These people are heroes. There's nothing else to say.
Mostly data driven.
My brother, Richard: How he came to be so smart interview with Joan Feynman by Web of Stories (2019)
Source. Ah, shame to see Joan so old. Some good stories. The tiles game thing was not mentioned in Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics by James Gleick (1994) I think.Maybe focus on job ads like Stack Overflow.
Stack Exchange solves to a good extent the use cases:
points of view. It is a big open question if we can actually substantially improve it.
Major shortcoming are mentioned at idiotic Stack Overflow policies:
- Scope restrictions can lead to a lot of content deletion: closing questions as off-topicThis greatly discourages new users, who might still have added value to the project.On our website, anyone can post anything that is legal in a given country. No one can ever delete your content if it is legal, no matter their reputation.
- Although you can answer your own question, there's no way to write an organized multi-page book with Stack Exchange due to shortcomings such as no table of contents, 30k max chars on answer, huge risk of deletion due to "too broad"
- Absolutely no algorithmic attempt to overcome the fastest gun in the West problem (early answers have huge advantage over newer ones): meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/404535/closing-an-old-upvoted-question-as-duplicate-of-new-unvoted-questions/404567#404567
- Native reputation system:
- if the living ultimate God of
C++upvotes you, you get10reputation - if the first-day newb of
Javaupvotes you, you also get10reputation
- if the living ultimate God of
- Randomly split between sites like Stack Overflow vs Super User, with separate user reputations, but huge overlaps, and many questions that appears as dupes on both and never get merged.
- Possible edit wars, just like Wikipedia, but these are much less common since content ownership is much clearer than in Wikipedia however
OurBigBook.com Learning management systems by 
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-04-24 +Created 1970-01-01
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-04-24 +Created 1970-01-01This website basically aims to be a learning management system, allowing in particular a teacher to focus his help on students that he is legally obliged to help due to their job. But it will have the following unusual characteristics in current LMS solutions:
- public first, to allow reuse across universities, rather than paywalled as is the case for most top universities
- students can create material just like teachers, both are on equal footing. Students/teachers will see an indicator "this is your teacher"/"this is your student for this/past semester", but that is the only difference between their interfaces.
Not everything is perfect.
One big problem of many big open source projects is that they are contributed to by separate selfish organizations, that have private information. Then what happens is that:
- people implement the same thing twice, or one change makes the other completely unmergeable
- you get bugs but can't share your closed source test cases, and then you can't automate tests for them, or clearly demonstrate the problem
- other contributors don't see your full semi secret important motivation, and may either nitpick too much or take too long to review your stuff
Another common difficulty is that open source maintainers may simply not care enough about their own project (maybe they did in the past but lost interest) to review external patches by people they don't know.
Therefore, if you ever submit patches and they get ignore, don't be too sad. It just comes down to a question of maintenance cost, and means that you will waste some extra time on the next rebase. You just have to decide your goals and be cold about it:
- are you doing the right thing and going for a specific goal backward design? Then just fork, run as fast as possible towards a minimum viable product, and if you start to feel that rebase is costing you a lot, or feel you could get some open source fame for cheap, open reviews and see what upstream says. If they ignore you, politely tell yourself in your mind silently "fuck them", and carry on with the MVP
- otherwise, e.g. you just want to randomly help out, you have to ask them before doing anything big "how can I be of help". If I propose a patch for this issue, do you promise to review it?
Writing documentation in an open source project in which you don't have immediate push rights is another major pain due to code reviews. Code code reviews tend to be much less subjective, because if you do something wrong, stuff crashes, runs slower, or you need more lines of code to reach the same goal. There are tradeoffs, but in a limited number. Documentation code reviews on the other hand, are an open invitation to infinite bike-shedding, since you can't "run" documentation through a standardized brain model. Much better is for one good documenter person to just make one cohesive Stack Overflow post, and ping others with more knowledge to review details or add any missing pieces :-)
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