
Five Minute Rule - brudgers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-minute_rule
======
shanemhansen
Not gonna lie. I thought this was a reference to how long you can leave food
on the ground before picking it up and eating it.

~~~
paulsutter
I know you're kidding, but can anyone explain why people believe the 5 second
rule?

The instant food falls to the ground it's going to pick up any dust / mites /
microbes, so it will be no less and no more infected after 5 seconds. It's
perplexing to me, what mental model explains how the food is cleaner during
the first 4 seconds on the ground?

Edit: the Wikipedia article is pretty clear that any bacteria attach basically
immediately (each of the cases when tested showed no difference after 5
seconds).

~~~
guelo
I believe in a indefinite period of time rule. The food might pickup dust /
mites / microbes, so what? There are dust/mites/microbes everytime you breath.
You probably swallow other people's shit particles several times a day. It's
OK, you have an immune system that can deal with it. If you do (very very
rarely) get an infection we live in magical times where an antibiotic pill
will clear it right up. You could lick the floor at the sports stadium
bathroom and you'll be OK. People need to stop it with the cooties crap.

------
fahimulhaq
If you are interested, read all 3 papers on this.

Jim Gray pubished the first paper, 5 minute rule in 1985
([http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/TR-86.1.pdf](http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/TR-86.1.pdf))

In 1997, he (along with Goetz Graefe) published the followup - The Five-Minute
Rule Ten Years Later ([http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/gray/5_min_rul...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/gray/5_min_rule_sigmod.pdf))

Goetz Graefe published the 2nd followup in 2008 - The Five-minute Rule: 20
Years Later
([https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1413264](https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1413264))

------
nathancahill
The note at the bottom about web pages is interesting. I always wish browsers
followed that behavior so the "Work Offline" button would actually work when I
got on a plane. I'd be happy to sacrifice 10GB+ of my SSD for the browser to
permanently cache (at least for the life of the Cache-Control header).

I wonder how performant a proxy like Squid would be to run locally with a disk
cache.

