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Ask HN: What's your least favorite tech word? Mine's "non-trivial".

5 points by ncarlson ↗ HN
Any time I hear someone mutter "non-trivial" a little piece of me dies inside. What other art/profession uses that word?

I can't imagine an automotive engineer describing a new car engine as non-trivial or a painter describing his work as non-trivial.

Anyways, what words wind you guys up?

Edit: Happy Monday, btw.

37 comments

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jacquesm
paradigm shift

leverage

billswift
Leverage is often irritatingly misused, but can be useful.

Paradigm shift - someone should invent a time machine and go back to shoot Kuhn's mother before he was born.

jacquesm
For that to happen we'd need a parad-- never mind.
wlievens
I absolutely loathe leverage.
TallGuyShort
It's not limited to tech people, but I do hear them say it a lot: "irregardless".

edit: Oh and let's not forget Scott Adam's favorite: Synergy

DanWood
"irregarldess" burns my ears, too. I also want to fight when I hear someone say "often times" (redundant) or "I don't disagree with you" (passive-aggressive double negative)
RiderOfGiraffes
Quantum, in almost any context. I do use non-trivial, but I'm a mathematician, and I refer you to Feynman's comments about tthe use of 'trivial'.
gdp
I have to step in here to defend "non-trivial".

Perhaps it is abused as a term by the population at large, but I'm reasonably sure it has its roots in theoretical computer science and maths. It has a meaning that is distinct from "complex". It means that something requires something more than pure mechanical verification or straightforward inspection.

A painter could use "non-trivial" in a sensible way. How much effort is involved in X? Well, it's non-trivial, because it involves more than having a look. It isn't estimating the effort, it is instead a binary classification - trivial and non-trivial.

Finally, to answer your question, I don't dislike individual words. I only dislike them once they are combined into sentences.

billswift
Non-trivial is important in mathematics. But I especially like it when used for humorous understatement; "Re-implementing Microsoft Office would be a non-trivial effort."
zackola
kludge synergy/synergistic/synergize proactive xml
jacquesm
No, not kludge, please :)

It's one of the best tech words out there, it is very specific and there is no other good way of saying it without using a whole pile of words.

zackola
It is a good word. I'm not saying people shouldn't use it. It is an ugly, ugly word to me - I hate the sound of it, which is part of why it is my least favorite. It's one of those words that sound like what they mean to me. What is that called anyway? Not onomatopoeia.

I also tend to hate it because I can tell before even starting to fix the kludge, it's likely to involve an large overhaul instead of a small bug fix.

jacquesm
I think that's how most kludges are born. Someone is given the assignment to repair something, they figure out that it will take them way too much time doing it the 'proper' way (their boss might simply not give them a time budget large enough to fix it well) so they resort to a kludge.
yan
Enterprise.
MikeMacMan
And its evil twin, Mission Critical
jacquesm
Ah, but Mission Critical actually has a place. When you're working for NASA, you operate a nuclear plant or some other outfit like that.

Everywhere else it's just pretending you do something important.

ganley
There's a joke that when an engineer says 'nontrivial,' he means 'impossible.'
billswift
The joke I heard was that it meant he didn't want to be bothered about it.
davidw
"Trivial" itself can sound quite snotty, said in the right way.
Maro
synergy

(Go watch 'In good company')

gaius
Idempotent.

But non-trivial does have a specific meaning: it means that we don't have any code already written or proven technique that we can simply reuse for or apply to this problem, and some new knowledge will have to be synthesized, and there's a risk in making any estimates of time/cost until more is known.

chuffwaffle
What's wrong with idempotent? It has a precise, useful meaning
gaius
It's often misused. Along with orthogonal.
Chronos
shudder We have a business relationship with a financial company based out of Germany, and their system (which sits on top of replicated Oracle) defines "idempotent" to mean "our database already has a cache of the answer we already gave you". Oh, and they gave us a JAR file of client code that does client-side failover, with a fixed 8-second delay to account for the Oracle replication lag between sites. No coordination between different instances of our client. So now, when one client fails over due to a connectivity blip, the other clients get cached error messages (logically equivalent to 404 Not Found). "Idempotent", indeed.
screwLoose
'webinar' has been annoying me for years now.
electronslave
Drill. Like "drill down".

It seems that trepanation might be a good response to someone using this word.

"Could you drill down into my data set and shift some paradigms?" "Yes, and while I'm at it, I'll equalize your humours." WHIRR "Indeed."

moe
Turnkey Solution

(My brain always translates to turkey inducing...)

bddbbdb
Tech/business jargon: "leverage" (when used as a verb) anywhere: "utilize" (when used as a word)
jlintz
"the cloud" please make it go away, it's totally the next buzzword to replace 'web 2.0'