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Comment by beau_g | Hacker News Reader

In which line of work or venue could a competent person with intentions like these NOT succeed in introducing subtle problems? If there were such a thing where someone could not possibly introduce a problem if they tried, what would that even look like? Certainly not an aspirational open source project. Maybe you couldn't do this with FAA regs or it would take too much time to build up the credibility to "commit code" there, or I guess for an extreme example the US Constitution, but most other things I can think of you can do something like this "study" and achieve similar meaningless results. Yes, people rely on other's goodwill and intentions to some degree when collaborating.

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> Maybe you couldn't do this with […] for an extreme example the US Constitution,

The Eighteenth Amendment says hello.

Preventing the introduction of subtle bugs when making changes to a complex system is hard, even disregarding intent. I'd say it's easier to catch deliberately-malicious patches, because easy-to-predict failures are the easiest to catch.

Every law has subtle problems. This is about introducing subtle but serious and exploitable issues on purpose, and I wouldn't say the eighteenth amendment is anywhere near that territory.

Well, there's another example. It was deliberately exploited by other lawmakers, but I imagine the original issue was probably accidental.

The thirteenth amendment, while intended to abolish slavery, actually rendered state-sanctioned slavery explicitly constitutional (albeit, with extra steps); e.g. the Black Codes in certain states prohibited “vagrancy”, which (afaik) basically let them enslave anyone they could get a jury to agree wasn't “contributing to society” via “gainful employment”. This lead to the fourteenth amendment trying to patch this issue – not by forbidding slavery as punishment for a crime, but by requiring “equal protection”: in essence, states couldn't make laws that only applied to certain people.

I don't have any examples of exploitable issues being deliberately introduced to legislation, because generally, people in a position to introduce them don't have to be subtle about it. Perhaps the 11th Congress of the Russian Communist Party's creation of the position of General Secretary was an example, but I don't know if we know what happened there.

Before the thirteenth amendment to the US constitution, §4.2.3 permitted slavery and, arguably, implicitly required its enforcement even by states that outlawed slavery. That might count, seeing as many drafters were anti-slavery, and did not expect this clause to allow the 19th-century resurgence of slavery-powered plantations; whereas other drafters were pro-slavery, and presumably insisted upon this clause's inclusion.

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