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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

Google's moonshot department was quite thoroughly lampooned in HBO's silicon valley, when they put bighead in charge of the hooli equivalent.

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Nobody that doesn’t watch the show wouldn’t have the slightest idea what that sentence meant

... what are you saying?

I don't watch the show -- is Bighead a person and Hooli a company with a product that google's mimicking?

Yes.

Nobody that doesn’t use double negatives wouldn’t have the slightest idea what your sentence meant

It is a triple negative if you count "nobody".

I think it is double negative as “nobody” before “doesn’t” is supposed to emphasize the negation, not reverse it. With that the sentence is supposed to mean: “Only body that watches the show could have the slightest idea what that sentence meant”.

Such constructions are frequent in Russian, like “it is not true that I have not done nothing” but apparently people use them in English too.

I ain't no english major, but everyone I know in America uses the "Two negatives resolving to a positive" form of english [0]. I'm pretty sure Australia is the same as I actually had this funny code review a few weeks ago which involved flipping an if statement based on a triple negative which unsurprisingly caused a bug. One of the guys in Sydney approved it, then unapproved it because he thought the original if statement was right, then realized the fix was right and approved it again while commenting that we should fix this horribly confusing function.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_negative#Two_negatives_...

Bighead is a clueless bumbling startup guy with no experience. Hooli is massive company like Google. In the show, they give the incompetent guy control of the entire research department.

I have no idea what this sentence means with the triple negative heh

(Reads "Nobody that doesn't... wouldn't...")

(tries to apply double-negative parsing, suspecting an off-by-one error)

(stops and laughs realizing the commenter was criticizing its parent for writing something unclear)

(edits original reply from "one too many negatives there" to this ridiculous response you've now finished reading)

Pretty cool potato cannon they built though.

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