

scale.metaoptimize - A StackOverflow-like site about high scalability and NoSQL - alextp
http://scale.metaoptimize.com/

======
scorpion032
The fact that all these "stackoverflow-like" sites copy the simple SO design
is a testimony to the designer that designed it.

For years before stackoverflow, everyone copied the PHP-BB UI. Stackoverflow
changed it.

New sites can come up with a better and different design. The ones that do,
stand a better chance of making it big than ending up as many of those
stackexchange1.0 sites (that died).

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paraschopra
Ironically, it is taking ages to load. Anyone else experiencing issues with
the link?

~~~
bravura
[update: _Service is now back to normal_. There was an unusual load spike that
lasted about ten minutes and is now over.]

I'm the person that launched the site.

I'm running it on a shared host. I apologize for any attendant problems with
quality of service. (and yes, I do see the irony :)

There is a pretty obvious fix. I'd need it switch it to a virtualized host or
its own machine. Sorry I haven't done this yet. I launched the site as a hobby
project.

My previous site: <http://metaoptimize.com/qa/> got a large amount of visitors
last week and no one complained about the load. Load randomly spiked to 60 on
my shared host because of another user's job.

OSQA devs tell me that running OSQA on its own machine gives very good
performance. Even the largest OSQA site, like LockerGnome
(<http://lockergnome.net/>) supposedly only has a single digit CPU percent
usage when run on its own machine.

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snprbob86
I think that it is quite distasteful to blatantly clone StackOverflow's
functionality and design, right down to the "New here?" banner. This sort of
behavior is no way to start a community.

~~~
bravura
I am the person who launched the site.

I recently launched an OSQA (the Django+Python software running my site) for
ML+NLP: <http://metaoptimize.com/qa/>

That last site was incredibly successful. I have a few hundred signups, there
is activity on the site every ten minutes or so, and everyone on the site is
very grateful. I'll post some quotes at the end of my comment.

I decided to try this again with another niche topic that I find very
important: scalability. There is a lot of undocumented folk wisdom, as well as
little known tips and tricks, that I believe should be discussed in a Q+A
format with voting.

I am sorry you consider my site distateful. I took the default OSQA skin and
made some small customizations.

I hope in reading the following comments about the ML+NLP site, you'll see
that people genuinely value what I put up. I am hoping similarly to create
value on another topic that a lot of people wrestle with daily.

Things people are saying about MetaOptimize Q+A:

Alexandre Passos (Unicamp): "Really thank you for that. As a machine learning
phd student from somewhere far from most good research centers (I'm in brazil,
and how many brazillian ML papers have you seen in NIPS/ICML recently?), I
struggle a lot with this folk wisdom. Most professors around here haven't
really interacted enough with the international ML community to be up to date"
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1476247>)

Philip Resnick (UMD): "Looking at the questions being asked, the people
responding, and the quality of the discussion, I can already see this becoming
the go-to place for those 'under the hood' details you rarely see in the
textbooks or conference papers. This site is going to save a lot of people an
awful lot of time and frustration."

Aria Haghighi (Berkeley): "Both NLP and ML have a lot of folk wisdom about
what works and what doesn't. A site like this is crucial for facilitating the
sharing and validation of this collective knowledge."

Ryan McDonald (Google): "A tool like this will help disseminate and archive
the tricks and best practices that are common in NLP/ML, but are rarely
written about at length in papers."

esoom on Reddit: "This is awesome. I'm really impressed by the quality of some
of the answers, too. Within five minutes of skimming the site, I learned a
neat trick that isn't widely discussed in the literature."
([http://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/ckw5k/stack...](http://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/ckw5k/stackoverflow_for_machine_learning_and_natural/c0tb3gc))

~~~
snprbob86
Assuming you are not the proprietor of OSQA: I apologize for implying that you
acted distastefully. I was not aware of the existence of OSQA, which is what I
find distasteful.

Digging deeper, I can see that OSQA is based on the same tech as CNProg, which
has been discussed on HN before. If I recall correctly, most people shared my
displeasure with the clone. But now because OSQA is open sourced, people think
it is OK?

When people spend a lot of time and money to design something through blood,
sweat, and tears, like I'm sure the StackOverflow team did, it is not cool for
someone else to come by and just clone it blindly. This also applies to free
and open source software. Derivative, inspired work is one thing. But this is
a step away from copy-paste.

~~~
andrewljohnson
In fact, it is cool, it is expected, it is flattering, and it is perfectly
ethical. I'm guessing the StackOverflow team feels this way too.

There is so much more to software than what your CSS layout is, and we should
all look to our fellow designers and programmers and steal the best ideas and
use them ourselves. That's how software evolves.

From a legal standpoint, didn't we settle the whole look and feel issue way
back when with Apple vs. MS?

~~~
pavs
>In fact, is it cool, it is expected, it is flattering, and it is perfectly
ethical. I'm guessing the StackOverflow team feels this way too.

really? You think so?

I am glad that there is an open source option, but I hate the fact that its
all most 95% copy paste job of SO.

There is a difference between design inspired from something and blatant
copying something.

~~~
dirtyaura
A lot of open source software has started by blatantly copying the design or
concepts of a commercial product, but then they have later diverged from the
original source of inspiration to have a few original ideas of their own. A
couple of examples: OpenOffice, RhythmBox, Freeciv.

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epi0Bauqu
Will there be cc dumps like SO? [http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/stack-
overflow-creativ...](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/stack-overflow-
creative-commons-data-dump/)

~~~
someone_here
Note: That's "creative commons" and not "credit cards".

~~~
pavs
I remember back in the days when you could trade CC dumps on private irc
channels. I think back then all you needed was name, pin, number and you were
good to go.

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cont4gious
since you are clearly ripping off the stackoverflow idea and design, why not
submit this to area 51? this would not only save you any kind of
hosting/bandwidth costs, but would probably get the word out faster.

~~~
joshfinnie
I really don't like what stackoverflow is doing with the area 51 project. For
example, the GIS version has 400+ people committed to it and I don't think it
will see the light of day.

This only has seven questions, but it is living and breathing. Isn't that is
what is important about a website?

~~~
alextp
Yes, the area51 process seems very broken. I'm not sure why they ask for so
much focus and bureaucracy for the new projects, given that stackoverflow is
so broad, open-ended and easy to use.

Until they fix it I guess the solution is to use external alternatives. I'm
not sure I like the stackoverflow copying done by OSQA, but it's open source
and easy to set up. I'm not the creator of this site, btw, just a user who
thought it would be interesting to the HN community.

