[HN Gopher] A single person answered 76k questions about SQL on ...
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A single person answered 76k questions about SQL on StackOverflow
Author : w-m
Score : 427 points
Date : 2021-09-24 13:52 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stackoverflow.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (stackoverflow.com)
| goldenkey wrote:
| And they paid him what? SO is for profit unlike Wikipedia, isn't
| it?
|
| https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/104947/is-stack-exc...
|
| Thank you in advanced ;-)
| somenewaccount1 wrote:
| Guitar Hero doesn't pay either, but it doesn't stop people from
| spending eons of time on it. Some folks just do it for the
| thrill and the rep.
| goldenkey wrote:
| I don't get your point. Are you defending SO as some sort of
| gaming company? Even gaming companies have tournaments with
| enormous prize pools and usually award their patrons in some
| way. Tournaments, teams and sponsorships are the lifeblood of
| professional gaming.
| scollet wrote:
| SO speed-running any%
| somenewaccount1 wrote:
| If you go to his profile on SO, you will see that he
| advertises his company.
|
| Also, I wasn't speaking about "professional gamers", I was
| speaking about every day people that forked over $100 for a
| game (or often $1,000 for many games) and then spend years
| playing it at home - unprofessionally, for no money.
|
| It's just how some people chose to spend their time because
| they themselves find the experience gratifying. And in his
| case, there is at least a small pittance of financial gain
| through advertising and publicly verifiable reputation.
| gavinray wrote:
| However unfathomable it might be, he may just genuinely like to
| spend his time here on earth knowing that he's helping people.
|
| He clearly has expertise so I doubt he's poor or hurting for
| cash. Maybe an older fellow who has had enough of the grind and
| decides to spend his days sharing his knowledge with others.
|
| Someone like this needs SO as much as they need him, it's
| mutually beneficial. He impacts millions, they make money. Both
| get what they came for.
| dhx wrote:
| All user content published is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 per
| [1] and backups/dumps of all this CC BY-SA 4.0 content are
| published every few months to the Internet Archive [2].
|
| CC BY-SA means you could use that latest dump to create your
| own "SQL Q&A" site and charge users for the privilege of
| looking at Gordon's 76,000 answers to SQL related questions.
| You would need to attribute Gordon Linoff for the answers
| provided, amongst other obligations of CC BY-SA 4.0 including
| an inability to re-license the content.
|
| Many would instinctively want to use a CC BY-NC license because
| of an unfounded fear of volunteering time to find out later
| that someone else is collecting a reward. There are many good
| reasons for avoiding CC NC (and even CC BY) licenses and
| choosing the least restrictive license possible. There is a
| good write up on Wikimedia's decision to prohibit CC NC
| licenses at [3] that explains some of the reasons.
|
| The majority of sites relying on volunteer contributions
| including Hacker News, Experts Exchange, Quora, Reddit, social
| media sites, Flickr (mostly), etc do not enforce copyleft
| licensing and contributions made to these sites could easily be
| lost forever. Wikipedia and StackOverflow including their
| volunteers likely wouldn't have enjoyed the same level of
| success if they used or allowed CC NC (or more restrictive)
| licensing.
|
| [1] https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-
| service/public#lice...
|
| [2] https://archive.org/details/stackexchange
|
| [3]
| https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Free_knowledge_based_on_Crea...
| oceanswave wrote:
| How much of that 1.8 billion did he get when SO sold?
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| SELECT 0;
| rchaud wrote:
| He was sharecropping on the land baron's property. Not his
| land, not his money.
| progre wrote:
| At the level he is at, he is clearly doing it because he likes
| doing it. Maybe to build a little bit of recognition to help
| sell his books, but I doubt that it's a big factor.
| bcx wrote:
| Impressive achievement. But for fun, as a skeptic, let's assume
| he outsourced some of the work, and then serves as an editor. How
| would we know the difference between this, and him answering the
| questions himself?
|
| Would we care?
| INTPenis wrote:
| According to some people in this HN thread he's also very fast
| at answering questions.
|
| So not sure he's out sourced it, but he might be using their
| APIs to get notifications of certain questions.
| dekken_ wrote:
| Link required a captcha, Fuck that
| jtvjan wrote:
| Looks like the OP accidentally linked directly to the captcha
| challenge page. Solving it takes you to the home page. They
| probably meant to link here:
| https://stackoverflow.com/users/1144035/Gordon%20Linoff
| dekken_ wrote:
| Thanks
| w-m wrote:
| It wasn't me, it was a corner case in an HN feature:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28644848
|
| How fitting for a StackOverflow link submission :)
| system2 wrote:
| If you aren't used to captcha by now, I am not sure how you are
| using the internet.
| dekken_ wrote:
| I'm not a slave.
| system2 wrote:
| Care to explain?
| dekken_ wrote:
| Feeding the algorithms should be paid.
| rastafang wrote:
| Yeah, web developers need to realize that they put captchas
| even where not needed, and Google takes advantage of that.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Unless you work for those companies and know what risks and
| attack vectors they are trying to mitigate, it's really
| hard to criticize their placement of captchas.
| Omnius wrote:
| Nice try robot!
| dekken_ wrote:
| https://extrafabulouscomics.com/boop
| thrower123 wrote:
| And then it doesn't redirect to the actual original link.
|
| Auth is fucking terrible, so I understand why this happens, but
| it is always irritating.
| weavie wrote:
| What kind of setup do you need to have in order to answer
| questions on StackOverflow?
|
| From time to time I think it would be a useful exercise, but it's
| really hard to find questions that haven't already been answered.
| I'm thinking you probably need some form of alerting system to
| notify you as soon as a question comes in.
| ggregoire wrote:
| You select a tag, select "Newest" and then manually refresh the
| page. For instance:
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/sql
|
| On the home page you can manage a list of "Watched Tags". If
| you add SQL it gives you a bookmark to the page I linked above.
| they4kman wrote:
| You can create saved searches, like sorting by new for a tag
| you're interested in. I don't have email notifications setup,
| but from time to time I visit my saved search for pytest
| questions -- which is a subject less inundated with homework
| questions and more with people trying to do their work, unsure
| of how to integrate their ideas with a testing framework.
|
| Though, some of my most popular answers have come from digging
| a little deeper on an older question and adding a better write-
| up, or simply answering a question for a newer version of the
| technology at hand.
|
| When it's a technology you use (or had used) everyday, it's
| easier to get a sense of the answers you would appreciate if
| you'd stumbled there from Google
| dehrmann wrote:
| Most of the questions that get asked are homework questions
| that were poorly asked and lack much research. "What have you
| tried?" is a common first comment.
| dyingkneepad wrote:
| I have knowledge about an area of computing that very few
| people in the world know about, and very few people need to
| learn about it. Very rarely a questions gets asked, but when it
| does it's guaranteed the question may sit for months without an
| appropriate answer. When I joined SO in 2012 I went through all
| the unanswered questions on that topic and was able to give
| good answers to like 60% of them. Got a bunch of medals. But
| then never did it again.
| dawson wrote:
| What was the topic?
| dyingkneepad wrote:
| I don't want to say it since this, along with the rest of
| my message history may be able to identify me. Maybe I need
| to switch to a fresh account again.
|
| Anyway, it's a low-level library that is used by a small
| handful of libraries that a _ton_ of people use. All hail
| the easy-to-use abstractions.
| gadders wrote:
| Gordon's bio from his company page: http://www.data-
| miners.com/linoff.htm
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Not mobile ready, blast from the past styling, just what you
| would expect from someone who could kill you with one line of
| SQL.
| Zababa wrote:
| I would argue that it's mobile ready. I only have to zoom a
| bit. No ads, no cookie popups, the text isn't that wide.
| y4mi wrote:
| At least it loads quickly.
|
| More important then mobile styling honestly.
| DoctorOW wrote:
| I don't see why they're mutually exclusive. On mobile,
| they're equally important.
| ddingus wrote:
| Doesn't that depend on the mobile user and device?
|
| Personally, a site like that doesn't impact me. I'm on a
| Note 8 and it's usable to a point where I will just do
| that with no worries.
|
| Everything comes at a cost too. Mobile styling may avoid
| a zoom op or two, but also usually comes with more
| navigation elements, or leaner overall content
| presentation.
| giarc wrote:
| When you are that good, you can get away with a page that looks
| like this http://www.data-miners.com/index.htm
| alpineidyll3 wrote:
| Heroes are not born, they are made.
| marto1 wrote:
| And hasn't asked any questions of his own. Quite strange to not
| be curious about something SO could answer for the past 10 years.
| mousepilot wrote:
| I love stackoverflow, use it all the time often from generic
| goggle searches, and I don't even have an account, its just
| that useful of a site. I suspect I would probably not answer
| very many questions due to others simply having better answers
| than me.
| OJFord wrote:
| If you take `[sql]` off the search, many in the first page of
| results are tagged `mysql` and not `sql`.
| caturopath wrote:
| That is:
| https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=user%3A1144035+is%3Aanswe...
|
| It seems like only all of the answers NOT tagged sql
| https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=user%3A1144035+-%5Bsql%5D...
| are sql-related.
| rasengan wrote:
| That means this person has single handedly improved the global
| social knowledge-space about SQL and improved the world.
|
| Impressive isn't even strong enough to describe what this is.
|
| Thank you, Mr. Gordon Linoff for advancing humanity.
| tonymet wrote:
| outsourced
| jalbertoni wrote:
| I guess he just really likes SQL. Can't blame him.
| jordemort wrote:
| "Yo dawg I heard you like queries so I wrote 76,000 queries
| about queries so you can answer queries about queries."
| kthejoker2 wrote:
| It's funny I knew it was Gordon without even opening the article
| - quite the mad lad - there should be a special of honor for
| beating him to the draw on SO .. ! (I think I've got 3?)
|
| He also has to be in the top 10 in terms of comments on questions
| and answers, he's everywhere :)
| h00kwurm wrote:
| Hoping that Gordon sees this, he's a wonderful person.
|
| helpful to the nth degree as his dedication to answering
| questions as is so demonstrated here in earnest.
|
| all your recognition is well-deserved. it's been a pleasure to
| work with you (and nice job solving the interview qs i give to
| others in pure sql from the other side of my desk)
| gfody wrote:
| he's too busy answering questions - he answered five more since
| this was posted
| system2 wrote:
| Not sure what his intention is/was, but I am assuming he also
| gets clients thru this. Many blog posts out there uses this
| technique to attract potential clients.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| A single person? It's kind of offensive to assume his
| relationship status like that...
| melenaos wrote:
| And I am here wondering if my SQL server needs an upgrade, index
| rebuild, restructure indexes and keys or use other tables for
| long term rows.
|
| I wish I could understand better the SQL Server beast
| sam1r wrote:
| Time flies fast when you're having fun.
| audiometry wrote:
| There's a similar guy, jezreal(?) who answers pandas ( python
| module) prolifically with beautiful idiomatic solutions.
| maleldil wrote:
| > jezreal(?)
|
| jezrael: https://stackoverflow.com/users/2901002/jezrael
| cjbprime wrote:
| > A single person answered 76k questions about SQL on
| StackOverflow
|
| TFW you forget to add the WHERE clause.
| mywittyname wrote:
| This is insane. They must be super-efficient because I can't give
| an SO-quality answer to a question in under an hour.
|
| I can see the appeal though. I used to spend my spare time in uni
| answering questions on SO. I actually learned a ton about how to
| conduct research, which is probably one the most useful skills I
| have in my toolbox.
| brigandish wrote:
| I've noticed a trend, some people answer with what should be a
| comment and then progressively edit their answer while hogging
| the attention of the questioner and anyone coming to view the
| page. For some reason people are loath to downvote an early
| answer without competition, even if it's rubbish.
| in9 wrote:
| Yep. I Do this quite a lot in the Cross Validated site. It is
| the only way to get up votes or the correct answer check. If
| you take too much time to craft a well thought out answer,
| somebody will beat you to it and get all those. So in order
| to get the best of both worlds, I anser fast and then, if
| needed, improve on it.
| jmartrican wrote:
| whats ur username on SO?
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Voting by user is against the rules of Stack Overflow; if you
| intend to upvote this user's posts in order to reward them,
| the votes will be reverted and you might face disciplinary
| action.
| bool3max wrote:
| How would the platform distinguish those votes from regular
| ones?
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| Navigating to an answer from the user's page only "shadow
| votes" it for you, it doesn't get counted.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| As a network moderator, I actually _know_ the answer to
| this, so I 'm not going to openly speculate. Suffice to
| say, the rule is there for a reason (voting-by-user
| messes up the ordering of answers to each individual
| question), so please don't try a clever workaround just
| because you think you can.
| codehawke wrote:
| As a YouTuber, this has happened to me multiple times. It's
| fans or people trolling, they always remove the points
| though.
| Arnt wrote:
| You can do it faster if you restrict yourself to questions that
| you already have researched. That is, to questions about bugs
| like ones you've fixed in your own code, or features you've
| found out how to use.
| Ronsenshi wrote:
| If I didn't know him from way back, I'd have thought that answers
| were done by some AI kind of like Github's Copilot.
| calltrak wrote:
| I kind of regret not joining stackoverflow I am sure alot of
| people get hired off of it instead of having to jump through
| hoops doing technical interviews. I am looking for work now in
| golang and i just hate having to do interviews over and over
| again with each new contract.
| nickstinemates wrote:
| If you're looking for something to do, it's still a great way
| to hone your skills. Don't let being late to the party stop
| you.
| somenewaccount1 wrote:
| to be fair to yourself, I am a member on Stack Overflow and in
| the past 13 years, 0 interviewers have asked about or
| referenced Stack Overflow (other than jokes about how we use it
| to cheat). I hear leetcode is all the rage these days, in
| prepping for technical interviews.
| toyg wrote:
| Nah, hiring processes with technical steps will just happen
| regardless of one's standing on this or that site - after all,
| there is no guarantee you were the one posting... Unless you
| know someone inside who can vouch for you, you'll be tested.
| skytreader wrote:
| I'd love to see actual data on this but I doubt that _a lot_ of
| people get hired because of their online reputation. And by
| "hired" I mean it directly lead to a job offer instead of just
| getting your profile noticed and getting you started through
| the recruitment funnel. And of those that had an offer, how
| many actually took it?
|
| Being top 1% contributor in Go would tell a recruiter you know
| Go but the job probably involves other technologies you need to
| prove yourself in. Even in the rare case that you are top
| contributor in _every_ technology on their checklist, the job
| might still involve domain knowledge that isn 't purely tech.
| Or they'd want to evaluate your personality.
|
| Anecdote: not to brag given my skepticism above but so far the
| only online activity of mine that lead to a job offer was a
| Ruby Github repo on traditional AI. The catch: I am not a
| Rubyist and that repo was nothing more than a fork I'm
| studying. Long story short, I was looking for a job then, this
| consulting firm saw my Github profile so I got an interview.
| Onsite, the TL looked at my resume, visited my profile, saw the
| Ruby project, asked a few questions about it, and then
| recommended me for an offer with the hiring manager.
|
| I did not take the job because (a) they looked desperate for
| _anyone_ in the process and (b) I would 've bailed anyway
| because I already found a company I'm set on joining. Nothing
| more came of it other than this HN comment.
| unwind wrote:
| I would hope that it also tells a recruiter that you are able
| to focus/persevere at something, that you have decent writing
| skills, and that you enjoy sharing your knowledge.
|
| I am somewhat biased, I also have a high-rep account (mostly
| from C questions). I have not tried drumming up interest when
| interviewing, though.
| bityard wrote:
| > I am sure alot of people get hired off of it
|
| Are there any numbers available on that? Do people on SO really
| get job offers if they have a high enough reputation? If so,
| are the offers from high-quality companies doing interesting
| things?
|
| All of my previous job changes have been due to "in real life"
| networking. In order words, a friend of a friend recommended me
| for the job. I'm not looking to change jobs anytime soon but I
| sometimes wonder if my lack of online presence would hurt my
| chances of finding another job if had to. I have a blog and and
| a github account but both are pretty bare. I don't have a
| LinkedIn account because they started spamming me 15 years ago
| and they have been blocked by my email server ever since.
| jofer wrote:
| In my experience, it doesn't help in terms of
| interviews/hiring. It's often rewarding on its own right, but
| you're not missing out on jobs, anyway.
|
| For context, I have a (now inactive) stackoverflow account with
| ~250,000 reputation. For a long time, I was the top answerer
| for many tags in the scientific python ecosystem (e.g.
| matplotlib, scipy, briefly top for numpy as well) and was in
| the top 10 for python as a whole at the time (i.e. showed up on
| the "top answers" page).
|
| I was really proud of that once, and spent awhile going from
| "this is a fun distraction" to "oh, this could get me a job and
| help me switch careers, I should focus on it".
|
| Not trying to brag there, just trying to put it in perspective.
| My SO track record was significant enough, particularly ~5
| years ago when I was actively applying, that I really thought
| it would help me get jobs or at least give me an edge. It
| didn't.
|
| I've never had my stackoverflow stuff asked about or mentioned
| in an interview before by the person interviewing. The couple
| of times I've incidentally brought it up during an interview
| (as an example of a specific problem they were asking about or
| as an example of teaching/training/communication), it went over
| as a lead balloon.
|
| My OSS contributions (which are slim and were all a long time
| ago) have opened doors, but stackoverflow hasn't, at least that
| I know of.
|
| I'm not saying it's not rewarding or that I regret it, just
| that, at least for me, it didn't seem to help in terms of job
| opportunities, and at the time, I was a bit disappointed in
| that.
| dehrmann wrote:
| It's only going to help with landing a first job, and even
| then, not much. Open source contributions are _somewhat_
| better, but you basically need to be heavy contributor or
| maintainer of a large project a company really cares about.
| zxlk21e wrote:
| This person is an absolute legend.
|
| Gordon Linoff has written a series of books on data mining and
| sql as well: http://www.data-miners.com/bookstore.htm
| tra3 wrote:
| This guy must be 10x.
| samhw wrote:
| For this guy I think 10x is an insult...
| zwieback wrote:
| Apparently they are good answers too. Talk about giving back to
| the community!
| [deleted]
| Causality1 wrote:
| I've always been jealous of this kind of drive. To have the type
| of mind that is never bored of action and productivity.
| daok wrote:
| However, it also mean that during that time this individual
| might not be working or spending time with his/her family, etc.
| Extreme performance like what he is achieving always come to
| the expense of something else.
| BikiniPrince wrote:
| When I worked for a small television station I would pass the
| time answering questions about Linux, routers and other misc
| categories. Like building long haul 2.4ghz networks. Then I
| moved out of the control room and forgot I had an account.
| faizshah wrote:
| I see they wrote a book on SQL too, probably not a bad way to
| develop an outline for a coding book.
| Matthias1 wrote:
| Am I the only one for whom the link is broken? I get sent to a
| Captcha, but after completing it, I get redirected to
| stackoverflow.com.
| ziotom78 wrote:
| It's the same for me
| rendall wrote:
| Same
| unixsheikh wrote:
| No, it's useless for me too.
| trevcanhuman wrote:
| OP probably meant to link here [0]. (taken from EForEndeavour's
| comment)
|
| [0]
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/400506/congratulati...
| busymom0 wrote:
| Same for me.
| dang wrote:
| Sorry all - I recently deployed code to follow redirects and
| like all such internet things there are of course a lot of
| corner cases.
|
| Changed back to
| https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=user%3A1144035+%5Bsql%5D+...
| now (from https://stackoverflow.com/nocaptcha?s=f29968b0-76eb-4
| 5d9-8d6...).
| TheCapn wrote:
| Heh, I had to go back through some of my old questions and sure
| enough Gordon has helped me before. I had to laugh because my
| comment below his answer was that he figured out my problem so
| fast that StackOverflow wouldn't even let me accept his answer as
| it was too soon after posting the question.
| sbuttgereit wrote:
| I've not seen Gordon Linoff, but usually when I have some sort of
| question about PostgreSQL minutia, I find that Erwin Brandstetter
| (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/users/939860/erwin-brandstett...)
| usually has posted very detailed and solid answers when it comes
| to Stack Overflow.
|
| I have to say, I'm usually not searching Stack Overflow
| specifically when I'm looking for information, I'm usually in a
| general search engine that happens to show me StackOverflow
| answers. But the high frequency that I see and am in fact aided
| by Erwin Brandstetter's posting of good answers is certainly
| worthy of a call out here. My thanks to Erwin!
| fuy wrote:
| Couldn't agree more! Erwin's SO answers are incredible source
| of knowledge on Postgresql usage, especially things like
| plpgsql. I benefited from his answers a lot, thanks to Erwin.
| topherPedersen wrote:
| I see that Gordon wrote a book about SQL. Definitely just picked
| up a copy with one-click:
| https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0470099518
| johnmato wrote:
| That is quite insane number to catch up especially in Stack
| Overflow; probably don't need to google to find solutions.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I didn't read the article but this must be Gordon, the guy who
| answered every SQL question I asked, within very short period of
| time. This guy is a legend. Love him.
| croes wrote:
| How many SQL questions are there in total? Could it discourage
| others to participate if few top posters answer too many
| questions too fast?
| havermeyer wrote:
| Gordon is amazing, and it's almost impossible to beat him to an
| answer for certain types of questions :) I had the chance to meet
| him a few years back to talk through some new SQL features coming
| to BigQuery (I'm at Snowflake now). He had a lot of great
| insights into what could make the product better, and what he
| thought was missing relative to other OLAP databases.
| gfody wrote:
| I like to answer sql questions too and it's like being in a
| quick draw match with Linoff around. he once blogged about how
| he's able to find all the new unanswered sql questions so
| quickly, iirc he made his own search
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| I remember John Skeet saying he would sometimes post a half
| finished answer just so he could get their first and deter
| other users then polish it later.
|
| I don't know what the point of that is.
| johannes_ne wrote:
| I think that is quite sensible, so multiple people do not
| (unknowingly) spend time writing the same answer.
| rendall wrote:
| A Jon Skeet encounter made me quit Stack Overflow, never to
| look back. I asked a question, Jon Skeet came along with an
| answer that did not answer my question. But his non-answer
| got 200 upvotes.
|
| I went to meta to talk about how the reputation system is
| broken if that could happen. Skeet came along and accused
| me of changing my question, and a bunch of SO fanboys
| mocked me and told me if I want more reputation I had to
| try harder.
|
| That's when I knew SO had irreparably changed for the
| worse.
| ozim wrote:
| Oh I had some negative encounter with Jon Skeet as well.
| For a person that has so much notoriety seemed he was
| quite defensive about me pointing out his "non-answer" he
| gave to someone else.
|
| My situation was that I noticed that person asking was on
| a very basic level and he gave answer that was not
| correct in context of experience or what was actually
| asked. Even though technically correct.
| DominikD wrote:
| This rings true for a lot of discussions online:
| technically correct, but irrelevant in context. :|
| asah wrote:
| 42
|
| /s
| PostThisTooFast wrote:
| Yes, unfortunately there is significant douchebaggery at
| SO.
|
| If you want to really rile the jagoffs up, suggest that
| nobody be able to downvote your content anonymously.
| matsemann wrote:
| If his answer was wrong, just accept some other answer
| then.
|
| Do you have a link to this encounter..?
| rendall wrote:
| Yeah, see that's frustrating. The point isn't his answer.
| The point is that his non-answer got him upvotes from his
| fans, and that when I tried to address this broken
| reputation system in meta, people aggressively missed the
| point exactly like you did.
| matsemann wrote:
| If no one understands what you mean, might the problem
| lie elsewhere?
| codehawke wrote:
| It's a popularity contest. Heavily favored towards those
| who came along when it first started off.
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| Every time I've asked a question on Stack Overflow, I
| include in the question what I've tried and hasn't
| worked, or that I'm specifically looking to do what I
| described and I'm not looking for a link to The XY
| Problem. It always gets edited out immediately so someone
| can post an unhelpful solution and get upvotes.
| EForEndeavour wrote:
| This user Gordon Linoff hit one million reputation points on
| Stack Overflow in August 2020 (now one year later he's at 1.17M):
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/400506/congratulati...
|
| > This comes after an astonishing amount of 71,839 answers (and 0
| questions!). He only joined in 2012, so that's an average of
| ~22.8 answers per day, every day, for the last 3144 days.To put
| perspective on the numbers, the second answerer on the site is
| Jon Skeet (our first millionaire) with 35K answers and then
| several others with 20k+
| jchw wrote:
| Absolutely astonishing. Answering questions on a Q&A site may
| not on its own be heroic, but at this scale it's hard to see it
| as any less.
| deltree7 wrote:
| If you look at many people's reddit/usenet/facebook comment
| history, 23 entries per day isn't much
| irrational wrote:
| Yes, because posting memes is just as easy as posting
| technical answers.
| ridiculous_leke wrote:
| I don't think you are being serious when you mention
| Facebook and Reddit.
| somehnguy wrote:
| It is when you do it for 3144 days in a row. Plus they're
| not just a bunch of 'lol' type low effort responses.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| How is throwaway comments and opinions on generic social
| media sites in any way comparable to answering questions on
| a very technical subject in order to assist people working
| in said technical area?
| jchw wrote:
| I don't disagree with your statement at all. However,
| people who contribute useful edits to Wikipedia or high
| quality answers to Stack Overflow are doing a bit more work
| than your average Facebook poster :) sorry you're getting
| buried on this, I assume your point wasn't necessarily that
| it wasn't more useful than that.
| deltree7 wrote:
| Yes, I was merely commenting about Volume.
|
| Also, if you are passionate about a topic, replying
| answers comes very naturally to you.
|
| But I don't expect HN to get it
| jchw wrote:
| The way I see it, there's not as much of a gap as people
| think between the 99th percentile and 50th percentile
| users, because being active on one of these sites isn't
| that difficult. However, I think this person does stick
| out. It seems there is a massive gap between them and
| even second place. I think that's what really makes this
| astonishing.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| I don't think we can equate the effort between answering
| technical questions and a comment on Reddit/Facebook.
|
| While the occasional comment feels like work (e.g.
| citations), that isn't the norm so 23/day is meaningless.
|
| Plus SO answers actually contribute positively to the
| world, whereas arguably social media comments do not.
| doc_gunthrop wrote:
| This.
|
| [ example meant to highlight the difference between a
| low-impact, low-effort comment from a social media site
| like reddit versus sites like SO where some degree of
| technical expertise is a precondition ]
| wubin wrote:
| Stack Exchange sites are not mere social media but more
| like an encyclopedia for specific topics. Answering as well
| as asking good questions requires extensive research and
| being mindful of future readers.
|
| Sad to see SE contributors are compared with FB users.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| Heroes are sacrificing themselves for the sake of others.
| Here we don't know if it was a sacrifice or merely an unusual
| hobby.
| freyr wrote:
| - person who is admired or idealized for courage,
| outstanding achievements, or noble qualities.
|
| - the chief male character in a book, play, or movie, who
| is typically identified with good qualities, and with whom
| the reader is expected to sympathize.
|
| - (in mythology and folklore) a person of superhuman
| qualities and often semidivine origin, in particular one
| whose exploits were the subject of ancient Greek myths.
| deltree7 wrote:
| Impressive!. But if you look at many people's comment history
| on reddit/Usenet/Facebook/Twitter/Slashdot it isn't hard to
| find 25 entries per day.
|
| Also an eye-opener about how much time an average person spends
| on message boards typing shit when they can be creating volumes
| of artifacts
| Ragib_Zaman wrote:
| Answering a technical question takes more time and effort
| than making general comments.
| caslon wrote:
| Solving problems for random people on StackOverflow helps
| them (the user, the corporation, and StackOverflow) make cash
| while not compensating you, and it _also_ requires relevant
| knowledge and effort to communicate concisely and correctly.
|
| On the other hand, people on Hacker News, Facebook, Tumblr,
| /. and so on don't actually have to know _anything_ , and
| their contributions only make money for the host company, and
| barely so in some cases. Reddit, as an example, isn't really
| profitable because of its average user.
|
| I contribute to similar things, myself, pretty frequently,
| but let's not pretend like social media and collaborative
| knowledge projects are completely equivalent and that effort
| spent is transitive.
| Salgat wrote:
| I can bullshit for hours but answering even a few technical
| problems in a well written fashion is exhausting work.
| lmilcin wrote:
| You need to understand these are not only technical answers
| to technical questions, but also highly valuable ones because
| people must indicate that they "like" the answer.
|
| Most even good answers get very little rep so the answers
| have to be pretty good to get that amount of rep on average.
| codehawke wrote:
| I wonder how much rep, has to do with who decides to up
| vote? If you see Jon Skeet answer, people will up vote him
| more than the average user with 5k. This is a subjective
| opinion of course.
| [deleted]
| darthvoldemort wrote:
| How accurate are his answers? Have they been validated for
| correctness?
| aloisdg wrote:
| His average is above the average user
| https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1467873
| Someone1234 wrote:
| If we use votes as a proxy for helpfulness, I'd argue most
| were "validated" by the community for _helpfulness_.
|
| "Correctness" is subjective and unprovable.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > "Correctness" is subjective and unprovable.
|
| Can you clarify how literally you mean that?
|
| Because a statement like "1+1=3" objectively _incorrect_ ,
| given the usual conventions about what I would mean with
| that equation.
| everythingswan wrote:
| With SQL, there are many different ways to write a query
| and to get the correct result returned to you. Instead of
| "1+1=2" being the only answer, it'd be more like:
| "1+1=2", "2+0=2", and "0+2=2". All are correct.
|
| In my experience on SO with both SQL and Python, there
| are usually a number of correct answers for every
| question. How correct it is depends on things that
| usually aren't in the question: size of the data set,
| dependencies or processes that may break as a result of
| answer, etc.
| hervature wrote:
| "1+1=3" is only incorrect in the standard accepted
| definition of arithmetic. That is inherently the
| subjective part. Nothing prevents people from using
| different math system. At the very least, I could say
| 1+1=10 in binary and you have to concede that you need to
| add more caveats to your statement. The other form of
| subjectivity is that style/performance/complexity is
| always considered for programming and the tradeoff is
| always subjective.
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| Math is objective, not subjective, which is why 1+1=3 is
| incorrect, not just a violation of my preferences.
|
| Binary is not a different _math_ system. It 's the same
| math system with the same rules but a different radix.
| 1+1 does not equal ten in binary. It still equals 2.
| You're just using a different notation for the same
| concept of two. The substance of the thing is not
| identical to how you signify it, which is why you can
| write "two", "2", "II", "2r10", ...all of which signify
| the same abstraction.
| hervature wrote:
| You are kind of proving my point. You just defined 10 to
| be "two" by establishing which base you are using. Thus,
| notation is subjective based on the author's desires.
| But, my argument was not even that. My argument was that
| 2 comes before 3 is not a universal law of math. That was
| chosen (subjectively) by humans.
| setr wrote:
| It's easy to show that something is incorrect, because it
| doesn't meet the base requirements of the question posed,
| or correct because it does.
|
| It's difficult to show a correct answer is good, or the
| best, for the question. Many answers you find on SO both
| provide a correct answer, as well as try to defend
| against and call out potential pitfalls and assumptions.
| Many answers also achieve at best "technically correct",
| giving something that works, but slow, error-prone,
| inelegant, and really just a Bad Idea.
|
| Technically correct is mostly a waste of time, unless
| nothing better exists. If this user is just technically
| correct (he's probably not constantly _wrong_ because he
| has more points than answers), then he's ultimately not
| much better than your regular shitposter.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > 22.8 answers per day, every day, for the last 3144 days
|
| I wonder if his employer is on board + supportive with this use
| of his time.
| bachmeier wrote:
| I believe it's this guy[1], so it's safe to assume his boss
| is on board with spending his time that way.
|
| [1] http://data-miners.com/linoff.htm
| da_chicken wrote:
| Okay, but that site is quite dead and has been for a long
| time. The homepage has Flash on it, and the linked blogs
| haven't been updated in 5 years.
| dylan604 wrote:
| If you're answering 23 questions on SO per day, you don't
| have time to maintain a website. Especially that initial
| time sink of converting from a Flash based site.
| necheffa wrote:
| He could be retired.
| biddit wrote:
| Why do you make the assumption that he does this on company
| time?
| asah wrote:
| 22.8 non-trivial answers per day. I'm pretty fast with SQL
| and no way I could do that, let alone 3000+ days in a row.
| bsd44 wrote:
| You are assuming that he answers questions every day. He
| could easily be spending weekends on SO and some
| evenings. It doesn't mean he's using work time to do
| this.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Even at 10 minutes per answer that is roughly 3.7 hours a
| day or 26 hours a week. That's more than half of a full
| 40 hour work week or like 23% of your waking hours each
| day!
|
| That's a non trivial amount of time!
| codehawke wrote:
| Most popular question shows, he answered it on a Friday at
| 2pm. I bet he did answer on the clock.
| julienfr112 wrote:
| He may be a database engineer on call in case of problems,
| but not busy doing anything. Some people on call are doing
| crosswords, watching youtube, posting on facebook. He's
| posting on stackoverflow !
| omk wrote:
| The user has published numerous books on SQL and Data Mining.
| Makes me think he is an expert who spends time curating
| caveats in this ecosystem. This is a great way to build value
| for the community and self. https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripb
| ooks&rh=p_27%3AGordon+S.+Li...
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