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Comment by ouid | Hacker News Reader

No.

What?

Say you're trying to invent a lightbulb. The first one ever, and it explodes when you plug it in. How would you describe its state?

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"I have failed to invent a light bulb" Broken implies it was working to begin with, or can be compared to something that works, as the post you're replying to states.

No. Your attempt is now just shards of glass. It's borked. Before it was broken, it didn't work, but now its broken.

sure, but the thing that's broken was just that, a "thing". It wasn't a "lightbulb", because it was never able to produce light. It's a broken "bulb", at best, and that's a correct use of the word "broken", because it can be compared to other bulbs that aren't broken, in this case the glass bulb itself.

Never having operated as desired and broken are different concepts.

My square wheel isn't broken, because it's square.

Seems like you just didnt read what I wrote.

Nobody knows what a lightbulb is as it hasn't been invented. What you did was fail to reinvent the candle.

I know what lots of things are that have yet to be invented. Space elevators and their variations, for example.

Is the one we have not better than the ones that came before it?

It's popular to look things like the gold standard through rose tinted glasses, but economic numbers don't support it.

Say you're selling a lightbulb and millions have bought it and then one day the millions of bulbs you've sold to millions of people all explode at the same time.

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