Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What's your least favorite tech word? Mine's "non-trivial".

news.ycombinator.com

31–38 of 38 posts

Re: Ask HN: What's your least favorite tech word? Mine's "non-trivial".

#31
post #19

Idempotent. But non-trivial does have a specific meaning: it means that we don't have any code already written or proven technique that we can simply reuse for or apply to this problem, and some new knowledge will have to be synthesized, and there's a risk in making any estimates of time/cost until more is known.

What's wrong with idempotent? It has a precise, useful meaning

It's often misused. Along with orthogonal.

Re: Ask HN: What's your least favorite tech word? Mine's "non-trivial".

#32
Drill. Like "drill down".

It seems that trepanation might be a good response to someone using this word.

"Could you drill down into my data set and shift some paradigms?" "Yes, and while I'm at it, I'll equalize your humours." WHIRR "Indeed."

Re: Ask HN: What's your least favorite tech word? Mine's "non-trivial".

#33
post #9

Enterprise.

And its evil twin, Mission Critical

Ah, but Mission Critical actually has a place. When you're working for NASA, you operate a nuclear plant or some other outfit like that.

Everywhere else it's just pretending you do something important.

Re: Ask HN: What's your least favorite tech word? Mine's "non-trivial".

#37
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with idempotent? It has a precise, useful meaning

It's often misused. Along with orthogonal.

shudder We have a business relationship with a financial company based out of Germany, and their system (which sits on top of replicated Oracle) defines "idempotent" to mean "our database already has a cache of the answer we already gave you". Oh, and they gave us a JAR file of client code that does client-side failover, with a fixed 8-second delay to account for the Oracle replication lag between sites. No coordination between different instances of our client. So now, when one client fails over due to a connectivity blip, the other clients get cached error messages (logically equivalent to 404 Not Found). "Idempotent", indeed.
Post reply on HN