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Comment by speedgoose | Hacker News Reader

It's a metaphor to illustrate than someone can suddenly disappear. It can be a bus, a plane crash, a murder, jail time. It happens once a while.

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Or, more commonly, and at my work, they leave the company with 1 months notice and there isn't time to do proper handover of the plethora of projects they babysit. Whoever picks it up ends up learning everything from scratch and stale documentation

We have been instructed to use the phrase "lottery factor" during our cynical rants. Everyone feels much better. I guess it's because of the "if I won the $70 million jackpot I'd just come back to work" meme.

I'd buy a bus with my winnings and put the lottery factor into effect for my former coworkers.

The problem with the "lottery factor" is that if someone wins the lottery, you can still theoretically go to their new mansion with a wrench and beat the information out of them.

When I'm creating hypotheticals which test our project's resiliency, I prefer to imagine my colleagues suddenly deciding to retire early and travel the world or something like that. But "sudden early retirement factor" doesn't quite have the same punchiness as "bus factor".

> a murder, jail time

Obligatory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Reiser

Of course. I just thought it was funny how it turned out in reality. Don't get hit by a bus, you'll be the butt of programmer jokes for years.

I think you would have got a different reception if you didn't include the "the risk is way overblown" bit. Up till that point, yeah it's morbid but funny. After that point it seems even confusing - how can this person not realise the bus number is not meant to be taken literally?

But yeah, I don't even walk out in front of vehicles that I'm not certain will stop when I have a green light and they have a red light. This surely pisses some drivers off when I stop in the middle of the road waiting for them to stop. They seem to be like "I'm not going to kill you and I'm offended you act like I will".

Unfortunately jail time has an outsized effect, look at Hans Reiser. That incident pretty much killed reiser4, which was on track to become a very popular filesystem for Linux, despite having 10s of developers working on it.

It didn't helped that the system was named after him.

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