Is it a bad idea? I created it. Wasn't trying to be anonymous or clever, just doing some ad hoc tagging of comments.

Most of the architecture is warren-like. It's natural that we'll evolve little subspaces as plazas by convention while the community is small. But there's room to grow. That's what I like about it.

You mean like this? (pdf) More: http://www.danah.org/researchBibs/sns.php.

(FYI as well, lil.)

Yes, that's weird :/

I'm not sure what they're finding broken, but we changed some DNS settings today. Perhaps they noticed that there were multiple DNS records for hubski.com floating around? It might be 48 hours for things to stabilize.

Please keep us posted if things get better or continue to look bad. I'll be investigating as well.

You forgot:

* The Talented Mr. Ripley * Three Kings * The Sixth Sense

1999 was totally the year for movies.

Ralph Fiennes was great in "In Bruges".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5K3E5tLoado

The book that got me off Card was Lost Boys. Incredibly gripping and moving while I read it; for a while I had it on my top 10 favorite books ever. It took me a while (days? weeks?) to realize that I'd been manipulated into sympathy for a repugnant worldview.

I don't remember the details. I think my brain has blocked it out.

We've had some teething pains, but that's mostly because of moving servers and foisting git on you :)

In the abstract I care about commit messages far more than I care about comments, because I believe comments are more useful with a timestamp. But it's still been low down my priorities given all the different technical debt we have to pay off. Since I'm already familiar with arc, comments seem mostly irrelevant right now. They'll become important at some point if we need to involve others. Maybe with the API? :)

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Talking about comments in isolation as a measure of codebase quality is like talking about height in isolation as a measure of mate quality. I think that's what your criticisms boil down to, and they're perfectly valid.

If the goal is to get newcomers to a place where they can meaningfully contribute, that drives everything. Well-functioning small teams rely on interactive discussion to orient newcomers. Since it's not clear that comments would ever replace in-person interactions, the default position tends to be that they're unnecessary/luxuries/evil, and that's reasonable.

In large teams, in-person interactions gradually get expensive, and that causes greater reliance on comments and other mechanisms.

I started out anti-comments, but have reluctantly come around to believing that there's nothing to replace them in certain situations. My current goal is to make the codebase intelligible to others even when I'm not around to explain it. That seems hard enough that I can't afford to be too ideological.

Bottomline: comments are sometimes useful, but there's too much dogmatic thinking on both sides battling over them. Attend to the big picture.

The main reason that so many of these cases, including that of the so-called cannibal cop, are prosecuted in federal court is that most state and local jurisdictions set a higher bar for conspiracy convictions, requiring that at least one member of the conspiracy be proven to have taken at least one decisive action toward carrying it out.

Holy tragedy of the commons, Batman!

Personally I find the notion of reading code without first running it to be meaningless[1]. We're unable to make sense of that program not because somebody didn't put some squiggles at the ends of lines prefixed by the right header, but because no muchine can run them, so we can't play with making changes and seeing what happens.

[1] Cue Dijkstra rolling over in his grave.

Yeah that's a goodie.

Rereading, I was struck by this quote about the patent office:

Today, people are filing patents, claiming that they just invented something which we had running back in the 1960s. How can that happen? Well, the patent office looks only at previous patents to see whether or not there is a prior claim. Of course, there are no patents from the 1960s, because they wouldn’t allow them. You were supposed to send the patent office not just a description, but a hardware implementation. Basically the notion of patenting something meant you carried to the office a model of the thing you were building, the thing that you had invented. And this just doesn’t work with software. So they had, for a long time, declared software as an unpatentable thing. Eventually, they decided that there is indeed intellectual property here, but it was quite a while later.

(http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/21/did-my-broth...)