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I loved listening to the Stack Overflow podcast with Jeff and Joel. It was kinda crazy that they were doing a podcast like that while they (Jeff mostly) were bu

by pan69 5y ago

I loved listening to the Stack Overflow podcast with Jeff and Joel. It was kinda crazy that they were doing a podcast like that while they (Jeff mostly) were building it and coming up with the name, etc. Still have all the mp3's somewhere. Edit: I'm in the top 2%. Most of my rep. comes from interest earned on questions/answers I posted very early on.

swivelmaster 5y ago
I used to listen to every episode of that while taking walks around Berkeley. I totally forgot about it until I saw this comment!
mrweasel 5y ago
It is still one of the most interesting podcasts I’ve listened to. Jeff and Joel completely chanced how I view hardware. So far they’ve been right in that scaling out isn’t something most of us need to worry about for a LONG time. Modern computers are insanely fast and capable of much more than we think.
- sitkack 5y ago
  Most sites could run on a single mid range machine. Top 500 sites could run on a small cluster of less than 10 machines. You have to balance work to external egress to intracluster bandwidth while accounting for your total random IOP budget. A well tuned monolith is a beautiful thing.
  - 867-5309 5y ago
    a CDN wouldn't go amiss either, or at least some sort of geographic mirroring
dstick 5y ago
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 answer on average. Still - that puts me in the top 8%. My guess is that the high percentage is more due to the sheer volume ;-)
- einpoklum 5y ago
  Yeah, the reputation model is nowhere near representative of the significance of your contribution. Just try not to take it overly seriously... I got my reputation asking > 1,000 questions and answering > 1,200 , and I can't say whether I should be higher up than people with 10x less reputation than me or 2x more than me.
  - kbenson 5y ago
    You're exactly where you should be. Reputation isn't an assessment of skill or knowledge, it's how useful you are/were to the site (as you state, contribution), and the site needs questions as well as answers. The person with 1000 reputation purely from asking questions is no less deserving of that score than the person that got the same score purely for answering some. It's probably better to think of the points as something akin to money paid out by mechanical turk for doing things the site needs, including cleanup and formatting in some cases. At that point, your contribution and what it means is fairly clear.
    - einpoklum 5y ago
      > it's how useful you are/were to the site One person asks a single naive question once: "How do I undo the most recent local commit with GIT", gets 200,000 reputation. Another person answers 100 complex, delicate questions useful to high-performance computation underlying widely-available cloud services; gets an average score of 5, has 5000 reputation. Another person occasionally asks and answers a few questions, reaching 2000 reputation, but does a lot of editing work, triages new posts, fixes up tag pages etc. Who has been more useful to the site?
      - 21bits 5y ago
        The person who asked the naive question that a million other new git users will have at some time or another.
        einpoklum 5y ago
haakon 5y ago
After all these years, I still remember exact locations I walked while listening to that. Funny thing, memory.
- lylo 5y ago
  That’s funny, so do I!
- nargella 5y ago
  Method of Loci
  - xpe 5y ago
    Not quite the same as what the commenters are mentioning: an involuntary, strong association of ideas and (real) places ... still, an interesting method, which may harness the brain's ability to connect location with particular non-location thoughts.
wwweston 5y ago
The dynamic makes sense: the more popular the question, the more likely it is to get asked early on. That means early answerers will reap benefits from the popularity of the questions down the road. There's definitely an "interest" dynamic to it, but there's also something like consuming the solutions with a good effort-to-reward ratio inside a search space early and then subsequent solutions get harder (kindof like a cryptocurrency?) Niche questions do present an interesting opportunity, though. My highest-ranked answer was about rolling your own setInterval / setTimeout function for JavaScript implementations running on the JVM that didn't have them. Not a hot topic, but apparently a few dozen other people cared about this over the years.
- johnmaguire 5y ago
  It's always interesting to see what SO posts I participated in - either as an asker or answerer - that became popular over time.
- z3t4 5y ago
  High reward for joining early is a good growth strategy.
  - xchaotic 5y ago
    It is also why crypto is having a run. Basically a Ponzi scheme that rewards early adopters
    - JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
      Yep like the stock market and the idea of money.
    - ThomasRedstone 5y ago
      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).
dotancohen 5y ago
Interesting. I'm also in the top 2%, but I'm far from being an early adopter on that site, with a userId in the hundreds of thousands: https://stackoverflow.com/users/343302/dotancohen https://stackoverflow.com/users/343302/dotancohen I was never even very active. I can only suppose that only 1 out of every 50 signups ever accrues any real significant amount of rep.
- int_19h 5y ago
  There's definitely a strong compounding effect over time. I have a 6-digit UID there, but haven't been active for years now. However, I'm still in the top 0.16%, largely thanks to a steady trickle of rep from all those old answers that are still relevant. But any such "interest" does apply to the magnitude of the initial contribution, so merely being around for long is not enough - you had to have a sufficiently productive period of activity to capitalize on.
thefourthchime 5y ago
Came here to share this! What a weird and innocent time that was.
Timothycquinn 5y ago
Agreed. Having Jeff and Joel on the podcast was great and the hosts really complimented each other. However, once Jeff left, that was pretty much for me though and I tuned out after a few episodes. Just wasn't the same without Jeff. Personally, I was a latecomer to the podcast and was about a year behind the launch of SO but still in top 13 today.
barelyusable 5y ago
I'm a fan of Spolsky's writing. I haven't heard of that podcast before. I see joelonsoftware.com has some expired links. Where can I listen to this archived podcast ?
- jenyay 5y ago
  You have them on SoundCloud [1]. Note, there is a mess with numbering of episodes. [1] https://soundcloud.com/stack-exchange https://soundcloud.com/stack-exchange

by pan69 5y ago

swivelmaster 5y ago

I used to listen to every episode of that while taking walks around Berkeley. I totally forgot about it until I saw this comment!

mrweasel 5y ago

It is still one of the most interesting podcasts I’ve listened to. Jeff and Joel completely chanced how I view hardware. So far they’ve been right in that scaling out isn’t something most of us need to worry about for a LONG time. Modern computers are insanely fast and capable of much more than we think.

sitkack 5y ago
Most sites could run on a single mid range machine. Top 500 sites could run on a small cluster of less than 10 machines. You have to balance work to external egress to intracluster bandwidth while accounting for your total random IOP budget. A well tuned monolith is a beautiful thing.
- 867-5309 5y ago
  a CDN wouldn't go amiss either, or at least some sort of geographic mirroring

dstick 5y ago

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 answer on average. Still - that puts me in the top 8%. My guess is that the high percentage is more due to the sheer volume ;-)

einpoklum 5y ago
Yeah, the reputation model is nowhere near representative of the significance of your contribution. Just try not to take it overly seriously... I got my reputation asking > 1,000 questions and answering > 1,200 , and I can't say whether I should be higher up than people with 10x less reputation than me or 2x more than me.
- kbenson 5y ago
  You're exactly where you should be. Reputation isn't an assessment of skill or knowledge, it's how useful you are/were to the site (as you state, contribution), and the site needs questions as well as answers. The person with 1000 reputation purely from asking questions is no less deserving of that score than the person that got the same score purely for answering some. It's probably better to think of the points as something akin to money paid out by mechanical turk for doing things the site needs, including cleanup and formatting in some cases. At that point, your contribution and what it means is fairly clear.
  - einpoklum 5y ago
    > it's how useful you are/were to the site One person asks a single naive question once: "How do I undo the most recent local commit with GIT", gets 200,000 reputation. Another person answers 100 complex, delicate questions useful to high-performance computation underlying widely-available cloud services; gets an average score of 5, has 5000 reputation. Another person occasionally asks and answers a few questions, reaching 2000 reputation, but does a lot of editing work, triages new posts, fixes up tag pages etc. Who has been more useful to the site?
    - 21bits 5y ago
      The person who asked the naive question that a million other new git users will have at some time or another.
      - einpoklum 5y ago

haakon 5y ago

After all these years, I still remember exact locations I walked while listening to that. Funny thing, memory.

lylo 5y ago
That’s funny, so do I!
nargella 5y ago
Method of Loci
- xpe 5y ago
  Not quite the same as what the commenters are mentioning: an involuntary, strong association of ideas and (real) places ... still, an interesting method, which may harness the brain's ability to connect location with particular non-location thoughts.

wwweston 5y ago

The dynamic makes sense: the more popular the question, the more likely it is to get asked early on. That means early answerers will reap benefits from the popularity of the questions down the road. There's definitely an "interest" dynamic to it, but there's also something like consuming the solutions with a good effort-to-reward ratio inside a search space early and then subsequent solutions get harder (kindof like a cryptocurrency?) Niche questions do present an interesting opportunity, though. My highest-ranked answer was about rolling your own setInterval / setTimeout function for JavaScript implementations running on the JVM that didn't have them. Not a hot topic, but apparently a few dozen other people cared about this over the years.

johnmaguire 5y ago
It's always interesting to see what SO posts I participated in - either as an asker or answerer - that became popular over time.
z3t4 5y ago
High reward for joining early is a good growth strategy.
- xchaotic 5y ago
  It is also why crypto is having a run. Basically a Ponzi scheme that rewards early adopters
  - JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
    Yep like the stock market and the idea of money.
  - ThomasRedstone 5y ago
    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).

dotancohen 5y ago

Interesting. I'm also in the top 2%, but I'm far from being an early adopter on that site, with a userId in the hundreds of thousands: https://stackoverflow.com/users/343302/dotancohen https://stackoverflow.com/users/343302/dotancohen I was never even very active. I can only suppose that only 1 out of every 50 signups ever accrues any real significant amount of rep.

int_19h 5y ago
There's definitely a strong compounding effect over time. I have a 6-digit UID there, but haven't been active for years now. However, I'm still in the top 0.16%, largely thanks to a steady trickle of rep from all those old answers that are still relevant. But any such "interest" does apply to the magnitude of the initial contribution, so merely being around for long is not enough - you had to have a sufficiently productive period of activity to capitalize on.

thefourthchime 5y ago

Came here to share this! What a weird and innocent time that was.

Timothycquinn 5y ago

Agreed. Having Jeff and Joel on the podcast was great and the hosts really complimented each other. However, once Jeff left, that was pretty much for me though and I tuned out after a few episodes. Just wasn't the same without Jeff. Personally, I was a latecomer to the podcast and was about a year behind the launch of SO but still in top 13 today.

barelyusable 5y ago

I'm a fan of Spolsky's writing. I haven't heard of that podcast before. I see joelonsoftware.com has some expired links. Where can I listen to this archived podcast ?

jenyay 5y ago
You have them on SoundCloud [1]. Note, there is a mess with numbering of episodes. [1] https://soundcloud.com/stack-exchange https://soundcloud.com/stack-exchange