<story><title>Magicians fought over an ultra-secret tracker dedicated to stealing magic tricks</title><url>http://www.businessinsider.de/inside-art-of-misdirection-ultra-exclusive-private-torrent-tracker-magical-pirates-invites-2016-11</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>simonw</author><text>If I want to know how a classic trick is done I&amp;#x27;ll look at the Wikipedia page. It often won&amp;#x27;t reveal the secret directly, but if you check the page history you&amp;#x27;ll find an edit war between magicians which exposes exactly how it works.</text></comment>
<story><title>Magicians fought over an ultra-secret tracker dedicated to stealing magic tricks</title><url>http://www.businessinsider.de/inside-art-of-misdirection-ultra-exclusive-private-torrent-tracker-magical-pirates-invites-2016-11</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>loup-vaillant</author><text>This hints at a more general problem: how does one gather a high-quality repository of knowledge on any given subject?  How do you get enough stuff?  How do you keep the noise down?&lt;p&gt;I believe some subjects make the problem harder than others.  Programming for instance is full of hard to check claims.  Even established techniques are hard to assess.  Say you need to parse stuff.  Will you go recursive descent?  LALR?  Earley?  PEG?  Might depend on what you want to parse, which environment you&amp;#x27;re working in, how much time you may invest…  Or say you write a compiler.  Will you use OCaml&amp;#x2F;F#&amp;#x2F;Haskell for the ease of handling recursive data structures?  Or do you want C&amp;#x2F;C++ because of the speed, and you know tricks to avoid recursive data structures anyway?&lt;p&gt;One tempting solution is to start a secret society dedicated to hoard knowledge on the chosen subject.  It would be hard to get in, but once there you&amp;#x27;d only get quality stuff.  (Or you might have gotten into a self-delusional sect…)  The idea is, maybe if knowledge was visibly scarce and hard to obtain, instead of merely buried under a mountain of noise, we would treat it with the respect it deserves.</text></comment>