skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was very actively involved in MediaWiki development & Wikimedia ops (less so though) in 2004-2006 back when IIRC there were just 1-4 paid Wikimedia employees.

It was a very different time, and the whole thing was run much more like a typical open source project.

I think the whole project has gone in completely the wrong direction since then. Wikipedia itself is still awesome, but what's not awesome is that the typical reader / contributor experience is pretty much the same as it was in 2005.

Moreover, because of the growing number of employees & need for revenue the foundation's main goal is still to host a centrally maintained site that must get your pageviews & donations directly.

The goal of Wikipedia should be to spread the content as far & wide as possible, the way OpenStreetMap operates is a much better model. Success should be measured as a function of how likely any given person is to see factually accurate content sourced from Wikipedia, and it shouldn't matter if they're viewing it on some third party site.

Instead it's still run as one massive monolithic website, and it's still hard to get any sort of machine readable data out of it. This IMO should have been the main focus of Wikimedia's development efforts.
> normal parties.

The matter is not the parties. It's ideologies. FN is prospering because of the remanent xenophobic culture of France. There is always a reason for hatred, it does not fade so easily
You don't understand. The cultural divide is huge and we have a long history of territorial disputes. Nation states in Europe are also relatively young and still forming. Just look at Yugoslavia.
I understand how this is valuable in offsetting load immediately but I think the graver threat here is the disbanding of the contributor community and resultant loss of network-effect value.

I imagine the cost of the disorganization or loss of volunteer contribution effort in the splintering of WP spinoffs/mirrors is orders of magnitude larger than load offset from mirroring.
I will emigrate for several reasons. Because I'd like to live in a country that has:

- a warmer climate

- sensible immigration policies

- a culture where people are less direct and have more respect for everyones personal space

- a smaller government, less social security policies, people take more care for one another

- lower taxes

- great food

Do you think the immigrants that come to Europe are travelling there for the same reasons?
Entropy is non-decreasing in closed systems. Also you can make a habit of not keeping all of your copies in one solar system.
This is why I'm not buying a house in the Bay Area. I look at these properties on the market for $1.5m for a run-down house in the bad part of town just because it's "only" 15 miles from SF and I think that there's no way this is going up in value forever.
I don't think the "one-time shot" thing is meant to say that such measures are useless. It merely means that you'll have to find new techniques beyond that one if you want to keep improving performance afterwards. The "temperature card" could be one.
In short: despite the alarming headline, financially Wikipedia is doing very well.
Wikimedia publishes independently-audited financial statements. Here's the latest one. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/43/Wikim...

It's clear that salaries and awards and grants are driving the increase in cost. Maybe this is damning evidence of a decadent culture, which the author of this op-ed clearly presume, but I doubt it. I would expect that Wikipedia's employees have been working very hard for a long time to keep the site running and they've cultivated expertise in governing the site in a way that avoids controversy and maintains credibility. I'd rather Wikipedia spend to retain long-tenured experts who have paid their dues than be an underpaid-college-graduate-mill like so many non-profits are. It seems that they've done that, and they've waited until the organization was financially stable to do so.
> Can you imagine not being able to hire a specialized SQL coder, because the only one available is in Austria, and you're business is in France, and there's no labor mobility?

In France, you can hire a SQL coder straight from Zimbabwe, South Korea, Venezuela or any other place on earth without a problem. The laws are in place and the EU has nothing to do with it.
Never needed to do something with layer2. I used it mostly for educational purposes for my home network. Can you name some real world examples when OSI layer2 filtering is needed?
Reproducing the table from the article with one extra column, the ratio of expenses to revenue for clarity, it looks like they're still operating with a very comfortable margin. Yes, the 19% margin is tighter than a 50% margin 12 years ago, and their existence depends on donations now more than ever ($23,463/yr is sustainable by a single engineer's salary, $65,947,465/yr is...not), but Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects also serve a much wider audience and broader purpose. This isn't scary in and of itself, especially if they've got cash reserves to give them time to tighten the belt later on if it becomes a problem and someone in a leadership position is monitoring their finances to act if their burn rate gets too high... I've seen plenty of nonprofits with tighter margins survive and succeed.

Year Revenue Expenses Net Assets Expense Ratio (1-margin)
2003/2004 $80,129 $23,463 $56,666 29%
2004/2005 $379,088 $177,670 $268,084 47%
2005/2006 $1,508,039 $791,907 $1,004,216 53%
2006/2007 $2,734,909 $2,077,843 $1,658,282 76%
2007/2008 $5,032,981 $3,540,724 $5,178,168 70%
2008/2009 $8,658,006 $5,617,236 $8,231,767 65%
2009/2010 $17,979,312 $10,266,793 $14,542,731 57%
2010/2011 $24,785,092 $17,889,794 $24,192,144 72%
2011/2012 $38,479,665 $29,260,652 $34,929,058 76%
2012/2013 $48,635,408 $35,704,796 $45,189,124 73%
2013/2014 $52,465,287 $45,900,745 $53,475,021 87%
2014/2015 $75,797,223 $52,596,782 $77,820,298 69%
2015/2016 $81,862,724 $65,947,465 $91,782,795 81%

How sure are we that these numbers are accurate, anyhow?
I don't think the "best tool for the job" necessitates needless polyglossia. They obviously have a "best tool for the job" mentality to some extent as they have 3 official/primary languages, not 1 like some places I've worked.

How many different languages/technologies are required for it to qualify as polyglossia?
They take the 85% of 100k because it's assumed when you retire, you won't be saving any of your income, just drawing down.

This calculator is often uses to demonstrate different savings rates : https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement

The reason why saving more quite rapidly lowers your retirement age is because it's a twofold saving. Firstly you are saving more money which is good, and secondly you are learning to live on less.

To take a super simple example. Let's say you can live on 50k a year. And you can get 3.5% on term deposit rates (You can in NZ). Then you should need 50,000 * (100/3.5) = 1.4 million approx to retire and be able to earn 50k a year off interest alone.
No I'm not. Most of those systems are proprietary for obvious reasons, and the training to work those systems is going to be a lot of on-the-job training. A CS degree would help, but Lockheed Martin isn't hiring people to rewrite data structures for missile guidance systems. Well, they could be, but that's an entirely different demographic.

But even with that being said, you're not including the multitudes of DoD services that are not critical, military email accounts and websites, payment processing, web portals for HR, etc etc.

I don't think you even need a coding school certificate for any of those jobs.
So short IBM?
Another suggestion, now that I have this set as homepage, is to reduce the load time as much as possible. I expect it to load instantaneously, with no javascript or custom fonts - those are luxuries :) Ideally generate a static page for each book and serve one randomly.
Attorney on contingency. Or report to credit agencies. or both.
They may need more than one, and I'm sure there are fixed or near-fixed labor costs pertaining to HR, legal, accounting, etc. but what business function besides content curation - which another commenter above claims is entirely volunteer, does WMF need that approaches even a linear growth rate to remotely justify the jump in orders of magnitude, let alone 300X?
There isn't any basis to your statement that Facebook could make as much short term and long term profit if they fired half their staff. Instagram, for instance, is much bigger than they were a couple years ago, and those employees have built things that have drove growth for the product.
The story about an econophysicist who maps crime [sic] networks is intringuing; too bad the article kept changing the topic and offering aggrandizing analogies and never covered it in-depth.
That's the point; he's arguing that WMF engineering practices are so disorganized that not only don't they qualify as agile, they don't even qualify as waterfall (which predates agile by several decades).

Waterfall methodologies are deeply un-hip today, of course, but when they first coalesced they were a big improvement over what came before them, which was essentially nothing: an absence of any formal project management methodologies, with people cobbling together projects from bits and pieces of expertise learned in other disciplines.

(Note that I have no idea how WMF's software engineering practices work, so I have no idea if this assertion is accurate or not. I'm just trying to clarify what I think Macon is arguing here.)
You're right - it's just pretty close. Presumably, most of their net assets are cash based on that though with other stuff thrown in.
On the contrast, I like it because I can quickly skim what the website is about from its screenshot and this is time-saver.
You don't even have to go as far as the big tech companies. You see it even in smaller ones. Something that's stuck with me is when, in the span of about a week or so, I had multiple people at different startups answer a question "hey, how's it going?" with "oh, really great, we [note: not founders] just closed a round and we're hiring X more people [note: at companies where the product is stable and well-understood]".

It's fief-building, to a large extent.
Yes.

It's so easy.

When I upgrade or (un)install a package, I get a completely clean fresh installed system. If upgrading my video driver broke my system, I can just pick the most recent version of my install from the bootloader. When I want to start writing code, I can use nix-shell to create an isolated environment with all the dependencies I need, and get to work, with one command.

At any moment, I know that my entire OS install is completely clean, devoid of any cruft, even if I have been installing and removing obscure software for months. I don't have a mess in /etc, in /usr/share, anywhere.

> I'm not reinstalling my OS regularly so I don't really see the advantage.

With NixOS, I'm never reinstalling my OS, because every update leaves me with a fresh new system, guaranteed.
>However this romantic idea that without phones people would be living vivid moments to the fullest also needs to die. Lets not romanticize the lived experience of a boring commute as a sensory roller-coaster just to score a few points against people glued to their phones.

No, but the problem is that people don't just do that on "boring commutes", but screen-staring increasingly encroaches other parts of life, from concerts to dates.

While at it, let's also lay to death the idea that all eras/decades/periods are the same, and everything a society does, from norms to arts, is either "the best it has ever been" or "the same as it always was", and anyone complaining is only romanticizing.

There are peaks and valleys, progress and regression, in lots of social norms and output, and its worth to point them out.

I mean, even when it was fashionable, they probably already suspected that the mule haircut was a bad idea...
I knew it would be unpopular. I get a few u popular posts a year.

But I am very, very irritated by Golang while I am working with it on a daily basis.

It's entire design is informed by assuming that no developer should understand the codebase, but should instead read it over and over. Symmetrically, no insight can be offered in the code, only a rote transcription of an inductive design.

The net result is a language hostile to both those writing and those reading the code. No shortcuts are offered or taken. All error handling must be done manually. All data structures must be reimplemented over and over with different test suites for each one.
As a Wikipedia administrator (mostly inactive), this sentiment makes complete sense to me. The WMF seemingly spends the majority of its money on non-critical functions such as community outreach, local chapters, yearly conferences and other non-critical costs. Including a parade of highly paid, not very effective executives. One thing to keep in mind is the WMF != the Wikipedia community, it is very possible to truly support the Wikipedia mission without also supporting how the WMF is ran.
The Inadequacies of the Invincible
There exist a ton of old economy businesses built on terrible legacy systems, so just being an eCommerce company doesn't necessarily mean that they would have robust enough systems architecture to be able to open it up and sell it as a service to the world.
NASA might offer a more salient comparison.
It is fascinating to see in real life, how science-fiction style AI is becoming a reality, where nobody understands how machines produce their answer. Given a few more decades, I'm sure the Asimov short story - The Feeling of Power - will become culturally relevant.
> Maybe you need 300 employees to maintain the site at that scale?

Should you? I mean, my day job is making it so you expressly don't. If your costs are scaling even linearly I would say you're doing something wrong. The point of scaling is to reduce costs--economies of scale are why you scale. And a user-editable encyclopedia and PHP application are not really good arguments for diseconomies.
As I understand it, Wikipedia's software and content is completely open source. You could make a foundation called BetterWiki, and run it on $1M (if you get the SEO and volunteers to your side). Is that right?

Now if the people donating (cards against humanity, mom+pops, etc) feel good supporting Wikipedia, and there are more people that want to feel good supporting Wikipedia than Wikipedia needs, maybe Wikipedia should invest money in more missions that go along with its general values?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reusing_Wikipedia_co...
I am not ruling them out. But it is only possible to prove such answers "up to solipsism" (or simulation, or similar metaphysics). Beyond that is a leap of faith. All I am saying is that my practice has decreased my willingness to make that leap. Perhaps it is not so dissimilar to how your practice (whatever it is) makes you unwilling to doubt your own consciousness -- something that you would be hard-pressed to justify to (the apparently many) consciousness deniers.

Taking a few steps back in the conversation, the reason it seems so silly to doubt that there's an objective basis for consciousness is that we've found an objective basis to basically everything else we've bothered to investigate. I claim that this is a false analogy. Though I'm apparently not good at communicating why, it amounts basically to this: you can be certain of your own consciousness, but of nothing else. Your consciousness and everything else are not on equal metaphysical footing.
I can't find proof in your comment that it's unsubstantiated either.
Why? its a valid analogy.
are you sure you aren't thinking of the dicing issues that caused chips to have eventual failure (used in some network products)?
Wikipedia is an explicitly not-for-profit enterprise, and thus something completely different from the standard startup.

For most startups, success means getting bought out by a larger company. Wikipedia by contrast has always put the highest priority on maintaining its own independence, which means that for them a buyout would be a profound failure.
The reason why I wrote it that way was to motivate why error handling is the way it is. I personally think it's hard to just throw the "right answer" at someone and hope they get it, because error handling isn't some rote process you can just plow through. It's important to understand the case analysis involved so that you can choose the right granularity of error handling for your task. All of the error handling strategies in that chapter are interoperable to some degree (with perhaps "panic on error" being the odd duck out). They aren't incompatible philosophies.

With that said, thank you for the feedback. When I circle back around to it, I'll make sure to put more emphasis on The Right Way. The conclusion already has some of it, and the case study is supposed to show the progression in action, but perhaps more is needed.

I will let others focus on more targeted advice, since one huge chapter on error handling is only part of the story. The purpose of the error handling chapter is start with someone who might not even know what `Option<T>` is, and take them all the way through `try!`, the `Error` trait and automatic `From` conversions from first principles. More than that, it's supposed to teach you why using `String` or `Box<Error>` for your error type can be bad, even if it is ludicrously convenient.

Rust is a young language. I expect error handling idioms to evolve. Evolution doesn't mean something isn't ready to be used, because all languages evolve in some way.
I got excited for a moment, but debian stretch is not released as stable yet? https://www.debian.org/releases/
Nobody expects sysadmins to use shiny new things. When you guys use something new, its because its actually already probably old - at the very least, its no longer shiny, and possibly even moldy. And even then you grumble about it. =)
I think that curmudgeonly mindset sets in due to your physical deterioration and hormonal changes. You'd be grumpy too simply getting up out of a chair causes you pain.

If life extension reverses / resets aging at the cellular level and you have the endocrine system of a 20 year old , it is likely that one could retain a youthful mindset. I think people overestimate the significance of experience and underestimate how your body's chemicals regulate your mood.
Personally, I learned Rust with "The Book" and "Rust by example", I'm still learning it!

My time never really allows me to be on IRC regularly. Point being that if you can't get on IRC, I don't think it's necessary.

And honestly, error handling was the most difficult thing to understand, until you start groking why sized types are required as return types from functions and that every function call up the stack requires its callees to compensate for all it's error possibilities.

error_chain! has made this all so much better.
They are handling around 2.9k req/s. In april they had 7.6 billion page views. English articles: 5,400,448.
English wikipedia download has size of 13 GB compressed (expands to over 58 GB when uncompressed).
I'll forward your concern to Mizuno next time I meet him.
So, basically, completely disregard the idea of net neutrality and the sentiment behind it?
You're likely never going to see that 25k and then you're down that plus lawyer fees.

How overdue is it? If we're talking 30 days then you need to wait a while longer before taking some action.

Threaten to report them to D&B, Experian/Equifax etc. Then if they still haven't paid by 60 or 90 days or whatever talk to a lawyer about the cheapest way to threaten them.
The book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom explores some of the issues that could occur if we achieve immortality.

People regularly perform backups of their mind. In the case of death or injury or illness, a new body is grown and their backup is restored into a new body.

It also presents interesting solutions to currency/wealth and what happens when life gets boring when you can live forever.
It's tragic and cruel how a felony conviction can destroy someone's life over a nonviolent drug offense. Growing up, I knew some people who got felony convictions for possession of marijuana. Now recreational cannabis is legal in a number of states, and it's upsetting to think that the trajectory of their lives could have been totally different if they had been born a decade later.
Well, I used "the internet" to avoid suspension in high school.

It was 1995, and I had made a fake parking permit for Fairview Hugh school in Boulder Colorado using Corel draw and Kinko's. The junior class president--my arch enemy--found out and narked.

I got pulled into the principal's office and was threatened with suspension. When they asked me how I made it, I told them I downloaded it from the internet. I explained further, that I had my own business making websites for local businesses. "Oh, ok then." They told me that my "we sentencing" would take place the next week.

I didn't sleep that weekend for fear of someone molesting my "permanent record." That next Monday, a student assistant pulled me out of class and took me to the principal's office for my sentencing: teacj the principal how to use the internet!

The best part of all this, is that I later learned the snitch had purchased his ap history term paper from the back of Vanity Fair magazine. I called him to tell him that I knew and he hung up. I called again and it went to his answering machine, where I explained that this was blackmail: he had exactly 1 hour to deliver me his authentic parking permit for the entire next semester, otherwise I would snitch. He answered the call mid-message and delivered the goods 40min later.

When I first got busted, my dad told me about revenge being best served cold (it's a saying in French), that I should bide my time. He was right!
Sounds better implementation wise but what about the interface for sys admins? It seems the syntax is complex enough that you need to copy a file to start.

Can ufw use nftables as a back end? And/or is there a good clean and easy to understand explanation for how to use nftables and useful reference?

Is there a tool to help with common configuration tasks?
How is this different from any other medium?

A newspaper prints articles most likely to consume your time (that's why you buy them). TV channels produce programs you're most likely to watch, and arrange them in such a way that your most likely to continue watching (damn HBO producing quality content so I'm more likely to watch it).

Don't pretend companies are forcing you to look at your phone all the time. Take responsibility for your own actions, and choose not to stare at your phone if you don't want to.

Should we praise the most boring magazine on the stand for not wanting to grab our attention? All hail Drying Paint Weekly, for they are the true guardians of my attention -- producing content so boring that's there's no chance of me getting suckered in!
I mean this in no offense, but you might be disillusioned or biased towards your particular vice. It's like an alcoholic telling me "well at least I am not doing heroin. Beer at least cleans out your kidneys!"

I struggled from video game addiction, and continue to struggle (it takes a lot of mental energy for me to simply not play). I used to tell myself, "well at least I am playing online and interacting with real people" or "at least I am sharpening my reflexes!"
Perhaps they view themselves as a charity, and that spending is the goal.
Leaked: UK's mass spying fantasies (1984?)
The version of the article on the signpost lacks the table of figures, if you go to the version on his user page, it paints a clearer picture [0].
idorosen has posted a table on the root thread which adds a column for the expense ratio (1 minus the margin) and it's getting much higher much quicker [1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14287495