This is not quite right. At least in Debian, only files that are newer than some standardised date are to that standardised date. This "clamping" preserves any metadata in older files.
Strangely enough, sometimes using the epoch can expose bugs in libraries (etc.) when running or building in a timezone west of Greenwich due to the negative time offset taking time "below" zero.
Debian's approach is actually to use the date specified in the top entry in the debian/changelog file. That's more transparent and resilient than any mtime.
One of the authors of strip nondeterminism is here. The primary reason it's written in Perl is that given that strip-nondeterminism is used when building 99.9% of all Debian packages, using any other language would have essentially made that language's runtime a dependency for all building Debian packages. (Perl is already required by the build process, whilst Python is not.)
Very true, but when there's literally 100s of years of women's legitimate medical complaints being dismissed (sometimes with fatal consequences), it is surely not too much of leap to speculate that this is part of the reason.
> "If that were the case, surely Tour de France riders would..."
Apologies for appearing to pick you out here, but your comment is representative of a number of eminently "logical" comments made here (as well as many analagous comments on HN in general). So, modern professional cycling is a sport with a 100+ year history, and in 2021 represents a bizarre fusion of the sports entertainment industry, the romantisation/revival of the past, celebrity culture, global cycling manufacturers, the mid-life crises of Wonka-esque team owners, the aestheticisation/fetishisation of the working class, the 'Olympics industry', lurking labour disputes, the fast fashion sector, the ad-hoc application of modern sports psychology, a looming confrontation with its historical emphasis on (mostly horrifically underpaid) white males, neoliberal economics, petty and bountiful financial corruption, widespread pharmaceutical corruption, and the influence of petrochemical money from several ex-Soviet states... All mostly filtered through the celluloid lens of France and Italy, two European nations that have an extremely complicated relationship towards their own history which comes out as a muted pageant of lukewarm national pseudopopulism that is not only is confused within its own borders, but is more-or-less unintelligible to those in the Anglosphere. To imply in any way that a kind of efficient market analysis can apply to decisions made within this sport (that has, if I remember correctly, strict rules about sock length), suggests an insufficient engagement with the background.
It would make an interesting essay or monograph to descrbibe the various similes and metaphors that people have variously used to describe the working of the human mind. Descartes, I believe, thought the brain worked via a series of hydraulics, and the Victorians thought that it worked by some variant of electricity, both of these being "new" and possibly exciting technologies for their times. Notwithstanding the scientific versimillitude of these previous theories, it seems only fitting that computers occupy that role today.
Hubert L. Dreyfus's "On Internet" contains, amongst many things, one of the most succinct overviews about how one goes from novice to expert. I highly recommend reading this short book, especially in this time of online learning:
The later chapters on virtual worlds in the second edition have dated a bit, but before that, it's almost entirely gold, even though it was written so long ago.
> ouple of rows in the likes table of a social media website
Don't get me wrong, I very much enjoy this kind of obstinate reductionism and we don't remind ourselves enough that this is what driving lots of our interactions online.
However, I will just add a slight counterpoint in that my bank balance is, at the end of the day, "just a bunch of rows" in a database and, to be perfectly honest, that is somewhat meaningful. :)