Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by SanjayMehta | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

SanjayMehta

But why?

View on HN

https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...

> but sometimes considered offensive if used by a man to a woman he does not know

There are billions of other magic numbers to choose from anyway.

> but sometimes considered offensive if used by a man to a woman he does not know

At some point within the past 10 years they started inserting these annoying little sjw asides into the dictionaries

So someone using "0xCAFEBABE" or whatever, do you really think women take it personally, or what is the problem here? If I were to use it, there would be no target, and I doubt in most common uses there are any, so it does not make much sense to me.

Just don't take the risk. Why is there a need to put potentially offensive words in the code when there are billions of alternatives?

Some people may find it funny, but it mostly gives an image of immaturity.

I’ve never liked those hex words, especially the sexually connoted ones, but at the same time I find the existence of code checking for them very cringy.

Because every word and every combination of hexadecimal characters is "potentially offensive", and because those prone to taking offense are perfectly capable of finding it anywhere that they want to anyway?

> Because every word and every combination of hexadecimal characters is "potentially offensive"

No they are not. There are plenty of harmless combinations, like 0x1235679a or other with English words like 0xcafebad0.

Offensive was a bit of a strong word here, I was mostly paraphrasing the dictionary. However in male-dominated field, using an objectifying word targeting 50% of the world population is definitely in poor taste.

Most important of all, it looks unprofessional. It don't think it would look professional for HR to put jokes in our salary sheets, and I think the same applies to company code.

Krssst wrote: > No they are not. There are plenty of harmless combinations, like 0x1235679a or > other with English words like 0xcafebad0.

and 0xcafed00d?

It's about what's offensive in certain groups living in the US.

Nobody cares about the rest of the world. Certainly not these groups.

I'm still baffled that it's still possible to use the "kill" word when terminating processes, but "cafe dude" is somehow undesirable.

Selective virtue signalling at its finest.

after the parent kills the children that were sending the commands to the slaves, it needs to wait to reap the zombies, because there's no garbage collection for the dead children. otherwise the process table might fill up from all the forking, like with a fork bomb. then stonith failover will nuke the server, unless it's on the blacklist of dummy servers

i wrote the stonith daemon in racket scheme because guile was too slow and was sometimes missing a heartbeat

Yes. Once I used Rust's Command in a wrong way, and after terminating a child it has turned into a zombie. I had to forcefully kill it manually each time this happened. It had to be fixed in the long run, because each run risked an OOM Killer (employed by the system) will show up and start its random kills. When I've finished my fixes, I've committed everything to the master branch and CI slaves started working nightly to bring me fresh binaries to execute in the morning. It wasn't much longer after smoke tests when it was apparent that the bug was eliminated. ;)

oh yes, i execute so many children every day, i take it so much for granted that i didn't even think about that

i'm sure glad this discussion is so hierarchical because on irc we might get kicked for it

> it's still possible to use the "kill" word when terminating processes

Shhhh, don't give them any ideas.

Just wait until they hear that it’s perfectly fine to show someone being graphically killed or blown up on prime time TV, but a national scandal if a boob gets flashed.

It’s just a particular flavor of first world problems combined with group policing using rage and shaming.

I know my libertarian tendency hackles get triggered when I see it, but frankly I’ve given up giving a shit. Mostly.

perhaps https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41238488 will provide helpful context on the different ways people think about these things

But there is a target here, too. "Ana" and "Leslie". I get the "b00b" ones may be "bad" in the sense that those are sexually explicit nouns, but as for "d00d" or "babe", not so much as it requires a target.

Oh.

I was reading them out in hex. As in CA FE BA BE …

Now I feel stupid.

The beauty of being that kind of ‘stupid’ is you’re impervious to certain kinds of shaming. Enjoy it. Revel in it, if you can.

It's a mystery, lost to the sands of time. IMO, it's highly unlikely anyone will ever discover why the maintainers of the Rust compiler decided to lint their codebase for a dozen or so magic numbers.

It's fairly simple - and I don't know why no one has pointed this out already.

If everyone starts to use the same magic numbers then they are no longer magic and you can end up with strange corner case bugs and holes where a magic number used in one context is mistaken for a magic number in another context.

I feel my leg is being pulled, ever so gently.

the github commit's "conversations" log for the commit has a few notes you need to log in for to view. But then, the maintainer who merged said "it's just a few constants". Which is fair enough.

I think this would more belong into clippy; it'd be easier extensible then, and less "magic". But I'm just a 0xf001 who's intentions are 0x900d ... please don't let me 0xbe misunderst0x0d.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com