skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Eh, it went from a interesting novelty, to a incredible community, to a petty bureaucracy.

My personal experience is that under the crowdsourcing model the well meaning non experts outnumber the real experts and it's hard to police them while treating all as equals. In short, democracy brought content toward mediocrity.

Now it's dangerous to use it but for a cursory introduction to any in depth content, while non factual content is polarised toward whatever the bureaucrats decide it's a neutral tone, which may or may not work.
Abstract

Open collaboration systems like Wikipedia need to maintain a pool of volunteer contributors in
order to remain relevant. Wikipedia was created through a tremendous number of contributions
by millions of contributors. However, recent research has shown that the number of active
contributors in Wikipedia has been declining steadily for years, and suggests that a sharp
decline in the retention of newcomers is the cause. This paper presents data that show that
several changes the Wikipedia community made to manage quality and consistency in the face
of a massive growth in participation have ironically crippled the very growth they were designed
to manage. Specifically, the restrictiveness of the encyclopedia’s primary quality control
mechanism and the algorithmic tools used to reject contributions are implicated as key causes
of decreased newcomer retention. Further, the community’s formal mechanisms for norm
articulation are shown to have calcified against changes – especially changes proposed by
newer editors.
Not the rave scene for me, but over the last few years I've really gotten into obscure soul, funk, disco and early electronica rarities and Discogs has always been an absolutely essential tool to track things. It led me so deep into the rabbit hole that I need to get a decent turntable to digitalize a lot of releases - I maintain a fairly large lossless digital collection, but these days I find more and more new releases that aren't available digitally, even including last resorts like what.cd. And then there's the old, out of print stuff - however I'm glad that a bunch of very good re-issue labels like Numero Group, Light In The Attic or Music From Memory made it their mission to bring those forgotten gems back to life.
The author is a non-tenure track faculty member. Expressing his criticism of his university--not to mention a whole class of similar universities--is taking an enormous risk, as he could be fired (aka his contract won't be renewed) for any reason.

He was even threatened with just that for expressing his complaints in a colloquium:

I tried to illustrate this old-style understanding for colleagues and
administrators at a colloquium at my university a couple of years ago
by offering a pictorial representation of the university as I thought
it should be. First I drew a very large building named “Students,”
then another of comparable size named “Professors,” then a still
larger one named “Library,” and finally a tiny shed well off to the
side named “Administration.” I wasn’t attempting to insult
anyone by this, but simply to make a serious point in a mildly
amusing way. In the event, my meaning was not lost on one
administrator, who, noting the disparity in proportions and considering
it necessary to match wits with me, suggested that come time for the
renewal of my contract, I would not be found in any one of my
fictitious university buildings. How is that for real university
debate? Suggest a deficiency in university governance and it’s a
pair of cement galoshes for you.
Wikipedia has problems, but I think it's worth noting that Wikipedia has enough content to fill 2,200x volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica[1], or, a small library.

I don't think it's necessarily an existential problem that the public image of Wikipedia's relevance is reaching a sort of "trough of disillusionment" due to some of its governance issues. It has simply reached a scale where it faces a new set or hurdles to overcome.

Personally, I've learned more from Wikipedia than I did in high school and college combined, and considering that, despite all of Wikipedia's problems, the content therein is more accurate and verifiable than the corrupted corpus whence our primary and secondary educations are derived, I really appreciate its existence.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_in_volumes
This is bad advice. You do not have to get audited to get yourself in trouble here. When you exercise options, that is reported to the IRS and their automated systems will ding you if you fail to report them correctly.
Because for some, children are a wealth far greater than money. Survival with 6 kids not that hard with a different lifestyle, lots of re-use of stuff, sharing, and valuing the important things in life (hint: not karate lessons).
> It wasn't in Al Quaeda territorial waters

What difference does that make? The Iraqi civilians killed by the U.S. were not in U.S. territory. In that respect the situations are exactly equivalent.

> AQ is not a state. That's why it's terrorism.

That is exactly the kind of rationalization I'm talking about. Why is AQ not a state? Well, one might argue that it's because they don't control any territory. But ISIS controls territory, and yet they are still not considered a state. Palestine controls territory, and they are not considered a state. Why? Simply because the people who currently run the club of human organizations called "states" have decided not to admit them. So it's a totally circular argument: these groups are "not states" and hence their violence is "terrorism" rather then "legitimate" military action simply because some powerful elites have decided not to recognize them as states.

And if you want to argue that these groups are not recognized as states because of their "terrorist" actions, there are counter-examples to that too, with Tibet being the poster child.

There are also "state sponsors of terrorism", a label whose attachment has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual number of civilians killed. Iran, for example, is a "state sponsor of terrorism" but the U.S. isn't despite the fact that it has killed vastly fewer civilians than the U.S. Why? Because the U.S. decides who is and is not a "state sponsor of terrorism."

There are also non-state actors whose actions cause more civilian death and suffering than Al Qaeda but which are nonetheless not considered terrorist organization simply because they are the "good guys": the Catholic Church (via their opposition to family planning and sponsorship of child sexual abuse). The NRA (via their opposition to reasonable controls on guns). I could go on.
I'm getting error 500 when uploading 2 files (~500kb, rar).
Probably got slammed with high traffic already.
Wow, thanks for your incredibly condescending reply. Let's look at the actual Wikipedia page for the Double Irish arrangement:

"The offshore company continues to receive all of the profits from exploitation of the rights outside the US, but without paying US tax on the profits unless and until they are remitted to the US."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement

"However, tax experts say that strategies like the Double Irish help explain how Apple has managed to keep its international taxes to 3.2 percent of foreign profits last year, to 2.2 percent in 2010, and in the single digits for the last half-decade, according to the company’s corporate filings."

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/business/apples-tax-strate...

"Under a typical “Double Irish” structure, a U.S. parent company (USCo) forms two Irish subsidiaries, IrishCo1 and IrishCo2. IrishCo1 is a first-tier Irish subsidiary organized under Irish law but managed and controlled in a low-tax jurisdiction (e.g., Bermuda or the British Virgin Islands). While U.S. rules determine tax residency of a corporation based on its place of incorporation, Irish law often determines tax residency based on the country where the company is managed and controlled. Accordingly, IrishCo1 will be treated for U.S. tax purposes as an Irish corporation, but for Irish tax purposes generally will be structured so as to be treated as a nonresident of Ireland resident in, for example, Bermuda. USCo will retain all US rights in the relevant IP and will license to IrishCo1 the rights to develop and exploit the IP outside the US. IrishCo1 will then sublicense these IP rights to IrishCo2, which in turn will use the IP to manufacture/produce IP products and then sell those products to customers outside the U.S."

http://www.taxeswithoutbordersblog.com/2014/10/death-of-the-...

You clearly do not understand how the double Irish arrangement actually works or what taxes it is supposed to reduce. Hint: if Apple could wipe out their US income tax obligations so easily using this arrangement, they probably wouldn't have bothered to pay that $14 billion in corporate income tax last year.
What reasons are there for complicated visa processes? Tracking entry/exit to/from the country can be done in a significantly more efficient way, and there's no economic upside to adding expenses to business trips or tourism.
Just a desire to learn. I gave this a quick glance, and it's reasonably complete in terms of foundation material.

It's not going to be difficult for people lacking some things to go and look them up in context.

The most important skill here is knowing what you don't know and the secondary skill of paying close attention to what you see happening.

One might want to explore electronics enough to use a scope, logic analyzer, etc...

This is a pretty great book, and I look forward to exploring it.
At some point I will write it up with templates and all on our blog, but we need to focus on growth right now.
I don't view it as "shut up and take it", but rather "here's what we're offering; would you like to take it?"

The most common form of dilution protection is the right to invest more cash in future rounds pro-rata. (So you can pay to stop being diluted.) That you might be able to get if you hold shares, but you're going to need to pay cash at each round to avoid dilution. You won't realistically be able to get it as an option holder in the employee option pool, and as a non-accredited person (by the meaning of CFR Title 17.II§230.501), I'm not sure of the legality of investing cash to protect existing holdings from dilution. (I'm not saying it's not legal; I'm just not sure as I meet at least one of those tests.)

As both an employee of startups (in the past) and an angel investor (dabbler/dilettante), I can see both sides, but when I contemplate writing a check to "2 founders, an idea, and a powerpoint deck", you can imagine that many provisions of convertible/venture debt exist to make that make a tiny bit more sense and provide some limited downside protection for the "indefinitely horizontal" company trajectory.

Once I invest, I have very limited input into how the CEO runs the company, but I'd advise a CEO to pass on a mid or late stage employee who is too much of a troublemaker about their options terms. Realistically, the company should not be negotiating and drafting custom options terms per employee and an employee who demands such is probably a better fit for someplace else. Quite literally, the terms of the company option plan are (often) set and modifying them is nowhere near the same as giving a signing bonus, flexible hours, a few extra vacation days, work from home on Wednesdays, or a different salary/bonus amount.
Until AI can move the boundaries of science/art/philosophy etc without massive direction from humans some of our jobs are still safe.

I would not be so smug however as I expect programming to be one of those jobs AI will become better than the human at within the next decade.
>If taxes and morality have nothing to do with each other, then the answer is simple: Everybody should avoid paying taxes.

Everybody should avoid taxes as long as they stay withing the law, particularly corporations that have a fiduciary duty to do so.

It's moral, usually, to follow the law. But companies like Apple are following the law. Apple already pays billions in tax, far more than it uses in services. Even by that argument Apple isn't doing anything immoral by avoiding more tax.
No, if we are doing analogies, it's more like if Red Hat employed 90% of Linux Kernel devs.

sure, you might be able to do more transactions with an increased block size, but I personally feel the negatives are not worth it. Regardless, having the ability to do things off the main bitcoin chain is a good thing.

Even more so "cripple Bitcoin" it the wrong way of phrasing something that

a) currently how things are

b) intensely disputed in the community
How is this related to the article? You seem to be talking about public perception of wikipedia while the article mainly focuses on the falling number of active editors.
That sounds wholy unproductive to society though. It achieves the goal, but only at a cost to the opportunity for those people doing something more productive. Like building houses, as you have mentioned.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9991094
I'm suggesting that there hasn't been as much of a decline in community as there has been a decline in the available encyclopedia-relevant information left in the world that isn't already published on Wikipedia.

Also, the public perception is related to the drop of users and vice versa. There has been a lot of negative press lately, specifically related to problems in the community.
A little too overengineered for my taste. I tried akka-http which is essentially Spray 2.0 and succeeded, but with twice the amount of code that I had with Sockoweb.
In some cases that was definitely true, perhaps most cases, but there were several times when I was being taught brand new material and was coding while I was listening to the teacher. In math class especially there was almost never a moment when I wasn't doing some form of programming during the class, since I could get away with having my calculator out the whole time.

This was TI-BASIC, though. I mean, it didn't get much more complicated than "PRINT", "INPUT", "IF THEN ELSE", "FOR", and "GOTO LABEL". I wasn't trying to figure out how to integrate a horribly documented third party API or anything.
In order to answer your question there are a couple of important data points that need answering:

1) Are any of the three co-founders engineers? Or are you expected to run engineering?

2) How senior are you? Will you be expected to take on a leadership role or, after they hire a couple more folks, will you just be one of the team?

3) What is the fundraising situation for the company?

4) Has the company released a product to the market? If so, how much traction is there?

The first two questions go towards answering how important you might be to the organization. Obviously more important -> more equity. The last two questions go towards evaluating how much success has been achieved already. More success -> less equity. Though less isn't necessarily a bad thing here as you'll be joining a company with a greater chance of success.
Nearly 70% of investors lost money in 2015
I read it as a criticism of the title - Wikipedia facing governance issues doesn't amount to a "fall".
Working with both statisticians and pure machine learners on the same task, I did notice some tendencies, presuppositions and modus operandi that were different (beyond being a specialized subset). Like said in this position paper, machine learners like to throw computation and parameters at the problem, where statisticians are more careful and sober. As an analogy, a statistician will approach a cliff very carefully, stomping the ground to make sure it is sturdy enough to carry a human. They'll approach the edge of the cliff 'till they have their p-measures and that is their model. Machine learners will jump head-first off the cliff and when you listen you can hear them yell: Cross-validatioooohhhh... as they plummet down.

I like the complement with cryptography. I would add another coding method: compression - Approximating the simplest model with explanatory power.
I would guess that more terrorists have been created, funded and supported by the US government than by any other group of Americans by a long shot. Dealing with terrorists aren't even particularly historic, with the early days of the civil war against Assad being supported and look what that turned into.
After Breakup
Agree, although properly positioned monitor speakers which have been equalized by the listener for a particular spot in the room can sound really, REALLY nice (if you don't leave your listening chair !).
Something for developers that have to deal with post codes addresses and this kind of stuff: even borders in stable regions can change.
Who is Co-Founding? (January 2016)
A fresh thread for the new year...
The author and I are in very different fields, but this article echoes a lot of the reasons why I left my tenure track position and ultimately ended up in industry.

The final nail in the coffin was an email sent out by some middle-administrator schmuck to all of the faculty, encouraging us to think over the winter break about how to "provide excellent customer service" to our students (or some such horse shit...this was several years ago, so I don't remember the exact words).
I seem to remember reading about an organization whose aim is to help startup founders battling depression, but I cannot seem to find the reference. I did, however, come across this article from last year:

http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/30/founders-on-depression/

In any case, I believe those endeavoring on leading ambitious projects almost entirely on their own must have a strong personal circle of friends and colleagues that are always supportive and know how to encourage preventative measures. Easier said than done, but maybe providing incentives for startup founders and investors would be one way to encourage a program like this.
The McDonald's of the Future Opens in Hong Kong
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the underlying concept of a democracy is to vote for one person to represent you in congress. So why is it that these people only stand up for the rest of us when they themselves are directly and personally affected?

Somewhere along the line the word representative has lost its meaning. They forget that they represent every single person in their state, not just the ones that voted for them. They are a single voice echoing the voices of everyone they represent. They are sadly tied conceptually to their political peers, rather than those they represent. They should be fighting for us, not against us.
I think Wikipedia will become the best case study in how bureaucracy cripples a working society. 80% of the effort of creating new content is following byzantine processes and procedures.

While I admit that these processes work for consistency of content, I cannot in the least observe any noticeable quality improvements, and the reason is that valuable contributors with deep domain knowledge will not invest the time to satisfy the OCD of some arbitrary editor suffering from Asperger.
This also reminds me of Luke Arduini, who took his own life by jumping off the Golden Gate bridge on January 1st 2014. Yahoo even hired a private investigator to find him. He also left (in hindsight unsettling) tweets shortly before his death.

In case someone is interested in the background story:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7048249

https://twitter.com/luk

https://the-pastry-box-project.net/charlie-robbins/2014-sept...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2536683/Yahoo-hires-...
In the post he says that the C++ training market is bustling.

I'm an experienced java guy looking to get in person C++ training. Hopefully something which moves quickly through the basics and addresses advanced concepts in memory management, concurrency and other low level topics.

Anyone have recommendations? The web is full of listings for HOTT, Learning Tree, GlobalKnowledge style mega training companies. Are they actually worth the $3k-$5k they charge? I'm afraid it will be a mediocre programmer droning on for 5 days in front of a power point.
And you are not the kind of person who would ever want to leave a corporate job to work at a very early stage startup. And that's fine.

But a 40% pay cut is within the the norms for that sort of transition. It can be a good move for some people.
As mentioned in the other comment, it hides the real problems.

It also does remove lo-fi sound we don't hear as pitches, or tones. We do feel those and experience them as volume changes at volumes and on equipment good enough to deliver them to us.

If you are ever in a place with great gear, where it can be loud enough to matter, apply that filter and a - b test. You may find some experiences filtered out.

In the very vast majority of use cases, nothing meaningful is lost, save for watching good amps move speaker cones in and out...
BOOM: Berkeley Orders of Magnitude – Declarative Languages And Systems
C++ has changed so much i barely recognize anything ( i used to code in c++ a bit like c with classes). Which makes me wonder : do we have any idea on the market share 20xx c++ versions represent ? I mean, how much c++ code produced today is "modern c++" ?
> OCD of some arbitrary editor suffering from Asperger.

Is it really necessary to use mental illnesses in a pejorative way to make your point ? How do you think it makes people feel who legitimately suffer from those illnesses ?
The biggest difference is that it makes sub-$450 phones much more of an option. When every phone contract included a $450 subsidy, it didn't make any sense to get a cheaper phone. You don't get cheaper than free. Now you can buy a basic smartphone for $100, and a pretty good one for $200.

(IMO, cheap smartphones make the most sense if you can get on someone's family plan. It only costs us $15 plus tax per month to add another smartphone to our plan, which is within the means of everyone in our family, especially if they buy a budget phone.)
Until bitcoin was created all currencies used centralized trusted parties too. These things are in their infancy. Saying something can't be done at this stage is begging to be on the wrong side of history.
I would say it's still the best singular repository of human knowledge. There is nothing to say that it won't deal with the bureaucratic issues.
I'm hardly a Ruby fan - nothing against it, I just prefer Python - but what makes it such a bad choice vis-a-vis JavaScript? Sure, Rails isn't built with this in mind, but why would Ruby with some kind of libuv-based framework be such a terrible choice?
This is a bit ridiculous.

Why do you need to pay taxes when exercising the options? At that point one did not made any profit and in fact you made an investment (you spent money and there's still high chance you might lose to that investment).

It would make much sense to be taxed when you sell the stock (and use the original option price you paid for the shares).
Using Model Tuning to Beat Vegas
pg has some really good insights. The guy has a lot of experience and has put a lot of it on print. On top of that he is quite a good writer. I don't know if he is right but a lot of what he says seems to make sense.
Chrome BTW plans to remove pre-Win7 support in early 2016. I was pushing for Firefox to at least remove XP SP2 support in 2016.
No map. Of course.