Yes but overall, isn't it better to at least have the choice to go to the supermarket? (As you kind of acknowledge in your own example.)

Yes I’m not saying you should never use tldr or similar tools; just that you could benefit from reading the manpages from time to time. I learnt more things from reading `man bash` than from any StackOverflow question or post on the Web.

Just curious, what risk are you referring to?

One person knowing the identities of all your spies? That's a huge violation of the compartimentalization principle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmentalization_%28informa...

Of course you could say there was a 'need to know' but at a minimum there should have been many 'Fifi's', and preferably ones that did not come from occupied territory.

Also there's the "never follow patterns" principle. Interrogate enough spies and you might figure out they have been checked by the same person.

Ah OK thanks!

It can also be thought of as a pun -- when you want to "exit" an application, you "X it".

I'd describe that as "verbing" it rather than "punning" it. The verb makes sense too, when you take keyboard short cuts into account. A very common short cut to exit a program (in Windows at least) is File->Exit, which translates to `Alt+F, X` so you do, in fact, "X it".

Wow, I've been saying "X it" for years but never even caught that it sounds like "exit".

Clarification: this is about MS Word 1.1a, which was released in 1990.

Other notable facts that year : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_(programming_language)...

Literally everything on HN is an opportunity for another Haskell advertisement.

I won't disagree, but I realized that even before I got a computer, Haskell was officially born. It baffles me that this very advanced gem was already there, yet so few knew.

http://file.vintageadbrowser.com/l-veh5m82f5jultw.jpg

To this day still few know...

> Chinese characters are not an alphabet, they do not carry phonetics, they carry meaning. And, guess what, this is arguably better. Why? Because phonetics tend to shift quickly.

But I would think (and remember reading somewhere) that phonetics shift more quickly where there is no written record of the pronunciation. Chinese has dozens of mutually unintelligible dialects (Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, Hakka, etc.). Maybe this fragmentation would be much less if they had a phonetic writing system in the first place.

> In a few decennies any spoken language has shifted, vocalisation is different, especially when the language is used by loosely coulped communities. And then you have to adapt spelling to new pronunciations. But what do you do with old books? And how do you keep the language united?

English (or Spanish, etc) is a real-world example of a mostly phonetic writing system, and I don't think it is that bad. We can still read old texts, even though our pronunciation of the words has changed vastly. If you go back far enough (e.g. to the time of Chaucer in the 1300s), it becomes hard to understand what is being said, but practically speaking I don't see this as a big problem. In contrast, I think it's very important to have a writing system that is easily learned, so that it is accessible to the entire population (not just those able to invest lots of time & effort).

> If you go back far enough (e.g. to the time of Chaucer in the 1300s), it becomes hard to understand what is being said

That's because at that time they still wrote phonetically. Today the spelling of some languages, like English especially, is fixed and immutable yet the pronunciation diverges.

Think about equATION and pronunciATION (or any other word ending in -ation that has "ʒ" instead of "ʃ").

There is also the reverse effect. Spelling influences pronunciation. Especially the sounds of single vowels (a,e,i,o,u), their sound being used frequently when spelling, becomes a guide to pronounce unfamiliar words, making words like "fungae" sounds nothing like what the latin word used to be (and how it was probably pronounced by english speaking educated people in the middle ages).

That said, even a crippled phonetic alphabet is certainly easier to learn than ideograms. However English is at the worst end of the spectrum. Japanese syllabic writing systems (hiragana and katakana) are much easier to write even if they have a few more glyphs. Unfortunately, even if you master -kana scripts, and thus able to write everything you want in Japanese, you'd be cut off from mainstream culture, including newspapers street signs etc

> But I would think (and remember reading somewhere) that phonetics shift more quickly where there is no written record of the pronunciation. Chinese has dozens of mutually unintelligible dialects (Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, Hakka, etc.). Maybe this fragmentation would be much less if they had a phonetic writing system in the first place.

This is why Latin, which had such an alphabet, didn't split into mutually unintelligible dialects like Romanian, Spanish, and French, right?

> We can still read old texts, even though our pronunciation of the words has changed vastly. If you go back far enough (e.g. to the time of Chaucer in the 1300s), it becomes hard to understand what is being said, but practically speaking I don't see this as a big problem.

But this wouldn't be the case if we wrote English phonetically today.

For example, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/Gawain?rgn=main;view=fulltex...) is one of my favorite pieces of Middle English literature, and exactly contemporary to Chaucer. It's hard enough to read without some knowledge of Middle English but you'd be totally lost if we wrote nait instead of knight.

>Chinese has dozens of mutually unintelligible dialects (Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, Hakka, etc.).

The different "dialects" are really different languages altogether (certainly as different as the various Romance languages, for example). It seems unlikely that a country as vast and diverse as China would have become monolingual just if they'd used a different writing system.

> mutually unintelligible dialects (Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, Hakka, etc.)

But the trick is that when written on paper these dialects are mostly mutally intelligible.

"Germanic languages have special words for 11 and 12, such as eleven and twelve in English, which are often misinterpreted as vestiges of a duodecimal system. However, they are considered to come from Proto-Germanic ainlif and twalif (respectively one left and two left), both of which were decimal."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal#Origin

Dumb question: What does it mean that autocommit is now turned on? I no longer have to call mymodel.save()?

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.6/#improved...

Side comment: that's a nice website; how did you make it? I see it's hosted on GitHub pages and that you use Bootstrap. Did you write all the HTML/CSS yourself, or use Markdown, etc?

Thanks!

The documentation source is markdown.

The styling and documentation building script is custom, and taken from the documentation for Django REST framework.

I'd like to build it into a proper markdown docs tool someday if I can find the time.

Dear God, this. I started looking at your makedocs.py over the weekend myself. I've never liked rst.

Another name for "begging the question" is simply "circular reasoning"

How do you know their issues are somatic, or that the relief they experience is a placebo effect?

Because a substantial minority of people have functional gastrointestinal issues that are well addressed by the same treatments as somatic pain: antidepressants, stress reduction, and placebo treatment.

The rate of actual gluten intolerance is some 4-5 fold less than the rate of functional disorders - it's nigh on impossible that all those eating a gluten-free diet have gluten intolerance (let alone celiac), but it's extremely likely that they have functional gastrointestinal disorders.