Hacker News Reader

Comment by pwinnski | Hacker News Reader

> An old joke is that there are only two hard things in computer science: cache validation, and naming things.

Way to ruin the joke! The joke is that that are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

See, now it's a joke.

View on HN

No - there are three hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming thi, concurrencyngs, and off-by-one errors.

I really like this version of the joke, but it's impossible to tell during regular face-to-face conversation

You can pronounce it with the cardinals

1st Cache invalidation

3rd Concurrency

2nd Naming things

4th Off-by-one errors

That could work but it would be easy to get the timing wrong.

Also, nit: those are ordinals (since they specify the order). Cardinals would be one, two, three, four.

Naming is hard ;) But thanks for the nitpick

Cache invalidation, concurrency (say slowly), naming things, off-by-one errors, and concurrency!

Two threads walk into a bar. The bartender says, "I don't race want any like conditions time last!"

and exactly once delivery, and exactly once delivery.

I'm sorry. I missed that. Can you please tell me again?

it was in the original joke.

If you add anything else, you ruin the "off-by-one" part.

Then there are three hard things

I would tell you a UDP joke but you probably won't get it.

I heard a good source routing joke but I don't know who to tell it to next

I could tell you a mathematical joke but that would be going off on a tangent.

I wouldn't say he ruined the joke. The original saying quite obviously only covered the first two issues. The off-by-one error was only added later. Though it definitely did enhance the joke factor.

https://www.karlton.org/2017/12/naming-things-hard/

But without the line about off-by-one errors it isn't a joke, just a straight forward statement.

The joke is that these two things seem trivial (perhaps even outside the scope of the real “problem solving” parts of the job) and computing is full of apparently much trickier problems. But in practice everyone repeatedly runs into trouble with the same couple basic issues.

It’s a joke because it’s not literally true – the other problems in computing can be incredibly hard, sometimes taking years of work to figure out – but like any good joke it does also have a kernel of truth and hopefully makes the listener do some reflection.

Adding “off by one errors” is a riff which only makes sense once people are already familiar with the original joke. It can be funny but also kind of misses/obscures the original point.

The best take on that joke I heard was like so. "Computer science has two problems: that we only have one joke, and that it's not all that funny".

I told my 12-year-old this joke last week, and she laughed out loud.

Then again, she had just (again) made an off-by-one error in her Python code, which she had variables named "stuff" and "things."

And scope creep!

My go to version is: there are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and cache invalidation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com