skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> and a complete lack of documentation or planning is not a good sign

Neither it is true. There is documentation and planning. As pretty much every software project I've seen over my career, documentation could use some TLC (and unlike many other pieces of software, anybody can actually help it[1]), but it's not exactly described as "complete lack". There's a lot of documentation, though some areas are covered less than others -
Mediawiki is a big piece of software, and a long-term organically grown project, and if you have any experience with those you know what it means. It is known and regular effort is taken to improve it.

Same for planning - not exactly ideal, but "complete lack" is very, very far from the truth - moreover, unlike many other organizations, all the plans and all the internal workboards are public[2] (excluding security issues and sensitive information), so you can check for yourself.

> Can anyone familiar with WMF engineering comment?

Yes, I am familiar with it by virtue of being part of it (still not speaking for anyone by myself, off-the-clock, in completely personal capacity :) and I say this claim is completely false. Moreover, it is so obviously false and so easily disproven by public documents[3] that I wonder how one could publish that in a public media without bothering to do minimal due diligence. I mean, we all panic about "fake news" and stuff - shouldn't it make us to at least minimally try to check our claims with easy search or question on a mailing lists having dozens of people who could point out where the appropriate documents are? The author of the article seemingly believes it is unnecessary. I do respect his long-time contribution to Wikipedia (much more sizeable than mine) but that still does not entitle him to his own facts.

Looks like he disagrees with some of the projects Wikimedia took on - like making user experience more friendly with Visual Editor and mobile support, both IMO excellent projects, but everybody is entitled to their own take on this. It is fine. What's not fine is claiming that not agreeing with him is equivalent to not having direction at all and wasting money and being cancer. That's way too far and completely untrue.

[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Documentation_Day_2...
[2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/
[3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2016-17...
People could also stop using CreateFile without a \\? prefix and all the problems would go away. There's not even a MAX_PATH limit on any NT based Windows version if you do that.
The whole discussion started on the premises that people on the Continent have had it way worse in recent times compared to the British (I'd call WW2 and everything that happened after it as "recent times", as we've got our grand-parents and parents as living proofs of said times), that's why an organization like the European Union that has managed to make us not fight between ourselves anymore (among other things) is a great fucking accomplishment. I was implying that the Brits not really knowing and not directly experiencing the horrors of recent history they feel sort of pampered, not fully realizing what they're throwing away.

> why not say what's the hardest thing you've ever had to endure in your life

If it matters I remember my mother sending me the the store to purchase rationed bread and sugar, as 8-year old kid or so. I was finding that normal. Food was not plentiful, to use an euphemism. What I don't remember is how in one those winters that you call "just weather" I was about to die as a kid because of the cold in my parents' house.
Why waste your money at Wealthsimple when you could open a Vanguard account and put the money in a target date fund?

https://investor.vanguard.com/home/

https://investor.vanguard.com/mutual-funds/target-retirement...

EDIT: Sweet jesus, wealthsimple charges 0.5% of your first 100k, Vanguard is like 0.16%. You might as well be stuck in a crap 401k at wealthsimple expense ratios.

https://www.wealthsimple.com/en-us/details#pricing
Thanks for this thorough response.
Since Windows 10 now comes with an official Linux subsystem, why not just use POSIX APIs and conventions everywhere, and not bother with Windows-specific code if possible?
How to deploy your static blog on Kubernetes
Each PR needs its own branch build and then a CI build after merging. So there'd be lots of downtime just screwing around with CI builds and resolving interim merge conflicts.
Pricing strategies for restaurants are not driven by whole-market perceptions but many combining factors such as local competition, available space, labor and rental costs, hours of available custom, etc.

To put it another way, you can do a high end anything restaurant, but takeaway makes far more sense in a high traffic location with massive rush hours, high rents and little available space, no foot traffic after 5PM and no access after 8PM.
Hehe, Linux (and Unix in general, I guess) is just a bundle of text files and C programs, held together by shell scripts and eternal vigilance. It's very impressive and very disappointing at the same time...
Fortran isn't dead. I'd bet money on there being more fortran programmers today than in the 70s, even if their slice of the programming language pie is proportionally much smaller.

Don't mistake other languages growing as another language being dead. Not all of computing is an exercise in following trends.
I would, since the figures show that it's not necessary. If it becomes necessary it will be because WMF failed to control spending growth, something the cynic in me says is likely.
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.

...

and their backup is restored into a new body.

Well, yeah, of course you'd want that. Because it's just SO reassuring to know that even if you die, an identical twin can pick up where you left off.

What a relief, to know that something that looks like you, can keep listening to your favorite bands, wearing your clothes, eating the same favorite foods, and having the same opinions about the world after you die.

Me? If I had a brain back-up, and they could grow a copy of my body in a vat... Why, I'd just run around fighting lions with my bare hands, and wrestling hungry sharks in the ocean. Who cares if I get completely eaten and digested?

The new copy can pick up where I left off, and just beat up whichever animal ate me!
In mitigation such things are pretty normal - particularly coming from the prosecution under direct questioning, which this was. You don't mince words when asked for a direct opinion by a judge.

Of course the press pieces don't address the context, as the context was and is a state secret.

Bob is a Rabbi, a youth worker, a kite festival organiser, and a stand-up bloke and father of three very well adjusted adults I've known since I became a conscious entity.
You could download the search indexes, also on the dumps site, that has the text content among other things.
Three years in development, ClearBank has forged a partnership with the Bank of England [1] to set ClearBank up as UK’s fifth clearing bank, joining the ranks of the Big Four — Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, and RBS [2].

ClearBank is not consumer-facing but instead offers an API [3] for its core banking platform.

[1]: https://www.clear.bank/about#clearbank-partners

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Four_(banking)#United_King...

[3]: https://www.clear.bank/services/clearbank-api
If you have ever crafted a chair, table, or anything else that is built by craftsperson, you will soon realise why such a profession exists, because it's very difficult.

You might slap a few pieces of wood together and by brute force, create something like a chair and that might do, but it's very unlikely to be a good, safe, attractive, comfortable long lasting chair. Building quality furniture is complex and difficult work which takes a lot of skill, experience and understanding in order to do.

I understand your point, I never said there is anything wrong with experimenting with NNs, I just don't agree with the OPs sentiment.
Extensive recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13580390

Since you're the same person who submitted the original (plus another two, 14 and 44 days ago), please note the following from the HN FAQ[1]:

"Are reposts ok?

If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we kill reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok."

This story had significant discussion (144 points, 100 comments) when you originally submitted it 3 months ago.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
[Former product manager at the Wikimedia Foundation and longtime Wikipedia editor/admin here.]

The author of the op-ed is a devoted editor but seems almost totally ignorant of how development is conducted. The Foundation has been doing transparent quarterly/yearly roadmap planning alongside their annual plan / budget cycle (which is shared all publicly). On a shorter timeframe, they are pretty serious about Agile/Scrum. You can see on https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff_and_contractors that today they even have a team of half a dozen full time Scrum masters. If what he thinks is missing is serious, detailed planning, he's sorely wrong.

The platform (MediaWiki) is still a FOSS community so you can find project requirements docs/roadmaps all over mediawiki.org, all the bugs on Phabricator, follow along on mailing lists, and even see commits on their Gerrit instance.

Agile isn't my cup of tea personally and I could grok criticisms of the organization's software output (ignoring the fact that they're buried under 10+ years of technical debt...), but it takes minimal digging to find all their plans and timelines. I would venture that the author chose not to dig into this because he, like a lot of entrenched old school editors, viscerally hates some of the past attempts to make MediaWiki a modern collaboration platform, such as building a WYSIWYG editor and a threaded discussion system to replace wiki talk pages.
Detecting and defeating browser spoofing
We're social creatures. We like interacting with other people more than we like interacting with machines, even if machines are more efficient in a narrow technical sense. I think this is especially clear for nannies--the main job of the nanny is to cuddle and interact with the baby in ways that only a human being can do.

There are plenty of fitness videos and apps, but people still pay a lot of money for in-person fitness classes. People wouldn't stop going to Starbucks even if someone invented a vending machine that could produce coffee that tastes identical for half the cost.
The entire furore was in response to his refusal to participate - what was said was pretty normal for the variety of case being heard - mitigation prior to sentencing tends to be a rather "cards on the table" affair, and the press focus was raised solely as a result of his refusal to engage in secret courts.

That said, believe what you will - I trust a man I've known over thirty years over the tabloid press.
I mean, within a month of my moving to San Francisco somebody got shot and killed on my street corner. And within the first two months I saw police barricade an intersection walking around with shotguns and automatic rifles due to a bank robbery of some sort. We were told to just walk around and in general nobody seemed to find this event to be anything special.

I've since stopped paying attention to these things. Better that way. Feels more peaceful.

Then again, just last week a guy got shot by police in broad daylight 3 blocks from me because he was actively in the process of stabbing someone.

No running gun battles yet that I know of. It's been 2 years or so.
I thought I knew nothing about ninjas, since I had never actually studied ninjas, only got information from movies and manga, then I heard a historian supposedly specialized in ninjas give a talk titled "Everything you know about ninjas is wrong" or somewhat like that. 90% of what he has said met what I already knew and believed (even though I wasn't very sure of what I knew).
Why were there so many sites that failed before Wikipedia took off? Looks like part of any search engine should be the service Wikipedia prodives, henece, the Google love affair. Can the same model be applied to other things, i.e. User created content + user curated content + indefinite feedback loop: the more users use it the more content is created/curated (a percentage of new users go on to creating/curating content)?
For one, because the Linux subsystem is an optional install. If you're making anything user-facing you can't rely on it being there - it's really a tool for developers, not end-users.
Hidden abstractions in the Diamond Kata
> Base64 encoding returns bytes. Why would anybody _ever_ want that? The whole purpose of B64 encoding is to make something string-safe.

No, it's to make something ascii-safe which is a completely different concern.

> It's also now invalid to have this as a project structure: Name/name.py (with a Name class) in it.

What?

> mkdir Name
> echo "class Name: pass" > Name/name.py
> python3 -c "from Name.name import Name;print(Name)"
<class 'Name.name.Name'>

> "Dictionary view objects" are horribly unsemantic

Unsemantic? They're just the opposite. keyviews and itemviews are now sets, which is semantically sensible and really useful to get the intersection of two dictionary keysets, the only missing part is being able to subdict based on a keyset.

> Just give me a list.

list(d.keys())

Why are you even using .sort()

> unicode strings.

That's what broke compatibility FFS, that's the entire reason why the maintainers felt they could change the rest of the language.
Drug abuse is such a fascinating and frustrating thing. I think in 500 years they're gonna look back at how we handled this and shake their heads at the inhumanity of it all.

Here's something interesting I learned the other day: if you give stimulants to kids with ADHD, they're actually less likely to have substance abuse problems later on.

Source: http://csam-asam.org/sites/default/files/pdf/misc/DeAntonio_...

So here's my wacky theory: maybe a lot of people who have a "substance use disorder" or "addictive personality" just have undiagnosed ADHD and would live much better lives if they took consistent doses of amphetamine on a regular basis.
The article attempts to claim that Japanese policymaking is somehow responsible for low prices. Correlation is not causation. For example one could posit that Japan is affordable precisely because nobody has any money, because their economy has been stagnant for two decades and against an aging population and reduced investment in critical technology such as industrial robotics it shows every sign of remaining so. Perhaps for many hope has left the building and with the absence of meaning life has become a rinse-and-repeat ritual of careful commuting.
It's all public, so in their financial reports:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/43/Wikim...

For 2016:

2.3M on travel/conferences

11.3M on grants (2x 2015 levels)

31.7M on salaries/wages

Their plan is here:
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2015-2016_Annual_Plan

If you check the staffing plan:

Engineering +9%

Community Engagement +15%

Advancement (fundraising) +35%

Legal +35%

HR/Finance +23%

Communications +175%

It's not a struggling organization. People are giving them barrels of cash so they expand their scope to spend it, then ask for even more the next year.
No harm, no foul.
> It is not "just because", it is because it returns a sorted list (which is exactly what you wanted), compared to returning None.

Also because `sorted()` works on any iterable, whereas .sort only works on lists.
UAE to secure freshwater future with plan to bring iceberg from Antarctica
Depends on what type of application you are making. For a library that can be used in a "real" graphical Windows application, you can't make a posix type shortcut.

I think "if possible" is (at least still) very rarely the case that it is.
> I believe that some of the most compassionate people have grown that way through hardship

This is very true, and all of the most dedicated physicians I know were inspired as children to pursue medicine because of some situation they were involved in involving the health of a loved one (or their own health).

> putting people ahead in the moral sense

Compassion is not the only relevant aspect of morality. The way I'd argue my point is that one of the big reasons we can all sit back and think about how to make the world a better place is because our basic needs are met. Over time, as humanity has overcome basic scarcity and basic fear, we have been able to look outward and prioritize things like making the world better for others.

Someone who is privileged is more likely to have had an excellent teacher explain the labor movement or the holocaust, and is more likely to have vacationed to places where other ways of life (including far subpar standard of living) can be observed, or even gone on a humanitarian school-cation to help people in need. Experiences like this help to break a person out of his/her safe little world and help create an understanding of broader issues, problems, and opportunities.

Meanwhile, the middle class kid's family got a nice new TV allowing a great view of music videos and action films.

This is not about blame or credit. A person alive in 2017 America is more likely to think slavery abhorrent than a person alive in 1830 America. This isn't because there is something superior about modern people, it's because economic prosperity offers the luxury of thinking about others more empathetically.

There are always outliers, people who are morally ahead of their time or unusual for their class. Nothing about my argument in this thread applies to them. I'm talking about the average person.

Thus the average privileged person is simply ahead at the age of 18 relative to those from more humble backgrounds or from decades past.

What scares me most is the large percentage of Harvard and Stanford grads who go into investment banking and similar careers. Those are fine choices for someone whose goal is to "level up" his/her family's wealth status in a single generation, but they are not the sorts of careers chosen by people who had the chance to develop moral clarity and self-actualization early on. It suggests a great deal of cynicism or timidness that should really not be the result of the best education in the world.
Improved high availability and geographic dispersion. They're running in multiple datacenters across the globe now.
Pretty sure this article could have been called "Wikipedia's Costs Growing Unsustainably" instead of the clickbait headline.

But overall this oped is misplaced. Running the leanest possible operation shouldn't be Wikipedia's focus at this stage in its lifecycle, it's improving the quality of its content.

Back in 2005 Wikipedia had 438k articles and the focus was expanding the reach of its content to cover all topics; today the article count is 5.4 million it's quality that matters more. You can't improve quality just based on crowd-sourcing alone (see: Yelp, Reddit, etc), and the bigger it's gotten the more of a target it's become by disinformation activists.

This attitude on budgets over value strikes me as a classic engineer's POV. The OP is nostalgic about a time when the site was run by a single guy in his basement, but could 1 guy handle the assault of an army of political zealots or Russian hackers? DDoS attacks? Fundraising? Wikipedia is arguably one of the most coveted truth sources the world over, protecting and improving its content is more important than an optimal cost-to-profit ratio.

If the OP has specifics, by all means, share them, but this kind of generalized fearmongering about budgets isn't spectacularly useful, IMHO.
> It could be the WMF taking a political position that offends many donors.

We have a winner. It's the same thing killing ESPN. It's not wise for companies to take political positions on the left or on the right that will alienate half your users. Just don't do it.
It seems op-ed followed Wikimedia's Financial Statements [1]

Expenses (2016/2015)

2016 2015
Salaries and wages 31,713,961 26,049,224
Awards and grants 11,354,612 4,522,689
Internet hosting 2,069,572 1,997,521
In-kind service expenses 1,065,523 235,570
Donations processing expenses 3,604,682 2,484,765
Professional service expenses 6,033,172 7,645,105
Other operating expenses 4,777,203 4,449,764
Travel and conferences 2,296,592 2,289,489
Depreciation and amortization 2,720,835 2,656,103
Special event expense, 311,313 266,552

Total expenses 65,947,465 52,596,782

--

Sources:
[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/43/Wikim...
I've found DMARC reports to be incomplete or flat out lies from time to time.
I'm happy they don't go down that route. And I wish they don't waste energy on discussing ads.

If we keep going with the cancer analogy: When I read about metastasis on Wikipedia, what kind of ads do you think I would be shown if they'd show ads? Benign ones?
> It's interesting to see how foods become either premium (ala Japanese in the US) or commoditized like Vietnamese or Thai in the US.

There's commoditized Japanese in the US, and there is probably premium Thai and Vietnamese.
If you want to see perfection, check out plan9.
If I package my Java app together with OpenJDK JRE then GPL code is bundled in my app and I can use "classpath exemption".

If I take OpenJDK JRE, fork it, make Retropiler out of it and publish it under "GPL plus classpath exception" and then package my Java app together with Retropiler then GPL code is bundled in my app - it is the same as above. Why I am not subject to the classpath exception in this case?
Why do you think you have the right to decide immigration policy for other people? It doesn't just affect you - it effects everyone. People have the right to let in whoever they want into their own countries. They can turn people away for a good reason, a bad reason, or no reason at all.

Also if you think the west is one of the more racist or sexist place in the world you are naive in the extreme. The immigration policies of "far right" European parties are completely mainstream in East Asia. If a party advocated for a similar immigration policy to say, Chinas, they'd be labelled as Nazis and lynched by a diversity mob.
Here: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff_and_contractors
I don't think people are that xenophobic in France. Not like core FN.
Click-bait headline from BBC.

TL;DR: Penguins are not heavy enough to set off landmines left by Argentinians in Falklands War. Plenty are left, now the British government has to clear them due to Ottawa convention, and this will disrupt penguins and the ecosystem.
But...why? What possible good could come out of immortality? Why do we never stop to ask "why" anymore? The trite "Just because we can..." thing is irritating but true.

My utopian vision doesn't involve millenia-old people everywhere. It involves a smaller world population that succeeds in leaving ever smaller footprints on the planet and living in harmony with other creatures.
> Python 2 is going to exist for a long time in a lot of places. But it's a dead end for improvements. It's a dead end for innovation. It's a dead end for bug fixes and security fixes.

One the one hand I have this from you, an anon as far as I'm concerned. On the other I have Google, filled with some of the world's best python developers (and until recently the BDFL Guido van Rossum himself). Google App Engine still doesn't support Python 3.