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

http://scale.metaoptimize.com/

by alextp • 16 years ago

74 22 16 years ago

scale.metaoptimize.com

cont4gious• 16 years 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• 16 years 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• 16 years 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• 16 years 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• 16 years ago

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

giu• 16 years 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?"

bravura2• 16 years 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/ 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/) supposedly only has a single digit CPU percent usage when run on its own machine.

snprbob864• 16 years 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• 16 years ago

It's also an easy way to make existing members of a community feel more comfortable, I assume: http://news.usethesource.com/news

bravura2• 16 years 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/

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)

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/stack...)

snprbob864• 16 years ago

Assuming you are not the proprietor of OSQA: I apologize for implying that you acted distastefully. I was not aware of the existence of OSQA, which is what I find distasteful.

Digging deeper, I can see that OSQA is based on the same tech as CNProg, which has been discussed on HN before. If I recall correctly, most people shared my displeasure with the clone. But now because OSQA is open sourced, people think it is OK?

When people spend a lot of time and money to design something through blood, sweat, and tears, like I'm sure the StackOverflow team did, it is not cool for someone else to come by and just clone it blindly. This also applies to free and open source software. Derivative, inspired work is one thing. But this is a step away from copy-paste.

jsdalton• 16 years ago

The site is running off of OSQA (http://www.osqa.net/). Your comment is a bit like complaining that someone running the default theme of a Wordpress blog is "cloning" other blogs.

snprbob864• 16 years ago

No, my comment is a bit like complaining that Wordpress' default theme is a clone of the default Blogger theme.

I had not heard of OSQA. I'm about to apologize to the person who started this particular site (other thread), as it's not his fault. But being open source doesn't make it OK to copy someone else's hard work.

robrenaud• 16 years ago

This site you are posting on reminds me a lot of this other site I read, http://reddit.com.

In fact, I'd say it's pretty much the same idea, just with a different community.

Oh wait.

Let good ideas/designs prosper and spread. Humanity is better off that way.

epi0Bauqu• 16 years ago

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

someone_here• 16 years ago

Note: That's "creative commons" and not "credit cards".

pavs2• 16 years 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• 16 years 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).

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

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