skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hopefully your professors also drummed into you that anyone can write a paper and send it to a conference -- the kicker is if it actually makes an impact. Isn't that more-or-less the definition of notability?

Hmm, not entirely. The problem is that certain publications are destined to be cited over and over again. Actually, entry into the elite publications at all can be a signal of significance. Anything published in Nature or SIGCOMM is pretty much notable. On a whim I checked the publication in front of me ("Inside the Bird’s Nest: Measurements of Large-Scale Live VoD from the 2008 Olympics") and it only has one citation but is clearly an important paper.

I won't speak about the people whining or the Wikipedia deletion policy (which I fundamentally disagree with) but clearly citation count is not how notability is derived. Even a quick search of Google Scholar shows ~7 citations for the Nemerle language. How many citations is enough for you?
I don't know if I am accusing you of bad faith or not, by wikipedia standards. I just find that your approach (move to delete without, so far as I can tell, trying to directly improve the entries) to be destructive to wikipedia's purpose of expanding the availability and interconnectedness of knowledge.

Why was wikipedia, and the public at large, better served by deleting these entries?
how do you remove it properly? after removing the earpads I don't quite see how to pop out the rest.
Yeah, I remember the first time I've installed and used Mustache with IcanHaz. It was.. really a pure moment. And then, x.y didn't work and I went crying. Even last week, I had to explain to a new developer why our templates doesn't have the x.y notation and instead have a {{#x}{{y}.. {{/wtf}} notation.

So, I'd be totally willing to help on that part :)
> I don't really think he would, it's just a vague hope that maybe he'll remember he has a soul or something and actually try to be what he portrays himself as instead of a politically motivated con man.

http://www.lyricsfreak.com/w/who/wont+get+fooled+again_20146...

> I feel like Egypt has changed him in some way.

Which stand was that? The official white house statements were all over the map and didn't become close to coherent until after Mubarek left.

> He actually took a minor stand against the establishment.

He is the establishment....

We'll see how it ends out.

Meanwhile, there's Tunesia and Algeria.

And then there's what Obama did wrt Iran.
All About the Benjamins: The $100 Bill By the Numbers
Antivirus artav
I don't think it's a specialist/generalist thing. I think it's a "do you have interests outside of programming" thing. In my experience, the image of the ultimate hacker is someone who eats, breathes, and drinks programming (which used to be me). As I've grown older, I've learned to appreciate the value of learning things outside of programming.
Well lets not do this in the abstract. I'd never heard of Nemerle until now, but a search on Google Scholar and on Google shows many papers, tutorials and general discussion on the language.

I would think an overview of syntax is an excellent level of detail for an encyclopedia to cover a less common programming language. I certainly see no reason to dismiss that in itself.

Proposing that a timely defense to an AfD nomination is a good test of notability in itself is completely absurd. By itself you'd have to consider it a less reliable indicator of notability than someone writing the article in the first place.

If you're doing a PhD in a topic and you decide to take on a section of wikipedia you have at least be willing to take responsibility for your actions.
Oh, Perl. In some cases, Lisp would certainly be more verbose. It's probably more tedious than Perl for some things. It also depends on which language you use. Scheme is more tedious than Common Lisp, which is sometimes more tedious than Clojure.

Here are the Clojure equivalents, omitting the act of assigning stuff to variables.

(map #(a-list %) '(3 1 4))

; I'm not modifying x in-place because unfortunately Clojure
; doesn't like that. Common Lisp is more imperative.
(.replaceAll x foo "BAR")

((colored-objects :red) 2)

(str "Sorry, but " thing1 " doesn't work with " thing2 ".")

(doseq [i (reverse (range 1 11))]
(println "Counting down: " i))

If you took the first example and assigned it to a variable other-list, it would typically be in a let expression, with a body.

(let [other-list (map #(a-list %) '(3 1 4))]
(subsequent statements that use other-list))
Probably instead of deleting, this articles should be moved to sublayers. In this case "programming sublayer". If you don't subscribe to it, you won't see the article and links to it.
Look at the deletion threads. He knows what he's talking about, but I think he has some agenda. Maybe he failed a functional language course, and wants to kill off his professor's favourite languages?

There's no way that he couldn't just do a google scholar search for "Alice ML functional programming".
there is clearly a perverse incentive for equity holders to apply downward pressure on salaries, so why do you guys think tiered is any different? I'm skeptical that there's any difference at all between average salary at tiered companies vs regular companies.
As of right now, all of their .com and .net registries are still down
I think that it isn't necessarily that Canada is unfriendly, but it's more that Canada isn't as easy to get over the certain bump (as others mention, that bump is funding). If you're boot strapping a startup then Toronto seems to be perfect - vocal community, good geography, lots of talent, and affordable businesses (also OK corporate taxes >$500k)
I believe there are specific requirements for something to be considered "notable" on wikipedia. Simply fulfill those requirements for each language page and you're good, no?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability
The Valley is not SoCal. We have several spaces in SD.
> One of the basic tenets of Wikipedia is "assume good faith"

Stylistic note: try not to assume that people you're dealing with outside of Wikipedia aren't intimately familiar with Wikipedia. It comes off a bit condescending.

I'm aware of WP:AGF, and I'm also aware of WP:IGNORE. You're selectively choosing which tenets to subscribe to: deletionism benefits nobody, because the opinions of the participants in the AfD (yes, opinions) are influencing the availability of information to everyone. Your actions are not benefiting Wikipedia, whether you want to lay claim to them or blame the Internet as you did in this thread. Rather than try to improve what was presented to you, you are pursuing an idealistic utopia of programming languages on Wikipedia, where only programming languages with a wide audience that you can observe get blessed with a mention on the site.

I don't have any stock invested in any of the languages you've nominated, but I do see the benefit of a resource describing them for people to find via Google. Some of the languages you've nominated are very new, and are finding a community - you've basically just issued a big "you don't count" to every single person that uses those languages. It has happened to companies I work for, too. I work for a very large contender in a specific market, which has had several "of impact" (to steal your term) media mentions including Dr. Dobb's Journal. They've been deleted from Wikipedia on more than one occasion due to not proving notability to the editor of the week that feels like nominating the article. It's a joke.

I find it really hard to digest that you subscribe so hard to the notion of notability (a very subjective concept, might I add), admit that your criteria for evaluating notability need improvement, then nominate languages and successfully get them deleted anyway.
I'm as qualified as any other PL researcher (or Wikipedian) to determine the validity of a source.

Meh, as a researcher and grad student myself I wouldn't say that. You earn the qualification to judge notability of scholarly works after defending your dissertation and publishing significant work for the community. That's kind of how the system works.
It takes me but a few minutes to figure out whether I am going to nominate an article for deletion. A single hit that looks like it might possibly be a reliable source and I'm outta there. In other words, the articles I am proposing for deletion are the lowest of the low hanging fruit. I honestly didn't think anyone would care, and to be honest, most don't -- the only reason anyone even took note of what I'm doing is because I proposed Nemerle for deletion.

I disagree that the clean up is detrimental to Wikipedia. I like to browse Wikipedia for new programming languages, and it is very difficult for me to do so when the "good stuff" is buried in WP's lists and categories. More information is not necessarily better :(
I'm not an audiophile, because audiophiles are the homeopathic suckers of the audio world. I do, however, like high-quality sound.

If you want a good over-the-ear headphone, the Sony MDR-V6 is quite nice. They sound decent, are built a tank, and have been in continuous production since the mid 80's. They're $90 on Amazon.

If you want in-ear, get Etymotic ER-4's. They're the only headphone I've ever found that can compete with my NHT 2.5i speakers. They should be available around $200.
What? You seem to be very focused on being upset about something and I can't quite follow what it is. Have you read any of the endless verbiage on notability?

There is a (hotly debated, etc, etc) wikipedia policy that article topics have to be 'notable'. If a topic is only covered in academic literature, one can make a perfectly sensible argument that it's obscure and not 'notable' enough for a general encyclopedia.

You don't have to agree with the policy (I, personally, am totally indifferent to the whole topic) but you write as if the very idea that something that's only mentioned in conference proceedings is obscure (CS or not, doesn't seem all that relevant either) is somehow irrational and worthy of great indignation.
Show HN: What happens when you translate phrases too many times?
I have not RTFA but equating content delivery with education seems risky. Yes, Khan Academy videos are engaging and often better than getting content from books, but education is much more than content. Education is also about building, creating, interacting, sharing.
Funny. I didn't make senseless accusations, didn't nominate him for anything. Just asked, matter-of-factly, why he was putting his energy into AfDs instead of into looking up references and trying to improve articles.

At which point (check his history if you care), he wandered over to another user's page to recruit help, saying:

One commenter even suggested I search for references to improve the articles in question, as opposed to nominating them for deletion (the sheer irony).

So, yeah, apparently asking him to channel his energies into something that's one of Wikipedia's main goals is "ironic" as well as "senseless"?

Sticking with my original conclusion that this is not someone who responds well to reason.
Drafting Like a Pro: Top 50 Blogs for Fantasy League Lovers
I agree and I'm not entirely sure that the company can sustain the same level of profitability, given the fickleness of gamers.

My big worry is that their profit margins return to industry average levels. There's plenty of reason to believe that they would earn closer to 5 or 10 percent vs. the ~%45 they currently get as time goes on. In that case, the company needs to grow to several billion dollars in revenue and become one of the largest game publishing companies in the world to support this valuation. I'm not entirely sure I see that happening for Zynga.
Nemerle is a beautiful example of a programming language that lets the programmer hook into the compiler's pipeline and add arbitrary new syntax.

For example, here's what the developer needs to do to add the LINQ syntax (introduced in C# 3.0): http://nemerle.googlecode.com/svn/nemerle/trunk/Linq/

It definitely belongs to Wikipedia simply because it's an interesting language, that doesn't have an easy replacement. It's of special interest to language designers looking for ideas or for students learning about programming languages.

Also, comparing the Nemerle page to your would-be biography on Wikipedia is pretty lame, as people would actually learn something when reading about Nemerle.
You action was a necessary cause of their deletion and therefore you are one of the directly culpable persons destroying the long tail of knowledge.

I am no expert here, but does one person tagging something for deletion make such an impact? He must have convinced the administrators by only good arguments (like lawyer arguments, which are not necessarily moral or anything, just good enough to win the case).

If we can trust the administrators for putting up something, we should trust them for taking something down.
for me its clearly a reason to not sign up with Quora...
Isn't this actually an argument for a better UI for wikipedia?
Adobe spells out Flash-y plans for Android
So many people create pet programming languages and add them to Wikipedia that the PL lists and categories are essentially useless. Most of the languages I propose for deletion have almost no information available about them, and therefore, one can't write a useful Wikipedia article about them. More information isn't necessarily better.

Anything I am not 95% sure about I add a notability tag to or simply leave alone. There are a number of articles that I did in fact find interesting citations for while trying to decide notability. Napier88 is a good example of such a language -- the papers on it received hundreds of citations, yet I had never heard of the language. I've been working on an entire rewrite of Napier88 in my spare time, which has understandably become even more "spare" recently :)
That's the position I'm in right now. I'm not saying there aren't startups with good code out there. I'm just trying to say that it's not startup_code == good && bigco_code == bad
If I recall correctly, they tried teaching calculation-light math in Washington and it turned out poorly.
Or that he didn't spend enough time looking:

> It takes me but a few minutes to figure out whether I am going to nominate an article for deletion. A single hit that looks like it might possibly be a reliable source and I'm outta there.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2215437

Reassuring description of the process, there...
It's relevant to CS because in CS, unlike in other fields, conference papers and proceedings are the main way to report on findings. In other fields conferences take a backseat to journals; CS is unusual in this respect.

As for the broader issue of whether academic entries are notable, surely the massive body of mathematics entries on wikipedia indicates that material which is never mentioned in the newspaper is notable.
But I didn't nominate Factor for deletion...
In any competitive field, from computer science to ballet, there are those who practice for hours and hours per day.

The author does not want to be a competitive computer scientist, and is happy being a casual one -- skilled enough to make a 40 hour-per-week living with it, to be sure, but not obsessed enough to advance the field itself. She made a great choice going to a liberal arts school.

When she compares herself to students at engineering schools, or references a study of students at CMU, home to some of the top computer science students in the world, she is doing herself a terrible disservice. She sounds a bit like a casual runner upset by the fact that Usain Bolt exists.

Elite computer scientists, like elite athletes, live in a different world. If you want to join that world, the rules are pretty gender-neutral -- work 80 hour weeks, write great software, publish papers, dream in code (or math, really). If you don't want to do that, you aren't a lesser person. Just don't compare yourself to those who do make that choice.
An Emotional Letter From a 99er Who Gives Up Hope
> So many people create pet programming languages and add them to Wikipedia that the PL lists and categories are essentially useless.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_list_of_programming...

What's useless about that?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_object-oriented_program...

I don't see many pet projects here...
I've seen several deletionists try to wipe their hands clean of responsibility in saying "I didn't delete it, I just nominated it!", which always strikes me as really insincere as they (as you pointed out) definitely played a part.
Ruby was released in 1995, and there was no documentation available in English until 1997. Ruby's popularity outside of Japan didn't even gain any kind of momentum until 2000 and on.

Obviously no one can say for sure, but I am sure an un-notable language could possibly gain even more popularity with a Wikipedia entry as it helps people learn more about a small obscure language that might grow in to something bigger - even if it takes years to do so.

While it might be argued that a page with little to no information should be deleted, I don't think that pages with adequate information to get someone the general idea about some new (possibly just new to the reader) programming language should go anywhere. It's a valuable resource and losing that kind of information from Wikipedia is a shame.

Please keep that line of thought in your AfD's - and think about the "notability" that Frenetic may get in the future.
> The very rudimentary basics will need to be learned by calculating, but anything above the fundamentals can be understood without the calculations.

Generally, I agree with this. But if everybody were to adopt that philosophy, eventually we'd get to the point where nobody could actually implement the calculations for those high level concepts. And then what happens when you need to update the software that's been doing all of that for you?

Does everybody need to know how to calculate? Probably not, above arithmetic and some basic algebra. But a lot of people do, and that needs to be included in their education somewhere.

You're probably aware of all that, but I felt it warrants making explicit.
I've never raised funding for a startup before, but I bet it's like most other things in life: persistence pays off more than skill. You just have to not let rejection get to you (even though it can be tough at times!).
> So many people create pet programming languages and add them to Wikipedia that the PL lists and categories are essentially useless.

OK, so some of them might not even pass my standard of notability (which would be almost embarrassingly lax).

But it strikes me that you're using notability to solve a user interface issue -- that you find it difficult to navigate the programming language section.

More generally, it strikes me as horribly inefficient to rely on what one might call "outrage-driven notability" to correct for what were, you may now realise, erroneous selections for deletion.

Maybe I'm a dolt for blaming you; you're acting rationally within a broken system.
The solution to this problem that mollifies wikipedia admin culture is to make these pages into sub-pages of huge articles. E.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_in_The_Simpsons .

This is a lot less useful way of doing things but it flies almost completely outside the deletionist radar. There is little cultural dance pertaining to the the concept of notability for mentioning something in a list, and no bureaucratic pseudo-procedure for a deletionist to wield against such practice.
Ouch, this is really sad because it took me ~10 seconds on Google Scholar and I found the Nemerle papers. I'm on your side too (if a language seriously has no users and no publications, why have an article on it), but your research skills are giving us grad students a bad name ;)
If the author of this blog post reads this then if I may, I have a few comments, and everyone else should take note as-well ;)

"When they talk about how they live to program and never leave the lab"

THEY ARE BORING.

I LOVE programming, however I also LOVE playing with my 2-year old, playing poker with the fella's, practicing origami, watching movies, working on my (admittedly horrible) art skills.

I know exactly where you are coming from when you say that you are worried about your programming skills not being 'up to snuff' but trust me, it is a small price to pay for having a life that is fun and enjoyable. It's these people skills and life skills that will make you more-rounded, and I'll be frank when I say that the more-rounded you are, the more likely you are to have fun, and the more you have fun the more it will show. And the more it shows you enjoy life, the more people/bosses/hiring managers will want to hire you to work around them.

It isn't always the technical skills, most of the time it's the soft skills that make a difference. So practice your knitting, and definitely practice the Japanese. And next time you are asked about what you have as a hobby, be honest. It will impress.
> But unlike companies like Google and Amazon who rigorously hired based on college degrees, GPAs and standardized test scores, Facebook and the companies that have spun out of it have hewed toward sheer, raw, hacker-like genius.

One of the best articles I've read by Sarah Lacy (I wish she would write more big picture stuff like this) and it's on TechCrunch! It would be a very interesting visualization to build a Silicon Valley family tree from Fairchild Semiconductor to HP to Xerox PARC to present day. Maybe that is one of the reasons Silicon Valley can't be duplicated - and is one of the most unique business locations on the planet - everyone is virtual cousins or 2nd cousins with everyone else. All in the (extended) family.
It's really obvious to me - having dealt with people raised on calculators for several decades now - that if you can't do arithmetic in your head, you don't understand any math.

Calculator kids will type in 10 + 10, get 100, and then assume the answer is 100 because they have no intuitive understanding of the meaning of any of it. It's just abstract operations relating to button pressing.

Where this goes off the rails is the ineffective methods used in many schools, and the frequent methodology changes due to the latest teaching fad, which results in 12th graders practicing addition because they still haven't learned it. This has led some to conclude that they should skip the basics and move into advanced things. No. They should instead spend the very small amount of time it takes to teach the basics properly, and then move into advanced things.

College freshmen are arriving at schools and they can't make change from a dollar after 14 years of classes.
Perhaps, but no one has come forth and developed one. But what would such a UI look like? Would it filter based on user-given notability criteria?
Nope. Looks great. Thanks.
And now I just read they're claiming Zygna is worth over 7billion - the company that make _Farmville_, who could be destroyed anytime Facebook chooses, is worth the same or more than _Sun Microsystems?_ Surely that's insane?

(oh, and "oops" on the Alphas error... I _did_ know they were build by DEC... Thanks for the correction)
The problem with the logic in this post is that it implies an unbounded amount of money funneled into research. In the real world, there's a bound on the amount of money that should be funneled into research. That bound should probably less than the amount of money it would take to bankrupt the supporting country. Any argument that doesn't even consider this question fails to impress me right out of the gate.

There isn't a government expenditure that can't be supported the exact same way and with virtually the same arguments, but the sum total of all these wonderful programs is that none of them are going to be funded at all in a few years when the funding entity is bankrupt and the dollars it can give you are worthless. Take a 20% cut now (and probably another cut soon) or a 100% cut not all that many more proposal cycles from now.

At some point the answer has to be no.