Ask HN: What are your favorite parables, anecdotes, idioms, etc.? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are your favorite parables, anecdotes, idioms, etc.?

26 pointssquircle69 comments

You can lead a horse to water... and what have you. Don't be shy about malapropisms either.

From The Teaching of Buddha:

Once there was a man on a long journey who came to a river. He said to himself: “This side of the river is very difficult and dangerous to walk on, and the other side seems easier and safer, but how shall I get across?” So he built a raft out of branches and reeds and safely crossed the river. Then he thought to himself: “This raft has been very useful to me in crossing the river; I will not abandon it to rot on the bank, but will carry it along with me.” And thus he voluntarily assumed an unnecessary burden.

"We build our computers the way we build our cities--over time, without a plan, on top of ruins." https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ellen_Ullman

Isn't this applicable to any complex enough systems?

Possibly, but software development seems particularly susceptible to the illusion of the ease of "rewriting from scratch" in ways that physical endeavors are not.

The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now.

Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly. (A less obvious but more memorable way of saying don't let perfect be the enemy of good)

The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.

William Arthur Ward

The Programmers’ Credo: we do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they would be easy.

If brute force doesn’t work, you’re not using enough of it.

There are only 2 hard problems in computer science:

1. Naming things 2. Cache invalidation 3. Off-by-one errors 0. Asynchronous callbacks 7. Buffer overflowA203FE11980018900000

"There are two hard problems in computer science: (1) We have only one joke, and (2) it's not even very funny."

Ah, but it’s an idempotent joke, so it’s funny no matter how many times you tell it!

Every tome I try to learn what idempotent means, it’s as though I’m starting from scratch.

Quote from Max Payne 2 on free will:

"There are no choices. Nothing but a straight line. The illusion comes afterwards, when you ask 'Why me?' and 'What if?' When you look back, see the branches, like a pruned bonsai tree, or a forked lightning. If you had done something differently, it wouldn't be you, it would be someone else looking back, asking a different set of questions.."

The more I hear about inverse proportionality, the less I like it.

This reminds me of something I like to say, "It's probably just confirmation bias, it's almost always confirmation bias".

In theory practice is just like theory but in practice it's not like it at all.

I like: "The difference between theory and practice is greater in practice than in theory."

Childhood ends when you realize you're not the most important person in the room.

Adolescense ends when you realize that just because you can does not mean you should.

One form of evil is trying to make others suffer because you are.

Parenting is love and consequences

Two of my favorites:

1. We will burn that bridge when we get to it.

2. You cannot make a computer run faster but you can make it do less.

one of my all-time favorites was "We are so conditioned to think that our lives revolve around great moments. But great moments often catch us unawares" – from the blog post titled 'The Cab Ride I'll Never Forget'

over the years, i kept my interesting finds at https://jerrynsh.com/food-for-thought/

You can't put 9 women in a room and get a baby in a month. - project manager adage.

"I bought for my manager two copies of Mythical Man-Month so that he could read it faster."

I like “have your cake and eat it too” - partly because it’s a pointless saying. You can always have cake and eat it, but you can’t eat your cake and then also have it.

So what people should really say is that someone wants to “eat their cake and have it too” but they don’t. But that’s really what they mean by the saying “have your cake and eat it too”.

We'll burn that bridge when we get to it.

I say that so much that I forget that it's a malapropism.

"Was Hans nicht lernt, lernt Hänschen nimmermehr."

german, roughly - "What Hans did not learn, his son will never learn."

It is so obviously wrong as a generalized truth but painfully accurate on occasion. Cool about it: The reaction of others towards this saying is a great signal on their views regarding life, society and education.

If you don't have time to do it right, you must have time to do it again

In my field (web dev), it's more like "if you don't have time to do it right, just leave after your promotion and let the next guy deal with it"

Same in my field (SRE/Architecture)! I know the struggle, friend :(

It's tough. The internet has taught people the value in branding/advertising. I'm too exhausted from doing the work they skipped.

"That dog just 'aint gonna hunt."

One of my UK vendors recently said, "this went off like a damp squib" for something that didn't go over well. Basically means a firework that didn't light because it was wet.

A squib is what they use in movies to make something look like it’s been shot with a bullet. Kinda a little flat firework that ejects “stuff” explosively. Actors wear them under their costumes. They’re usually remote controlled

more generally, a squib is a low-power explosive

“There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.” ― Bjarne Stroustrup

“Are you scooping what I’m pooping?”

Drill sergeant asking recruit if he understands what he has just been told.

Victory has a thousand fathers but defeat is an orphan

No mutiny has ever succeeded; if it had, it would be called a revolution (paraphrasing).

Mexican proverb: Every revolution eventually becomes another government.

Measure twice, cuss once.

My body is a temple: old, crumbing and full of unspeakable horrors.

If my grandmother had wheels she would have been a bike

If my aunt had balls she’d be my uncle.

When that came up on a cooking show and the news anchors cracked up it was so funny. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-RfHC91Ewc

The secret to happiness is lower standards.

As I told my daughter: You don’t have to brush all your teeth. Just the ones you want to keep.

Make the easy, easy and the hard, possible.

And at Google we made impossible things possible, but at the cost of making easy things hard.

Every service is either deprecated or not ready yet.

The S in IoT is for Security, ...

and the P is for Privacy.

A proctologist can enter IT if an IT specialist comes to him for doctor's appointment

couple of jokes whose punchlines have stuck with me as personal catchphrases:

1. a city dweller was driving through the countryside when he saw a ladder propped against a tree, and a man on top of it holding a goat. he's curious enough to stop and find out what's going on. the guy says "oh, I'm feeding my goat leaves off the tree". the city guy asks "but doesn't that waste a lot of time?", and the farmer looks at him like he's an idiot and says "what's time to a goat?"

2. this one is from back when lift operators were a thing. the lift doors open and there's a furious guy waiting there, who immediately yells "where the hell have you been?!". the operator calmly replies "dude, where can you go in a lift?"

If you aren't making enemies you're doing it wrong. (You never know when you may need them / they may need you.

Also, there's more than one way to bell a cat.

You can't cross a chasm in two small leaps.

Code is written once but read a thousand times.

The toothpaste of that ship was squeezed out of the open door of the horse barn, sails and all.

«Hofstadter's law states that a project always takes longer than expected, even when the law is taken into account.»

(Jokes about recursion are always funny, take, for instance, this one.)

What's old is not outdated, if it works, don't touch it

We live in the distant past, we are still not at all civilized

If you don't laugh you'll cry.

You are what you are in this world.

It’s like hurting cats.

"Do we really need to test all our code?"

"No, of course not! Only test the code that's supposed to work."

"Now, this is only temporary ... unless it works."

Few things are as permanent as a temporary fix that works

"Some people, when faced with a problem, think: I know, I'll use a regular expression.

Now they have 2 problems."

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice... you can't fool me twice!

"Don't try to think outside the box. There is no box."

Wait, now there's two boxes.

"Soap box, ballot box, ammo box. Use in that order."

> Now the shoemaker had enough money to buy leather for two pairs of shoes.

Everything I need to know about business in one line of one old story.

"Prostate with grief"

Many great sopranos quotes to go along, such as..

"Much like a child, a film has many parents".

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