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0 pointsbryanlarsen14d ago0 comments

Here's a better example. Use "a few bad apples" wrong, and you'll likely get a response. A few bad apples will cause the entire barrel to spoil rapidly, so a few bad apples is a big deal. But it's often used to say the opposite, that a few bad apples isn't a big deal.

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the_af14d ago

Wow, I guess I never thought about the "few bad apples" figure of speech! Interesting. But regardless, everyone understands what it means in common use, even if it's logically wrong, and I swear I've never seen anybody be a pedant about it here.

And really, it goes against the spirit of HN to hyperfocus on idioms instead of addressing the meat of the argument...

As a personal observation, if an LLM was figuratively looking over my shoulder and pointed out something like "well, ackshually, 'a few bad apples' means..." I would delete the fucker.

bryanlarsenOP14d ago

A few bad apples is a great idiom though that applies to so many places. For examples, teachers often report that more than 2 troublemakers in a classroom ruins the entire class. A few bad cops destroy trust in all policemen, ruining the the entire force, et cetera.

And more relevant to us, a couple bad lines of code sprinkled in the millions in your code base can ruin the entire thing....

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