Remember that Stack Overflow thing we've been working on? Some commenters on a recent Hacker News article questioned the pricing of Stack Exchange -- essentially, a hosted Stack Overflow:
You know, I would actually pay someone to come up with a decent clone of this thing… will someone please start coding?
It is called “Shit’s Easy Syndrome” 
Have you ever legalized marijuana?
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legalized-marijuana.html
Coming across as a douchebag in this post.
I agree with Jeff. Your posts are usually awesome - this one sucks “enough to write a response”.
Funny on Hacker News this morning I read a short snippet titled the “Mythical Man Weekend”. All about how easy it would be to build something over the weekend. And the dude used Stack Overflow as the example.
Now I read this.
Again with that ?
Just because some Chinese copied your idea ? and worst it’s open source.
Come on, tell the truth, it has nothing to do with OSS. It’s just because you’re loose the Chinese market.
It was bound to happen. Stop being childish and get over it.
The devil is in the details.
A weekend? Much less, I have written my version in DoubleSpeak++ in less than a minute. See the entire codebase below:
({./.})
All I need now is somebody to write a compiler smart enough to interpret the code!
Stackoverflow reminds me of McDonalds in that it’s really optimised to its core purpose but at the expense of being utterly soulless
@Jonathan Hayward. I beg you, please tell me your kidding on your personal website. Tell me you did not really “spent a lot of time on usability and user experience touches that are rarely noticed if you do them right”, tell me you are being sarcastic.
Your site looks awful, is hardly usable and breaks about every guideline in the book in terms of navigation, color theory, contrast, accessibility and so on.
Either you were joking and the joke’s on me, or you have a very very long way to go.
I could still bang out a Stack Overflow clone with even better spit and polish in 4 weeks on top of a FOSS stack (Ruby on Rails, Lift or Mono’s ASP.NET - you pick). I’ve done it end to end in the past - from DB all the way to Ajaxified UI and CSS. It’s not that hard.
These clowns are the same people undercutting us on bids, because they undervalue their own time. I love and support open source and free software, but scoffing over the cost like that doesn’t help any of us support ourselves, much less a vibrant and functioning industry.
I’ve said it many times - the most important things that make for a good website don’t happen on the web server!
Great post Jeff.
Could a decent coder put together the skeleton of SO in a weekend - yep. Would it be crap - yep.
It’s all the small details that make a good product, and why so many projects that are just put together by ubergeeks, who are only interested in writing cool code, totally suck from a user perspective, and correspondingly, no one uses them. Ergo, they don’t count for shit.
There are some awesome open source projects out there, and the concept of open source is great, but I really don’t agree that if you write something cool you should just open source it. Maybe, but it is the creator’s decision to make, not the angry mob’s. It’s not your birthright to use other peoples work, it only happens if they want it to.
This is about business, Jeff put his neck on the block, walked away from a stable job, and (eventually 
) made an awesome product. Why TF should he just give that away, to be bastardised by some retards who never risked leaving their parents house, and set them up as competitors?
This is not Disneyland people. Here on planet earth, there is this little thing called a financial crisis going on, and people still gotta eat and pay mortgages.
Unfortunately, we don’t live in a utopian society where money doesn’t matter. That would be cool, but it isn’t here yet, and apparently does not happen until wayyy after someone develops a warp drive…
Some people will just want it and buy it. Pay your money, turn the key, done. That’s called commerce. Everyone else does it, why shouldn’t programmers?
Others will want to write their own, that’s fine - go for it.
@DMB - good for you - you finished a project - how much money are you making out of it?
@Jonathan Hayward - my freakin eyes !!!
Jeff, I want to have your baby!
Ahh, Stack Overflow, a pile of shit followed by some shit developers, with the occassional decent reply.
Stack Overflow is not a smooth experience, it’s a nasty bumpy one from Australia.
That’s why coders are not project managers.
Developers estimate with an inverse factor of dog/cat years.
Er - Phillip from Oz. Having a bad day? I don’t have any issue with SO and I am accessing from Australia. Change your ISP, mate. You’ve got a lame one, something even us developers in Oz should be able to work out…