I don’t get why people ask questions like this nowadays when the Wikipedia article or an LLM will give you a much better answer than what someone could type in a reply.
Judging by the murderous sounds you hear all night here in the summer, I would not want to be cornered in a dark alley by a gang of adolescent raccoons.
>Judging by the murderous sounds you hear all night here in the summer, I would not want to be cornered in a dark alley by a gang of adolescent raccoons.
Well if you ask me adolescent raccoons are a big problem in many of our cities, I'd be worried about such a case myself.
Toronto, Canada is hands down the raccoon capital of the world. Something like 100k raccoons live in the city.
I can’t get my head around how such big animals manage to live all around us in such densely populated place. I suppose it helps that they are cartoonishly adorable.
But they are increasingly getting really, really big. It’s just a matter of time before the chonker living in my neighbour’s shed bullies me out of my house.
All you need to know about Toronto is that the generational effort to build a raccoon-resistant trash can has failed every time. They're unstoppable beasts!
Kassel is under 200k people, with ~100 raccoons/km² though!
Curiously, that raccoon population was established legally and intentionally in the 30s to bolster local fur production; later efforts to eradiacte the animals (for being pests from an agriculture perspective) have been given up.
Damage to local ecosystems seems fortunately pretty limited, even though the raccoons are highly successful and spreading.
I have a relatively rare name — I’ve actually never met anyone with my last name, never mind someone with my full name — and this happens to me regularly. Last week I got a job rejection from New Zealand post, for a while I was getting someone’s pay stub notifications from the US, etc.
I suspect it’s because I was the first to register the first.last@gmail.com address for my name. I guess it’s a bit like owning a simple noun .com domain.
I use my lastname [at] gmail (same as my HN username). Over the years, I’ve received all sorts of misdirected messages: medical, financial, support, even real estate documents. When it seems important, I do my best to contact the sender and let them know.
What I’ve learned is that “no-reply” email addresses can cause real harm in situations where it’s critical to reach an actual person.
My dad's first name is my last name so my last name @gmail is taken by him :)
But I have a relatively rare first name and even rarer last name due to my dad having a very rare first name, so I easily snagged first.last. Pretty sure to this day I've never even seen anyone with my dad's first name (or my last name).
Meanwhile, my coworkers name is literally Adam Smith and his usernames tend to be adamsmith2 or 3 or 4.
I once worked at a place that has two Brian Smiths who worked at desks across from each other. That was quite bizarre.
One place I worked, we had one guy with the same personal and family names of the (then) Director General of the BBC… working on a project with another guy who also shared both.
I am not the horror film director I share a name with.
> Over the years, I’ve received all sorts of misdirected messages […]
Looking at my text messages, surely these are a mix of serious business and the starts of scams. How unsavory to think that helping someone could be a bad thing.
Absolutely... I've had the same issue (nickname is gmail name), and constantly amazed how many people don't "get" that you can't just claim any gmail address you like and start using it on websites anyway.
I've gotten student financial aid docs, various product mailing lists, order receipts etc... it's amazing how many places take an email address and just start spamming without any validation at all.
I have lastname.firstname@gmail.com because first.last was already taken.
Just curious, do gmail accounts ever expire? Will I ever get the chance to snag the other one? Or does it forever belong to my nemesis and life-long enemy?
Even if your google account is deleted, the email address is NOT recycled because it can be used to impersonate people - maybe the previous owner still has physical/digital accounts linked to that old email. As far as I know most services do this - an email address once registered is never released again.
Yea I own first.last@gmail.com for my name too and I get emails for who I think is the same person fairly often. Like job stuff, professional education emails, etc. I used to reply to them saying wrong person but have given up...the guy must not care about not getting these emails...
My first name is very uncommon and my last name is very common.
I am on the other side of this problem and was surprised because it is very easy to contact me. When the other person with my name forwarded the emails, it was all careless and unwanted recruiter mail. Someone goes into work, types first.last@gmail, and hits send without doing one Google search. Incredible.
I'm in the same boat, except my first and last name are fairly common.
My gmail account is not my primary email address, and to be honest I don't know if I could manage making it my primary because of the amount of rubbish I get.
I recently wanted to introduce someone to our internal recruiters to a person with a long, uniqueish name. The recruiter was like: they did respond with „I’m not interested“. But the person was like: I’ve never got a mail.
Turned out the whatever tool our recruiter used spit out „first.lastname@gmail.com“ even though the person in question doesn’t own that email.
I've gotten a wide enough variety of stuff (mortgage paperwork, homeowners insurance, game service accounts) that some of it has to be organically entered, but that is a good note. Crazy that any system would be set up that way, but HR tech is a clusterfuck.
I am lastname.firstname@gmail.com, but I wouldn't be surprised if something similar is happening in some instances.
I have met someone with my last name, if its not hyphenated, which mine is. My name is as unique as it gets with hyphenating. I never use my hyphenated name anywhere other than 100% legal stuff.
My address is the same. Someone with my name thinks their email address is firstlast@gmail.com
Its annoying especially since we have the same bank and they are not very good at paying their credit card on time. I therefore get their bank emails. Initially
It will always have me confused as weight wait. I don't have any balance on my credit card. Was this fraud?
I have pretty rare first and last name, but somehow have gotten random person's car service receipts (and reminders) from a service place in the US (I live in NZ).
There car has a lot of problems.
I got on twitter pretty early too, and just have a short first time as my @, and occasionally get DMs about getting my @, but no one wants to hand out cash for it. The most I've been offered is $50.
But most just expect me to give it for free.
I have a sufficiently uncommon last name to be able to figure out which branch of the family the misdirected emails are meant for. Was quite nice getting updates from the chip shop we used to get fish and chips from when we went to visit grandma, intended for someone who afaik I never met.
That's good. Because large refactorings are usually harmful. They are also usually unplanned, not scoped and based on very unquantifiable observations like "I don't like the code is structured" - let's do ity way.
That's a good thing, large scale refactorings should be very, very rare. Even automated code style changes can be controversial because of the churn they create. For large and/or important software, churn should be left to a minimum, even at the cost of readability or code cleanliness. I've seen enough open source projects that simply state they won't accept refactoring / reformatting PRs.
A new language feature is released, you cannot apply it to old code, since that would make a big PR. You need to do super slowly over time and most old code will never see it.
A better static type checker, that finds some bugs for you, you cannot fix them as your PR would be too big, you instead would need to make a baseline and split it up endlessly.
In theory yes, maybe a bit safer to do it this way, but discouraging developers to make changes is bad IMO.
Obviously depends on your usecase, if you develop software that is critical to people's literal life, then you'll move more carefully.
But I wager 99% of the software the world produces is some commerce software, where the only thing lost is money.
> A new language feature is released, you cannot apply it to old code, since that would make a big PR.
Good. Don't change code for the sake of shiny new things syndrome.
> A better static type checker, that finds some bugs for you, you cannot fix them as your PR would be too big,
Good. Report each bug separately, with a suggested fix, categorised by region of the code. Just because you ran the program, that doesn't mean you understand the code well enough to actually fix stuff: those bugs may be symptomatic of a deeper issue with the module they're part of. The last thing you need is to turn accidentally-correct code into subtly-wrong code.
If you do understand the code well enough, what's the harm in submitting each bugfix as a separate (independent) commit? It makes it easier for the reviewers to go "yup, yup, yup", rather than having to think "does this part affect that part?".
Large-scale refactoring is not something you want from an external contributed, especially not if unsolicited.
Typically such refactoring is done by the core development team / maintainers, who are very familiar with the codebase. Also because DOING such a change is much easier than REVIEWING it if done by someone else.
AppStore only accepts games compiled in a new version of XCode, and I have only a very old Mac on which it does not seem possible to install such a new version.
Just wait until the Quebecois government here in Canada hears about this. They are militant about avoiding english at all costs. They changed all the STOP signs in Quebec to ARRET because STOP was too english.
I don’t want OOP. I just want the language to include a system for imposing constraints that prevent entire categories of bugs and make it easier to safely do large scale refactoring.
It’s really hard to go back to living without this once you’re used to it.
Coq, Idris, et. al. are over there if that's what you really want, but there is probably good reason why no "real world" programs are written in languages with proper type systems.
For one, there's little ability to avoid message passing in our modern world. You can take it out of the language, but that just means pushing it to another abstraction (e.g. sockets), and all the same lack of type safety comes right back.
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