keyist

I consider it good practice to allow users to customize where your program creates files. I don't like $HOME to be the default dumping ground for anything I run.

A standard that uses environment variables means programs don't have to provide extra options for this customization (I've seen -f,--file , -c,--config and other variants). It allows for common code (libraries that implement the spec).

If you poke around for feature requests for various open source programs, you'll find XDG basedir compliance come up occasionally (moreso for CLI utils). I wouldn't say "nobody seems to be using it"; quick scan of my folders includes Chromium, uzbl, htop. Git's next release will be compliant too.

Instead of putting a dotfile or dotdir in the user's home directory, do follow the XDG Base Directory specification: http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-l... .

It's easy to understand and requires only a marginal increase in effort/code.

"Between semicolon-free folks and JavaScript traditionalists, who gets to play the role of the expert?"

You're framing this as a disagreement between equals. It is not. There are degrees of expertise. (Total lines of production code * amount of usage) is a reasonable approximation, and those who rank highest on this scale are overwhelmingly in favor of requiring semicolons.

If Carmack and Torvalds were in agreement on a C best practice while Odesker^W^W^W^W^W^W^W Topcoder user #12571 said to do something else, I wouldn't go with the latter.

Google, responsible for a JS engine, multiple compilers that target JS, and what is likely to be the single largest JS codebase of any company: http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/javascript...

Brendan Eich: "The moral of this story: ASI is (formally speaking) a syntactic error correction procedure."

Or you can go with the Node.js guys.

You can't have a "How to Learn Haskell" post without mentioning the Typeclassopedia: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Typeclassopedia

For those going through LYAH, I highly recommend supplementing chapters 11-13 with this excellent resource.

This is a great post that gets mentioned from time to time and covers the underlying theory well. I'd supplement it with Chapter 9 of the Pro Git book: http://progit.org/book/ch9-0.html , which focuses more on the actual implementation and shows how to create commits from scratch using Git's content-addressable primitives.

RMS has the FSF and Defective By Design sites as soapboxes if he wished to gain more attention from Jobs's death. This was a post on his political notes page. He did nothing to publicize it.

He didn't post to aggregators or tweet to ask for upvotes (technically it was posted on his Identi.ca account which is linked to his political notes feed, but it got no special treatment).

If some major sites hadn't picked up on it and provided the publicity, most readers would never know. So RMS wrote a politically incorrect opinion on his personal page. Can we move on now?

I was going to say something similar but you've done it much better, with a story to boot. So I'll just chip in with one point I had that you didn't cover directly.

A lot of the posts here are generally of the form "you can't speak ill of the newly dead". (Why? Because that's what regular people do, that's why). But adhering to social norms takes away from freedom. Indifference to what society prescribes is consistent with RMS's beliefs.

Call him what you want, but the man is consistent.

I'm guessing a lot of the angry responders here will have similar "I'm glad he's gone" feelings on RMS's death. Would not publishing those feelings give you the moral high ground over those who do?

Tarsnap gives deduplication, compression, and encryption. Some technical background on how it does this here: http://www.tarsnap.com/efficiency.html

There is a detailed breakdown provided as well. Sample output:

                                         Total size  Compressed size
  All archives                               697 MB           323 MB
    (unique data)                            215 MB           100 MB
  This archive                               148 MB            67 MB
  New data                                    17 MB           5.2 MB

Edit: Don't want to misrepresent Tarsnap's granularity. The print-stats option gives size in bytes. Above output was generated with the --humanize-numbers option.