austintaylor

A crappy anti-muni broadband law was passed at the state level a couple of years ago (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/03/cable-backed-anti...), so apparently the network has to be run by a private company?

There is joint initiative by local municipalities and universities to bring in a private company to run fiber (http://ncngn.net). It's not clear to me how this will be affected by the Google announcement. (They released a rather vague statement about it.)

On the one side, if you don't have copyright at all, it severely limits the ability of creators to monetize easily copied works. This became a problem with the printing press and copying has only gotten easier as technology has progressed.

On the other side, there are a number of problems with granting an absolute, indefinite copyright. One is that you stifle the creation of derivative works. Another is that obscure works can easily fall out of print and be lost forever. A larger philosophical concern is whether corporations should be allowed to hold control over the shared cultural heritage of a society long after the actual creators have died.

Almost everyone sees the need for some kind of compromise here. Personally, Canada's life+50 years sounds pretty reasonable to me.

I thought this was obvious, but maybe it isn't? I see disclaimers on Youtube all the time ("I don't own this") which seem to imply the person posting the video doesn't understand the difference.

IMO the biggest flaw in Ruby is that it doesn't really take advantage of this design choice. Of course there is a performance cost to this kind of dynamism, and all it really buys you in Ruby is the ability to monkey-patch other people's code (the advisability of which is debated). In the Lisp world you have tools like SLIME which provide a much shorter feedback loop to the developer by connecting the dynamic runtime to the editing environment.

Tools like pry move Ruby forward in this area but it is still nothing like SLIME. My impression is that the weakness of Ruby's module system, along with heavy use of OO classes, make it unlikely for Ruby to ever support that kind of development process.

(There are other examples of Ruby's Lisp heritage, such as everything-is-an-expression and implicit return values, but I think those are relatively small design choices compared to the runtime thing.)

One Thing Well demonstrates how one command (git checkout), while it does do 'one thing well' (changing your working directory to match something in the index), can handle a wide variety of seemingly unrelated use cases.

Only the Gods demonstrates how history can mean different things: commit parentage, which is usually immutable, and branch history, which is ephemeral.

The Hobgoblin probably refers to the Emerson quote "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."

The Long and the Short of It is about how git accepts `git --help command`, `git command --help`, and `git command -h` but `git -h command` returns an argument error.

A theme here is that git does not try to anticipate your workflow. Its commands and options are named based on what they do, rather than how you should probably use them. This makes git a very powerful tool, but with an interface that is often counter-intuitive.

In general, when I fall on the liberal side of an argument, I think it is for the reasons he gives (no fear, resist ossification). But when I fall on the conservative side (which happens just as often) it is not because of fear, but because I think that mathematically rigorous abstractions (pure functions, persistent data structures, etc) offer a more powerful way to approach the problem.

I think my attitude toward bugs (which he suggests is the defining issue) is more nuanced than this spectrum allows. Bugs are inevitable, and it's not the end of the world when you have a bug. We need debuggers. But I think that over time, if we are doing anything right, we should be growing a stable core of our codebase that is increasingly flexible and bug-free. I guess maybe this could be considered a centrist view. It is certainly neither liberal nor conservative.

Someone in the thread mentioned pragmatism vs. idealism. I think this is a much more useful distinction. I would definitely consider myself an idealist. But the pragmatic-ideal axis doesn't map to the conservative-liberal axis at all.

1. The bulk of the story is framed as Cobb & Saito's recollection in limbo. My theory is that the recollection (rather than the gun) is what wakes them up.

2. There is no explanation for why the first kick in dream level 1 (the one they miss) doesn't wake up Arthur, who is awake in dream level 2.

Licensing info might be useful as well. Some of these are free to read but not to distribute.

If you want to yank a line character-wise, you would do something like ^y$. I have Y mapped to y$ for this sort of thing.

You cannot yank a substring of a line line-wise. That doesn't really make sense. I typically open a new line with o and then paste in insert mode with <C-r>". So o<C-r>".

    (fn [r]
      (reduce #(cons
        (* (first %1)
           (/ (- r %2) %2))
      %1) [1] (range 1 r)))

  > Do I have to do everything myself?
  > (+ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10)

If this is not the case, the original article should explain why a straightforward reading of the bill is not correct.