It’s Back! Welcome to episode #33 of the Stack Exchange podcast.  We’ve got a brand new co-host (Jay Hanlon, our new VP of Community Growth) plus our guest this week is David Fullerton, VP of Engineering at Stack Exchange.

• So what’s new in the seven months since our last podcast? Check out the new and improved review queue! If you’ve got enough reputation, you can see the review button at the top of any Stack Exchange site. The new system is clearer to use and it’s fast thanks to a ton of AJAX goodness.
• From the community side, one of the most important things about the review queue is the First Post queue – a list of the very first post from each brand new user.
• You can also filter the queue, so you can tell it what kind of posts you want to look at – “only duplicates”, for example..
• There’s a badge connected to using the review queue, so people are (naturally) gaming it. There’s an incentive to just go fast instead of thoughtfully helping to improve posts.
• If we add a “reopen” queue, will we then have to add a “reclose” queue?
• We’re looking at tweaking all of the language surrounding closing questions, including the word “closed” itself. “Not constructive” is itself not constructive feedback. How about “insufficiently objective”? “Poor thinking”? “You’re dumb”? “Subjective”? – but we have such a thing as good subjective. It’s not an easy thing to figure out.
  • (4:07PM – first mention of Taco the Siberian Husky.)
• Closing questions is on the road to deleting them, but we still have hope for closed questions – or at least for the user who asked the bad question. Closures need to provide feedback to the users who asked the questions, so they have the opportunity to dispute or explain the situation.
  • (4:16PM – first mention of Yahoo! Answers.)
• Got suggestions for how we re-word the close descriptions? Post them on Meta! The one thing that we need to be conveying is that Stack Exchange is a place for expert answers to factual questions, not shopping recommendations or discussion questions.
• So what does Wikipedia do with content like this? Jason Punyon is here, apparently! He’s impressed with the way Wikipedia points out the problems they have with their articles with a big box right at the top. Wikipedia faces many of the same problems we do, with the faceless cabal of “moderators” deleting content at will.
• Okay, let’s talk about something else.
• Bigger picture: how do we teach new people how to use the site? We’re working on a new “About” page! (Here’s the old one.)
• Example: tagging your first question! The current system tells new users they have to give their question at least one tag, but then it won’t let them create a new tag. They have to understand that there is a list of existing tags from which they must choose. (Or we’ll make the random forest do it for us.)
• So! What’s happened to the company in the last six months?
• We opened a sales office in Denver! We’re expanding our office in London! We hired Jay! Put your profile up on Careers 2.0, because it’s exploding and that’s why we’re hiring salespeople for those two offices (and the NYC one) like crazy!
• We’re hiring a ton. We’re hiring developers for Careers in NYC and for the Core Q&A team in NYC or telecommuting or hanging out in our sales offices in Denver or London. (The offices and the sales people are very nice. Plus there’s free lunch.)
• We’re hiring a product designer! And a product manager! And a senior sysadmin!
• We’re getting a new office in New York City, by the way! If you’ve got enough rep, we’ll give you a lifetime membership to come hang out in our offices now and then.
• So what else has happened? We’ve done some promotions. We’ve got a patents site. We’ve got an app development contest with Microsoft going, so you can win prizes (including cash) for developing a Windows 8 app. Apptivate.MS. The MS stands for Microsoft or Malaysia or Multiple Sclerosis or Montserrat (it’s the last one) but Microsoft uses it the most. (Montserrat is really small and probably has a viceroy.)

We’ll see you next week!

SE Podcast #32 - It's Back! [ 52:32 ] Download

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We all know everyone loves pretty pictures, chock full of graph-y goodness.

You probably also know that about two months ago we started the Stack Overflow Machine Learning Contest, and that it’s now winding down.  All models have been (or will shortly be) committed, and we’re starting to gather data for the final judgement.

What you may not have known about was the subsidiary Visualization Contest, which is looking to find an interesting and informative way of making sense of the mountains of interesting data in our data sets.  You’re free to pull in any additional publicly available information from sources like the Data Explorer or API, but the data set put together for the machine learning contest is a good place to start.

Entries will be accepted through October 26th with voting ending November 1st.  We’ll choose the most awesome of the top-voted entries based on how interesting and informative the visualization is, with bonus points for focusing on the subject of the machine learning contest.

So go out there, find a set of interesting statistics, gin up a cool picture and submit it to the…

Stack Overflow Visualization Contest

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We’re growing like crazy! Between launching exciting new sites, developing new features and promotions for existing ones, and branching out geographically, Stack Exchange can use all the help it can get – so we’re currently hiring for seven (7!) different positions, from developers to designers to sales to… well, just look at the list yourself:

• Product Manager – Q&A Team (telecommute or New York)
• Web Developer – Q&A Team (telecommute or New York)
• Web Developer – Careers Team (New York)
• Senior Systems Administrator (telecommute or New York)
• Product Designer (telecommute or New York)
• Account Executive – Careers 2.0 (London, Denver, New York)
• Sales Representative – Inside Sales – Careers 2.0 (Denver, New York)

We’re dogfooding Careers for these of course, since who better to help make the software running Stack Exchange more awesome than the folks using Stack Exchange. Here are a few positions that are especially appropriate to our community:

Product Manager – Q&A Team (telecommute or New York)

We’re looking for someone to help us design and build the next set of features and special projects for Stack Exchange.  We want someone with serious startup experience building and shipping products, from conception to deployment.  You’ll take ideas from us and the community, or come up with your own, and work with our designers and developers to get them shipped.

Web Developer – Q&A Team (telecommute or New York)

We’re looking for a top-notch web developer for the Core Q&A team.  You’ll work directly on the engine that powers all the sites to ship new features, fix bugs, and scale and grow the sites.  We want someone with serious front-to-back web development experience (C# not required), a track record of getting stuff done, and a history of activity in the community.

Web Developer – Careers Team (New York)

We’re looking for more top-notch web developers to work on building Careers into the best place for developers to find a job, anywhere.  You’ll work on lots of new features, fix bugs, and help us decide the future of Careers.  We want someone with serious front-to-back web development experience (C# not required), a track record of getting stuff done, and a history of activity in the community.

Senior Systems Administrator (telecommute or New York)

We’re looking for a veteran Windows / Linux systems administrator to join our team.  You’ll help build out our infrastructure and keep it ahead of the growth curve.  We want someone with experience working with both Windows and Linux systems (emphasis on Windows), and a track record of taking on big challenges and delivering blog-worthy solutions.

Product Designer (telecommute or New York)

Last, but not least, we need a product designer.  You’ll work with Jin to help our developers and product managers design new features, create and implement full brand identities for new Stack Exchange sites, and help improve user experience across the network.  We want someone with a portfolio of web design and experience working directly with developers and product managers to design products and features.

Telecommute?

Most of these positions are open to the world: we want to hire the best people, wherever they are.  However, there are a few things you should be aware of:

1. You should be awesome at working remotely — self-motivated and aggressively communicative — to make sure you stay on the same page as the rest of your team
2. We still believe in getting teams together at least once a week to talk, and that generally happens between 1 – 5pm EDT.  You’ll need to be flexible with your hours
3. There may be some countries that are legally too difficult for us to work with…sorry!

A few positions are in-office only, but don’t worry: we have awesome offices.  In fact, a few people who started working remotely moved to New York just to get access to our catered lunches.  If you do want to move to New York (or our sales offices in Denver or London), we’ll assist you with relocation but you must already have the permanent right to work in the country of the office (US or UK).

Apply!

Each job has instructions to apply, and we’re hiring immediately.  If you see a job that might be a fit for you or someone you know, apply soon.  You can also always find a list of open positions at http://stackexchange.com/about/hiring, or click the “jobs” link in the footer of any Stack Exchange site.

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Windows 8 officially launches on October 26th, and it’s already generating quite a few questions on Stack Overflow.  So when Microsoft approached us about sponsoring an app development contest, we thought it was a great idea.

Today we’re announcing Apptivate.ms, a Windows 8 App Development Contest sponsored by Microsoft.

The contest has two parts:

1. A Developer Contest for people interested in writing applications
2. A Reviewer Contest for people interested in reviewing and voting on apps

You can participate – and win prizes – in both categories, so even if you aren’t interested in developing your own app you can still participate by helping others by reviewing their submissions.

Developer Contest

The Developer Contest awards prizes for the best apps in 5 broad Groups: Knowledge, Games, Interest, Work, and Social.  Here’s how it works:

1. Create a Windows 8 app and submit it to Apptivate.MS by December 6
2. The top 10 apps in each Group (chosen by judges, with input from your initial votes) will advance to the semi-final round December 7 – 9
3. Vote on the best apps between December 10 – 16.  The top 3 voted apps in each category will win the Voter’s Choice Prizes.
4. One winner will be chosen by the Stack Exchange and Microsoft judges to win the Grand Prize on December 19

Two Grand Prize winners* will be awarded:

$5,000 Cash Grand Prize

+ Feature in MSDN Flash and Microsoft’s DevRadio

+ Promotion in Microsoft’s User Community

The top 3 apps in each category will win a Voter’s Choice Prize:

5 first-place winners: $500 + Tablet running Windows RT

5 second-place winners: Tablet running Windows RT

5 third-place winners: Windows 8

Submit early and often.  Your first submission doesn’t have to be final — in fact, you’re encouraged to submit early and get feedback to develop your app further.  The votes will be reset for the semi-final round so everyone can vote on your final submission.

See the full Rules, Terms & Conditions and the Submission Guidelines on Apptivate.ms for more information.

Reviewer Sweepstakes

Not developing an app? You can still help by leaving comments on apps, asking and answering Windows 8-related questions on Stack Overflow, and participating in the Windows 8 Developer Chats.

See the Contest page for a full list of achievements that can be unlocked on Apptivate.ms.  Each achievement (up to 30) gives you an entry into one of the reviewer sweepstakes:

3 Gold-level Winners: Tablet Running Windows RT

10 Silver-level Winners: Windows 8

50 Bronze-level Winners: Limited-edition Apptivate.ms T-shirt

See the full Rules, Terms & Conditions on Apptivate.ms for more information.

Getting Started

Thinking about developing an App, but not sure where to get started?  Check out the Resources page for some helpful links and tips.

Prefer to assist others writing apps?  Register your Stack Overflow account on Apptivate.MS now to be eligible for reviewer prizes, and then ask, answer, or share Windows 8 questions on Stack Overflow to get started.

Register on Apptivate.ms now!

*NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. A PURCHASE WILL NOT INCREASE YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING. OPEN TO AGES 18 AND OLDER AND WHO DID NOT PURCHASE ANY EQUIPMENT FOR PURPOSES OF ENTERING THE PROMOTION. VOID WHERE PROHIBITED. Enter Contest by: 12/6/12. Enter Sweepstakes by: 12/16/12. For Official Rules, prize descriptions, alternate method of entry, and odds disclosure, visit http://apptivate.ms.  Sponsor: Microsoft Corporation, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052, U.S.A.

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We’ve all heard the stories of seemingly trivial patents being used to mug technology companies. There was the patent on the “Interactive Web” which a troll named Eolas used to extract $521 million from Microsoft–until a jury in East Texas threw out the patents. There are the four patents Lodsys is using to send threatening letters to software developers everywhere–trivial patents that Google says never should have been granted, in fact, Google and Oracle have submitted mountains of prior art to show that the patents should be invalid.

Many small app developers have just decided it’s cheaper to settle rather than spend half a million dollars in legal fees fighting in court.

What’s going on here? And what can we do to stop it?

Anybody who follows patent applications closely and who understands technology may have noticed something odd about a lot of the new patents: they don’t really seem like inventions. Really? They got a patent on that? I wrote that in eighth grade. In BASIC. On a TRS-80. Isn’t a patent supposed to be an invention?

Yes. But the escalation of the patent wars has led companies to try to patent everything in sight, so they can build up a portfolio of patents (“to defend themselves,” of course, so that they have something to countersue with when they get sued). The way they do this is by sending lawyers up and down the corridors where the engineers are working, looking for things that they might be able to patent. And the imperative to get a lot of patents means that sometimes they submit things which aren’t exactly inventions per se to the USPTO. Just in case they stick.

Now, the patent office works hard, but in order to determine if something is not an invention, they have to find prior art.

Prior art could be another patent, something in a publication, or even an implementation, like a shareware software program from 1992 that does the same thing that somebody is now claiming to have invented in 2008. It can be published anywhere in the world, in any language, in any publication, no matter how obscure, to qualify as prior art.

And, as you might guess, in the 22.5 hours [DOC] that examiners might have to review each patent application, searching every document published in the entire world in every language is not practical. There’s no possible way examiners can conduct a truly exhaustive search of prior art.

And that’s how we get bad patents.

Luckily, we got two breaks.

The first break we got is a tiny provision in the America Invents Act, the “Patent Reform Act” which, on the face of it, appears to have done absolutely nothing to solve this problem, but if you look closely, there’s a tiny provision in there, which says:

“Any person at any time may cite to the Office in writing prior art consisting of patents or printed publications which that person believes to have a bearing on the patentability of any claim of a particular patent…”

In other words, as of September 16, the USPTO is required to accept submissions from the public of prior art.

The second lucky break is that we have a very good Director at the USPTO right now, David Kappos. Mr. Kappos, who came from IBM, realized that this provision gave the public an opportunity to help patent examiners identify prior art. But it’s not enough just to allow prior art submissions… you have to find a way to get the public involved in looking through patent applications and trying to find prior art that could prevent bogus claims.

And that sounds a lot like… a Stack Exchange!

We humbly submit that it’s a testament to how good the Director of the USPTO is, that he actually came to us. We were not paying attention. He came–twice!–to the Stack Exchange office in New York City to encourage us to open a Stack Exchange site that would generate heaps of prior art to help the patent examiners do their jobs.

Ask Patents is a new Stack Exchange site launching today that allows anyone to participate in the patent examination process. It’s a collaborative effort, supported by Stack Exchange, the US Patent and Trademark Office, and the Google Patent Search team. It’s very exciting, because it is opening up a process that has been conducted behind closed doors for over 200 years.

Our hope is that Ask Patents will reduce the number of patents mistakenly granted for obvious, unoriginal non-inventions, especially around software, a field that is near and dear to us.

Ask Patents is a collaborative effort, neatly tagged by keywords and classification, and searchable by patent application number. It is inspired by a research project called Peer To Patent, run out of New York Law School. That pilot project, created by Professor Beth Noveck, proved very successful at identifying prior art that the USPTO wouldn’t otherwise have known about.

Citizen volunteers and other interested parties will be able to ask about applications that they think are suspicious. Others can answer, identifying possible prior art, and using our upvote/downvote feature to rate any examples of prior art that other people found.

The USPTO, complying with the new law, will also provide an online system for submitting prior art. We’re also integrating with Google Patent Search, so every patent application on Google will include a link to discussion on Stack Exchange. Google has also implemented an algorithmic prior art search utility that will be helpful to site participants.

On Ask Patents, participants can also ask and answer questions about the nuances of patent law or about specific patent applications.

Collectively, we’re building a crowd-sourced worldwide detective agency to track down and obliterate bogus patent applications. Over time, we hope that the Patent Stack Exchange will mitigate the problems caused by rampant patent trolling. It’s not a complete fix, but it’s a good start.

75 comments