alt Hacker News> GitHub's migration guide tells developers to treat the new IDs as opaque strings and treat them as references. However it was clear that there was some underlying structure to these IDs as we just saw with the bitmasking
Great, so now GitHub can't change the structure of their IDs without breaking this person's code. The lesson is that if you're designing an API and want an ID to be opaque you have to literally encrypt it. I find it really demoralizing as an API designer that I have to treat my API's consumers as adversaries who will knowingly and intentionally ignore guidance in the documentation like this.
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You could also say, if I tell you something is an opaque identifier, and you introspect it, it's your problem if your code breaks. I told you not to do that.
I think more important than worrying about people treating an opaque value as structured data, is wondering _why_ they're doing so. In the case of this blog post, all they wanted to do was construct a URL, which required the integer database ID. Just make sure you expose what people need, so they don't need to go digging.
Other than that, I agree with what others are saying. If people rely on some undocumented aspect of your IDs, it's on them if that breaks.
Literally how I designed all the public facing R2 tokens like multipart uploads. It’s also a security barrier because forging and stealing of said tokens is harder and any vulnerability has to be done with cooperation of your servers and can be quickly shut down if needed.
> Great, so now GitHub can't change the structure of their IDs without breaking this person's code
OP can put the decoded IDs into a new column and ignore the structure in the future. The problem was presumably mass querying the Github API to get those numbers needed for functional URLs.
At a big enough scale, even your bugs have users
This is well understood - Hyrum's law.
You don't need encryption, a global_id database column with a randomly generated ID will do.
Hyrum's law is a real sonuvabitch.
Can GitHub change their API response rate? Can they increase it? If they do, they’ll break my code ‘cause it expects to receive responses at least after 1200ms. Any faster than that and I get race conditions. I selected the 1200ms number by measuring response rates.
No, you would call me a moron and tell me to go pound sand.
Weird systems were never supported to begin with.
The API contract doesn’t stipulate the behavior so GitHub is free to change as they please.
Who cares if their code is broken in this case? Stupid games stupid prizes.
> Great, so now GitHub can't change the structure of their IDs without breaking this person's code.
And that is all the fault of the person who treated a documented opaque value as if it has some specific structure.
> The lesson is that if you're designing an API and want an ID to be opaque you have to literally encrypt it.
The lesson is that you should stop caring about breaking people’s code who go against the documentation this way. When it breaks you shrug. Their code was always buggy and it just happened to be working for them until then. You are not their dad. You are not responsible for their misfortune.
> I find it really demoralizing as an API designer that I have to treat my API's consumers as adversaries who will knowingly and intentionally ignore guidance in the documentation like this.
You don’t have to.