Calling out Hacker News
No offense to this guy, but the first argument that doesn't seem to make any sense is that you couldn't reproduce SO because it would take you 33 hours just to type the existing code back into an editor.  It seems like a pretty arrogant assumption that the existing code is <i>the simplest possible</i> code that could be used to provide this functionality.<p>Beyond that, he is ignoring the fact that...Stack Overflow is really not <i>that</i> obscure of an idea.  There is posting questions and responses (or stories and comments); basically a blog which, by this point, is kindof trivial to put together.<p>User icons and profiles?  Seriously?  Not to be a prick, but I implemented those on my own website in a matter of about an hour.  From scratch...and I am <i>not</i> a developer.<p>Okay, so...upvotes and downvotes and a frontpage that bubbles like reddit does?  Mayyybe...how nice do we have to be to the database?<p>select (upvotes/(now() - time_submitted)) as heat from questions order by heat desc limit 50;<p>On a related note, he also mentions the scaling...so, what are our constraints here?  What hardware are we using and how much do we get to use?<p>Okay, then search.  Seriously?  This is also something that most geeks have written at some point and would have no problem dusting off.<p>Granted, yeah, this guy is probably right.  I don' think anybody is TOTALLY going to reproduce a verbatim copy of SO over the 4th of July weekend...but I don't think this guy (I am assuming he is the author of SO) should assume that he is th BEST, FASTEST dev in the world.  Especially when he is talking about such a common problem; what is essentially a blog.