skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Alice has influenced programming languages and programming language research. http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/440 being just one example.

PL researchers are most excited about the ideas in the language. It is not surprising at all that they do not go tooting their horn with gay abandon about a particular implementation (or coursework grades). The vehicle of that idea is no less important.The notion of an electron may be more important than the instrument used to discover it, but that does not mean that the instrument has no place.

I would argue that the deleted articles are more important than an articles on, say, Java which does not bring any new ideas and I hear about it all the time. I don't need Wikipedia for it. But I do need it for languages like Pure.

I think it is more important that articles about relatively obscure but influential languages like Alice are preserved. It lets a potential CS student get excited/interested in something and pursue it further. Not everyone will be digging up old PL folklore. Wikipedia is one of the few, largely spam free, venues where on could come in contact with them.

Wikipedia serves an important purpose of disseminating knowledge in an accessible form to all. If any purpose was at all served by the deletion, it is hardly much different from dilettante vandalism: destruction of potential value to a reader.

What about human languages. There could be a human language that has remained isolated for the most part and only few speak it, that in itself will be a fascinating thing to know about. Does it mean that Wikipedia will not have space for an article on it.

Peripherally: many if not most grad students would get an A in PL if they are taking that course, and will prove theorems if one works on theorem proving or verification. I don't see anything special about that.
Calculation is important for understanding math. It should not be the only thing taught, but it should definitely be in the curriculum, and in a substantial amount, at least in the first few years. I think it lays a lot of ground work for further mathematical reasoning. Probably the most compelling reason, though, is that in mathematics you're assumed to have a certain degree of competency with computation. If you can't add or multiply small numbers in your head, you would be out of place among the current crop of mathematicians. While not everyone is trying to be a mathematician, it seems that it's not a good idea to remove something so fundamental that is essentially taken for granted in certain fields.
I started doing web development as a consultant at 16. I didn't care much about going straight to a university while I was at High School and I had about a 3.0. I never bothered taking the SATs.

I went to community college just to see if I could get into the UCLA CS program after 2 years. I did, and then I dropped out after a semester to shift my consulting business to product development. This was about 8 years ago and it was the best decision I've ever made.

The main turning point for me was a) I realized anything I actually used in my business I learned on my own, and b) I never want to think I can "just get a real job" if what I'm doing doesn't work out. Incidentally, my lack of a degree has never gotten in the way of an opportunity.

One argument for going to school is you get access to people you might not get access to otherwise. I say if you know what you want, and who can help you get there, you'll find a way to get access to the people you need. Especially if you're young. Being young is a huge advantage when looking for help if you can shut up and be humble when asking for it.

That said, I think having a business degree might have been useful. The problem there is that smart people can figure out the nuts and bolts of business as challenges of running a business present themselves.

The nuts and bolts of managing/leading/inspiring others is another story. Sadly they don't seem to teach that in business school. Even if they did, it wouldn't make it much easier. You have to just do it for a while and stay committed to learning it while you go through hell for the first couple years.

It's really a personal decision. Personally, if I could do it all over again I wouldn't waste the 3 years that I did. Instead I'd get a few roommates who attend some school and a campus apartment so I can have the "social experience" while I work on my own stuff during the day.
"Here's a challenge, then, for the internet: instead of spamming my Wikipedia talk page (which I don't really care about), why don't you work on fixing WP's notability guideline for programming languages?"

Amen to that. Others have said it many times before and it is still true: Wikipedia's notability guidelines would benefit from being fixed. It's rather annoying to note that what this guy was doing was within the letter of the law but yet seemed so wrong. There is no way that the likes of Factor or Clean should be deleted from Wikipedia so the question becomes how can the guidelines be changed so that they don't allow it to happen.
This isn't true. According to Wikipedia, the NY Times has 876,638 daily/1,352,358 Sunday subscribers [0] while the NY Post has 525,000/343,361 [1]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NY_Times
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NY_Post
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Do we discuss about order? For me it is same if you prefer Method(self param) or X.method(param)...
Zed Shaw's personal hell: being given a laptop with an internet connection, a browser pointed at Wikipedia, and being asked to complete the article List of things which do not exist.
It's not supposed to be a compendium of ALL human knowledge

...:

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing. —Jimmy Wales. Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Responds. Slashdot, 2004. http://interviews.slashdot.org/story/04/07/28/1351230/Wikipe...
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Not to be snobbish, but the NY Post is considered a working class paper. Usually bought by those more interested in the funnies, movie times, and local sports, than say international affairs or ramblings about AI.
In addition to what the guy above (below?) me said, it's because of the similarity of the direction and grammar of the European languages vs. Japanese, for instance, where the verb is at the end. Translation systems typically rely heavily on N-gram models, which are susceptible to these issues.
Why is it "way too many"? Seriously, that implies that some harm is being done. What harm?
You have a funny definition of problem. "This base of information is too useful and too widely applicable! It's only supposed to contain generally useful knowledge!"

In all honesty, do you think allowing something with Nemerle's level of notability would be bad for Wikipedia? Is it somehow crowding out articles about these "other parts of the world" you mention that would otherwise exist?
The other thing to keep in mind is that many of the graduate students being trained under this funding and working at places like Fermilab actually end up going into industry and making much more tangible changes in the short term. If funding drops and it has an effect on either the number of PhDs that are be granted or their quality then that will in turn have a real impact on the innovation that we see from companies. I sat in on DOE funding talks a few months ago and this idea came up over and over.
who doesn't love Crowdbooster and Ricky Yean?
If anyone thought what I was doing was wrong, they could have just sent me a friendly message and I would have politely discussed the issue.

I guess he missed all the subtle indicators people left all over the place saying "Christopher, we are upset".
> So many people create pet programming languages and add them to Wikipedia that the PL lists and categories are essentially useless.

Surely a simpler solution to that is to make a list that you feel describes the languages you consider important. Maybe "List of programming languages notable in academia" (which would include things like FeatherweightJava but probably not regular Java). People who want to find languages that meet that criteria can find them all in one place.

Meanwhile, people like me who are interested in new languages, or languages that experiment with syntax but don't push the academic envelope, don't have that knowledge outright taken away from them by you.
The most important rule of all:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules

i.e., if something seems to fit in with the "letter of the law" but has no real benefit and lots of reasons not to do it, don't do it!
I think this is absolutely appalling.
I think you did not get what ngom said here correctly. I got the feeling that he suggests travelling around the country, walking in nature, running a sustainable startup is not mediocre at all; they are all rare and outstanding activities not many people really do.

To me it seems like you have a Mastermind personality (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INTJ), one which is pretty hard to deal with. Execute your plans, not your imagination.
While reading Nemerle's deletion discussion page, I can't help but notice what seems to me to be some degree of racism on the part of the deletion advocates, particularly Christopher Monsanto. Where the many sources in English, instead of Polish and Russian, I can't help but think that perhaps they would not have been dismissed out of hand. RSDN.ru being dismissed as a "mere tutorial"? Ugh! Read it yourself and make up your own mind though.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Wikipedia:Art...
The difference being that web apps are supposed to be foreign. AIR is kind of like a weird stepfather who tries too hard to become a part of your life like your real father (native apps), despite the fact that he can never take his place. Web apps are like that cousin that, despite having little in common, you always have a good time whenever you visit them.
Has he published anything? I'm not saying he hasn't or that he won't, but I don't see his name on any of the Frenetic papers [1], he doesn't have anything listed on his site [2], and I couldn't find anything by him on Google Scholar. So, even by your definition of qualified, I don't think he is, yet.

[1] http://www.frenetic-lang.org/papers/
[2] http://monsan.to/
...and this is why almost all academics put their papers as PDFs for free on their web sites. Have you even looked? It is times like this when I wish there was an appropriate emoticon to express an eye roll.
According to CNN, 84% of employees plan to look for a new position in 2011
Call me old school, but this is called college. I already lived through this once. Although good times, I don't like smelling like week old laundry.
I think it is impossible to get to the "higher orders of thinking" without slogging through some of the grunt work to see what is really going on. Unfortunately there is no magic number of cases or fixed level of calculation work that guarantees understanding. It varies by the nature of the maths being taught and the context, interest and intelligence of the student. Moreover, with today's dependence on calculators and computers many practicing engineers and scientists are often missing the meaning behind the numbers despite knowing the math.

I had this last point revealed to me when I gave my first engineering review lecture to an audience of about ~80 engineers. During the Q&A one of the best (and older) engineers asked a question that indicated I had made a mistake. However, the mistake could only be seen by connecting information from PPT slide 5 and slide 40. After the lecture I asked the guy how he ever saw my mistake, I was really curious. He said he tends to think in ratios and showed me that some (easy to calculate) ratios from early in my lecture did not agree with ratios calculated later in the lecture, which revealed the mistake. He explained that he acquired the habit from using a slide rule when he was in school. He noted that young engineers (me), with their over-dependence on calculators and computers, generally did not have this skill. He was not advocating using slide rules and banning computers but thought that using a slide rule had an epistemological value in understanding the meaning behind the numbers which was becoming a lost art.
Well as they said above, to dig that deep the civilization needs a non trivial technology, so I would think any human with an index finger would get it (but the problem remains for those who don't have fingers).
I've met plenty of very, very wealthy and successful
individuals to know that how you type has absolutely no
connection to how much respect you give readers, and how
much they think about their responses.

I've read enough on the internet to know that how people type is strongly correlated to their respect for their readers, whether they take long enough to think about their response and, above all, their clarity of thought.

In other words: your personal experience and opinion isn't relevant or convincing, because others have other priors.

The barrier to entry of participating on HN is not how you
word, or begin your point - but the value you add.

The value you add is very much in how you choose your words. Every single one of our most interesting contributors could make any comment vicious and denigrating without losing a bit of the valuable content. That would seriously diminish the value of their posts.

You cannot clearly separate presentation and contents. The presentation always influences how the contents are perceived and rated. You could be the smartest guy in the world: if you type without using caps, nobody is going to realize, because your text gets harder to read and understand. You can probably think of many more examples yourself, where presentation detracts from content.
This victory will only last until the page is updated :)
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Closing Invites Tomorrow
That's also a modern tribute to the original "I Am Sitting in a Room" by Alvin Lucier - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jfssj80oNuM
Wikipedia article here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Sitting_in_a_Room
> there's a big hullabaloo where everyone votes and argues about it before it's actually deleted.

And it's still often actually deleted, even if consensus isn't reached.
One thing I noticed about the recent Egyptian events that few have mentioned. Folks in Egypt gather in Tahir Square and protest for almost 3 weeks, Mubarak still in power. Obama administration on Thursday then basically gives an ultimatum to the senior Egyptian military leadership, and bang, the next day Mubarak has "resigned".

Lesson: huge props to the Egyptian people. But also give credit to the US administration. They didn't have to do what they did. Also, the follow-in issue being that probably the biggest reason why we had such strong leverage over Egypt was the billions in military aid we give them annually. To a government run by a dictator. Leverage is good, but backing dictators is bad in the long run, despite short term benefits.
I don't think he's talking about Bada (certainly not current Bada... though what he's doing might relate to future-Bada).
It's not harmful, just silly. There are N articles about star wars and M articles about africa. When N > M to a ridiculous level, I'm okay with pruning stuff. I've never made a single edit to wikipedia though. Looks like I'm encountering some nerd rage.
Wikipedia has not [sic] problem paying for storage

What do the near-constant donation drives cover then?
Academics for the most point don't care about paywalls as long as they are on the right side of any paywalls. University libraries and their institutional subscriptions exist to abstract away the concept of paywalls, so that researchers only need to ask for the article and never need to worry about whether they need to pay for it.

Also, are there really all that many university libraries left that aren't open to the public?
Getting people to rally around anything that someone is trying to have deleted is a sure-fire way to get it deleted, protected from recreation, and basically never coming back. It is like some kind of 'defend the hive' kind of reaction.
The focus is changing, 2011:

“It’s about diversifying the community. At the moment we’re really male, geek orientated, which is great, but there are lots of editors that we don’t get who are geeks, but not tech geeks. So they may be real experts in, say, ancient Chinese poetry but if they go to try to edit Wikipedia, then they find it too intimidating and we lose them and that’s just silly."

I think this whole explosion of whatever-it-is-itis is a perfect example of that.
Not a very informative video. Better link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichloroacetic_acid
The notability requirements do not exist for a technical reason. That’s entirely wrong. Maintainability is the reason. The space is not limited but the time of people working on those articles. The goal is for Wikipedia to only have articles of a high quality, the more articles there are the harder that gets.

I’m not trying to defend the notability rules (I think that they are quite often pretty stupid), I’m only saying that it is completely and utterly wrong to claim that Wikipedia’s notability rules exist for a technical reason.
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> Hopefully your professors also drummed into you that anyone can write a paper and send it to a conference

Sure anyone can submit, but not anyone can get a paper accepted. Conferences in CS are much more selective than journals.

As a Ph.D. student in CS, you should know this.

> the kicker is if it actually makes an impact. Isn't that more-or-less the definition of notability?

No, notability != impact.

My dictionary defines notability as "worthy of attention or notice."

And, how do you measure impact anyway?

By citations? By peer-reviewed papers? By venue prestige? Seasoned academics cringe when these are used as measures of "impact."

You're a Ph.D. student in programming languages. Obscure languages with a handful of users are the norm.

When you're doing a literature search on one of these languages, it's helpful when it pops up on Wikipedia.

You're doing a disservice to the programming languages research community (of which I am a member) by nominating these articles for deletion.

You may be obeying the letter of Wikipedia's policies.

Yet, at the same time, you're being disrespectful to your peers.

If you want to help the community, instead of nominating these pages for deletion, go to conferences like POPL, ICFP or PLDI and ask folks, "So, what's notable about language X?"

They will tell you.

Capture that knowledge and then add it to Wikipedia.
That's true, so maybe it shouldn't really be said that people are "voting" after all. But at least an administrator has to actually agree and delete it; I guess that's what passes for oversight.
Almost. Web apps and native apps are very different beasts, and AIR makes a noble attempt to bridge the gap. The difference is that users expect web apps to act like web apps; a little bit of latency between input and visual feedback has always been the status quo (and it's getting much better). Native apps are supposed to react instantaneously, and behave consistently, and respect certain OS-wide UI conventions, accessibility features, and so forth. If the app stutters when being resized, or if there are lags in the interaction, semi-savvy users will assume that the app is poorly coded while the non-technical will be less satisfied without the ability to understand or express why.
Notability is broken, since it is usually subjective and wielded mercilessly as an axe by the Wikipedia mafia to cull material which they deem as not notable. Inclusive? Haha, don't make me laugh.
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I realize your question was mostly flippant and not directed at me, but to answer the question seriously:

The English Wikipedia is amazing, but it's incredibly ethnocentric in its coverage. There're a lot of red links here, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_television_articles_by_.... Unfortunately, when you are looking for information that's not something the average native English-speaking editor has knowledge of, and you are able to find some information, sometimes those writing it have a vested interest in the topic at hand. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul_supremacy is a minor example.
Ask HN: Can a one person startup/side project implement lean method?
The damage is already done. "I'm sorry (but I was still right!)" is the kind of apology I would expect to hear from a child. If you're sorry, then make it right and undo the harm that you did. Otherwise, just shut-up, you're not sincere.
Oh no, please, let's not sic the internet mob on these people.
I have no idea what this comment means and it is already the highest Google hit, with all others not making any sense. Would you please care to elaborate?
It depends very much on the field. CS has the most open culture of sharing information that I know of, which it should be proud of.
Pruning articles about Star Wars doesn't actually improve the number (or quality) of articles about Africa. Deleting Star Wars articles won't make the contributors suddenly interested in writing articles about Africa instead.
I get what you're saying - but I have doubts about whether non-technical users care enough about those differences, glaring though they may be.

On the other hand, I guess non-technical users don't even have a concept of 'web apps'. They're just web sites which provide some useful service.
It's just an encyclopedia, not a replacement for the internet. That's all I'm trying to say. I've never heard of nemerle, and I'm not a wikipedia editor, so I have no opinion about it's notoriety. In general, the categorization of knowledge is a hard problem, and a lot of people prefer to spend spend time organizing things rather than writing new content, and this just seems like one of those examples.