My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow - <AUTHOR> http://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/741.php <comment><USER2> First off, a caveat: I'm about to complain about a lot of people I respect and rather like. I'll probably take a lot of heat for it, but it needs to be said.

I feel like a lot of the closing of niche questions these days comes from the chat communities. (By "chat", I mean: [http://chat.stackoverflow.com/](http://chat.stackoverflow.com/))

There's a huge rash of "cv-pls" in the chat rooms. I don't have a problem with it in general, but the culture around it has become rather toxic. It effectively gives anyone there an automatic close hammer. Furthermore, it's not the current "dupehammer", but a close hammer for any reason, as you can pretty instantly get 5 votes to close.

Somehow, every question involving anything than popular web frameworks is apt to be closed as "too localized".

I can't count the number of times I've been in the middle of answering an admittedly niche, but well-phrased and on-topic question, when it's closed before I can answer. The source of the sudden rash of close votes? Almost always a "cv-pls" in relevant tag's chat room.

<comment><USER3> We will look into this. Not very different than voting rings on HN or other places. You want vote diversity.

<comment><USER4> An auto-unclose process that examined web logs for direct hits from google might be nice too. And closed question that gets N hits from google probably deserves to be reopened with a special "google wants an answer" tag.

I usually (always) search google for my problem de jour. And frequently (enough so I remember) the first stackoverflow result is my exact question... but closed. Probably happens once or twice a month, and usually on something "thorny" (i.e. no clear cut answer... so "primarily opinion based" answers are fine... I can compare the top voted answers and decide for myself).

<comment><USER5> Sometimes I find a two year old post on HN that I want to comment on, but it's "closed" \- the reply button is gone. HN should implement that when N hits from Google occur, it bumps it back to the front page and makes it able to be discussed again.

More seriously though, Stack Exchanges platform isn't designed to handle opinion polls and endless discussions. You might want to consider asking the question on a site geared to opinions and discussions such as quora or reddit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To me, I see this strange contradiction in how stackoverflow is evolving. Joel Spolsky (one of the founders) gave a very interesting presentation[1] in 2009. The key takeaway I've always remembered from his comments was the idea of "anthropology". The science of trying to _really understand human behavior_ and make the website amplify good communities.

What I see 6 years later is a lot of " _why is this question closed as 'not constructive' when it has 500 upvotes?!?!_"

There is clearly a disconnect between the way the end users see stackoverflow and the way the moderators see it. These days, it seems like the stackoverflow guys (not necessarily Joel specifically) are inexplicably blind to human behaviors that was was highlighted in 2009. But, I don't have the whole story so maybe someone closer to the situation can explain.

I don't know who is right or wrong. The thing I'd like to know is if stackoverflow still "works" for the quality contributors who invest their time writing extensive and insightful answers. Or, have a significant percentage abandoned the site because they wade through too many questions from homework, or outsourced sweatshop employees who don't even do modicum of googling, etc.

On the other hand, are the majority of complaints distorted because they are mostly voiced by the Eternal September[2] crowd?

So, is it experts leaving? Or newcomers overwhelming the site with bad questions? I don't know if one can gather from website analytics which of the 2 situations is dominant.

[1][http://youtu.be/NWHfY_lvKIQ?t=3m18s](http://youtu.be/NWHfY_lvKIQ?t=3m18s)

[2][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September)

<comment><USER7> It's both.

The former is inevitable - most people, like the author of this article, spend the bulk of their time up-front: post a lot of answers, enjoy the experience, get tired of it, pull back to only answering the occasional post that piques their interest. So there's a fairly constant fall-off of activity from people who've previously posted a lot. And this gets worse when these folks find fewer questions that interest them, which brings us to...

The number of questions posted on Stack Overflow every day is overwhelming. Over the past year, it's ranged from a low of about 5.5 thousand per day (Christmas holidays) to over 11 thousand per day; currently it's averaging around 8.5K. Depending on your interests, you might see very little of this (if you focus solely on a relatively obscure tag) or all of it (if, as many do, you drink from the firehose at [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/?sort=newest](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/?sort=newest)) or some mixture (if you stick to the home page).

The folks who stick it out long-term tend to have some pretty gnarly filters in place. Those who don't tend to become very bitter about the whole Eternal September thing, _because that 's most of what they see_. The chance of dropping in on Stack Overflow over lunch & just _stumbling upon_ a new question that covers some novel, interesting tech you've been working with lately is pretty slim, so if that's all you're answering anymore, well... You're probably not answering very much anymore.

The trick here is to find a way of putting more interesting questions in front of the folks they're likely to interest, and showing fewer "here's my homework, verbatim" questions to... well, everyone. And it's a hard trick.

Disclaimer: I work for Stack Exchange and have been hanging around Stack Overflow pretty much forever.

<comment><USER8> Who cares how many times a question comes up? That is just such a non-issue, a peeve of a minority of replaceable people, because people are always replaceable, including the ranks of those who answer the most questions. Resurfacing questions is helpful for people new to programming topics and who are just discovering the lay of the land by using the New filter on StackOverflow. Novelty for advanced users should be an incredibly low priority, yet because advanced users have power, it becomes a big priority. The fact is, if some advanced users get bored by the stream of novice questions and leave, that's fine, there will always be new experts to take their place: SO is extremely popular that way.

What really frustrates me is that the usual interface to SO is Google, yet SO closes so many questions as duplicates that this interface is massively under- optimized. It would be much easier to find the solutions to problems if there were variations in Google's index for every different way a question's been asked (and answered).

And answering questions is a great way for intermediate developers to concretize their own knowledge. There's always a new wave of developers needing to learn. Why on earth SO fetishizes itself now as a DRY repository of programming questions is beyond me. Ok, it's not actually beyond me, it's because SO is made up of programmers, and programmers tend be compulsive about DRYing up everything in sight even when that's not the best solution to the problem.

The complaints of SO's elites are the same I've seen since always on mailing lists and forums by the folks who have the most power and thus force their ideals on everyone else. It repels novice users and creates a hostile environment for mentoring and learning. What's sad is that when SO first came out, it was set apart from these incumbents for being welcome, open, and friendly.

Another side issue is that the SO culture almost certainly is not receptive to female developers. I thought of this the other day when I saw some woman's post in the negatives. The sort of chest-thumping, rule-brandishing nitpickery that's the order of the day is an intimidating turn-off for a large swathe of people.

What's happened to SO is why every institution has to be replaced eventually, as SO will be, by some question and answer site that returns to SO's roots. The world is crying out for it again the same way it was when SO was founded.

<comment><USER7> Nice rant. Not sure how this relates to what you're replying to, so I'm not gonna attempt to rebut it... But for future reference, "people are always replaceable" tends to be a euphemism for "we're gonna treat you like canon fodder" \- not really a good attitude, IMHO.

If you want to clarify what you're responding to, I can try to provide a more helpful response; until then, here's some useful references for the "roots" of SO's current policies:

\- [http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/the-wikipedia-of- long-...](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/the-wikipedia-of-long-tail- programming-questions/)

\- [http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/06/optimizing-for- pearls-...](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/06/optimizing-for-pearls-not- sand/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Every time I work on a project dealing with unusual C++/Windows/COM topics, I end up hitting a high percentage of highly relevant, closed questions. The worst are the ones where I figure out the convoluted solution, but I can't answer the existing question because it's closed. So, anyone after me will suffer the same aggravation or simply give up.

The worst are the ones where some new mod has trolled through four-year-old questions closing them whenever possible. Makes me wonder how much great information has simply been deleted to give a new mod, what, a feeling of power? More history (ironically)? It's also darkly funny when a mod clearly doesn't understand the technology involved, and thus doesn't understand that it is, in fact, valid and properly worded.

I suppose it's no different than the rest of the tech community, "blogosphere", social coding sites, etc., where it's a self-promotion-centric approach that dominates. You'll get further working on the latest and greatest stack than you will solving hard problems with an older tech stack.

<comment><USER3> Do you mean closed or locked from vandalism by drive by users? A lot of popular stuff gets locked due to noise answers and bad edits.

<comment><USER9> Usually closed as non-constructive (I think that's S.O.'s wording).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It has largely become more or less a standard expectation that every single question I come across on Stack Overflow through search engine results will be locked. This expectation is rarely contradicted, and then only usually within very small sub-niche topics (the Racket SO community is quite pleasant, frex).

It has rather ensured that I never made any effort to contribute to that community. I do still use SO answers if Google or DDG happen to provide me with a link to one that answers my question, which in fairness is quite often, even most of the time. But when so many of those clearly helpful answers (often answering my own question to the letter), are downvoted/locked over some matter of bureaucratic principle or the opinion of a nameless moderator, it makes it abundantly clear that any contribution I might occasionally wish to proffer will be unwelcome, and any question I ask is as like to be met with censure as actual assistance.

Actually participating in SO seems these days to be about as fruitless an endeavor as editing Wikipedia was.

<comment><USER11> A note on locking: Locking prevents edits and comments on an individual post. The reason for locking a post is nearly always spam edits/comments. Locks are finite in time. Questions that rank highly for popular search queries receive a lot of traffic, and locking is often necessary to prevent vandalism.

On question closure, this is rarely done by moderators (users with a diamond ♦ after their name), but by 5 votes from regular users. Only moderators can lock posts.

Disclosure: I am a Stack Exchange moderator

<comment><USER12> I'm curious about the five vote threshold. Has it been fixed throughout the history of the site? Is it still appropriate given the degree to which the site's popularity and traffic has grown?

<comment><USER10> Indeed. I was really surprised by that number, and by the sheer number of people with edit/delete privileges.

That's just begging for abuse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Even better when you post a question to stackoverflow and a moderator closes it with "this question should be on xyz.stackexchange.com". You remove your question and post it there just to get another moderator saying "this question should be on stackoverflow".

It's obviously a great site, but as always most moderators are usually people with more spare time than real clue on how to organize things.

<comment><USER14> "Which site do I submit to" shouldn't be as hard of a problem for certain.

Heck they removed a lot of options from that close reason to minimize this, as anything database related go punted to the DBA one (which is only for professional questions not minor schema questions).

<comment><USER15> Only problem with the sister sites is that their user base is much smaller than on SO and the value of SO pretty much boils down to "everyone's in there so someone may help me".

<comment><USER14> I find the true value of SO to be "populating google with good answers to questions", but that is just me :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I would like to defend Tim Post's meta-answer because it's quoted out of context. The OP's question was about the reduction in quality of questions being asked on SO, which I myself have noticed in my particular area of expertise [0].

I don't think Tim comes off as "elitist"/"cool kids" (also Tim is genuinely a really nice person, not at all uppity or "elitist" [1]). There _is_ a rising deluge of utterly shit quality questions being asked on the site. As an "expert" I just can't be bothered any more trying to assist users who are missing so much fundamental knowledge and understanding about the tech they're working with. Hell, some of them can't even tell me which version of IIS they're using. It saps too much energy and is the reason why my own participation on the site has taken a nose-dive over the past couple of years.

I do agree with the comment throttling timer and "@user" behaviour in comments, I think that was one of Jeff's personal things he got implemented much to the frustration of many folks on the site. I like Jeff but some of his ideas about how to solve certain types of problems were a bit peculiar.

I still love SO, I still visit daily but it sure burned me out as an "answerer".

[0]: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/*iis*](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/*iis*)

[1]: Disclosure: I'm an ex-diamond mod on the site - I would like to think I played fair, erring on the side of giving folks the benefit of the doubt and that their questions were asked in good faith (and with a tiny wee bit of upfront research).

<comment><USER17> I have noticed the same thing I do not visit the site all that often I usually check it once a fortnight or so in my lunch break. I tend to browse the "Linux" section. Everytime I visit it feels like Deja-Vu the same questions keep appearing, there will almost always be questions like "How can I get my program to run as a daemon?", "Why am I seeing Zombie processes?" and some variation on "How can I get the PID of my running process?".

Quite a lot of questions seem to have a negative score or are locked for seemingly no good reason and the ones that aren't are questions like the above that are easily googleable.

A lot of the time it feels like the person asking the question hasn't bothered to a) read man page or b) do a google search beforehand or they lack basic knowledge about Linux - such as what the /proc file system is for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> My favourite is the upvoted "You should have Googled this" comment with an accompanying, and equally upvoted, "Google sent me here."

SO seems to have not awakened to the fact that it is the defacto programming information site for all languages and developer capabilities and no longer the purview of elite.

<comment><USER19> I dunno these days it seems like Google is sending me to Chinese sites that just scrape SO and repost all the questions/answers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Quite often when I Google something, I end up on an SO page with exactly the answer I needed, and it's been closed due to some BS. And there's a bunch of comments about why it's closed.

I think the moderators have gotten more and more zealous. Everything is looked at with the guidelines in mind, instead of common sense. I suspect there's a certain type of person who likes to apply stringent rules to everything, and common sense people just have enough and decide not to run in the elections.

If SO was a billboard I could understand the need to only have the interesting stuff on. But SO doesn't have a space problem. If someone has posted a question, it's likely they're not the only noob wondering what the answer is. If the question is useful to people, Google will lead them there.

</comment><comment><USER21> I've always been uneasy about the fact that Stack Overflow users can edit each other's posts more or less arbitrarily. User A can edit user B's post to say something embarrassing, and most readers will attribute it to User B.

I've had this happen with my posts. It's never been egregious, like a user inserting something inflammatory into my otherwise mundane programming question. Most often, the offending edits give the appearance that the original poster doesn't know how to write or doesn't know basic programming concepts. It's not unheard-of for potential employers to look at a programmer's accounts on Stack Overflow, Github, etc., so an unflattering edit could be problematic.

Granted, one can use a pseudonymous account. But it would be better not to have to.

<comment><USER22> You should receive a notification whenever someone else edits one of your posts. If the edit is inappropriate, you can revert it or re-edit it. "Edit wars" do happens sometimes, but they're discouraged, and you can always flag for moderator attention if it comes to that.

<comment><USER23> I didn't realize how much edit comments (description of changes) mattered until I saw some of my deleted/unapproved edits. E.g. Editing an answer to add an environment variable that was actually required was denied. I ended up writing it as a comment and had someone thank me for it in the comments. Had the edit been accepted there would have been less comment spam and more "good answer" on that page...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm actually struggling to recall the last time I followed a link to a StackOverflow question where the question wasn't closed for some reason or another. It's gotten to the point where it feels like the only goal of the site is curate old content.

</comment><comment><USER25> I think I may just be becoming a grumpy old man programmer,

But my frustration with stack overflow lately is with how many people ask ill- formed questions because they don't understand what they're talking about -- and don't seem to _want_ to understand what they're talking about, they just want a copy-paste solution. (Worse is when the answers are from people who similarly have no idea what they're talking about)

Rails is not an end-user app. It's a framework for developers. You use it to program. If you don't know what you're doing, copy-paste from reddit/SO aren't actually going to get you very far.

Now, what might make it an "SO community" issue, is that when I try to explain the fundamental concepts involved (which I actually kind of enjoy doing, when I'm in the mood), my answers -- or the questions themselves -- are likely to be closed/deleted as inappropriate.

Now, many questioners aren't even interested in this kind of answer, it's true, they just want a copy-paste. Sometimes you can give them one (even if it doesn't serve them very well because they are trying to do the wrong thing, or dont' even know what they're trying to do), sometimes their question is so off that it's not even possible.

But for those who are -- maybe we need a place where people can actually get fundamental conceptual things explained, like you'd do in a professor or TA's office hours. And SO doesn't seem to want to be that place?

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't have a problem with Stack Overflow, I have a problem with its community and, as a result, have completely abandoned the site. I no longer ask questions there nor do I answer them. If I need help my circle of friends is often able to provide enough information for me and if I take to Google the vast majority of the time the first search result is a link to a Stack Overflow page with someone asking the exact question I'm trying to find an answer to. And it's closed as off topic. It's a great site and for a while had a great community, but these days it's just too toxic to be worth the bother.

</comment><comment><USER27> > the Stack Overflow staff and moderators seem to take the attitude that the > long-term content of the site is much more important

Perhaps the Stack Overflow owners realize they can muscle in on the programming language documentation business. With the ongoing increase in programmers who learn a programming language at the same time as they're paid to write production code in it, the promoters of some languages will inevitably skip writing documentation that fully describes what it does and instead set up a basket of Stack Overflow users to plant lots of answered questions, which also gives the initial appearance of an existing community for that language. Eventually languages will even be designed and implemented without any thought given to documentation that explains it from beginning to end, but instead only the intention for it to be learnt in Stack Overflow- sized chunks, keyed to search engine keywords instead of documentation subheadings. And part of Stack Overflow's business model may be to host the primary documentation for these emerging types of programming languages.

Dr Dobbs magazine described this phenomenon as a "conundrum" and used Groovy as an example of this new type of language: " _The endless variety of features requires considerable documentation, which is simply not available, especially for the advanced features that give Groovy much of its benefit. And so, if you jump in today, you 'll find the language is easy to learn, but hard to master_". [http://www.drdobbs.com/jvm/the-groovy- conundrum/240147731](http://www.drdobbs.com/jvm/the-groovy- conundrum/240147731)

<comment><USER28> People learn languages from different routes depending on their background. A complete beginner to programming probably needs tutorials and will not understand a language reference that is most useful for an experienced coder. Stack overflow is more like a recipe book that happens to let you list the ingredients. But that is a poor alternative to tutorials and proper documentation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> One of the "Soup Nazis" here:

I can understand the author. Still I found out, that my name was also in one example of "Soup Nazis" (how embarrassing!).

The point is, that with some experience, you are "invited" to review other posts. You can also see it as giving some of the benefit taken back. But as reviewer, you should take responsibility for the quality of questions and answers. And I must say, that there where many cases, where I wanted to vote differently but knew, that the system is intended differently -- the vote I made in the example was one of them. You are softly pressured by the system, to adhere to the "group standard".

I think it is a little similar to the Wikipedia problem. Wikipedia also is less attractive to authors today, than it was, because many are chilled by the rigid system. The problem is, that some system is needed for the quality, but how could you reduce the chill factor for newcomers?

I think, a little less rigid system would be beneficial to stackoverflow (as it does not need to be an encyclopedia). Some "Soup Nazi" behavior is fostered by any (more or less) rigid system. Here, more sense of understanding of the more experienced users (especially reviewers) would also be good.

</comment><comment><USER30> SO seems like less of a discussion board, and more of a snapshot in time: 2009 seems about right. Once the so-called "moderators" started deleting, editing and locking most of the answers, I was definitely discouraged from contributing. There WAS some gold buried in some of the less upvoted posts and comments, but "no soup for you."

One other little note, and don't know if anyone else noticed this, but SO is somehow biased a bit towards Microsoft. It's no big deal, but I thought I would mention it. [http://blog.codinghorror.com/giving-up-on- microsoft/](http://blog.codinghorror.com/giving-up-on-microsoft/)

As SO fossilizes, I think there might be an opportunity to create a new programming QA site.

<comment><USER31> SO-the-infrastructure might be biased towards MS, but the people on it certainly don't tend to be, at least in the tags I'm involved in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Oh you have a problem with stack overflow? Sure i could help you with that, but what's the problem you're _really_ trying to solve?

</comment><comment><USER33> This comment at the end states it very well:

"Stack overflow has failed to understand it's mission. Stackoverflow exists to share technology information–not to curate it. Curation should be replaced by indexing and ranking. With Stack Overflow, it is as if google had decided on a primary strategy of deleting content from its index, rather than a primary strategy of ranking good content highest."

</comment><comment><USER34> After reading all these (good) comments, I thought I'd go to SO now and try and pitch in and answer a question or two in my domain of expertise. You know...give back to the community. Be a part of the solution.

I found a question that could easily be answered and would be of value to users hitting this issue.

Here's that question: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28541540/how-to- generate-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28541540/how-to-generate- report-in-excel-or-pdf-format-in-groovy/28549845#28549845)

I could not stop laughing at how this confirms the insanity being discussed here.

"Questions asking us to recommend or find a book, tool, software library, tutorial or other off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam..."

Yes. And 238 million people saw Dez Bryant catch that ball notwithstanding the NFL's rule-which-must-be-followed-to-the-letter-of-the-law.

Some guy, or woman, won't get their question answered that could have helped them. It was a reasonable question. And people are willing to help them. In some way, I suspect StackOverflow is incredibly proud they prevented that...but stuck to the letter of the law on their policy.

You win StackOverflow.

</comment><comment><USER35> I think the mandate is pretty clear: quality writing of the original question is a must. If you can't write in clear english, or you have a whiff of snark in your question, or your question falls below what many people think of as a valuable contribution, then your question probably deserves to be closed. Why is that not fair? I think it is fair! Be professional!

Sometimes you get very cool superusers like BalusC who will edit a sub-par question for clarity or formatting rather than delete it out of hand. Most of the time, I look at his edits and I like what he does with the question. Add value, add value, add value. BalusC makes JSF a joy to research on and work with.

<comment><USER36> Agreed. As much as I found JSF horrible, BalusC has made it less so for years it seems.

What he does isn't rep-farming using google but rather putting effort into being helpful. Same goes for others.

Contrast this to what people refer to as drive-by downvoters: people who seems to routinely troll the forums looking for anything that can be closed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Sounds like early Wikipedia. It started out fun - people from all over working together and helping each other out to create something that was going to change the world. My contributions may not have been the best quality possible, but others would edit or offer suggestions for improvement. Sometimes others would start something and get stuck, and I could offer an edit or suggestion to get them going again. To see the entries grow and improve, and be a part of a group helping each other to become better and achieve more, was one of the great things about it. Together, we made something from nothing.

Of course, it wasn't long before obnoxious pedantic tyrants swarmed in and took over, reveling in their chance to get a cheap power trip. Volunteering to contribute wasn't fun under a constant barrage of rudeness from people who contributed nothing and couldn't even be bothered to offer alternatives or suggestions while insulting and deleting other people's contributions.

It would be an interesting case study for someone to find out how Wikipedia survives despite the best efforts of its own moderators to destroy it.

</comment><comment><USER38> #1 on my StackOverflow wishlist is a way to make collaboration easier on answers.

I see many questions and answers where the top answer mostly works, yet buried below there's a much better answer. I see this happening in areas where technology is in flux, such as languages with evolving syntax, or when toolchains are moving to new tools.

Collaboration can improve this by enabling subsequent people to add additional information. Some examples: "This older answer is for version 1, and this newer answer is for version 2", or "This older answer is specifically for bash, and this newer answer is specifically for zsh".

<comment><USER39> What would you look for that's not dealt with by comments and edits?

<comment><USER38> For example:

* Wiki-style editing of some kind, along with collaboration tooling, and users can annotate particular pieces of information within an answer.

* Ability to combine/collaborate on multiple answers, such as beginning with introductory information relevant to all the answers, then having some kind of sectioning for specific information for each version.

Two small steps can help toward this:

* Mark an answer as applicable to a specific version number, or range, or date, or implementation.

* Enable the question author to accept an additional new answer that is more current, without subtracting points from the original answer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I stopped using StackOverflow a year or so ago, when I was astonished to discover that people can edit your questions.

I accept that this sometimes may be necessary, but I asked a question which was then edited to be a _different_ question, so that the answers I got were entirely useless.

I understand the need for moderation but surely they should not be able to change the meaning of what you posted.

<comment><USER41> If that happens, you revert the changes. Editing to change the nature of the question is definitely not a valid edit. If people do it consistently, a mod should intervene.

<comment><USER36> Problem is it is the mods who do it, isn't it.

New users cannot edit questions?

<comment><USER42> New users can make suggested edits, which are sent into a moderation queue before being applied. Once you reach a certain level of reputation (2000), you can edit other users' content without moderation.

[http://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/edit](http://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/edit)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> The worst part is the new users who don't have the faintest clue as to what they're doing, and the annoying duplicates. And sometimes I get shat on for asking the question not quite right.

1\. Need to incentivize new users to read some real basic FAQs before posting. Not sure what the best solution is. Fascist Me wants to see them walk through a wizard, agreeing that they understand basic topic X before continuing, but that doesn't sound too user friendly.

2\. Need some better text similarity with Latent Semantic Indexing or something to find duplicates. I'll see new questions that I _know_ are recent duplicates, but then can't even find an example. Doh.

<comment><USER44> I am constantly amazed how mods can find a duplicate I could not, and I consider myself a fairly savvy googler.

Edit:

Instead of forcing RTFM on every new user, I don't see why new users should not have immediate tryout without reprocussions and learn the guidelines from a kindly mod or other user replying with a reason why their question is not appropriate/duplicate or whatever. That is the point of upvotes/downvotes and active moderation. This is a learning community, not a cadre of elitists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Is there a correlation between Atwood leaving, and the eventual take over of internet community zealotry?

I've yet to participate in a forum where that doesn't occur.

</comment><comment><USER46> I agree with everything said and I'd also like to add this:

I used to enjoy visiting the site because quite often there was a nice general question on the front page that related to me in some way... Well, ALL of the general CS type questions are answered now... and any new ones are closed as dups almost immediately.. Which means the questions that survive these days are hyper specific, and not very useful or enjoyable...

</comment><comment><USER47> As users of stack overflow, product hunt, & hacker news, we have to subject ourselves to the tyranny of the upvote. We have effectively banished unpopular questions and ideas. Or great ideas conveyed in an unpopular manner.

Unfortunately, there is no better way to self-organize and moderate large masses of user generated information..

</comment><comment><USER48> Sure stack overflow isn't perfect, but shit... Do you know how much productivity would be lost on a global scale if the site suddenly disappeared? I still use it in some capacity almost every day. Sure some of the rules might be nit picky and can be obnoxious sometimes, but nothing is perfect.

<comment><USER49> We're not saying it's perfect, we are saying its usefulness/quality is going downhill. It was never perfect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> > 6,900 users with a reputation of 10000 or more can delete questions.

I have 20k reps and I can't delete questions. This is not correct.

<comment><USER39> You can only vote to delete closed questions over a certain age.

Eg: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16681587/some-bigger- rust...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16681587/some-bigger-rust- examples)

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Just a thought, but how about letting privileged users vote to keep a question _open_ , which would negate some number of close votes? (As well as a delay before closing, even once the votes were obtained.) Also if someone is in the process of writing an answer, that should count against closing.

I tend to agree with the OP that sorting and filtering are a better solution to maintaining quality than unnecessarily closing marginal questions. However, some questions certainly need to be closed. The problem (or at least a problem) seems to be that with such a large number of privileged users, hitting a 5 vote threshold is not difficult, even if the question doesn't deserve to be closed. Increasing the threshold would be one solution, but would make unnecessary moderation work. A don't-close vote seems like potentially a better solution.

Edit: Unsurprisingly, looks like I'm not the first one to have this idea: [https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/125/how-about-a- vot...](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/125/how-about-a-vote-not-to- close-option-to-counter-the-vote-to-close)

</comment><comment> ryan-allen I reckon about 20% of the things I find on Stack Overflow while searching via Google are questions that have been closed for being irrelevant.

And my favourite questions are often those ones in the 20%, for example, when you type "1nf vs 2nf vs 3nf" into Google, the top page, is this StackOverflow post:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/723998/what- are-1nf-2nf-a...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/723998/what-are-1nf-2nf- and-3nf-in-database-design)

Despite the fact that the top answer has 218 upvotes, the question has been closed as 'not constructive' (which is cearly not the damn case, it's the top hit in Google for fuck sake!).

Stack Overflow should either stop this from happening somehow, or back their own goddamn policy and deindex or remove this content from the site.

That answer can no longer be improved upon, despite the fact it has such high search ranking, because some idiot deemed it 'not constructive'. What hogwash.

There is clearly a gap in the market right here that Stack Overflow either needs to plug, or someone else will (and at their expense).

</comment><comment><USER52> I can't think of another site that had such a huge gap between its very high potential and its very low fulfillment of that potential.

<comment><USER53> twitter? pre-cesspool twitter had a lot of potential

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I really wish there were better options on SO for dealing with "offtopic" questions

Sometimes a question seems like someone is just asking for an answer, like posting their homework, and hasn't tried anything or even googled at all for help. Maybe those questions should be closed and deleted with prejudice but if I was giving the benefit of the doubt I'd prefer to move them to "pergatory.stackoverflow.com". I guess that's what they are by closing them but.

But, often there are noob questions that are similarly frustrating but giving the person the benefit of the doubt maybe they really don't know where to start. If wish I could click a button that said [Move to noob.stackoverflow.com] or something like that where people with more patience or that just like helping noobs could be more helpful.

I also wish it was easier and required when marking as duplicate to provide a link to the duplicate.

</comment><comment><USER55> This post has put in to words much of my own, un-reputable experience with SO and stack-exchange forums. The technical corrections and constant closing of questions by mods discouraged my asking of questions ages ago. There is a feeling that researching the details necessary to describe the question adequately takes away from research that may have yielded how to solve it by looking at similar questions or documentation. I know that this is partly the intention of the mods: go do your homework before asking. But, it can swing to be the flipside: homework of asking is as long or longer than deciphering your problem. In my experience, much of a questioners research to prepare their question was UNRELATED to their problem, so the amount of information included in the question is far above and beyond what is necessary to solve their variable typo, or whatever.

Where this is a good thing for the long-term usefulness of SO, like the OP said it takes away from the short-term usefulness of the site for us plebian self-doubters.

Having said that, previously asked questions on SO answer ~90% of my programming questions, so they're obviously doing something right.

I've thought before that a 'staging area' for questions might be useful, where a question gets posted by _anon_idiot_user_ like me asking why thier code won't run because of something simple. It is marked as 'not useful' for whatever reason, but can still offer (diminished) reputation to answerers. After a particular amount of time, the question is removed from the SO 'canon' (i.e. unpublished and deleted), but the reputation sticks. Nobody's ego is hurt from having thier stupid question memorialized, and mods would be more forgiving to stupid questioners knowing it will go away once solved.

just an idea. All in all, I'm eternally grateful to SO and it's 'asshole mods'. They've taught me more programming than any other entity on the web.

EDIT: Clarity

<comment><USER56> The problem of bad questions isn't just "having stupid questions memorialized." It's that it takes away from good questions.

There is a finite number of people who can answer a question, and these people have a finite amount of time. They don't necessarily know a question is going to be bad before they read it, so if a bad question stays, it continues wasting more and more people's time, and taking time from other people who did put in the effort to ask a good question. So instead, the question is closed while you improve it, and the idea is for it to be reopened when you're done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> The recent funding news seemed really strange when I have been feeling like the author for a while. I think SO is going downhill fast and people running it don't even realize it. Joel, where are you? So sad, used to like SO when it came around and now the way it's being moderated makes you want to just leave.

</comment><comment><USER58> SO jumped the shark for me when its scope shifted hard from the original goals. I remember the original seedling goals that Spolsky posted; for example, a question is likely inappropriate for SO if its answer couldn't involve code. That got lost awful fast.

Oh, and remember how it was going to be all Wikipedia of programming, where really good answers would be zipped together so that SO became the defacto good-idea repository? And could evolve over time? Such a good idea. Never materialized.

Proper props for putting in the effort. Better than e-e. Usually, though definitely not always, better than isolated boards. But now we're in a good- enemy-of-best world where I still want some site or system addressing the original problems, but SO is so dominant I don't see how it could germinate.

<comment><USER59> SO has definitely out-stripped what came before. They were generation 1 and had gen-1 problems.

SO is generation 2, better than generation 1. But it's having gen-2 problems. I think a lot of it is because they are so proud of having fixed the gen-1 problems that they refuse to see their gen-2 problems.

Eventually we will see generation 3.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Hacker News faced some of the same issues when people complained about excessive down-voting.

I remember some of the solutions proposed were a higher threshold for downvotes as the site grew, and the requirement that an actual explanation be typed in with every anonymous downvote or deletion.

</comment><comment><USER61> I feel you, seems like too much soup-nazi. I think maybe I've burned some friends I myself have encouraged to try to get started on the site.

But it's the nature of the site. No one else is doing it. Maybe that's because it's not easy. Maybe you should compete with them. I have a feeling there's a lot of people here who've been burned by SO. I know I have.

But you can't argue with success. So I've thickened my skin and hardened my resolve, and I'm in the top 3% of users now. I expect my current body of work on the site to put me in the top 1% within a year or so, with no further work from me.

The answer to this is to build a better StackOverflow, if you can. But I don't think you can.

<comment><USER62> At this point I think it's hard to compete with SO because it's so clear-cut and full of questions and answers for common things.

"Running out of questions." comes to mind.

Also, off-topic, I don't think being in a top percentage is something to brag about or a sign of merit. I've done nothing but ask stupid questions on SO and I was lucky to be there when the site was new (lots of high-coin questions!) and I'm in the top 5%.

<comment><USER61> That's a good point, but the top 1% (where I expect to be in a year or two) is close to the end of a long tail. Not many people get there by asking questions, and I only started contributing about a year and a half ago.

That percentile rank is a foot in the door in a lot of situations. If someone who is interested in me finds out it's because I give comprehensive smart answers with strong communication, in spite of the fact that I wasn't around when there were lots of easy questions to be had, I think I've got something pretty good to brag about.

That's not to say that I wouldn't consider someone who asks lots of good questions too. That requires communication skills as well as technical skills. I personally find it harder to ask good questions than to give good answers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> {Based on my recollection of something I heard listening through the StackOverflow/StackExchange Podcast archive.}

The example of the Python question about angles is from 2011. I believe that subsequent to that time there were changes to both the close process and the reopening process. Part of the problem I think was that close votes accumulated and did not expire, so that they would stick even after a question was edited or months had passed since the vote was cast.

The most recent podcast...about taking more Venture Capital...discussed some of the cultural issues that have developed at StackOverflow. There are two significant pools of users: those like me who know a little or nothing, and those who know a lot. One of the goals of the funding is to make StackOverflow work better for both...at least that was my impression from the podcast.

At the top end, the gamification has problems. It doesn't matter how competitive or smart anyone is, they aren't going to catch John Skeet any time soon. So people make up things to entertain themselves. Anyone else remember the popular Meta about deliberately feeding bad algorithms to suspected homework questions?

It's always been clear [you can listen to six plus years of Joel and Jeff and the gang yourself] that the longterm purpose of StackOverflow is not helping the person originally asking the question. It's making the internet better. It's also always been clear that there was a tension between questions that are interesting to experts and questions that are so basic that only an absolute beginner will ask them. The test case was:

        How do I move the Turtle in Logo? [1][2]

It's simple, clear, to the point, and offensive to some programmers.

[1]: [http://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions?page=2](http://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions?page=2)

[2]: [https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=mov...](https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=moving+a+turtle+in+logo&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8)

</comment><comment><USER64> SO is one of the best things that has happened on Internet, but lately it became really annoying due to all these closed questions by over-zealous moderators. More often than not, my questions are closed just because they are not mainstream (for example, embedded related) or _slightly_ reassembles existing questions, that ask totally different things. One solution, that comes to my mind could be not to allow _all_ moderators close _all_ questions, but only these, that are in moderator's area of expertise. For example, if you want to close a question tagged "Java", you must have >5000 or so reputation in Java field.

</comment><comment><USER65> I don't use SO to ask questions any more, but it's really good for searching stuff you already know but don't like to remember, like if that method used camelCase() or under_score(), what the annoying workaround for that little quirk in the framework of your choice was, etc.

I feel beside the new stuff that comes from new FWs and languages most questions seem to be answered. Therefore starting to focus on long term quality is not a bad thing.

Most of my recent work in SO was also not asking questions but correcting/connecting answers that are already there.

</comment><comment><USER66> The thing that pisses me off the most is when you put the effort into a question that doesn't have an existing solution anywhere on the Internet, including on SO. Within a few seconds of posting, it gets a downvote but no comment. Getting a downvote results in immediate loss of visibility. It really puts you off using the site again. Its happened to the last several questions I've posted.

</comment><comment><USER67> About the question about "this" in JavaScript. And how to "get rid of it". I always give it another name! Like car = this. Then I'll write car.engine instead of this.engine. It makes life much easier as I do not have to worry about "car" changing in sub-functions. And it's much easier to search and replace if I want to change the variable name.

</comment><comment><USER68> One of the examples he gives falls under computational geometry even if its a basic question. Categorically those have become off-topic even though there is a tag for it. Seriously, go find something that requires some dot or cross products to compute and ask it - but not anything that resembles a graph, because they like graph theory.

</comment><comment><USER69> I agree that SO gets overzealous about closing questions but I don't think I needed a page-long summary of the Market Basket saga (as if I didn't hear enough about it this summer) and the rest of it to get to that point.

</comment><comment><USER70> I've been using IRC to ask questions instead of Stack Overflow for some time now. Each room has its own character, but I've found people are generally very helpful.

<comment><USER42> It depends, I suppose. The last time I used IRC in a technical help channel, someone asked for a simple way to open a bare X screen. I gave the answer I knew, which I got from a mandrake system script. It has worked for me for years on Debian and Ubuntu:

        xinit -- /usr/bin/X :1

And right away, a group of 3-4 clueless people or trolls told the asker that I was attempting to harm their system and not to listen to me. It wasn't very productive or fun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> Im so grateful for stack overflow. Big thanks to everyone who contributes. Those of us who need to get stuff done owe you our lives, almost literally.

</comment><comment><USER72> the key to not getting your answered close is to copy paste large text of garbage code that these zealous mods won't bother reading through. the large wall of code allows the question to appear to carry merit and come across as a coding question, when in reality it has nothing to do with the question.

This is what is happening. the quality of the questions has deteriorated so much instead of improving.

the people providing quality answers have moved on.

when the chicken leaves and the eggs start rotting, that's when you know, the decline is the beginning.

</comment><comment><USER15> I used to love SO, but nowadays the proportion of assholes running the site is so big that it ruins everything.

To give you an example, check out the last question I've asked there: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27510345/c-map- assignment...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27510345/c-map-assignment- overload-for-different-types).

11 downvotes and closed within a few hours; apparently I pissed off one of the moderators (when asking him why is my question "off-topic") and he invited his gang to downvote me as well, some other guy even threatened to deactivate my account. That is SO now, and I no longer try to engage into that community.

Edit: Looking at how the votes in my question are evolving as we speak, I see that some guys still go in and downvote it more. Read out the question, and check out the really good accepted answer, if you don't think that's valuable information for many programmers out there then I'm at a loss of words.

<comment><USER73> Well, you didn't _just_ ask why it's off topic. You threw around insults and used very vulgar language. [http://stackoverflow.com/posts/27510345/revisions](http://stackoverflow.com/posts/27510345/revisions)

<comment><USER15> Actually I did ask, strange you didn't notice that since it's right there in the link you posted.

And yeah, you are right, I used the word 'cunt' after they started behaving like that, I'm sorry if that scared you; I did it because I was really pissed off by all their bs. Have you ever felt annoyed some time in your life? Apparently not, lucky you.

<comment><USER74> Good Lord. The sense of entitlement it takes to use language like that and _then_ post it here and expect people will be supportive of your argument. This is a side topic but one I see often. I think it's very important that Europeans/UK/Aussie's realize the "c word" is one of the few swear words that doesn't travel well in the US. It's _never_ used here and is extremely vulgar. So I would not use it on the web unless you are sure that your audience is primarily European and specifically the UK. (Grew up in Australia through University. Lived in Europe. Have lived now in the US a long time)

<comment><USER62> The web is global, deal with it.

<comment><USER74> The Web is indeed global which is my point. The word in question has a very different meaning so best not to use it unless you're prepared for the fallout.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> Hating this coz of few assholes?? There is no perfect world..</comment>


One Man's Signal is Another Man's Noise - <AUTHOR> http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/03/02/one-mans-signal-is-another-mans-noise/ <comment><USER2> I find it quite interesting. For me, aside from email all of the areas he touches on constitute noise, angelgate, bin38, all that jazz. Obviously it's noise to me because I'm completely disconnected from that world. I definitely agree that we're growing into a world where there is a heck of a lot more noise, in fact compared to the 90s I'd say it's pretty deafening these days. I hope that people have become smarter consumers of media and discussion to cope with this, to be able to spot obvious spin and hopefully see through it.

But as we grow used to the noise around us I wonder if there's still a place for a disruptive technology that filters noise and provides us only with signal. Would users feel as though they're missing out? Would the quiet make them feel unsettled?

<comment><USER3> That's the general trend that I see shaping the growth of the internet, actually. At first, it was "how do I find XYZ?" Now it's more of "How do I find the right/best XYZ?" because there are dozens of discoverable XYZ destinations available.

At first it was discovery, then it was user generation. Now that there's exabytes of data out there, how do you filter it?</comment></comment>


3D Color Print - <AUTHOR> http://www8.hp.com/us/en/printers/3d-printers/3dcolorprint.html <comment><USER2> It's funny how I and other people see hp and immediately think of bad business practices that lead to a bad experience with the brand.

Relates to the concept that you optimize for what you measure. Not factoring in that screwing over customers will have some impact down the line is also like some sort of debt (as in tech debt). It's like long term brand debt.

<comment><USER3> It's a bit depressing too, considering what the HP brand used to be. They used to be synonymous with the some of the most cutting-edge, best engineered test equipment and other electronics gear you could buy. Gear from that era like the legendary HP3458 multimeter still commands very high prices on the used market ($5000 or more if calibrated).

Really that part of HP still exists at that level of quality, but they spun it off as Agilent and later Keysight. Hard to believe they squandered the original brand so completely, though.

<comment><USER4> Funny thing is that said HP still exist.

What people are complaining about is the bottom of the barrel consumer products hawked out of very storefront the world over.

I have seen similar sentiments aimed towards Acer, yet i have seen Acer business market laptops survive for ages.

Basically companies like HP and Acer have multiple product ranges with different QA protocols and different margins. Yet people keep buying the cheapest consumer offerings and expect something mil-spec.

<comment><USER5> There are companies that refuse to dilute their brand or sully their image:

\- BMW, Lexus

\- Tiffany's

\- Rolex

Tech companies just think that they are immune to the market forces that keep other high end brands from skimming off the lower rungs (or at least doing it with their marquee brand).

The examples are just the first ones from different markets that came to mind.

<comment><USER6> I feel like many tech companies have to support a much broader audience with more varient use cases than the companies you listed.

Luxury watches sold by rollex only have to do a few things very well, and look nice. Some major tech companies are constantly under pressure to not only maintain quality of existing features, but to develop new features to stay competitive (all of this on updated hardware).

Im not defending any 'bad' products that major tech companies put out, but i dont think the companies you listed are very comparable.

<comment><USER7> > I feel like many tech companies have to support a much broader audience with > more varient use cases than the companies you listed.

Perhaps the examples of BMW and Lexus, which were provided by the previous poster, would be a better comparison than Rolex for you? Car companies like those two, which focus their (multiple) brands for different levels of the market rather than diversifying the levels of the market covered by their brand, are a great example of keeping people thinking that one brand is "only for X type of buyer" while maintaining a presence across all corners of the market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> While I am sure the HP solution will run circles around this, in both quality and in price, but XYZ Printing has introduced a (low cost) inkjet+FDM 3D printer. Basically it prints a layer with the FDM printer, then prints a layer of color with the inkjet.

Now, it seems pretty hard to find any good reviews on Youtube about it. Obviously their marketing material shows it printing fabulous vibrant prints, but the "3D printing professor" did a review of it, and he ran into a whole slew of issues. This is his success video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFxKxdGvV0w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFxKxdGvV0w)

Interesting stuff, but looks to be at the infancy stage.

<comment><USER9> Ha, if you think filament is expensive NOW, just wait until you have an HP printer!

That said, they do provide some interesting cost values which make it sound like this will probably be in the ballpark of low 6-figures:

>1\. Based on internal and third-party testing for HP Jet Fusion 580 and 5403D Printers, printing time is a fraction of the time of the printing times of comparable plastic fused deposition modeling (FDM), stereolithography (SLA), and material jetting solutions from $20,000 USD to $120,000 USD on market as of June, 2017. Testing variables for the HP JetFusion 580 3D Printer: Part quantity: 1 full build chamber of parts from HP Jet Fusion 3D at 10% of packing density versus same number of parts on above-mentioned competitive devices; Part size: 30 cm3; Layer thickness: .08 mm/0.003 inches. Competitor testing variables are comparable.

>2\. Based on internal testing and simulation, HP Jet Fusion 3D average printing time is up to 10 times faster than average printing time of comparable fused deposition modeling (FDM) and selective laser sintering (SLS) printer solutions from $100,000 USD to $300,000 USD on market as of April, 2016. Testing variables for the HP Jet Fusion 4210/4200/3200 Printing Solutions: Part quantity: 1 full build chamber of parts from HP Jet Fusion 3D at 20% of packing density versus same number of parts on above-mentioned competitive devices; Part size: 30 grams; Layer thickness: 0.08 mm/0.003 inches.

>3\. Based on internal testing and public data, HP Jet Fusion 3D average printing cost per part is half the average cost of comparable FDM & SLS printer solutions from $100,000 USD to $300,000 USD on market as of April, 2016. Cost analysis based on: standard solution configuration price, supplies price, and maintenance costs recommended by manufacturer. Cost criteria: printing 1 build chamber per day/5 days per week over 1 year of 30-gram parts at 10% packing density using HP 3D High Reusability PA 12 material, and the powder reusability ratio recommended by manufacturer. Based on internal testing and public data, HP Jet Fusion 3D 4210 Printing Solution average printing cost-per-part is 65% lower versus the average cost of comparable FDM and SLS printer solutions from $100,000 USD to $300,000 USD on market as of April, 2016 and is 50% lower versus the average cost of comparable SLS printer solutions for $300,000 USD to $450,000 USD. Cost analysis based on: standard solution configuration price, supplies price, and maintenance costs recommended by manufacturer. Cost criteria: printing 1.4 full build chambers of parts per day/5 days per week over 1 year of 30-gram parts at 10% packing density on fast print mode using HP 3D High Reusability PA 12 material, and the powder reusability ratio recommended by manufacturer.

<comment><USER10> Fusion printers are even more expensive. You can only re-use the leftover powder so many times before it needs to be thrown out. The particles start to clump and melt making your prints less accurate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> We use HP jet fusion printers to manufacture end use parts (see [https://www.jabil.com/insights/blog-main/3d-printing- reality...](https://www.jabil.com/insights/blog-main/3d-printing-reality- printing-the-printer.html)). They are impressive machines, and I'm excited to see the full color ones in action. Also, the MJF API is pretty well designed.

<comment><USER12> Do you work for Jabil or are you just using that article as an example?

How do you find the mechanical properties of the parts? Do they vary print to print? Do they suffer from the same problems that cheaper 3D printed parts do - principally either very low strength across the layers (for FDM prints) or very soft materials (cured epoxy and most of the SLS prints I've dealt with).

<comment><USER13> I was recently at HP labs and got to see the mono color printers in action. The process is very consistent, and they told me that the parts are very uniform. Given my own observation of a bunch of finished parts and the active process, it produces very consistent results.

The pieces were pretty damn durable. (I couldn't break them by hand). They used either Nylon or Glass Fiber reinforced Nylon.

<comment><USER13> BTW, the printer I saw had made ~70% of itself. So, the parts coming out of it were good enough to produce many of the parts it requires to operate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Question totally off topic, related to writing rather than 3D printing!

They call it not just the "HP Jet Fusion 580 Color 3D Printer", but the "HP Jet Fusion 580 Color 3D Printing Solution"

When I myself would be the target audience, "3D printer" sells better than "3D printing solution" I think.

Do you know what the true target audience they are writing for is, and if it really genuinely is so that there are such audiences where adding words like "Solution" helps the sell? Can you please elaborate on that and give intuition why?

Same applies for some other such words, like adding "Technology" to something that is more like a specification, and of course "Enterprise".

Thanks! :D

<comment><USER15> For a company about to spend ~$250,000 on the ability to fabricate 3d models in house "3D Printing Solution" does message better. A 3D printer is just an expensive tool that requires expensive software and expensive people to make it work. A 3D Printing Solution implies a complete suite from installation to software to support that doesn't require investing in specialized skills.

<comment><USER16> It makes sense that someone who uses "message" as a verb would think "solution" is a good way to brand a printer, 3D or otherwise.

/I kid! I kid!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's very similar to the Projet x60 (formerly ZPrinters) or projet 4500 series printers from 3D systems. The printer lays down thin layers of powder material then goes by with a bonding agent and color as it prints. The prints are relatively cheap because after the print you can vacuum up the excess material and use it in subsequent prints.

</comment><comment><USER18> Interesting to see HP jumping in here. They certainly have the positioning/deposit/chemistry expertise to make this work.

I would love to be able to print things on one at the local copy/printing center, but I'm wondering if they have moved enough down into the price point to displace what the current SLA shops offer.

And while I've posted things to Thingaverse there is an interesting opportunity for a curated source of soft 'things' that you could order from a local service bureau. Shapeways is nice but it doesn't seem quite there yet.

<comment><USER19> They are already in the 3D printer market, see [https://youtu.be/F2fIOBtdojY](https://youtu.be/F2fIOBtdojY) from 2016. Research and development go way back of course. The new thing is the color.

Disclaimer: I worked at HP in the past.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Full color is nice but it always depends how colorization is handled. If you ever have to go into 3rd party apps to "paint" colors on, its not worth it. It needs to be able to handle coloring from the exported file ie color it in solidworks or creo or whatever.

</comment><comment><USER21> Maybe my understanding of "Reinvent the wheel" is wrong, but I always took it as "spend time inventing something that already exists", basically wasting your time. Didn't think it was a positive term you want to put on your landing page.

<comment><USER22> See for example Michelin "reinventing" the wheel [1]. Taking old stuff and recreating them with new kind of internal structure which is made possible by 3d printing.

[1] [https://www.engadget.com/2017/08/07/michelin-vision- biodegra...](https://www.engadget.com/2017/08/07/michelin-vision- biodegradable-3d-print-airless-tire/)

<comment><USER23> Just for the record/FYI, they already re-invented it as the "tweel" a few years ago:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tweel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tweel)

[http://www.michelintweel.com/](http://www.michelintweel.com/)

and it is actually available (and works just fine in some specific application).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's amazing to think that not long ago we marveled and scoffed at the prohibitive cost of 2D computer printing, going from simple monochrome printouts to highly detailed full color physical manifestations.

</comment><comment><USER25> I recently bought/built a really cheap 3D printer to see what it could do, and I'm finding it more useful and easier to use than I anticipated. I'd say it is the 3D equivalent of the dot-matrix printer, and this HP beast is the 3D equivalent of the first colour laser printers.

I think 3D printers will be a much smaller market than paper printers, because the number of things you need printed is much less than the number of pages we (used to) need printed.

And although this HP machine looks amazing at first sight, lets look at the specs: it does about three times the resolution of my 3D printer - and colour - for A THOUSAND times the price. (Anet A8 0.2mm resolution for $200; Jet Fusion 0.08mm resolution for $x00,000 according to comments below). OK, colour is cool, but you could employ an artist to hand-paint your creations for a tiny fraction of this cost.

I get that this is first to market, but I think they are missing an opportunity to price lower and build mindshare while they learn the lessons required to build the cash cow: a consumer machine that does twice the resolution for ten times the price.

And this needs to happen fast - Brother won't allow HP anywhere near the lead they got with laser printers last time around.

</comment><comment><USER26> How much is the ink?

<comment><USER27> Ink? Relax, no ink! Just HP Proprietary Multi-Agents (source: HP video on youtube link below)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Can you imagine how much they would charge for the "ink" on these things?

<comment><USER29> > HP Jet Fusion 3D 4210 Printing Solution average printing cost-per-part is > 65% lower versus the average cost of comparable FDM and SLS printer > solutions from $100,000 USD to $300,000 USD on market as of April, 2016

Depends on how much you believe that statement I suppose?

<comment><USER30> If you look at the fine print they compared the "default mode" of the other printers with their "fast mode."

I've evaluated a few 3d printers and from what I recall the default mode is usually fairly high quality (read uses more material.)

We were about ready to pull the trigger on a competitors printer (~100k machine) but at the last minute figured out that the media would basically cost us the salary for a full time employee. Instead we're running a cheapo FDM machine for parts where quality isn't critical and outsourcing the highend stuff to shapeways (who are mentioned below.) Overall I've been really happy with this strategy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXntl3ff5tc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXntl3ff5tc)

<comment><USER32> Good overview. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Indeed, it's massive and expensive. But this probably falls in line with some of the floor space/capital budget of the earliest plotters or copier/scanner/printers.

So maybe in ten years every office will have one.

<comment><USER34> Does every office _need_ one? That's the main difference from 2D printing the way I see it - unless the printing process gets way better it will never catch on enough to warrant low prices. Then again, maybe they said the same about early printers, comparing them to offset press?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I bet, they started with cartridges with anti-refill chip, and only then proceeded with the printer itself

</comment><comment><USER36> Very neat idea - but trust HP to incorporate a disposable, proprietary ink system with a product like this.

Reminds me of the infographic comparing the cost of HP's black ink to other liquids, the next most expensive shown (at half the price of the HP black ink) was human blood: [https://thumbnails-visually.netdna-ssl.com/ink-costs-more- th...](https://thumbnails-visually.netdna-ssl.com/ink-costs-more-than-human- blood_50290ced00807_w1500.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER37> It looks amazing, but at this point, why would I trust HP?

</comment><comment><USER38> Starting at $130,000 no less. I'll stick with my prusa MK2 for a little bit longer.

<comment><USER39> They also have ~1500x the build volume (15,643,840 cm3 vs 10500 cm3), so 144x the cost is possibly warranted. They are two totally different classes of machine.

<comment><USER40> Uh no, HP's build volume is presented in MM, Prusa uses CM. So...

580's build volume: 190 x 332 x 248mm.

Prusa I3 MkIIs build volume: 250 x 210 x 200 mm.

15,643,840 cm3 vs 10,500,000 cm3

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> If you can put one of these very near (in) Amazons warehouses / delivery network you may not strictly need it in house.

<comment><USER42> So basically like shapeways

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> This one has been around for a while: [https://www.mimakiusa.com/products/3d-printers/mimaki-3d-pri...](https://www.mimakiusa.com/products/3d-printers/mimaki-3d-printer/)

Mimaki is a pretty awesome company.. we have one of their fabric printers, the tx300p-1800.

</comment><comment><USER44> Sorry to be that guy but their inspirational video to 'reinvent making' feels like it was made by Erlich Bachman: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWOGbu5BcT0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWOGbu5BcT0)

</comment><comment><USER45> Now, if that printer could be part of [https://instantink.hpconnected.com](https://instantink.hpconnected.com) it would be great.

</comment><comment><USER46> Hello HP, Let's work out the bugs with the 2D printers before we move on to 3D. Thx.

</comment><comment><USER47> Good Lord, these things are humongous. Not your average hobbyist printer for sure.

<comment><USER48> In the long run I hope that the model for this kind of thing will be 'printing as a service', much like how historically you went to a shop to get photos developed. It'd be amazing to be able to upload a design and pick it up/get it delivered next day, for the 'commodity cost' of the printing.

<comment><USER49> Shapeways already has HP Jet Fusion printers (albeit not with the color printing abilities) that they'll print parts for you on-demand with for quite reasonable prices. It's not "next day" delivery, but it's not far off from how mail-order film photo developing/printing works.

[https://www.shapeways.com/materials/hp-jet- fusion](https://www.shapeways.com/materials/hp-jet-fusion)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Thinking about it, it probably won't cost that much more to officially support basic PCB printing in almost all their printers, right?

</comment><comment><USER51> Apart - Why they use the url with the "www8." name instead of "www."?

<comment><USER52> HP's website is legendarily disorganized and horrible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Following some links around i get the impression that this is using laser sintering.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a powder bed, like laser sintering, but the melt energy comes from IR light sources. The parts of the bed that were printed on melt under the lights, the other parts stay powdery and can be recycled.

<comment><USER4> Heh, i knew i should have left the laser part out.

Anyways, would be interesting to see this way of doing 3d printing find its way to the hobbyist market at some point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Fingers crossed we don't see "PC Load Material" errors..

</comment><comment><USER54> How does this printer differ from other 3D printers on the market?

<comment><USER55> Full color. But as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, it's nothing new. Printer's with this functionality have been around for 15+ years. HP is like Apple, take an existing technology, sprinkle liberally with hip marketing, and boom! -- act like you invented it.

<comment> gene-h Their printing process is pretty new. Sure printers that can print in color have existed for a while now, but they weren't able to produce strong parts like this printer does. Other printers that produced similar strong parts also couldn't print as fast as this printer.

<comment><USER8> I wonder if the target audience of this printer even care about material properties like strength. I mean, what functional parts do you know of, in your car, bike, washing machine, are in full colour?

I feel like the people who want full colour will be making pre-production sample prints for marketing purposes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> How much do they cost? What kind of printing technology?

<comment><USER57> The site claims:

> delivering quality output, up to 10 times faster[2] at half the cost[3]

And, reading the fine print:

> Based on internal testing and public data, HP Jet Fusion 3D average printing > cost per part is half the average cost of comparable FDM & SLS printer > solutions from $100,000 USD to $300,000 USD on market as of April, 2016. > Cost analysis based on: standard solution configuration price, supplies > price, and maintenance costs recommended by manufacturer. Cost criteria: > printing 1 build chamber per day/5 days per week over 1 year of 30-gram > parts at 10% packing density using HP 3D High Reusability PA 12 material, > and the powder reusability ratio recommended by manufacturer. Based on > internal testing and public data, HP Jet Fusion 3D 4210 Printing Solution > average printing cost-per-part is 65% lower versus the average cost of > comparable FDM and SLS printer solutions from $100,000 USD to $300,000 USD > on market as of April, 2016 and is 50% lower versus the average cost of > comparable SLS printer solutions for $300,000 USD to $450,000 USD. Cost > analysis based on: standard solution configuration price, supplies price, > and maintenance costs recommended by manufacturer. Cost criteria: printing > 1.4 full build chambers of parts per day/5 days per week over 1 year of > 30-gram parts at 10% packing density on fast print mode using HP 3D High > Reusability PA 12 material, and the powder reusability ratio recommended by > manufacturer.

So, sounds like we're talking something on the order of 50-150k per year or so if you're planning to use this frequently. Definitely not a consumer-focused solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Can we please not link the commercials?

</comment><comment><USER59> Not touching an HP printer with a barge pole. Fuck you HP.

<comment><USER60> Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

<comment><USER59> Merely sharing a strongly held opinion here.

HP _is_ the cancer of modern printing - anyone who crossed paths with their "region locked" printers/cartridges - can attest to that statement.

<comment><USER60> Yes, stating a "strongly held opinion" without explaining why is one kind of unsubstantive comment we don't need here. Adding information, like you did in this reply, makes it better. Adding name-calling, like you did above, makes it worse.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Earth in Minecraft, 1:1 scale - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/8_bW3ab8YAk <comment><USER2> I really want to see more from this. I've literally had dreams of having a sandbox version of the world as we know it. I'll probably be downloading this and exploring a creepy empty version of my hometown.

I love the idea of having a built up version of the world but I also get a sick pleasure of seeing the world with no buildings whatsoever. It has this peaceful serene logan's run/mother 3 "death of humanity" vibe to it. I hope the terrain generation gets more and more improvements and we get closer to what the world would look like untouched.

Minecraft is truly a game of the ages...

Ps. Mojang should totally officially incorporate that chunks mod. Projects like this just show what wonders could be done with it.</comment>


Show HN: Apply HN Aggregator - <AUTHOR> http://www.thefinac.tk/applyhn <comment><AUTHOR> Hacked together an aggregator for "APPLY HN".Can sort by points, date and random. Maybe a little buggy. Do let me know here or on the site if you want anything to be improved.

<comment><USER2> Nice - one thing that would be nice is the description text under each title. Often the title doesn't really tell you too much about what the idea is about and you have to click on each title to read. I would love just one long list of all the titles and description that I could scan through.

<comment><AUTHOR> I could do that but some of the posts have a HUGE amount of text. That was my reasoning of having it the way it is. Thoughts?

<comment><USER3> Maybe snip it at the first line break, and/or limit it to a certain amount of words to show above the fold, then expand it to read the rest.

<comment><AUTHOR> I tried what you said...The results were very inconsistent. As there is no particular format for posting there was no coherence at all

<comment><USER3> Well that's disappointing (not at all on your part, but on the part of the current format), but completely understandable considering how freeform YC seems to have encouraged these applications to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice but you're aware of this, right?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/applyhn](https://news.ycombinator.com/applyhn)

It's linked in the top menu.

<comment><AUTHOR> yup i was done almost the same time that went up. Plus its a little fun to see the standings by ratings

<comment><USER5> Yours is great, though! The more the merrier.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks! Do let me know if any particular feature will make it more helpful

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> i'm not sure if this is just my problem with whatever plugins i have, but i can only get the site to load in firefox, but it's a total no-go in chrome, safari or even the safari tech preview. in safari and chrome, the xhrs to search_by_date on algolia never resolve (the webfonts never load in any browser cors-related).

Also not totally sure why the xhrs are marked as synchronous, but that causes all the browsers to complain in any case. rock on.

<comment><AUTHOR> the same issue is coming up on friend's browser but working fine on mine (Safari, chrome and firefox).

The synchronous issue is my bad, was trying something out and forgot to change it back. Will do now. Thanks for letting me know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ta. A single page view would be nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are welcome! My only issue with that is its only been a couple of days and we already have around 180 posts. So that would mean A LOT of scrolling by the end of the month. Thoughts?

<comment><USER7> I prefer scrolling to a bunch of separate pages. Also the 'find' thing works.</comment></comment></comment>


Outsourcing code reviews? - <AUTHOR>

I'm writing a lot of code, and I want it to be good.  Good code reviews can help that, especially with code written solo.
I don't especially like the idea of outsourcing coding, but having someone else tear apart my design, style, and logic seems like it could be a good idea.  The across-the-world aspect of some outsourcing seems like it could be a benefit.
Code reviews can bottleneck development, so I was thinking it'd be nice if I could just commit at end of day... Then in the morning, I'd come in to an email box magically full of corrections, criticisms, etc.
When I think of the big worries I have about outsourced development, schedule risk, quality risk, and the miscommunication burdens.  They all seem to be mitigated by just doing reviews.  If they can't review well in a reasonably timely manner (strong preference for a day), just quit using them.  No major loss.  If the code isn't understandable, there's a real benefit to improving it... it's not just a burden imposed by the process.
Has anyone tried this?  What issues did you / might you run into?
Are there companies I could approach about hiring them to do it?  I'm happy to pay up for such a service because if it works well it could make me dramatically more productive.
Am I missing something that makes this obviously a stupid idea? <comment><USER2> I do reviews for a client and might be interested in taking on another. You can see my contact info and some of my code at <http://github.com/darius>.

</comment><comment><USER3> We've been doing this under our "Code Audit" service for clients since 2003.

<comment><AUTHOR> If it's allowed, could you give me a reference to how I could contact your firm? Are you in the US?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is all of the code you are writing open source? If not, then you may not want to release it to third parties, and they may not want to read it.

Also, getting a reasonable code review on a large project pretty much requires the reviewer to be versed in your codebase. Depending on what you're doing, it may be more costly (in time/money) to bring someone up to speed.

<comment><AUTHOR> _Is all of the code you are writing open source? If not, then you may not want to release it to third parties, and they may not want to read it._

I was speaking of closed source parts. Open-source has a reasonable enough review process already. Although I don't want the code publicly available, I don't want to waste my life being paranoid.

 _Depending on what you're doing, it may be more costly (in time/money) to bring someone up to speed._

Very true. Fortunately, I control the requirements, and I'm almost compulsive about simplicity. I want to be able to keep the code small and be able to rewrite parts quickly. I'm very much into quantity over quality (<http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001160.html>), so if it's useful, I'd be happy to start from scratch just to bring reviewers up with me.

That said, I want to be able to bring other developers up to speed on the project later, and it might be time well invested trying to make the project easier to get up to speed on. That'd also reduce the dependency on particular people that are in some part of the world I'll likely never see.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Code reviews can bottleneck development, so I was thinking it'd be nice if I could just commit at end of day... Then in the morning, I'd come in to an email box magically full of corrections, criticisms, etc._

This sounds like open source development. There's a reason why people joke that the fastest way to get a patch reviewed is to commit it. :-)

But more seriously: Finding people who are good at reviewing _your_ code is very difficult. The more obscure the code you're writing -- that is, the more you actually need your code to be reviewed -- the fewer the number of people who would be competent to review it; so any attempt to put together a generic "group of reviewers" isn't likely to get the most important code reviewed.

If I were you, I'd think about what specific things you're doing in which you're likely to make mistakes -- generally speaking, this means sorts of code which you don't have much experience writing -- and then go out and look for experts to review for those specific bits of code.

I'm available for contract work reviewing cryptographic code. :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> _Finding people who are good at reviewing your code is very difficult._

I think this is generally true even without the emphasis on my particular code. Most folks suck even more at reviewing than they do at coding. And of course it's always hard to find really good developers.

I think there might be attractive qualities for a high quality developer to take on such a project though.. For instance:

Short off-time hours.. like someone in Seattle could review pretty interesting code after their stupid day of meetings that they got sucked into by being too good at their job. Hell, they might be able to do it _in_ the meetings.

Pay... I'd happily pay well over good dev rates for a good reviewer (or set of reviewers). People telling me how I'm dumb and how to improve is great.

Joy of working outside of Java / C# / C++ / VB / ASP.NET corporate code.

Freedom to rip stuff apart without fearing for one's job or worrying about office politics. Some of us have a lot of pent up rage :)</comment></comment>


New search-by-image method on Bing.com - <AUTHOR> http://searchresearch1.blogspot.com/2018/09/new-search-by-image-method-on-bingcom.html <comment><USER2> These days I have same feeling about Google search results as I'd with Yahoo in late 90s. They routinely fail to identify important keywords and just ignore them. I have to put quotes on important keywords for roughly quater of my queries to avoid seeing generic stuff. For at least 10-20% of my queries, things are buried deep in to page 4 or 5 because rest of the pages are taken up by people gaming the SEO or they get ranked high because of stupid viral reason. Every person I have talked to about this has echoed this sentiment wholeheartedly. It appears that no one at Google cares anymore about all these pain people are experiencing. May be Google's internal metrics would even fail to capture this dissatisfaction because people keep using it despite of issues. Thanks to monopoly, traffic doesn't just drop. The image search by image is such an old ask that they have never got around to doing properly. Kudos to Bing for keep marching despite of our collective decision to just increase our pain threshold and stick with Google.

</comment><comment><USER3> Good to see signs that Bing isn't just in maintenance mode, I'd hate to lose what little competition in search engines we have left. I switched back to Google from Yahoo after the latter got sold to Verizon, but it occurs to me that I never really did give Bing a fair shake. I suppose now's as good a time as ever.

<comment><USER4> I just finished spending two months on DuckDuckGo, and landed back on Google simply because I was tired of searching for so many things twice: once with the original search, and once with g!.

I really want a Google alternative. Maybe I'll try Bing again, too.

<comment><USER5> I've been using DDG for a few years now as my primary search engine. I would say 99% of the time I can find what I need (just like with Google), and it's super useful with some of their integrations into stack overflow and related sites.

Regarding the results, after a few years, I found that it's not that DDG is worse then Google -- but it's that I was conditioned on how to optimize Google's results. I believe it's because no search engine uses natural language, instead it's language that we think is natural but our brains have optimized for the engine.

Once I came to that realization, I started optimizing my search for DDG just as I had done for Google.

<comment><USER6> I often type a programming error message into DDG, fail to find anything useful, type it in Google, find it right away. I don't see how reoptimizing my brain would help in this situation where I'm just typing in an error word-for- word.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice, though I use Bing daily (I am the only one, if I believe my collegues), I didn't know this exist.

I do wonder however, why the search function doesn't try searching on sub- parts of the image automatically.

Bing really has been improving compared to Google. I can find stuff on Bing which I can't easily find on Google because Google keeps rebuilding my search query, causing irrelevant results to show up.

<comment><USER8> > I do wonder however, why the search function doesn't try searching on sub- > parts of the image automatically.

i also wonder the same. But then it's quite a hard problem to automatically decide which part of the subimage to rerun a search (presumably, it's not free to run so many).

<comment><USER9> Actually this is a typical Machine Learning probleme, luckily was solved years ago and you can read about it here: [https://medium.com/@ageitgey/machine- learning-is-fun-part-3-...](https://medium.com/@ageitgey/machine-learning-is- fun-part-3-deep-learning-and-convolutional-neural-networks-f40359318721)

<comment><USER10> I don't think that is directly applicable to this case (definitely not to the level of calling the problem 'solved').

The link describes a technique for training a neural net to detect a type of image, an '8' for example, in an image regardless of location.

However, in this case, you only have one sample of the target. You could run a net to attempt to extract a list of features (children, bronze), and compare that to all your images, but I don't think that's how the bing image search is structured. That would be closer to searching for '4 children bronze park' (which it does a great job of finding such things; just nothing related to the target image).

Also, when you use convolution in the way described in the article, you would lose relative position information (or at least, dampen that part of the signal) of each of the bronze statues; as the entire point is to not care about the position of the object.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Geez, I didn't realize Google and Bing had search by image. I'm still using tineye.

<comment><USER12> There are a good number of search engines for reverse image search, I've made a browser extension to search them all.

[https://github.com/dessant/search-by- image](https://github.com/dessant/search-by-image)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Very cool, especially the cropping feature! If anybody is curious as to how you would even start to tackle the problem, I wrote a tutorial to build your own prototype here: [https://blog.insightdatascience.com/the-unreasonable- effecti...](https://blog.insightdatascience.com/the-unreasonable- effectiveness-of-deep-learning-representations-4ce83fc663cf)

</comment><comment><USER14> This reverse image search engines are all really fascinating (Google, Tineye, Bing, Yandex). Recently I use more and more yandex.com reverse image search because it let's me find more associated pictures of an uploaded one. Side note: It's not censoring my searches... I'm an adult and I don't need supervision from a search engine company!

</comment><comment><USER15> Not new. But yes useful when needed.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, I think this has been around for at least a year.

For others reading this, if you're looking for long tail content (e.g. running a ∃ type query), my experience with reverse image engines is roughly:

Yandex > Google = Bing > Tineye

For niche content also worth checking KarmaDecay and SauceNao if relevant. Bing's gotten a bit better recently, and with the big boys playing in the space Tineye's quality has definitely dropped off. As far as I can tell Baidu's reverse image search is just complete garbage and never has any useful results. I rank Yandex higher than Google not because their algorithm is better (although it does seem to be a bit more tineye-style forgiving in terms of editing), but also because they seem to greedily index images they crawl in a way that google doesn't (e.g. AFAICT a lower percentage of the images available in google's text-based image search index are available for reverse- image searching than on yandex)

For non long-tail reverse image searching (e.g. I just want a larger size or to find the original source) I mostly stick with Google though, because they seem to make it easiest to binary search the search timeframe like how they caught DPR.

If you're on Firefox (might be a chrome version avail now too?) Image Search Options is the extension you want so you can compare the different engines with a single click.

If others have good newer resources I'd be interested to hear about them.

<comment><USER15> Great comment, useful info! What is that about DPR? I had to do an acronym search. Dread Pirate Roberts? Is there a good story behind this about how they caught the suspect?

<comment><USER16> If I remember correctly Ulbritch was originally caught by doing basically a "git bisect" on the records associated with one of his usernames: [https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/27/business/dealbook/the- uns...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/27/business/dealbook/the-unsung-tax- agent-who-put-a-face-on-the-silk-road.html)

<comment><USER15> Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Does it require public URL like Google or is it based on classification?

</comment><comment><USER18> it seems weird in this era of Machine Learning that the feature here is just an easier way for the user to experiment with different croppings of their image until they get good results</comment>


New Ideas About Temporal Pooling - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/numenta/nupic/wiki/New-Ideas-About-Temporal-Pooling <comment><USER2> I am a bit surprised to see this on HN without context. This was originally an email from Jeff to our mailing list and was a pretty good overview so we dumped it into a wiki page. For those new to the problem, the page summarizes it well:

> The basic idea of temporal pooling is patterns that occur adjacent in time > probably have a common underlying cause and therefore the brain forms a > stable representation for a series of input patterns.

While the idea is simple, the implementation is tricky. We recently made our experimentation public here: [https://github.com/numenta/nupic.research](https://github.com/numenta/nupic.research)

Jeff also had a really informal discussion about the topic at one of our hackathons: [http://numenta.org/blog/2014/05/09/2014-spring-hackathon- out...](http://numenta.org/blog/2014/05/09/2014-spring-hackathon- outcome.html#temporal_pooling)

<comment><AUTHOR> From what I've observed, quite a few people on HN have read "On Intelligence" and are receptive to these type of posts.

I'm guessing this is the same Scott that gave the presentation at OsCon? I wasn't physically there, but watched it online. It was one of my early exposures to NuPic, CLA, HTM, Jeff Hawkins, etc. Thanks for that.

Have you had a chance to play around with NuStudio (by David Ragazzi)? I don't think I've seen you comment on it via the mailing list.

<comment><USER3> Thanks Michael and Scott for try NuPIC Studio!

This weekend I'll update NuStudio repo with the newest version and its tutorial..</comment></comment></comment>


AI Trained on Old Scientific Papers Makes Discoveries Humans Missed - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/neagpb/ai-trained-on-old-scientific-papers-makes-discoveries-humans-missed <comment><USER2> I'm skeptical. Sounds VERY much like overfitting. Remember the Shakespeare and CS paper generators? Word2Vec isn't real AGI, it's a "magic trick"

EDIT: oh, it's a Vice article

</comment><comment><USER3> Our track record is already embarrassing :) [https://www.pnas.org/content/112/24/7426](https://www.pnas.org/content/112/24/7426)

</comment><comment><USER4> Now if only we were less unsure of the accuracy of published results

</comment><comment><USER5> This feels like a good use case for HN's mysterious title revision policy. Something that sounds less like we blew past the singularity overnight?</comment>


A Bayesian Shops on Amazon - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/exchez/amazon-bayes <comment><AUTHOR> I use a Jupyter notebook to explore how a Bayesian might compare two products on Amazon with the goal of finding the probability that one product is better than another.</comment>