spolsky

22 ms·

181.
by spolsky 16y ago
There is a 7 day secret, private beta so that a few hundred super-committed people can fill up the site with questions to set the tone, and establish a system of tags. That way when the public beta hits, the site is already stocked with a b
182.
by spolsky 16y ago
it's not incredible, it's by design :) We only open the sites that we know will get traction (through the "Area51" process, see http://area51.stackexchange.com ). Right now it looks like we've got about 10 sites that are pretty much guaran
183.
by spolsky 16y ago
That was a serious comment; I'm not being snide. Stack Overflow is the only company I know of in the Q&A space with the deliberate strategy of creating individual Q&A communities for like-minded experts. The strategy of creating one
184.
by spolsky 16y ago
If you're interested in the pro webmasters site, it's likely to go into closed beta in a matter of days... you should commit to the site today so that you can participate in the closed beta. The closed beta will be 7 days long after which w
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by spolsky 16y ago
OK, then you should buy stock in Yahoo!Answers or Mahalo and short Stack Overflow.
186.
by spolsky 16y ago
I don't think that it's a foregone conclusion that Area51 generates niche sites, just because it generates niche site proposals . I for one believe that it's the big blockbuster stackoverflow-size sites that will actually make it to the en
187.
by spolsky 16y ago
If you're referring to Max Levchin, he was a key early founder and made a lot more than that. But there were probably HUNDREDS of later employees who made more than about a million and THAT'S why PayPal spawned so many startups.
188.
by spolsky 16y ago
A lot of early PayPal founders probably cashed out to the tune of a million or two bucks. That's not enough money to retire, but it is enough money to take a risk on your own startup.
189.
by spolsky 16y ago
Check out the area51 tag on http://meta.stackoverflow.com for endless in depth discussion of the exact mechanics.
190.
by spolsky 16y ago
Indeed, we are using Area 51 to gauge commitment to a particular Q&A site so it does have a certain amount of hoops to jump through. The last time we tried to let people create Stack Exchange sites without demonstrated commitment, most
191.
by spolsky 16y ago
Maybe this is a sign that someone is porting android to a new CPU!
192.
by spolsky 16y ago
Aren't there are processor-specific assembler versions of memset for common chips? There are usually assembler versions (for example using REP MOVS on Intel which is light years faster) or even unrolled C versions (typically setting 8 or 16
193.
by spolsky 16y ago
Yes. Crikey. There are thousands of companies in the UK that hire programmers. How many of them can you possibly blow? Besides, the more jobs you apply for, the more practice you'll have applying.
194.
by spolsky 16y ago
hmm. I can't tell the difference between that and any other twitter feed. Mindless gibberish brain-hand-grenades that take 45 minutes to decipher and turn out to be about a television series I've never seen.
195.
by spolsky 16y ago
I almost always consider it a strong positive, because Microsoft has a strong selection process (everyone who works there went through a day of interviewing). That said, the way that Microsoft has been dealing with its extreme uncoolness la
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by spolsky 16y ago
I can tell you from experience... the job changes from making to managing. (c.f. http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html )
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by spolsky 16y ago
Easy: Grandfather every existing customer, permanently.
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by spolsky 17y ago
We're going through this right now ("converting" an LLC to a C-Corp to make VCs happy). It's not hard, not expensive, and not cumbersome. We're creating a new C Corp, and making the old LLC a subsidiary of the C Corp. It's common and standa
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by spolsky 17y ago
Alain de Botton is a beautiful writer... if you liked this, you'll love "A week at the airport," a whole book full of this kind of stuff from Heathrow Airport. (Currently not available in US, but you can order from Amazon UK with your US ac
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by spolsky 17y ago
Maybe you have different goals than us. You're trying to build communities... we're trying to make the Internet a better place to get expert answers.
201.
by spolsky 17y ago
I do the best I can not to comment on competitors, although I can't always live up to my ideal. There are a lot of companies built on the business model of making low-cost, low-quality pages for long-tail Google search results, either algor
202.
by spolsky 17y ago
Sounds like you have a great business plan. In the meantime, I think that the Stack Overflow model has proven itself among nerds, and I think that your assertion that nerds are weird in some way and need completely different software than t
203.
by spolsky 17y ago
Still, when you look at how answers are ranked on Stack Overflow, it really seems to work. The top ranked answers really are the best... far more than on a traditional PHPBB type site.
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by spolsky 17y ago
I consider Jason a friend ( http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/podcast-56/ ), a very smart guy, and a great entrepreneur, although I have a different philosophy than he does on how to build a Q&A site.
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by spolsky 17y ago
More specifically, I think what he's saying is, "if you write a URL shortener or image uploader, don't whine when/if Twitter decides that it needs to compete against you by building that functionality into the product."
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by spolsky 17y ago
the wording says "Applications must be ORIGINALLY written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript"
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by spolsky 17y ago
I agree. If you're getting sick of reading our overstated and undersupported crap, I suggest getting a puppy. During the first few months of his life you'll be too busy to surf the internet. I barely have time for one or two HN stories a da
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by spolsky 17y ago
We did, by any reasonable measurement. Compete undercounts us ridiculously. Alexa and Quantcast showed us passing them months ago.
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by spolsky 17y ago
that's how it works in Mercurial, if you make your branches by cloning.
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by spolsky 17y ago
Feature flags are usually just a poor-man's way to separate development (changing) and live (stable) code branches. They have explosive complexity (2^n combinations need to be tested). They require you to contort your code unnaturally to mi

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