The Stack Exchange Podcast

With the recent “REP-OCALYPSE” that happened over the weekend, we thought it was a great time to do another podcast – so come join Joel, Jarrod, and Josh as they talk about some of the recent changes to the site and the motivations behind them. JOEL: This is not necessarily a podcast, but it might turn into something useable, perhaps in the form of a podcast, maybe. The goal is to talk about all of the questions that are getting closed, aka REP-OCALYPSE NOW. Part One: there has been closing and deletion of very popular old questions going on lately. Are we happy with how this is going? What are the other options? This has come to a head because it got noticed all of a sudden thanks to the global reputation recalc. SHOG: This is a perfect storm. Prior to the rep recalc, an SO mod got it in his head that he should go clean up these old popular questions, since they’re totally inappropriate for the current standards of the site. He posted on MSO about it. Then, this rep recalc made a whole bunch of people painfully aware of a bunch of their stuff getting suddenly deleted. A lot of the stuff that got deleted was worthy of getting deleted. Some were valuable, though, and were worthy of discussion and possible salvation. JOEL: There are a few categories that the lynch mob is after that should stay open (They’re interpreting a particular rule too zealously.) One of these is talking about separate questions that all have the same answer. One of them is three different [identify-this-game] questions that all refer to the same game. SHOG: If you ask a bullshit joke question and it gets good answers, great! You broke the “only ask questions you really need the answer to” rule, but the page is now improving the internet. It has value. Good job! JOEL: An example: the center cannot hold. The activity in the answers should be protected, not the questions. Hidden features questions tend to devolve. They lose value after the top ten or so answers. JOEL: So! There have been a lot of bad questions that were deleted, and some higher quality ones that are hotly contested. So what about programmer cartoons, or boat programming questions? They get a million views. They bring people into the network. Making those pages be Page Not Found is violent! It breaks the internet a little! SHOG: A theory: this is a lottery. Most of the time you post stuff, and it goes nowhere. Sometimes it strikes a chord, people go crazy over it and generate a great page. JOEL: There are no new questions that this really affects. If somebody asked “what’s your favorite Pascal question” today, it would get closed in a second. Eric Lippert wrote a great answer a year ago on a question that pissed people off – it was a duplicate and a homework question and all sorts of terrible stuff, but the amazing answer redeemed the question. SHOG: We don’t want to encourage people to gamble. We can encourage them to put their money in the bank instead! JOEL: Back to the question. What is bad about keeping these lottery winner questions around? JOEL: New example: the programmer cartoons. It benefits us because there are lots of views, and because people laugh! It’s better than googling “programmer cartoons” because we have voting. JOEL: Programmer cartoons questions get closed. So is it okay to keep the weird exceptions around just because they were very successful? Concept #1: Famous RFC about TCP/IP over Pigeon that wasn’t serious. Did it break the internet? Did this one not real RFC turn all RFCs into Reddit? Concept #2: Purim Torah on Judaism SE. On Purim, you are required to break rules and get drunk. Purim Torah is a humorous fake discussion of Jewish law that you discuss as if it were serious. The Judaism SE community has decided to allow it during/around the time of Purim. Some of the questions are very funny. An example of a “Purim Torah” Stack Overflow question: What i[...]

Well, it’s time for the final Stack Exchange Podcast featuring Jeff Atwood before he rides off into the sunset.  Tune in to hear Jeff and Joel reminisce about the origins of Stack Exchange, the journey along the way, and listen to some special recordings from those who have been around since the beginning. Joel was reading the transcript of Stack Overflow Podcast 001. It’s from April 2008. Listen to the awesome excerpt about the birth of Stack Overflow! (Stack Overflow is not another place to discuss tabs vs. spaces.) What was the biggest thing that surprised you about Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange? Jeff mentions the Meta Issue. Joel started out with a strong antipathy toward meta questions, or discussing the site on the site instead of discussing the topic of the site. It comes down to building the software to accommodate the direction the community goes in.  You can’t plan everything. Stack Overflow originally launched without comments, but that was fixed very shortly after launch, because it was something the community needed. Wikipedia hasn’t done this for Talk pages, and that’s why they’re so darn confusing. People have recorded nice messages for Jeff in honor of his departure. Geoff Dalgas aka Valued Associate #00003 goes first, and his clip is full of win (and awesomely bad music). Quantcast says we have 20 million visitors a month, and together they could populate a city the size of Seoul, South Korea. We have more people typing on our websites than English Wikipedia. Kyle Cronin sent in our next message. He’s an exemplary Stack Exchange user who contributed heavily to the birth of Meta Stack Overflow. Kyle was started a meta bulletin board after he found the official UserVoice site inadequate (that is until Jeff decided it was a core business function and made MSO). Next up is Josh Heyer aka Shog9, another Valued Associate who speaks very slowly. Jeff had originally put Josh in the same bucket as the Welbogs - people who get bored with chess, so they start flinging the chess pieces everywhere. Stack Overflow and Josh have grown up together. Jeff and Joel found a way to keep users like Josh interested and entertained without being detrimental to the core purpose of the sites, through Meta, Area 51, more sites, and beyond. History of the site: Started with Stack Overflow. Then came Server Fault and Super User, which topics were deemed off topic for Stack Overflow, but which were great fits for our audience. Then came Stack Exchange 1.0 and… …Valued Associate David Fullerton! He came over from Fog Creek and took the reins for Stack Exchange 1.0… which failed. Luckily, it became clear that the asset is not the software, but the community. Enter Stack Exchange 2.0! Communities were given the power to create new sites, for better or for worse. Theirs is the power to decide whether or not things like “identify this x” questions are helpful. There is such a thing as sites that harm the internet simply by continuing to exist. For that reason, sometimes sites need to be closed. Facts of life! (Askville is an extreme example. It can’t even hide its bad content, like Reddit can.) Here’s Jon Skeet, the all-time top user on Stack Overflow with more nice comments for Jeff. Jon Skeet is legendary. He has answered 20k questions on Stack Overflow thanks to his long commute to and from work. He exemplifies what makes a great Stack Overflow user, and has been justly rewarded with internet fame, and a ton of reputation. We’re almost at Version 3.0 of the core engine. Things are pretty polished, from a software perspective! But software is never really done, especially software that is being built for (and with) a community that’s always changing. So plenty of work remains to be done on the engine, but Jeff is leaving it in very capable hands. Information maintenance is a huge problem, especially in the realm of software development, and e[...]

Guests this week are Robert Cartaino and Rebecca Chernoff. Yeehaw! They’re members of our Community Team. The original Joel on Software forums were sort of a progenitor for Stack Overflow. They had strict rules: nothing off-topic was allowed – and discussing the forums themselves was off-topic. So a Joel on Software Off-Topic discussion group was created for all of That Stuff. Joel’s forums are still going strong! What happens if we let a community go on forever? If it’s stagnating or not really growing, it’s not necessarily making the internet worse. It’s just not doing anything. Right? But think about something like an eHow, that has low quality pages that still rank higher for most queries than other pages with real, good information. The Community Team does evaluations of the quality of sites, but they are beginning to make that process transparent to the communities or even have their communities do the checks. Or potentially to hire really deep experts now and then. Or both? What if we have the best site on the web, but it’s for a terrible topic? For example – what if horoscopes.stackexchange.com was the best darn horoscopes site out there. Does the topic still make sense on our engine? This is why proposals are examined so thoughly in Area 51 (and its respective discussion section). If you haven’t checked Area 51 out recently, you should stop by – there are lots of cool improvements that have been made. Robert, Jeff and Rebecca discuss the newfangled Area 51 process, and what sorts of mysterious things happen to a site when it spends its “week” in Private Beta. Sometimes proposals fail and get closed. Game of Go was one of them. It got shut down, but its questions and its users got migrated over to Board Games - which is one of the ideal ways to handle having a young site shut down. Another positive way to handle the shutting down of a site is to let its users regroup in Area 51 and try the proposal again with a different approach. “Wouldn’t it be simpler to just create a catch-all site, answers.stackexchange.com, and split off topics as they grow large enough for their own sites?” Basically, there is no way to grow acommunity through this method, since all the people there would have nothing in common. A counterexample is the split between Stack Overflow and Programmers - but that wouldn’t have worked with someone just asking a question about hardwood flooring on Stack Overflow and having it turn into Home Improvement. Really good moderation is key to everything. There are 260 moderators on the whole network! We start to identify moderators a few weeks into a site’s private beta by looking for active meta participants, editing to improve content, voting to close – doing activities other than simply asking and answering questions. This does not necessarily mean that the moderators must be the highest-rep users! That’s like asking your grandparents to be ushers at your wedding. Rebecca tells us about the changes that were made to the Stack Overflow election system for the recent moderator election. It involves badges. Learn more about elections! The Android elections are going on now. We hold chat-casts with moderators every few weeks to open a channel between the Community Team and the moderators. There’s also a monthly moderator newsletter with highlights of important announcements. That’s so people can get the 5-6 things they need to know without having to be too deeply ingrained in the moderators’ chat room or in metas. Meta Stack Overflow is to the federal government as individual site metas are to state governments. It’s possible to spend most of your time on your local site government, and the newsletter will keep you apprised of the changes on the national level. Moderation and meta activity are huge parts of why Stack Exchange is so awesome, but we can’t forget tha[...]

Jeff and Joel are joined today by Chris “Moot” Poole, founder of 4chan and Canv.as.  It’s a wide ranging discussion from internet memes and tropes to the danger of the SOPA bill that is currently making its way through the house. We need a number display like they have in delis. If anyone out there can get us one on the cheap, Joel would appreciate it so he can always know what podcast number we’re on. Canvas is re-imagining a message board, because the aesthetic of forums hasn’t changed in a very long time. It’s got a focus on remixing and collaborating images. It’s similar to 4chan but interestingly, Canvas requires users to authenticate their login using Facebook to deter trolls, but still allows pseudonymous and anonymous posting. 4chan is weird. Stuff doesn’t last very long there – there’s no archive. Moot gives us a brief history of 4chan and how and why he started it. Its a fast way to get a message out to thousands of people because every post starts out as position zero on page zero. That’s why 4chan has a reputation for “porniness” when that actually represents a small percentage of the content that ends up there. (See the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.) Most of the internet’s memes originate on 4chan. They make the internet! The memes migrate to Reddit, where they move to the greater internet as a whole. 4chan and Reddit (and Tumblr and Twitter) reflect a recent trend away from text and toward images, short-form text, short videos, etc. So! Canvas! It’s a real venture-backed company. It’s not going to serve display ads (unlike 4chan which has only been monetized by banner ads). Shifting gears to talk about SOPA/PROTECT-IP. Hollywood wants it, and they spend way more money on campaign financing than the tech industry, so legislators are going to pass it. Hollywood wants the ability to go after ISPs who are resolving DNS entries to overseas sites, which is stupid because the workaround for that policy is simple. It wreaks havoc on the existing DMCA provisions for protecting copyrighted content online. A long, long time ago… people tried to sue telephone companies for allowing calls in which illegal things were discussed. That was ridiculous, and the phone companies were ruled to have no liability for how their channel is used. That’s the precedent that the internet operates on today. Joel describes the current provisions outlined in the DMCA that give copyright holders and websites ways to enforce copyright in a fair way that punishes only the infringer, not the website. It’s demonstrative of the fact that Congress is run by corporations currently; the only things that gets passed are things that companies want passed. Example: pizza is a vegetable. Two important books to read on the topic: Republic Lost and Master Switch.  You can also read Larry Lessig’s post on why he’s focusing on trying to reform the whole system Go to americancensorship.org to learn all about SOPA/PROTECT-IP, and what you should do to get involved. (Hint: in the U.S., it involves contacting your representatives.) It’s likely to come to a full floor vote soon, and we need to stop it. Add your name to the list Senator Ron Wyden will read during his filibuster of the bill. We come back to 4chan, where we learn about moderators, janitors, and on-topic-ness rules on the various boards. People apply to be moderators on 4chan, so it’s self-selecting. Chris is on Twitter, as are 4chan and Canvas. Also be sure to check out canv.as and 4chan… but don’t do that last one at work.   Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #29 w/ Chris Poole by Stack Exchange

Jeff & Joel are joined this week by Brent Ozar, database wizard who has helped tons of companies (including Stack) with their massive scaling needs. The Spanish site is live! It’s sort of strange having a site about learning one language be conducted in another. With French we decided to let them try to conduct the whole site in French. It’s an experiment! Gaming is having a meteoric rise due to Skyrim. Check out the graphs! (Here they are in the show notes!) Skyrim questions have 1.35 million views in ten days, at time of recording. Whoa! Thanks to badp for posting. Anyway! Brent Ozar is our special guest today! He is a SQL Server Master. He has a blog. He has a talk about SQL tuning and whether or not you should even do it. He summarizes it for us, and the gang talks about SQL tuning, caching, load sharing. XML shredding. You know. Database stuff. At Stack Exchange, and especially with Stack Overflow Careers, we are trying to elevate users and show off how awesome they are. Joel’s been reading up on all the Wikipedia pages on personality disorders. Most executives, especially at startups, are indistinguishable from people in insane asylums, apparently. Paranoia is a particularly common form of mental illness among executives. This is relevant because people often say they won’t send employees to a Stack Overflow event because they’ll get poached! (But it’s probably true.) Feel free to poach Jason Punyon, employers. (Scratch “Punyon” off your Podcast Bingo card.) There’s a post on the Server Fault blog about why Stack Exchange isn’t in the cloud. It’s got a nice discussion about the pros and cons of letting somebody else host your stuff, which the gang explores. Answering questions on Stack Exchange is about doing a little science to come up with a canonical answer instead of just posting opinions. Jeff measured the range of a remote controlled robot in Battlefield 3 so as to be able to answer this question. Jeff experimented with posting a question for someone else on Super User (based on this post)- and it does! Well-written questions get better answers. But we eventually have to teach the person to fish (to write their own well-written question and post it themselves). You can find Brent at his website or on Twitter! (Here’s his video about how Stack Overflow scales with SQL Server.) Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #28 w/ Brent Ozar by Stack Exchange

Jeff & Joel are joined today by Dave Winer, who’s upset that we don’t have a jingle to start the show! He “invented” (well, pioneered, really) the XML-RPC protocol. Dave tells us the story of how and why the protocol came to be. Right now, Dave’s working on a “magnificent symphony of software” – it’s the communication system he wants to use. It involves a minimal blogging tool with only RSS output (plus a dongle that will push the RSS to twitter, etc), a “River of News” aggregator, and an overarching tool for creating content that can be picked apart and included on other platforms. Dave’s philosophy is that some time soon, users are going to realize that they need a place to build and control their content before they post it to any service or platform that’s controlled by an outside company. The gang discusses the nature of comments on blogs (and on Stack Exchange questions and answers), and how to manage them – or whether to allow them at all. It leads to a discussion of creating new pages on Wikipedia, and its requirements for citations and notoriety. Dave suggests putting together a Best Practices manual on managing your content on the web. He suggests that having as few domain names as possible will help people not lose their content (or break all their links). Jeff suggests that Facebook can be that sort of “repository” for many people, but Dave disagrees. (n.b.: He recently deleted his Facebook account.) Companies don’t necessarily last forever – we’re looking at you, Geocities. (Talk of Facebook inevitably pushes the discussion into the realm of what information websites record, and how, and why – generally as related to advertising.) Services like FedEx and UPS can get you your new Kindle Fire on release day because they’ve cut every possible corner – except for the 1% of people who are not a simple case because they’ve moved, or they need their package on time. That 1% outlier idea can’t be applied to freedom (intellectual, personal, what have you), Dave says. Dave wants to buy a bland, uninvolved service that does nothing but provide the service it says it provides. Amazon was doing a great job of that until they kicked WikiLeaks off their storage. Dave is overlooking that incident for now because there is nowhere else to go that provides the whole package (uptime, reliability, etc). Dave wrote a blog post involving the quote: “If you’re not paying for something, you have no reason to expect it to be there tomorrow.” But does that mean that because you are paying for something, youcan expect it to be there tomorrow? The gang explores this philosophy. Suddenly we’re talking about how Dave believes there is no real hard line between government and business… an issue which cannot necessarily be solved in a 60-minute podcast. Twitter solves the subscription process that RSS has. With RSS, you have to go through a bunch of steps to get yourself subscribed. With Twitter, you just have to click one “follow” button, and you’re set. Joel is considering writing fiction! He likes the medium because you don’t have to tell the truth. You tell the deeper truth by manipulating the superficial facts. The coalition of the users doing stuff together independent of Facebook or Google or what have you is valuable and should be encouraged and protected. It’s a conversation that Jeff and Dave will continue offline. You can find Dave at Scripting News, and you should also check out EC2 for Poets. Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #27 w/ Dave Winer by Stack Exchange

No guest today. Moot had to postpone his appearance on the show. But David Fullerton is here to hang out with us Jeff is packing up to go on an international trip. He’s going to Øredev in Malmö via Copenhagen and London on British Airways. He will take the train from Copenhagen to Malmö - good choice! Joel is full of handy travel tips. Among them: The chip-and-PIN credit card system is vastly superior to the one we use, which is why it can be tough to get cash overseas! Joel also has packing tips for the cold Swedish weather. Also, freezing eyeballs Per a chat room question: there’s no news on DevDays. Though we did have a vendor offer us a refund on money we didn’t pay, but Producer Alex is too honest for his own good. Also, Future iterations will be closer to the original conference. Stack Overflow is accepting nominations for moderators for the next 6 days (at time of recording). So far, the nominations are civil and intelligent (unlike in the real world of course). The gang talks about other sites/forums/chat rooms from years past that have held elections like ours. There aren’t many! Jeff & Joel discuss what moderator elections mean for a community, why communities need moderators, and what makes a good moderator. David Fullerton is here to provide some insight on what makes a Hot Question on the Stack Exchange homepage… and we realize that an algorithm can never replace a good old-fashioned human moderator. Moderation is incredibly important. Jeff & Joel discuss previous elections, and the lessons learned from them which have turned into requirements for this new round of nominations. There are real-life elections today, too, but the weird off-season ones. “Dogcatcher” and “comptroller”. Leave it to the professionals who read the newspaper and listen to NPR every day! (If you were informed enough to vote in your local elections today, good on you!) The Gaming Stack Exchange is having a massive competition in honor of the launches of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. We want to see which game gets the most views on the site in the week after it was released. There are sweet prizes! Jeff will be shocked if Call of Duty wins this particular contest. David thinks Skyrim is going to win, too. It seems that many people feel this way. Can Call of Duty pull it off? Maybe, if we discover The One Question that gets a million views from Google. Also, we’re having a launch party on Friday! If you’re a gamer in New York and you want to come, send an email to team+gaming@stackexchange.com! We will also be livestreaming the party, where there will be 10 consoles playing MW3 and Skyrim. Stack Exchange and Fog Creek employees will be playing games, having snacks, and asking and answering great questions on the site. Spoiler alert for the first Modern Warfare game: it’s a video game where you die! In the campaign story, you die. You have to, and there’s no way around it. You die! That’s sort of rare. Jeff is off to the airport! Go see him at Øredev! We’ll be back next week at the normal time (Tuesday @ 4pm ET) when Dave Winer (the Podfather) will be live in the studio with us.  See you then! Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #26 by Stack Exchange

This week’s guest is Mark Russinovich, from SysInternals.com and now with Microsoft. Chatrooms are chaotic! Jeff mentions that lots of spaces need editorial oversight. A lot of good information is available, but it’s a hard to find it in the disorganizations. It’s a chronic problem. Mark and Joel talk about his command-line work. Mark had to reverse-engineer this stuff, almost from scratch. SoftICE was effectively a device driver that took control away from the OS, when it was active. Mark’s become famous for being a Microsoft hacker (yes they exist) and for his work with rootkits, the problems with which are becoming an epidemic. Mark started outside of Microsoft, but later his company was acquired by them. He’s worked on Vista, Windows 7, and a bit of Windows 8, but is now on Windows Azure. For Azure, an OS for data centers, Mark works for the fabric controller team. Like the kernel in Windows, this defines processes and consumes application xml. Basically, he’s all up and down the stack. One of their biggest concerns is upping consistency, to make Azure the best in the industry. One of the project’s other goals is to have a virtual machine deploy in less than 5 minutes, and update in 2 minutes or less. Right now, those times are 8-9 minutes at the 50th percentile. They’re pursuing a variety of tactics to optimize the boot process. There are lots of moving parts to optimize. It’s a fun project, and it’s all new. Not that many companies can deploy a cloud operating system at such a scale. Investment is expensive, although, as Jeff points out, machines today are more powerful than ever before. Still, although Stack Overflow is ranked #180, getting to #150 requires four times the traffic. Mark points out that yes, you can manage the servers yourself, make the investment, figure out all the parts, and so forth. Or, in nine minutes, you can upload your webapp to the cloud and pay only for what you use. The cloud is best for companies who have traffic in bursts and periodic traffic. Companies where, say, there’s a known holiday shooping rush or other specific types of workload patterns. By contrast, Stack Overflow’s traffic is weirdly predictable. Mark notes that the other benefit to cloud computing is replication; if a disk fails (as 3-5% of them do annualls) your data is cloned across the country. Mark wrote a novel: Zero Day, which was published in March. It’s a cyber thriller based around a cyber terrorism plot to bring down parts of the world using malware. It’s readable and got lots of verisimillitude. The sequel, Trojan Horse is set to come out next fall. Right now, while direct attacks are less common, spear-phishing (targeted phishing attacks) and good old exploitation of vulnerabilities in a system are still serious threats. Jeff talks about the back-and-forth about putting anti-virus software on our servers. On the one hand, it’s absolutely necessary, especially as Careers 2.0 has users uploading resumes and CVs onto the server. On the other hand, mention “anti-virus” in a Linux room and be prepared to get laughed out. There’s also a serious performance question there. Everyone should go implement 2-step verification on their email accounts (Gmail account!) right now. Well? Go! Do it now! We’ll wait. Mark says he would separate his password into tiers, with the top tier being ecommerce sites. Jeff says that this is part of why he’s been pushing for third-party sign-ins, where the third party isn’t a bunch of idiots. Mark believes we are converging towards this naturally, with the proliferation of Google and Facebook sign-ins. Joel wonders if maybe there just aren’t that many malevolent people in the world. Mark quickly counters with Facebook’s admission that 600k logins are compromised daily. He also points out that while our security is better (compare XP to Vista or 7′s [...]

Jeff & Joel are joined this week by Eric Ries, author and expert on The Lean Startup.  Topics for the chat include: Jeff Atwood is joining the podcast from his vacation. He has an announcement! He is having twins! In February! This will bring the total Atwood Child Count to 3, meaning they will outnumber the adults. Congratulations, Jeff! Talk of children leads to talk of war which leads to talk of Battlefield 3. The core team spent some time playing today. It incentivizes working as a team! ANYWAY. Eric Ries is our guest today! He’s got a new book out called The Lean Startup. What is a Lean Startup? It’s an analogy to lean manufacturing: a system of management about fast cycle time and building quality in from the beginning. Lean startups take those techniques and apply them to startups, where there are a lot more unknowns about the product and the customer. Eric wants to convince Jeff and Joel not to batch deploy anymore. (We deploy multiple times per day. We have at least one per day, and other than that people can deploy as they see that they need to.) The discussion about the way the teams deploy changes leads to a discussion about unit testing. Joel’s criticism of lean startups: the combination of Lean Startups and the fact that any startup can get a huge amount of funding instantly leads to a lot of startups that seem to “pivot” an awful lot. Color is a classic example of this. Eric reminds us thatwinter is coming for entrepreneurship, and this might not be a problem much longer. What is a pivot? A change in strategy without a change in vision. The key to the analogy is that in a pivot, one foot stays planted while you shift around to a new direction. Innovation accounting is Eric’s alternate accounting system that’s designed to tell if you’re getting close to product market fit. ROI, profitability, growth rates – all the traditional accounting metrics don’t apply at the really early stages of a startup. Joel’s dream for the Stack Exchange Network is medical research. The problem is getting a critical mass of people together to make the site work. Currently, we branch into other verticals via “overlapping circles” – starting out with programmers who also have other hobbies. Gaming is one of the biggest sites that has been created out of the “overlapping circles” theory. It’s likely to be an excellent bridge between the existing community of programmers and civilians who also play games, so we are going to put time and effort into figuring out how exactly to make Gaming more awesome. Eric is Mr. Pivot, so let’s get back to that: Pivoting is not necessarily a mistake. It’s the realization that a strategy that you used to be pursuing is working well for a specific customer base, and that you should pursue the parts of it that work. Gamers tend to pick a certain game to obsess over for a while, so it makes sense for the Gaming Stack Exchange to take a more specific approach to games as opposed to the Stack Overflow generalist approach. If you could imagine having An Encyclopedia Of X, there could be a site about X. (There might not be an encyclopedia on Call of Duty, but there would be one about all games in general.) That leads to the generalist approach, which can get messy, but we allow users to participate in segmenting themselves. Joel has decided to attack the Stack Overflow moderator flag queue. Some things he’s noticed: There is a tendency to pile flags on people that don’t speak English natively. The mental load on a new moderator can be very high as they learn the ropes of how to handle particular types of flags. Handling flags requires a lot of effort and decision from moderators. Joel has an idea on how to handle this! Discussion on moderation and flagging ensues. Eric‘s book The Lean Startup, found on Amazon or right on Eric’s website, peaked at #2 on the New York T[...]

Our guest today is James Portnow of Extra Credits. We are also joined in the studio by David Fullerton. James Portnow is joining us! Extra Credits has been a thing for a few years. The idea struck back when James was working at Activision. He wanted to open up the conversation about game development and design to the consumer side, instead of continuing to speak in the industry-centric bubble. At Stack Exchange, we’re trying to make learning fun. All of the gamification that we do on the system is in service to the goal of making the internet a better place for learning. Extra Credits did an episode about gaming addiction, which is related to the reason for the reputation cap on Stack Exchange sites. Stack Exchange has sites for gamers and game developers! The Game Development site is distinct from Stack Overflow because developing a game is a bigger set of activities than just writing code. Gamification is a way to get users to “read the manual”, and get them to the point where they don’t need the gamification aspects anymore at all. Games like Simon and Dragon’s Lair don’t give you any choice or control. Games provide positive simulation in various ways – by feeling like you’re acquiring a skill, by keeping things neat in Tetris, or on Stack Exchange, seeing somebody vote up something you wrote. One Chance is a flash game with an interesting mechanic: it leaves a cookie that prevents you from playing the game again. It’s an interesting concept on the bleeding edge of game design. The dark side of gamification… is conditioned actions that make players continue to play FarmVille, slot machines, some MMOs, etc. Players become aware that they are not enjoying the experience, but they are compelled to continue nonetheless. The danger in the Khan Academy is that for the American education system, this is the way to reduce our budget: have people record videos and have other people learn via these gamified websites. This is James’s concernabout the Khan Academy. When gamifying education, everybody should start off at 1 and work up from 1 - not get docked points down from A+ or whatever. You also have to incentivize the class to help get each other’s points up, not just each individual’s own points. A high sense of agency is the sense of having control over your own existence and the world around you. When a student falls behind a little bit and does not feel like he or she can catch back up, they lose their sense of agency, and it becomes a monumental task to get the student back on track. Games teach us that outcome is directly related to our own actions, but with more instant results. (Programming is another way to demonstrate this direct impact.) Joel peeled hard boiled eggs in the Israeli Army, so you can cross that off your Podcast Bingo card. James is the hero in his own story. Games teach you that you can always win, and that nothing is unachievable. We will close on that hopeful note! James can be found @JamesPortnow or @ExtraCreditz on Twitter, or over at Extra Credits. Oh, right, news from Stack Exchange: David, interim CTO while Jeff is on vacation, has no news. Except that we have a mascot now. (David had nothing to do with it.) Also, Jeff will be speaking at Oredev, which is November 7-11, and Punyon should probably go with him. Oh, yeah! We have our own URL shortener! It’s s.tk. Check out s.tk/joel and you’ll pick up the gist. Make sure to tune in next week when our guest is Eric Ries. Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #23 w/ James Portnow by Stack Exchange

Joel (but no Jeff) is joined this week by Paul Biggar (who Joel originally met when he was a DevDays London 2009 speaker about scripting languages).  Paul currently works at Mozilla, having come off his own (not that successful) Y Combinator startup. Paul’s least favorite scripting language of all time is PHP. Paul works in static analysis, which is looking at a program that is not running, and making decisions about whether or not it will work, how to make it faster, what the security implications are. Paul has solved the Halting Problem… twice. PHP stinks, so we talk about C and C++ for a while. Bjarne Stroustrup wrote a great book on the topic. The people who love language design are not the people that are enthused by PHP, and they were scared off by the “poisonous community” (Paul’s words!). The most popular programming languages that aren’t very well designed: PHP, Perl, JavaScript, shell. Their creators “had no business designing languages”. How did they become popular? Haskell was a programming language that was well-designed but never gained any traction. Paul says there are two types of programming languages: those that start safe and try to build performance, and those that start performing well and try to build safety in. Haskell is the former. It “escaped” from academia… barely. F# comes from the same school of thought. What about Dart? Google released a spec. They’ve got a full implementation that’s ready to go in Chrome. The cool kids are using MongoDB, CoffeeScript, and tortoise shell glasses. Enough about programing languages! Paul started a YC journalism startup called NewsTilt. It was the Future of Journalism, which is a terrible business to get into. Here‘s why it got shut down. In a nutshell: there were problems with the product, and problems with communication between Paul and his co-founder. Also, not being in Silicon Valley can be problematic… though Silicon Valley is not necessarily the be-all end-all of startup success. Perhaps most important was that it didn’t solve a problem Paul really cared about. Circle CI is a compiler-related startup that does capture Paul’s interest. It’s “continuous integration made easy”! Paul didn’t actually make the slides for his talk. But the message he wants to get out there is that working on compilers is actually very easy, and not something only wizards can do. Paul can be found on Twitter @PaulBiggar, and at PaulBiggar.com. Join us next week when our guest is James Portnow from Extra Credits – same place, same time. Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #22 w/ Paul Biggar by Stack Exchange

This week, Jeff & Joel are joined (in studio, no less) by David Fullerton, head of the NY Dev Department, and Jason Punyon, a developer here in the office.  Its a fast moving discussion covering all kinds of topics, like: Stack Exchange 1.0 (which gave users wanting their own Q&A site the Stack Exchange software, without being official Stack sites) is touched on. Jeff discusses the clones that exist and their reason for existing. Trello’s launch caused some kerfuffle on Web Apps.SE when general (and off-topic) help questions started being asked. In the larger sense, they discuss the necessity of applications and products to have their own unique help service. Some recent changes made to Area 51 are discussed, including the restructured voting system for example questions. Joel discusses the problems that arose out of the previous method of judging example questions. Fabian asks about overlapping proposals on Area 51, and David gives an overview of the process that goes along with the decision to merge proposals. Joel admits they aren’t too good at judging whether or not proposals are the right size. Joel gives a call to arms for Area 51! They discuss the soon-to-launch Biblical Hermeneutics site and its relationship to the existing Christianity and Judaism sites. Jeff brings up some other sites on Area 51, including LEGO and Firearms. The validity of a Healthcare IT site is discussed. Alex just access to Stack Exchange’s real-time Google Analytics, so the traffic trends of the site are discussed. Jeff plugs one of his pet proposals, and others discuss theirs (Krav Maga does indeed pop up). Joel shifts the conversation over to Careers. You can visit Joel’s profile here! Careers and Stack Overflow aren’t integrated as well as they should be, and solutions to that are discussed. Jeff and David also talk about cool updates coming to Careers. On a sidenote, if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be an intern for Fog Creek, you’re in luck! David talks about that experience briefly. Careers’ relationship with Linked In is mentioned and spurs on a wider discussion about the other career site. The history of Careers’ filter is discussed, including how it ran originally and how it runs now. Notifications on Stack Overflow have been modified recently. Jeff goes into the depth about how this was brought about. The term “yak-shaving” is involved. A discussion about parenting questions on other Q&A sites reminds Jeff of a recent discussion on Parenting.SE, regarding the horrific-sounding “hot saucing”. Join us next week at the usual time when we’ll be joined by Paul Biggar and his wonderful Irish accent. Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #21 w/ David Fullerton by Stack Exchange

Joining Jeff & Joel this week is John Siracusa, writer for Ars Technica – he’s the one who introduced Macs to the Ars world (and apparently ended up converting their entire staff into Mac users). John didn’t know who Jeff was until the Stack Overflow Podcast started. (Pop quiz: What was the podcast called before Stack Overflow was Stack Overflow?) Jeff and Joel brought everyone with them on their initial journey of setting up the site. Transparency is king. Version numbers don’t matter to Stack Overflow. There’s “current” and “not current” – it’s a constant work in progress. Especially if version numbers are a ploy to get everyone to buy the software again. We are downgrading Joel to an Etch-a-Sketch, since he can’t get his trackpad to work. Good programmers have a temptation to clean up Stack Overflow, and that can lead to everything suddenly looking off-topic. One result is that we get a lot of questions closed as General Reference. The gang discusses the many ways these questions have been handled over the years. There’s even a blog post on the topic. Jeff and Joel have different interpretations of how these types of questions should be treated. So what can be done to encourage good questions? One point of view is that a clearly no-work, no-effort question should not be rewarded with a brilliant answer. Another is that we shouldn’t care about the questioner – the goal is to create a useful piece of information that makes the internet better. We’re here to serve the 15 million people who get answers from the site without ever typing a word. Weakness to be addressed: better canonical answers, better de-duping, better practices at editing questions. The answer might be… better social networking, although that’s been heavily discouraged in the past. It’s promotion on Other Channels that gets eyeballs onto pages. Therefore, promoting things you’ve written is an incentive for asking better questions and giving better answers. We allow (and sometimes encourage) users to ask and then answer their own questions. Ask a good question when you start the project, then keep trying to figure it out yourself. In the meantime, somebody might jump in and answer your question. If not, solve the problem and add the answer yourself! What if the system tried to parse the code you’re typing a little bit? That way questions that aren’t necessarily similar in their vocabulary would be more intelligently flagged as similar to other questions that are actually related. Careers 2.0 doesn’t have an applicant tracking system, which is why Stack Exchange uses Resumator for its internal hiring. Why didn’t we ever think of that before!! (/dripping sarcasm) A Mac v. Windows conversation take us 20 minutes over time, even when it isn’t a heated debate! (Sidebar: conversations about PCs and Windows are generally much more technical than are conversations about Macs and Apple stuff… except among developers.) The main complaint John gets about his Ars Technica articles is requests for reviews of Windows to the same level of technical detail as his Mac reviews. Follow John Siracusa on twitter and listen to his podcast! Join us next week when Jeff and Joel are joined by David Fullerton, the head of our NY (read: SO Careers) Dev Team.  Same Place, Same Time. Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #20 w/ John Siracusa by Stack Exchange

Everyone’s back in their home towns this week (Sorry for the audio quality last week. It was Joel’s fault [actually, it was TechCrunch's fault]). And joining Jeff & Joel this week is John Sheehan, Developer Evangelist for Twilio. Jeff and Joel are bored of board meetings. How do you make them productive or even useful? Brad Feld says you should give out a document beforehand. Joel does this, and nobody reads it, but they at least pretend they did. Maybe Joel should plant money under the attendees’ chairs? Joel launched Trello at TechCrunch Disrupt last week, and they did not have adequate monitors onstage! It was representative of the general A/V “screw-uppedness” of the whole conference. Cool story, bro. Let’s talk about John Sheehan! He’s a developer evangelist at Twilio and doesn’t have enough Stack Overflow reputation. He travels around trying to make developers be more awesome. The future of phones is in things like BBM, iMessage, etc – alternatives to SMS. Voice is a whole ‘nother medium, for when emoticons just aren’t cutting it anymore. Text is useful for transmitting pieces of information, but for more nuanced conversations voice or video is necessary. How fortunate for this conversation that we have someone from Twilio on the line! New in the SE Universe: Linguistics! Joel’s dad thinks it’s full of amateurs. We also have a site on Christanity now. It is less technical than Judaism… which isn’t good. Our engine works better on more technical applications. Jeff: “I’m not 100% sure Christianity is working.” It’s still early, and it is getting more fact-based as it gets older, though. Bitcoin is low on activity until it gets a new question. It’s not what we call a healthy or growing site, but maybe that’s okay for a site like Bitcoin. There is no defined formula, and it is still being figured out. Now private beta participants will be able to invite others to the site while it’s still private. This devalues committing to a proposal slightly, but the private betas sometimes need a little help. John was at the BUILD conference in Anaheim last week. It was like Disney World, but with middle-aged dudes with questionable hygiene! Windows 8 had a developer preview, but it’s probably a year away from launch. John got to play with one of their tablets and says they’ve taken touch and made it completely un-intuitive. The longer he used it, the less he liked it. John is giving it away to the developer of the coolest Twilio app that uses some of the new WinRT or Metro stuff announced. Scrolling is a thing that many people have many feelings about. We got onto the subject through talking about Windows 8 merging its mobile and desktop systems, and how Apple is doing the same thing with iOS and OS X. John asks: Does anyone have any faith in a PC manufacturer making a tablet you would actually want to buy? Joel says no. Alex says no. Everyone keeps doing things like putting stickers about the component brands on a sports car. Totally hot right now: Trello t-shirts. DevDays failed because we did not promise a thousand dollar piece of hardware to every attendee, like developers at BUILD got. Jeff has not been to Burning Man. He likes the idea, but does not like the idea of being in the desert for so long. Joel did that in the army (cross that off your Podcast Bingo cards!), and it isn’t pretty. The Stack Exchange API 2.0 is baking! Take a look at the spec, and provide some feedback if you like. It’ll be released by the end of the year. Stats on the API will maybe be released in a blog post or something. Jeff uses the API as much as anyone that doesn’t work here, rather than using things a special, sneaky way. (You can read about past mistakes with the API on Kevin Montrose’s blog. Jeff, Joel, and John share their opinions on APIs and company/developer relations i[...]

No guest this week as Joel calls in to the show live from the TechCrunch Disrupt Conference in San Francisco since he’s there launching Trello for Fog Creek Software (also why his audio isn’t quite as good as usual, it’s pretty loud there).  There’s still a full hour of Jeff & Joel goodness though so make sure to check it out! Joel gives rundown of what he’s seen at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco so far. A discussion about differences between East Coast and West Coast tech startups leads Jeff and Joel to talk about how important centralized locations are for modern day companies. The recent Facebook deal has led to a recent influx of general Facebook support emails. This leads to a discussion about user support and how other companies rate against Stack Exchange. The merits of paying for internet services comes up, specifically thefreemium and 37signals models. Jeff discusses the merits of 37signals and Joel recounts his time using that model. The Most Valued Super User contest is discussed, specifically how this contest gets people to do “the right thing for the right reasons.” Mention of the contest’s prizes spur a discussion about merchandising (and inadvertently, whose head looks best on a plush Buddha). Jeff announces that Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange are getting Nerd Merit Badges. The Bitcoin site launched recently and is proving to be very popular. In other site news, Jeff mentions that enhancements are underway for the SE language sites. Jeff addresses the problem of duplicate questions, specifically on Meta. A little later on, Jeff goes into detail about the defense mechanisms being put in place to block duplicate questions. User interface proves to be a hot topic today between Jeff and Joel. What starts as a discussion about search engine functionality leads to a full-on talk about the ins and out and future of user interface. Listen to find out which user interface Jeff thinks is like a canker sore! Many sites have launched in the last week, opened recently. The new targeted method of advertising proposals may be the cause of this. As new sites open, Jeff and Joel discuss the new sites with overlap of existing questions. This is currently an issue with the existing Physics site and the soon-to-launch Theoretical Physics site. CHAOS member Sam brought up the idea of regional Stack Exchanges. Jeff and Joel support their differing opinions on the necessity of localized Stacks (also known as the “let your freak flag fly” theory vs. the “Hurricane Irene” defense). Tune in next week at the normal time and with our normal in-studio setup (really, promise) for another episode as Jeff & Joel are joined by John Sheehan, developer evangelist for Twilio. See you then!   Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #18 by Stack Exchange