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Comment by reactordev | Hacker News Reader

The two most difficult things in software engineering...

Naming.

Timestamps.

You must not have invalidated your cache since a third thing.

Obviously there are more but the original joke circa 1999 was this. Made Y2K even more exciting.

> but the original joke circa 1999 was this.

No, the original joke, which GP is referring to, is “There are only two hard things in computer science. Naming things and cache invalidation.”

It predates 1999 and the Y2K bug by a fair amount. I first saw it on Usenet in the early 90s, around 1994 I think.

> There are only two hard things in computer science. Naming things and cache invalidation.

More like

  There are only two hard things in
  computer science. Naming, cache
  invalidation, and off-by-one bugs.

too, parallel processing!

AND... (drumroll) Containing AI Agents! LOL

And of by one errors

You are off by one characters.

In my freshman Pascal class, I quickly learned how to use “iff” [if and only if] in a sentence, and my T.A. loved that.

Timestamps aren't hard. It's almost everything else with time that's hard.

For examples check : "Falsehoods programmers believe about time..."

Have we solved cache eviction?