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derpapst

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That's a totally valid point, gbelote. Nevertheless, there will always be questions where you don't know you to frame a question - even after having searched around for a while.

E.g.: if you are new to Linux and X doesn't start - how could you ask if you are new to the whole field? A bit of guidance by an expert could help in 5min. And then, sometimes it is just like the xkcd strip at http://www.twotoreal.com/site/about/

I view it as a last resort - after SO/Quora/etc. could not help.

The article nailed it. Chances are that the world of QA sites is switching from narcism based reputation systems to the real web currency: user attention. That is, if I spend some of my attention on your problem, the system will remember it the next time I have a question.

This is what I am doing with http://www.TwoToReal.com: Unlike SO/Quora/etc. it is a synchronous QA site for questions where you didn't get an answer on the the former QA sites. As it works by pulling in other expert users into a real-time web chat, I had to be very careful to find a reasonable trade-off between disturbing the expert (i.e. asking another user by IM to participate) and benefiting the questioner. Rule-of-thumb at TwoToReal: the more you are allowing yourself to be "disturbed" the more will be asked for participation the next time you have a question. Soon it will allow you to "invest" more of your attention on one question by letting the system pull in more than one expert. Thus the currency of attention.

That's why my wife and I abandoned TV long time ago. First week was hard, but after that we have always been happy with how we spend our time.

Cool idea. However, I am missing the method to auto-group chats by topic. Would be nice to have it with IRC.

Currently, I am doing that (not with IRC, but with Jabber/XMPP) via my side-project http://TwoToReal.com (beta): You ask questions (or raise topics) for which automatically determined experts are then pulled in via IM into a real-time web chat (most of the knobs/switches are tuned by machine learning).

What are your pricing plans?

Git is exploding 15 years ago

Indeed. E.g., I am using git for more projects than I use mercurial. To these projects, however, I just submitted a limited number of change sets. Most heavily I am using mercurial instead, which I also would choose for future projects. Maybe it would more accurate to measure the number of submissions per time interval.

Also interesting that the Economist continues to come up with the same kind of story every week. Just check the last Economist links that were posted on HN over tha last weeks and you will see that they all have the same message. To be honest, I would expect them to be more diverse.

One of the many reasons we got that far the global crisis is probably the reactive attitude "jump when the markets tell you so". As a German I find it comforting that our chancellor is not of that kind. One can criticize many points, but one has to agree that she does not fear head wind. Would be nice to have more politicians of her kind in Germany.