1. Third party statistics sites like Alexa and Compete are horribly untrustworthy indicators of reality.
2. Growing traffic isn't the best way to foster a community. I believe pg has written about this a few times, with regards to communities in general and HN.
I think the Quora community is amazing. It's very populous and the quality of answers is generally on par or better than specialty interest sites/forums from a wide range of topics, all in one place. Of course, it has its strengths and its weaknesses - for example, a strength would definitely be reading an answer from an actual CIA [something] analyst, former Foreign Service Officer, doctor, etc. on a relevant question, but it falls behind in areas like technology IMO.
The site is annoying and I hate a lot about the community (surprise, it turns out "mature adults" can use shitty memes just as much as the teens everyone blames for them on reddit), but I think they've done a great job at fostering the kind of community they want so far. If anything, it's being threatened by the pressure of growing.
A more interesting comparison if you're going to use medicine, IMO, is how it's the exact opposite for surgeons compared to doctors. If you believe The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success by Kevin Dutton (which is the basis of this HuffPo article):
It makes sense because doctors require a high level of empathy whereas surgeons need to be better under pressure, be able to hold longer focus, etc. which are qualities of psychopaths.
It's where people (think mostly the lowest common denominator of wannabe hackers like script kiddies and such, i.e. not just bad but fairly inept) go to learn how to and share information about stealing credit card information, usually leading to minor levels of success if they keep at it, it seems.
I go to Wikipedia itself all the time. I just type 'en' + enter into my address bar because I'm so used to it, but I'm sure there's probably millions of people that always go to the first page instead.
I still think it should remain mostly as it is, though. I didn't like their changes to it.
"Below is Khan’s e-mail to me, which I shared with the author of Monday’s post, Karim Kai Ani, a former middle school teacher and math coach who is the founder of a company called Mathalicious. He said Khan is wrong. This won’t be the end of the debate."
It was part of the recap, I understood it to mean "Khan responds to this guy who posted the other day who said Khan was wrong" and then "stay tuned for his response to Khan's response" rather than "And then he replies Khan is wrong in his response. Stay tuned."
For trying to get away from the story book evil sounding-ness of an entity named "Blackwater", they sure didn't do very good with "Xe", which sounds even more mysterious and potentially evil-doing IMO.
Academi sounds a lot better though. And they do a lot US LE/gov't/etc. training which is probably what they would rather emphasize than their being a "private mercenary company".
Well, until we figure out plausible ways to control weather reliably on a large enough scale, at least. Without killing the atmosphere or our species or anything like that.
Written documentation is fine, but a quick video would help. That's not unreasonable for something like this, you could have replied more nicely. Instead of like a terrorist.
Well, they did crash into a rain forest that was so dense she couldn't even see the planes she heard above searching for the wreckage. I imagine crashing over something like that has to be one of the safest places it can happen (not counting the survival rates post-crash).
It's because it looks like a landing page for an internet marketing ebook. I scrolled to the bottom to make sure it wasn't that or a mailing list full of the secrets for success that somehow got to the frontpage.
I was first introduced to computers at age 9 (I'm not that old, the internet had been around for a little bit) when my "girlfriend" got me to talk to her on a chat site over summer break.
I started getting more and more interested in the things I saw like the way the chat programs worked (they were java applets), exploring them as a user and mod and learning how to "hack" them. It wasn't long before this lead me to communities where I was also shown HTML and I started learning about it.
When I was 10-11, I got into modding boards like the InvisionFree ones, which taught me a lot more about HTML and exposed me to JavaScript as you only had limited access to them so that's how all the modding was done, and a lot of those communities intersected with ones about making your own forum systems and/or modifying forums you had more access to (like hosting your own phpBB or IPB forums) which got me interested in PHP and MySQL.
By that point I'd heard a lot about C, etc. too and I was a lot more curious about computers than I was my schoolwork so I'd spend as much time learning about everything I could as possible. I started migrating to more general programming and hacking oriented communities when I was 12 and would stay up literally all night most nights and make up the sleep on the weekends, and I haven't had a proper sleeping schedule since.
Why does that make everybody happy? What I got from the article was that the difference in cost to the ISP for having someone connected at all and using a ton of data had grown increasingly minimal in recent times.
Is Yao Ming the best comparison though? He's 7'6", something that sets him apart more than ethnicity would. I wouldn't be surprised if Lin's did play a part, maybe not overtly, just because Asians in the NBA are fairly underrepresented.
Weird. You only posted two minutes ago, but our experiences seem to have been much different as it loaded the next images instantly for me. The only delay was for comment pages, but that's to be expected.
Start Googling around for ISPs in your area. Look for ISPs' sites and forums discussing ISPs in your area.
From there, you'll have to check on each of their sites to see if they service your address or not. Hopefully you'll find some that do. I've tried dozens in my general area, and none of them did.
Awhile ago I got so desperate I nearly resorted to T1, but it's hard to justify for my purposes... and generally my internet connection through Comcast is pretty reliable, but for about a month or two back then they couldn't/wouldn't figure out whatever was causing it to be nearly unusable.
The way they talk about spare parts, sneakers, etc. makes me wonder how we would ever be able to store all of that material. Maybe there will be ways in the future, but with that much variety in things they think we'll be able to print, literally how will we be able to keep it all stocked? Printer ink is hard enough for some people. Of course, this entire thing is about how stuff we take for granted now seemed absolutely ridiculous in the past, so I won't dismiss it.
I'm probably not the average MU user, but 99% of the stuff I used it for pretty legitimate. Game files/recordings, map files, photo albums people were too lazy to upload one by one, personal videos between friends we didn't want to upload somewhere public like YT, etc.
This is all anecdotal and I probably agree with you that the average user most likely just used it to download music and pirated content, but I do think you're overlooking a ton of legitimate usages as well.
1. Third party statistics sites like Alexa and Compete are horribly untrustworthy indicators of reality.
2. Growing traffic isn't the best way to foster a community. I believe pg has written about this a few times, with regards to communities in general and HN.
I think the Quora community is amazing. It's very populous and the quality of answers is generally on par or better than specialty interest sites/forums from a wide range of topics, all in one place. Of course, it has its strengths and its weaknesses - for example, a strength would definitely be reading an answer from an actual CIA [something] analyst, former Foreign Service Officer, doctor, etc. on a relevant question, but it falls behind in areas like technology IMO.
The site is annoying and I hate a lot about the community (surprise, it turns out "mature adults" can use shitty memes just as much as the teens everyone blames for them on reddit), but I think they've done a great job at fostering the kind of community they want so far. If anything, it's being threatened by the pressure of growing.