Calling out Hacker News

http://blog.bitquabit.com/2009/07/01/one-which-i-call-out-hacker-news/

by boilerbill • 17 years ago

209 68 17 years ago

blog.bitquabit.com

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.

tsally3• 17 years ago

Same thought process for me, but I decided not to read. I doubt more than 5% of the community thinks they can reimplement StackOverflow in a weekend.

maukdaddy• 17 years ago

Apparently you did read it.

TomOfTTB• 17 years ago

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)

icey• 17 years ago

It's a pretty interesting article, if you can look past the link-baity title.

Although, the topics he covers do address a larger part of HN than just the guy who said he could clone StackOverflow in a weekend.

MaysonL• 17 years ago

And only about .1% of the community could actually do it.

ktharavaad2• 17 years ago

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.

Raphael_Amiard2• 17 years ago

> 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 =)

henning2• 17 years ago

Sounds cool. Hack something up and push it to github/Google Code/whatever so we can see the commits. :)

I would be extremely proud of myself to get high quality search in place in one weekend.

thaumaturgy2• 17 years ago

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.

adrianwaj• 17 years ago

"provocative title that lured me into reading"

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?

raganwald• 17 years ago

I know its an oft-visited subject, But I liked his analysis of how many programmers ignore the spit-and-polish of a UI and focus solely on implementing the model.

CGamesPlay• 17 years ago

Agreed. Despite its "provocative title", the "eternal optimism of programmers" rings true in my book!

Kirby• 17 years ago

Yes. Except I really have implemented caching in a half-day, using memcached. :) (Utterly fixed the speed issues with the site I was working on then, incredibly easy to use.)

That was a good day.

It almost never happens like that - in fact, the irony for me is the example he uses in the quote is just about the only time where it was _substantially_ easier to do something than I expected. :)

davidw3• 17 years ago

> ... what actually makes StackOverflow a continuing success ...

What actually makes SO a success is network effects, dude:-)

Is it nicely done? Sure. It's way better than "expert sex change" for sure! But something that took 3 people 6 months (as per the other thread) to do is well within the reach of a lot of people here. "Spit and Polish" included.

Now, how many people could get significant linkage/coverage from two people who already have huge audiences of just the sort of people who use SO?

That's your 'moat', your competitive advantage. Not to belittle the good work behind the app itself of course, but that's just the base you need to stand on. Joel could link some piece of junk and, yeah, it might not become a hit, but the community is really what makes sites like SO, or reddit, or even HN go. HN, for instance, doesn't seem to have a lot of 'spit and polish' and yet I prefer it to SO.

caffeine• 17 years ago

It has more spit and polish than you think - just not flashy. (Think 'Shibumi'.)

ErrantX2• 17 years ago

He had a really good point with the last thread regarding Open Source and it's tendancy to be a little lacking on the "Polish"

But he's going a bit far now to suggest, as I read it, all FOSS suffers this fate... plenty of well polished Open Source software exists. And plenty of paid software lacks polish.

And at the end of the day; maybe not a weekend but SO wasnt put together in TOO long a time. With a couple of good enough hackers and someone to do the UI a few weekends might be doable..... the polish doesnt make SO.... it helps, but it sure doesnt make it (IMO of course)

zaidf• 17 years ago

Coming soon: Calling out posts with provocative titles

gecko4• 17 years ago

That's a fair point, and one I thought about for awhile. Both this post and the previous one were originally a single Yegge-length post entitled "The Eternal Optimism of Programmers." The problem was a) Yegge's columns are so long that even when they're great, people zone out, and b) I'm no Steve Yegge. So I split the column into its two general parts and started editing two essays: the one in which I said software sucked, and the one in which I seemed to be calling out Hacker News. I realized that no matter what I titled the first one, someone was going to end up posting it as me saying open-source software sucked, so I simply decided to one-up them and meet that title on its own terms: the usability side of the equation. At that point, turning the working titles into the actual titles made sense.

Are they provocative titles? Yes. Are they fair titles? I think also yes. That means they're good titles. There's nothing wrong with being provocative, as long as you're not being provocative for the sake of being provocative. I don't think I'm doing that here, but I understand if you disagree.

unexpected2• 17 years ago

Ben, off-topic: I really like the way you've done bitquabit, and I wanted to look at the Django code you used, but when I went to your bitbucket account, it doesn't seem like it's up there? Did I miss something?

mahmud2• 17 years ago

The guy makes a good point, but he is underestimating the redundancy and code duplication of web apps. I could have "something like" StackOverflow in a day, not because I will write it from scratch, but because I will be running global string search and replace on a bunch of stuff that I have in ~/hacks.

Having said that, I would probably estimate a 3 - 6month time frame just to cover my ass.

Be optimitistic all you want to yourself, but you must estimate projects very conservatively and assume the worst, Big "Murphy's" Omega of everything.

Arm-chair programmer != professional :-)

LargeWu2• 17 years ago

You could have "something like" StackOverflow in a day the way a 10-speed bike is "something like" a Honda, in the sense that they've both got wheels and they get you around.

ErrantX2• 17 years ago

Are you sure?

Pretty much all of the functionality (minus the stuff directly related to the questions) alreayd exists for my framework of choice.

The only "custom" from scratch bit I can really see is a GUI (arguably a lot of that might pre-exist in ones personal toolkit) the Q/A segments and the search.

Not that Im agreeing it can be done in a weekend: but I definitely think he is assuming a lot would be made from scratch, when the beauty of open source is you dont have to do that! :)

mahmud2• 17 years ago

Are we taking bets here? let's talk shop; get a check for $2k ready, list everything from SO you would like to see copied and have a stop-watch ready.

Sorry, didn't mean to put you in the spot like that, but yeah, sometimes it's just that easy, specially when you have a check list and well specified requirements.

Sometimes it takes longer negotiating the deal than writing the actual software.

kyro• 17 years ago

"Build a skyscraper? Dude, I could build one taller than the Chrysler building in like a week."

blhack2• 17 years ago

No offense to this guy, but the first argument that doesn't seem to make any sense is that you couldn't reproduce SO because it would take you 33 hours just to type the existing code back into an editor. It seems like a pretty arrogant assumption that the existing code is the simplest possible code that could be used to provide this functionality.

Beyond that, he is ignoring the fact that...Stack Overflow is really not that obscure of an idea. There is posting questions and responses (or stories and comments); basically a blog which, by this point, is kindof trivial to put together.

User icons and profiles? Seriously? Not to be a prick, but I implemented those on my own website in a matter of about an hour. From scratch...and I am not a developer.

Okay, so...upvotes and downvotes and a frontpage that bubbles like reddit does? Mayyybe...how nice do we have to be to the database?

select (upvotes/(now() - time_submitted)) as heat from questions order by heat desc limit 50;

On a related note, he also mentions the scaling...so, what are our constraints here? What hardware are we using and how much do we get to use?

Okay, then search. Seriously? This is also something that most geeks have written at some point and would have no problem dusting off.

Granted, yeah, this guy is probably right. I don' think anybody is TOTALLY going to reproduce a verbatim copy of SO over the 4th of July weekend...but I don't think this guy (I am assuming he is the author of SO) should assume that he is th BEST, FASTEST dev in the world. Especially when he is talking about such a common problem; what is essentially a blog.

Raphael_Amiard2• 17 years ago

>but I don't think this guy (I am assuming he is the author of SO) should assume that he is th BEST, FASTEST dev in the world.

Where in the world did you see him say that ?

blhack2• 17 years ago

The first couple of paragraphs where he said that it would be impossible to recreate SO in a weekend because of how long the current code was.

This is making the assumption that the new code would be the same length.

PieSquared• 17 years ago

>Okay, then search. Seriously? This is also something that most geeks have written at some point and would have no problem dusting off.

Of course, because search is really quite a solved and ridiculously easy problem... You know, it's so easy I could probably reimplement Google in the same weekend, too. :P

Not to be rude, but brushing off basics like search, upvotes and downvotes, etc as something 'most geeks have written' and can easily write again is a mistake. The amount of these minor features makes a real reimplementation in a weekend utterly impossible.

jcl• 17 years ago

I find his time-based argument compelling. While the SO code is likely not the simplest possible code, it is likely that it is within an order of magnitude. Moreover, coming up with the simplest possible code is hard work and would take longer than coming up with the original code, even if it would be a bit faster when typing it in. If it was not harder to write simpler code, people would write simple code to begin with.

secret• 17 years ago

Have you seen the "P2" theme for wordpress? There's your multi-user blog with most of the functionality you mentioned.

dabeeeenster• 17 years ago

> StackOverflow’s .cs, .sql, .css, .js, and *.aspx files come to 96.5kB

This simply can't be correct. The css file by itself is 26kb. Actually the js file is over 90kb...So it's not correct, unless I'm missing something?

I would expect the source code for a site such as SO to be will over 3 or 4 MB...

gecko4• 17 years ago

Crap. That's a superb example of me not actually processing whether what I'm typing makes sense. The actual size of those is 2.3MB. I'll update the post accordingly. (96.5kB is the size of all the file names in StackOverflow.)

Edit: Post updated.

skwiddor2• 17 years ago

probably 96.5ksloc

skwiddor2• 17 years ago

This seems like a list of stuff I tell clients when they sit down with only the ideas of how the visitor will access the site.

But 18 man months seems like an awfully long time, but I bet their framework has 10x more features than they use!

If the guy thinks it is just a feature of OSS he clearly hasn't bought much shrink wrapped software. Procomm anyone? try these proprietry programs http://homepage.mac.com/bradster/iarchitect/shame.htm

jasonkester3• 17 years ago

You can build a prototype of pretty much anything in a weekend. We've all done it.

Most of us have also gone through the 6-24 month process of turning that prototype into a real functioning product that people would actually want to use. We know how much work goes into "polish", and how many little details crop up and eat into your time.

So yeah, I have no doubt that this kid will put out a working prototype of a StackOverflow clone over the weekend. And he'll think he's just a few days from putting it live. He'll be wrong, of course, but if he puts in the year or so it will take to finish it up, he'll learn a lot about the software business.

I wish him luck.

tdavis2• 17 years ago

August, 2007:

  Hmmm, a ticket aggregator, huh? Yeah, I can throw that
  together in a month over the summer. Then we can find 
  another idea so I can work on something *hard*!

July, 2009:

  Fuck, I'm *still* working on this thing?! When did it turn
  into a fully-fledged, funded company? And why can't I find 
  an intern to help me with all this damn work?!

The original plan for TicketStumbler was a quick, stop-gap solution to the problem of not having jobs anymore. It was supposed to take a couple months, at most. Some day I might get into why it will soon have taken a year and 3 complete re-designs (working on #3 as I type!) and 3 re-writes of a high-performance site crawler / parser which is now largely obsolete thanks to proper APIs, just to get to a point where we kinda know what the hell we're doing. Until then, I just laugh at Techcrunch commenters who think they can clone it in a weekend. But I can get you started:

  CREATE TABLE ticket_ticket
  (
    id serial NOT NULL,
    event_id integer NOT NULL,
    section character varying(150) NOT NULL,
    "row" character varying(150) NOT NULL,
    price numeric(9,2) NOT NULL,
    quantity smallint NOT NULL,
    url character varying(300) NOT NULL,
    extra text,
    broker_id integer NOT NULL,
    last_update timestamp with time zone NOT NULL,
    root_url character varying(300),
    CONSTRAINT ticket_ticket_pkey PRIMARY KEY (id),
    CONSTRAINT broker_id_refs_id_2b5e6c11effcebee FOREIGN KEY (broker_id)
        REFERENCES review_broker (id) MATCH SIMPLE
        ON UPDATE NO ACTION ON DELETE NO ACTION DEFERRABLE INITIALLY DEFERRED,
    CONSTRAINT ticket_ticket_quantity_check CHECK (quantity >= 0)
  )
  WITH (OIDS=FALSE);

Good luck! :D

tdavis2• 17 years ago

That part under "July" is meant to be mildly sarcastic; hopefully it doesn't come off as disappointment that it didn't take two months. It has been a very fun and educational ride.

smhinsey• 17 years ago

I can't really disagree with any of the specific claims here, but at the same time, the whole argument seems to be constructed on the basis of a hasty generalization. This situation is not reflective of OSS, developers, hacker news, hackers, whatever, it's reflective of a handful of people and their own biases. The author's statements about the lack of usability in OSS in the large are as dubious as the statements being made about how easy it is to implement a clone of product X, Y or Z.

I think there is definitely a discussion to be had in this general area, about the relative importance of usability and polish to applications depending on their target audience. Maybe next time.

MicahWedemeyer• 17 years ago

The SO guys seem to really love to hate on FOSS. I'll admit that the user interfaces for some desktop FOSS stuff are crap, but let's not forget that the server architecture is top notch.

How many programmers would be out there asking the kind of questions that show up on SO if it weren't for the ubiquity of the LAMP stack? I shudder to imagine a world where hitting the start button on your neat weekend project involves buying licenses for Vista, IIS, Visual Studio, MSSSQL, etc., etc., etc. "Now that I've dropped $20k on dev tools, I'm ready to get to work!"

Elepsis2• 17 years ago

Everything you mentioned but Vista is available in a free version precisely for things like the aforementioned weekend projects. And I don't think that it's any more fair (for 99% of users) to include buying an OS in "prerequisites for fun weekend project" than to include buying a computer in the first place.

crux_• 17 years ago

Counterpoint: They are available in a free version precisely because of the competitive pressures from the open source stack...

johns• 17 years ago

> The SO guys seem to really love to hate on FOSS.

Care to source this? You can start on MS tools for basically free with BizSpark (which SO is a member of). Even if you only wanted to start a weekend project on MS stuff, you could get started with the free express versions (Windows excluded, but if you're going this route, you probably have that taken care of already). They also use FOSS like jQuery and the markdown editor they started with when appropriate.

If you want to talk about wasting money at the start of a project, how about considering the time required to learn a whole new stack?

jasonkester3• 17 years ago

I use the Microsoft Stack for my weekend projects, and it cost me a grand total of $375 to set up my development environment, including all the packages you mention and more. That's the cost to get in to the EmpowerISV program, which gives you a full MSDN license (meaning you get everything that Microsoft makes except games).

I spent way more than that on 3rd party tools to make my life easier. Hell, I spent more than that on coffee since I started the project. If you're an open source developer, and you value your time, you'll spend cash money on good tools too.

Cost is certainly not a reason to shy away from MS stuff (and it's good stuff).

gecko4• 17 years ago

Just to be clear, since there is some confusion: I have never worked, am not now working, and do not anticipate working, on StackOverflow. I do have access to the StackOverflow source code, since I work at Fog Creek, and, for the same reason, I have a bit of an a semi-inside perspective on what went into it. That, however, is it. Jeff and his team do their own thing quite independently of the rest of Fog Creek, and I definitely do not speak for them.

Tichy• 17 years ago

Well only yesterday I asked a question on StackOverflow and noticed that there does not seem a way to monitor a question without answering it. So even now it needs more polish.

Probably after one weekend a clone would not be as polished, but it might be usable enough. If it picks up, there is still enough time to add polish by and by (maybe taking another direction than SO in some respects).

Also if it is open source there is a chance that other people chime in and help adding features they miss.

easyfrag• 17 years ago

Every question has an rss feed, for example: http://stackoverflow.com/feeds/question/415260

benmathes• 17 years ago

I suspect there is a high correlation between coders who think that cloning something like StackOverflow would be easy and those who have crappy interfaces to their own code, even if the core functionality is there.

_cbsz• 17 years ago

No one complained that C# is significantly more verbose than Python/Ruby/Arc/whatever?

Sandman• 17 years ago

One of the best blog posts I read in a while...

Calling out Hacker News

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