Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Pyxl101 3926 days ago
I don't think it's obvious that an "integer multiple" of a quantity necessarily excludes 0 or 1. I could accept that it excludes zero if from the context that would make no sense. But to presume that it excludes 1 is a bit too much.

I'm not sure if I agree with the EFF's position completely, but I see where they're coming from.

Let's say that I was implementing linear backoff. I do this by multiplying my base delay time by an iterator i, where i starts at zero and count upwards. Sleep time = delay + delay * i. So after the first failure, we sleep "delay", and after the second failure we sleep "2 * delay", and so on. If I was describing this in words, I might say that I was multiplying the delay constant by the integer multiple i. In this context, it clarifies that the number is a whole number as opposed to a fraction.