evilotto

I think the most important property to preserve is causality; that is, if a user sends a message B after they have read (i.e., received) a message A, then B should come after A for everyone, because B depends on A. Basically use a Lamport clock.

That's not what it was at all.

Any time you say that something can't be done, you will attract people who say "I have found a way to do it!" Even more so if you have a proof that it can't be done. This phenomenon is far older than the internet; the term "morbus cyclometricus" suggests its origins in antiquity.

The FAQ maintainer was not looking to profit off fools. They wanted to chase them off; after spending several pages explaining why the task is impossible it is tedious to explain to a crank (the term generally used for such people, as described by Underwood Dudley) that they are in fact wrong, the task is impossible, and here's why. It's easier to say "Pay me if you want to waste me time" and reasonably assume that no one will do it.

It's similar in spirit to the James Randi challenge. You're not going to win it, because you're not going to prove that math or science is wrong. But the JREF had as its goal to expose the charlatans, and had the time and resources to devote to the task. A newsgroup FAQ maintainer has neither the time nor the resources. So they shouldn't have volunteered? Then you have no volunteers. Hooray for the internet.

Now yes, every once in a great while someone will come along and legitimately do something that was claimed un-doable; the obvious case is George Dantzig. But that case also shows that any scientist or mathematician who can be shown an error in something thought impossible will be thrilled at the discovery, because that is new knowledge, which is the whole point. Poking a hole in the rules of the contest, finding a weasel way around them, is not something interesting at all.

This is why we can't have nice things.

Some volunteer puts in time maintaining something and makes a claim that is obviously correct and - most likely in jest - promises cash to anyone who shows it to be wrong. Then some rules lawyer decides that he's better than the unpaid volunteer and does his best to humiliate him, just for the lulz.

Is it any surprise that volunteers rarely stick around for long?

Nowadays lots of companies run bug bounty programs where if you find a bug and report it responsibly you can get real cash. This is a valuable service. And I'm positive that these programs get gobs of submissions from people trying to see if they can find a bug in the rules, rather than in the software. If the people vetting the submissions to such programs weren't getting paid for it, I'm sure they would quit in disgust.

This happens with physical addresses too, for similar reasons. The ABC (Alcoholic Beverages Commision) tracks complaints against physical addresses, and too many violations will get an address banned from permits. Then a new owner comes in with a new business and gets mysteriously denied for a liquor license, even years later.

Not to mention Fardin, 2014.

The talk about immutabilty and serialization makes me think of tcl, where "everything is a string" also means "everything is serializable" and you don't copy references around, you copy strings around, which are immutable. What's neat is that it always looks like you are just copying things, but you can mutate them, just so long as you can't possibly tell that you have mutated them, meaning that the old value isn't visible from anywhere. With the caveat that sometimes you have to jump through hoops to mutate something.

I have a suspicion that a lot of people who rant about makefiles using tabs also praise python for the brilliance of using whitespace for scoping. Or who love yaml for its indented block structure.

Nah, who am I kidding ... no one loves yaml, it's just better than most of the alternatives.

the only thing I really miss in make is the ability to resolve mtime as something other than mtime. So I resort to using touchfiles which are gross but still work better than a lot of other things (I'm looking at you, docker build caching).

There used to be a plugin (or something) that would let you play Zork on a 404 page.