Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | Cpoll's commentslogin

He's considered and written about this very subject: https://www.stallman.org/articles/dr-stallman.html

You forgot 0, -1, null, "1".

Since I work in a strongly typed languages the last two will fail to compile and are thus not worth the bother - those who don't have that luxury of course need to test the edge cases that apply to them. The first are maybe, in my experience they are rarely a problem, but we need to go from the abstract to the particular algorithm before we can have a discussion on if they are potentially a problem or not.

If you're using Rust you can push it one level further: use a NonZeroU*.

More than that and you'll need nightly for now: https://docs.rs/ranged_integers/latest/ranged_integers/


Isn't this a bad example? There's only one adjective in "prudent hedges." Changing which noun "prudent" acts on isn't a matter of adjective order.

(I suppose Wall Street is a proper adjective, like "New York pizza," but you said no nitpicking)


In compound noun phrases, nouns serve as adjective-like modifiers.

By the way, modifying compounds generally must not be plurals, to the extent that even pluralia tantum words like scissors and pants get forced into a pseudo-singular form in order to serve as modifiers, giving us scissor lift and pant leg, which must not be scissors lift and pants leg.

An example of a noun phrase containing many modifying nouns is something like: law school entrance examination grading procedure workflow.

The order among modifying nouns is semantically critical and different from euphonic adjective order; examples in which modifying nouns are permuted, resulting in strange or nonsensical interpretations, or bad grammar, are not valid for demonstrating constraintsa mong the order of true adjectives which independently apply to their subject.

For instance, red, big house is strange and wants to be big, red house. The house is independently big and red.

This is not related to why entrance examination grading procedure cannot be changed to examination entrance grading procedure. The modifiers do not target the head, but each other. "entrance" applies to "examination", not to "procedure" or "grading".


Did you read the second sentence of that paragraph? The same thing would happen with a legit adjective, like if the forum had been named "FinancialBets": "Guys, this is financial bets, not financial prudent hedges."

Ironically, the article is using hyphens (-) instead of em-dashes (—). An em-dash should be one em (the height of the font) wide.

> all I want is bug fixes and security updates.

Yes yes, I don't want updates. I just want updates. haha.

> People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions.

constant updates


"Don't give me security updates every time there's a security issue. Instead do it occasionally because I like my vulnerabilities to be a surprise"

I'm just pointing out that your proposal doesn't match their requirements.

> I don't want updates. I just want updates

It only sounds dumb if you write it like that. If you say "I don't want feature bloat, I just want security patches" it sounds reasonable.


It's possible those arguments are correct. I wouldn't give up Google and SO, but I suspect I was learning faster when my first stop was K&R or a man page. There's a lot of benefit in building your own library of knowledge instead of cribbing from someone else's.

Of course no-one's stopping a junior from doing it the old way, but no-one's teaching them they can, either.


> If a tool like this is currently only suitable for specific and minor cases under human oversight, how does it prove any better than a human?

Not to defend Grok, and I agree with your point about checking, but you can also say this about a hammer.


Not unless you wanna punch a nail in with your fist.

"AI" only does things we can do, because to do otherwise would be evidence against the general, human level intelligence that the marketing behind these abominations are so desperate for. The catch is they do it quicker, sometimes much quicker, but always much worse.


> More than 40 million is a lot. For comparison, the US has ~132 million households.

Does comparing sales to households make any sense though? You'd need to figure out (40MM - Roombas in landfills) / average Roombas per household.


Nah, cranks post inscrutable incorrect proofs (and/or bizarre unified theories) to math forums regularly. They often lack the vocabulary to even format it in a way the community can read and correct.

I recall there was a mathematician that was cataloging all the 'squaring the circle' methods people kept mailing him (it's been proven to be impossible).

If their idea were legitimately revolutionary and they had the vocabulary to express it, they could simply publish.


> The length of our days is generally seventy years, or eighty years if one is strong

Which translation is that? Or are you paraphrasing?

Most translations don't include "generally," and therefore read more as an upper bound "if one is strong" than an average.


Just a poor memory translation. Yeah, generally is incorrect - though I think the correct phrasing also implies an average age of natural death, rather than an upper bound. There were certainly plenty of people living past 80. In the aforementioned study of Ancient Greeks, there were at least 3 centurions - Aristarchos, Democritos, and Gorgias. Granted 1400BC is a thousand years yet prior to that already ancient time, but life peaks seem to be relatively unmoving for humans, and so I don't see any major reason to think there would have been a major difference between 400BC and 1400BC.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: