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Comment by tschwimmer | Hacker News Reader

>If someone barely get's a PR accepted, they probably lack the skills to add a sophisticated backdoor.

Unforuntately it's easy to sandbag being dumb. Just because someone submits a PR defining constants for 0-999 does not mean they're actually bad at programming.

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How incredibly wasteful.

You can form most useful numbers with just ten singe-digit constants, some casting, and string concatenation.

Indeed, in python you can just eval.

Sure, but being known for submitting bad code is going to make code reviews more thorough, not less. It's drawing additional attention to yourself.

> defining constants for 0-999

That person might just be an old school Java <5 developer.

That person might just be a regular Java developer who works on a project which onboarded Checkstyle, and can't disable it's MagicNumber check.

https://checkstyle.sourceforge.io/checks/coding/magicnumber....

Man, I hate such tools. Do I run into problems when I try to convert seconds to minutes?

Larger problem than magic numbers ever could be.

Yes! Anytime you see a function signature like "int timeout", it's safe to assume that the unit is in femtoseconds and pass a gigantic number while you curse out the incompetence of the developer. Either name your variables correctly (timeoutZeptoseconds), or use a proper data type (like a Duration or Period in Java, TimeSpan in C#, or a user-defined literal in C++).

Oh, now I get why you need those constants:

  var secondsPerWeek = Math.pow(2, SEVEN) * Math.pow(THREE, THREE) * Math.pow(FIVE, 2) * SEVEN

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