IMSoP

https://rwec.co.uk

Professional developer and software architect. Yes, people pay me for this stuff; don't expect the same level of service for free.

I like code that's explicit and well-structured more than code that's clever and concise. That probably goes with my tendency to use more words than I need to in sentences like this one which is still going on for some reason.

Developer in PHP, and occasionally a developer of PHP (although my C skills have plenty of room for improvement). Yes, PHP has its flaws, no I do not want to hear your childish jokes about those flaws.

I tend to downvote answers that give a literal code solution to the problem posed with no accompanying explanation, as they miss the opportunity to teach people how to solve the problem themselves next time.

If I'm arguing with you after 23:00 UTC, please tell me to go to bed!

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21h	comment	Are football and week‑end English loanwords in French, and why is week‑end hyphenated? Although I've been able to find the definition online, "revendications" is not a word I have ever heard in English. I suspect it of being a "faux ami", and that you intended a much more common word like "demands".
1d	comment	Has the “wake up in a bathtub of ice with a stolen kidney” story ever been documented as a real crime? @SK The very first thing on that page is "Claim: Drugged travelers awaken in ice-filled bathtubs only to discover one of their kidneys has been harvested by organ thieves." That appears to be exactly the claim in your question. Whether it would be possible to harvest and sell a kidney this way is a completely different question, which would be off-topic on this site.
1d	revised	Has the “wake up in a bathtub of ice with a stolen kidney” story ever been documented as a real crime? fix typo "utube" -> "Youtuibe"
Apr 27	comment	Did single-user operating systems first appear with minicomputers? @MargretheodorosHeliodoros Imagine you turn on the computer, and it reads a file called "startup-config" from a local disk, displays "startup-prompt", and asks for a password stored in "startup-password". The concept of those files "belonging to a user account" only makes sense when there's the ability for more than one user account. Until then, they just belong to the computer. So you can't really have "only 1 user account": either there are no user accounts, just computer settings; or there is the ability for multiple user accounts (even if only one happens to be created).
Apr 27	revised	Missing features from the Windows Event Log subset of XPath 1.0 I think "deduce" is the word you were looking for
Apr 26	comment	Does Sri Sri Ravi Shankar have a BSc degree? @SK Your proposed edit doesn't actually fix the problems with the question, it just repeats what is already said. When we talk about "notability", we don't just mean the subject is notable, but that the claim is notable - in this case, who is saying that the degree is not real? (Compare: "Is the Pope secretly a woman?" The pope is clearly notable, and evidence for their sex and/or gender could be put forward in response; but I just made up the claim, so it would be a waste of time responding to it. I would be asked to first demonstrate someone making that claim if I tried to ask here.)
Apr 26	reviewed	Reject suggested edit on Does Sri Sri Ravi Shankar have a BSc degree?
Apr 26	comment	Did spectators shower the chessboard with gold coins after the Marshall vs. Lewitzky game in 1912? There's lots of evidence collected here, without reaching a firm conclusion: chesshistory.com/winter/extra/marshall1.html
Apr 26	comment	What does `cat-file` stand for in Git? @jtc Think of it like how the English word "chichenburger" comes from "hamburger", which comes from the town of "Hamburg", and the "burg" in "Hamburg" means "castle". It wouldn't make sense to say that the "burg" in "chickenburger" means "castle", even if we can trace it back that way. In the same way, we can trace the origin of the "cat" in `git cat-file` to `cat`, and then to "concatenate"; but it doesn't "mean" "concatenate" as such.
Apr 24	awarded	Supporter
Apr 24	comment	Prejudicial censorship of Indigenous history on the Stackexchange history forum Since, as you say, questions are generally expected to use reasonably formal language, it might be best to avoid the colloquial "King Tut" in your example, which as far as I can see is like saying "Queen Bess" instead of "Queen Elizabeth I".
Apr 21	comment	Changing StackExchange UI to expose Sockpuppet/Sybil Attacks? I'm voting to close as "needs details or clarity". Before anyone can discuss what new tools are needed, they would need to understand why you think the existing tools are not doing a good enough job. As others have said, many existing tools are granted only to elected moderators or staff members, so if you haven't already discussed the situation with those, it is too soon to say that they don't have the tools to deal with it. If you have discussed it with moderators and staff, and are not satisfied with the outcome, you should be explicit about that.
Apr 21	comment	the usage of "borrow" and "lend" I think this answers the question very clearly. In case the OP (or anyone else reading) wants to learn more, the technical term for this is that "me" in these exampels is an "indirect object", as opposed to the "direct object" (the jacket being borrowed, the diamond being stolen, etc). In many European languages, the indirect object is marked by using the dative case, e.g. in German "me" would be translated "mir" rather than "mich"; in English, we just infer it from word order, or use an extra preposition ("for me", "to me", etc).
Apr 21	awarded	Citizen Patrol
Apr 20	comment	Astronauts are stranded on an planet where society is limited to what technology exists in the 1910 Encyclopaedia Britannica @user14111 Fair point. I've only ever heard it called "the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica", but I can see someone might talk about a 1910 volume.
Apr 19	comment	Astronauts are stranded on an planet where society is limited to what technology exists in the 1910 Encyclopaedia Britannica Entirely incidental to the question, but the Encyclopedia Britannica involved was almost certainly the 1911 Edition rather than 1910. As well as being a landmark when it was published, that edition passed into the public domain some time ago, so has been widely reproduced online and used as a seed for other references. It makes total sense for such a free (rather than "bootleg") copy to be at the heart of this story.
Apr 13	answered	Proposal: 1lang — A single language with native columnar DB + native ML engine in one unified runtime (zero-copy pipeline)
Apr 12	awarded	Good Answer
Apr 10	comment	In the UK, are first and middle names legally distinct? @phoog It's an accepted convention on this site that users can add answers for jurisdictions other than what was originally asked, tagged appropriately. If the question asked was "In France, are first and middle names legally distinct?" it would be weirdly pedantic to say "no because 'name' isn't a French word"; the intention of the question, and the scope of the answer, seem perfectly clear to me.
Apr 10	comment	In the UK, are first and middle names legally distinct? @phoog Last I checked, New York is not subject to the laws of New South Wales, or vice versa; so the common law developed there does not affect the validity of this answer.