skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Regardless of whether you agree with Monsanto's actions that are the focus of the reddit submission, that stuff is a dick move.
This is true, but there's deletion review for you think the admin made the wrong choice:

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

Alternatively, if you wish to remake the page and improve it, there's nothing stopping you from re-creating it with new sources and information added[1]. The "Be Bold" guideline exists to encourage people to do things like that if you think you can improve it.

[1] Not entirely true, controversial pages that get recreated and deleted back and forth can be blocked from being recreated. At least in the case of Nemerle, it appears that that has yet to happen.
The apollo/manhattan approach that government tends toward doesn't seem a very good way to do research. In 1971 Nixon started a "war" on cancer, hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent. That's mis-allocated money because of the centralized, targeted management of aims. I'd prefer to see hundreds of thousands---or millions---of small, subsistence grants for esoteric stuff than few big-ass, centrally administered "wars". The same dollars directed by a substantially larger group of recipients would better cover problem & solution spaces.
puts on conspiracy cap

wikipedia was a huge threat to traditional information sources, but now something has to come from one of those traditional sources to be considered legitimate info. problem solved.
Before Jeopardy, IBM's computer played Wheel of Fortune and The Newlywed Game
You've given a very Lawful Neutral response (and are correct on those grounds).

However, that still doesn't make deletionism a good or sensible or internally consistent idea.
The important thing would be restoring the articles. As far as I can see, that isn't happening (yet).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_(programming_language)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemerle

I might just be seeing a cached version, though.

edit: grr, I cannot reply to you, but yes, that was my point exactly: he could request a deletion review.
"The web server also had to be configured to not send a "charset" parameter on the "Content-Type" header, because the old browsers didn't know what to make of that. "

Looks like someone messed that up later. From a telnet session to home.mcom.com:

HEAD / HTTP/1.0

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2011 07:57:27 GMT

Server: Apache

Last-Modified: Fri, 21 Oct 1994 19:00:00 GMT

ETag: "10400d9-f1-2c7ebe95f4c00"

Accept-Ranges: bytes

Content-Length: 241

Cache-Control: max-age=31536000

Expires: Tue, 14 Feb 2012 07:57:27 GMT

Vary: Accept-Encoding

Connection: close

Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Man vs. Man vs. Machine
You are basically arguing about P-Zombies[1]. I think that line of argument is fallacious.

What if the computer were powerful enough to perfectly simulate the workings of a human brain? Does that brain not have a consciousness?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-Zombie
The machine age (Peter Norvig)
If tyrannical admins didn't chase away all possible contributors by deleting their work, perhaps this would no longer be an issue.
This problem is hardy unique to this instance alone, or even to wikipedia alone. This is a question faced by All publications, that of target audience and market. Obviously on a tech forum like HN we're more likely to be interested in langs like factor. But imagine a journalist looking through langs to report on computer sci or a teenager looking for something new to study... It would be a waste of time.

Problem with wikipedia is that it does not have a target audience defined clearly enough to answer these questions easily. And as with many sites, except for the specific use case it was designrped for, it's not useful. For eacmple could a student learn any calculus from the calculus page?

We should stop trying force wikipedia to be the ideal resource for everything, as it's clearly impossible. There are better mediums for that.
In this case I think it's more down to the fact that a "fan community" exists. The exact same response happens when a band gets proposed for deletion and someone posts about it on the band's mailing list. You get 100 posts about how this is in fact The Most Important Band In Genre In The Past Ten Years and Wikipedia's administrators must be knuckle-dragging cultureless slobs if they don't recognize that. Then semi-organized mobs try to find who proposed the article for deletion and harass him, etc.

When I saw a bunch of these posts at the top of HN, I was actually expecting a better discussion, but it seems PLs fans are pretty similar to music fans when it comes to someone touching the stuff they like!

And in the other direction, you get much better discussions when there isn't a fandom involved. Most deletion debates of science and math articles end up pretty civil, with a reasonable debate about whether to merge the information somewhere, whether better sources can be found to improve the article instead of deleting it, etc. At worst, you get the one guy who wrote a vanity article about his research lab posting under multiple accounts to try to save it, but usually no mobs.
Yea, in fact, have you seen this: <!--//--><![CDATA[//><!-- ... //--><!]]>

XHTML required the <![CDATA[, old browser compatiblity required the <!--.
The point isn't to delete bad content. The point is to delete content that is known by so few people that it is unlikely to get the attention needed to become a good article.

To put it another way, even if someone writes a really, really good article about their neighbor's dog Spike - complete with genealogy down to Rover the fifth, the harrowing near-death encounter when that gallstone removal surgery went wrong, and even a detailed account of that incident last Wednesday when Spike wet the carpet, there are so few people who know anything about that dog that it's impossible to fact-check the article. For all anyone knows it's all made up. So the line has to be drawn somewhere, and there need to be clear policies for it, as otherwise, well, things like this happen.
Alright, Techcrunch is sometimes journalism.
He could call it "List of things registered in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"
He very correctly points out that people should simply fix the Wikipedia rules then. In an open system, once you start ignoring the rules, everybody will want their exceptions and you end up in chaos. Anyone remember the Wikipedia from ten years ago? Today, it aims to have a good standard regarding its content, that is only possible with rules. So just update the rules and everything is fine. More importantly, it will still be fine ten years from now, when nobody remembers this incident anymore.
Really cool study, thanks for sharing. I don't think the research proves that social media wouldn't be a worthwhile signal. They really don't look into how bookmarking data could be applied to results, they just look at how bookmarked sites relate to search results and the web at large. The strongest conclusion is that Delicious users only bookmark a sliver of the web's content, and while the researchers considers this a weakness. I would consider it a strength.

The way I see it, search engines are entirely inclusive, while bookmarking sites are selectively inclusive. For certain ultra-specific queries, I'd much prefer the search engine approach -- I want as much breadth as possible. For other not-so-specific queries, I'd much prefer the result sites to be vouched for by people. Looking one step further, probably for a decent chunked size of my search queries, I'm OK if the number of sites it is searching over is only about 10,000,000 (my estimate for how many sites on Delicious have been bookmarked by more than 20 users).

What I find exciting is that the two can be effectively combined. Take all the normal results that a search engine would show, but give it a boost based on the log of how many times it's been bookmarked. It really is that simple.
Eric Schmidt: Welcome to “Age of Augmented Humanity”
The Shah of Iran was a dictator who only came to power because of an American/British orchestrated coup. He was overthrown against American wishes, and the government that came to exist in Iran is reactionary and hostile to the West as a direct result.

This is a case of a homegrown movement to overthrow a dictator. The resultant government is not necessarily what the West would prefer, but that is a consequence of being (rightly) seen as the funders and supporters of both the previous dictator and the instigators of the war waged by the next-door neighbor (Saddam Hussein's Iraq, whose military was entirely funded by Western powers and was once among the most powerful in the world).
The way calculation is taught to kids I think could use a whole lot of work. Calculation and mental arithmetic are pretty interesting and quite handy, even for adults. Check out Vedic and Trachtenberg techniques:

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

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

Doing 3-digit multiplication in your head with those techs is like doing a mental pushup. Practicing calculation this way helps keep your mind active and your concentration sharp. Here's a fun clip of Scott Flansburg, Guinness world record holder for being the fastest "mental calculator", teaching a class of kids - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjSPMfBoV0w

Teach math to kids like that and I bet you'll a foster a stronger appreciation for the field early on.
They didn't have to do what they did.

Since when the US doesn't have to join/start political changes in strategic regions? Let's wait what will be going on during the upcomming elections - US and EU have to an will take a big part in this game.

To a government run by a dictator. Leverage is good, but backing dictators is bad in the long run, despite short term benefits.

Oh, come on, a lot of dictatorships overthrown with US help where good buddies before.
Judging from his comments, I'd wager this wouldn't have blown up if it weren't for his attitude toward the whole situation. His use of smileys coupled with his tone leaves the impression of condescension, obliviousness, or apathy toward the people he'd upset.
Doesn't work on iPad, which I'm using now as I lay in bed
I thought this was a parody of /r/DoesAnybodyElse at first.
Getting motion sick just imagining it
Otherwise put:

1. Articles are not substitutable goods.

2. The supply of articles is not a zero sum game.
I would concur with other posters in saying that this is not a gender-specific problem at all.
We could get a motion sickness pills company to sponsor this. (I'm not even kidding)
Chris is just another Wikipedian though. He has the same ability to undo the changes as you do.
If I hit a rock and it cried in pain, I would believe it to be sentient.

Sentience does not come from the raw materials -- we're just a bunch of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen etc. ourselves -- but from the way those materials are arranged to process information.
My actual thoughts on the issues related to inclusion and deletion are not what I was trying to address. I contributed to Wikipedia for a time and saw and was part of deletion sprees on both of the sides. Something like this happens every three months I would guess. Mostly, my thoughts on it at the moment are 'not this shit /again/'.
The AfD process is problematic, but Christopher was also problematic. He was strictly following the rules, even when it didn't make sense, and continued to do so even after other users were telling him, politely, that he was wrong.

This sort of behavior is not acceptable on Wikipedia (at least, according to everyone who comments on ridiculous AfD stories). As for teaching him a lesson: he was caught live. The harshness of the lesson was proportional to the amount of rage such behavior induce.
Pivot: measure - and rank - how fast a person can shake their iPhone.
It was just a counterpoint to your quote

In what way?

encouraging editors to contribute more to non-nerd-lore topics

Surprise! Deleting Star Wars articles doesn't create more content for the article about the large-tailed antshrike.

And guess what? I don't even like Star Wars, and I think the lack of information on, you know, real stuff (in contrast to "nerd-lore topics") is disheartening. So lay off with the kind of presumptions you're throwing around in these comments.
I strongly suspect you didn't watch the youtube video in the article... Game mechanics are one of the KA's system's biggest features.
You could also just take the article in good faith at face value. I don't think anyone really believes everything on wikipedia is going to be top notch quality. If people are looking up popular things a lot of work will have been done maintaining the article, if they are looking up things of narrow interest it is reasonable to assume that everything there might be from just a single perspective, but could still give value to that person.
But Spike is a straw-man (well, dog).

These programming languages aren't non-existant, and can be verified as actually existing. It's not that there are no references to it.

On top of that, i'm still unclear why it would even matter? Things with little interest will generate little traffic. The potential to misinform is pretty low. And if it were to be the case that an article that was incorrect (maliciously or not) were to suddenly see an increase in traffic, presumably that can only serve to encourage people to point out inaccuracies and correct them (treating fictionalized accounts of anything as being an inaccuracy). And wikipedia already has a mechanism for resolving synonymy and name-resolution disputes.
The thing that does annoy me is that he seems to agree that the policies need to be changed, but he followed them anyway. Sure, the policies are what ultimately need to be changed, but we also need to discourage blindly following the rules without thinking critically about them.
(First sorry for the incoherent rambling above, it made sense when I wrote it)

The flash machine architecture (at least last time I read about it, about a year ago) was based on a stack architecture, which is pretty okay on an x86 but doesn't work very well on an ARM processor primarily because it is optimized for register use (and has a lot more registers than is normally used in x86).

See also this question [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2719469/why-is-the-jvm-st...] on stack overflow.
I can see how the two are similar. However, the scale of the band page problem is, I'm guessing, at least 2 orders of magnitude worse, if not more, than the programming language clutter.
Whoops, email bounced (update your profile), so I'll just post here for anyone else that gives a shit:

I've spent the last 2 years doing contract work for a few different startups while I've traveled, first in southern Brazil and now here in Thailand. I've spent a few weeks each in Saigon, Hong Kong, Singapore, Vientiane, and Phnom Penh, but I keep coming back to Chiang Mai as I think it has the best combination of low cost of living (it's absurdly cheap here), access to infrastructure, and tolerance of resident foreigners (notice I said "tolerance" and not "acceptance"; more on that later). Singapore and Hong Kong are far easier for a European or North American, but the cost of living is about 2-3 times what it is in Bangkok, which itself is easily twice as much as a smaller place like Chiang Mai.

My first few months here I kept wondering why nobody has set up startup incubators here. The cost of living is so low it's almost a joke, and the environment can be amazing if you know the right places to stay (and which places to avoid). Of course it would be beneficial to be in San Francisco and have coffee with 5 different VCs in the same day, if that's the route you are taking, but I personally prefer the idea of the lean, bootstrapped startup. So why would you cram 5 guys into a tiny apartment in San Francisco and eat ramen noodles 3 meals a day while you develop your prototype, when you could be eating in restaurants and living in a nice, furnished apartment with a view for less than half the price? How many single engineers would jump at the chance to spend 6 months hacking in Thailand? I know I certainly would (and I did!).

And now the downside: Asia is VERY, VERY different to any other place in the world. It sounds stupidly obvious, but the magnitude of the difference takes a few months to sink in. Thailand is full of some of the friendliest, most accommodating people in the world, but the culture just doesn't have a place for foreigners as anything other than tourists. I lived in a small village in the northeast for five months, and even though everyone there knew my name, they would only refer to me as "farang", or "foreigner". Could you imagine what kind of reaction you would get if you walked around New York saying to all the immigrants: "Hey, foreigner!" You would be labeled a bigot and ostracized, at best, and probably receive a well-deserved punch to the face. And if you ever have a girlfriend here, everyone will automatically assume she is a prostitute, which makes it really difficult to get a date with a nice girl, as you can imagine. Singapore and Hong Kong are a different story, as they have a much longer history of cultural and ethnic integration, but living there is just as expensive as any big city in the U.S., if not more so. I am making a lot of gross generalizations, and I should point out that I don't speak the language very well, but this has been my personal experience here. As always, YMMV.

Sorry for the rant. If anyone wants to contact me, my email is in my profile.
> It's already struggling against a tide of marketing abuse.

I'm sure. And that's why deleting the pages of languages with peer-reviewed literature is a vital and useful way to prevent marketers from abusing Wikipedia.
The Facebook Business Model
I have been thinking that something like "beauty buying bloc" would probably be fine. It would clarify things enormously (ie not imply "this is a means to block out beauty"). And it's possible that changing the name like that wouldn't really require changing the domain name.

Also, women who are younger than me wouldn't be likely to have Cold War associations. So I think the demographic of your target market may impact this.

Good luck with this.
Not anymore. It is no longer "just an encyclopedia" and yes for many things it is very close to being the "replacement for the internet". What with spam and ads cluttering the web up. I think that precisely was the reason for the uproar.

I do not belong to any of the language communities involved, and neither do I depend on those languages for my day to day work. But languages interest me, though I am not a PL person. That is why Wikipedia is an important resource for me to come in contact with these languages. Yes, the content might exist on other parts of the web, but here it has already been collected under one umbrella. The quality on average is good, the site is speedy and without distracting cruft.

So of course that is one of the first resource I will turn to, and I have often been plentifully rewarded. Google is not the internet, neither is Wikipedia. Nevertheless if I want to search for something I will go to Google and if I want to browse something I will go to Wikipedia.

So, what these deletions mean to me is someone is destroying the value that Wikipedia has for me. I am sure many people feel the same way and hence the outrage.
Seems to be correlation does not equal causation here. What if Mubarak needed 18 days to move his money offshore or a myriad of other reasons? Obama administration could have simply saw the government deteriorating and joined the crescendo of calls.

Joining the bandwagon doesn't give them any more credence than the many other countries and people in the world demanding Mubarak to resign. They all deserve as much credit.
I certainly oppose deleting programming languages, obscure or not, from wikipedia. I went to the site to try to register a complaint but could not find a way to do that. It seems that meta-comments are not really handled well withing the wikipedia framework. Or did I just miss the right link.
How do you find contract work? I'm on vacation in Australia for 3 months but would like to do some contract work to take care of expenses like buying a surfboard, tent, possibly a used car, etc.
No, I live on the planet where some random dude can "elect" to have a page deleted and poof page gone. I don't care about the bizarre bureaucratic process involved, all I care about is that there's no review process or delay to it.

Also, I do mean "sort of impossible". If you're going to use bad grammar to correct my writing, then at least use quotes properly.
I know the story, I'm quite interested in Iran, so I'm surprised myself I didn't mention it as an exception, but here the only reason is US was the opposite (overthrown) side this time. Good point.
Unfortunately, it sounds like 'terrorists' invented it first as part of a guerrilla campaign.
If something keeps cropping up again and again, that says to me that there is an expectation that is not being met.

Either wikipedians can try to change the expectations of the entirety of the rest of the internet, or they should deal with their internal problem.

As far as i have ever been able to determine, the only people who support deletionism are a subset of wikipedians.
Uh, that makes no sense.
I agree with you. Writing protocols, websites, creating new programming languages... all relatively simple.

Getting people to use what you built is the hard bit.
Regarding risks, I think you're understating the sophistication and importance of risks on flight projects. (I work at JPL, but not on flight projects; once upon a time, the OP's office was right down the hall from mine.) A modest sized flight project will have a risk list which is itemized down to great detail, covering many pages, and this list will be one of the main things the mission managers work on reducing.

In general, there are two parameters, likelihood of the risk materializing, and cost if it does. Sometimes the cost is easier to bear (dollars and schedule), sometimes it's harder (lose the mission). For units like dollars and schedule, it does make sense to do a weighted average (sum over risks of probability * cost); for others it does not. People go farther and use various Monte Carlo methods to deal with risks that interact, so that the sum above does not work.

Here's someone at JPL who's in that area:

http://www.usc.edu/dept/ise/directory/jairus_hihn.htm