The Rule of Three | Hacker News Reader

The Rule of Three

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61 pointstdmckinlay28 comments

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I noticed this on a box of Diamond Crystal brand kosher salt.

You can tell they were really reaching for that third bullet point to list on the side of the box:

- No Additives (Just Salt!)

- Kosher for Passover

- Sticks to food well

I like to imagine they held a serious design meeting about it.

Third one is true and verifiable and actually useful for cooks :)

I think it's that the flat flakes increase the surface area to mass ratio to well within that which surface tension (from moisture in the food) can adhere the flake to the food?

Fun fact: The “sticks to food well” part is the reason it’s considered kosher salt.

All salt is actually kosher. “Kosher salt” is a special kind of salt that sticks to food well, to be used when “koshering” meat (removing all blood) by completely covering it in salt.

I guess it derives from the rule of three in writing[1]. It's a shame the article doesn't even mention it.

Some famous examples include:

Veni, vidi, vici (Jules Caesar)

Ready, set, go!

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness (Jefferson's draught of the US Declaration of Independence)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(writing)

Did you intentionally use three examples... even 'rule of three' is guilty!

That site is awful on mobile. I can’t tell what is part of the story and what is an ad!

It's not just on mobile.

"And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, 'O Lord, bless this thy hand grenade, that with it thou mayst blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.' And the Lord did grin. And the people did feast upon the lambs, and sloths, and carp, and anchovies, and orangutans, and breakfast cereals, and fruit bats, and large chulapas. And the Lord spake, saying, 'First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin. Then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it.'

Came to comments to find this. Left satisfied.

Obligatory discussion of OP: "This research could be disproven in the future (although this is rare)" … sounds like "irreproducible results".

I think the quote flouting the rule of 3, and the discussion in the article is analogous to a similar phenomenon with face attractiveness.

If you average across many faces, you get an attractive face. It's a safe bet for an attractive face.

Yet, many super models are not an average across features, but have extreme features. The challenge is that unlike an average, extremes can generate unattractive faces.

Rule of 3 is a recipe for a pursuasive message, but you can be pursuasive by flouting it (and extremely pursuasive writing often flouts rules).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Averageness

The holy hand grenade of Antioch might be a powerful weapon but someone should tell those ancient patriarchs that feasting on fruit bats is a foolish thing to do.

1, 2, 5.

three sir

Now THIS is the sort of high quality discussion I come to HN for!

Destructor, copy constructor and assignment operator!

Retro. With move semantics, it's all about the Rule of 5 these days.

Can think of so many examples of threes. But for the sake of confirmation bias...

  Rise and shine
  Rinse and repeat
  Lock and load
  Wax on, wax off
  Netflix and chill

When I talk about writing I call this a bump-bump, a quick pairing of ideas; good ones often exhibit parallelism in syntax or sound.

To be, or not to be (parallel contrast, Hamlet) light of my life, love of my loins (allteration, Lolita)

Rise and shine (assonant i) Rinse and repeat (alliterative r) Lock and load (alliterative l) Wax on, wax off (parallel contrast)

Don't know about Netflix and chill - I want to say there's good assonance and consonance there, but I might be pushing.

In spite of my clumsy word (bump-bump) I actually think these are highly memorable:

e.g. Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. One small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.

They are incredibly ear-wormy, aren't they? My internal name for them was "this and that" phrasing, but if I recall from Uni the sterile academic term is a "paired construction".

I honestly thought this was going to be about C++:

https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/rule_of_three

Shouldn’t that be the rule of five now? No wait, I mean the rule of zero.

Both referred to in my link.

Bill Clinton used to use three words to advocate, usually with the same first letter. For instance, in a recent speech, he warned that the opposing candidate would “blame, bully and belittle” and that he would be "denying, distracting, and demeaning". Of course, Biden's slogan is "Build back better".

Spiro Agnew anticipated both Clinton and Biden by a couple of decades with "nattering nabobs of negativism."

That is a terrible thing to research, and potent fuel for cynicism, but thank you for the data, that was interesting =)

Is it just me or this website awful to read. Substack needs to up its UX.

no examples?

I wonder how this is related also to meetings. From my own experience, any meeting with more than 3 persons can never yield results effectively.

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