Eponymous Laws

“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.”

“Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.”

“The overall performance improvement gained by optimizing a single part of a system is limited by the fraction of time that the improved part is actually used.”

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

[O]rganizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

“Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”

Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

“The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.”

Implementations should follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.