startlingly bad moments in API design

Weka, the machine learning toolkit, has these nice filters that let you change what's in a data set, maybe the features on the instances, or the instances themselves. Pretty useful. One is called "Remove", and it removes features. Here's a case in Weka where order matters when you're setting up the parameters for an object.

Like so: this does not remove any features.

Remove remove = new Remove();
remove.setInputFormat(instances);
remove.setAttributeIndices("7,10,100");
remove.setInvertSelection(true); // delete the other ones.
Instances out = Filter.useFilter(instances, remove);

This works just fine, though:

Remove remove = new Remove();
remove.setAttributeIndices("7,10,100");
remove.setInvertSelection(true); // delete the other ones.
remove.setInputFormat(instances);
Instances out = Filter.useFilter(instances, remove);

How are you supposed to find that out?