I would prefer the money to go to http://www.wikinfo.org at https://secure.ibiblio.org/gift/ because:

* Original Research - Wikipedia does not allow any. Wikinfo's solution: Allow original research with editor registration.

* Wikipedia only allows certain types of information, as it is purely an encyclopedia. Wikinfo's solution: All types of information are allowed

They state that they have 47 staff. 22 tech is fair enough as you say there is an operational overhead. However I don't see why they are paying for programming work required when the majority of that can be done by open source volunteers.

10 people are described as 'other program': I'm guessing this means "Support strategic volunteer work" and "Bootstrap community programs in key geographies". But why not just let the site grow organically? Why do they have to spend time encouraging people to be editors? The volunteer model has worked so well in the past that it seems to me that the motivation behind this is purely expansionism.

5 members of staff for fundraising: again why act like a corporation instead of letting people donate if they think the site is valuable.

There is also $1.8M spent on external contractors: what for?

$380,000 on travel works out at $8000 per person. That's a lot to get to wikimania and 3 nights in a hotel.

Overall it is a bit galling to me that they have built the site on data contributed by us, it is edited by us and now they want money from us at the same time becoming more and more dictatorial over the type of content that may be submitted and unresponsive to users complaints.

Running a site with 70M users/month and relying on the "majority" of new development work to be done by volunteers. I think that is highly optimistic.

Regarding contractors I might say that their multimedia-related code (ie the in-browser audio/video player) is done by Kaltura, an external contractor. http://kaltura.com Penny counting is a bit too much, folks should be paid properly. But their drift away from "organic" growth is a bit disturbing indeed.

I think you need a link there to http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ : thought you just meant it wasn't readable! Readability is great: before that I was just copy & pasting to a text editor...

I predict a rise in crossbow sales in the near future

A lesson on logic from somebody who equates "It's often the foolhardy and the ignorant that tackle problems that are supposedly impossible. And sometimes end up succeeding" to "It is often the ignorant who succeeds" seems ironic to put it mildly.

:-)

It seems to me that data going over a publicly accessible network that is designed to let that data go by whatever route is necessary has been routed over a part of that network.

How is that a problem? You cannot expect your internet data to be private: the nature of the beast is that it will be public. Anything sensitive must be encrypted in such a way that by the time the encryption is broken by your enemy (considering the likely resources they have) the data is no longer useful.

Did I miss something?

That just shows an empty white box for me (FF 3.6).

The right arrow button to look at the different links has poor discoverability. The first link is shown twice on the main page, and there's no real indication that there are any more links. [edit: slowness was caused by twitter being open in another tab!]

Licorize is an interesting idea, but I feel needs more work before being unleashed on the general public.

Don't know why but refreshing fixed this issue for me.

Btw, it's the 2nd or 3rd time i see a link to something on licorize but every time i feel its interface it's a bit hard to "get" and a little confusing (it could be me). What about removing the image list at the bottom (it ruins the layout imho), making the page preview clickable and use more identifiable icons? My €0.02.

We are working on the layout of Licorize booklets - updates will be online soon, including hand picking which images to show.

Is there much benefit to

    fact = lambda n: _if (n <= 1) (1) (lambda: n * fact(n-1))

over

    def fact(n):
        if (n <= 1):
            return 1
        else:
            return n * fact(n-1)

1 line vs 5 lines doesn't seem like an advantage to me when it takes pretty much the same amount of time to read and understand the complicated 1 liner.

Is there more optimisation possible?

     python -c "import _if; fact = lambda n: _if (n <= 1) (1) (lambda: n * fact(n-1)) ; fact(5)"

The main advantage of a 1-liner is that you can compose the whole thing and execute it without having to format anything. That is a nice feature for code that is only ever intended to be used once, such as from the python repl or some other shell. --Or more than once, for the duration of a session. It's a lot easier to use command history to get and modify a 1-liner than to replay a 5-line function definition.

When the code is primarily expressions, it's relatively easy to to this. Trying to do one-liners with regular python syntax can get tricky.

Also, if you have a series of similar relationships to present, it's often easier to line them up next to each other. You might cut 12 lines to 6 lines and the whole thing will be far clearer. Although in those cases, it's probably more effective to use a dictionary to achieve the same thing, with the advantage of data/logic separation.

    fact = lambda n: 1 if n <= 1 else n*fact(n-1)

or, for that matter:

    def fact(n): return 1 if n <= 1 else n*fact(n-1)

The point was to demonstrate that the one-liner fits easily as an argument to 'python -c' from the command-line. You could also point out "import _if;" probably won't let me call "_if()", but again that wasn't really the point.

Also, you'll need to know the version of python:

    $ python
    Python 2.4.3 (#1, Dec 11 2006, 11:39:03)
    [GCC 4.1.1 20061130 (Red Hat 4.1.1-43)] on linux2
    Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
    >>> fact = lambda n: 1 if n <= 1 else n*fact(n-1)
      File "<stdin>", line 1
        fact = lambda n: 1 if n <= 1 else n*fact(n-1)
                            ^
    SyntaxError: invalid syntax
    >>>

I understand you just copied the same snippet for your example. I'm just pointing out that Python does support that kind of if natively, so that people won't think that it doesn't.

Sometimes I put short ifs in one line, just personal taste

    def fact(n):
        if n<=1: return 1
        else:    return n * fact(n-1)

One of those times when I hugely miss languages with pattern matching/guards.

  fact(1) = 1
  fact(n) = n * fact(n-1)

Seems much more readable to me.

Which I guess can be written like

   def fact(n):
        return 1 if n<=1 else n*fact(n-1)

unfortunately not on python 2.4, which is the version we have on our production servers (2 yr old Linux)

One liner

    def fact(n): return n*fact(n-1) if n>1 else 1

They are of broadly equivalent complexity (if you are used to Python) and you can fit more of the former in an editor window.

I don't like tho' that "lambda" is a keyword in Python, I much prefer Haskell's \ or OCaml's fun.

   from math import factorial

Or

   fact = lambda n: reduce(operator.mul, xrange(1, n+1), 1)

"available to buy in over 30 countries" ... leads to ...

"The page you asked for does not exist You may have followed an out-dated link, or there may be an error in our service. We apologize for the inconvenience."

Whoops.

Why just restrict the search to buy-now items? In my experience more of the esoteric stuff seems to go on straight auctions and buy-now is used mainly by commerical retailers.

Yes, I plan to support things other than buy-now. This was just the simplest way to get something running.

My plan is to have it wake up every hour, check if it's won something in the last 24h, and if not then do a search for items to bid on that are closing in the next hour.