The Cultural Anthropology of Stack Exchange

Usenet Practice of Quoting developed because most people didn’t have access to more than a few days worth of usenet history (7 min)

Programming, Yeshiva, Math communies use language which keeps out the outsiders.  When you are trying to get expert answers, you don’t want to attract every demographic.

We hate fun.  A question is asked by 1, answered by 1-4, and viewed by hundreds.  The site is designed for google, for creating a great artifact.  The old q&a forms were conversations, that did not produce great artifacts.  We don’t want multiple answers because we want to produce canonical ones.

A lot of non-constructive questions draw a crowd because it is fun to watch a fight, but they do not create a good artifact.

Quora is provoked blogging (45 min)

Wikipedia requires articles be: Notorious with Citations (53 min)

Philip Roth wanted to correct something on wikipedia, so he did an interview with someone and cited it.

SchemaSpy: Graphical Database Schema Metadata Browser

SchemaSpy is a Java-based tool (requires Java 5 or higher) that analyzes the metadata of a schema in a database and generates a visual representation of it in a browser-displayable format. It lets you click through the hierarchy of database tables via child and parent table relationships as represented by both HTML links and entity-relationship diagrams. It’s also designed to help resolve the obtuse errors that a database sometimes gives related to failures due to constraints.

 

BeautifulSoup-like Parser for PHP

  • A HTML DOM parser written in PHP5+ let you manipulate HTML in a very easy way!
  • Require PHP 5+.
  • Supports invalid HTML.
  • Find tags on an HTML page with selectors just like jQuery.
  • Extract contents from HTML in a single line.


// Create DOM from URL or file
$html = file_get_html('http://www.google.com/');

// Find all images
foreach($html->find(‘img’) as $element)
echo $element->src . ”;

// Find all links
foreach($html->find(‘a’) as $element)
echo $element->href . ”;