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Comment by desine | Hacker News Reader

>for the sake of argument

Yes.

And for the sake of the same argument I made a counter argument, stating that some initially believed to be rare circumstances are actually not that rare.

"For the sake of argument" does not mean "I invite you to debate this", it means the exact opposite: "let's assume this is correct/we agree/etc. for a while and debate what comes after". So in this case you are doing the exact opposite of what the phrase "for the sake of argument" is requesting.

https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/for+the+sake+of+argumen...

> I know you want to go to Stanford, but just for the sake of argument, let's talk about what some of the other schools you got into have to offer.

This does not mean "I invite you to make a counter-argument as to why no other schools than Stanford are worth going to".

It sounds to me like NullPrefix accepted the hypothetical bug, for the sake of the argument, and then addressed the rarity assumptions made about that bug. "For the sake of argument" doesn't mean "No debating" it means "Let's assume some thing x is taken as a given and go from there."

The whole point was that "given this assumed rare bug, one can know it's pretty rare". Whether the example is actually rare enough is completely beside the point. If it's not rare enough for you, replace it. The argument comes next: given a rare bug, a developer can make an assumption of how rare it is. Debating the example of rareness is splitting hairs.

There is no argument, and it did not require a counter-argument, because that is not the point. He could have used literally anything else, it just has to be rare.

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