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Never lower the guard. (Reuters/Rick Wilking)

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theartofmoviestills → 2001: A Space Odyssey | Stanley Kubrick | 1968

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"Riot police fire tear gas on student protesters occupying streets surrounding the government headquarters in Hong Kong, early Monday, Sept. 29, 2014. (Wally Santana/AP)"

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Illustrations by Liam Stevens

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michaelgeorgephoto → Coney Island, 2014

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Note that a CodeSmell is a hint that something might be wrong, not a certainty. A perfectly good idiom may be considered a CodeSmell because it's often misused, or because there's a simpler alternative that works in most cases. Calling something a CodeSmell is not an attack; it's simply a sign that a closer look is warranted.

Code Smell

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Photography by Matt Nager

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This principle is similar to OnceAndOnlyOnce, but with a different objective. With OnceAndOnlyOnce, you are encouraged to refactor to eliminate duplicated code and functionality. With DRY, you try to identify the single, definitive source of every piece of knowledge used in your system, and then use that source to generate applicable instances of that knowledge (code, documentation, tests, etc).

Dont Repeat Yourself

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I think the advice got turned into a command: "Do the simplest thing that could possibly work." That's a little more confusing, because there isn't this notion that as soon as you've done it, we'll evaluate it. People ask, "Well, how do you know it's the simplest?" In my case, we didn't know. We were just going to get it on the screen and look at it. But as soon as it becomes a command, then we have to analyze it and ask, "Is that the simplest?" And all of a sudden it becomes complicated. What is or isn't simple?

The Simplest Thing that Could Possibly Work, A Conversation with Ward Cunningham, Part V by Bill Venners.

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The “dilemma” faced by the prisoners here is that, whatever the other does, each is better off confessing than remaining silent. But the outcome obtained when both confess is worse for each than the outcome they would have obtained had both remained silent. A common view is that the puzzle illustrates a conflict between individual and group rationality. A group whose members pursue rational self-interest may all end up worse off than a group whose members act contrary to rational self-interest.

Prisoner's Dilemma, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

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An argument that sometimes fools human reasoning, but is not logically valid. It is crucial to remember that reasoning from definitions and facts to conclusions is fundamentally different from reasoning about definitions. Before you can scientifically establish whether or not Foo is a Bar, you have to establish the meaning of the label Bar.

Fallacious Argument

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Proof By Utility is another way of saying It Works! (At least most of the time). The proof is that it is used, by many who find it useful. See MicrosoftWindows and LinuxOperatingSystem. The proof is not that it is correct, precise, foolproof or bugproof, but that it is useful.

Proof By Utility

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South Central Los Angeles, August 2, 1991

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lackofpostage → Jim Campbell: Exploded Views

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#Dope

Have you heard? Scott Listfield’s ‘Astronaut’ opens November 1st at 7pm at Gallery 1988 (East) at 7021 Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, and will be up through Nov 29th. Be there, or be crushed by falling space junk. Your call.

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The Jacquard head used replaceable punched cards to control a sequence of operations. It is considered an important step in the history of computing hardware. The ability to change the pattern of the loom's weave by simply changing cards was an important conceptual precursor to the development of computer programming and data entry.