Ask HN: Is this the most quoted quote on HN? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is this the most quoted quote on HN?

66 pointscorobo59 comments

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it"

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

View on HN

I'd guess the paraphrase of Goodhart's law:

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Upton Sinclair: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/

"correlation does not imply causation" must be a strong contender.

It's a really misleading saying because of the ambiguity of "implies". It's true if you interpret "implies" in the mathematical sense - i.e. "proves". But it's not true if you interpret "implies" in the normal sense - i.e. "suggests".

Correlation does not prove causation, but it does suggest it.

When someone mentions correlation, they imply a linear relation between the correlated variables and a range of values for which that relation is valid.

Only when that model is further validated correlation suggests causation.

> When someone mentions correlation, they imply a linear relation between the correlated variables and a range of values for which that relation is valid.

Yeah that's what correlation means?

> Only when that model is further validated correlation suggests causation.

No! It suggests causation already. There may not be causation but it definitely suggests it.

For example if I find that eating fast food correlates with BMI then there's a pretty clear suggestion that eating fast food causes increased BMI. It might not be the case! But it's clearly very suggestive.

I believe I understand your point, but there these options (as I see things):

1. There is little correlation, but there is actual causation (e.g: a cricle)

2. There is correlation, but it turns out to be a fluke later during validation.

So, yes. It suggests but in both cases I'd rather continue checkcing

Reminded me of xkcd 522[1] alt text haha

> Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'

[1] https://xkcd.com/552/

And this part is always omitted: “you can’t have causation without correlation”

Well, you can. You just need confounding causes.

"Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme." Meanwhile Coinbase goes public for $100B.

"The stock market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

"640k should be enough for anyone"

-Abraham Lincoln

"Don't believe everything you read on the Internet."

- Also Abraham Lincoln circa 1864 :)

"I don't care what anyone says, 14 inches is enough for any woman"

-Also Abraham Lincoln, just before finding out he was to be president in late 1860

"Did you win the putnam?" is also an old, old classic.

Context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079

"...you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem."

This comment is what led me down the rabbit hole of building a Dropbox like UI for FTP [1] and generalise the approach to work with SFTP, WebDAV, S3 and ultimately any system that can be modelled as a filesystem [2] with the magic of interfaces in OO [3]

[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash

[2] https://www.filestash.app/img/illustration/filestash-framewo...

[3] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash/blob/cddbcfc6d1...

There’s simply no better smack down of the old “I could build this in a weekend” than for the idea to become a multi billion dollar company.

Picture rsync... as a service!

I mean I would've thought that by now the competition for Dropbox would be as aggressive as for todo apps, but I guess it's more complicated due to legal (= content checking) issues.

> Picture rsync... as a service!

https://rsync.net

Not the cheapest storage, but it's a very good service.

> Cloud Storage for Offsite Backup

> We give you an empty UNIX filesystem to access with any SSH tool. Built on ZFS for data security and fault tolerance. You can back up any other cloud with your rsync.net account.

> rsync / sftp / scp / borg / rclone / restic / git-annex

MS and Google have their competitors + the demand is drying up.

Classic. Response to the Show HN for drop box right?

Yup https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Great one.

More broadly is always some version of "couldn't you just do X?" in response to any new product.

Honestly I ask this question a lot, but without a passive-aggressive intention. I just don't understand everything and I hope the asked person can explain it to me well enough, that I understand why.

It's usually really helpful for both.

I think that's fair as consumers will certainly pose the same question.

"Couldn't you just put a text file in Dropbox instead of use a todo app / password manager?"

"Couldn't you just rent a server instead of Amazon's?"

"Thanks dang"

It might be the most-repeated phrase, but I wouldn't call it a quote.

I don't think of it as a quote either.

Why did you single out my response amongst all the other similarly tongue-in-cheek replies?

"Citation needed" which I find annoying and always downvote.

I know that it may be abused, but sometimes people are just curious

I think what turns people off of this is that the phrase “Citation needed” carries an additional connotation of passive-aggression and is not a great way to ask for a source. It’s most notably used (outside of Media Wiki) as a rude way to say, “I challenge you to back this up” at best or “I know this is bullshit” at worst.

"But that phrase doesn't really express curiosity, more unwillingness to accept. Anyway, it isn't a quote."

-- Alfred Einstein

"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."

...including Common Lisp. - Robert Morris

http://paulgraham.com/quotes.html

Occam's razor is surprisingly recurrent on here.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

That's Hanlon's Razor. Occam's Razor is one that developers seem to constantly forget when they're debugging.

Possible contenders:

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it”

“Never attribute to malice what can be adequately described by stupidity.”

Having seen it play out 1st hand more than once, I gotta say, if it turns out to be the most quoted quote on HN, it is well deserved. I have made many mistakes in my career that I could have easily avoided by just keeping it in mind.

It might need a modern-day makeover though as it equally applies to women.

There are several that I find to be painfully recurrent at this point:

- hanlon’s razor references

- xkcd 927 (competing standards)

- you aren’t the user you’re the product

Some days it feels like we’ve reached the point where an AI could generate a believable comment thread for a typical front page story…

xkcd 538 ($5 wrench) is also up there

How about "Please don't break the site guidelines"

Probably need some sort of tf-idf scheme to handle "It depends" or "I don't know" and such, but a pretty common quote is (or was, anyway) "If you're not the customer you're the product".

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I have definitely seen that one several times.

Here's one that might beat it: "developers, developers" for lots of Balmer quotes.

why was this downvoted???

"Bitcoin is the future of currency"

"Do you have a source for that?"

"Not to be pedantic, but..."

That's exactly what you mean to be.

"It depends" <- 100% sure its this.

That isn't a quote though.

It might be. It depends.

"Yeah, but did you win the Putnam?"

Thought of the same, but "only" about 50 I can find: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Original: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079

That’s a good quote that I have used many times. Most used? Hard to say. What I find is that popularity is constantly changing. Example: we went through a good year or two of EVERY… SINGLE… TITLE… that ended in a question mark would have someone comment about Betteridge’s Law like what they were saying was somehow witty, insightful or novel when anyone who reads HN has seen it 5684269537 times already. That one was annoying.

This isn't exactly a quote but fits in the sense of "general ideas mentioned frequently on HN and not frequently elsewhere"--

Gell-Mann Amnesia

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Betteridge's Law yields 130 results - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Dang commented on this a bit over a year ago:

> It's probably time to retire Upton to the Internet Hall of Fame next to Betteridge.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23100306

If only!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com