Is that a thing? I don't seem to be able to do that with 18k+, so if it exists there are only a couple dozen people that can.

That rationale may be a bit revisionist, here is Olin Shivers' take on RMS's justification for elisp's dynamic scoping:

"Some context: Common Lisp did not exist (the effort was just getting underway). MIT Scheme did not exist. Scheme was a couple of AI Lab tech reports and a master's thesis. We're talking the tiniest seed crystal imaginable, here. There was immense experience in the lisp community on optimising compiled implementations of dynamically-scoped languages -- this, to such an extent, that it was a widely held opinion at the time that "lexical scope is interesting, theoretically, but it's inefficient to implement; dynamic scope is the fast choice." I'm not kidding. To name two examples, I heard this, on different occasions, from Richard Stallman (designer & implementor of emacs lisp) and Richard Fateman (prof. at Berkeley, and the principal force behind franz lisp, undoubtedly the most important lisp implementation built in the early Vax era -- important because it was delivered and it worked). I asked RMS when he was implementing emacs lisp why it was dynamically scoped and his exact reply was that lexical scope was too inefficient. So my point here is that even to people who were experts in the area of lisp implementation, in 1982 (and for years afterward, actually), Scheme was a radical, not-at-all-accepted notion. And outside the Lisp/AI community... well, languages with GC were definitely not acceptable. (Contrast with the perl & Java era in which we live. It is no exaggeration, thanks to perl, to say in 2001 that billions of dollars of services have been rolled out to the world on top of GC'd languages.)"

http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html

(emphasis not my own)

That whole page is a good read, particularly if you are a fan of Shivers' writing style.

Cool, I hadn't read Olin's take.

However, the cited rationale can't really be revisionist of what RMS told Olin, because it was published in 1981, about 14 months before Olin came to MIT in 1982.

It appears verbatim in RMS's paper, "EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable, Self-Documenting Display Editor," A.I. Memo 519a, ftp://publications.ai.mit.edu/ai-publications/pdf/AIM-519A.pdf (March 26, 1981). He doesn't mention an efficiency justification in there.

The whole document is also fascinating for including RMS's nascent but not-fully-baked early thinking about free software.

Hmm, good catch, I didn't notice when that was published.

Ideally anything that you reject for should also be conveniently baked into the build system so that you can do things like `make validate` before pushing to save yourself the embarrassment.

pre-commit would be a bad idea. You would have to ask all of your developers to install the hook, instead of just installing it on your 'official' repos and it would quickly become a nuisance to developers who liked to create temporary commits with no intention of ever giving them out to the rest of the world. These developers would quickly become annoyed at the pre-commit hook, turn it off, then you would be back where you started (except now you would have a false sense of security).

I do agree that pre-commit isn't the best choice though. I prefer update hooks; I find they are simpler to write and easier to read.

A braggart might construct a humble persona, but would a true braggart maintain such a persona for long? If they could, is there really any basis for calling them a braggart in the first place?

Being a braggart seems fundamentally incompatible with "not bragging", for years on end, about your greatest accomplishment (and barring the possibility that SN is somebody very famous, say, Putin, it is almost certain that bitcoin is the most famous thing that SN has done). Not in a "Scottish, but doesn't wear a kilt" way, but in a "Scottish, but does not live and was not born in Scotland" kind of way.

The presentation is pretty good (fairly minimal, which I like), but I think that some autocompletion in those search forms would go a long way. Things like showing autocompletes for town names or strains.

Barring the possibility that you are in a jurisdiction with unusually draconian drug laws, sure it's legal. This site is just telling you how much different strains cost at different businesses where you can legally buy them (currently, if you have a prescription). The site itself isn't selling weed.

Nowhere in Washington or Colorado is selling recreational weed legally yet (although many businesses are partially through the licensing/application process).

fwiw, Leafly seems a bit easier to use than this site.

I believe there is now one business in CO that has their permits :)

Hmm, it looks like you are right, but I think they can't start actually selling until January 1st. I'm not quite sure there.

In Washington it will still be a few more months, since anything sold recreationaly needs to be grown explicitly for recreational use, and that process cannot start until the permits are issued (I believe they have until the end of this year before they are required by law to start issuing permits to grow (or sell)).

Fun graphene fact: As the article mentions, graphene was first isolated at the University of Manchester using sticky tape. For this discovery, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics... making Andre Geim the first person to be awarded both the Nobel Prize and the Ig Nobel Prize. He was previously awarded the Ig Nobel Prize for magnetically levitating a live frog.

So which accomplishment do you find more rewarding? While I see graphene becoming an extremely popular 21st century material, levitating a frog is the first step to levitating anything larger.

The frog was levitated using diamagnetic levitation which is pretty much useless for anything in the real-world (hence the ig Nobel, not Nobel).

The magnetic field used was stronger than the confinement field in ITER - so stronger magnets than you need for nuclear fusion.

We can already levitate much larger things, such as trains.

Thanks. Good point on the trains, completely missed that.

I guess levitating a live frog seems more interesting to me however. To be able to use magnetics to simulate gravity for humans safely, is IMO, a huge barrier (of many) to space travel/living one day.

My understanding is that they do use such magnets for microgravity experiments. Here is a cool video on diamagnetic levitation from the University of Nottingham: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nod54HFkH0o

You have just rediscovered the reason that some people talk about "free software", and some people talk about "open source".

The sort of access to source code that is being expected here is really no more than the sort of access that you can get to Windows code. It really is not an unreasonable expectation.

No - when most people use the term "open source", they mean something along the lines of the Open Source Definition (http://opensource.org/definition), rather than the literal meaning; this is independent from the distinctions between open source and free software, which are mostly about philosophy rather than the set of applicable licenses (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html)

I suppose that you, however, do not, which makes what I was trying to say irrelevant.