10 ms·

Hacker Laws

270 points by maltalex 5y ago

vikingcaffiene 5y ago
These types of lists are nice and I appreciate the time and effort put into making them. I do wonder how much utility they provide though? I personally find it a bit overwhelming. Like is idea that I sit down and memorize all this stuff? In the past when lists like this come up I read a bit, then bookmark for later. Later never comes and now I just have this bookmark lying around amongst the thousands of others I have made over the years. Maybe a more useful way to present this stuff is figure out a better way to give you the law relevant to the context in which you are in? For the sake of argument I could see something like this being useful: INPUT I am a `_developer_` working at a `_start up_` who `_needs to give_` `_an estimate_` OUTPUT - see Hofstadter's Law Probably a non trivial task and I'm sure there's a law in that list that describes this phenomenon!
- jmchuster 5y ago
  I think it might be more useful to think of this as a list that could help you expose "unknown unknowns". These aren't ironclad rules, but they are each a piece of gathered advice that hold some truth in some context. So if you encounter one that makes no sense, then great, that's a potential blind spot that you've transformed from an "unknown unknown" to a "known unknown". So let's take your example of Hofstadter's Law > It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law. So your reaction to this might be one of: - Yes, that's a funny way to put it. I've spent many years estimating projects and matching up the final time taken, and even though i've gotten better at it, i still underestimate a little on each project. Here are different patterns i've seen for how my estimates end up going wrong. Here are different approaches i use now to try to mitigate how wrong my estimates end up being. - Huh, that's interesting. I've just started being a manager, and i've been wondering why everything seems to take longer than i expect. Am i just the only one who is bad at estimating? Or is this some kind of problem that everyone encounters. Maybe i should look up techniques or ask advice on this subject. - I don't know what this means. Why would anyone's estimates be wrong? Writing a website is like making a ham sandwich right? Once you do it once or twice, you must be able to estimate it perfectly every time.
  - GuestHNUser 5y ago
    >These aren't ironclad rules, but they are each a piece of gathered advice that hold some truth in some context. This is spot on. There is a time and a place for these "laws" which is sometimes forgotten. Don't be dogmatic about following them. They will be detrimental to a team following them blindly.
- akkartik 5y ago
  I tend to agree with you about generic awesome lists, but this one seems useful as a reference. Bookmarking for the next time I can't remember what the Lindy Effect is called. ..wait, it doesn't include the Lindy Effect :D
- robbedpeter 5y ago
  It's good to give it a read so you're familiar with the concepts, but then remember where the list is, or archive it so you can return to it. Later down the line, you're going to encounter a problem and one of the ideas in the list will be helpful in framing the context of your problem. It may or may not help in finding a solution, but it can help articulate the problem to other people.
- amelius 5y ago
  Amelius' law: Management will always refer to Hofstadter's law as a myth or an excuse.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    And will use the Pareto principle to cut corners
  - vikingcaffiene 5y ago
    Heh. I have been at the butt end of that one a few times. Another favorite of mine is when they push back with Parkinson's law: work expands to meet time available for its completion.
    - amelius 5y ago
      I think in the future I'll just use error bars, which they may ignore at their own peril.
buwka 5y ago
I've always found the 90-9-1 rule fascinating. Especially when considering anonymous or semi-anonymous forums such as Hacker News or Reddit. These sites have large audiences and don't require users to log in. Therefore, they have an incredible amount of "lurkers" who do not comment, post, or vote. I think voting is an important aspect of content curation. So if a type of individual is more likely to vote, then that type of content will be more prevalent even if it is not necessarily the content the 90% want to see. But they're not voting so they're irrelevant. In turn, the users who do actively post and comment have an amplified affect on what the 90% actually see. I find this to be particularly interesting when the culture of a userbase changes. I've been a long time user of Reddit, however rarely am I ever logged in. Overtime, I've felt that the culture of Reddit has changed to be much more liberal with posting low-effort comments. Many new users post on every post they see, while a previous generation of users may have dismissed that kind of behavior as being "Facebook-like" behavior. I think it may be another factor in the age old rule that the larger a site grows, the more the quality of discussion drops.
- howenterprisey 5y ago
  I wish more communities these days had "preserving the signal-to-noise ratio" as a cultural value.
  - kingcharles 5y ago
    I wish there were vastly more online resources and papers dedicated to this topic. Almost every community of value on the Internet degrades into a cesspool. HN is one of the lucky exceptions, although early users might not see it that way. How can an online community avoid this? What techniques can be used? What technology can be used? What skills are needed? How should communities be organized and staffed? I've run online communities with hundreds of thousands of active users. The problem as an owner was that as soon as I wasn't able to moderate it myself I had to hire volunteer moderators from within the userbase. I would slowly step back as this staff took over my workload, but as I created a hierarchy and promoted staff they would all become increasingly power-hungry and dictatorial, without exception. I would end up in a constant churn of having to ban the most senior staff (who would then turn into demons of revenge trying to burn down everything) and again promoting less staff who swore they would not become what they had despised. Surely there must be books on this shit?
motohagiography 5y ago
Feels like I learned most of these from the fortune line in my .login file in the 90s, and now they form the landmarks of how I reason about problems. As a teenager, these quips were profound wisdom, and in fact some of them were. Simple mental reference tools like the six reliability curves and mean time between failure, pareto distribution, network and cascading effects, shortest paths and solvability, recursion, mutability locking and versioning, complexity classes, logical contrapositives, dependent and independent probability, are all things the fortune file seemed to have quips about and if you had a sense of humor, you could map them to everyday situations. Hackers are an old trope now, but when you read these together again, it was a very rich and distinct culture and way of thinking. I appreciate seeing these put together.
- ximeng 5y ago
  https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/usr.bin/fortune/datfiles/fortunes?view=markup&pathrev=325827 https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/usr.bin/fortune/datfile... FreeBSD fortune file
  - ComputerGuru 5y ago
    Actually, that’s just the truncated version. Full text here: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/usr.bin/fortune/datfiles/fortunes?revision=325781&view=co&pathrev=325827 https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/usr.bin/fortune/datfile...
    - ComputerGuru 5y ago
      And the actual FreeBSD-tips file which I think is what you meant to link to: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/usr.bin/fortune/datfiles/freebsd-tips?revision=368014&view=co https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/usr.bin/fortune/datfile...
  - usually 5y ago
    Surprising amount of hitler-related quotes in the last version, some of them are pretty funny, but considering there seem to be about 12365 quotes, they probably won't be missed. Diff if interested: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/usr.bin/fortune/datfiles/fortunes?r1=325781&r2=325780&pathrev=325781 https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/usr.bin/fortune/datfile...
KarlKemp 5y ago
Some of these are actual science, such as Fitt’s law. Some are humorous simplifications that point to observed phenomena that are good to know. And then there’s bullshit like “Dilbert’s law”: information-free inside jokes technical people come up with to disparage other disciplines.
- krapp 5y ago
  I'm surprised the Gervais principle[0] isn't there, as it supercedes the Peter Principle and Dilbert's law as far as I'm concerned: All organizations are perfectly pathological, their hierarchy being divided up between sociopaths (management), clueless (middle-management) and losers (everyone else). Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves. [0]https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
  - TameAntelope 5y ago
    I genuinely feel bad for folks who actually believe stuff like this, because it must make the world a dark and sad place to be in.
    - krapp 5y ago
      The world can be a dark and sad place to be in, and stuff like this is accurate more often than not, even if this is slightly satirical. But realizing that and accepting it for what it is can be liberating.
      - TameAntelope 5y ago
        You have complete control over whether or not it is dark and sad in this particular way, which is why I feel bad for people who think otherwise.
behnamoh 5y ago
Other laws that I liked: "If you're not 5 minutes early, you're 10 minutes late." "The expectation that more programmers on the team leads to faster shipment times is like expecting two women to give life to a baby in 4.5 months." "Only 50% of programming is writing code. The other 90% is debugging." Hofstadter's law: “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law."
bfung 5y ago
Good collection of wisdoms for development. With “Hacker” in the title, I was expecting more unwritten rules like “When you find yourself in a place you’re not suppose to be in, like admin access, make no changes that cause harm”
- johannes1234321 5y ago
  See hacker ethic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic Interestingly I only knew the German version by the Chaos Computer Club.
contingencies 5y ago
https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup provides much of the same content but in fortune format.
DonHopkins 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Notable_quotes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Notable_quotes Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment, also known as Zawinski's Law: "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can." Some have interpreted this as commenting on the phenomenon of software bloating with popular features: Zawinski himself has stated: "My point was not about copycats, it was about platformization. Apps that you "live in" all day have pressure to become everything and do everything. An app for editing text becomes an IDE, then an OS. An app for displaying hypertext documents becomes a mail reader, then an OS."
DonHopkins 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule Greenspun's tenth rule of programming is an aphorism in computer programming and especially programming language circles that states: "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
DonHopkins 5y ago
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Popehat%27s%20Law%20of%20Goats https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Popehat%27s%... Popehat's Law of Goats "He who fucks goats, either as part of a performance or to troll those he deems has overly delicate sensibilities is simply, a goatfucker." He claimed he was just pretending to be racist to trigger the social justice warriors, but even if he is telling the truth, Popehat's Law of Goats still applies.

270 points by maltalex 5y ago

These types of lists are nice and I appreciate the time and effort put into making them. I do wonder how much utility they provide though? I personally find it a bit overwhelming. Like is idea that I sit down and memorize all this stuff? In the past when lists like this come up I read a bit, then bookmark for later. Later never comes and now I just have this bookmark lying around amongst the thousands of others I have made over the years. Maybe a more useful way to present this stuff is figure out a better way to give you the law relevant to the context in which you are in? For the sake of argument I could see something like this being useful: INPUT I am a `_developer_` working at a `_start up_` who `_needs to give_` `_an estimate_` OUTPUT - see Hofstadter's Law Probably a non trivial task and I'm sure there's a law in that list that describes this phenomenon!

jmchuster 5y ago
I think it might be more useful to think of this as a list that could help you expose "unknown unknowns". These aren't ironclad rules, but they are each a piece of gathered advice that hold some truth in some context. So if you encounter one that makes no sense, then great, that's a potential blind spot that you've transformed from an "unknown unknown" to a "known unknown". So let's take your example of Hofstadter's Law > It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law. So your reaction to this might be one of: - Yes, that's a funny way to put it. I've spent many years estimating projects and matching up the final time taken, and even though i've gotten better at it, i still underestimate a little on each project. Here are different patterns i've seen for how my estimates end up going wrong. Here are different approaches i use now to try to mitigate how wrong my estimates end up being. - Huh, that's interesting. I've just started being a manager, and i've been wondering why everything seems to take longer than i expect. Am i just the only one who is bad at estimating? Or is this some kind of problem that everyone encounters. Maybe i should look up techniques or ask advice on this subject. - I don't know what this means. Why would anyone's estimates be wrong? Writing a website is like making a ham sandwich right? Once you do it once or twice, you must be able to estimate it perfectly every time.
- GuestHNUser 5y ago
  >These aren't ironclad rules, but they are each a piece of gathered advice that hold some truth in some context. This is spot on. There is a time and a place for these "laws" which is sometimes forgotten. Don't be dogmatic about following them. They will be detrimental to a team following them blindly.
akkartik 5y ago
I tend to agree with you about generic awesome lists, but this one seems useful as a reference. Bookmarking for the next time I can't remember what the Lindy Effect is called. ..wait, it doesn't include the Lindy Effect :D
robbedpeter 5y ago
It's good to give it a read so you're familiar with the concepts, but then remember where the list is, or archive it so you can return to it. Later down the line, you're going to encounter a problem and one of the ideas in the list will be helpful in framing the context of your problem. It may or may not help in finding a solution, but it can help articulate the problem to other people.
amelius 5y ago
Amelius' law: Management will always refer to Hofstadter's law as a myth or an excuse.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  And will use the Pareto principle to cut corners
- vikingcaffiene 5y ago
  Heh. I have been at the butt end of that one a few times. Another favorite of mine is when they push back with Parkinson's law: work expands to meet time available for its completion.
  - amelius 5y ago
    I think in the future I'll just use error bars, which they may ignore at their own peril.

buwka 5y ago

I've always found the 90-9-1 rule fascinating. Especially when considering anonymous or semi-anonymous forums such as Hacker News or Reddit. These sites have large audiences and don't require users to log in. Therefore, they have an incredible amount of "lurkers" who do not comment, post, or vote. I think voting is an important aspect of content curation. So if a type of individual is more likely to vote, then that type of content will be more prevalent even if it is not necessarily the content the 90% want to see. But they're not voting so they're irrelevant. In turn, the users who do actively post and comment have an amplified affect on what the 90% actually see. I find this to be particularly interesting when the culture of a userbase changes. I've been a long time user of Reddit, however rarely am I ever logged in. Overtime, I've felt that the culture of Reddit has changed to be much more liberal with posting low-effort comments. Many new users post on every post they see, while a previous generation of users may have dismissed that kind of behavior as being "Facebook-like" behavior. I think it may be another factor in the age old rule that the larger a site grows, the more the quality of discussion drops.

howenterprisey 5y ago
I wish more communities these days had "preserving the signal-to-noise ratio" as a cultural value.
- kingcharles 5y ago
  I wish there were vastly more online resources and papers dedicated to this topic. Almost every community of value on the Internet degrades into a cesspool. HN is one of the lucky exceptions, although early users might not see it that way. How can an online community avoid this? What techniques can be used? What technology can be used? What skills are needed? How should communities be organized and staffed? I've run online communities with hundreds of thousands of active users. The problem as an owner was that as soon as I wasn't able to moderate it myself I had to hire volunteer moderators from within the userbase. I would slowly step back as this staff took over my workload, but as I created a hierarchy and promoted staff they would all become increasingly power-hungry and dictatorial, without exception. I would end up in a constant churn of having to ban the most senior staff (who would then turn into demons of revenge trying to burn down everything) and again promoting less staff who swore they would not become what they had despised. Surely there must be books on this shit?

motohagiography 5y ago

Feels like I learned most of these from the fortune line in my .login file in the 90s, and now they form the landmarks of how I reason about problems. As a teenager, these quips were profound wisdom, and in fact some of them were. Simple mental reference tools like the six reliability curves and mean time between failure, pareto distribution, network and cascading effects, shortest paths and solvability, recursion, mutability locking and versioning, complexity classes, logical contrapositives, dependent and independent probability, are all things the fortune file seemed to have quips about and if you had a sense of humor, you could map them to everyday situations. Hackers are an old trope now, but when you read these together again, it was a very rich and distinct culture and way of thinking. I appreciate seeing these put together.

ximeng 5y ago
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/usr.bin/fortune/datfiles/fortunes?view=markup&pathrev=325827 https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/usr.bin/fortune/datfile... FreeBSD fortune file
- ComputerGuru 5y ago
  Actually, that’s just the truncated version. Full text here: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/usr.bin/fortune/datfiles/fortunes?revision=325781&view=co&pathrev=325827 https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/usr.bin/fortune/datfile...
  - ComputerGuru 5y ago
    And the actual FreeBSD-tips file which I think is what you meant to link to: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/usr.bin/fortune/datfiles/freebsd-tips?revision=368014&view=co https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/usr.bin/fortune/datfile...
- usually 5y ago
  Surprising amount of hitler-related quotes in the last version, some of them are pretty funny, but considering there seem to be about 12365 quotes, they probably won't be missed. Diff if interested: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/usr.bin/fortune/datfiles/fortunes?r1=325781&r2=325780&pathrev=325781 https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/usr.bin/fortune/datfile...

KarlKemp 5y ago

Some of these are actual science, such as Fitt’s law. Some are humorous simplifications that point to observed phenomena that are good to know. And then there’s bullshit like “Dilbert’s law”: information-free inside jokes technical people come up with to disparage other disciplines.

krapp 5y ago
I'm surprised the Gervais principle[0] isn't there, as it supercedes the Peter Principle and Dilbert's law as far as I'm concerned: All organizations are perfectly pathological, their hierarchy being divided up between sociopaths (management), clueless (middle-management) and losers (everyone else). Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves. [0]https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
- TameAntelope 5y ago
  I genuinely feel bad for folks who actually believe stuff like this, because it must make the world a dark and sad place to be in.
  - krapp 5y ago
    The world can be a dark and sad place to be in, and stuff like this is accurate more often than not, even if this is slightly satirical. But realizing that and accepting it for what it is can be liberating.
    - TameAntelope 5y ago
      You have complete control over whether or not it is dark and sad in this particular way, which is why I feel bad for people who think otherwise.

behnamoh 5y ago

Other laws that I liked: "If you're not 5 minutes early, you're 10 minutes late." "The expectation that more programmers on the team leads to faster shipment times is like expecting two women to give life to a baby in 4.5 months." "Only 50% of programming is writing code. The other 90% is debugging." Hofstadter's law: “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law."

bfung 5y ago

Good collection of wisdoms for development. With “Hacker” in the title, I was expecting more unwritten rules like “When you find yourself in a place you’re not suppose to be in, like admin access, make no changes that cause harm”

johannes1234321 5y ago
See hacker ethic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic Interestingly I only knew the German version by the Chaos Computer Club.

contingencies 5y ago

https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup provides much of the same content but in fortune format.

DonHopkins 5y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Notable_quotes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Notable_quotes Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment, also known as Zawinski's Law: "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can." Some have interpreted this as commenting on the phenomenon of software bloating with popular features: Zawinski himself has stated: "My point was not about copycats, it was about platformization. Apps that you "live in" all day have pressure to become everything and do everything. An app for editing text becomes an IDE, then an OS. An app for displaying hypertext documents becomes a mail reader, then an OS."

DonHopkins 5y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule Greenspun's tenth rule of programming is an aphorism in computer programming and especially programming language circles that states: "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."

DonHopkins 5y ago

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Popehat%27s%20Law%20of%20Goats https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Popehat%27s%... Popehat's Law of Goats "He who fucks goats, either as part of a performance or to troll those he deems has overly delicate sensibilities is simply, a goatfucker." He claimed he was just pretending to be racist to trigger the social justice warriors, but even if he is telling the truth, Popehat's Law of Goats still applies.