Ask HN: What is the most memorable sentence you read in 2022? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is the most memorable sentence you read in 2022?

4 pointsChaitanyaSai5 comments

It's the year end and we have our usual flurry of best-books-you-read lists. How about the best sentence(s)? Some of my favorites are ones that pack in a lot, are many-layered, and yet economical with words. Here's my favorite:

"To reliably capture 3 kilowatt-hours’ worth of fuel requires knowledge, wit, skill, and persistence — plus considerable help from your friends. H. sapiens occupies every niche — but always with company." - from the book "What is Health?" by Peter Sterling

What are your favorites?

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"Product management should take 20% of team's capacity and give it to them to spend as they see fit. You can't get away with much less than 20%. If the state is very bad, 30% or even more might be needed. Without paying this 20% tax, the debt will increase to the point where the entire organization will spend all of the cycles paying it down."

- about technical debt in DevOps Handbook, and that's not the only one

After working in several companies, ahhh man, how true that is.

„…Imagine being the lawyer hired to help steal one month’s salary from a laid-off kitchen staff member to give to the second-richest person in the world. Imagine thinking that was an ethical thing to do. Obviously the second-richest person in the world is going to pay you more to steal money from the kitchen staff than the kitchen staff will pay you to stop him. Nevertheless!…“

Money Stuff by Matt Levine - December 14 Newsletter

“Now that times are turning bad, tech companies can no longer afford to sustain a massive “court” of professional-class nobility, paying sinecures to sons and daughters of the good and the great who don’t know how to code or crunch numbers, but know how to write emails, hold useless meetings, and talk about diversity and inclusion.”

“One of the biggest and least-talked-about social questions in the West is how to economically provide for our own modern version of France’s impecunious nobles: that is, how to prop up high-status people who can’t really do much economically productive work.”

https://t.co/8P0kgmYP5m

I left a big tech co. over the summer. This resonates with me, because I left out of frustration. The culture was not great to begin with and rotted in recent years. Mid level managers fighting for territory and fiefdoms, promotion driven development, and a practical disdain for customers.

"...when my bird was looking at my computer monitor, I thought 'woah, that bird has no idea what he's looking at'. And yet, what does the bird do, does he panic? No, he can't really panic, he just does the best he can. Is he able to live in a world where he's so ignorant? Well, he doesn't really have a choice. Yeah, he can kinda live...usually the bird's okay, even though he doesn't understand the world, and he can kinda learn what's safe and what's dangerous. So uh, that's where I've been living."

- Terry A. Davis

I love thoughtful ways of saying 'It is what it is'.

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