WingNews logo WingNews GitHub [2]

jlericson's comments

jlericson | 11 months ago

OpenSSL 3.5 includes post-quantum cryptography algorithms and this blog post explains why.

jlericson | 2 years ago | on: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

Author here and I agree actually. The quote was the first thing I wrote and I never went back to consider if it still made sense for the post as a whole. Given the title (which is maybe more combative than I intended?) I don't think I need it. I'm planning on watching the CEO's announcement today and updating the post. Unless there's a better use for the quote, it'll be gone in the next edit. Thanks for the feedback!

jlericson | 2 years ago | on: Stack Overflow Moderation Strike Update

That's . . . not a bad analogy. Only instead of 100 homes (like the condo I lived in with an HOA) imagine thousands of people complaining about their neighbors each day. Sometimes it's the ticky tack lawn nonsense and sometimes it's a leaky water heater flooding the neighbor. (The second happened to my neighbor. Unfortunately, it was my water heater.) Until you understand the scale of what the SO moderators were doing, it's easy to call them "entitled".

But I know it's hard to drum up sympathy for mods (or HOA boards).

jlericson | 2 years ago | on: Stack Overflow Moderation Strike Update

I don't know why you say "entitled moderators". If you send any time with them, you'll quickly see the vast majority of the job is drudgery. You wouldn't say "entitled janitors" would you?

jlericson | 2 years ago | on: Stack Exchange Moderator Strike

Yeah... that's not it. I used to handle escalation tickets on SO and we were handling tickets from the EU years before I joined. Also, that's not how any of this works.

jlericson | 2 years ago | on: How's business at Stack Overflow?

The key word is "average". I'm assuming the former Enterprise customers (large companies like banks who pay for many, many users) are folded into the Teams product now. In any case, a few big customers will skew the average. I'd be interested in median, but that would be a lot less impressive in the annual report.

jlericson | 5 years ago | on: A deeper dive into our May 2019 security incident

Yeah. I'm almost certain I was the one who got sick of having no idea what a user would see when they opened their email that I asked for _some way_ of see it. (Otherwise it was this strange dance of "Request a password recovery and tell me what it says.") I don't recall if I ever considered that it might be a _massive security hole_ if anyone got a hold of it. In retrospect . . .

(I overlapped with Shog at Stack Overflow.)

jlericson | 6 years ago | on: Why I Left Stack Overflow

I mean, do your best, sure. But I've literally been offered jobs because friends and relatives have connections that aren't available to other people. I was thinking this morning that I've written a lot of resumes, but mostly to give to employers as a formality. I've never been unemployed between jobs partially because I started life with a number of advantages not given to others. This isn't a political thing; it's just the facts about my life.

jlericson | 7 years ago | on: How Stack Overflow for Teams Fits into the Community

I'm not sure what size company is too small — we'll have to see after a few months. My hunch is a team as small as 3 could make the system useful with a bit of self-discipline to answer on the site and not in Slack or what not. It's also useful if your team expects to onboard new people. Those questions from new members can really help build up a collection of policies and processes that haven't been written down yet.

At any rate, moderation tools are toned down or removed altogether for Teams. As we hear back from customers, we'll likely be tweaking the tools to fit better with their workflow. A lot of the moderation tools on the public site amount to crowd control.

jlericson | 7 years ago | on: How Stack Overflow for Teams Fits into the Community

I'd guess it sorta depends on whether people spend more time on Confluence or Stack Overflow. If questions are already getting answered and used, Stack Overflow for Teams isn't likely to do better at this stage in its development. On the other hand, if questions aren't getting answered or if people forget they exist, it might be worth trying out the Stack Overflow product since developers are likely to end up there regularly.

(Disclaimer: I have 0 experience with Confluence and I'm a Stack Overflow employee.)

jlericson | 9 years ago | on: Whither Stack Overflow

I sympathize with 2-4. Those things make it much harder to earn reputation by asking then it used to be. Fixing those problems requires fighting a bunch of institutional inertia, so it will require either time or some sort of judo move.

But I don't understand how having separate sites relates. If you contribute to some of the smaller sites, I think you will find you'll get excellent answers from people more focused on the sort of problems the site covers. Frankly, I've seen DBA questions asked on SO that get short-sighted answers from programmers. Those questions should be asked of people who really know how a database works under the hood.

I can see how collaborative filtering might help. But a big reason people have moved to dedicated sites as opposed to SO is that they want to have separate moderation policies for the questions they enjoy answering. (I've put a little bit of thought into the criteria for spinning off sites on meta.SO: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/271989/does-it-pay-t...)

(Disclosure: I'm a Community Manager hired by Stack Overflow.)

page 1