“There are only two hard problems in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.” – Phil Karlton
The variant mentioning off-by-one errors may be pleasant, and useful for beginners, but is hardly a problem.
When we'll have solved the naming thing we'll be safe.
The rest is just buzz-words and useless noise.
Some seriously hard problems in computer science: distributed programming (consensus, consistency, handling machine failure), parallel programming models, proving correctness of nontrivial programs, P?=NP.
Cmon, P?=NP is cache invalidation? Be serious.
It's not meant to be a literal, pedantically correct statement, it's meant to be an insight, and enough people think that it is that this quote gets repeated. By all means print out your own page in 4-point text of what is and is not a hard problem and stick it on your own wall.
It's not insightful if it leads people to the wrong conclusions. It would be more insightful to impress on people that CS is a large and diverse field with more hard problems than can be reduced to a single pithy saying.
I am curious as to the reasoning here. Why are these 2 the only hard problems in computer science?
On the contrary-- I have seen many beginners struggle for a long time to fully grasp counting starting at 0, which leads to many off-by-one errors.