skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From his blog a year ago:

"... have just started back to school for computer science. I’ve been poking clumsily at programming for a few years, but only in the past few months have I actually started to take ideas of my own and successfully bring them to life.

... While I don’t think I can study an algorithm and announce its big Oh complexity, I’m getting there.

... going to school does take time away from my actually programming and self-learning about computer science in general."

Twelve weeks not exactly starting from scratch.
While this is the typical story about online "cabals", this is also the story of how Wikipedia's alleged success as a platform - no meta-functionality, everything is accomplished through the Wiki itself - is also its failure.

MediaWiki is great software for collaboratively editing documents. It is lousy software for workflow management. All the Kafkaesque dead-ends he describes are wiki pages that try to use other wiki pages as a medium for controlling the process of creating wiki pages.
I think Amazon embracing Android is great for Google in every respect.

Primarily because as long as the underlying platform doesn't branch too far away, every dev who makes something for the Amazon app store is almost certainly going to also make it for the Android Market. That means a huge boost to the interest in making tablet friendly apps for Android and a huge boost to the potential return from making an Android port (or an Android exclusive app) for a developer.

But also it is great for Google because it validates all their arguments about Android being an "open" operating system and will keep allegations of things like anti-trust and other potential criticisms of Google's role significantly muted.
Just the latest victim of the deletionist forces. This is the reason I, and many many other people have given up on contributing to Wikipedia altogether.

Jason Scott has a very eloquent description of the problem [1],[2], and Wikipedia's failure in addressing it several years ago; nothing has changed since then, and I doubt it will any time soon, since the Wikipedia administration sees no problem with the status quo. It's sad.

[1] http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/808

[2] http://www.cow.net/transcript.txt

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in...
Find one paying customer.
Sometimes the initial version of code can be like a Rube Goldberg machine

I like that -- "Rube Goldberg" would be a good moniker for initial releases :)
Corollary: How well would the fundraising go if you could only make contributions by following a MediaWiki-based editorial process?
Per the title of this HN thread, I think the money quote is

OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme LateBinding of all things.

I also love this:

In the article Is Software Engineering an Oxymoron?, Kay writes: "Until real software engineering is developed, the next best practice is to develop with a dynamic system that has extreme late binding in all aspects."
The Wilderness Downtown (Watch in Chrome)
Recently I noticed that Google Chrome has a custom search built in for what.cd (a huge, exclusive music sharing website). When logged in, typing in the URL "what.cd" and hitting space brings up "Search What.CD Artists:" Autocomplete also continues to suggest "what.cd faq" as the first result for "what."

It makes sense though. What.CD is a tacit community, much less known about than any of the more "mainstream" file-sharing networks mentioned in this article. I wonder if Google is consciously just leaving it alone because reckons it can afford to. This move is no doubt a PR move and a legal precaution (understandably). It's just funny how they've been selective against the public networks.
He pointed out exactly why he posted in a "wrong" place and presented how frustrating it is to get to the right information. He's saying that the process is broken and you're saying he did nor follow the process... I think your response doesn't make much sense.

He did quite a lot (i.e. Tried to follow instructions) but was effectively sent to /dev/null. Regardless of whether the original article should be restored or not, I think this points out some interesting facts about how wikipedia works.
Mad props on sitting down and actually hacking something out :)
I spent a half-hour just trying to find the right form to merely request that the page be reviewed for restoration. That form, as I explained in detail, doesn't actually work.

There is no form for pages that have been deleted. There is a page only (as best I can tell) for pages that are under consideration for being deleted. Once they are gone, they're gone -- unless they were removed for the ill-defined uncontroversial reasons.

Yes, I think that Wikipedia would welcome having subject expert barge right in when editors who are not subject experts are having a debate and looking for expert advice. I think they'd welcome that very much.

If you actually read the debate on the page I've written about, you'll see the editors don't understand the space that well, cannot find citations to prove or disprove what they're arguing about and in the end someone declares that the lack of an agreement is a consensus.

When I get alerted to this, and I'm trying to share detailed reference based on both first-hand knowledge as well as third-hand resources to actually help them make a decision, there is simply no easy way to do this, not unless I want to spend hours figuring out the insider mechanism to Wikipedia.

That's simply not how it should work. That is a massive Wikipedia failure, that actual expect on a subject cannot easily contribute.

If Wikipedia is designed only to have experts on Wikipedia contribute, then it will continue to succeed as a successful summary of non-expert guesswork.

I think, however, it is more than reasonable that those who are involved in the system take a hard look at how many barriers they've erected and whether the bureaucratic system that has come up couldn't be made more user friendly.

But hey, the next time you register a car at the DMV, and you've got to go from one window to the next, maybe you'll think no, it's your fault for being upset -- that's just the way the DMV works, and you're to blame for not having studied the bureaucracy better.
Two of my favorite quotes of all time:

“Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.” – Alan Perlis

“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.” – Charles Mingus
We did an MVP as well, but we also learned a lot from a quick 5 questions survey. We got 60 answers from our target market, identified and confirmed pain points and got our initial beta testers this way. We just asked people to fill it out and spread the word on FB and Twitter.
These people are abusing the terminology. They know they are supporting piracy. They know it's illegal. Theyre counting on ignorance, exaggeration, and this new Sense of entitlement to free music, movies, and software that's infected the younger generation (at least in the US, and I'm only 25 but it applies to my peers too). They're using these great ideals like freedom as shields and in the end they're going to hurt all of us because of it. They want to act innocent as if they're being persecuted unjustly. It makes me so mad that the freedom of the web might be restricted and it's these same people who say they love freedom so much who gave law makers the excuse to be able to do it!
That's because 1) There is a policy against Americanizing British spellings for no reason (this is probably a good thing); 2) frequently experienced editors are much too harsh with new contributors and don't explain why (this is definitely a bad thing).
If you don't want to use a mouse, why not just stick with cli? It doesn't require a mouse and can do everything any gui can do and more.
A Young Steve Jobs definitely would not get in [YC].

Prove this statement.
> If the author had just been willing to | <snip>

Many many many people have had these types of problems with Wikipedia. This isn't an "everybody else" problem, this is a Wikipedia problem. Wikipedia is a success, but it does have serious flaws in the bureaucracies of how it deals with contributors and new content.

> If this person had been allowed to just barge in and trample Wikipedia's policies on who is notable, despite having zero knowledge of how Wikipedia works, that would have been a Wikipedia failure.

Ok, I'll bite. Why would Wikipedia have failed?
Ideas for Network Marketing Meetings
Thanks for the great tips. Splitting the process to the different workers is a good idea.
You missed the part where the author provided several citations of publications mentioning the unnotable person and books published by the said person. He also goes on to state, if the goal of Wikipedia is to encourage subject matter experts to contribute expertise it's not making it particularly easy to do so.

Wikipedia policies exist to facilitate user contributions, not the other way around. Wikipedia itself says as much: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules

This is not about entitlement. This is about Wikipedia raising ridiculous bureaucratic barriers to people making good faith contributions of knowledge. In so doing, it undermines its basic mission.
Interesting. You point all the bad things the author did in regard to wikipedia's process, which I suppose is fair. But at the same time, you don't really make a compelling argument that the person in question doesn't belong in wikipedia.

Should I take this to mean that the merits of the article in question are secondary to Wikipedia's processes?
Planes, Trains, Automobiles, & Foursquare Check-ins
What You've Always Wanted To Know About Search Engine Optimization
Two questions. 1) Do you do that for everything? Including database and memcached connection settings, cache settings, basically everything that's configurable about a web app? I'm not an IDE user nor familiar with Java, so that's a serious question. 2) How do new developer's get an environment set up quickly?
Bidirectional. Json. Json.
HN is full of people who pride themselves on caring about UX, right?

Here's (effectively) a first-time user trying to make sense of the process of Wikipedia--this should be a great time for introspection about how to make it more usable (especially when pestering the users for money!).

So--perhaps--it might be worth it to do something other than dismiss his complaint?
Absolutely! I'm a recovering drug addict (3 years sober) and I have found the closest thing to the heaven I once experienced on heroin is the state of mind regular exercise puts you in. You're in control, you feel more energetic, and on and on. It's a wonderful tool and it isn't used as often as its prescribed!
Flagged for removal. Notability?
How Telecommuting Beats the Recession
>If the author had just been willing to spend half an hour learning about Wikipedia's policies instead of bitching...

Half an hour? You cannot be serious?
Perhaps nothing can be truly 'open' to contribution given that everybody has a different opinion and everybody often believes that they are right. Probably a huge number of newbies who tried posting something on Hacker News, will also feel that HN is closed and unfriendly as well. Is it really unfriendly or just a resource-management issue; it may be better not be perfect but can satisfy a large audience.
This is an egregious copy/paste job.

Original article: http://www.inc.com/articles/2010/09/inside-the-mind-of-a-ven...
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Yes, I agree. We are currently working on our video demo. Since you use Campaign Monitor and are familiar w/ email marketing, I would have loved your FB on the software.
cool project! one design advice though. Remove the large yellow rectangle above the video that shows your history. I like the idea, but dont make it so dominant, it kinda distracts too much. :)
DO NOT move Orange (colour) to Orange (color).

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.

The problem with Wikipedia is its a very large bureaucracy, and the culture of Wikipedia seems to weigh heavier on confirming from 3rd party sources that a person is "notable"

What's confusing is that Wikipedia also wants to "welcome" anonymous edits, which leads to huge problems with vandalism, but editing Wikipedia has a high learning curve.
Geong drops plans to buy online marketing firm
Education pays ...
This is funny, and leveraging the humor to donate to Charity: Water is brilliant. I donated just for that.
Blocking is not done via robots.txt. It would more likely be IP-based.

Impossible to block Google? Probably true. But only because they have been allowed to grow so large as to be indefeasible. And the reason they've been able to do that is because of what the commenter said: websites allowed them to crawl, fast and hard, year after year. This is not true for all bots.

I'm not sure how this is relevant to the article and the specific issue. I don't disgree with what Google is doing in this case. And I understand why and where Google is headed.

The issue of who is allowed to crawl and who is not is something the commenter raised. It's a huge issue that people take for granted, in my opinion.
The page on notability seems to imply that notability means having sources that don't require original research; which is a reasonable thing to do but probably should have just been put under that rule.

Wikipedia avoids original research for a very good reason: to keep out physics cranks and the like, who would infest WP otherwise.
More non-minorities talking about the life and experiences of minorities? It's uplifting to see the talk, but it would go well with some first hand experiences too.
New Relic - The Death of the Salesman?
I'd be very surprised if that actually happened, seems like it has been a lengthy integration process that isn't yet complete in all locales.
I wonder how he even got the idea to create something like spark. It's such a "unique" project. I wonder if he has a list of ideas or it just came to him spur of the moment.
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His case for the notability of his friend doesn't seem to add anything that hadn't already been considered by the Wikipedians already, and his attitude was monstrously shitty. Especially his reaction to the guy/girl that removed his comments on the page that said not to leave comments on it, saving them on his "user page" with a helpful message about the process to get the debate, which was already over, reopened.

I hate the tone of this. He knows what should be in Wikipedia, and what they should consider notable under their standards, yet feels put upon by having to know what a "talk page" or "deletion review" is, and assaulted by being informed of a talk page being created for him. In turn, he assaults the random person who tried to help him with his goal by saving his work and giving him directions with more than a half dozen paragraphs of angry, condescending tl;dr like he was reading his list of grievances to the King of Wikipedia.
I personally find Wikipedia semi-useful as an ultra-high level view of topics I want to refresh myself on or get interest in. I wouldn't cite it in any remotely academic or meaningful forum, but it's an amazingly broad repository of information.

I hold this view mainly because a great friend of mine, a college associate professor, got sick of students explicitly violating his directive to avoid Wikipedia as a primary source and started randomly changing entries.

His first (and in my mind best) work was when another friend who is very into music mentioned a jazz musician that he really liked. The professor friend said, "Oh yeah, he's the one that composed the background track to I Wanna Sex You Up". Then he rushed off to update that artist's wikipedia page to reflect that statement. My musically-inclined friend called back the next day and said, "Wow, I never would have guessed that!"

Is this a good thing? Absolutely not. However, seeing the unquestioned acceptance of Wikipedia content has opened my eyes to the way that the system can be gamed or used to support lies or propaganda. Because a musician was wronged? No, its the principle. I now take everything I read on wikipedia with a colossal grain of salt. You should too.
Actually, I think YC is incredibly diverse. Each batch has people of different gender, ethnicity, and country of origin. More importantly each batch has people with an incredibly diverse range of personalities and experiences - there are nerds, athletes, business people, political activists, and everything in between.

Everyone shares focus and determination, which I suppose makes people look the same on the surface, but if you dig a little deeper you'll be pleasantly surprised at the diversity of ideas, personalities, points of view, and experiences.
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I think I installed adblock once and never bothered reinstalling.

I dont like ads, I just dont dislike them enough to care, if they bother me that much I dont use the website.
This is great! The Apple doc browsers are SO awful. I've filed a report with Apple about it. The problem seems to be that their search/index code always runs locally and is abysmally slow.

Can you auto-select the top result by default? It's a drag to press down-arrow to select the first result.
Turns out if you throw together a few thousand neckbeards and convince them to play status games around building an encyclopedia, you get an encyclopedia.

You also get a whole lot of stupid politics, wasted energy, process wanking, flamewars, and acronym-laden cryptic discourses where words like "arbitration" have strange, Orwellian connotations. ("Arbitration" is Wikipedia's name for the process governing, among other things, removing administrator privileges and banning contributors for long periods of time.) Contributing to Wikipedia is a usability disaster because of all the red tape, process, policy, and other crap the core group of contributors has constructed.

But the project is big and popular enough, and the work is easy enough, that people still throw themselves into it. You start by just making a few small edits to something, or adding some sources and information to an article. Then it goes on a bit, and you learn some of the terminology and process, and you start feeling personally invested in it. I mean, it's Wikipedia! It has lots of information about everything! It's free! The human race needs something like this! Before you know it, you're in a "community" of core contributors. There are people with impressive titles like "arbitrator", "administrator", "bureaucrat". You start playing status games. You worry about your edit count. You try to get an article up to "featured article" status. You network. You try not to make enemies. You try to sound wise on "Articles for Deletion", or the "Administrator's Noticeboard", or a million different talk pages. Eventually someone nominates you for administrator. You answer a few questions and other contributors vote for you. Let's assume you played politics well enough leading up to this point. You win! Now in addition to all the crap you were doing before, you get to play with your administrator tools as well. Fun, eh? Well, for some people it is. But at that level, Wikipedia is 90% politics. There's an awesome encyclopedia there for sure, but man, you don't want to see how the sausage is made.
Steve Jobs and Business Dogma
>Now, the author feels entitled to barge in without learning anything about how Wikipedia actually works

that's kind of the point. the author tried to figure out how wikipedia works. they couldn't figure anything out because, as far as i can tell, all wikipedia documentation is designed to scare away anybody who isn't already an established wikipedia editor.
In Response to SOPA, Reddit Meshnet Project picks up steam
Didn't personally find it funny (I respect you and others may, however).

Clearly they're not going to buy Yahoo and it just reeks of shameless publicity stunt to me. Donating to Charity:Water just makes the thing viable - otherwise why would anyone want to actually put money in here.
The World Without Facebook
Getting Back Together With Your Ex – 6 Tips
Chrome adds sites that you visit to your list of search engines [1]. It's not built in.. typing in what.cd and hitting space does nothing for me.

[1] http://superuser.com/questions/276069/google-chrome-automati...
Walkie Talkie App Voxer Is Going Viral On iPhones and Androids
No, I'm saying that of all the XMonad users who know Haskell, none has bothered to write an alternative configuration system. That is, once you know Haskell you seem to no longer find interest in such a system.
Epic Groupon poem, especially for those who do not understand why this is price action is happening!

http://www.thereformedbroker.com/2011/10/30/groupoem/

Here are the first three verses as a teaser:

Gather round, dear investors, and hear all about

The worst IPO that has ever come out

It's hitting this week if the stars align right

But only the foolish would look for a bite

---

For Groupon is now past the peak of its glory

Its promising start a well-known story

Of youthful intensity, vision and zeal

Of crafting the perfect consumer-led deal

---

City by city, Groupon grew like a weed

Positioned as marketing for the small biz in need

Coupons for shoes and coupons for socks

Offers for Lasik and half-off on Crocs
3 Reasons to Write Plainly
This critique reminds me very strongly of Evan Miller's "How Not To Sort By Average Rating": http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating....

In both cases, the key observation is to realize that the meaning of the numbers is more important than the numbers (or how they're calculated, per se). This point is kind of abstract--especially compared to the salient examples in both pieces--but if you're looking to understand why this error is so common, look first to the fact that it's not an error of stupidity or insufficient maths.

You can sometimes avoid a big practical problem (e.g., an avenue to attack your system via diluting meaning ("spam")) by abstractly considering the meaning behind the structures available to you.