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Comment by petersumskas | Hacker News Reader

There are only two hard problems in computer programming:

1. Naming things 2. Cache invalidation 3. off-by-one errors

Length 3 lists always feel better, and my favorite formulation of this is,

  There are only three hard problems in computer science:

  1. Naming things
  2. Cache invalidation
  3. Off-by4. Multi-threading
  -one errors.

My favorite version of this but is like "An engineer has one problem he decides to solve with multi-threading. Now problems. has two he"

there are actually 10 problems: naming things, cache invalidation, base conversions, off by one errors, and cache invalidation

Base conversions are easy, but which off by one is it? base 4 or base 6?

10 base 2 is 2 base 10. i gave four unique hard problems. and now typing this out i see that I was off by 1 (or two)

Off-by-two is a subset of all possible off-by-one errors.

All off-by-one errors can be reproduced by producing an off-by-one error of some other off-by-one error.