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Comment by mnw21cam | Hacker News Reader

And apparently the BBC thinks it needs to explain what the word "trivial" means.

I've been caught out a couple of times by describing something as trivial (or non-trivial) to people not versed in software-speak. They can either think you are dismissing the whole discussion in some way or just have no idea what you're talking about whatsoever.

I don't think you'll find 'easy' as a definition of trivial in a mainstream dictionary (rather things like 'of little value or importance'). It probably is just computing jargon, though I recall it being used when studying mathematics and meaning 'self-evident' (e.g. a trivial solution).

Mathematics books are full of "trivial" for things easy enough to require no explanation (not only trivial solutions etc.). Probaby CS inherited it.

Yes, for me "Trivial" was a Mathematical term.

Some mathematicians do have a definite over-fondness for handwaving away statements they can't be bothered to prove with the "it follows trivially that ...". It's all well and good when such a proof would be 20 minutes of basic algebra, but that's frequently not the case.

One of our lecturers at university was so renowned for this, everyone taking that module organised to write "the answer to this question is trivial, and is left as an exercise to the marker" for any question they couldn't figure out in the exam.

Did they not grow up playing Trivial Pursuit?

The claim here is not that people don't know the word "trivial," but that they don't know of its use to mean "easy to solve."

Learning the facts needed to be a good Trivial Pursuit player is literally a pointless pursuit. It's not easy though.

But not mention which extensions were doing the harvesting...

I tried to find if someone is compiling the list of these extensions, but I couldn't find anything.

I'm guessing it was because "trivial" suggests it is so for everyone, whereas "easy" suggests it is so for someone with the expertise.

That seems quite unlikely.

And they got it wrong too. Trivial in the software sense merely means there is a known solution, you just have to implement it. Non-trivial means you need to generate some novel IP first.

Genuinely sorry if I'm being ignorant here, but... by whose definition?

As far as I can tell, he's borrowing the mathematics sentiment, where "the proof is trivial" doesn't necessarily mean you'll find it easy - it just means that the interesting aspects of the problem have been dealt with and what's left is a simpler or more general case.

That said... I've never encountered "novel IP" as the actual standard for 'trivial' in mathematics or CS. It would take a very strong source to convince me that's a formal or most-common-use meaning. (The Wiki page on 'trivial (mathematics)' certainly doesn't offer that meaning.)

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