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

What Can You Put in a Refrigerator?

prog21.dadgum.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 87 posts

Re: What Can You Put in a Refrigerator?

#51

Post by andrewingram »

stordoff wrote: post #32
mikepalmer wrote: post #24

Reminds me of a question I have been wondering about: Can you formally specify what is the purpose of a suitcase? In principle, you could dump all your clothes, toiletries, etc. in a pile on the airport checkin counter, and if system were organized enough, it could deliver all your stuff to hawaii and lay it all out on the hotel bed for you. E.g., a robot would scan all your belongings at the airport, and dump them a…

> kinda like how the internets work! Using this analogy, isn't a suitcase roughly equivalent to a packet? It's tagged with source/destination, and basically standardised so the routing gear doesn't need to care about the specific items you are routing.

You know, I think the analogy might actually be the wrong way round....

Re: What Can You Put in a Refrigerator?

#52

Post by thaumasiotes »

downer70 wrote: post #16
Symbiote wrote: post #5

The question is wrong, as it stands the answer is "any non-fluid or contained fluid that will fit". "What should one store in a refrigerator?" is a better question.

One could also refrigerate contained gases.

As your parent comment explicitly stated. Gases are fluids.

Re: What Can You Put in a Refrigerator?

#53

Post by eropple »

miguelrochefort wrote: post #45
SixSigma wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* Puff pastry that needs to be chilled for five minutes so that the butter doesn't melt into the flour before you do the next roll. * Jello that needs to be set * Sprouted beans / seeds for which you want to restrict the rate of growth

"Any contained item that can fit inside a refrigerator, whose quality would be better if kept at 1-4°C rather than at room temperature by the time it's used/consume."

Does a bowl of hard-boiled eggs count as "contained"? It's not sealed.

Re: What Can You Put in a Refrigerator?

#54

Post by goodcanadian »

silentplummet wrote: post #50
hapless wrote: post #38

The original spec, "Anything that fits into a refrigerator," is a pretty darn good one. It conforms to Postel's law: "Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others". We can develop a spec in a vacuum, but we can't be sure what users actually want from our refrigerator. Maybe a live penguin actually does belong in there, as in the famous children's novel.

Can you put a baby or pet into a refrigerator? What about a freezer?

You certainly CAN. Whether you SHOULD is a philosophical question which is outside the scope of this specification.

Re: What Can You Put in a Refrigerator?

#55

Post by eps »

miguelrochefort wrote: post #11

"Any contained item that can fit inside a refrigerator, whose quality would degrade significantly more when kept at room temperature rather than at 1-4°C, by the estimated time of use/consumption." The term "contained" above is restrictive, and probably needs further precision. Only things that thrive inside an opaque and sealed container would fit the definition above. Otherwise, things that can affect the quality o…

Technically, that's an answer to "what you should put in refrigerator."

Re: What Can You Put in a Refrigerator?

#56

Post by sparkie »

Anything the user decides to put in the refrigerator, provided we put warnings in small text on the document that accompanies the refrigerator for catogories of items we know to be unfit for the refrigerator so as to cover our asses if the user does not heed our warnings.

In terms of software, trying to decide up front for the user what they can do is the wrong approach. Even constraining them is flawed, with the exception of constraints for liability issues. What the user needs is the meas to express their decision making as to whether something should go into the fridge, so they need an input mechanism capable of doing selection, which has access to the context in which the item might be being placed into the fridge.

Does this sound like any configuration format you've ever used? The typical key-value stores which attempt to give you a declarative list of what you can put where, without the means to compute whether or not it might be a good idea first are almost ubiquitous, and the number of programs which take the right approach: give the user a proper, expressive programming language to configure the software, are few.

Just as it happens, we've developed ACME Refrigerator v2.0, which now allows you to store chocolate bars in it; a feature we missed in v1.0. Upgrade now for just $400.

The absurity of this idea with a fridge seems lost in software because we can upgrade at almost zero cost in just a few minutes, but that's only masking what is an obvious design flaw.

Which raises the question: What can you put in a software package definition?

Re: What Can You Put in a Refrigerator?

#57

Post by arbitrage »

nathancahill wrote: post #48
TwoBit wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with Postel's law, as it results in broken standards in practice.

Only because people break the first part of the law. Postel's law is absolutely crucial for communication between independent systems.

Ignoring the reality of what people chose to ignore will end up making you very unhappy.

Re: What Can You Put in a Refrigerator?

#58

Post by miguelrochefort »

eropple wrote: post #53
miguelrochefort wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Any contained item that can fit inside a refrigerator, whose quality would be better if kept at 1-4°C rather than at room temperature by the time it's used/consume."

Does a bowl of hard-boiled eggs count as "contained"? It's not sealed.

Are they shelled?

Re: What Can You Put in a Refrigerator?

#60

Post by epochwolf »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #33

The more I have to deal with corporate project management patterns, the more I think the whole approach behind specifications is wrong. Trying to focus on what the "domain objects" are and what is their flow is pointless, especially if you're dealing with real-world objects (like the fridge from TFA). You can model something this way, but it will be usually the imaginary perfect path, a narrow vision of how things sh…

> Just look on what people are doing and find a way to do some parts of the process faster and better.

This requires buy-in from different parts of the company that are going to have their own opinions about how to do things. They can be surprising resistant to change.

Post reply on HN