Stack Overflow Blog

That's like asking the foxes how the farmer should manage his chickens. Kagi is a (wannabe) competitor. Likewise, YC's interest here is in making money by having viable startups and having them acquired.

I also don't think crawling the Web is the hard part. It's extraordinarily easy to do it badly [1] but what's the solution here? To have a bunch of wannabe search engines crawl Google's index instead?

I've thought about this and I wonder if trying to replicate a general purpose search engine here is the right approach or not. Might it not be easier to target a particular vertical, at least to start with? I refuse to believe Google cannot be bested in every single vertical or that the scale of the job can't be segmented to some degree.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/06/16/the-perfect-web-spider-storm/

Cheaper rent is definitely the driving factor in cities like NYC and SFO. But I think small private offices like those at Stack Overflow [1] don't really eat up that much more floorspace (maybe 1.5x-2x but then you need far fewer small conf rooms).

[1]: https://stackoverflow.blog/2015/01/16/why-we-still-believe-in-private-offices/

Saying "toughen up and use headphones" is such a dismissive response to noise that employers use. I'm extremely sensitive to noise distractions, and music is, for me, just as bad as coworker chatter. Even white-noise apps make me feel like I'm getting barraged with sound. I want "library quiet." It's amazing that "open office" workplaces don't generally have a policy to keep the space as quiet as possible so people can get real work done.

Anyone else remember the "Summer of Love"? [1]

I had stopped attempting to answer or ask anything on the site due to the behavior I observed. It was pure gamesmanship for people trying to rack up their SO score and then summarily abuse it with enforcement of opaque, draconian rules. My favorite was when a question would be marked as a duplicate incorrectly, so what was the takeaway? That solution was barred from discussion on the site?

Since then I simply look at SO when it happens to come up in a search. I'm not ever logged into the site anymore. If I want to describe how I fixed something, I do it in my own space, and only reference answer when linking to SO.

1. https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/07/20/kicking-off-the-summer-of-love/

I think it’s worth mentioning that these CMs have been on staff for almost 10 years and users for even longer than that [1] (Shog9’s user ID is only three digits). They have an impeccable track record of listening to the community and making very good decisions, and as a result they have earned a ton of respect and trust from the community. There should have been a ”thank you/farewell/tribute“ blog post celebrating their legacy.

In light of all the recent turmoil, they were among the very few SO employees that anyone still trusts, which is what makes their firing such a big deal and yet another indicator of the culture shift within the company.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/03/25/welcome-valued-associate-josh-heyer/

I'd also consider myself to be a direct communicator and always think twice when reviewing someone's PR / doing code review. My team is completely remote and things can get awkward at times. Often, it may come off as unnecessarily harsh or may make it seem like I'm telling them what to do. Like it or not, the tone of the review can greatly influence the morale of the team.

I found this[1] to be a good resource. Another thing that has helped me is adding a prefix to my review. Classifying it as: suggestion, nitpick, props, etc. More about this here[2].

[1] - https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/09/30/how-to-make-good-code-reviews-better/

[2] - https://emmer.dev/blog/code-review-comment-prefixes/

https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/08/21/stack-exchange-machine-learning-contest/

They were on it in 2012! And no, it didn't help. The site's value was in providing users with answers to their questions, but that was never on the radar of the folks running SO. I guess they just assumed the free labor of the people that built the place would continue forever.

Edit: I even told them at the time that this was not the right way to proceed. They had no reason to close questions or even review them. All they needed was a holding pen where first-time questioners posted questions, and they needed to be promoted by users viewing them as worthy of an answer.

Guess what. They deleted my comment.