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by palata 550 days ago
What I learned with this article is the English idiom:

"Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched."

Which in my language translates to:

"You should not sell the bear’s skin before killing it."

Not that it appears in the article, but rather because the author wrote the blog post before doing the thing. Which results in a blog post essentially saying "here is the cool thing I plan to do", which was apparently never done.

Anyway, I'm happy to know about counting chickens now :-).

5 comments

It's possible the author didn't expect to have a few thousand Hacker Nerds looking at their blog post already, with all the critique and pressure that entails.
Already? This blog post is from 2 years ago...
Fair enough. My point still stands that they may have been blogging this for themselves or a relatively small number of readers.

I'm reticent to criticize anyone for putting their unfinished or aspirational work up on the internet, it reminds me of a 'net where people hosted their own blogs for mostly noone. Writing destined for a small or non-existent audience feels precious when everything is made to game the attention system.

Well I did not mean it to be offensive, and I hope that the author would not take it this way.

I genuinely thought about this expression when I realised what happened with this project, and looked up the English translation. I shared it because I found it fun and interesting, that's all.

Which language is it? In mine it's almost the same, "don't divide the skin of a non-killed bear".
It's in French. Not sure if it's exclusive to French but it's commonly used.
I am going to guess Russian.
In French, the bear is killed. In Spanish, he is chased. In Dutch, he is shot. The Spanish look adventurous, and the French straight-forward.
Spanish I'd say
It's more gruesome about the chicken. These are also said to be counted in fall. It's not just about hatching (in summer), but rather about surviving till fall...

The original Nokia 5110 obviously lived long, probably still is there in author's drawer in some disassembled state.

The blog post is from 2022 and the sequel never arrived. So the idiom wins this one.
We have the same in Polish as well