Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

This Message Does Not Exist

kmjn.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 278 posts

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#101

Post by rovr138 »

femto wrote: post #96
mkl wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how do you explain to a non-technical user that their data has been deleted on the server, but that their client still has a cached copy that they might want to try to salvage somehow? How about: "This message has been deleted from the mail server, but Outlook still has it in its temporary cache on this device. You can copy the message contents, or discard it from the cache, at which point it will be permanently de…

A typical person's head will explode at the mention of the words "cache" and "server". They will then go into a blind panic that their data is going to be "permanently deleted".

"locally", "the cloud"

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#102

Post by kazinator »

kelnos wrote: post #20
kazinator wrote: post #7

It's very easy. "This message does not exist" can be taken to be a false statement, without introducing any contradiction. It is not like "this message is false" (Liar's Paradox) or "this sentence has no proof" (Gödel's sentence). Unfortunately, just because "this message does not exist" is a false statement, contradicted by existential evidence, doesn't mean that the remaining claims next to it can be dismissed as f…

Perhaps not, but if one encounters a false statement, then it is reasonable to assume any following (and previous) statements are suspect as well. Also I think you are missing the point. This is clearly written tongue-in-cheek. The author is being entirely rhetorical; they're not asking you to solve the apparent inconsistency. They just thought the error message was silly, and that working through it logically (as if…

The statement has a true interpretation. "This message" can be interpreted as referring to some object in a back-end database represented by text you see in the UI. The thing you see on the screen corresponds to no persistent representation in the system.

"This person does not exist" under an AI-generated image similarly tells the truth; the image is not the person.

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#103

Post by lostlogin »

lisper wrote: post #85

Everyone is snickering at this and talking about philosophy, but there is actually a legitimate point being made here, albeit obliquely: how do you explain to a non-technical user that their data has been deleted on the server, but that their client still has a cached copy that they might want to try to salvage somehow? I submit that this is a nontrivial problem worthy of serious consideration.

How about your phrasing?

‘your data has been deleted on the server, but that your client still has a cached copy’

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#105

Post by 2four2 »

uyzstvqs wrote: post #84
klysm wrote: post #4

This is the most Microsoft error message I have ever seen

Only for a while until someone changes it to "Something went wrong"

With a large :( to redundantly communicate that something bad happened, in case the user didn't even read the simplified message.

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#106

Post by trifurcate »

haiku2077 wrote: post #86
a1369209993 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sleep(1) sleeps for approximately 1 second. This is correct - Sleep(1) does sleep for approximately 1 second; the problem is you're confusing the 95% confidence interval (which might be as narrow as (999ms,1001ms) for some reasonable designs) with the absolute error bounds (which are (0ms,∞ms], and yes, the infinity end is inclusive).

If your software is running on a VM, and that VM is suspended (e.g. for migration), the end of sleep could be minutes or months in future. This is surprisingly common when running on certain VM instance types on public cloud! Common enough that I've had to account for it in production code.

The confidence interval comment still applies for any production or client environment I've ever deployed code to.

Unless you actually expect your environment to spend more than 5% of its time on average getting suspended and resumed. Maybe you work on some tooling that is scheduled to run right around migration time (for servers) or sleep/resume time (for clients).

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#107

Post by lopkeny12ko »

Why does the author find this so difficult to understand? I read the error and both immediately know what the problem is, and can guess a likely series of events that caused it.

1. You load a page with the message, and your client (browser) renders its contents after fetching it from the server with an API call

2. Some unrelated process causes the message to be deleted on the server

3. Some asynchronous process on the client (like a periodic refresh) tries to get the message, but it's since been deleted, but the client-side rendered state stays the same

4. Thus the error: the message doesn't exist anymore, so you can discard it to manually make your browser state consistent with the server. Or you can just refresh and it'll be gone. So if you want to save the contents, copy it in your clipboard first, before refreshing.

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#108

Post by aaron695 »

mkl wrote: post #91
lisper wrote: post #85

Everyone is snickering at this and talking about philosophy, but there is actually a legitimate point being made here, albeit obliquely: how do you explain to a non-technical user that their data has been deleted on the server, but that their client still has a cached copy that they might want to try to salvage somehow? I submit that this is a nontrivial problem worthy of serious consideration.

> how do you explain to a non-technical user that their data has been deleted on the server, but that their client still has a cached copy that they might want to try to salvage somehow? How about: "This message has been deleted from the mail server, but Outlook still has it in its temporary cache on this device. You can copy the message contents, or discard it from the cache, at which point it will be permanently de…

[dead]

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#109

Post by [deleted] »

cortesoft wrote: post #36

Oh, finally a chance to put my Philosophy degree to use! The error says the "message" does not exist, but the message is not the same as the text. The message is an object that can be saved or discarded, and it contains text. The text still exists and can be copied, but the message is gone and can't be saved anymore.

[deleted]

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#110

Post by bongodongobob »

OmarShehata wrote: post #100
mkl wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how do you explain to a non-technical user that their data has been deleted on the server, but that their client still has a cached copy that they might want to try to salvage somehow? How about: "This message has been deleted from the mail server, but Outlook still has it in its temporary cache on this device. You can copy the message contents, or discard it from the cache, at which point it will be permanently de…

this is the only correct answer. "a non-technical user has no idea what a server or cache is" sure, but they can learn. The average person is much smarter than you think they are (when it comes to matters that actually affect their day to day life). If they don't get your explanation, it's almost always because (1) they don't care, they don't see why it matters to them (it often doesn't) (2) you're not explaining it…

The problem is that people's brains just fucking shut down once it's computer related. "What was the error message?" "Idk I didn't read it." "Well here it is, it's asking for your password." "Ok what should I do?" This type of shit is more common than it should be. So many people just give up on computer related things that isn't the happy path.
Post reply on HN