Comment by jonathanhefner

I believe it's a reference to this old (but insightful) comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902739

As such, it is actually "Bane's Rule" which states, "you don't understand a distributed computing problem until you can get it to fit on a single machine first."

(Thanks to nekopa, who also referenced it further down in this thread.)