Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Same for me. Day 1. I'm user 25 on the site as I listened to the podcast about them making it. Just for answering a few questions early I'm in the top 0.76% overall.

https://stackoverflow.com/users/25/codingwithoutcomments




I loved listening to the Stack Overflow podcast with Jeff and Joel. It was kinda crazy that they were doing a podcast like that while they (Jeff mostly) were building it and coming up with the name, etc. Still have all the mp3's somewhere.

Edit: I'm in the top 2%. Most of my rep. comes from interest earned on questions/answers I posted very early on.


The dynamic makes sense: the more popular the question, the more likely it is to get asked early on. That means early answerers will reap benefits from the popularity of the questions down the road.

There's definitely an "interest" dynamic to it, but there's also something like consuming the solutions with a good effort-to-reward ratio inside a search space early and then subsequent solutions get harder (kindof like a cryptocurrency?)

Niche questions do present an interesting opportunity, though. My highest-ranked answer was about rolling your own setInterval / setTimeout function for JavaScript implementations running on the JVM that didn't have them. Not a hot topic, but apparently a few dozen other people cared about this over the years.


One of my funniest work experiences comes from a coworker who had a question about an obscure RHEL 5 thing long after RHEL5 should have been abolished, him googling it, and finding an answer I had posted about a decade before when RHEL5 was in beta and I had experienced and answered the same issue.

Through the “asking and searching” phase, he was sitting next to me on a rooftop at a really stressful job, we were drinking daily on the job, and I had no idea why he suddenly started smacking my left arm and laughing to the point he couldn’t speak. He finally turned his laptop towards me and I just saw my StackOverflow profile with the icon I use at work and on GitHub and everywhere else, the picture of my first dog. He could have just spoken up (but I’d probably forgotten the answer) … he googled instead and got the answer of the person he was sitting next to.

When occasionally I have worked at big companies, now people know my dog’s face more than they know me as a person.


I've had the same experience of looking up and finding an old answer from someone I knew, but one that I made _myself_ for the exact same problem I've just hit again years later... :D


Happens to me all the time. I'm either not automating enough things, or automating too many things.

Btw, is there a simple way to backup all of ones own answers from across all stackexchange, in case the new owners mess everything up?


It has been posted elsewhere, but there is a complete data dump of stackexchange on archive.org.

https://archive.org/details/stackexchange


I’ve had a worse experience - I end up looking for a solution to a problem only to find an unanswered question from years earlier, which was also asked by me back then :(


I've done this too. Its at the point, i figure there is no solution


If I had an dollar for searching and finding a reddit thread that I created for a question that I eventually had to find the answer to myself since somehow everyone else remembers this, I'd have at least 10 dollars.

Come on brain, you remember fucking commercials.


Hilarious and heart-warming (minus the drinking daily on the job part, of course)!


I found an answer I had posted a few years prior.


High reward for joining early is a good growth strategy.


It is also why crypto is having a run. Basically a Ponzi scheme that rewards early adopters


That isn't how a Ponzi scheme works, a Ponzi scheme directly uses fees taken from new members to pay out older ones, lying and saying it's from actual business activity.

Crypto doesn't behave any differently than the stock market (except the fundamentals are a little shakier, okay, a lot shakier).


Cryptocurrency doesn't have dividends or share buybacks which are what make stocks have inherent value.


Stocks do not need buybacks or dividends. They are rights to control a share of a company, which earns (or potentially earns) money. That’s inherently valuable even without a stock market to determine a price. You control a machine, which makes things and earns money.

Crypto is only valuable, because others think so, too. You control a place inside a distributed list. Others think a place in exactly this list is valuable, while all the other lists are shitcoins.


How do you explain the prices of Class-C shares which don't bestow voting rights to the holder? For example, GOOG trades for over 2000 a share. In fact, it even trades at a $50 premium over GOOGL, which offers voting rights. Strange.


You don’t have to control a company personally, you can also rely on other shareholders to do that. You just have to know, somebody is voting in your interests, since you probably won’t do it (but again: you could).

I don’t know whether your statement about the price difference is true and if so, I don’t know why. Maybe different free float? My statement was about inherent value not short term price negotiations via stock exchange.

I thought about an actual attack against my argument: Stocks are just shares of companies, which sell stuff that is valuable because other people think so. Some stuff might have inherent value (because it can generate money), but in the end it still comes down to people deciding something has value. Turtles all the way down.


"You don’t have to control a company personally, you can also rely on other shareholders to do that. You just have to know, somebody is voting in your interests"

How would you know they're voting in your interests?

I've never known how any other shareholder voted in any of the stock I owned. For all I know they could have been voting completely contrary to what I'd wanted.

No. Unless you own enough of a stock to vote and make a difference, stock ownership is not about influencing a company but just about hoping the value of the stock will rise, and there are many theories about why that might happen, from fundamental to technical analysis to people who invest based on the phase of the moon, divination, tips from friends, insider trading, trend following, news, etc.


Those other shareholders also want the shares to retain value, so your interests are aligned regarding my initial argument that stocks are valuable because of the voting rights.


Yes it does. Proof of stake networks (Ethereum, Tezos, etc) pay dividends + transaction fees to stakers, decentralized exchanges pay a cut of fees to token holders (with decent P/E ratios), and the list goes on.

This is an out of date view that does not match the current reality.


As a thought exercise, suppose a proof is stake currency was only used by one person. How exactly does do it’s dividends create value? In short “crypto dividends” don’t actually create any value it’s purely incrementing an arbitrary number rather than creating an income stream.

The same is true if N people use the currency without any new money coming in they can’t cash out. Therefore it’s not an actual dividend. This is why everyone calls crypto a pyramid scheme, the only way to cash out is to get someone else to buy in.


For proof of stake, I agree - I think it's useful to instead focus on net issuance. For ETH2 this could very well could be negative since the base transaction fee will be burned, and transaction fees currently are greater than miner rewards a decent percentage of the time.

Proof of stake coins that don't have much usage and mostly pay out rewards from new issuance have an interesting piece.. - they are inflating the base supply to pay out dividends that holders pay taxes on. Effectively moving normal gains from the capital gains bracket to regular income, which is sub-optimal.

For DeX's, the image is a lot better - the biggest issue here is - are fees arbitrarily high, and will they go down over time. My gut says the percentage fee will go down, but the volume increase will more than make up for this loss.


US dollars wouldn’t be worth very much either if you were the only one using them.


> The same is true if N people use the currency without any new money coming in they can’t cash out.


As a counterpoint, YFI literally buys back it's token from fees earned from users using their automated yield farming strategy. There are plenty of duds around, but that doesn't make everything a dud.


Yes, cryptocurrency can be programmed in many different ways and can be defined as several different things at once.


PancakeBunny too! I’m considering to buy the dip…


Not all stocks have dividends.


The ones that don’t are valued on the assumption that they will in the future.


Have google, Facebook amazon or Netflix ever issued a dividend?


They are likely to do stock buybacks which are the same thing. You’re certainly not buying them for voting rights - FB and Google almost don’t give those out, and ETFs don’t pass on their voting rights but are not cheaper than the underlying stocks.


When was the last buyback?


What is your basis for saying this?


Are you asking me to link the Wikipedia article for capital asset pricing?


> The [stocks] that don’t [pay a dividend] are valued on the assumption that they will in the future.

Could you please make a specific section that justifies your claim?

I skimmed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_asset_pricing_model but I don't see anything there that validates your claim. I may have overlooked something, if so please let me know.

I'm skeptical of your claim. Based on some other reading [1]:

> To manage your portfolio, you need a way to compare your different investments and decide which are worth keeping. The dividend discount model and the capital asset pricing model are two methods for appraising the value of your investments. DDM is based on the value of the dividends a share of stock brings in, whereas CAPM evaluates risks and returns compared to the market average.

[1] https://budgeting.thenest.com/capm-vs-ddm-24472.html


You could have written "the Wikipedia article for capital asset pricing". I don't see the need to make it a question.

Your comment comes across as passive aggressive, unfortunately. I hope that wasn't your intent.


Buybacks are very popular in crypto. Its call token burning. Binance does it all the time with BNB.


Yep like the stock market and the idea of money.


and being involved with a common question

the more newbish the better


It's always interesting to see what SO posts I participated in - either as an asker or answerer - that became popular over time.


I think most of it is really down to the quality of the answers you've given combined with the vast amount of users on SO.

I'm user 537XXXX with an account that can't be more than 8 years old but I did spend a solid 6 months actively posting detailed solutions to problems I ran into - ~50 in total. And some more general answers. Which has amounted to ~4.900 points. Which isn't _that_ much. Just 490 upvotes. Or 10 per answer on average. Still - that puts me in the top 8%.

My guess is that the high percentage is more due to the sheer volume ;-)


It's also very much about timing. If you happen to write a popular answer at the time when interest in some particular tech is high for whatever reason, that gets a lot of views and upvotes early on. And once it has those upvotes, people looking for related answers later are more likely to stumble onto it.

I still get a steady rep trickle from a generic answer about WinRT back when Win8 was the hot new thing (or mess, depending on your outlook): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7416826/how-does-windows... - but most upvotes there are from back when it was posted, and I doubt it would get anywhere as many if that answer was written today.

And sometimes, it's the tongue-in-cheek answers that score massive upvotes, like the famous one about using regex to parse HTML.


I'm chuckling at the idea that you could have possibly misinterpreted that post.

"No, int_19h, he said to NOT use regex to parse HTML!"

int_19h: wạ͈ͣ̿i̘̱͚̝̍̎ṱ̜̙ͯ̏̾̐̃ͮ,̿̑̓̒̇̄ ͈̺̯͙̰ͦ̐̎̂w̜̦̱͇̝͂̐̈́̄ͅh͚̞̯̰͑͑̐̋ͪa̩͕͑̂̒̔t̪̬̱̞̞̹͌̿́̆̑ͮͮ?͕̮͒̊̃͒̊̈

/s


Yeah, the reputation model is nowhere near representative of the significance of your contribution. Just try not to take it overly seriously...

I got my reputation asking > 1,000 questions and answering > 1,200 , and I can't say whether I should be higher up than people with 10x less reputation than me or 2x more than me.


You're exactly where you should be. Reputation isn't an assessment of skill or knowledge, it's how useful you are/were to the site (as you state, contribution), and the site needs questions as well as answers. The person with 1000 reputation purely from asking questions is no less deserving of that score than the person that got the same score purely for answering some.

It's probably better to think of the points as something akin to money paid out by mechanical turk for doing things the site needs, including cleanup and formatting in some cases. At that point, your contribution and what it means is fairly clear.


> it's how useful you are/were to the site

One person asks a single naive question once: "How do I undo the most recent local commit with GIT", gets 200,000 reputation.

Another person answers 100 complex, delicate questions useful to high-performance computation underlying widely-available cloud services; gets an average score of 5, has 5000 reputation.

Another person occasionally asks and answers a few questions, reaching 2000 reputation, but does a lot of editing work, triages new posts, fixes up tag pages etc.

Who has been more useful to the site?


> One person asks a single naive question once: "How do I undo the most recent local commit with GIT", gets 200,000 reputation.

I imagine the person that asked the question about git was the first to ask. There's a benefit to being the first, or asking unique questions. The value of the first time that was asked and answered usefully on SO is vastly greater than the 100th time, and the value of having it at one time compared to a year later is also great. Sometimes what matters is how it's asked, so it looks like other people's questions.

> Another person answers 100 complex, delicate questions useful to high-performance computation underlying widely-available cloud services; gets an average score of 5, has 5000 reputation.

I would guess those complex and delicate questions didn't help a lot of people, or they would have upvoted, right? Whether that's because people didn't see them or it's so esoteric as to not really help many people, the result is the same.

> Who has been more useful to the site?

The person who asked a question that got a useful answer first, or that answered a question usefully first, is greater.

Stack Overflow would be a pretty shit site if the first time someone answered that git question was in 2021 and not a decade or more ago, so optimizing for people identifying, asking and answering unique questions that match the questions other people have and are easily identified when people search for that problem makes sense IMO.

In the mechanical turk metaphor, you're willing to pay a lot for someone to take out your overflowing smelly trash because that's what you need, but you're not willing to pay as much for someone to do the same thing a day later if it's not even half full and doesn't smell. You reward people more for doing the things you need.


The person who asked the naive question that a million other new git users will have at some time or another.


If that person hadn't asked the question, any number of other people would have asked it, probably a couple of days later.


And then they would have gotten the rep

They're fake points that don't matter


I like their approximate people reached metric. I've answered at lot of VBA questions which get a lot of views but not necessarily from developers who might have an account. I suspect they are mostly anonymous users and thus the answers get a lot of views but relatively few votes.


I've looked at the 'people reached' metric and wondered: does this mean that, objectively speaking, the greatest impact I'll have on the world will turn out to have been a few stackoverflow answers?


Also, if these answers contained any code, it might end up the most used code you've ever written.


Out of curiosity I've done code searches on identifying substrings and found code from my stackoverflow answers all over the place, though of course the hits tend to be in that long tail of seldom used code out there. Pretty sure my most used code would be in deliberate open source contributions.


I'm in the top 3%, joined in 2010, it's mostly all from questions though. I only posted 8 answers, vs 83 questions. When I joined I remember allot of the issues I came across has no answers, so I guess with the years to come lots of others had the same issues/questions. At the time I thought it was just me, everyone else seems to know so much. Guess we all start at the bottom at some point.


It is still one of the most interesting podcasts I’ve listened to. Jeff and Joel completely chanced how I view hardware. So far they’ve been right in that scaling out isn’t something most of us need to worry about for a LONG time. Modern computers are insanely fast and capable of much more than we think.


Most sites could run on a single mid range machine. Top 500 sites could run on a small cluster of less than 10 machines. You have to balance work to external egress to intracluster bandwidth while accounting for your total random IOP budget.

A well tuned monolith is a beautiful thing.


a CDN wouldn't go amiss either, or at least some sort of geographic mirroring


Agreed. Having Jeff and Joel on the podcast was great and the hosts really complimented each other. However, once Jeff left, that was pretty much for me though and I tuned out after a few episodes. Just wasn't the same without Jeff.

Personally, I was a latecomer to the podcast and was about a year behind the launch of SO but still in top 13 today.


After all these years, I still remember exact locations I walked while listening to that. Funny thing, memory.


That’s funny, so do I!


Method of Loci


Not quite the same as what the commenters are mentioning: an involuntary, strong association of ideas and (real) places ... still, an interesting method, which may harness the brain's ability to connect location with particular non-location thoughts.


I used to listen to every episode of that while taking walks around Berkeley. I totally forgot about it until I saw this comment!


Interesting. I'm also in the top 2%, but I'm far from being an early adopter on that site, with a userId in the hundreds of thousands: https://stackoverflow.com/users/343302/dotancohen

I was never even very active. I can only suppose that only 1 out of every 50 signups ever accrues any real significant amount of rep.


There's definitely a strong compounding effect over time. I have a 6-digit UID there, but haven't been active for years now. However, I'm still in the top 0.16%, largely thanks to a steady trickle of rep from all those old answers that are still relevant.

But any such "interest" does apply to the magnitude of the initial contribution, so merely being around for long is not enough - you had to have a sufficiently productive period of activity to capitalize on.


I'm a fan of Spolsky's writing. I haven't heard of that podcast before. I see joelonsoftware.com has some expired links. Where can I listen to this archived podcast ?


You have them on SoundCloud [1]. Note, there is a mess with numbering of episodes.

[1] https://soundcloud.com/stack-exchange


Came here to share this! What a weird and innocent time that was.


Ha, I'm user 26! So funny: https://stackoverflow.com/users/26/shawn


What's the story about the XSS vulnerability? If this is the right time for that...


I miss that podcast. The 2 of them disagreed on some technical things, which made it more interesting. Listening to them all the way to success was pretty cool.

Is there anything else out there like it?

EDIT: People mentioning that they could remember where they were when they listened to the podcast makes me remember where I was when they had Jason Calacanis on the show who informed them that they were sitting on a gold mine.


With Jeff, loved the podcast. But without Jeff, not so much.


Do top contributors get compensated financially ? This is a question that is burning me out of curiosity...

Do not get me wrong, I understand the whole point of giving back to a community, selfishly helping others and all that. But lets get a simple example: For example the famous Jon Skeet. https://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet

Based on the account statistics this user is a member as of today, for 12 years and 8 months. So a total of 152 months. Again according to the site statistics, Jon Skeet provided so far 35,254 answers.

Making some assumptions of continuous linear work, :-) this user in the last almost 13 years, provided an average of 232 answers PER MONTH,non-stop for the last 13 years.

That is an average of almost 8 answers PER DAY non stop, 13 years in row, while having a job at Google ( per the site account details ...) maybe a family, side interests ? etc ...

Assuming the mythical Jon Skeet, is not a team of 200 engineers at Google :-) I want to understand how a person who provides EIGHT well researched developer related answers PER DAY, non stop, for 13 years, feels about the site founders making 2 Billion while this user ( again...presumably...) gets a pat in the back and "reputation " ?


>Do top contributors get compensated financially

Not from Stack Overflow / Stack Exchnage

That's for sure

There may be employers that look at your standing and say, "hey - let's toss a couple extra $K in this candidate's offer"

..but I've not seen or experienced it


I loved this podcast. It came about when we were a year into our first startup (freeagent.com if you wondered) and it was really influential. I loved Spolsky and he was a major influence, and we ended up colocating our infra on our own hardware for 10 years and I can attribute a lot of my faith in that strategy to some of these early discussions! Worked out very well indeed.

We’re now on AWS, go figure ;-)


I'm in the top 0.35%. For a while around 2010ish I was answering a lot of questions. I've barely even logged in in many years. I don't think the percentile is very useful. SO always tried so hard to find a way to assess devs and hopefully use that to spin up the jobs board side of the business, but I feel like despite a lot of effort it just never quite happened.


How much of the billion dollars will you get?


I was active for maybe 1 year on SO. Account is dormant ever since. Your answer prompted me to check. Still in the top 0.02%


I joined maybe within the first year or so and answered one fundamental javascript question which has earned me dividends for many years. I'm top 11% without having even looked at my profile in at least 5 years. Best part is that my answer was slightly wrong and had to be corrected by a comment.


Interesting. I've barely posted/commented — in particular I've only made seven posts since 2012 (and zero since 2018) — but I guess because signed up in 2010 I'm in the top 17% of users.

Nothing to brag about, but it's definitely higher than I would've expected. The required mental model is different from what I'm used to HN/reddit — rather than posts going stale and/or getting archived, Stack Exchange and Quora are more like social wikis. Writing a popular early answer that happens to remain relevant over time is like writing a high-profile Wikipedia article and then collecting karma on it indefinitely.


By contrast, I have the 639th Reddit account and I don’t seem to be anywhere close to the top percentile in karma.




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: