You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

Lumifer comments on The horrifying importance of domain knowledge - Less Wrong Discussion

15 Post author: NancyLebovitz 30 July 2015 03:28PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (236)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: HungryHobo 03 August 2015 03:57:52PM *  -1 points [-]

Which sounds nice right up until a production system shuts itself down gracefully a few hours before a daylights saving time switch purely because of tests which turn out to be more picky than the actual thing they're supposed to be protecting.

Multi-byte characters can do surprising things to scripts designed to truncate logs written by someone who didn't take into account the maximum size of characters and chinese production server names.

A lot of a programmers day can end up being related to fixing bugs due to incorrect assumptions or failing to take edge cases into account and knowing lots of edge cases and handling a reasonable portion of them right away is far better than making the most restrictive possible assumptions off the bat.

You don't want to end up running into the Y2Gay problem: http://qntm.org/gay

Comment author: Lumifer 03 August 2015 04:03:04PM *  0 points [-]

Sometimes it's the sanity checks themselves which fail to handle input that the system itself could handle fine.

Do you know that "the system" can handle that input fine? If you do, why did you sanity check reject it?

Sanity checks are just code -- you certainly can write bad ones. So?

You don't want to end up running into the Y2Gay problem

That post argues via mind-numbingly stupid strawmen (or should that be strawschemas?). Yes, you should try to be not stupid, most of the time, to the best of your ability. I agree :-/