
Ask HN: What's some “one sentence” wisdom you've learned or created? - keanebean86
It doesn&#x27;t have to be one sentence but try to be concise. Something you&#x27;d end a code review comment with or mention to a Jr dev that&#x27;s easy to remember.<p>Today I realized &quot;there&#x27;s a fine line between credit and blame&quot; but that&#x27;s a little too pessimistic to be real advice.
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credit_guy
"Don't do people favors if they don't ask for them."

Sometimes in the corporate life, you imagine that X would like to have Y, and
you put in a lot of effort to make Y happen. And then X is not even aware that
Y took effort, or worse, you misinterpreted, and X is annoyed that Y happened.
Better make sure that X really wants Y and asks for it.

------
mmsimanga
Change is a process.

It has been my experience that to change anything with an organisation takes a
while. First you present your proposed change or new process. No one
understands or pay attention. Once you implement and showcase the new process,
expect objections as it dawns on people they might have to change how they do
things. Don't take offense at the objections (which should have been aired at
first meeting but no one was paying attention). Just agree to note them and
then a week later present same thing you presented. Now you will find most
people have processed the change and might even have tried new process or read
the documentation. Now the change begins. It's a process.

------
gotostatement
"Your code should reflect your ontology."

Meaning that you should strive to program so as to encode the structure,
relationships, and qualities of the objects of your task/domain. If you do it
faithfully, then your code will be logically consistent and bug-free. I think
this is most directly possible in declarative programming.

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InfiniteRand
The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come
to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and
chance happen to them all. - Ecclesiastes

Life does not always make sense, sometimes best efforts and best preparation
fail. That is okay

~~~
entropicdrifter
My favorite variant of this is the version from Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek:
The Next Generation:

"It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness.
That is life."

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logicslave
"If someone does something once, they will do it twice"

This is in some ways depressing, but its always been true for me. Individual
actions that are outside the realm of someones common patterns are extremely
rare. So if they act in a certain way, expect that going forwards. Be cynical.

~~~
pmiller2
Maya Angelou said it like this: "When someone shows you who they are, believe
them the first time."

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martinrlzd
"Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life."

------
fsflover
"If you have no backup, you have no data. If you have one backup, you have no
backup."

~~~
piinbinary
Backups you've never tested are not a backup

(backups encrypted with a key no one has access to are not a backup)

~~~
giantg2
If only I could have convinced my previous department head of this.

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nkristoffersen
Commandments I refer to often:

1\. Make it work, then make it work well

2\. The user doesn’t give a shit how it’s made

3\. If you can’t measure it you can’t improve it

4\. The problem is more important than the solution

5\. Write code that is easy to delete

6\. Buy right buy once

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boxed
Never attribute to intelligence what can be sufficiently explained by
stupidity.

~~~
bitminer
s/intelligence/malevolence/

Stupidity is more likely than bad actors. Usually.

~~~
boxed
The original expression is "malice" yes. But it becomes much more generally
applicable with "intelligence" imo.

------
probinso
I've got a bunch more, but these are some of my favorites ( after reading that
it was for a mentee relationship, I had to remove some)

\- You impact your environment, regardless of your participation, and even
your presence

\- Perception is a weak approximation for reality

\- Value the opportunity to be wrong, because eventually you'll lose the
privilege of being told so

\- The greatest barrier to getting things done, is not doing things

------
tduberne
This might sound silly, but the following, cited in Getting Things Done,
helped me a lot:

"The middle of every successful project looks like a disaster"

Whenever I have setbacks, delays, whatever, this sentence can help me put
things into perspective and keep at work rather than panicking. (Although of
course, sometimes, things look like a disaster because that's what they
are...)

------
doonesbury
I like these three:

Eating the menu isn't the same as eating the meal. (I believe from fritz
pearls).

Thinking is hard that's why most people go straight to judgement. (C Jung)

There's nothing more disgusting that a person with tons of resources (money,
time, imagination) but who has no taste. (Paraphrase of Goethe)

------
notmyname9173
Parkinson's Law of Data: "Data expands to fill the space available for
storage"

Most frequent use: Justifying quotas on NAS/SAN devices. People retain more
stuff when they think a shared drive has 500GB free than they do when they see
2TB free.

~~~
mmsimanga
Interesting that means people don't read the unit of measurement, just the
number 500>2.

------
AnimalMuppet
The most general problem cannot be solved.

------
jburwell
Bad news does not age well.

~~~
Konohamaru
My interpretation of your aphorism: bad news is not forever.

~~~
masukomi
not aging well implies the thing gets worse the older it is. So, a more
accurate interpretation would be "bad news gets worse the older it is"
Although that seems unlikely to be what was intended.

~~~
gameman144
I read it the same way, with the sentiment of "People will be more upset if
you delay telling them bad news."

e.g.

"We got a letter for past-due rent yesterday, and I'm telling you now"

vs.

"We've been getting letters for past-due rent the last few months, and I'm
telling you now."

------
T-A
Never eat a grapefruit in front of a computer screen.

~~~
saaaaaam
Story please.

------
theandrewbailey
Not tech related:

Don't complain about being bored. Bored/boring means that people around you
(e.g. family) aren't dying.

~~~
TheMblabla
Seems like the same logic as "finish your food, there are starving kids in
Africa"

------
matt_the_bass
\- If you think you should ask the question, then you probably Already know
the answer (questions that start with “should”, “do you think”, etc.

\- when in doubt, keep it out (tru for most things from cooking to sex to
commentary)

------
ISO-morphism
Doubt your own infallibility

------
throw7
"It doesn't matter what they do. It matters what you do."

------
alexis2b
_ « if you can not afford to buy it, you certainly can not afford to build it
»_

To eager business leads saying that a software or service is too expensive and
we should build it internally instead...

~~~
beagle3
That's been quite false in my experience - quite a few times it was much
easier / simpler / cheaper to build than buy, because there wasn't an offering
good enough, and the cost of adaptation was on the order of the cost of
building.

Many SAP and Oracle-software (not the DB, the other stuff) implementations
fail, and take years to do so, after costing as much as building in house
would have (and likely succeeded).

For some things, it's true - but I wouldn't consider this "generally
applicable wisom"

------
sethammons
No single raindrop thinks it is to be blamed for the flood.

------
vendelay
Treat people like children and they’ll behave like children.

------
accosine
"It's lonely at the top in whatever you do"

------
joezydeco
"Measure twice, cut once"

~~~
pickle-wizard
No matter how many times I cut, it is never long enough.

~~~
xocd
"I've cut it twice and it's still too short."

------
rawgabbit
Making work complex is easy; keeping things simple is hard.

Success has a thousand fathers; failure has none.

------
Pelerin
You train people how to treat you.

------
sethammons
If you can’t do something about it, don’t worry. If you can, then do, and
don’t worry.

------
mstolpm
„Getting better is just screwing up less“ - Adam Savage

------
banjo_milkman
if you don't test it then it doesn't work.

------
beagle3
Well, it's life wisdom, but it has applications in software development
(though not necessarily in a commit message ...)

Overabstraction is generally much worse than underabstraction.

The right level of abstraction is worth it's 'wc -l' in gold.

Murphy was an optimist. Everything that can go wrong, will, but at the most
inopportune time (while demoing for the biggest client ever, for example).

The new thing can save you 10% at best, but easily cost you 50% (in delays,
unexpected costs, bugs, ...); Prefer boring and established.

Everything has a context. "readability" is not absolute, it depends on your
target audience.

Your dev/test machine should be slightly weaker than your user's to guarantee
a usable product.

Most people decide if something was brave or foolish only in retrospect.

The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, but the next best time is
today. That's extremely true for refactoring/code changes/decision making in
general.

Praised be those who have nothing to say, and nevertheless remain silent
(supposedly a German saying). Keep your descriptions short and to the point,
don't go on rambling.

Most people, most of the time, aren't rational, but rationalizing (part of the
problem is that we really believe the stories we tell ourselves, even though
they are mostly post-hoc rationalization). Is that really why you did that?

Most people like to complain and blame things they can't change, but fear
acting on things that they can change.

The game is mostly rigged against you (unless you are the incumbent. Then, the
game is rigged by and for you - but you already knew that ...).

History is written by the victors, so take anything you weren't there to
witness with a grain of salt -- including science history. (e.g. Barbara
McClintock and Danny Shechtman were pariahs until they weren't, but evidence
is being whitewashed). Extremely true for office and dev politics. And there
are always politics.

Those who cast the votes determine nothing. Those who count the votes
determine everything (supposedly by J.G.Stalin). Are you really a decision
maker, or just imagine yourself to be?

------
matinisen
Motion.

Everything changes when you're in motion.

------
motiw
When in doubts, do the right thing.

------
egberts1
The higher, the fewer.

------
tawayfree
“You can work from anywhere” is just a big lie!

