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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

The lesson here is never ignore your own "Huh, that's weird." experience when using software. :-)

Yes, I refer to this as cognitive dissonance. You know that something isn't right, and you can't readily think of an innocent explanation that really holds up, but it's possible to ignore in the short term because you can work around it or it's not a complete show stopper. Those things almost always seem to eventually come back to bite you!

> Those things almost always seem to eventually come back to bite you!

Or maybe you only remember the ones that bit you, and forget the ones that didn’t.

A French proverb is « Il n’y a pas de fumée sans feu », means there is no smoke without fire. I use it a lot in my day work when I try not to watch a suspicious behavior…

The usual form of that proverb in English is "When there's smoke, there's fire".

Is it? Interestingly I’ve only heard it as “no smoke without fire”

"Where there's smoke, there's fire" is how I've heard that proverb

“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire” is what I’ve heard (from fire heavy Southern California).

This is how we phrase it in Australia.

I'm Australian and have only heard, "where there's smoke, there's fire".

I've heard both.

Exactly the same in Russian: "Нет дыма без огня".

I guess there was something they could share during the Moscow fire in 1812.

Smoke is absolutely possible without a fire. Have you ever seared any meat on an electric stovetop? Overheated an empty frying pan?

By what means was electricity generated to be delivered to your stovetop? ;)

("solar panels!" sun is a ball of fire)

("nuclear power plant!" via what means was the steel in the brace for the control rods forged then? :D )

Since we seem to have started a competition about who can provide the least relevant and most pedantic correction, the sun is not a ball of fire. It is a plasma heated by nuclear fusion. There is no oxygen to support combustion.

Congrats, you have now proved that everything is fire. So "no smoke" also means fire if we follow your logic. Was that your intent?

The point of the saying is that if there's evidence (smoke) of something normally worth paying attention to (fire), said thing is indeed present.

If something is smoking on your stove, it's worth paying attention to, whether it's because you're actively searing something on an electric or because your pan is empty.

My OP was the one you should come at with this tone lol, they were the ones that sidetracked off whether or not "if there's smoke, there's fire" is a useful idiom. Maybe a better question would have been, "though there's no actual fire, would not those instances of smoke still be worth noting?"

Shall we start thinking of times smoke is present, and not worth anyone's attention?

They sidetracked by taking too binary of an interpretation, sure, but your rebuttal was flat-out broken.

I don't feel the need to reply to every post I disagree with.

The definition of fire is kind of not precise, Humans are on fire (burning calories with oxygen) well nearly everything in contact with oxygen is "on traditional fire", burning alcohol is invisible and no smoke, and the sun does not need oxygen (fusion), so you can say everything that "decays" is on "fire"....even your mixtape.

I think you have to ignore some of these, especially at a large company, where there may be bugs everywhere. Otherwise you will never get your features done and just fix bugs the whole time.

The code for databases such as MySQL and SQLite is so huge that there are probably 100s of bugs, some get fixed and some don't.

Tis good advice, but in most cases I'd question my own code first and then be confused by general complexity - is it the threading library, or the API, or the database? Rarely do we get a chance to pare back to an isolated behaviour. Also there's a voice that says "surely someone much smarter than me already knows about this".

Eh, depends.

I found a bug once in Clojure's implementation of format. It was perfectly reproducible, Clojure's behavior was out of spec, and it didn't match SBCL's output from an identical call to format.

I wanted to report it, but I had to give up on that; the process was too opaque.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/03/02/eureka-funny/

Hire me a full time bug reporting assistant then please :-)

I usually only ignore things when I'm just too busy to care, unless it stops me from doing what I'm currently doing.

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