A single person answered 76k questions about SQL on StackOverflow
stackoverflow.com
stackoverflow.com
> 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+
- 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.
Sad to see SE contributors are compared with FB users.
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.
[ 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 ]
Also, if you are passionate about a topic, replying answers comes very naturally to you.
But I don't expect HN to get it
I wonder if his employer is on board + supportive with this use of his time.
As an aside, he was also a big reason why I stopped participating in the network as we had a few run-ins over nuances where his support was “I wrote a book.”
That’s a non trivial amount of time!
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Most even good answers get very little rep so the answers have to be pretty good to get that amount of rep on average.
I don't know what the point of that is.
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.
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.
/s
Do you have a link to this encounter..?
To me that says they're not telling the whole truth about their own behavior.
I quit SO in 2014, and asked Stack Exchange to delete all data from my accounts across their properties. I doubt any link exists.
You are free to disbelieve. You are free.
Impressive isn't even strong enough to describe what this is.
Thank you, Mr. Gordon Linoff for advancing humanity.
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!
Gordon Linoff has written a series of books on data mining and sql as well: http://www.data-miners.com/bookstore.htm
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.
Yeah, that's because downvoting answers cost reputation. If not for that, people would be waaay more willing to downvote
... but that would also bring a practice of downvoting good answer made by others to boost your own
SELECT 0;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.
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.
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.
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
TFW you forget to add the WHERE clause.
More important then mobile styling honestly.
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.
It seems like only all of the answers NOT tagged sql https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=user%3A1144035+-%5Bsql%5D... are sql-related.
He also has to be in the top 10 in terms of comments on questions and answers, he's everywhere :)
Would we care?
So not sure he's out sourced it, but he might be using their APIs to get notifications of certain questions.
I wish I could understand better the SQL Server beast
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)
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/104947/is-stack-exc...
Thank you in advanced ;-)
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Changed back to https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=user%3A1144035+%5Bsql%5D+... now (from https://stackoverflow.com/nocaptcha?s=f29968b0-76eb-45d9-8d6...).
[0] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/400506/congratulati...
How fitting for a StackOverflow link submission :)
Auth is fucking terrible, so I understand why this happens, but it is always irritating.