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Hyrum's Law: "With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system

Hyrum's Law: "With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody." https://www.hyrumslaw.com/ https://www.hyrumslaw.com/

bladedtoys 2y ago
For example https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man-print-gimme-gimme-gimme-at-0030 https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man...
- eviks 2y ago
  Where is the example of a dependency? The link is about an unexpected behavior that broke something, not that someone depended on 3 gimmes
madamelic 2y ago
I once worked at a place where we essentially were unable to fix bugs because it was a no-code tool so people would do all kinds of wacky things with the system. The mandate was, as far as I can tell, to enshrine these former bugs into actual documented features. I wish I had seen this as a warning for how the place was ran but I also needed the money. That was on top of people doing completely stupid things and abusing the systems we gave them in exchange for way too little money. It got to the point where the company was offering dedicated servers as an upsell because there were clients that were paying far too little money, in my opinion, for the amount of resources they were taking up. The breaking point came when I got woken up at 3am two nights in a row by a client who was very obviously an Indian scam call center who was paying us something like $100 / mo to have a button that calls an engineer at any time. The problem was they had something like 7 layers of recursion through their app and each update was causing cascading updates and unsurprisingly was taxing the entire server causing updates to be slow and/or unreliable. Maybe I just sucked at it but I told leadership we need to jack up prices on that button and kick these pretty obvious scammers off the platform. I left a few months later.
Rendello 2y ago
I was going to make a tongue-in-cheek suggestion about randomizing undefined behaviour, but I suppose that's common in debugging and even seen in some APIs. At one time, in Python, dictionary (hashmap) ordering was randomized so users wouldn't rely on non-specified ordering behaviour. Eventually though, dictionaries were guaranteed insertion ordering. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p33CVV29OG8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p33CVV29OG8
- porridgeraisin 2y ago
  Go maps randomize intentionally the ordering of the keys

bladedtoys 2y ago

For example https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man-print-gimme-gimme-gimme-at-0030 https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man...

eviks 2y ago
Where is the example of a dependency? The link is about an unexpected behavior that broke something, not that someone depended on 3 gimmes

madamelic 2y ago

I once worked at a place where we essentially were unable to fix bugs because it was a no-code tool so people would do all kinds of wacky things with the system. The mandate was, as far as I can tell, to enshrine these former bugs into actual documented features. I wish I had seen this as a warning for how the place was ran but I also needed the money. That was on top of people doing completely stupid things and abusing the systems we gave them in exchange for way too little money. It got to the point where the company was offering dedicated servers as an upsell because there were clients that were paying far too little money, in my opinion, for the amount of resources they were taking up. The breaking point came when I got woken up at 3am two nights in a row by a client who was very obviously an Indian scam call center who was paying us something like $100 / mo to have a button that calls an engineer at any time. The problem was they had something like 7 layers of recursion through their app and each update was causing cascading updates and unsurprisingly was taxing the entire server causing updates to be slow and/or unreliable. Maybe I just sucked at it but I told leadership we need to jack up prices on that button and kick these pretty obvious scammers off the platform. I left a few months later.

Rendello 2y ago

I was going to make a tongue-in-cheek suggestion about randomizing undefined behaviour, but I suppose that's common in debugging and even seen in some APIs. At one time, in Python, dictionary (hashmap) ordering was randomized so users wouldn't rely on non-specified ordering behaviour. Eventually though, dictionaries were guaranteed insertion ordering. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p33CVV29OG8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p33CVV29OG8

porridgeraisin 2y ago
Go maps randomize intentionally the ordering of the keys