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Comment by havermeyer | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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.

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.

This rings true for a lot of discussions online: technically correct, but irrelevant in context. :|

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.

It's a popularity contest. Heavily favored towards those who came along when it first started off.

If his answer was wrong, just accept some other answer then.

Do you have a link to this encounter..?

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.

If no one understands what you mean, might the problem lie elsewhere?

But at least some people did understand his point. I did, for example.

It's just weird how often a discussion on something on SO ends up with someone complaining about overzealous downvoting or closing of their perfectly reasonable question, but no one can ever actually post a link to it.

To me that says they're not telling the whole truth about their own behavior.

Given there could be any number of reasons that strangers on the internet do not supply to you that which you demand, especially given the down-votey tone you demand it; it is instructive that you narrow in on the least charitable.

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.

Or they don't want to reveal their identity on HN.

I'm pretty open about my ID on HN, but that could be one of the many reasons this fellow does not get that which he demands from others.

I think that is quite sensible, so multiple people do not (unknowingly) spend time writing the same answer.

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