News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:A social coding experiment that updates its own code demo... by Ace17 on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @08:50AM (#14400701)
Has anyone tried to build a code version of Wikipedia?
Re:A social coding experiment that updates its own code demo... by abecedarius on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @02:50PM (#14404055)
There was a site called literate-programs.org (or something like that) where you could add literate programming examples. I think it's gone missing.

Luke Gorrie many years ago made a site like that just for Scheme code, which would also run the code and show the output. A page was also a module and could import from other pages. I helped a bit with the design. I've forgotten what it was called.

Later I made a couple more experiments along those lines, like https://github.com/darius/hmph, but it's undocumented and kind of weird.

Re:A social coding experiment that updates its own code demo... by ZenoArrow on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @01:49PM (#14403391)
How would the code version of Wikipedia work? Do you mean an encyclopedia of code snippets or code that anyone can edit that causes the hosting application to be recompiled?
Re:A social coding experiment that updates its own code demo... by yosito on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @11:55AM (#14402268)
Not the same thing, but Lunyr is building Wikipedia on blockchain technology: http://lunyr.com
Re:A social coding experiment that updates its own code demo... by placeybordeaux on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @03:01PM (#14404154)
They speak against centralization then right in their whitepaper they have:

> Lunyr may make changes to the size of the LUN pool, LUN distribution and other related matters that it believes, in its reasonable judgment, are beneficial to the LUN platform growth and development, or it considers reasonable under the circumstances. Keep in mind that any corrupt behavior would be irrational for Lunyr to do. Lunyr will be holding onto LUN and any decisions that dilute the value of LUN and devalue the knowledge base would be harmful to Lunyr.

So they say that you shouldn't use the centralized solution, but it's okay for Lunyr to maintain control because it's in it's economic interests.

Okay.

Not to mention they include ads, this just sounds like a worse version of wikipedia.

Re:A social coding experiment that updates its own code demo... by anythingbot on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @12:45PM (#14402779)
You have to say which set of programs you will run, and then you have to pick how you will describe a set of programs (since the name of a set of programs is just data).

Wikipedia lets malicious editors enter lies...these lies can be very difficult to detect so you need smart people to see them. The hope is that because it is text, people know how to read and can use critical thinking...computers on the other hand do not do this with code; they apply a set of rules that governs what can and cannot be executed; in other words, the input is either in the set of programs it will run (or not).

Now, you could allow each article to name a way of translating between...and all of a sudden we are kicking a hornet's nest of code-breakers :D :D :D

So, the short answer is...YOU COULD DO IT...but why would you want to attract the attention of people whose JOB it is to do figure out breakthroughs in code-breaking?

This gets into ZFC set theory and Tower of Babel and intelligence collection stuff. Essentially the problem is that if we want to define the boundary of what we will execute, we wind up getting marginally closer to state secrets.

And then, before you know it, somebody posted the code to crack the data-link to a drone in (redacted foreign country) and this caused the deaths of ___ soldiers.

So, you have to spend some time defining the territory before you let people wander aimlessly into danger.