A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe • Hacker News Board

Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe

#101

Post by PaulKeeble » Tue, Sep 08, 2020, 4:00 PM UTC

unethical_ban wrote: post #92

mellosouls wrote: post #32

Unfortunately - especially when dealing with non-technical ideas - some of these "falsehoods" veer into opinion territory. It's an interesting resource but perhaps the title of it is a little egoistic/presumptuous in that regard.

You just inspired an idea from me regarding HN comments. I think Slashdot still has one of the most elegant commenting systems around, even if the quality of the comments (due to the site's ownership) is worse. I would love to tag HN comments with certain attributes and be able to filter them out. For example, this comment and the parent could be tagged "meta-discussion". Then those who want to discuss the content of…

I have been thinking about this for a while with Reddit. If users could mark why they think something is worth upvoting then everyone else could just filter to find the insightful or informative comments and get rid of the funny ones, or vice verses depending on what they were looking for at the time. Distilling down the comments to stuff you are much more likely to be interested in could improve the site quite a bit, it works on Steam fairly well for games even with a somewhat free tag system but I can't help but think that perhaps not many people would bother.

The simplification to up and down hurts discussion on Reddit (and probably on hacker news too) because it promotes widely comprehended and accepted content. This is why on Reddit pictures do so well unless they are banned, they are very quick to review and choose to up or down vote. However a 10k document will be reviewed by a lot less people, it could fit exceptionally well with the content and get 100% upvotes but be completely buried by all the pictures because a lot less people had time to view it and upvote it.

There is a deeper challenge here with how comments and upvoting and content filtering via users is done. It isn't just the lack of information from tags but also once a document is reviewed will an upvote occur. Much of Reddit shows users will widely upvote on the basis of the title of say news without ever reading it. The longer the article is the less people will return to Reddit to upvote it. Both HN and Reddit promote popularity over fit because low numbers of upvotes on content equates to low engagement and that isn't valuable to them, but it might be the singularly most important piece of content for that audience its just long and badly titled.

There are a bunch of unsolved issues that Reddit and HN have surfaced around the model for content and comment voting and where these two sites differ is mostly only in the rules to try and mitigate the problem with the chosen model. The problem is only more complicated models can improve it and the moment you do that you potentially lose customers, but at the same time you potentially don't want those customers either.

That is my unfinished thought chain on this.

Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe

#102

Post by liability » Tue, Sep 08, 2020, 4:00 PM UTC

astura wrote: post #99

liability wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question, what is the purpose of sorting names? I presume you never give your customers a list of other customers, so such a sort couldn't be useful to them. Is it for internal reports or something? Some MBA says "get me a list of all our customers... and make sure it's sorted!" ? And is some arbitrary imperfect sorting order not adequate for this sorting need? Why not just treat the name field as a bunch of…

One stupid example off the top of my head: A teacher that needs a list of all the students scheduled to be in their 5:00 class. There's literally millions of similar examples. Software where none of the users know about the other users would be fairly rare in my world (I've worked on internal business tools most of my career).

Is any arbitrary imperfect sort not adaquate for roll call? If the full names are sorted naively like any other string, why would that be a problem for teachers? I don't get this. Usually what happens is last names are placed first for sorted lists, but this seems like an arbitrary meaningless convention without real utility. And since this arbitrary convention is problematic in cases where names can take on many forms, it makes sense to disregard the convention. If you're not already accustomed to the convention it doesn't even make rational sense; why should the first name be last and the last name first? That's totally backwards, but it's convention. Why though? It's not even like that ordering will necessarily put siblings next to each other on the sorted list. Many siblings have different last names and many people who aren't siblings have the same last name, so what is the actual purpose of supporting this convention?

My name is such a convention-defying name by the way, the way I use it. Often I have to enter "[first initial] [middle name]" as my ''first name'' even though it isn't. Just give me a single name field please.

Edit: Annoying example from a minute ago: I gave my first initial/middle name to newegg. Newegg tried to be clever by dropping my middle name and now calls me simply "J." That's not my name!

Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe

#103

Post by Muromec » Tue, Sep 08, 2020, 4:04 PM UTC

ry_co wrote: post #91

Muromec wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You don't need bitcoin because you can just wire money from one account to another" "Okay, you don't need bitcoin if you are not sending your money to imaginary places like Iran and N'Korea" "Okay, you don't need bitcoin in Europe or US unless one party in your transaction has surname that starts with Ass and ends with ange" "What do you mean by saying that banks abroad could refuse to open you account if you are US…

You do realize that it's still illegal to do all these things with Bitcoin, right? It's not that banks can't do these things; they just have no interest performing illegal activities on your behalf. Bitcoin solves nothing here.

It's also illegal to smoke weed, drop acid, watch netflix or be gay or publish suicidal jokes in some places. Everybody draws a line for themselves in regard to which laws they have to respect or have no choice but to break today.

Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe

#104

Post by Muromec » Tue, Sep 08, 2020, 4:08 PM UTC

dmitriid wrote: post #80

Uberphallus wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once you get foreign names, this becomes weird even with European names Wait until you think about multi-heritage names. My son is Spanish AND Ukrainian. Ukrainian naming customs are like Russian, then in Spanish you have two last names. This breaks down as follows: in Spanish the second last name is that of the mom, but in slavic naming customs it changes according to the gender. So in Spain he won't have the last…

There are also cases of transliterating names. Belarus insists on their internal schemes, so Евгений becomes Yauheni (to match Belorussian version of the name, Яўген) when it should become at least Eugene.

The old trick of having your name mentioned in any public document issued in other country in whatever spelling you want doesn't apply in Belarus? Had to do that, because my name looks more like a barcode when transliterated from original Ukrainian spelling.

Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe

#105

Post by dathanb82 » Tue, Sep 08, 2020, 4:53 PM UTC

lisper wrote: post #88

0x4a42 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are Malcom X and you create, let's say, a Facebook account, then your last name is X.

Harry S Truman's middle name was the letter S.

Ditto Ulysses S Grant (though he wasn’t born with that name).

Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe

#106

Post by dathanb82 » Tue, Sep 08, 2020, 5:00 PM UTC

unethical_ban wrote: post #92

mellosouls wrote: post #32

Unfortunately - especially when dealing with non-technical ideas - some of these "falsehoods" veer into opinion territory. It's an interesting resource but perhaps the title of it is a little egoistic/presumptuous in that regard.

You just inspired an idea from me regarding HN comments. I think Slashdot still has one of the most elegant commenting systems around, even if the quality of the comments (due to the site's ownership) is worse. I would love to tag HN comments with certain attributes and be able to filter them out. For example, this comment and the parent could be tagged "meta-discussion". Then those who want to discuss the content of…

This is probably solvable with Hypothesis and a custom browser extension.

More generally, third-party annotation of web (especially hypertext) resources is an underexplored opportunity. I suspect it’s at least partly because integration isn’t a first-class concern for these sorts of apps (if it were, they’d build it themselves and own the feature and the data), so the experience isn’t that great and the marketing is significantly diluted.

Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe

#107

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Sep 08, 2020, 5:17 PM UTC

silicon2401 wrote: post #75

jmnicolas wrote: post #62

> My system will never have to deal with names from China I work in a small French town where Chinese people were quite rare until a few years ago. Their passports have a translation of their names in Latin alphabet, same for Russians. However one day one of my user told me "hey I can't find some customers in your app, but I'm 100% sure I recorded them previously. Funnily they're all Chinese". It turns out that to av…

This happens with western names as well. Jo, Bo, Malcolm X.

[deleted]

Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe

#108

Post by Sebb767 » Tue, Sep 08, 2020, 5:17 PM UTC

kube-system wrote: post #69

Sebb767 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but in the other hand, if you don't handle validation or storage of these things it's rather irrelevant.

I wouldn’t say it’s irrelevant. If you are speaking to someone over a phone, over a counter, or through the mail, they interpret your communication through the same lens of assumptions, before it even reaches your application.

That's why I said rather ;)

Human assumptions are one thing, but if you're directly speaking to a person, you can explain your unusual name situation. There is no discussing with the input validation on a web form, though. That's why I think it's far more important for programmers rather than, for example, counter staff.

Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe

#109

Post by karambahh » Tue, Sep 08, 2020, 5:47 PM UTC

jmnicolas wrote: post #62

> My system will never have to deal with names from China I work in a small French town where Chinese people were quite rare until a few years ago. Their passports have a translation of their names in Latin alphabet, same for Russians. However one day one of my user told me "hey I can't find some customers in your app, but I'm 100% sure I recorded them previously. Funnily they're all Chinese". It turns out that to av…

I'm a friend (and former colleague) of the repo author.

That's exactly some of the cases we had to deal with some legacy invoicing systems (of which Kevin was not responsible, but I was ;))

Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe

#110

Post by karambahh » Tue, Sep 08, 2020, 5:52 PM UTC

superhuzza wrote: post #89

0x4a42 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a few french names that are 2 letters long and even some only one letter long.[1] ;-) [1] http://www.geopatronyme.com/cdip/lettresnoms/lettres1-3.html

I clicked on some of them, and most have fewer than 20 recorded instances in over 100 years. I guess it happens sometimes, but it's really not comparable to the prevalence of names like Ed, Jo, Bo etc (which aren't always contractions). The most common two letter name in France is probably something like Li or Ng. Edit: Funny observation - when you use the system that's linked to try and look up the public records, i…

The French minister for digital affairs is, funnily enough, named Cédric O

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A9dric_O