POSIX_ME_HARDER is an alias for the POSIXLY_CORRECT an environment variable that can be used for some programs, particularly those written by people exasperated by some aspect of the POSIX standards.

RMS quote (from an interview with Linuxcare in 1999, no longer online? archive at karmak.org):

To have an excuse to say that we still support the spec, if you define the environment variable, POSIX_ME_HARDER was the original way. Then a slightly prudish board member convinced me to change it to POSIXLY_CORRECT which I now think was a mistake. I should have left it as POSIX_ME_HARDER.

And an RMS quote from an interview with Federico Biancuzzi:

Some GNU utilities such as df and du do not follow the POSIX spec unless you set the environment variable POSIXLY_CORRECT. Normally GNU df and du print disk space figures in units of k. POSIX says to print disk space figures in units of 512 bytes. If you set POSIXLY_CORRECT, GNU df and du do that. (My original plan was to name it POSIX_ME_HARDER.) I would guess that very very few users set POSIXLY_CORRECT.

See Democracy Triumphs in Disk Units. (To put this message in context, there had recently been a coup that resulted in the demise of the Soviet Union.) Despite that page suggesting that df(1) uses POSIX_ME_HARDER, at least recent versions don't. So it's not a very good alias.

$ df Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/hda3 18690576 3958640 13782496 23% / $ POSIX_ME_HARDER=yes df Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/hda3 18690576 3958640 13782496 23% / $ POSIXLY_CORRECT=yes df Filesystem 512-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/hda3 37381152 7917280 27564992 23% /