
Hacker Laws: Theories, principles and patterns that developers will find useful - dwmkerr
https://github.com/dwmkerr/hacker-laws
======
d-d
> _Goodhart 's Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good
> measure._

This makes me think of the first song I posted to YouTube. I couldn't help but
curiously flip through the viewer statistics. Automatically I began wondering
how I could prevent the 50% drop-off at X seconds, and what type of person was
sticking around beyond the drop-off. And before I looked much into it I
realized this would be a great way to suck all the life out of something
that's supposed to be fun.

~~~
saagarjha
This is one of the many reasons I don't run analytics on my website (in
addition to the more obvious ones, such as privacy). In my case, I still get
useful "second-order" information from the frequency of people writing emails
to me about the content, and it feels a lot nicer to read that someone found
something I wrote useful than to try to micro-optimize for what people are
willing to click on.

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hliyan
I came across this law many years ago, and since then lost track of it's
origins:

 _McIntye 's Law: Under the right circumstances, anything I tell you could be
wrong._

I preface much of my advice to young developers with this.

~~~
james_s_tayler
Wow. I love it. Never heard this one before. Would be better if it were:

Under the right circumstances, anything I tell you could be wrong. Including
this.

~~~
hliyan
I have found the original. It is Vonda McIntyre:
[http://bookviewcafe.com/bookstore/sample/pitfalls-
sample/](http://bookviewcafe.com/bookstore/sample/pitfalls-sample/)

------
dsr_
The First Law of Consulting: The customer knows their goal, not how to achieve
it.

The Second Law of Consulting: The customer's list of constraints is
incomplete, because fish don't think about water.

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tobinfricke
Reminds me of this story:

[https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2014/08/26/how-
northeast...](https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2014/08/26/how-northeastern-
gamed-the-college-rankings/)

"How to Game the College Rankings - Northeastern University executed one of
the most dramatic turnarounds in higher education. Its recipe for success? A
single-minded focus on just one list."

------
NineBlam
This is a nice list to read through. The concept quoted, Goodhart’s law, came
up in a project review today, though I didn’t know it was named. It feels
nearly unavoidable, but at least recognition helps.

~~~
csours
Keep your eye on the prize, and the prize isn't measured by metrics. Any prize
in the real world is something complex and complicated, hard to describe and
prone to squishiness.

Metrics are things that are "easy" to measure and compare across systems.
Setting goals in terms of metrics is appealing and even necessary because it
makes things measurable and comparable in the real world, but you need to have
some cross-check where you can come back and verify that you are moving closer
to your real world goal.

\---

A real world example: Consumer products are often distinguished by appearance,
and surface quality is an important facet of appearance. You purchase a
surface quality tester and improve the measurements produced by the surface
tester to the point where you beat a competitor's surface measurements. Then
you have a customer clinic and have real potential customers evaluate the two
products again. Customers prefer the competitor product because you were not
actually measuring attractiveness or appearance of quality, you were measuring
something that the surface tester measures.

~~~
vanniv
If the impact of your work can be losslessly reduced to something that can be
directly and cheaply measured, you're probably solving an easy problem or a
theoretical one.

------
dang
We changed the submitted title to that of the page. The submitted title was
_Hacker Laws: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good
measure.”_ , which of course is Goodhart's Law. Some of the comments in this
thread are referencing that one.

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matt4077
It's commendable that the author counteracts the tendency towards cynicism
with the occasional rebuttal, although to fully embrace the spirit of
kindness, I would maybe skip the Dilbert reference.

Remember: If everyone really were as stupid and/or evil as some of these
maxims postulate, it'd be highly unlikely that you just happen to be the
exception. Also: management, design, law, marketing, journalism, social
sciences, and politics are all disciplines just as challenging as programming
or engineering.

And if you can't think of any reason _why_ one of those fields should be
difficult, you're just as likely to better at it as that field's practitioners
being better at your job.

------
fit2rule
Rule #1: Its only about the user. Rule #2: The meaning of 'use' is, even
itself, subject to the whims of the user - i.e. See Rule #1.

Everything else is culture and can thus be discarded.

------
Chris2048
DRY is dangerous if applied to pedantically; sometimes similar code should be
allowed to exist to make overall architecture simpler, or allow similar
components to evolve (possibly Divergantly) over time.

~~~
k_sze
The Pragmatic Programmer also warns against overzealous deduplication. Stuff
that are coincidentally the same should be left untouched. Only remove
duplication of _knowledge_.

------
BerislavLopac
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21442330](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21442330)

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Peckingjay
My immediate thought went to benchmarks. Some of them get stale pretty fast.
Nice to have a name to put on that concept.

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Chris2048
I absolutely disagree with Hanlon's Razor; malicious intent often hides behind
the appearance of incompetance.

~~~
0x445442
Your assertion could be correct 49.9% of the time and still not invalidate the
proposition.

~~~
Chris2048
What is the propostition? I read it as "That which is adequately explained by
stupidity is not (or is rarely) malice".

Otherwise it is a not a statement that can be objectively "factual" and is as
such not a proposition.

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jroesner
Valuable collection Dave! Brilliant as always. Thx for putting this together.

