Kernighan's Law: You are not smart enough to debug it

Over 20 years ago, after I had devised a way to use Gray Code to embed a clock into a signal without increasing the signal's modulated bandwidth, one of my engineers said that someday there'd be a "Moyer's Law". I thought that was funny, so I created one myself: Moyer's Law: "When we can finally print from any computer to any printer consistently, there will be no CS problems left to solve." Since every good law has a corollary, I…

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…

> Goodhart's Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. This makes me think of the first song I posted to YouTube. I couldn't help but curiously flip through the viewer statistics. Automatically I began wondering how I could prevent the 50% drop-off at X seconds, and what type of person was sticking around beyond the drop-off. And before I looked much into it I realized this would be a great way to suck…

I see this fact used pretty often to dismiss the idea that we should use abstractions at all, and I think that's pretty wrongheaded. As an example, it's pretty common to hear that people should prefer writing raw SQL to using an ORM or query builder because those are both "leaky abstractions" Abstractions aren't necessarily only there so that you don't need to understand anything about what's being abstracted. They are there so that your code can get away from…