking the specifics of how much commitment a site needs, but we're certain it's more than a link on a few websites the first day. The design of the software goes a long way, but in order for these sites to not fall flat they have to give answers fast, and they have to attract experts. You can't make that happen by just launching a URL; we're working full time on making sure we figure out how to do that.
paraschopra 16y ago
Ironically, it is taking ages to load. Anyone else experiencing issues with the link?
- giu 16y ago
  Yep, I'm experiencing the same issue. I guess the first post of the Q&A site is something like "Has anyone tips on how to scale scale.metaoptimize?"
- bravura 16y ago
  [update: Service is now back to normal. There was an unusual load spike that lasted about ten minutes and is now over.] I'm the person that launched the site. I'm running it on a shared host. I apologize for any attendant problems with quality of service. (and yes, I do see the irony :) There is a pretty obvious fix. I'd need it switch it to a virtualized host or its own machine. Sorry I haven't done this yet. I launched the site as a hobby project. My previous site: http://metaoptimize.com/qa/ http://metaoptimize.com/qa/ got a large amount of visitors last week and no one complained about the load. Load randomly spiked to 60 on my shared host because of another user's job. OSQA devs tell me that running OSQA on its own machine gives very good performance. Even the largest OSQA site, like LockerGnome (http://lockergnome.net/ http://lockergnome.net/) supposedly only has a single digit CPU percent usage when run on its own machine.
snprbob86 16y ago
I think that it is quite distasteful to blatantly clone StackOverflow's functionality and design, right down to the "New here?" banner. This sort of behavior is no way to start a community.
- pixelbath 16y ago
  It's also an easy way to make existing members of a community feel more comfortable, I assume: http://news.usethesource.com/news http://news.usethesource.com/news
- bravura 16y ago
  I am the person who launched the site. I recently launched an OSQA (the Django+Python software running my site) for ML+NLP: http://metaoptimize.com/qa/ http://metaoptimize.com/qa/ That last site was incredibly successful. I have a few hundred signups, there is activity on the site every ten minutes or so, and everyone on the site is very grateful. I'll post some quotes at the end of my comment. I decided to try this again with another niche topic that I find very important: scalability. There is a lot of undocumented folk wisdom, as well as little known tips and tricks, that I believe should be discussed in a Q+A format with voting. I am sorry you consider my site distateful. I took the default OSQA skin and made some small customizations. I hope in reading the following comments about the ML+NLP site, you'll see that people genuinely value what I put up. I am hoping similarly to create value on another topic that a lot of people wrestle with daily. Things people are saying about MetaOptimize Q+A: Alexandre Passos (Unicamp): "Really thank you for that. As a machine learning phd student from somewhere far from most good research centers (I'm in brazil, and how many brazillian ML papers have you seen in NIPS/ICML recently?), I struggle a lot with this folk wisdom. Most professors around here haven't really interacted enough with the international ML community to be up to date" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1476247 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1476247) Philip Resnick (UMD): "Looking at the questions being asked, the people responding, and the quality of the discussion, I can already see this becoming the go-to place for those 'under the hood' details you rarely see in the textbooks or conference papers. This site is going to save a lot of people an awful lot of time and frustration." Aria Haghighi (Berkeley): "Both NLP and ML have a lot of folk wisdom about what works and what doesn't. A site like this is crucial for facilitating the sharing and validation of this collective knowledge." Ryan McDonald (Google): "A tool like this will help disseminate and archive the tricks and best practices that are common in NLP/ML, but are rarely written about at length in papers." esoom on Reddit: "This is awesome. I'm really impressed by the quality of some of the answers, too. Within five minutes of skimming the site, I learned a neat trick that isn't widely discussed in the literature." (http://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/ckw5k/stackoverflow_for_machine_learning_and_natural/c0tb3gc http://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/ckw5k/stack...)
epi0Bauqu 16y ago
Will there be cc dumps like SO? http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/stack-overflow-creative-commons-data-dump/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/stack-overflow-creativ...
- someone_here 16y ago
  Note: That's "creative commons" and not "credit cards".
  - pavs 16y ago
    I remember back in the days when you could trade CC dumps on private irc channels. I think back then all you needed was name, pin, number and you were good to go.
scorpion032 16y ago
The fact that all these "stackoverflow-like" sites copy the simple SO design is a testimony to the designer that designed it. For years before stackoverflow, everyone copied the PHP-BB UI. Stackoverflow changed it. New sites can come up with a better and different design. The ones that do, stand a better chance of making it big than ending up as many of those stackexchange1.0 sites (that died).

74 points by alextp 16y ago

since you are clearly ripping off the stackoverflow idea and design, why not submit this to area 51? this would not only save you any kind of hosting/bandwidth costs, but would probably get the word out faster.

joshfinnie 16y ago
I really don't like what stackoverflow is doing with the area 51 project. For example, the GIS version has 400+ people committed to it and I don't think it will see the light of day. This only has seven questions, but it is living and breathing. Isn't that is what is important about a website?
- alextp 16y ago
  Yes, the area51 process seems very broken. I'm not sure why they ask for so much focus and bureaucracy for the new projects, given that stackoverflow is so broad, open-ended and easy to use. Until they fix it I guess the solution is to use external alternatives. I'm not sure I like the stackoverflow copying done by OSQA, but it's open source and easy to set up. I'm not the creator of this site, btw, just a user who thought it would be interesting to the HN community.
- mhp 16y ago
  webapps went into public beta today. gaming went into private beta today. GIS will be out soon enough. The point in the democratic process we're pushing is so the site doesn't have seven questions on day one and someone checks it out and goes "Gee neat..." and never comes back again. The 400 people committed to the GIS proposal have committed "to visit at least three times per week, to ask at least three questions during the beta phase, and to answer as many questions as I can for at least three months." That's a pretty good head start for a site where you want expert answers to your questions and you want them fast. We're still tweaking the specifics of how much commitment a site needs, but we're certain it's more than a link on a few websites the first day. The design of the software goes a long way, but in order for these sites to not fall flat they have to give answers fast, and they have to attract experts. You can't make that happen by just launching a URL; we're working full time on making sure we figure out how to do that.

paraschopra 16y ago

Ironically, it is taking ages to load. Anyone else experiencing issues with the link?

giu 16y ago
Yep, I'm experiencing the same issue. I guess the first post of the Q&A site is something like "Has anyone tips on how to scale scale.metaoptimize?"
bravura 16y ago
[update: Service is now back to normal. There was an unusual load spike that lasted about ten minutes and is now over.] I'm the person that launched the site. I'm running it on a shared host. I apologize for any attendant problems with quality of service. (and yes, I do see the irony :) There is a pretty obvious fix. I'd need it switch it to a virtualized host or its own machine. Sorry I haven't done this yet. I launched the site as a hobby project. My previous site: http://metaoptimize.com/qa/ http://metaoptimize.com/qa/ got a large amount of visitors last week and no one complained about the load. Load randomly spiked to 60 on my shared host because of another user's job. OSQA devs tell me that running OSQA on its own machine gives very good performance. Even the largest OSQA site, like LockerGnome (http://lockergnome.net/ http://lockergnome.net/) supposedly only has a single digit CPU percent usage when run on its own machine.

snprbob86 16y ago

I think that it is quite distasteful to blatantly clone StackOverflow's functionality and design, right down to the "New here?" banner. This sort of behavior is no way to start a community.

pixelbath 16y ago
It's also an easy way to make existing members of a community feel more comfortable, I assume: http://news.usethesource.com/news http://news.usethesource.com/news
bravura 16y ago
I am the person who launched the site. I recently launched an OSQA (the Django+Python software running my site) for ML+NLP: http://metaoptimize.com/qa/ http://metaoptimize.com/qa/ That last site was incredibly successful. I have a few hundred signups, there is activity on the site every ten minutes or so, and everyone on the site is very grateful. I'll post some quotes at the end of my comment. I decided to try this again with another niche topic that I find very important: scalability. There is a lot of undocumented folk wisdom, as well as little known tips and tricks, that I believe should be discussed in a Q+A format with voting. I am sorry you consider my site distateful. I took the default OSQA skin and made some small customizations. I hope in reading the following comments about the ML+NLP site, you'll see that people genuinely value what I put up. I am hoping similarly to create value on another topic that a lot of people wrestle with daily. Things people are saying about MetaOptimize Q+A: Alexandre Passos (Unicamp): "Really thank you for that. As a machine learning phd student from somewhere far from most good research centers (I'm in brazil, and how many brazillian ML papers have you seen in NIPS/ICML recently?), I struggle a lot with this folk wisdom. Most professors around here haven't really interacted enough with the international ML community to be up to date" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1476247 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1476247) Philip Resnick (UMD): "Looking at the questions being asked, the people responding, and the quality of the discussion, I can already see this becoming the go-to place for those 'under the hood' details you rarely see in the textbooks or conference papers. This site is going to save a lot of people an awful lot of time and frustration." Aria Haghighi (Berkeley): "Both NLP and ML have a lot of folk wisdom about what works and what doesn't. A site like this is crucial for facilitating the sharing and validation of this collective knowledge." Ryan McDonald (Google): "A tool like this will help disseminate and archive the tricks and best practices that are common in NLP/ML, but are rarely written about at length in papers." esoom on Reddit: "This is awesome. I'm really impressed by the quality of some of the answers, too. Within five minutes of skimming the site, I learned a neat trick that isn't widely discussed in the literature." (http://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/ckw5k/stackoverflow_for_machine_learning_and_natural/c0tb3gc http://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/ckw5k/stack...)

epi0Bauqu 16y ago

Will there be cc dumps like SO? http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/stack-overflow-creative-commons-data-dump/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/stack-overflow-creativ...

someone_here 16y ago
Note: That's "creative commons" and not "credit cards".
- pavs 16y ago
  I remember back in the days when you could trade CC dumps on private irc channels. I think back then all you needed was name, pin, number and you were good to go.

scorpion032 16y ago

The fact that all these "stackoverflow-like" sites copy the simple SO design is a testimony to the designer that designed it. For years before stackoverflow, everyone copied the PHP-BB UI. Stackoverflow changed it. New sites can come up with a better and different design. The ones that do, stand a better chance of making it big than ending up as many of those stackexchange1.0 sites (that died).