[havermeyer]

Gordon is amazing, and it's almost impossible to beat him to an answer for certain types of questions :) I had the chance to meet him a few years back to talk through some new SQL features coming to BigQuery (I'm at Snowflake now). He had a lot of great insights into what could make the product better, and what he thought was missing relative to other OLAP databases.

[gfody]

I like to answer sql questions too and it's like being in a quick draw match with Linoff around. he once blogged about how he's able to find all the new unanswered sql questions so quickly, iirc he made his own search

[tonyedgecombe]

I remember John Skeet saying he would sometimes post a half finished answer just so he could get their first and deter other users then polish it later.

I don't know what the point of that is.

[rendall]

A Jon Skeet encounter made me quit Stack Overflow, never to look back. I asked a question, Jon Skeet came along with an answer that did not answer my question. But his non-answer got 200 upvotes.

I went to meta to talk about how the reputation system is broken if that could happen. Skeet came along and accused me of changing my question, and a bunch of SO fanboys mocked me and told me if I want more reputation I had to try harder.

That's when I knew SO had irreparably changed for the worse.

[ozim]

Oh I had some negative encounter with Jon Skeet as well. For a person that has so much notoriety seemed he was quite defensive about me pointing out his "non-answer" he gave to someone else.

My situation was that I noticed that person asking was on a very basic level and he gave answer that was not correct in context of experience or what was actually asked. Even though technically correct.

[DominikD]

This rings true for a lot of discussions online: technically correct, but irrelevant in context. :|

[asah]

42

/s

[PascLeRasc]

Every time I've asked a question on Stack Overflow, I include in the question what I've tried and hasn't worked, or that I'm specifically looking to do what I described and I'm not looking for a link to The XY Problem. It always gets edited out immediately so someone can post an unhelpful solution and get upvotes.

[codehawke]

It's a popularity contest. Heavily favored towards those who came along when it first started off.

[matsemann]

If his answer was wrong, just accept some other answer then.

Do you have a link to this encounter..?

[rendall]

Yeah, see that's frustrating. The point isn't his answer. The point is that his non-answer got him upvotes from his fans, and that when I tried to address this broken reputation system in meta, people aggressively missed the point exactly like you did.

[matsemann]

If no one understands what you mean, might the problem lie elsewhere?

[johannes_ne]

I think that is quite sensible, so multiple people do not (unknowingly) spend time writing the same answer.