You're not really calling out HN, you're calling out the coders here who claim they can recreate StackOverflow. But it is an example of a provocative title that lured me into reading.
Yep, thats me and I'm still going to try do it this weekend =) I think some people takes things way too seriously like the fog creek employee who posted in the original thread whose post this blogpost references. EDIT: it actually appears to be the same guy who wrote this blog post.
To me its just a fun little thing I'll try to do over the weekend and hopefully it'll offer a bit of refreshing perspective into web-based app development again since I've been stuck in the flex world (what pays the bills for now) for so long.
But actually his post offers a pretty good to-do list for the list of things I need to do to get it working, so basically, there is:
1, Asking and Responding to question
2, can't downvote person too many times in certain amount of time
3, spam bot detection/prevention
4, user icons
5, sanitizing html lbrary
6, karma
7, full-text search with search-as-you-ask
8, user bios
9, important questions that bubbles down slowly
10, bounties
11, email notifications
12, javascript smart tags
13, user configurable badges
14, history of karma, upvotes and downvotes
and oh yes, I'm not going to attempt to implement the design, i'll prolly start off by using the stackoverflow css and html as a template like what cnprog did when they started off and perhaps let someone else ( or do it myself ) replace it later.
> I think some people takes things way too seriously like the fog creek employee who posted in the original thread whose post this blogpost references
Well if he is really an SO dev, or knows the SO devs, he knows how much work has been put into it. SO is definitely not a complicated site, architecturally speaking. But as he points out, it's a very polished site. This may not be important for a programmer, but it is for an user (it is for me as an user at least), as he also points out.
Regarding the amount of work wich probably has gone into it, your original statement :
>it looks like something that can be thrown together in a weekend.
surely sounds disrespectful to the labor of those guys.
I'm also quite amazed by the general reaction to this. I don't understand how some commenters on hn, wich is supposed to be oriented towards entrepreneurs, who are by definition people interrested by the end user experience, could so quickly discard in several largely upvoted comments the work that has been put by those individuals, by saying that their success is just due to 'owners reputation'.
This is amazingly rude, and seems to be going along just fine.
When you provoke an argumentated and well thought out reaction as this one, you should ask yourself, before saying some people takes things too seriously, maybe you're taking what is important to them too lightly. And that's your responsability, not theirs.
EDIT: This is not to say your challenge is not a nice one. I'll be interrested to see how it works out =)
> could so quickly discard in several largely upvoted comments the work that has been put by those individuals, by saying that their success is just due to 'owners reputation'.
> This is amazingly rude, and seems to be going along just fine.
No one is "discarding" their work (well, I certainly am not, in any case), just saying that you can be covered in all the spit and polish you want, but if you don't have a community, a site like SO isn't going anywhere. And having Joel and Jeff as backers contributed to that. A lot.
Also, if we're talking about being dismissive, any idea how much work has gone into make things like Gnome, KDE and Ubuntu better looking? On beating all the involved code into shape so that it has started to conform to some kind of uniform look and feel? And it "it sucks" according to this guy, whom I will quote from directly:
"open-source software is, incontrovertibly, a total usability clusterfuck."
The astute observer will note that he's wielding an awfully broad brush that is very much discarding the work of a lot of people, who, while they may not have attained perfection, are working on these kinds of issues:
The quote isn't, "open-source software's usability could be perfected in a weekend". The quote doesn't suggest that it's easy, or not time-consuming, just that the end result right now isn't great.
Which I would agree with.
You're just saying that a lot of people are working hard to make it better.
"Isn't great" or "needs improvement" is quite different than "total clusterfuck". This last statement is extremely rude and dismissive of a lot of hard work that has brought great progress to the Linux desktop, which, contrary to the hand waving, is quite usable these days.
I'm sorry if I came across as disparaging. I mean no disrespect to either the Fog Creek employee, Stackoverflow or anyone else. I read both Joel and Jeff's blog and I have the utmost respect for both of them and their work. Thinking it over in my head again, I should have probably thought things over before posting this part:
>>>>it looks like something that can be thrown together in a weekend.<<<
It was mostly a reaction at the huge amount of money they want to charge for a such a software. But after reading the various responses, it has helped me understand the amount of engineering, user-experience studies and hard work that has gone into this fine web app. Regardless though, I still think its overpriced.
Yep, I probably fell into the "shitz easy" trap there and I will probably fail, publicly and humiliatingly in this case =( to implement all of StackOverflow's functionality in one weekend.
EDIT: Actually, as a sign of respect to SO and their folks, I'm not going to clone SO anymore, it has just become a totally no-win proposition for me. Another reason is that the project here:
Already does a really good job of emulating SO and there's little point in me writing another one.
But, I will spend the weekend cloning another piece of highly vaunted ( and overpriced IMO ) web software which does NOT have an opensource alternative.
CNProg lacks the polish that makes SO what it is. Although it would be more sensible to help out with CNProg rather than build your own, I would have been interested in seeing just how well you were able to do in a weekend.
BTW, what project are you referring to? Let us know once it's done in any case!
Lucene helps a lot, but searching for technical information is different from general information retrieval. That general purpose search engines are inadequate are stackoverflow's reason for being, after all.
It just takes testing and tuning with real data to get it right.
I have no idea how awesome you are (or not), but I consider myself a fair-to-OK programmer, when I can actually focus, and I just spent about thirty minutes on a nascent content delivery engine just making sure that all of the file paths it handled were inspected, cleaned, and reformatted in certain ways.
The only reason I don't have a lot more security holes to fix is because this thing is only responsible for grabbing data and presenting it. If I were dealing with the administration side of it ... no fun.
Then there's caching to do, too -- that'll probably be a couple hours if I do it right.
So, I'll be really impressed (for what little it's worth) if you manage to get a working copy going over a weekend and include even rudimentary performance and security features.
I'd wager even less. If you search the thread he refers to (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=678398) you see the original guy who said it would take a weekend only got 6 upvotes and the guy who claimed he could clone it over a weekend only got 4.
So I think someone's just trying to get to the top of HN with a provacative title (which in all fairness was a plan that seems to have worked perfectly)
And I enjoyed reading it. I think it serves as a great reminder to all those who think it's quick to clone stuff.
It might not be hard work sometimes for some sites. But it surely isn't trivial and surely isn't cheap (especially time-wise).
Guys, that's also why people will pay for your "free" web apps. When they improve their lives and are "easy" for you to write, the time and money to recreate even the easiest site is a barrier that they have.
If by it you mean the original thread and/or the parent comment to mine, then yes. Fairly simple to infer the subject on the post from these two pieces of information.
0% is pretty black and white. Many people here are in control of serious teams and I have no doubt they could duplicate SO in a weekend if they really wanted to.
Of course they wouldn't, but still, it's not impossible, which is what "0% could" implies.
Headline fails are the biggest threat to web usability. Not only are they an abuse of language, but when a genuinely good article with a suitably entitled provocative headline appears, its impact is diminished, the reader is more weary, and the article may be in fact skipped over.
"Pushy and manipulative news editors are akin to the boy who cried wolf" --- there, that's an overly provocative headline, isn't it?
