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efarefon Please do not attempt to simplify this code

It's not used very often here, either. Despite their claims at the top of the code of every `if` having a corresponding `else`, there are 140 `if`s, but only 20 `else`s and a mere 5 `else if`s.

efarefon Copyleft and community licenses are not without merit, but they are a dead end

The limitations it imposes are the price.

efarefon Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

The cost of excessive politeness can be that the person doesn't get the message. I've seen people waste hours on the wrong problem because the person giving feedback was overly polite, and also things just reach an impasse with no progress made because everyone's being too polite to point out the elephant in the room.

I think a better word is "respectful." You can be direct and blunt, as long as you're respectful.

efarefon The fifth hyperfactorial: 5⁵×4⁴×3³×2²×1¹=86400000 milliseconds is exactly 1 day

It's pure coincidence, but "pi seconds is a nanocentury" is a useful mnemonic.

efarefon High Sierra broke AFP searching on our server

Your server ran 2018 software back in 2012?! That's amazing!

efarefon Urban Housing Solution That Has No Good Name

London has loads of dodgy landlords cramming people into sheds in their gardens. It's not a solution, it's a terrible symptom of the problem.

efarefon The estate tax is a bad tax say economists (2001)

In the UK at least, it is paid by the executors of the estate as part of discharging the estate, so it's definitely an estate (or "death") tax. I would expect the same is true in the US, but happy to be corrected.

Your reasoning about the allowances is backwards. If you lose a parent, an uncle and a grandparent all in one year, and get $22 million from each, then you have had a $66 million dollar "tax allowance". There's only one of you, but there are 3 deaths, so $22 million per death, ergo, a death tax. Conversely, if you work for 3 companies, you don't get to consider each income separately and pay only the bottom bracket of income tax for each of them; you pay the bracket that is appropriate for your total income, because it's an income tax, not a having-an-employee tax. (in the UK we also have a 'having-an-employee' tax, but that's handled separately).

efarefon The estate tax is a bad tax say economists (2001)

Without prejudice as to whether or not it's a good thing, I think "death tax" is the more honest as it is charged at the cardinality of the people who performed the action of "death", as opposed to the people who performed the action of "inheritance".

If it really was an "inheritance" tax, then each person would have an "inheritance tax allowance", that is the amount they are allowed to inherit before the taxes start. So if 20 of my ancestors all kicked the bucket at once, each leaving me a modest fortune that adds up to a large total, then I would be liable for a hefty inheritance tax bill. Whereas, if great aunt Mabel died and left $1000 for each of her 1000 progeny, then no tax would be due, as surely a measly sum like $1000 would fall below any reasonable inheritance limit.

The "death" or "estate" tax is levied on the value of the assets of the person who died, not on the value of the amount received by an individual who inherits. Ergo, it's a death tax.

efarefon The estate tax is a bad tax say economists (2001)

Your children will still pay those when they spend their money on riotous living.

efarefon Linux Performance: Why You Should Almost Always Add Swap Space

The most compelling reason to enable at least some swap space is that the Linux kernel's memory handling algorithms can't cope with there being no swap. If you have no swap, then you will encounter stalls and OOMs even if you don't actually run out of memory. Adding even a tiny amount of swap prevents this from happening.

efarefon An Ikea Bowl Has Been Setting Things on Fire

I think he did learn the lesson, but then his fix for it was removed in the cost-cutting phase.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/1029...

efarefon Coal plants emit more radioactive waste than nuclear plants (2007)

But coal and oil, working correctly, are destroying the planet.

efarefon My Family’s Slave

I thought mostly the farm was owned by landlords, with the people who worked there (male or female) being tenant farmers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenant_farmer

efarefon Machine Learning

By the looks of http://explainxkcd.com/1425 it was September 2014.

efarefon Facebook to add 3k people to community operations team to improve moderation

I thought he was referring to situations like the person who killed his daughter on Facebook Live[1].

[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/thai-man-films-...

efarefon Why Chinatown Produce Is Cheap (2016)

In the UK we also have the after-effects of the Common Fisheries Policy, which has seen a ~50% decline in our local fishing industry since the 1970s.

In 2014 UK fishing boats landed 424ktonnes of fish into UK ports, while we imported 720ktonnes of fish, mostly from outside the EU.

efarefon Lyrebird – An API to copy the voice of anyone

I can't wait to hear the new cassetteboy songs.

efarefon How SSH got port number 22

You could quite easily write a script that does this:

    #!/bin/sh
    cd $1
    shift
    exec "$@"

It's a shame "in" is a reserved word, because that'd be a good name for it. Maybe "cde" for "cd-exec":

    tar c files | ssh dest cde /some/dir tar x

efarefon Analysis of the Facebook app for iOS

    that_function(i_know_what_im_doing=False)

efarefon Former Google VP Starts a Company Promising Clean and Safe Nuclear Energy

Agreed. Nuclear accidents may have made some bits around Chernobyl and Fukushima unpleasant, but coal and oil have ruined the entire planet.

People simply aren't rational. It has been so hard for me to accept that.

efarefon Unix Is Not an Acceptable Unix (2015)

Better:

    find ... -delete

efarefon I was a multi-millionaire by 27–here's what I learned

Games development is as much a crapshoot as book authoring, so I suspect Notch Prime's game would languish in indie obscurity like Robert Galbraith's books did, right up until someone leaks the association.

efarefon Jeff Bezos Is Now the World's Second Richest Person

I don't understand your point. Norway is 5 million people, so that's only 180k per capita.

efarefon Jeff Bezos Is Now the World's Second Richest Person

It's not about being jealous of a particular person's success, it's more about observing the problems with a world where a tiny fraction of the population capture and control over half of the wealth.

If that were problem free, then fine. But it's not. Think of it as a symptom of an illness, and we should work to get the fever down.

efarefon Jeff Bezos Is Now the World's Second Richest Person

The problem isn't that Bezos has 1,000x my net worth. He has 1,000,000x my (approximate) net worth. One millionth of my net worth is seven cents, so Bezos:me is me:$0.07.

The graph isn't logarithmic. It's shaped like this:

                |
                |
                |
    ____________|

efarefon Evidence That Robots Are Winning the Race for American Jobs

The fact that you think that people without "the aptitude, desire, or willingness to get a highly technical job" are a "lesser class of humans" says more about you than it does about those people.

efarefon [dead]

I thought the politicians with above average incomes were the corrupt ones.

efarefon Hiring without whiteboards

That's just silly, though. "tar" is pretty easy to use in its basic form, and I have dozens of commands ingrained in my memory.

    tar tf filename.tar
    tar xf filename.tar
    tar xfz filename.tar.gz   # Newer tars don't even require the z
    tar cfz filename.tar.gz directoryname

Heck, surely even

    tar --help

would suffice.

More interesting questions would be like: "which lower-case letters are NOT valid options to GNU ls". :)

efarefon Emoji.length == 2

> backspace on a family emoji will eliminate family members one by one.

Unexpectedly sinister.

efarefon How a French scholar was treated at US airport

In this case, "as the original author" would be taken by a native speaker to mean the person is speaking with the authority of being the original author, i.e. they are the original author. "As" is only used for comparison when it is clear from context that that's the case. The idiomatic way to express what I think is intended is "like the original author".