Hacker News Reader

Comment by lainga | Hacker News Reader

Thus far I have seen screenshots of it flagging the phrases "I would like to buy 4 watermelons" and "I just broke my 8 year old laptop". Regardless of your opinion on the ethics of this feature it seems to need a little polish.

View on HN

Reminds me of the 2005 conversational simulation game, Facade[0], in which any mention of the word "melon" would be met with being immediately kicked out of your host's dinner party.

[0]: https://www.playablstudios.com/facade

c.f also the “Scunthorpe problem”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

A working text content filter that doesn't randomly flag seemingly innocent input is something I wouldn't expect to see within my lifetime.

Yeah, that would get flagged in human code review, too. Way too many magic numbers

One number is 'too many'?

I've gotten into way too many fights over this, and my bitter sarcasm is leaking here. I actually like numbers in code. But I've literally been told that

   distance = ((x1-x0)**2 + (y1-y0)**2)**.5

has "magic numbers" and that's a "code smell"

Raising to the power of .5 rather than using the sqrt function does whiff a bit. Even better, use hypot.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/web/javascript/refe...

https://docs.python.org/3/library/math.html

Yup, hypot is better on performance grounds, if you assume I'm using doubles. But is it as readable as my snippet?

How could it not be? It has a name that says what it's doing, while yours is more punctuation than text. To "read" yours I have to just skim over it and mentally assign "according to the variable name, that hodgepodge means 'distance'... I hope".

I have a BS in math, so obviously I'm familiar with the math notation, but I code like an English major.

If the function was named "hypotenuse" then it would be unambiguously more readable. But since the function is considerably older than the modern zealotry surrounding code readability, it's this weird 5-letter word that most people aren't familiar with. Contrast that to the Pythagorean theorem, which folks are exposed to in elementary/middle school.

Yeah, not to mention tons of possible variations of that line that you might not notice at a glace but would completely change the output.

Yeah, my bad for not radiation-hardening my code

https://github.com/mame/radiation-hardened-quine

I was thinking more in line with http://www.underhanded-c.org, but that was also an interesting read

Well, clearly we need a metricFactory to provide the distance function, in case we later want our game to run in a non euclidean context.

I hope you get that metricFactory out of a computableMathConceptFactoryFactory

I was once told in code review that using XOR was "too low level" for Ruby code.

This was by a person that sprinkled lazy backfilling behavior throughout the codebase, created magic method_missing dispatches against polymorphic ActiveRecord relationships, and exposed the database as a service through a RESTful DSL that allowed arbitrary method dispatch.

I'm glad I spend most of my time in statically typed, math and binary-friendly codebases now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com