skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How does one stay geeky and secure good pay checks?
This applies to those that may want to be able to fall back to
employed gigs when they're not working exclusively on startups and/or
side projects. Many of us here are working on our own things on the
side, and there's a need to ensure that (1) we're well paid on the day
job, and (2) the work is still technical enough to compliment our side
work.

It's a global market place now, and as programmers we're often
competing against not just Australia's best or (insert your country /
local city / university)'s best, it's the world's best - and there are
likely people in the world that are cheaper to hire than you that can
do the same thing. This is what keeps us in our game, forces us to
innovate, and makes this one of the most rapidly evolving industries
in the world - so I think in an overall sense it's a great thing.

However, I've noticed that the natural inclination in working "for the
man" is for people to want to get away from the tech work as fast as
they can, to work their way through the ranks of management. Reasons
often cited are that "tech work can get outsourced very easily", or
that "it's just the thing to do when you want to get higher pay". But
what if you really like the tech work?

In light of this, I'm really curious as to HN's opinion: what do you
see as the key qualities, skills and attributes needed to keep your
hands dirty (i.e. stay focussed on hands-on work, not managerial) and
still remain extremely well-sought after and well paid?
Seems odd to separate Asia from Europe and not separate North and South America. I mean Eurasia is even on the same plate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Plates_tect2_en.svg

But, I expect when they start teaching people which plates things are on plenty of people are going to find it strange.
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He hasn't made any hard choices, he just picked what is most available and put the pieces together.

Frankly he'd have bought me if he made his hands dirty with some obscure 8bit assembler. There he'd have to really THINK his way out.

At least some sweat during rolling his own data structures and algos around them would make him something in a shape of a programmer, but not this.

Of course what he's done is cool, learning anything new is worth some pat on the back. But this is a newsfeed on hacking, and Lords, it ain't hacking. Let's call things what they are, ok?

There's also the problem that some people like him start calling themselves programmers on the job market and when we're trying to hire them, they occur to be only Django programmers with very limited abilities. Practice makes perfect, but they didn't do it yet. Have some interviewing experiences like that. Not funny.
Indeed, the strict 'encyclopedic' standard that got Wikipedia this far, as a defense against lots of problems, is now itself a damaging constraint.

I'll soon be launching a reference site called Thunkpedia which loosens the 'encyclopedic' standard, but adds other constraints in its place.

There's a video about my motivations, and a sneak peek of its interface, at http://thunkpedia.org. More discussion is at the project blog, http://infinithree.org (from the original codename).
I am aware of multiple cases where subject matter experts have tried to fix errors relating to their area of expertise, had the changes reverted, and given up. The phenomenon is by no means limited to "SEO experts", but extends to, for example, law professors, including law professors widely regarded as the foremost experts in their speciality, trying to fix obvious non-controversial errors in an article relating to their speciality.

All it takes is one editor deciding that this is a good opportunity to play a status game. And it doesn't take long hanging around Wikipedia to learn that for a significant fraction of the active user base, every opportunity is a good opportunity for a status game.
I think it comes down to what the goals are.

If the goal is to connect peer to peer with a small group of people you know in person and can trust, I see great potential. People congregate in small groups. Facebook friends, Skype contacts, etc. The advantage here is that third parties like Facebook, Microsoft and a gazillion advertisers are not involved. If it's small like that, it's doable as an overlay without using wireless as long as at least one person has a reachable IP and can act as the keeper of everyone else's address info.

If the goal is to create some sort of www replacement that must scale to global internet sizes, where any stranger can connect, and where kids are allowed to do all the things they're not allowed to do legally on the www, I see big problems.
Ahh I see. That's really cool! No bloat and easy to use. I'll have to consider this for my next project. Honestly I think CommonJS gets too much flack. It's bounds better than ECMAScript Harmony's module draft.
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Even although they make less money than apple by an order of magnitude

Apple makes more money than Google, but no where near an order of magnitude more. It would be more accurate to say they make between 2 and 3 times more (depending on what you call "make money"):

Apple: Revenue = 108.25B, Gross Profit = 43.82B, EBITDA = 35.57B

Google: Revenue = 35.76B, Gross Profit = 18.90B, EBITDA = 13.45B
Over 200K what?
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What Wikipedia really needs is for a UI expert to step in and fix what is essentially a broken UI.

Requesting a reinstatement of a deleted page in a properly designed UI should take no more than a couple of clicks and 1 minute of reading, tops. Navigating a twisted web of broken or confusing or incorrect links with walls of text at every step does not a good UI make.

All of the UI frustrations the op experiences snowball into a frustrated response, which only aggravates and frustrates the editors who receive such responses. This, in turn, further snowballs things until everyone is aggravated, nobody wants to contribute, and Wikipedia stagnates.

So, fix Wikipedia's UI. It's in everyone's long term interests to do so.
If this guy had discovered the Internet in the early 90's I have confidence that he would have been single handedly responsible for inventing top posting.
SJCL is a very nice piece of code. Not all Javascript has to run in a browser.
I think you didn’t understand me. That’s not what matters. There is no need to count continents. It’s unnecessary.

If you know every property of something it’s not necessary to ask whether it really is a continent or not.

There isn’t even a communication problem when it comes to this question so it isn’t really necessary to find some sort of great definition.

No matter how many continents you told there were, if you payed some attention you know what people are talking about when they say America, North America, Europe, Asia or Eurasia.
The more important question is "Why do you want TC to cover you?" Does your target audience read TC? If not, you shouldn't bother.

Get your product in front of your target customer. Get some relevant blogger to cover you. Cold call potential customers and buy them lunch in exchange for trying out your product.

Getting coverage in TC should be a means to an end - getting your message out to your customers, helping with credibility/recruiting, etc. TC coverage shouldn't be viewed as an end in itself. Getting customers to love your product - and be willing to pay for it - is much more worth your time.
Wikipedia policy is that articles must meet certain criteria, of which "notability" is only one. Were there verifiable sources? Was the article promotional? Was there original research in the article?

Wikipedia has guidelines to ensure that the facts cited in articles are verifiable and accurate. These guidelines are overstrict by design. It's better to have some true information deleted than it is to allow false or promotional material into the encyclopedia.

You don't cry when your patch gets rejected for failing unit tests. Likewise, you shouldn't cry when your article gets deleted for violating Wikipedia guidelines. If you do have verifiable sources and a version of the article that is factual, then it shouldn't be difficult to recreate the article in a manner that allows it to avoid deletion.
I get what you are saying but I still rather your teacher gets a page in a different site (Facebook is perfect for that, create your own group) if she doesn't have much notoriety (startup idea?).

But you probably don't want Facebook because it just doesn't have the same status that Wikipedia has, right? (i.e. Most Facebook pages are junk) Wikipedia did not achieve a high status by letting somebody's teacher have a page (No snark intended), and there lies the rub.

If Wikipedia lowers their standards then that means that your teacher will get her page along with a lot of spammers. Right now Wikipedia is quite good, if they open the gates the spammers will ruin it.
It will not surprise you to learn that you are far from the first to complain about the flat discussion pages. They have a lot of advantages - they're just easier to work with for a lot of things like rearranging sections, creating new sections, etc. - all stuff that your random social news site (like Hacker News) simply does not let you do because it would be a UI and vandalism nightmare.

There was a nearly complete effort to rewrite talk pages: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:LiquidThreads But it turned out to have atrocious performance, and the few times I used talk pages on wikis with it enabled, I wished they really hadn't enabled it.
A more extreme example is the Amanda Knox article on Wikipedia. For years it was kept deleted by a cabal of British English speaking administrators and editors (Knox's murdered roommate was British). A deletion review finally overturned the deletion a couple weeks after Knox's conviction was overturned.

http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2011/03/amanda_kn...
> This does not refute in an way that MS quit the EEE game. Merely, you seem to troll me ("Cool story, bro.").

I'm trolling you because the claim that MS is trying to EEE HTML/JS/CSS by implementing hardware support for rendnering in IE is inane. Both Chrome and Firefox have the same capabilities, and I've seen more that one site (I actually use IE9 for specific reasons) that usually point me towards the usual bunch.

>Exactly, a few big fish and some smaller pure trolls. I am not aware of industrywide patent enforcement. There are thousands, if not tens of thousands of IT companies, who don't pursue software patents let alone enforce if they have.

So what in your mind makes Apple and Oracle different from Microsoft? If not, just concede the point: hating the players is pointless, the game is broken.

> If MS decides to sue they decide to sue.
Your point here is? Sure, if I implemented C# according to the standard and my own set of libraries, the company could try to sue me. I am positive they wouldn't get very far. But continue on with your Stallman like conspiracy theories.
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We do (Bloomberg), but on equities, not commodities. We are working on it though :)
Here is a distinction I've been trying to make clear over the past couple of days.

While our "vision" of the absolute end goal sounds slightly more like the second, our actual goals are to produce the first. This is a much more realistic plan than our vision, and is what the project really aims to do. The vision just aims to bring everyone together about a set of issues that have been very much discussed in recent times.
So the only added feature is that it is in 1080p WebM / HTML5 combination? (Since H264/HTML5 1080p was already available)
Conclusion: I should buy a bigger screen supporting at least 2560x1080 resolution.
Well, in general terms, if the USMC (or the Army, or the Navy, or...) really did build up work ethic - a personality trait that correlates quite a bit with income - why do veterans seem to do so poorly, even veterans who never experience the confound of war? Because personality traits are, like IQ, very tough to alter. (This is why that psilocybin-increases-Openness study got so much play.)
Not necessarily that the guy did something malicious, but he could be making it exceedingly difficult for amazon to solve his problem. It seems like such a simple solution to me - if the account is for some reason not unlockable, create a new account, gift credit the guy all his purchases, and permanently close the old account. I know that the CSRs have the ability to do this. If they aren't, there's a reason.

Initial guess, from some experiences with chargeback happy customers, is that the guy started initiating chargebacks before giving amazon a chance to resolve his problems, and amazon is refusing to help him until he cancels the chargeback process.
While I can't be sure, I doubt WePay is going to take their typical fee on this, since they're the ones raising the money.
The problem we are definitely running into is that as a crowdsourced project, we have a lot of people who don't know what they're talking about. However, we have a small subset that do (myself not included, I'm more aiming to get the ball rolling than anything) and have been hard at work on the project. There is a lot more noise than signal right now, but that will change as a more solid technological platform for local mesh networks arises. Once we have a basic platform we will begin to address issues such as the addressing and other scaling issues.

So I guess my final point is that we ARE working on a hardware platform and then we will work to make this accessible to the average person on /r/darknetplan . There are hurdles, there are idiots, but we are working on it and I don't think it is safe to call the project failed until we've had a chance to actually try.
The OP's complaint is 20% that they deleted an article they shouldn't have and 80% that the software and culture of Wikipedia is completely opaque and unusable to everyone except the most dedicated contributors.

It's absolutely retarded that discussion pages are just wikipages where you have to handle comment threading and nesting yourself with indentation syntax. It's absolutely retarded that you have to learn tons of policy and dozens of acronyms before you're deemed qualified to discuss whether an article should be deleted. And it's absolutely retarded that by default, unless you spend the time and energy to learn dozens of acronyms and policies and "get really involved with the site", your input is at best ignored and at worst openly suspected of bad motives.
Microsoft doesn't have enough money to buy a better reputation. I'm not sure how buying Yahoo helps at all.
>The problem with Wikipedia is rather than consistency they go with, "who got here first and what is a large majority of the article written in? (British?, American?). All the other pages on color all use American English but apparently someone using British English got to Orange first. It's a huge mess but I suppose it doesn't matter since no one types in disambiguated names.

That's a problem? That's exactly the policy I use with the legacy codebase I manage. If you're making a change to an existing file, you should make the changes according to the file's existing style, regardless of whether you agree with it or not. It prevents files from becoming impossible to read when different people edit it over a period of months, or even years. Wikipedia enforces this policy for the same reason. It's pointless and distracting to have an article that changes from tyre to tire every paragraph.
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I'm watching a startup right now that is doing the opposite. They are marketing vaporware while trying to build the entire feature set for launch. We'll see how it works out, though history says that this is normally the wrong way to do it.
It's too bad that the people who perennially propose adaptive mesh radios as some sort of decentralized alternative to public wired networks never consult anyone that has actually worked with mesh on any scale. If they did they'd quickly look for some other solution. I thought Greenberg was a real journalist, what's happened to fact checking?
And yet somehow, as absolutely retarded as Wikipedia is, it continues to be the most successful reference site on the Internet. Funny how often stuff geeks find "absolutely retarded" turn out not to matter in the real world.

I really shouldn't dignify your comment though, because it dubs "absolutely retarded" a process that got a non-notable SEO consultant's book considered by someone who could find out how many libraries carried it, and no money changed hands to make that happen.

Seriously: the interface you're complaining about? Even if it had been perfect: that article wasn't a keep. Jessie Stricchiola doesn't belong in an encyclopedia; at least, not yet. Maybe she'll fix all of click fraud, instead of commenting about it; then she'll be notable.
Thanks! Yeah, ECMAScript Harmony's module proposal uses new syntax, which basically means most developers won't be able to use it for a while. Also, I'm not sure if Harmony supports loading/using multiple modules defined in a single file.
Hit the nail on the head. There are a ton of very enthusiastic people there who collectively have very little technical knowledge.
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Has anyone else huge problems with YouTube’s HTML5 player on the desktop? You can test it out if you activate it at http://youtube.com/html5. Be sure to watch a video without ads, only those will use the HTML5 player.

I’m running OS X Lion and Safari and I get stuttering video and awful performance. This doesn’t happen to me with any other HTML5 video player.
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I see, thanks. I originally wrote omega (I knew it was the last letter, alpha/omega and such), but changed it after checking the character viewer in OS X, which called it an ohm.
There were rumors that Pete Cashmore *(Mashable) fired Ben Parr, but no reason was given to what led to this action.

Also, Arianna Huffington and Heather Harde (TechCrunch) recently got into an email argument, which now led to Heather resigning as the CEO of TechCrunch.

AOL should wake up and see this call, TechCrunch had one of the best writers (and still do, don't get me wrong), but they lost key players and are starting to fade away.

On the bright side, TheNextWeb has been improving, shout out to Hermione!
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Looks like Color was beaten to the punch.
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I would like to think that, in some small way, the exposure of this on HN and keeping it on the front page for so long helped them, uh, see the errors in their ways.
The article is a usability study of a scenario where a committed but novice domain expert has something to contribute to the Wikipedia process. The deleted article itself is just a MacGuffin.
On the one hand, yes, yes, yes. On the other hand....

95% of the effort that goes into Wikipedia may be nothing more than primate status games among insiders, but those games motivate an extremely large number of people, and because so many people do get involved, the actually-useful work is 5% of a very large number. If some change in policy cut the political bullshit in half but drove away two-thirds of the people who, in between PvP battles, improved the quality of the encyclopedia, it would be a net loss.
Folks, thanks for the great response. I just put up a site explaining the process and containing the details of the training, and an application form

http://devbootcamp.com
Launched my site into beta on 11 Nov

Submitted site to TechCrunch, Sitepoint and Mashable's Spark of Genius series

Fixed a ton of minor little things and a few major ones - expand/collapse, media uploads, frontend profile editing

Read as much as possible about startups, community management, other entrepreneurs, etc.

Realized how little time there is trying to develop and launch a site after a full work day
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If there's an article about his company in a legitimate publication, then he can put a page up for his company in Wikipedia. It'd pass the notability requirement and the requirement for verifiable sources.

The problem is that getting rid of the notability requirement would lead to lots of people putting up pages with nothing more than opinion. It wouldn't be spam. It'd be more dangerous than that. It'd be unsourced opinion disguised as factual information.

There's also the fact that Wikipedia is much more of a finite resource than, say, Google. Google has millions of server and a data center staff of thousands, backed up by even more thousands of programmers dedicated to making things run smoothly. Wikipedia is 400-odd servers and a staff of less than a hundred. Opening things up like you say would quickly overload Wikipedia's infrastructure, degrading the encyclopedia for everyone.
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The politics are so bad because the stakes are so low... I have a hard time believing that there's any grave risk to throwing open the doors on Wikipedia, simply because not all Wikipedia articles are equal.

I've been on the other end of this. The shitty little start-up I worked on for many years somehow managed to squeak past the finish line of notability and keep its shitty little Wikipedia entry from being deleted (despite the fact that it was mostly written by the marketing department). And you know what kind of difference it made? Absolutely none. To the best of my knowledge, precisely 0.0% of the site's traffic came from the 'external link' in the Wikipedia entry. We got precisely 0 phone calls or emails from potential customers who heard about us on Wikipedia. VCs did not magically dump piles of money on us because we were listed on Wikipedia. Engineering candidates -- even bad engineering candidates -- never spontaneously sent us their resume after reading our Wikipedia entry.

Conversely, given that my startup benefitted not one bit from having a Wikipedia entry, I'm quite confident that if a competitor had wasted 15 minutes of his time to deface our Wikipedia article, it would have hurt us as a business not one lick.
I'm with you in this one! I heard the rage and entitlement too! The author is out of line. Instead of talking about this constructively he posts a temper tantrum and everyone sides with him. I got downvoteed to hell too with my initial reaction. I do admit though I was very sarcastic and snarky but I think it warranted it. I mean, this post really did come off as the equivalent of a digital temper tantrum. How do you respond to someone who behaves like? Surely with the way that post is written and the points you make you cannot take him seriously anymore.
>>Something I don't get about people on HN and their attitude towards Wikipedia.

You are overestimating your average hacker news reader.
I agree. The wikipedia people seem petty and bureaucratic at times, but their hearts are usually in the right place.

My coworkers all got together a few years ago to create a gag article about another coworker as a practical joke. We built a web of subtle edits to associate our friend with some German rock band, a type of haircut, and a bunch of other things.

We eventually got our article up, and there it sat for about a month. Some wikipedia person figured it out, though, and unraveled the whole network of references in a few hours.
I'm not sure how much of the article you read. You have a long angry rant (that makes good points) about people that get upset because a Wikipedia page they care about is deleted. The article is not about that, it is about how hard it is to figure out how to navigate the Wikipedia waters to give support to an article that has been deleted or is up for deletion, etc. It is about Wikipedia's usability in cases like this. (If you did read the article and knew this, but still felt like ranting on a tangential note, I apologize.)
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