Kerckhoff&#x27;s Principle holds only if the adversary&#x27;s cost are unbounded. In reality, there&#x27;s almost always a cost ceiling tied in some way to the value of the target.<p>In other words: you are welcome to spend unlimited hours and dollars finding and exploiting the flaws in HN&#x27;s ranking model simply to prove a point, but hopefully, you have better things to do. Similarly, the HN team has better things to do than investing resources to defeat the (unlikely) adversaries who harness both skill and irrationality.<p>(This wrinkle of Kerckhoff&#x27;s Principle comes up a lot in systems security work, which is why I was moved to comment about it.)