Hacker News Reader

Comment by EForEndeavour | Hacker News Reader

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+

View on HN

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.

Heroes are sacrificing themselves for the sake of others. Here we don't know if it was a sacrifice or merely an unusual hobby.

- 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.

If you look at many people's reddit/usenet/facebook comment history, 23 entries per day isn't much

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.

Agreed! I'm active on several SE sites and every quality answer takes me time to research, write, and edit.

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.

Haha, yea, this isn't like having a snap streak of showing a funny face to your friend for 3,144 days. But alas, the internet at large probably thinks that is a harder feat than this.

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.

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 ]

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?

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.

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

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.

Yes, because posting memes is just as easy as posting technical answers.

I don't think you are being serious when you mention Facebook and Reddit.

> 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.

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=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3AGordon+S.+Li...

Would be interesting to see the overlap in answers. It may be that instead of closing as duplicates, he’s just answering them and his SO cred keeps folks from chasing duplicates.

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.”

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

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.

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.

If it's occupying his life so much that he hasn't updated the homepage for his technology consulting firm in 5 to 10 years, then he seriously hope he's retired because the alternative is really not good.

Why do you make the assumption that he does this on company time?

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.

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!

I'm willing to bet this guy is so good at his craft that he bangs out quality answers in less than 10 min per question. That'd actually be a fun side project: for a given SO user, compute their average time between each of their answers and the corresponding question.

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.

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 !

Most popular question shows, he answered it on a Friday at 2pm. I bet he did answer on the clock.

He could be retired.

Is his employer satisfied with the results of his work? That's all that matters

You should pay him...

How accurate are his answers? Have they been validated for correctness?

His average is above the average user https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1467873

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.

> "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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Answering a technical question takes more time and effort than making general comments.

I can bullshit for hours but answering even a few technical problems in a well written fashion is exhausting work.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com