
Jon Skeet earns 1mm rep on Stack Overflow - juliasilge
https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/01/15/thanks-million-jon-skeet/
======
elchief
> Jon Skeet's SO reputation is only as modest as it is because of integer
> overflow

From

[https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-
fact...](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-facts)

I like his answer about Chinese time zones

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6841333/why-is-
subtracti...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6841333/why-is-subtracting-
these-two-times-in-1927-giving-a-strange-result)

~~~
brazzy
Note how the answer has 30+ comments and yet no admin has dared delete them...

~~~
Shog9
There are 123 _additional_ deleted comments there too...

------
ars
Once you have a large body of answers your score will just keep going up.

Mine has gone up about 40% in the last year and a half, despite not having
time to answer any more questions.

~~~
Deimorz
It gets a bit ridiculous over longer time scales. Almost all of my SO activity
was in early 2009, when I got up to about 12k reputation. I had another small
burst in early 2010 that took me to 17k or so.

I've had basically zero activity since then, and am now at 56,725. So I've
gained about 40k while doing absolutely nothing for 8 years, and am still
ranked #1331 (top 0.34%) on the site overall.

Here's a screenshot of my reputation graph:
[https://i.imgur.com/qgkdTz1.png](https://i.imgur.com/qgkdTz1.png)

~~~
tannhaeuser
I've only been a contributor on SO for the last 1.5 years or so (though a
long-time lurker since almost the beginning) and can tell you that it's not
that easy or outright impossible to reach that kind of figures nowadays. Not
that I care that much about my SO rep but still. Folks would often not even
respond to long answers, use throw-away accounts, and the quality of questions
is depressingly low, like in "How would I go about _(description of a multi-
year web project)_?" without even the slightest effort of basic research or
checking already answered questions. And of course the frequent case where
students want to crowd-source their homework (sometimes answered by others who
want to quickly grow their rep).

Was it always like that, or is it a recent phenomemon with more Web freshman
coming to the scene since around 2012?

~~~
shalmanese
All the easy questions have already been answered so most new questions are
obscure, poorly formed or duplicates.

~~~
carlmr
And obscure, poorly formed duplicates don't yield much long term rewards. As
it should be, but it still means that these numbers are out of reach. Except
maybe if you manage to work in the hipster shop that only uses the new
technologies before they become cool. Then you can go back to answering the
basic questions.

------
labster
I didn't know reputation was measured in millimeters.

~~~
lucb1e
I don't get this either, it's not as if there are two "m"s in the word
million. I must be spelling it wrong.

~~~
nsgoetz
I believe it come from mille - Latin for 1000. So 1mm is one mille mille or
one thousand thousand. Why we use the Latin? I have no idea.

------
michael_fine
Anyone know who that other user is in the first graph, who just surpassed Jon?
They seem to be answering at a crazy consistent constant clip.

~~~
drawkbox
Looks to be #2: Gordon Linoff
([https://stackoverflow.com/users/1144035/gordon-
linoff](https://stackoverflow.com/users/1144035/gordon-linoff)) as he is at
41k answers.

------
flukus
If only stack overflow had a crypto currency, he'd be a rich.

~~~
Radle
I'd assume he is rich for a software engineer anyway. As he has written
multiple books and is currently working as a senior engine at google.

------
option_greek
The answers given by the model mentioned at bottom don't even make any sense.
I wonder if ML will even be useful at harnessing and redistributing knowledge.

~~~
metafunctor
It's just a simple Markov chain model, obviously included for laughs.

That said, a relatively simple character-by-character RNN would probably have
been more interesting.

------
etergri
I wish I had his job: spending my time answering and playing (it's a gamified
Q&A) on SO all day and even being paid regularly.

