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Welcome to Wikifunctions

wikifunctions.org

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Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#12

Post by userbinator »

js8 wrote: post #8
userbinator wrote: post #2

There is a link on the main page titled "Decolonizing Functions", which leads to... https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Abstract_... I'm not sure if that is satire, or for that matter this whole site.

Your outrage at this seems to be analogous to outrage of people who think that it is horrible that Unix has a "kill" operation. Basically, you don't understand that "decolonization" is a metaphor for a broader historical perspective, and instead you're trying to interpret it literally and in a bad faith.

The only ones talking about "decolonization" are on one very extreme side of the political spectrum and trying to inject identity politics into everything.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33607032

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#13

Post by nottheengineer »

4mitkumar wrote: post #11

Wow... Would this collection be helpful as a free and curated source of coding blocks to train future LLMs on?

Probably, but LLMs seem to gain more understanding from seeing lots of different examples than they do from a few examples of good code so people won't stop scraping stackoverflow.

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#14

Post by atoav »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #9
abathologist wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That page seems totally reasonable and admirable to me. It’s literally just advocating for including the wide and varied history of algorithm development, in order to encourage readers from many different backgrounds to find ways to connect with the important topic.

[flagged]

If you want to write who invented the algorithm and there is one asian invention in 1303 and one by some eueopean in 1803 then leaving out the asian inventor is actively harmful to the encyclopedia as it distorts truth.

This article to me just tries to raise awareness for the fact that our western history of who invented what is often incomplete and sometimes simply wrong.

Historians right now have the unenviable task of considering how the history they work with has been distorted by racism (e.g. by playing down the role of certain people with the "wrong" race and instead attributing things to people with the "right" race).

I'd like an encyclopedia to list all inventors of something even if they are not known in my culture — preferably in my own language as well, but that is a different topic.

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#16

Post by userbinator »

abathologist wrote: post #5
userbinator wrote: post #2

There is a link on the main page titled "Decolonizing Functions", which leads to... https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Abstract_... I'm not sure if that is satire, or for that matter this whole site.

That page seems totally reasonable and admirable to me. It’s literally just advocating for including the wide and varied history of algorithm development, in order to encourage readers from many different backgrounds to find ways to connect with the important topic.

What exactly do you mean by "to find ways to connect with the important topic"? That sort of obfuscated language doesn't help explain anything.

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#17

Post by raincole »

js8 wrote: post #8
userbinator wrote: post #2

There is a link on the main page titled "Decolonizing Functions", which leads to... https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Abstract_... I'm not sure if that is satire, or for that matter this whole site.

Your outrage at this seems to be analogous to outrage of people who think that it is horrible that Unix has a "kill" operation. Basically, you don't understand that "decolonization" is a metaphor for a broader historical perspective, and instead you're trying to interpret it literally and in a bad faith.

People also got mad at Git for having default branch named master.

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#18

Post by nologic01 »

The documentation doesn't quite match the ambition of the project which may complicate the onboarding of new contributions

Some suggestions for immediate questions that people might want to see on a landing page:

* How does the function collection relate to existing function libraries in various programming languages

* What are the target domain and range of the function set, i.e., what is the overall scope of the project. Even if its open ended it needs some meaningful and self-explanaory scheme to categorize and group them

* What are some gee-wow uses. Why should one be involved. How can this be used outside wikipedia etc

Re: Welcome to Wikifunctions

#19

Post by mg »

What is everyone's favorite function / formula?

Mine is

    n/(n+x)
It has a bunch of interesting aspects:

    As n gets bigger, it goes from 0 to 1.
    
    When n equals x, it is 0.5

    As n gets bigger, the difference between n and n+1 gets smaller

    For two sufficiently large n's, the results are equal.
Say somebody told you about a new cafe in town and that it is completely awesome. The best cafe ever. What probability do you assign to it really being an exceptionally awesome cafe? If your x is 3, then the probability after one person praised it is 25%:

    1/(1+3) = 0.25
And if another person told you about that cafe being awesome, the probability becomes 40%:

   2/(2+3) = 0.4
And after 3 people told you the cafe is awesome, chances are 50% it really is:

   3/(3+3) = 0.5
The changes in probability are pretty strong at the beginning. But after 1000 people reported about the awesome cafe, the next report makes almost no difference anymore. It only ups the probability from 0.997008 to 0.997011.

By changing x from 3 to 4, your formula becomes more "suspicious", by changing it from 3 to 2, it becomes more "gullible".

I wonder if this formula has a name already. If not, "the trust formula" might be a candidate.

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