4 ms·

I have strong feeling that it’s a specialized form of Pigeonhole principle. Am I missing something?

• omnicognate 4y ago
  No, the pigeonhole principle is the mathematical fact that you can't allocate m thingies to n doodahs, where m > n, without doubling up somewhere, i.e. having a doodah with more than one thingy allocated to it. (Eg. thingies = letters, doodahs = pigeonholes.) Applying the pigeonhole principle here would give "with a sufficient number of users it's guaranteed that some observable behaviour of the system will be relied on by more than one user", which is true (assuming the system has a finite number of observable behaviours) but not very interesting. Hyrum's law says that with enough users all the observable behaviours are relied on by at least one person. Mathematically it's trivial for that not to be the case regardless of how many users you have. You just need a single behaviour that nobody's relying on. So Hyrum's law isn't mathematical, it's an observation about software development and human behaviour.