I wonder how the treadmill affects its stability. It doesn't need to overcome its own momentum in order to accelerate; rather, slowing down requires acceleration.

There was a lot of repetition about X, Y, and Z being anathema to the systemd people. I would've appreciated some links backing up these claims of their hostility. I've heard so much against systemd, and so little that wasn't hearsay. (This is not a comment on the merits of the objections against systemd, just on the exposure to the arguments I've gotten from casually browsing hackernews.)

Article makes it sound like the student was being shut out unfairly and that the entrenched editor was hostile or even sexist. This isn't borne out at all by the talk page. It looks like there was just an edit war and a call for citation, with further discussion pending.

If you check the history yourself, you'll see that everything the student contributed was deleted twice by the wikipedian. The contributions were not modified, simply everything completely removed.

I don't agree with it, but I could see how the author would justify those edits. The author rolled back edits that he/she felt were unfounded (whether or not they are is a topic for another debate). The student then reverted all those rollbacks without any discussion on the Talk page or edifying comments in their changes. The attempted discussion appears to have happened after this. The only difference between good- and bad-faith edits here is that the student does not understand Wikipedia policy.

Now, the way the original author responded is completely inappropriate given WP:DNB (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BITE). A couple people have already tried having that conversation with the author, and he/she still incorrectly feels the onus is on the (naive) editor.

Please do show how deleting everything that was contributed by the student can be justified (you say that you "could see how" the wikipedian "would justify" the reverts to the pre-student's-contribution-state of the article). I can't see, please see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Super-spreader&di...

Obviously the deleted material, that is, everything that the student previously contributed, contained the citations (on the left). Still everything was deleted by the strange behaving wikipedian.

The difference I link to shows the effects of the second deletion of the student's newly contributed material by the wikipedian. How can that be justified? I understand that the wikipedian didn't want the original research. But was it all really just the original research?

Article interprets wikipedian behavior as hostile, but where did you seen sexism? There is brief part where it discuss typical male vs female style of argumentation, but I found no sexism accusation there.

A strange rant. I saw nothing in it to back up the title. Indeed, it seemed to completely contradict itself when it quoted the text of the first amendment.

Incredible. I was giving him the benefit of the doubt until comment 10.

As you said, you haven't used the Linux desktop in many years. It's come a long way in that time.

For example, editing your xorg.conf is virtually a thing of the past these days. I haven't touched it in years and run a fancy triple monitor setup.

right up until a ubuntu kernel update breaks the binary gpu driver, and you spend the next two days trying to figure out which binary or open source driver allows you to run everything the way you were at the beginning of the week. Repeat this every 6 months.

Why not give it another try now then? I have used it for years and, unlike windows, I never had to reinstall it just because something broke. And things only broke when I messed around with them, but it was always fixable. If you also use virtual machines or linux containers you will never break anything.

I intend to dual boot next time I upgrade laptops, so we'll see. I absolutely loved the customizability of the desktop environments.

But I hated worrying about graphics drivers, updates, xorg.conf, automake, and finagling my system configuration to get source tarballs to compile.

> "How are we going to attract and recruit the best engineers unless we've got a reputation for the very best and most foolish April Fools trickery?"

You say that sarcastically, but I see that as a legitimate concern. Why miss out on a great opportunity to make a connection with thousands of users who otherwise wouldn't see any uniqueness or individuality to what you do? And the only risk is that they'd piss off someone with a corny joke.

That said, I sympathize. I enjoy jokes, but I'd like to read real news too.

I didn't look at the game, but converting from hex to binary is easy since one of those bases is a power of the other. It's a 16-entry lookup table, but just like memorizing the multiplication table, there are easy-to-remember patterns. The fact that there are two digits just means to do it twice and concatenate the results (padding to 4 bits first).

What's hard about it? If you can eliminate even one answer it's in your favor to guess.

Really you can just always guess. When you can't eliminate any answers, guessing has the same expected value as leaving the question blank. If you can eliminate one or more answers, the expected value is higher for guessing than for leaving the question blank. So in no situations does guessing decrease your expected value.

Test questions like the SAT are designed to have wrong answers that look like they are right at first glance, so people who think they have a better than average chance by guessing often don't because they were baited by one of the wrong answers without thinking it all the way through.