Is this the most quoted quote on HN?

I'd guess the paraphrase of Goodhart's law:

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

"correlation does not imply causation" must be a strong contender.

"Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme." Meanwhile Coinbase goes public for $100B.

"The stock market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

"640k should be enough for anyone"

-Abraham Lincoln

"Did you win the putnam?" is also an old, old classic.

"...you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem."

"Thanks dang"

"Citation needed" which I find annoying and always downvote.

"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."

Occam's razor is surprisingly recurrent on here.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Possible contenders:

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it”

“Never attribute to malice what can be adequately described by stupidity.”

Having seen it play out 1st hand more than once, I gotta say, if it turns out to be the most quoted quote on HN, it is well deserved. I have made many mistakes in my career that I could have easily avoided by just keeping it in mind.

It might need a modern-day makeover though as it equally applies to women.

There are several that I find to be painfully recurrent at this point:

- hanlon’s razor references

- xkcd 927 (competing standards)

- you aren’t the user you’re the product

Some days it feels like we’ve reached the point where an AI could generate a believable comment thread for a typical front page story…

How about "Please don't break the site guidelines"

Probably need some sort of tf-idf scheme to handle "It depends" or "I don't know" and such, but a pretty common quote is (or was, anyway) "If you're not the customer you're the product".

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I have definitely seen that one several times.

Here's one that might beat it: "developers, developers" for lots of Balmer quotes.

"Bitcoin is the future of currency"

"Do you have a source for that?"

"Not to be pedantic, but..."

That's exactly what you mean to be.

"It depends" <- 100% sure its this.

"Yeah, but did you win the Putnam?"

That’s a good quote that I have used many times. Most used? Hard to say. What I find is that popularity is constantly changing. Example: we went through a good year or two of EVERY… SINGLE… TITLE… that ended in a question mark would have someone comment about Betteridge’s Law like what they were saying was somehow witty, insightful or novel when anyone who reads HN has seen it 5684269537 times already. That one was annoying.

This isn't exactly a quote but fits in the sense of "general ideas mentioned frequently on HN and not frequently elsewhere"--

Gell-Mann Amnesia

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Betteridge's Law yields 130 results - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Dang commented on this a bit over a year ago:

> It's probably time to retire Upton to the Internet Hall of Fame next to Betteridge.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23100306

If only!