>for the sake of argument that a hypothetical bug requires you to have more than ten contacts of the exact same name and these also need to share the same country and area code
This is only rare if you have a small social circle. My circle has multiple first name-collisions of at least 5 participants, but my circle is not very big and the area code is also quite small.
Some countries do not use area codes for mobile phone numbers, which are used for Signal, meaning country code is the only area limiting factor.
Well he just wanted to make an example. One could also construct an example, where the bug only occurs for people with a rare sequence of unicode symbols (e.g. U+2600 U+2601 U+2602) in their username and have a specific date (e.g. 05.04.1920) as their birthday.
It's not that your argument was incorrect. It's that it is tangential to the parent comment. hnarn was not making the point of something being rare, they were demonstrating that a developer can estimate the rarity based on the conditions that trigger it. The rarity itself is no matter.
Arguing over small semantic or circumstantial differences is often considered impolite
I do not know why I keep replying to this... but regardless, here it comes: your counter-argument is irrelevant! It does not require any counter-argument, because it is hypothetical! He could have said anything else that is rare, something that you think is rare, too. Just assume he said something that you think is rare as well. It is a hypothetical scenario, so you can do that; in fact: you should have done that, because all that is important is that it is rare, whatever that is. Again, argument over what he said is rare or not is not needed. Just assume it is rare, or assume he said something you think is rare.
I hope this gets the point across. Yes, maybe what he said is not rare, but that is besides the point.
And for the sake of the same argument I made a counter argument, stating that some initially believed to be rare circumstances are actually not that rare.
"For the sake of argument" does not mean "I invite you to debate this", it means the exact opposite: "let's assume this is correct/we agree/etc. for a while and debate what comes after". So in this case you are doing the exact opposite of what the phrase "for the sake of argument" is requesting.
It sounds to me like NullPrefix accepted the hypothetical bug, for the sake of the argument, and then addressed the rarity assumptions made about that bug. "For the sake of argument" doesn't mean "No debating" it means "Let's assume some thing x is taken as a given and go from there."
The whole point was that "given this assumed rare bug, one can know it's pretty rare". Whether the example is actually rare enough is completely beside the point. If it's not rare enough for you, replace it. The argument comes next: given a rare bug, a developer can make an assumption of how rare it is. Debating the example of rareness is splitting hairs.
There is no argument, and it did not require a counter-argument, because that is not the point. He could have used literally anything else, it just has to be rare.
This is only rare if you have a small social circle. My circle has multiple first name-collisions of at least 5 participants, but my circle is not very big and the area code is also quite small.
Some countries do not use area codes for mobile phone numbers, which are used for Signal, meaning country code is the only area limiting factor.