To be more explicit, again: if you do something in LW and explain it by saying "in the circles I move in, X is true" then I don't see how that's a useful explanation
OK, let me reformulate things this way. Let's say there is a variable s (which stands for snark) defined on the [-1..1] interval so that when it is at -1 the snark is entirely directed at the left wing, when it's at 1 it is entirely directed at the right wing, and the intermediate values determine the proportions in which both left and right get snarked. This variable s is a function of two other variables: the subject who's doing the snarking and the location in which the snarking takes place.
You assume that s is predominantly a function of location. This is not true in my case. For me, s is predominantly a function of the subject (me) and the influence of location is secondary.
In other words, the direction of my snark is heavily influenced by things that are happening outside LW, even though the snark which you observe happens at LW.
the direction of my snark is heavily influenced by things that are happening outside LW, even though the snark which you observe happens at LW.
I suggest that this is unwise; snark on LW won't do anything to repair the opinions or attitudes of people elsewhere. If one place is Too Green and another Too Blue, then someone who frequents both does no favour to the place that's Too Green by complaining about bluism there merely because they're annoyed by the excessive bluism in the other place.
(Of course, you might not be able to help it; or you might not ca...
There are some long lists of false beliefs that programmers hold. isn't because programmers are especially likely to be more wrong than anyone else, it's just that programming offers a better opportunity than most people get to find out how incomplete their model of the world is.
I'm posting about this here, not just because this information has a decent chance of being both entertaining and useful, but because LWers try to figure things out from relatively simple principles-- who knows what simplifying assumptions might be tripping us up?
The classic (and I think the first) was about names. There have been a few more lists created since then.
Time. And time zones. Crowd-sourced time errors.
Addresses. Possibly more about addresses. I haven't compared the lists.
Gender. This is so short I assume it's seriously incomplete.
Networks. Weirdly, there is no list of falsehoods programmers believe about html (or at least a fast search didn't turn anything up). Don't trust the words in the url.
Distributed computing Build systems.
Poem about character conversion.
I got started on the subject because of this about testing your code, which was posted by Andrew Ducker.