Ignoring the (fantastic) content, I think this is how Julia slowly wins users. I keep find myself doing parallel implementations like this.

Agreed, amazing content but also a great tutorial for Julia. This is my first stab at it and it's great (as a daily R user).

Also, consider reading The Sciences of The Artificial. This is in it, with so much more.

It's very cool that you know exactly what is going to happen. Or, at least, you could simulate exactly what should happen. And, if there was some repository of contracts, you could simulate the effects of the system. Such higher-order possibilities are so opaque most of the time.

But, I'm not sure ambiguity is a bad thing. Or, at least, there is a dose-specific effect. A lot of ambiguity is bad, but so is none. The flexible Goldilocks Zone is the least fragile -- to society that is, not to law.

Thank you for this morning's diversion.

I just moved up from DC to NJ. It definitely modified by behavior. Down there, I didn't want to pay the five cent tax. (IIRC, I think the five cents went to Chesapeake Bay cleanup or something like that. It wasn't more money for the store.) Now that I am in NJ -- where there is no tax -- I still instinctually say, "no bag, thanks."

I think the article was OCR'd. There were a few other mistakes that were clearly misinterpreted characters. I think the 1 in the thousands place is actually a comma on the source.

Good point. There are many hints that article was OCR'd, for instance an ".4ECL" instead of "AECL".

I like this app. However, most of my work Latex based. If you had something like this for Sublime Text, I would buy it.

I think I would too. I like the idea. Not sure about calling it Hemingway, because I am a huge fan of the writer, but I would like to have something like this available for Sublime.

It might have to deal with markdown.

Another vote that I would like this within Sublime (although I'm not sure how that would work), and would really like for the tool to be able to interpret Markdown. Right now it gets confused by the markup for hyperlinks.

Looks like a great tool for me to take rambling blog drafts and trip them down while editing/refining.

Does lots of written work in restructed text and would buy as well (a sublime text addon, for example)!

It would be great if there was some way to write Sublime / Vim / whatever plugins that use this.

Not if it uploads my texts to some 3rdparty webservice, though

Ya that's one thing I would like to avoid also.

I gave this book out as a Christmas gift to a lot of people. I read it six months ago and it has dramatically improved my life.

This just got more interesting.

I certainly found what they did distasteful. Their non-apology makes me lose tremendous respect for a company whose product I sincerely like and frequently use. As other people mentioned, they come off as whiny children -- "but Sally did it first!"

At the same time, I recognize that they might have just pulled off something really smart. If they had came out and said, "hey, Google, you should do something about our competition, they cheat" as a blog post, it might have got some attention but most people would write it off as "yea, who doesn't use SEO." Instead, they generated a publicity storm; provoked Google; then, pointed out that, to be consistent, everybody should be punished according to the severity of the offenses. RapGenius being the least severe offender comes out on top, and they still have the best product.

I am more inclined to believe they just fucked up than they actually thought about things from this game-theoretic perspective. Misquoting Hanlon's razor, "never attribute to genius that which can be adequately be explained by luck." Moreover, I don't know how much the loss of my respect and that of people like me will cost them, but as a startup it could be expensive.

Regardless, this has been fascinating to watch.

they offered no proof and used a lame excuse for justification.

I'm glad they stopped. I'm also glad they deleted this comment, although I would have been happier if they simply never made it. When I read it, I felt like I was watching a toddler who, after being caught cheating, complained "so did Sally!"

Just announce your _mea culpa_, and stop doing it. And, if you need to adopt strategies that do boost your ranks -- _which, given that RapGenius is a great service_, I don't think is long-term necessary -- avoid the patently obvious ones.