Best of Rationality Quotes 2009/2010 (Warning: 750kB page, 774 quotes)
The year's last Rationality Quotes thread has calmed down, so now it is a good time to update my Best of Rationality Quotes page, and write a top post about it. (The original version was introduced in the June 2010 Open Thread.)
The page was built by a short script (source code here) from all the LW Rationality Quotes threads so far. (We had such a thread each month since April 2009.) The script collects all comments with karma score 4 or more, and sorts them by score.
There is a minor complication: The obvious idea is to consider only top-level comments, that is, comments that are not replies to other comments. Unfortunately, good quotes are sometimes replies to other quotes. Of course, even more often, replies are not quotes. This is a precision-recall trade-off. Originally I went for recall, because I liked many replied quotes such as this. But as JGWeissman noted in a comment below, to build the precise version, only a trivial modification of my script is needed. So I built it, and I preferred it to the noisy version after all. So now at the top of this post we have the filtered version, and here is the original version with even more good quotes, but also with many non-quotes:
Best of Rationality Quotes 2009/2010, including replied comments (Warning: 1.3MB page, 1358 quotes)
UPDATE: I changed the links and rewrote the above when I decided to filter replied comments.
UPDATE 2: Added a comment listing the personal quote collection pages of top quote contributors.
UPDATE 3: Responding to various requests by commenters, added several top-lists:
While Windows has it's share of flaws, I can't help but wonder if a system in which it's noteworthy to have "precompiled and widely available binaries" (so the USER doesn't have to compile the app before he uses it) isn't just as wrong, only in different ways.
The thing many nix fans overlook is that most people just want to USE a computer, and one that's good enough is, well, good enough. From that perspective, nix isn't so much a tool as it is a toy: something from which people derive more entertainment than utility.
The precompiled note is because Pandoc is written in Haskell for
ghc
; the Haskell toolchain is far from being universally available (as, say, C toolchains usinggcc
are) and is somewhat immature on Mac and Windows. The Pandoc source is available, of course, but one may legitimately not wish to install everything necessary to compile the source oneself. (If Pandoc were written in C, then I might not bother specifying that there are trustworthy binaries available.) There's a reason not everyone uses source-based distros like Gentoo or Arch.