dkharrat

Is there an advantage to overriding the man command over the approach of just directly exporting the env variables in bashrc? I currently do the latter and I don't override the man function. I suppose overriding the man function would allow for man-specific customizations, but perhaps there are other good reasons too?

Type erasure introduces limitations on what you can do at runtime that forces a developer to write code to workaround it. For example, in Java you can't write a generic method that instantiates an object based on the type of the generic. The workaround is typically to pass in the Class type as an additional parameter to the method, which in theory should not be necessary. A lot of JVM-based languages are required to introduce additional complexity in the language to simulate reified generics (e.g. Scala's Manifest/TypeTag classes).

Doesn't Airbnb fall in the same category? Renting out your property for a few days to complete strangers requires a lot of trust, and yet from what I can tell, Airbnb seems to have overcome this hurdle.

I do agree there was a trust issue with Homejoy (I've personally tried them once and had similar concerns). But, I don't believe the issue was that they were in an unviable business where trust can't be gained, but rather they didn't have the right mechanics in place that help develop the necessary trust between the consumer and the cleaners.

An example where kill -9 can screw things up is killing a database process (e.g. MySQL, mongo, etc). Killing it with -9 will most likely lead to data corruption/loss, as the process might be in the middle of flushing to disk for example.