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The kind of company I want to be a part of

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Re: The kind of company I want to be a part of

#171

Post by angiolillo »

ctxc wrote: post #158
angiolillo wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough, and honestly I agree with you that supporting the n==1 case is the bare minimum of care I'd expect from an application developer. Though if you support languages other than English even the decision to simplify pluralization logic to n==1 seems like a form of "...meh, whatever" given various pluralization rules: https://cldr.unicode.org/index/cldr-spec/plural-rules

The best approach is to probably separate the number out I guess. Files deleted: {0 or 1 or 1,000,000}

That's certainly the approach our translation team prefers! Assembling a grammatically-correct statement from multiple discrete tokens is hard in languages with grammatical gender, complex pluralization rules, word ordering, etc. And there's not much benefit of doing it halfway right.

Re: The kind of company I want to be a part of

#172

Post by dullcrisp »

cantor_S_drug wrote: post #149
tyleo wrote: post #2

I’d say overreaction. The real world is full of tradeoffs and I’ve seen people try to get minutia like this correct in convoluted contexts which actually broke the core application logic. Given the limited time we can spend on things, supporting proper plurality falls below some of my other UI priorities like proper accessibility settings. I don’t think plurality is bad, just low in the stack rank of things that matt…

I think there was an article on English stackexchange where linguists proved that the word "the" is a useless word. It's a filler word like umm, etc.

You mean, “I think there was article on English stackexchange where linguists proved word “the” is useless word. It’s filler word like umm, etc.”

Re: The kind of company I want to be a part of

#173

Post by ang_cire »

darkwater wrote: post #125
ang_cire wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they didn't read the catering closely, did they also skim the electrical schematics? This is dumb pop-psych stuff, like the "make interview candidates wait then reject them if they don't know the other candidates' names" type hiring "tricks". It's barely different than judging someone based on their handshake grip strength, imo. Perhaps these companies prioritized the work properly, and determined that electrica…

> This is dumb pop-psych stuff, like the "make interview candidates wait then reject them if they don't know the other candidates' names" type hiring "tricks". It's barely different than judging someone based on their handshake grip strength, imo. Wait, what? How are these related? One thing is putting a canary clause in a contract between companies to check if they actually read all the clauses (which had to be foll…

> One thing is putting a canary clause in a contract between companies to check if they actually read all the clauses

Not following the letter of a canary clause, especially if you don't recognize it as such because it's inane and prima-donna-esque, doesn't mean you didn't read the clause. It's an assumption that Roth is making which he falsely believes has given him special insight into the contractors, when in fact it's entirely possible and even probable that the meaningless canary clause requirement was ignored in favor of actually handling the real, important requirements.

The best stage technician in the world could very well say, "he can get his own damn M&Ms", and that would not detract one iota from their skill or legitimacy.

Ask most professionals to do dumb shit outside their job description, and that's the response you'll get, rightfully so.

Re: The kind of company I want to be a part of

#174

Post by zem »

cmdtab wrote: post #81
jordanb wrote: post #22

This is the Californian Ideology in a blog post. The implication that title and intro mean to imply is working for companies that build products that are not evil and hostile to their users. But the call to action is to.. embed logic in the programs to pluralize properly (in English). It's possible to write evil software that pluralizes words. It's possible to write beneficial software that does not pluralize words.…

We want to hire engineers who really pay attention to details and great product experience but it’s quite rare in practice. Hiring is super hard.

are the engineers you do hire rewarded for paying attention to detail though? it's often the case that the company decision makers "want" attention to detail, in that they agree it's a nice thing, but their revealed preferences are more along the lines of "why are you wasting time on component x which is already in a shippable state when component y is behind schedule?!"

Re: The kind of company I want to be a part of

#175

Post by maratc »

abraxas wrote: post #69
maratc wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it still "16'777'222 pliki wysłane"?

yeah, the last digit matters. But sometimes the second last as well because of teen numbers: 22 pliki wysłane 12 plków wysłanych

I've read that Russian is similar but also treats anything ending in 1 (but not 11) as singular, similar to "16'777'221 plik wysłany".

Re: The kind of company I want to be a part of

#176

Post by darkwater »

ang_cire wrote: post #173
darkwater wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is dumb pop-psych stuff, like the "make interview candidates wait then reject them if they don't know the other candidates' names" type hiring "tricks". It's barely different than judging someone based on their handshake grip strength, imo. Wait, what? How are these related? One thing is putting a canary clause in a contract between companies to check if they actually read all the clauses (which had to be foll…

> One thing is putting a canary clause in a contract between companies to check if they actually read all the clauses Not following the letter of a canary clause, especially if you don't recognize it as such because it's inane and prima-donna-esque, doesn't mean you didn't read the clause. It's an assumption that Roth is making which he falsely believes has given him special insight into the contractors, when in fact…

They added it because they routinely had issues with venues not doing the mandatory things. He also explains that their show was bigger than the other ones in terms of installation size (9 trucks vs 3). So, saying that it was just a primadonna caprice it's actually going the "easy way" here: following the rockstar stereotype we all have in mind.

Re: The kind of company I want to be a part of

#177

Post by sivaraam »

mdriley wrote: post #163

Obligatory oldnewthing: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030929-02/?p=42... > Multilingual support also explains why you see things like “1 folder(s)” instead of “1 folder” and “2 folders”. Why not have two format strings, one for when the number of items is exactly one, and one for when the number of items is two or more? > Well, for one, that would significantly increase the number of strings we would h…

I suppose Raymond chen has shared enough insights for us to build a whole wiki out of it :-)

A couple of other related ones:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20241007-00/?p=11...

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20241101-00/?p=11...

Re: The kind of company I want to be a part of

#179

Post by jmye »

jordanb wrote: post #22

This is the Californian Ideology in a blog post. The implication that title and intro mean to imply is working for companies that build products that are not evil and hostile to their users. But the call to action is to.. embed logic in the programs to pluralize properly (in English). It's possible to write evil software that pluralizes words. It's possible to write beneficial software that does not pluralize words.…

> The implication that title and intro mean to imply is working for companies that build products that are [...] hostile to their users. But the call to action is to.. embed logic in the programs to pluralize properly (in English).

So it's your belief that paying attention to how your tool communicates with it's users (in the language they're speaking) has no implications on user hostility? That's certainly a fascinating point of view that I would guess is in the extreme minority, and probably isn't actually something you believe yourself, if you stop trying to rant about California long enough to consider the words you wrote.

Also, would love if you'd call out where anything about "evil" is actually implied - I would assume that, when you read the actual written words, you'll realize you've added that yourself, and that perhaps you'll be a bit more careful in the future when trying to throw in a slightly wordier Twitter-slap. Or not, I suppose your post is "current social media discourse in an HN post" or whatever.

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