skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks, Zed. A typically balanced, well-researched and well-thought-out solution to a complex problem. I especially liked the part where you blamed all of Wikipedia for the actions of a single user.

I wish you had considered the route of getting involved instead. There are just some basic, fundamental things that would help fix this. A modification to the notability rules would require a lot less effort than your other proposals. The notability rules work pretty well for kicking out useless chaff like pages about high school garage bands that have never played a show. But they do privilege old-school publishing and broadcasting, so particularly ephemeral creations like new programming languages may fare very poorly against the notability criteria. But this strikes me as fixable.

Programmers can help too. We don't even have the capability, for instance, for people to be emailed when their favorite page is up for deletion. We don't have a lot of means for casual involvement; everything depends on logging into Wikipedia regularly. This is part of why battles in Wikipedia tend to be won by the most, shall we say, persistent.

I work for the Wikimedia Foundation, as a programmer. In general our resources are stretched pretty thin, and there's really only been two years so far of a budget that's even remotely in line with the size and impact of the site (thanks to your contributions). In a lot of ways we're still playing catchup with an explosive period of growth that happened around 2006-2007, using technology that's getting a bit venerable.

But the issue of deletionism and the general community demeanor is a problem that is occupying more and more of our attention. If it matters to you then contact me. I can definitely tell you there are lots and LOTS of ways to help out.

Actually you could even get PAID to fix this problem. Want a job working here? We have lots of open technical positions. http://bit.ly/WikimediaJobs

The one thing I can't guarantee is that it will satisfy your need to rage. The truth is, almost everyone in the Wiki community is acting in good faith. What they need are a) your input as a knowledgeable person about how policies need to change, and b) your technical and design skills, to create systems that avoid these communication breakdowns, and guide volunteers to be more effective.
Don't count your eggs too early, this has yet to play out fully. The Iranian uprising is either still simmering or largely ineffectual. Algeria has apparently degenerated back to despotism. And it's too soon to see how Egypt will develop.

On the whole though, these are positive signs. People in the Arab world are taking an active role in their governance. They are having discussions about the role of government and of liberty. They are being more and more exposed to reporting and information from other countries. Compared to the state of things a mere decade ago, this is a vast improvement.
Must not be Asian. My friends give their wives all their money.
Well, then if there is no technical reason, then it's a usability flaw or just stupidity. If it is possible to create meta-pages that could house sub-cultures and esoteric information, then they aren't doing it and using these rules for no reason. If they can't create one more level, then it's a technical problem they should solve.

Another way to put this is, you can't expect a single flat namespace to contain even a reasonable amount of human knowledge. At some point, as any Librarian will tell you, you have to make a 2nd level. If they did then they'd solve the problem since you could say nothing is deleted and is just "subbed".

Of course, then that'd be a new insult, but at least information wouldn't disappear for no reason other than egocentric opinion.
You could have a topic of the day :)
You have to be careful, as most places will have strict regulations against working while on a tourist visa. Thailand won't even let you volunteer, and they will deport you if they catch you. If you have anything that looks like an office, and you have "tourists" in there hacking, you could get in a lot of trouble. Don't know what the rules are in Indonesia, but you should definitely talk to a lawyer first.

Having said that, I've been in Thailand for a while, and the same idea keeps popping into my head. If I were bootstrapping a company, I would much rather fly with my partners out here for 6 months than try to rent an office in SF. I can see one major problem with the execution though: people are going to get beach fever for the first month or so, so don't expect productivity to be very high. You might want to schedule a few weeks of partying in, just to get it out of their systems.
As long as the articles on Women's Suffrage and Henry VIII are of appropriate length and depth, I don't see how this is a problem. Is this a contest or something?
"The problem all comes down to 10% curriculum and 90% teachers. Curriculum only seriously concerns me when it overconstrains good teachers and prevents them from doing their job."

I agree with this in part but the problem is that relying on good teachers is not something that can be scaled across countries. I'm not sure if the introduction of computers in the national education might help solve this problem, but I'm hopeful.
In Praise of Continuous Deployment
That particular buzzword doesn't usually refer to hacker-built one-off projects, like the tweeting coffee pot mentioned in the article.
As I said, the official reason for the notability rules is maintainability – to keep the amount of articles low and relevant so that they can be maintained.
"and the "non-exportable"-crypto versions of almost all of them."

Not that these are very useful, since SSLv2 is obsolete and disabled on many servers because of several flaws in it.
I'm not so sure. Zygna's model is less like conventional computer games (once-off payment or lately recurring payment) and much more like slots machine gambling. People get a little rush from their pointless achievements and are prepared to pay for it. Given that the product has almost zero distribution costs, I expect profits to remain high.

Even competition is going to struggle to bring down those profits, because of the same network effects Facebook now enjoys over competitors.
Ask HN: Which of your start up mistakes has taught you the most?
Learning from your faults is critical. Adapting with necessary adjustments can be powerful. Which of your start up mistakes has taught you the most?
> Oh, come on, a lot of dictatorships overthrown with US help where good buddies before.

We agree. I'm not sure why you think your statement contradicts what I said.
Sadly the mostly widely mis-used rule :) IAR is for daily usage, no real application in this case (because unfortunately the wider community will probably agree with deletions)
Where are the unit tests?
http://www.zerosign.net/index.php/2006/03/15/nes-zapper-mous...
Are you just saying the contrast ratio is bad or is there a specific rule of thumb for contrast? The text isn't what I would call 'off-white', it's about a 50% gray. Half of max contrast looks fine on my screen, is it calibrated strangely? How much contrast should there be?
Regarding bandwidth, I have a CDMA mifi router with a local telecom that works anywhere in Thailand except Bangkok (3G deployment in Thailand is a long and sordid tale). I get about half a megabit up and down anywhere that has a cell tower, which is just enough for voice skype and doing server administration on my linode slice over ssh. It even works in Laos as long as you are close to the Mekong. :)
App Filters What Pages You’ve “Liked” On Facebook
Re your 2: it's not really up to Monsanto to restore the deleted articles. It's not his call, and if it went through Afd once, to recreate the articles would be to see them get redeleted.
This:

Perhaps the coolest feature of the product’s design is its inclusion of 192 LED nodes, which display volume levels, battery life, and Internet connectivity on the device’s face.

Has got to be one of the silliest sentences on TC today, at least. Calling LED:s "nodes" in a tech-oriented publication just makes me cringe. What is a "node", anyway? Also, I guess the idea of using LED:s to display information is not totally novel, I think I've seen that done before.

I agree that using said LED:s to form what appears to be a matrix display filling the entire front of the device, while looking like old-school ventilation holes, is clever.
Thanks Neil, a completely inaccurate reading of what I wrote. For the record, deletionists have been a problem for many people who are members of sub-cultures and Wikipedia has ignored the problem. Writing more arbitrary rules is not the solution. The solution is to fix the software so people can create a richer organization of information.

I personally have had some idiot with a vendetta get a page about me deleted numerous times despite me having been mentioned in about 10 trade and mass publications and having a book published (now two) as well as my own articles in the press. It was baffling that a single person can get a page deleted without any warning, flagging, or attempts to do some research.

But really it comes down to trust. I don't trust any organization that begs me for money then deletes the content that matters to me most and tries to hide behind some bogus "well it's not us really (tee-hee)". Either Wikimedia is in charge or they silently allow this kind of crap.

Finally, the issue of deletionism is purely the result of bad usability and structure. All you need to do is make a place to put these pages rather than delete them and you'll solve tons of problems.
FWIW, iOS and open source aren't opposites. It is quite possible to have open source apps (or even use an open source library) on the app store - just avoid the GPL.

My rationale: I contribute to Mobile Colloquy, an IRC client for iOS that is available under the BSD license. And we've never had any problems :)
This appears to be a tribute to the Cascade virus from the 80s.

http://kannan.jumbledthoughts.com/index.php/cascade-virus-do...

That page includes the ASM source code. Pretty interesting as it was the first malware to encrypt itself.
> Seems to be correlation does not equal causation here.

True, not necessarily. But likewise, speculation does not equal evidence. The actual evidence suggests that the US ultimatum to the Egyptian military was a strong force toward Mubarak stepping down, and it correlates more highly timeline-wise than the protestors actions. I could plot it on a graph and it would make it more apparent. Obviously the Egyptian military leadership also had a strong say in what happened. Many things probably had to be a certain way for things to happen like they did. But to imply that the actions of say, the government of New Zealand or Lichtenstein somehow played as strong a role and deserve as much credit as the the US government (or the Egyptian military leadership or the Egyptian protestors) I think is not reasonable based on the reality of it.

Giving billions to a dictatorship may be bad but it also gives the giving country a lot of political leverage when they want some kind of change on the receiving end. To somehow hand wave that away as not being significant is not realistic I think.
What about coffeescript.
If there is a band out there with an active online community numbering in the hundreds (which means their offline following is a few orders of magnitude greater), I don't see why they shouldn't have a wikipedia page.
wow. I want to upvote this 100 times - you basically describe my exact situation.

I'm leaving a startup next month. I'm in a senior position so it was a very difficult decision to make in addition to what you said about the time invested / gambler's dilemma.

But in the end, like you said, I just don't agree with the direction the company is going - whilst at the same time I have no doubt that the company will continue to successfully raise VC, for the exact reasons you describe.

In a nutshell, get out of my mind, sir!
You need to work on how you say it, so that you don't come across as a trolling 14 year old. Especially the "moar" misspelling was over the top.

Considering your karma and how long you've been here I'm surprised I need to tell you this.
I can't read a sentence ending in "...is about to explode" without being put in mind of a low-rent press release from an idea-free MBA's idea of a startup.

Not that I think that's what this is, it's just an unfortunate turn of phrase.
What?! To keep the amount of articles low? Ok wait, why were they begging for 10 million dollars then? So they can have no content?

You understand that you just said the organization that's devoted to becoming the largest record of human knowledge is interested in keeping that large record as small as possible.

Holy crap, I officially give up. The internet is nothing but a giant never ending scene from Catch-22.
I've seen this get voted down by a non-trivial amount, then upvotes bring it back up, and now it's voted back down. Anyone care to, you know, comment about whatever you're finding in my words to be an assault on your faculties of reason?
Hopefully the events in Egypt will serve as a model for people in all the other Middle East, Arab and Muslim dictatorships. If they don't want a foreign country or coalition to come in and topple their regime then, well, they need to do something domestically to make it happen. Otherwise it's hard to whine. Pick your poison.
All of my work has come from referrals from previous clients in the U.S., but after 2 years it is starting to dry up a bit. I need to get my blog up to date and start improving my network, but getting work abroad is the same as getting work at home: get on the phone and start calling everyone that you've ever worked with.
Skype's Crazy Regex Easter Egg
Please add "bring back the slide rule". I've never used one, but I think graphical techniques (including the use of slide rules - multiplication can be done by addition if you use logs) helps you get a better feel for maths.

Programming is a separate subject. Computer driven data-analysis is also a separate art to mathematics, though a maths background helps understand it. But these aren't core maths.

"Computers are useless. They can only give answers" - Pablo Picasso
Computer-use should not replace the nitty-gritty mechanics; it should change the way students learn the nitty-gritty mechanics.

Instead of a homework assignment like this:
1. compute this integral.
2. compute this integral.
3. compute this integral.
4. compute this integral.
5. compute this integral.

Students should be getting homework assignments like this:
1. compute this integral.
2. write a procedure to compute any integral.
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Deletionism has caused innumerable PhDs and casual users alike to stop contributing to Wikipedia. It has been a cancer for years.

If Zed's article means someone at the Wikimedia Foundation finally understands the problem, fantastic!

First thing you do, please kill all of the rules lawyers (and maybe get some machine learning in there to clean up spam and pause edit wars, rather than relying on fallible humans with obvious agendas).

Till then, one can only hope that Zed's fork of Wikipedia gives it an incentive to move in an inclusionist direction. Perhaps a fork oriented around Facebook Connect, such that people edit with their real names and have property rights over their pages (Knol hasn't really properly executed on the idea, though it's been around for a while).

I'm pretty sure next year when Wikipedia start asking for donations I'm going to come out strong and campaign against them.

Brilliant!

Wikimedia person, you guys do a lot of A/B testing of your donation pages. Why not put something in there asking how many donors actually favor deletionism? I think you'll be surprised how many people have been turned off by it.

Just include it all and let search (and writer reputation) sort it out.
It's not the admins. There are relatively few of them, and they really don't nominate pages for deletion very often. When a page is nominated, it's the community that argues and the admin only deletes if there's clear consensus. The problem is that deletionists flock to AfDs like it's Mecca, and inclusionists are too busy writing content.
8 years at Microsoft: A tribute to my managers
Unlike Apple or RIM, they are entirely dependent on Android.

My Samsung Omnia 7 disagrees (WP7).
If there are good sources to write an article from, sure. But if there aren't any sources besides the band's website, their MySpace, and a few fans' blog posts, what goes in the article? The usual result is that fans just write a bunch of stuff about the band they like, which doesn't make for the best article. I don't personally care that much, but I don't think the world is greatly harmed by not having those articles, either; for that kind of stuff, there are always fansites and fan wikis, so they don't have to go on Wikipedia.
You're assuming that people don't know how Wikipedia works. I think most people who are angry with arbitrary deletion on Wikipedia have probably at some point read through enough of the WP: articles to understand why it's offensive.
Free Halloween Wallpaper – Best Wallpapers
FTP as a means of interfacing with your product might be over-the-head for a Comic Sans-targeted audience.

WYSIWYG or change the font; or both.
If only Wikimedia had enough $ to afford maintainers. Oh wait..
You might be responding to an earlier version of what I said, but I absolutely agree with you that it's got a lot to do with the software.

Do you really want the Wikimedia Foundation to set themselves up as a judge of the content in Wikipedia? I mean, apart from the fact that we have no mandate or qualifications to do this, how could you get an organization that fits around a few tables in a restaurant to judge all the edit wars in Wikipedia? In over 250 languages?!

If this problem is going to be solved, it's going to be solved in some distributed fashion, by the community, or by interested hackers such as yourself pitching in and giving the community new tools. There's a good chance you (by which I mean any hacker reading this) could get PAID to solve this problem.

Or, it's going to be solved by someone forking Wikipedia content or starting over, but the same problems have to be solved somehow.
Because it doesn't have to be necessarely bad in the long run. Think Iraq.
My current phone is slowly breaking and I've been searching for something along those lines. Samsung E2370 seems to fit the bill, though even it has some extraneous features:

http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_e2370_xcover-3152.php
Judging by the discussion so far, I would be willing to wager that most people in fact are unfamiliar and have not read anything.

One experiment that could be useful is for people to just follow the "Articles for deletion" page for a few days when it's not currently focused on something they're personally big fans of. Say, next Monday through Wednesday. Then everyone would be much better informed to explain what's wrong about the process and what to do about it. They'd also have a better understanding about the kind of crap that gets regularly deleted, i.e. why the rules exist in the first place, which is what any reform proposal would have to also account for.

But I think most people are just jumping in because someone said something bad about a thing they're a fan of, hence the mob style.
I was with you until you advocated the 80-hour work week. That's a sure recipe for burnout, not necessarily excellence.
Multicopter Paparazzi with extension Booz
What is the point of posting a 10+ year old toy? You could do this same thing in a very wide variety of languages, but since it's useless most people usually don't bother.
Plan A is a DOS attack. It's not about getting the information there, it's about putting so much there repeatedly that they have to admit that those topics need their own page.

Plan B wouldn't be "self-published". It would be published by me as a record of the languages that came out that year. Since no language I have is in the book, it's not self-published. If what you're really saying is Wikipedia doesn't recognize Lulu.com, then they're gigantic hypocrites. My book, "Learn Python The Hard Way" is published there, and has an ISBN and Lulu is my publisher. It's just as legit as my books published by Addison/Wesley, especially given their size.

You say Plan C doesn't work, but then here you are debating the topic, and Wikipedia's primary supporters are probably all over this. As many other people say, it's all filled with white nerdy males. If Wikipedia goes around deleting the things they like in order to "de-nerdify" the content, then eventually people will stop donating and go after them. I plan on doing it, and maybe some others.

Plan D is mostly a joke, but it might be good to create a record of the "great nerd purge" that seems to be hitting Wikipedia lately.

I also find it sad that you say people write things like this when Wikipedia deletes content they care about, and yet nothing is done. In fact, you sound powerful and proud of this fact, like it gives you a sense of pride, which is really really scary.
I'm like you:
I've been an active reader for the past couple years, but I rarely comment.

Sometimes I have stuff to say, but I'm afraid I'll spend the rest of the day coming back to HN and hope for acknowledgment and responses.
This could be selfish, I know, especially when I really know something about a topic, but I can't help it.
Pruning knowledge is a dangerous process.
No, after this and many other things I'm not interested in working for them, at all. Especially if I find out the rumors of a "nerd purge" agenda are true. If there is a call to delete "nerdy" content I'm gonna really turn up the destruction.
It's pricing like this that leads people to just buy the cheapest offering available, without doing any research. If you already know you will be taken for a ride, why not just pay the least amount possible for the 'privilege'?
Well.. wow, I take that as a compliment.
I should definitely read more HN comments though, to improve on my writing style (sorry, I got all my early English from coding and the rest from chats &c. (barely speaking a word even today), and those sources are undoubtedly not the best pool for poetry).

I must say that many people here are surely right what serious contribution is about, i.e. involving serious commitment, not sloppiness, which certainly improves on content quality.

However, if that scares away those of us who merely wanted to point out something without having the time for a proper pronounciation (especially non-natives), less a proof, it would be sad to lose their opinions.

Unproven Intuitions and fun statements must be allowed as well, otherwise you'd lose some important flow here, and who can say what might inspire others, effectively.

Prohibiting smileys and alike or limiting types of expressions through forced writing style can even mean worse, being contraproductive for the overall content submission. But surely there are better places for instant-talk.
> If you look at wikipedia's contributor stats it's like 70% white†, college aged males. (Actually wikipedians are like 87% male. http://feministing.com/2011/02/02/why-are-only-13-of-wikiped.... )

When an all/mostly black country invents something like the Internet, and then creates a website like Wikipedia, and then most of the nerds it attracts to administrate it happen to be black male nerds, then, yes, you'll see a different demographic mix. But until that happens, you'll see demographic trends that are likely (and reasonably) going to be heavily influenced by their starting conditions.
Looking at job boards never really occurred to me. Thanks man, I'll try that. Pretty creative idea.