Thanks to Donald Knuth, CS students and programmers know about Big O notation.
Unfortunately with all the years of academic brainwashing or glossing over, people think that Big O is all that matters and look at you funny if you dare to even mention substandard algorithms like linear search.
Formal Definition of Big O
Many people forget that M and X0 can make a big difference.
Stackoverflow is a programming Q&A website that has overtaken the old and spammy Experts Exchange.
Part of the incentive to participate in Stackoverflow is reputation points. These points allow you special privileges such as editing other people’s questions or offering some as incentive to answer one of your questions. Once you receive 10,000 reputation, you will get access to special “moderation tools”.
Now that I recently reached 10,000 reputation along with 223 out of 84,000 other people, I thought I would share some tips to get there.
1. Be the First to Answer. Even at the cost of quality.
In Stackoverflow answers are arranged first by vote number and submission/edit time. Being the first answer that people see is a huge advantage.
I have seen many incorrect/inferior answers on top. People are too lazy to scroll down. Too often the voters are just as clueless as the asker and will vote up whatever has the most votes already. This turns into a snowballing effect.
You can also edit your answer as much as you like for 5 minutes after submitting without showing up as an edit and changing positions. I first discovered this when people wrote fast incorrect answers and then copied my correct answer a few minutes later. This usually happens in easy questions which tend to get more votes.
There a 3 major statistics providers on the Internet.
Alexa is probably the oldest but I never liked it since it was mostly based on people who installed their toolbar. Google is another provider that seems to have very accurate, secret sources (stuff that goes beyond what they could find from their search engine and analytics).
Quantcast is a very interesting one because it is the only one to provide demographics such as race and income. I am not going to comment on the accuracy except to say that I am a skeptic.
I noticed from all the traffic today that someone was attempting to collect Analytics statistics from Reddit again. Amazingly it already has 1000 upvotes while the most I had was around 200. However I had already had multiple stories on the front page, netting ~ 60,000 visitors directly from Reddit.
Previous I had only posted the geographic data here and here. So today I noticed that some people wanted the other statistics such as browser or OS so here they are. I used the filtering options to only show referrers from reddit.com.
Be sure to click the pictures if you want a full screen image.
Here is an update of how much traffic your favorite social websites are receiving. Data is from Google trends.
Facebook is eating Myspace away while Twitter shows modest gains.
Surprisingly, Stumbleupon nearly has half the traffic of the 800 lb heavyweight Digg. It is interesting to note that Digg is losing traffic.
Subscribe to the feed.