Come on now, don't be disingenuous. Of course they are mutually exclusive, because you mean "not being reddit" as in "we are better than reddit" -- an elitist stance.
> When I see comments criticizing others' comments I am always reminded of reddit. I think this is exactly what you're hoping to avoid when you come to HN.
> I don't think HN is going to become a better place by becoming more elitist.
> This seems extremely pedantic. "Use case" as it's used today basically just means "case" or "situation" for a particular project or task or goal. It's not business jargon or a buzzword term, even if perhaps it started off that way many decades ago.
Notice that you are already in contradiction with the first criticism that I received in this thread, where a subtle difference in meaning was proposed.
> it means "in the future", which is ambiguous, but it's no more ambiguous than saying "in the future",
The main point is that it is totally unnecessary, we already have the future tense to talk about what will happen in the future.
The same applies here. Remove the phrase with "use case" and you get exactly the same meaning, with less words and less cringe.
> HN has a history of comments like this that criticize other comments and add nothing to the discussion
I disagree. HN is a place that seems to pride itself on the quality of its discussions, and on a higher intellectual caliber when compared to other Internet discussion venues. Surely a good command of language is part of that?
Corparate-speak that makes its way into common language is frequently justified post-hoc by subtle differences in meaning like the ones you allude to. The problem is that these differences are personal and subjective. Ask someone else, they might have a different answer. I have had the same discussion multiple times over the equally meaningless and inelegant "going forward".
Corporate-speak and cliché idioms makes one sound less clever, not more. It might temporarily signal belonging to some crowd (for example, the HN tech crowd), but in the long term it hampers one's ability to communicate in an effective and elegant way.
> For my personal use case at least, this timeline worked out well for me.
Hint for Hacker News commenters: 99% of the time, if your phrase includes the term "use case", you can safely just delete it and lose no meaning. It's just a way to say "for me" or "for them" that sounds more technical but really isn't.
In this case, you could say "This timeline worked out well for me".
> Why did we look for a solution in the first place?
They did. I do not believe that you were involved.
> How is it important that a number can be a sum of three cubes?
People like things for their own sake. How is it important to have sex or drink a beer? Same thing. Also math has this uncanny tendency to turn out to be useful where you least expect it. Consider the primes. For a long time people might have asked the same question you are asking here, and yet now they are central in encryption and thus the digital finance market. Could not find a more capitalistic and materialistic use if you tried.
The very idea of a "scientific theory" is a philosophical concept, and your implicit assertion that empiricism trumps abstract reasoning (which I am here neither agreeing with nor opposing) is in itself a philosophical position.
Pseudoscience refers to activities that superficially have the aesthetics of science but do not follow its constraints. For example, homeopathy is pseudoscience. They dress in white coats and use chemistry lab equipment, but they do not test their ideas with experiments that could falsify them. This has nothing to do with reasoning with the current scientific theories. What do you think theoretical physicists do?
I say this because more and more I notice people using "pseudoscience" in a sense similar to "heresy", and treating philosophy as some sort of inferior system of knowledge that is bound to be replaced by science. These people misunderstand both science and philosophy, and would benefit from a bit more of reading and thinking outside of their comfort zone.
> How can it be a state machine if you aren't mutating it?
You are confusing a state machine (which is an abstract model of computation) with the behavior of a program implementing it. The set of possible states and the conditions of transition from one state to the next never change.
These conditions can depend on mutable state, as is the case described by the author (in this case, mutable state is kept in the current and previous node pointers).
Maybe they do disagree with me. It is impossible to know, because they are not free to say what they really think -- which is another fundamental problem with not-democracy.
> Russia is a democracy. The US was a democracy when it genocided the native Americans. askmike is right. Democracy alone won't help Hong Kong. China will not stop. Pacifist Hong Kong will be crushed, regardless the form of government.
I am not claiming that democracy will save Hong Kong from China. What I am saying is that democracy is better than no democracy, and no amount of doublespeak or whatabbautism is going to change that reality. "Eat this poison, it's good for you", it's what the Chinese autocrats are saying. Well, people might indeed have to eat it, but they don't have to believe that it is good for them.
> You've never heard of James Dresnok. Why?
Yes I did, and I'm sure you can probably find a similar case that is actually related to my example. The simple point is that, when you have a wall between a democracy (not a "democracy", like contemporary Russia) and an autocratic regime, the ratio of people making the jump in the direction of the dictatorship against people making the jump in the direction of the democracy is < .00001. It is probably not zero because of people with psychiatric issues, people who are in love with someone on the other side, who left family there... But it is pretty damn close to zero, and this is something you have to explain if you want to insist that democracy or no democracy is the same for people.
Nothing is perfect, but dictatorship is worse. I live close what remains of the Berlin wall. People risked their lives to jump it and escape to the democratic side. Nobody ever wanted to escape the democratic side and jump in the other direction. Why?
I love China and I have a lot of empathy for the Chinese people. You have an amazing and ancient culture and I hope that you can release yourselves from oppression, gain control of your own government as a people, prosper and be happy. We are all human beings, fuck the dictators.
> I don't see where OP is implying that individuals suffering from unfortunate accidents outside of their control are driving up health care costs
No, OP is just proposing that help is denied to everyone who needs it and can't afford it, because it is deemed more important to prevent free-riders than to be humane. It's a nasty ideology, that is only embraced by the US among all developed countries.
It means that your life is only valuable to society if you have (or had) some economic value. It doesn't matter, by the way, if this economic value comes from actually contributing, or by inheritance, or by winning big at a casino. The important thing is that you have money, otherwise go (literally) die in a corner.
> This whole discussion seems to be centered on lifestyle choices, eating large quantities of sugar, that have a significant effect on the health care costs of the population as a whole.
So why not tax the big corps that make all of this junk for the costs to society that they externalize? Sure, it would be great if people had the level of education necessary to make the right choices. It is pretty hard to get that level of education in the US if you are born into an unprivileged situation, because the education system for the poor is shit, because said companies avoid paying taxes as much as possible, and the more well-off are selfish and shortsighted, and vote for politicians that do not spend public money on what can improve society as a whole.
> Childhood cancer or other unfortunate illnesses are statistically too infrequent to be driving up health care costs alone.
You are very young, I imagine. Perhaps you haven't yet started to understand that things go to shit as you age, and it is not "infrequent", it is part of the human condition. A part that is hidden out of the public eye because it is inconvenient to talk about it. All Americans are immortal and about to be millionaires!
> my answer to that is that the government should not be paying for people's health care. It enables bad behaviors and it forces people who make good choices to subsidize people who make bad choices. Which is legitimately bullshit.
Bullshit. The government is not "paying for people's health care". In most of the civilized world, you pay a percentage of your income to the national health care system, and then the national health care system takes care of you if you need something.
Why? Because you can be suddenly diagnosed with all sorts of diseases that could not be prevented by having "good behavior". That is puritanical bullshit to blame those who need help and compassion the most. People have life-threatening diseases because of genetic factors, environmental factors that are out of their control, receiving a cosmic radiation at the wrong moment, etc etc.
Also: people get old. The older you get, the more shit starts to happen.
Not having a national health care system leads to a nasty and cruel society.
It is only confusing if one spends too much time paying attention to those who want to sell you something, or develop some sort of guru personal-brand (I vomit in my mouth a little bit when I write things like "personal brand").
Here's what most people need to know:
Eat unprocessed food, mostly from vegetable sources.
This means no refined-anything (no added sugar, no white flour, no hydrogenated-fats, etc.)
The less ingredients the better. The more you recognize the ingredients as something you could grow in nature, the better.
I imagine I will be bombarded with paleo-something, keto-whatever, broscience, etc etc. You don't need any of that. Eat unprocessed food, mostly from vegetable sources and you will be way ahead of the vast majority of western people in terms of having a healthy nutrition.