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Comment by berkle4455 | Hacker News Reader

> Crucially, it held onto the Redis connection for the duration of that fallback condition and allowed errors from SET to fail the entire operation.

What? Was this inside a MULTI (transaction) or something? This isn't a flaw of Redis being single-threaded. Honestly all of these "footguns" sound like amateur programmer mistakes and have zero to do with Redis.

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No. As it explains at the beginning of the paragraph you're quoting:

> If you're particularly naive, like I was on one occasion, you'll exacerbate these failures with some poorly-implemented application logic.

Then a few paragraphs above that is this sentence:

> The gotchas that follow were all occasions when I didn't use it correctly.

I'm not sure how to make it more clear that I'm criticising myself, not Redis, in the post, but that's the intention. If you have suggestions how I could make it more obvious, please let me know.

The title comes across like these are faults of Redis and that if you're not particularly careful about you'll shoot yourself in the foot.

> I'm not sure how to make it more clear that I'm criticising myself

"Mistakes I made while building applications on Redis"

Thanks, I'll update the post and link to your comment for attribution.

"Footgun" unfortunately does have some "prior art" as blaming unexpected behavior of a technology.

PS Love the aesthetic of your blog!

Ah, that's a good point. I explicitly didn't call Redis a "footgun" at any point, because of what that word means. However the post is tagged with `footguns` and perhaps that contributed to the misunderstanding. I'll remove the tag.

(I also wonder if "shoot yourself in the foot" is an idiom that doesn't translate well; at least in the UK I think it's fairly well understood to put blame squarely on the person doing the shooting, rather than the firearm they happen to be holding at the time)

Interesting. I always assumed it to be something that’s easy to use insecurely (or to cause a self-DoS) but thinking about it, I suppose a "footgun" is made for shooting oneself in the foot.

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