herdrick

That's so you get sync'd histories across one user's logins? Good feature, but I need my history. It's invaluable to me. Still, maybe 250k lines is enough. Is there a way I could bump that up and judge for myself the consequences?

Yes.

visible to anyone with physical access to your box

Maybe not. That's an auth problem, not a reason to throw away your archives. I keep all my email even though there's probably something in there embarrassing to me given some audience.

It sounds like Feynman was suspicious of the Soviet Union.

Also, in the blog post I linked to the link you mention.

History file should apply some kind of maximum history length

Fine, but the default needs to be large, like 100MB. Disks are big now. I hope ridiculousfish agrees.

    find . | xargs -I {} grep pat {}

    ... material science, sensors, robotics, 
    medical devices, life sciences, etc... 
    VCs whose firms would have looked at these 
    deals or invested in these sectors, are now 
    only interested in whether it runs on a 
    smart phone or tablet.

Instead of 'positive' activities, I'd say, 'societally approved'. Social pressure did Galileo no good. A concern is that the internet might enable enforcement of whatever orthodoxies are dominant at the time more than it helps free thinkers. But it certainly doesn't yet.

We tried both options and liked using one scale for all categories. The idea is that you are comparing influence, or something like it, so that can be visually compared across categories. You do have the downside of having very small dots for the people after only a few pages, but since there are > 100,000 people, most are going to have the minimum sized dot anyway.

Perhaps the better word, instead of 'impartial', would be 'disinterested'.

In the data source, TechCrunch's Crunchbase, the influence of Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, et al. is captured in YC the company, and Marc Andreessen is split between his personal identity and AH. So you get a lot of odd things like that.

As for why YC got classified a company, who knows? It's accident of history. They should change it.

Try clicking on MySpace's blue dot and see what is connected to it.

Like a lot of philosophic thought, this is just playing with the meaning of words. Yet is that so bad? Did such discussions help set to thinking the people who finally got us to understand the probabilistic nature of all knowledge?