skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I distinctly remember The Little MongoDb Book, I must have missed (or not had the problem at that time) the leaderboard one heh.
Yeah I don't go to malls because they seem like disease incubators and smell like human flatulence. But it's really not about the malls.
Yes, I did miss it. But you'll notice I did not use the word deletionism once in my comment so that's kinda besides the point. The more important issue is that bureaucracy is making Wikipedia unusable for casual users (philwelch also says as much upthread).

I understand you're trying to defend deletionism from the HN horde but I'm not even fighting that fight.
Ask HN: How would you beat Craigslist?
In terms of traffic, Craigslist is the overwhelming leader in online classifieds. With over 60 million uniques a month, it vastly outsizes competitors Oodle (~4.9 million), Backpages(~3.8 million) and others. Granted, this does not take competitors dedicated to one vertical(i.e. Monster.com for Jobs; Match.com for Personals) into account.

My question to you HN, is how would you compete with Craigslist to build a complete classifieds site?
- Jobs, For Sale, Personals, Housing, Services

How would you penetrate their first mover advantage and extreme market share?
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Your anecdote doesn't match up with the link's more solid evidence...
Many (most? all?) of the Stackexchange sites are already overwhelmingly bureaucratic. The difference between Wikipedia and SE is that on SE, the problem isn't "deletionism" it's "closequestionitis." That and a generally unwelcoming / unfriendly attitude expressed towards n00bs. But, ya know, it's working for them (for now at least) so what can ya do?
Amazingly for once, I agree with Gruber about the report being weird - but not with his reasoning.

What I don't understand is why look at a time window a significant portion of for which the primary OS under consideration (Android) didn't even exist on tablets. The Android tablet ecosystem effectively only came to market in a meaningful way in April(and even then it took several months more to release world-wide). Why would someone make a report in which half the considered time period is more or less irrelevant?
"It takes half an hour to challenge the community decisions of the website than in 10 years will simply be referred to as the encyclopedia? You can't be serious!"

You sound like the guy Louis CK talks about, complaining about how slow his smartphone is. "Give it a second!", one wants to respond, "It's going to space!"
It's not especially edifying to discuss your perceptions of Danny's hidden motives, when the intended topic of discussion is what Danny actually wrote.
"Customer Satisfaction"
> it's extremely difficult to participate,

I ask honestly: why should it be easy to participate?

> and I don't want to need to spend a bunch at Wikipedia reading countless rules trying to figure that out

You don't want to spend time contributing, you just want readers to accept your contribution? I hope I'm misreading your intent, as it sounds like you feel you're above the vetting process? I've made some modest contributions to OSS, and I've never expected anyone to accept a patch based on the fact that I feel like I'm a competent programmer.
The link's evidence is not solid. It's Distrowatch.

This article means almost nothing.
The problem I have with this is that Ubuntu does not require you to use a particular interface. I run Ubuntu with Xfce all day, and I have a few other environments installed for testing purposes.

I don't understanding switching distributions solely because of the default desktop environment. It's only a default, not a requirement.
This!

One of the things novices eternally miss about Wikipedia is that is might be their first time posting/supporting an article, but it is the eleven billionth time Wikipedia has has to deal with somebody like them.

When I got spam in in 1995? I would call spammers on the phone and politely talk them out of spamming. Now? I would happily nuke them from orbit. Most HN readers would.

One of the things on Wikipedia that wore me out is people approaching things like Jessie Stricchiola and Danny Sullivan did. I am sure they are decent people generally, and from their perspective I'm sure their self-promotion and drama spewing seems entirely reasonable. But man, when you're just a volunteer trying to help make something cool, stuff like this makes it get real old, real fast.
I'm not communicating well. I'm saying, "sure, Wikipedia's UX is clunky, but it obviously does work".

You should read downthread; other people have taken a closer look at Danny Sullivan's real experience working with Wikipedia's processes. This isn't a good case study to make a stand on. Give it a few weeks; Wikipedia will inevitably do something genuinely dumb we can get outraged about. It appears not to have here.
Mint's policy of having a custom Google search (that resets itself upon every browser update) in all their browsers[0] is rather off-putting.

I personally have switched over all my non-technical friends to Lubuntu[1]. It has proven to be fast, simple, and trouble-free. It follows the Windows metaphor very closely, which has made the transition painless for even those who know as little about computers as they can survive with.

0: http://stevehinesley.com/tutorials/linux-tutorials/linux-min...

1: http://lubuntu.net/
The analysis excludes the nook because it is an e reader, not a tablet. And yes, that matters. We talk about tablets because they are a platform for third party stuff to run on, nook is not a platform for anybody but B&N.

"Why is this so hard for mortals to understand"

No need to be an asshole
Count can be done with an incremental map-reduced. CouchDB does this automatically, but you could easily (read - with some difficulty) replicate this with any stack.

This would be much easier to do if Mongo had triggers.
Work hard

Produce quality code you are proud of. Believe in what you are writing and why you are writing it.

Focus on making good decisions.
Really? Twice in one day. I'll paraphrase myself from the last post:

Distrowatch stats are based on hits to distro pages on their 'informational' website. They don't reflect downloads, active installs or anything tangible beyond interest in a platform based on their #3 ranking for 'Linux Mint' in Google. Even the graph used on this pingdom blog say "Distrowatch's page hit ranking (Nov 23)".

In fact the Google Trends referenced below as "gage the interest in" stats are _more_ likely to be a barometer of real-world popularity as google searches will include a considerable amount of people looking for support for their own (current) platform, not just 'about distro X'. Hence Ubuntu's higher numbers.

It's not even fair to Alexa to call DW the 'Alexa of Linux popularity' the stats are that skewed from reality.

I'm not an Ubuntu fanboy, and fair credit to Mint for providing another truly viable user desktop distro, but I do get tired of the annual trotting out of bogus stats and misinterpretations for the sole (successful) purpose of flamebait, originally on slashdot, and now apparently HN.
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You're really sticking up for the wrong side in this one case. Read downthread at what really happened with Danny Sullivan's experience with Wikipedia. "Unusable for casual users" is certainly not a fair summary of what happened here --- even if you were going to start with the premise that overriding community votes was something that should be in the bailiwick of "casual users".
His point has an analogue in traditional book publishing. Historically they would decide (at least, in the US, up to say the 90's) what was a "bestseller" only after first excluding any book or genre they did not approve of, like romance, westerns, military adventure, the Bible, etc. Which just happened to have very high and consistent sales. In other words, the actual bestsellers were first excluded, then among the remaining they decided which of those also-rans were the least also-ranny, and called them the bestsellers.

Numbers: the best way to lie.
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Wikipedia presents itself as a pain in the ass. It takes very little energy to convince someone to walk away.
I can't agree with this post strongly enough. It's an amazing small insular community of bureaucracy.

I've tried to make a few minor edits and had my edits undone and squashed in a pretty unfriendly way, and encountered the same things that the author of this article did.

Bravo for calling it out and posting about it.
What Danny Sullivan did write appears to be disingenuous: he didn't want to read a noisy web page in order to override a community vote on Wikipedia, scribbled on a page he wasn't supposed to edit, had his scribbling carefully preserved by another Wikipedian, and then started yelling.
The "Top 5 desktop Linux distributions" chart (the first one) shows Ubuntu declining steadily from 2005 until now. There's no dramatic drop with the introduction of Unity in 11.04.

It DOES show Linux Mint becoming very strong in the past year all of a sudden, but, at least from that graph, it doesn't look like it was Ubuntu users who "flocked" to Mint.
I don't think he was trying to be insulting. From what I gather, he was trying to justify the negativity theme in the comments for this post, which was the subject of the original comment. I agree that the blog post was not detailed enough, and didn't talk enough about HOW you became a programmer in 12 weeks.
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Previous submissions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3261677 (2 days ago, when the link was slashdotted)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3261498 (a thread with comments)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3263367 (2 days ago, no comments)
"but this[gruber's] article is incredibly stupid, for exactly the reasons he posts about"

Gruber's article is a counterpoint on "PC manufacturers are dominant in the tablet space", and the idea that NPD were incorrectly attributing the "number 2" player to HP. Naturally the iPad comes into discussion (and yes it's smart to remove the iPad when trying to look at the rest of the market.) However NPD were publishing conclusions that aren't reasonable in light of the fact that the Kindle Fire and B&N Nook are selling very well in addition to the dominance of the iPad. By some reputable estimates the Nook is selling well in excess of HP. (To the tone of 15x the sales of HP.)
If I got treated in NYC like I've been treated and have seen people treated on Wikipedia, I'd never go back there either.
Everything I've seen from mint is that the people switching to it can't or don't want to install something as simple as a media player or a font, let alone a whole new DE.
No where in his post did he claim to understand all aspects of programming. This guy spent 12 weeks learning the basics, and is now working as a full-time programmer - presumably this is the road to "learn[ing] through experience, by working".
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When you install on multiple machines it's going to be a pain point, and knowing that the prime focus of Canonical looks to be Unity support there's understandable concern from users that their DE of choice will be sidelined (look at the complaints from Kubuntu users over the years regarding Gnome's preferential support).

I've run Ubuntu for years on multiple machines, and took a look at Mint in the past couple of months on this basis. A well put together distro, but until they change their policy of baked-in search hijacking on the browser, I think they'll have a hard time winning over the 'droves' being talked about here.
My experiences are identical. Their notion of community is tragic.
I also use Fedora. Mint is an Ubuntu derivative, so basically any tutorial about Ubuntu will also work for Mint, which I think is a big plus.
I clicked play on that video thinking it would be in informative introduction.. tip: don't press play
Interesting that doctoral degrees do not pay more on average than professional ones! Perhaps it is because most PhD's enter the field of research as opposed to industry? I haven't met that many PhD's in industry but there are a few.
What happened to Chatroulette?
Should I Seek Electrical Stimulation Physical Therapy?
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I think they are focusing more on WebM than h.264, so check it out with Chrome. They are probably fading out support for h.264.
What kind of information do you mean? I programmed, asked questions, programmed, read source code, and programmed. There's zero magic. I learned in the same way all human beings learn.

We're knowledge workers. I gained enough programming knowledge to be a programmer. Where's the confusion?
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.

I'm actually not convinced of that. That is, I'm not convinced it's a bad thing that people have to learn policy and acronyms in order to participate in a discussion. Wikipedia is - like any large, distributed group effort - entirely dependent on its processes. Without those processes, I don't think it could function. Your argument, as I understand it, is that people shouldn't have to become familiar with the processes that enable Wikipedia to function in order to be a part of how it functions. That seems contradictory to me.
Are you confusing Hacker News with Reddit? (for context, below is mattdeboard's deleted comment)

"Well, thankfully, I didn't write this for you. I wrote it for the people -- I suspect the vast, vast, vast majority of the HN readership -- who are not expert programmers, or even professional programmers, but they want to be."
I don’t think so. I have no problem playing YouTube videos on (Apple’s) mobile devices. The experience there is smooth and they use h.264.
The two rules you've outline are the primary reason i contribute very little to wikipedia.

I can put together a well-sourced piece outlining the importance of a variety of subjects which i am indirectly involved in, and give a dispassionate description of its relevance to the community it serves and the world at large.

Wikipedians, instead of saying "do that and have neutral 3rd parties check over your work", instead say "we do not value your contribution, and will delete your work".

As such, wikipedia isn't a place where knowledgeable people can contribute matters of expertise. And that really freaking annoys me.

Concrete example: The Knight Foundation's wikipedia page is incredibly sparse, and contains little or no information about the efforts they fund, or the substance of the work they do. This is unfortunate, because the foundation has been around for decades, is an integral piece of newspaper and journalism history, and currently funds a massive amount of the innovation taking place in journalism, including the project i work on, DocumentCloud (which the Knight Foundation entirely funded).

But, by the rules of Wikipedia, i shouldn't contribute to the subject. Meanwhile, there are plenty of startups and essentially irrelevant companies that already disregard the rules and write their own freaking wikipedia pages anyway. That's ultimately the real problem. Wikipedia is so capricious in the enforcement of the rules, and there's so little stopping people from breaking the rules, that deletions do seem arbitrarily and inconsistently enforced. I'm entirely unsurprised that there are so many cries of "injustice!" so often.
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That's just the old "success forgives everything" argument. It's a tempting argument, but that's also the primary mechanism by which success leads to failure. Wikipedia works, and is completely usable, by committed and dedicated nerds. Maybe even the dumb ones that work at the gas station.

Yeah, this guy was probably wrong, and this particular subject probably isn't notable. Wikipedia still could have given this guy a better experience in the process of figuring this out, and writing this guy off as worthless and not worth listening to is just arrogant and unproductive.
What about an native implementation of Freenet? Currently Freenet is an overlay network, on top of the Internet, but from my limited knowledge of Freenet, it doesn't have to be that way.
For those wondering about the backstory, I went and looked at the history of the deleted page.

The article for Jessie Stricchiola was created by account "Stricchiola" in November 2009. The commit message: "Added article for search industry pioneer Jessie Stricchiola". That account made only one other significant edit, which was to link the Jessie Stricchiola article into the first paragraph of "Search Engine Marketing".

Within 15 minutes, Wikipedians marked the article as insufficiently referenced, a probable conflict of interest, and possibly lacking notability. Stricchiola edited the article for the next few days, ignored the warnings, and eventually stopped editing. Other than minor fixes from Wikipedians, the article was basically untouched until September 2009, when user Cantaloupe2 nominated it for deletion discussion.

So as far as I can tell, a search engine marketing person wrote a self-promotional article about herself. Wikipedians immediately warned that the article had a number of issues, all of which she (and everybody else in the world) ignored for nearly 2 years. Somebody eventually noticed; Wikipedians discussed it and decided the article was unsalvageable.
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If this article is inaccurate and flamebait-y then why don't we flag it so that it is removed from HN?

P.S I thought the same and hence flagged it.
"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."
--Leonardo Da Vinci
> 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.

It seemed like the person the blog post was referencing passed that requirement as well, but was deleted.
In the case described in the posting, if I found it to be a valid claim and could not resolve why the problem was occurring within 24-48 hours, I would likely suggest that we create a new account for the client and populate it with the titles we knew he had purchased and perhaps provide a $100 or similar amount as compensation.

For this case, my team would have resolved it within 24-48 hours, based on the information that he's posted. It doesn't seem overly complex, assuming no fraud (or his account was mangled in a data transfer or deleted in someway and he hasn't mentioned that), and the resolution takes a few hours of someone making the new account and searching for titles to add to the account.

As a longer answer...

We didn't deal directly with public relations or issue press releases concerning significant public domain complaints, as to the best of my recollection, we didn't have a large PR nightmare to deal with while I was with the team. So that aspect I can not comment on.

If it was an issue of fraud, and we had several instances of fraudulent claims, we would clearly state that was our conclusion to the customer (or claimed customer). Our company did not actively pursue legal action against fraud cases, including a significant internal fraud case that was discovered, because of the possible negative publicity and loss of public reputation/brand quality.

Though through escalation, if I could not personally (as head of the team) find a solution to the issue and we felt it was fraud, we would offer to arrange an in-person meeting with the customer and ask that they bring their (or a) lawyer as the department VP, along with our legal team, would like to discuss the issue in detail. I don't remember more than one client coming in for a meeting in a two year period and we had security officers in the next room (with blinds down and listening in) in case there was a problem.
There is LMDE too: Linux Mint Debian Edition, which is based on Debian testing (so it's a rolling release).
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I really like the free OS X application Ingredients - http://fileability.net/ingredients/
Cool site. You should really put overflow: hidden to .sidebar.

Man, we should really start to use a few different themes for bootstrap, all new sites are starting to look alike... a lot!
That wasn't a "try" - that was a success. Thank you!

If I may attempt a paraphrase: CPU caches stop being a bandage for slow access to RAM and become a valuable first class citizen for each core of the CPU when coupled with the actor model.

Did I understand you correctly? Again, thank you.
>>but your comment largely renders advanced degrees, like PhDs, about as useful as some poorly written Java book with regard to success as a software engineer.

I am not saying that at all. All I'm saying is, as programmers we tend to assume knowledge of text books and programming is all that is needed to win. And that if you have it, that is all there is that it takes to win.

This is largely untrue. I have seen that this is hardly what it takes.

It's important to learn the fundamental and concepts, but if you are bad at everything else. In the the practical scenario you and the 12 weeks programming guy will both sail in the same boat. You will be bad at one set of things, and he will be bad at the other.
>Were there any interesting ah-ha moments?

Yes, all of them. I have them every day. Today's was Solr's facet.limit/.prefix/.mincount methods as it relates to what I'm working on. Nothing stands out because it was a huge bolus of information.

>What would he do differently?

Nothing.

>What guidelines would he give to someone else in a similar position?

http://mattdeboard.net/2011/11/23/how-i-became-a-programmer/

>How did he find an appropriate mentor?

I was lucky. I answered this both in the comments and in this thread.

>What was he surprised to learn?

The level of apathy among a lot of programmers.

>What can he do now that he couldn't do when he started?

I can program now, so there's that.

You think it's hand-wavy because you think I'm holding something back. I busted my ass dude, I worked very hard. That's not hand-wavy, that's just really what happened. I taught myself a lot of shit by reading, asking questions and trying new stuff. There's no mystery or secret sauce.
All such studies suffer from the same debilitating flaw—there are almost certainly confounding variables at work. To reach any firm conclusion, you would need to compare degree recipients with a cohort of statistically equivalent people who could have earned degree X but did something else instead. All these "education pays" charts show is that people who earn advanced degrees earn more money. But such people are also probably smarter and more determined than average. You don't need a Ph.D. to know that correlation doesn't imply causation.

P.S. This is not sour grapes. I have degrees in physics from Harvard (A.B.) and Caltech (M.S., Ph.D.), and I make well more than the median earnings for Ph.D.s.

P.P.S. I know the real reason these sorts of studies proliferate, but this comment is too small to contain it.