Scamperings

- The Competitive Spectrum Pattern - Design Pattern Library - YDN: Also known as the Caring-to-Combative Community Spectrum. Focused on designing reputation systems in online communities but applicable to in-person. « The degree of competitiveness of a community depends on the individual goals of community members, the actions they engage in, and to what degree inter-person comparisons or contests are desired. »

- Types of Lawyers: Family tree and terminology: « Nothing emphasizes how complicated the “family tree” of lawyerdom has become like trying to explain it to intelligent people who don’t know already. So I can link to it later, and on the odd chance it might help some Internet passersby, I’ve published a new page with an outline of types of lawyers, as well as some other common ways we slice and dice the legal practice community. » [intro]

- Norms of Membership for Voluntary Groups: « One feature of the internet that we haven’t fully adapted to yet is that it’s trivial to create voluntary groups for discussion. [...] What we don’t seem to have is a good practical language for talking about norms on these mini-groups — what kind of moderation do we use, how do we admit and expel members, what kinds of governance structures do we create. »

- mtime comparison considered harmful: Technical piece on why build tools like Make need to do better than just looking at file modification times. Builds a very convincing case for...

- redo: a recursive, general-purpose build system: A replacement for make that is *vastly superior* along a variety of axes. My favorite part is that there's no weird syntax to learn. There are a bunch of implementations that should all be generally compatible with each other.