Interesting remarks, thanks!

When discussing remote vs non-remote with a colleague some time ago over lunch, he mentioned that "remote is an extreme version of yourself", so those inclined to slack off will slack off way more to the point of being unproductive, and those inclined to work longer hours will eventually just spend all their time working... Maybe over-simplified but I think he was onto something.

arXiv replaces any URL in the text of the abstract with a link with text "this http url"; it seems the authors did not know this and just embedded a bare URL in their abstract.

I think it mistook a typo that didn't add a space after a sentence.

I think this is the relevant code:

    TLDS = "[a-z][a-z]+" 

https://github.com/arXiv/arxiv-base/blob/develop/arxiv/base/...

A more restrictive TLD list would have prevented this, but I certainly don't want to be the one to add new TLDs all the time, so I can see why the code looks like it does.

Mozilla has a list, https://publicsuffix.org/list/, relatively easy to update. I'm sure there is some Python wrapper library they could use.

One thing that Git and the other DVCS's massively improved over Subversion is that commits are local, and you only need to talk to a remote endpoint when you push/pull. In Subversion, every commit would require uploading changes to the repository server, which encouraged larger commits (to amortize the overhead).

Yeah, this was huge at the time. Laptops were good but Wifi wasn't as ubiquitous. If you wanted to work on some code while you were traveling or at a cafe or something, you'd at best be working without version control, making ".backup" files and directories and stuff. With DVCSes you could branch, commit, etc. as much as you wanted, then sync up when you got back somewhere with good internet.

`s6-sudo` [1] is an alternative that does exactly this: connects to a running privileged daemon and asks it to execute a command.

[1]: https://skarnet.org/software/s6/s6-sudo.html

I'm curious: why the `printf '%s\n' "$(pwd -P)"` ? wouldn't just `pwd -P` achieve the same?

Actually nothing. The format seems to have come from a similar line that builds the script path..

    printf '%s/%s\n' "$(pwd -P)" "$(basename "$0")"

It's just been in place, in so many places, so long it's become unquestionable. So yes the `pwd -P` in this case will suffice.

I've been using just `V="$(cd -- "$(dirname -- "$0")"; pwd)"` for ages, everything quoted, several OSs, never had an issue with the output that required me to format it again.

This approach breaks if you run the script from a symlink.

It really depends on what your current and wanted roles are... When it happened to me, I would have had to interview again because there were no other roles in my career ladder left in town.

IIRC, Linux' ext2/3/4 support an 'a' attribute that make a file append-only.

I guess they redirect you to a different IP than they publish in the public DNS?

I agree, but how is this different from polls, fidelity programs at department stores, statistics on various topics, etc - all of which have existed for decades?

It's different because department store fidelity programs weren't generating terabytes of raw data per day, feeding it into ML systems, correlating output against millions of other data points available for purchase, and then using the resulting insights to manipulate political affairs on a large scale.

So Ur- comes from Urdeutsch? :-)

You are joking, but the Proto-Germanic language (the ancestor of all current Germanic languages (English, German, Dutch, Icelandic, Faroese, etc. (sorry for the nested parens, but this is a Lisp thread))) is actually called “urgermansk” in Scandinavia.