You're not really calling out HN, you're calling out the coders here who claim they can recreate StackOverflow. But it is an example of a provocative title that lured me into reading.
To me its just a fun little thing I'll try to do over the weekend and hopefully it'll offer a bit of refreshing perspective into web-based app development again since I've been stuck in the flex world (what pays the bills for now) for so long.
But actually his post offers a pretty good to-do list for the list of things I need to do to get it working, so basically, there is:
1, Asking and Responding to question 2, can't downvote person too many times in certain amount of time 3, spam bot detection/prevention 4, user icons 5, sanitizing html lbrary 6, karma 7, full-text search with search-as-you-ask 8, user bios 9, important questions that bubbles down slowly 10, bounties 11, email notifications 12, javascript smart tags 13, user configurable badges 14, history of karma, upvotes and downvotes
and oh yes, I'm not going to attempt to implement the design, i'll prolly start off by using the stackoverflow css and html as a template like what cnprog did when they started off and perhaps let someone else ( or do it myself ) replace it later.
Well if he is really an SO dev, or knows the SO devs, he knows how much work has been put into it. SO is definitely not a complicated site, architecturally speaking. But as he points out, it's a very polished site. This may not be important for a programmer, but it is for an user (it is for me as an user at least), as he also points out.
Regarding the amount of work wich probably has gone into it, your original statement :
>it looks like something that can be thrown together in a weekend.
surely sounds disrespectful to the labor of those guys.
I'm also quite amazed by the general reaction to this. I don't understand how some commenters on hn, wich is supposed to be oriented towards entrepreneurs, who are by definition people interrested by the end user experience, could so quickly discard in several largely upvoted comments the work that has been put by those individuals, by saying that their success is just due to 'owners reputation'.
This is amazingly rude, and seems to be going along just fine.
When you provoke an argumentated and well thought out reaction as this one, you should ask yourself, before saying some people takes things too seriously, maybe you're taking what is important to them too lightly. And that's your responsability, not theirs.
EDIT: This is not to say your challenge is not a nice one. I'll be interrested to see how it works out =)
> This is amazingly rude, and seems to be going along just fine.
No one is "discarding" their work (well, I certainly am not, in any case), just saying that you can be covered in all the spit and polish you want, but if you don't have a community, a site like SO isn't going anywhere. And having Joel and Jeff as backers contributed to that. A lot.
Also, if we're talking about being dismissive, any idea how much work has gone into make things like Gnome, KDE and Ubuntu better looking? On beating all the involved code into shape so that it has started to conform to some kind of uniform look and feel? And it "it sucks" according to this guy, whom I will quote from directly:
"open-source software is, incontrovertibly, a total usability clusterfuck."
The astute observer will note that he's wielding an awfully broad brush that is very much discarding the work of a lot of people, who, while they may not have attained perfection, are working on these kinds of issues:
The quote isn't, "open-source software's usability could be perfected in a weekend". The quote doesn't suggest that it's easy, or not time-consuming, just that the end result right now isn't great.
Which I would agree with.
You're just saying that a lot of people are working hard to make it better.
Which I would also agree with.
>>>>it looks like something that can be thrown together in a weekend.<<<
It was mostly a reaction at the huge amount of money they want to charge for a such a software. But after reading the various responses, it has helped me understand the amount of engineering, user-experience studies and hard work that has gone into this fine web app. Regardless though, I still think its overpriced.
Yep, I probably fell into the "shitz easy" trap there and I will probably fail, publicly and humiliatingly in this case =( to implement all of StackOverflow's functionality in one weekend.
EDIT: Actually, as a sign of respect to SO and their folks, I'm not going to clone SO anymore, it has just become a totally no-win proposition for me. Another reason is that the project here:
http://code.google.com/p/cnprog/
Already does a really good job of emulating SO and there's little point in me writing another one.
But, I will spend the weekend cloning another piece of highly vaunted ( and overpriced IMO ) web software which does NOT have an opensource alternative.
BTW, what project are you referring to? Let us know once it's done in any case!
I would be extremely proud of myself to get high quality search in place in one weekend.
It just takes testing and tuning with real data to get it right.
The only reason I don't have a lot more security holes to fix is because this thing is only responsible for grabbing data and presenting it. If I were dealing with the administration side of it ... no fun.
Then there's caching to do, too -- that'll probably be a couple hours if I do it right.
So, I'll be really impressed (for what little it's worth) if you manage to get a working copy going over a weekend and include even rudimentary performance and security features.
So I think someone's just trying to get to the top of HN with a provacative title (which in all fairness was a plan that seems to have worked perfectly)
It might not be hard work sometimes for some sites. But it surely isn't trivial and surely isn't cheap (especially time-wise).
Guys, that's also why people will pay for your "free" web apps. When they improve their lives and are "easy" for you to write, the time and money to recreate even the easiest site is a barrier that they have.
Although, the topics he covers do address a larger part of HN than just the guy who said he could clone StackOverflow in a weekend.
Of course they wouldn't, but still, it's not impossible, which is what "0% could" implies.
Headline fails are the biggest threat to web usability. Not only are they an abuse of language, but when a genuinely good article with a suitably entitled provocative headline appears, its impact is diminished, the reader is more weary, and the article may be in fact skipped over.
"Pushy and manipulative news editors are akin to the boy who cried wolf" --- there, that's an overly provocative headline, isn't it?