skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They have buried the lede, though. They can say 'More Affordable' megacities, but still not affordable. And they include Yokohama, which is still a lot cheaper than Tokyo proper. They've basically included commuting distance cities outside of Tokyo in the calculation to reach these numbers. What happens if you do the same for SF or Vancouver?
> The modern Wikipedia hosts 11–12 times as many pages as it did in 2005, but the WMF is spending 33 times as much on hosting, has about 300 times as many employees, and is spending 1,250 times as much overall. WMF's spending has gone up by 85% over the past three years.

Can someone analyze this? It sounds a lot like he has a negative feeling about WMF, and threw in numbers to validate his opinion. I'd expect non-linear spending (in terms of pages hosted) at some point (because other things related to pages like links probably grow non-linearly).
> Economists have been saying for years that the UK economy is too heavily weighted towards finance. We now have an opportunity to resolve that.

But the cause of this issue is not due to being a member of the EU; other member states have more balanced economies. Can you explain what has prevented successive UK governments from addressing this imbalance, yet will now be resolved by Brexit?
> Have you been around the last 40 years?

Yes I have. Third-world Asian countries have been doing great.

> Why do you think that everyday more people is against globalization and they are becoming more nationalist? something in the milk?

So you're saying the vast majority of the world, which are currently benefitting from massive incomes due to globalization, is against it?

You should tell the billions of people across the developing world that. I'm sure the average Bangladeshi, who had their incomes go up by 5x over the last 20 years, is going to appreciate you telling them that globalization is a bad thing.
The OP is complaining about personnel and fundraising costs rather than actual hosting costs.
Cool idea, I like seeing book related projects on HN.

Small suggestion: Slow down the image carousel on the homepage it moves to quickly to process what it's showing you. Also it would be neat to able integrate this into other projects, for example I like https://momentumdash.com/ (unaffiliated user) and I'd rather have this than a quote of the day or what not.
> ...I have never seen any evidence that the WMF has been following standard software engineering principles that were well-known when Mythical Man-Month was was first published in 1975. If they had, we would be seeing things like requirements documents and schedules with measurable milestones.

This part of the critique seems a little off, doesn't it? I don't know the state of WMF engineering, it very well may have problems, and a complete lack of documentation or planning is not a good sign, but the particular artifacts (requirements documents, schedules with milestones) mentioned here are more from the pre-Agile waterfall school of thought. Can anyone familiar with WMF engineering comment?
>right now it's Elixir but I'm going to be evaluating Haskell, not a huge fan of the JVM langs tho

FYI, Haskell is not a JVM language. It compiles to binaries, the compiler is called GHC. Elixir runs on the Erlang VM, also unrelated to JVM.
No.

Used to; gave up years ago as I don't think it helped and it was just another thing to adjust/kick/break.
AFAIK this is how the BSD Ports system works too.
The table of spending vs. revenue suggests revenue is growing just as fast as expenses. There's nothing here about the trends of the amount of traffic over time. And if there was, the cost of hosting and developing a system vs the amount of traffic is can take is not a linear relationship.
Basically I like the pf's syntax. As already mentioned - it reads like a prose
Like I said, after months of using NixOS, I do not understand how to write a simple Nix expression.

Where is this explained?

I am speaking from experience when I say the documentation is "absolute shit". Most of the useful documentation I have read comes from the deprecated wiki.

When I first installed NixOS, I had to read the source code for simple things like defining a user or getting samba set up, and still had to rely on the deprecated outdated wiki.

Three current state of documentation for NixOS is spread between the manual, deprecated wiki, and the source code itself. The manual barely shows how to get a simple system working, but as soon as you reach an edge case - which Nix itself is fantastically suited to handle - you have to start digging.

In time, documentation for NixOS will be mature and usable, but right now it is severely lacking, moreso than any other aspect.
I largely agree with you on efficiency. For topics you're familiar with, papers and high-quality blogs are more efficient. Still, I like nonfiction books for a few reasons:
(1) Audiobooks. Sure, I definitely don't retain as much as reading a paper book. And many books are poorly suited for audio (books with lots of foreign proper nouns, books with tables and figures, etc). But I take time that would otherwise not be productive and turn it into learning time. Walking, working out at the gym, and cleaning house become a classroom.
(2) Books provide context. Wikipedia works too, but a book is usually more detailed. I have a degree in economics, so it's usually more efficient for me to read papers than to read popular economic books. But when I want to learn about theoretical physics, I'll read The Universe in a Nutshell, not the most recent paper.
(3) Books force you to meditate on a topic. Certainly, not everyone requires such concentration. For me, I remember more if I spend a few hours reading a book rather than < an hour reading a paper.
> many people did not read or understand the disclaimer and were surprised that we forwarded their full abuse report to the host who then, in some cases, could forward it to the site owner.

It's a bad idea to engage in lawfare [1] (in this case, spamming abuse forms to pressure a host/CDN into stopping providing services to a given website) without being familiar with the functioning of the mechanisms one seeks to exploit.

[1] I don't use this term pejoratively.
The Disruption of Transportation and the Collapse of Oil Industries [pdf]
> After we burn through our reserves, it seems likely that the next step for the WMF will be going into debt to support continued runaway spending, followed by bankruptcy. At that point there are several large corporations (Google and Facebook come to mind) that will be more than happy to pay off the debts, take over the encyclopedia, fire the WMF staff, and start running Wikipedia as a profit-making platform. There are a lot of ways to monetize Wikipedia, all undesirable. The new owners could sell banner advertising, allow uneditable "sponsored articles" for those willing to pay for the privilege, or even sell information about editors and users.

I honestly wouldn't complain if Wikipedia was owned and monetized by Google. I think they would recognize the importance of Wikipedia and handle it very carefully. I also think there is a small and very vocal minority on Hacker News who would be outraged, but most of the world wouldn't think twice.
Thank you sharing that. It ended up being something I needed to read.
GC, though, an a much, much smaller community.
The Louvre is one of those important institutions of mankind completely ruined by tourists. Unlike the Met or the Frick in New York, going in super early on a weekday doesn't even help. It's almost always packed.

At least it's better than Versailles...
But that's a problem with the data, not with the functioning of the net. The whole thing hinges on the premise that you will be able to tell 'sense' from 'nonsense' when you see it, even if you don't know exactly why it labeled 'sense' as 'sense' and vv.

If you are simply amassing data without purpose then what you could do is to try to visualize the layers of the network to see if any surprising features turn up but that will only work if the features are obvious enough to stand out and if that were the case I would suspect we would not have this discussion in the first place.

Computers excel at: remembering stuff forever and speed.

So any kind of improvement that a neural net or any other solution would bring to the table over a human would likely fall in either one of those categories, either the computer is faster at solving the problem, or its ability to remember and apply a vast amount of data to the problem will give it a (slight) edge over what a human could do, or maybe it will be just enough to reach parity.

It will not tell you what is and what is not significant in the input, though, with enough samples you with your slower but much superior intellect might be able to draw new and far-reaching conclusions once you are exposed to the data in sufficient quantity yourself that a pattern suggests itself.

That's in a way a very nice collaboration between man and machine, each doing what they are best at.

A key element in something like this being at play would be the computer consistently being at odds with experts in the field but being right more often than not about those cases. That would be an excellent opportunity to wake up to the possibility that there is something that should be obvious and noticeable but that still got missed.
Without the EU, they wouldn't have free labor mobility, limiting business hiring.

If you want your business to succeed, you better have a free and open labor pool.

This is why economies grow with open borders, because it's more labor efficient.

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?

Or did you think labor was a commodity? And that anyone can do anyone else's job?
Agree completely. Renewal has been central to the development of the world. So unless people are able to reset their mindsets at intervals, all we'll get is curmudgeonly old people set in their ways --few sons or daughters questioning the status quo and overthrowing their mothers' and fathers' thinking.

Renewal would be more or less dead.
>But neither the NN nor the researcher will be able to give you a rule like: "F=(G m_1 m_2)/(r^2)" to explain the underlying reasons for the object-trajectory dynamics.

It is not impossible. There is a combination of a special neural network architecture and strong sparsity-inducing regularization that makes it possible to learn equations from dynamics dataset: https://openreview.net/pdf?id=BkgRp0FYe
> one crazy workaround because of the weirdness of modern jazz development

Autocorrect of “JS”? If so: it’s not a modern weirdness; this is an old, long-fixed browser bug.

FWIW, JavaScript continues executing after errors in cases where it makes sense. If an event listener throws an error, it doesn’t make much sense for it to stop all future events without crashing the page (which is kind of what IE used to do with its script error message box, and we know how that turned out).
The leaked data was released too late to have an imapct on the election. Either who released it was really desperate or they seek to blame Russia.
> There's nothing here about the trends of the amount of traffic over time.

Yes there is.

2005: > So, we're doing around 1.4 billion page views monthly.
2016: > According to the WMF, Wikipedia (in all language editions) now receives 16 billion page views per month.
> If you don't want to think about errors and just want to crash, then I feel like there should be a sane way to crash the script with a default error message.

We have `expect` it's like unwrap(), but takes a string. When the program encounters some error, it will exit and print the string.
And thank heavens for that. Imagine medium style resource bloat every time you want to read about how Rasputin died
Last time I interviewed they gave me one-time use Zoom or appear.in links. That's what I'm going to use when I interview.
AFAIK, NixOS relies heavily on systemd.

Any particular reason you don't want it?
This is a great example of something else about software. As software grows in usage and use cases, it starts bumping up against edge conditions which need to be handled for various reasons.

Cargo now is becoming stronger and more stable because of bugs like this being discovered. All software goes through this growth cycle. It's great to see these things worked out in the various projects that support Rust.

There is another point here though; anytime the question comes up to just rewrite a piece of software, throw out all the technical debt, it's not as straightforward as it seems. Remember, together with that technical debt lies a lot of valuable learnings written into the code. I haven't worked on Windows directly in years, but I never knew that NUL was a reserved word as a file. I would, and probably still will make this mistake in the future.

Which makes me wonder, has anyone written a file name validation crate that guarantees that you're not writing to any reserved words on a filesystem of the host OS? A quick search of crate.io doesn't turn anything up.
Cash. It's the (mostly) the cumulative sum of revenue - expenses.
I think he meant "Why don't we solve dying of old age first". I think that is pretty obvious from context.
> If we want to avoid disaster, we need to start shrinking the cancer now, before it is too late. We should make spending transparent, publish a detailed account of what the money is being spent on and answer any reasonable questions asking for more details.

I never search for it, but I'm really surprised the foundation has not yet made their spending transparent. Aren't they supposed to be non-profit ?
Speaking as someone who has had companies in various countries (Japan, China, Hong Kong and France). The paperwork and complexities in France are by far the worst. Even China with it's love of red tape is at least relatively well organized and not to difficult to navigate.

In France, you get to deal with organizations like the RSI and URSSAF which are incredibly incompetent, frequently make mistake, do not have phone numbers that can be called from abroad (which is extremely inconvenient when traveling for business) and have Bizantine rules.

I would never create a company again in France because the system is completely broken. I really hope that Macron follows through on solving this. I believe that it's a priority.
Maybe a bit off-topic, but I don't think we should use the word "cancer" that way.
You would think so, but it's 2017, and despite all our impressive progress, we still heavily rely on fossil fuels and have no cure for baldness.
I suspect there are network effects of pushing out users who use ad blockers. These people, who will feel frustrated with their experience on your site, might not share your articles to other users, who in turn might not have those ad blockers installed.
You're not expecting an error. On the contrary, you're expecting a value or throwing an error.
Home ownership in Japan is not a permanent thing, however. You build a new house every 3 decades. This is going to drive the cost down during the time that you're paying for a house, sure - you use cheaper materials, everything is build with a short timeframe, etc. But if I buy a house here on a 30 year loan, at the end of the 30 years, I'm no longer paying that off. It's just property taxes and upkeep, etc. In Tokyo, at the end of those 30 years I'm building a new house. I don't ever stop.

There's no point where I go "Yep, mortgage is paid off, I don't plan on ever moving, or if I do, I can sell this house for enough to pay for another house that I can just move in to."

Any single month or year might be cheaper, but it still costs a lot more in the long run to perpetually be paying for your house.
The original authors of cargo, wycats and carllerche, aren't around today to ask (it's a weekend!) though IRC attempted to answer regardless:

<foo> to keep the number of files in a single directory down
<foo> tools become unhappy with hundreds of thousands+ of things in a single dir
<foo> as do filesytems
<bar> why not just a flat file
<bar> or sqlite or whatever
<qux> right now it uses git's deduplication feature
<qux> aka, when downloading updates you only download the objects that changed
<qux> but it mostly works on a per file basis
<qux> so git hashes each file and if the hash didnt change, it doesnt download an update
<qux> but if it did, it treats it as completely new file, even if its just a little change
Frankly, the problem with this Op Ed is there is a very simple solution available to anyone who is concerned about a "doomsday" scenario for Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#Wh...

Mirror it and make it available read-only until that day comes as a separate "disaster recovery" organization and raise the minimal funding required for that function (1 employee + 1 dedicated server) would be sufficient to the task. More if you wanted to make it usable but at that point, you aren't really a dumb mirror.

> pages-articles.xml.bz2 – Current revisions only, no talk or user pages; this is probably what you want, and is approximately 13 GB compressed (expands to over 58 GB when uncompressed).

You just need to mirror this regularly and maintain a reasonable depth of the backup. (Say, once a month for the past 12 months)

Then, whenever this terrible event destroys Wikipedia you are on the clear due to you operating under the past licenses for the data and people will need a new place to go if Wikipedia is genuinely destroyed.
> Does that mean developing into a senior engineer or a techinal lead.. or management?

Yes. :)

At this point I don't know if I'll do well in a management role or not, I still need some time to decide.

> You will find all sorts of politics at play. From the cooperative to competitive. It could be at the layer above you or with your peers.

Can you give some examples? What sort of things do I need to be cognizant of?
The cancer metaphor seems very artificial - it is only about the exponential growth with no underlying model. Without the model exponential growth means nothing - because you don't know how to extrapolate the current trend.
Wikipedia would become even more sided by going this route.

But Google or any other corp will not do that I think, as Wikipedia is website hated by many powerful people.
I think majority here would disagree, including me :)

And for Google it's fine as it is, they make billions using the free data people provide through Wikipedia. They just spill out the facts (often wrong) and people never leave Google.
Falklands minefields: de facto nature reserves for penguins
He didn't say that what happened to other people and not him long before he was even born was worse than what happened during the Blitz, he said British people "never really got to experience the horrors" of WWII, which is simply a denial of fact, offensive and the words of someone who doesn't know even basic history.

Not everywhere in Eastern Europe was Stalingrad or Warsaw, particularly in fascist, anti-Semitic states like Romania, which eagerly invaded the USSR alongside its Nazi ally, and was second only to Nazi Germany in murdering Jews.
Out of interest, who are the powerful who hate Wikipedia?
> fail silently

No. They are usually logged. The difference is that with exceptions, the logging will occur at a higher level and be done uniformly while in Rust you'll have to explicitly thread the error through the call stack manually to log it at a higher level.
A GraphQL Server Implementation – Ruby on Rails
I think it's been faster to search on google, scroll to wiki link and click than to search on wikipedia anyways
Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands and Switzerland are such dysfunctional banana republics with all that single-payer healthcare, sensible urban traffic design and reform-centric criminal justice.

Also, fire depts, police and highways are so socialist: let's privatize everything and see how well that works.
All you talking about really hilarious. The Chinese students' protest has nothing related with Chinese government, all these is assumed by NYT. There are lots of political related protests in US campus, like protesting against Milo Yiannopoulos was supported by Hilary?!
In NYT's point, all Chinese students are dumb, and they are brainwashed by Chinese government, and controlled by the gov. So, their protest is remote controlled by the gov. Really?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14281808

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14283096
Turkey started blocking Wikipedia last week.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_block_of_Wikipedia_in_Tur...
http://stackoverflow.com/a/22597637
Heh, I thought "wait a minute didn't IBM do this 20 years ago and it was a total flop?" and yes, and its one of the same people involved.

Cryogenic computing wasn't a bust because the technology didn't work. It does. It was a bust because silicon really hates to transition between cryogenic temperatures and room temperature. If you transition it quickly (say you pull a card out of the liquid nitrogen and start working on it) it will crack as it warms up unevenly. As a result you needed anywhere from 20 to 48 hours to get a card from 'cryo' temp to 'room' temp, and while you could cool a bit faster it still took longer than just dumping it in LN2. So repairs and maintenance were multi-day affairs. Compare that to a modern AWS, Google, or Azure data center where a system fails, a tech can skate out to it with a new motherboard, pull the old one, put the new one in, and poof you're back on line in under 30 minutes.

As a result cryo computers either had to have failure rates that were so low that a repair that required transitioning the hardware through a cold/warm/cold cycle rarely happened, or you had to have enough extra hardware to support your base load while part of it was slowly going through the cold/warm/cold cycle.

I don't know how much IBM spent, but it was a lot and they never cracked that nut.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12...

A serious eye opener. I was under the impression WMF was struggling to survive
As an example of the kind of specificity you might want, take a look at the error type for parsing a regular expression: https://docs.rs/regex-syntax/0.4.0/regex_syntax/enum.ErrorKi...

Now, in most cases, callers don't care at all about which specific error happened. They just want to print the error and be done with it. And that works just fine, because of the error handling machinery. But if you do want to drill down, then the option is there for you.
Replace Austria with Australia in your post, and reconsider the truth value of your EU==Labor Mobility equation ok?
"Watson seems to be one of the leading contenders there" ... Could you elaborate? I'm interested to know why. The only group of people I know who are interested in Watson are government folks, everyone else seems to be into AWS of Google Cloud products.