Re:Hyrum's Law
by omginternets on Friday October 21, 2022 @07:45AM
(#33286988)
This is an interesting point. Taken to its extreme, Postel's law will trade some abstraction for robustness. Conversely, Hyrum's law will trade some robustness for abstraction.
Hyrum's law is an extension Postel's law to say "accept everything you accepted in the past"
Re:Hyrum's Law
by pencilguin on Friday October 21, 2022 @12:20PM
(#33289734)
Postel's law has turned out to be a disaster for security, and for extensibility. If everything you can get already means something, nothing can ever mean anything new.
"Be clear about what you will accept", instead. And, make sure there is an easy way to discover why it was not accepted.
Postel's law (or robustness principle) states that you should be liberal in what you accept, conservative in what you output. Hyrum's law shows the danger in being liberal in what you accept.
(Shameless plug: I've just made public an open source CLI flashcard app where the example deck includes a set of Hacker Laws including the aforementioned ones, you can try it here: https://github.com/SteveRidout/flashdown)