Can someone give me some context? Who is rachelbythebay? I gather she is probably someone well known for her writing on software, tech culture, etc in the HN community, but I am not that immersed in the community(hence my ignorance). Thanks!
If you think someone is a bit of a local celebrity on HN, you can click the domain name on a story like this and see what their blog was submitted for. Usually useful information.
In addition, on my mobile, when I accidentally or intentionally hit the downvote, it doesn't take the first couple of times. This has saved me numerous unintentional downvotes. Thanks, HN!
And frankly, she is amazing and the last time I read her blog it was to discover to my amazement that Apple was using shims for stuff like git... which led me to write about it a bit more here;
Basically, I wish I could do what she does. I don't go anywhere near her level of complexity, but due to a variety of reasons I seem to lately be diagnosing and discovering insane things in Windows 7, in particular Windows Update and SxS assemblies.
In case Rachel's reading this: I've missed her posts. I'm getting out of the troubleshooting part of the industry because it sucks (or rather, it's not where I want to put my energy anymore), but her stuff has always been a real treat to read and a reminder that no matter what's in front of me, someone's probably got a much tougher problem in front of them.
Always sad to be reminded how many good people get their careers swallowed up by a corporation. The public sphere suffers.
I have a lot of anger towards Google in particular, who seems to relish in having private resources, secrets, learning and technology that only the annointed may access. I should probably talk to my therapist about that.
Work somewhere that public output is part of how you're compensated and promoted. See: https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/07/how-much-should-you-pay-d... "One important principle of Stack [Overflow] is that we do as much as we can publicly, and we try to leave public artifacts of all the work we do."
My philosophy: sell luxuries in narrow channels but distribute medicine broadly.
It's pretty subjective what fits in which bin, people should decide for themselves. But Google certainly has resources that they consider to be "medicine" for their employees and yet they keep those products in-house.
Things could always be better, but at least it's routine now for stuff like Swift, GoLang, Rust, Protobufs, Cassandra, etc. to get built for internal use and then shared with the world. A far cry from software's dark ages.
You know what, the whole grenade metaphor? I don't need it. It's just a damn web site. People _do_ sometimes use it to communicate in critical situations... but none of us working there are ever in any risk of bodily harm because someone pushed a bad config.
Given that people are dealing with actual wars, I can lose it. It's easy to lose sight of such things when you're sheltered from them.
I'm in a similar field (surprise surprise) and the most impactful thing someone has ever said to me is that we're making websites, not curing cancer. Respect for making the change.
She figured that since it was a 1-bit bug, xxd -> vi -> xxd -r was going to be quicker and simpler than downloading, modifying and recompiling the source.
Was that the final solution or just for debugging purposes? It doesn't seem like you'd want to make binary patches the next time that software got updated
In the article she indicates it was for proving her hypothesis regarding the source of the problem. She then sent an actual patch upstream to fix it. It was faster this way because of the way the binary did bitwise flags for options. Flipping a single bit in the binary was quicker than recompiling bit twiddling code to for testing purposes.
you get less and less productive the more experiense, as you can think of more and more stuff that can go wrong. Im glad she found an employer that put use of her experience
I guess you're referring to the uncertainty principle, but this one is more related to the observer effect[1] (also described by Heisenberg): Observing a system alters its state.
In terms of software, it describes bug that change their behaviour (usually vanish) when being investigated. The reason is often a racing condition that swaps to one side due to blocking one thread through a debugger or additional delay through print statements.
I haven't read the article, but I would assume any mention of 'bags of water' would be a reference to a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. Specifically, the episode where the crew of the Enterprise encounters a silicon-based life form capable of communication with humans. Humans are three quarters water, so the silicon lifeforms (rightly?) refer to the humans as 'ugly bags of mostly water'.
To put this into context, it's not uncommon to have the set of people who use and work with technology overlap with the set of people who are sci-fi fans. This is prevalent enough that the culture itself overlaps. Here, I would guess a non-sequitur referring to 'bags of water' is a form of signalling; 'I'm one of you', or something to that effect.
I would go so far to say that knowledge of certain sci-fi tropes, plot lines, and even quotes is a requirement for working on certain teams. At the very least, active displays of ignorance of sci-fi culture should be avoided.
But then again, I haven't read the article linked to by the OP. It's just a guess.
The inference I made was that it had a second meaning to do with water flowing downhill, since the context is how people will always take the easiest path & can be relied on to ignore any safeguards that aren't strictly required
Though on the other hand, hair on fire is just as likely to have happened in a warzone. How will you run away from all the analogies which make random strangers on the internet queasy?
Perhaps somebody doesn't like hcf opcodes because they remind them of when their house burned down. Is the concept of running into a blaze owned solely by firefighters? Do soldiers own the concept of battle?
True, at some point you just stick to it and that's that.
That said, the grenade thing happened because, well, that's what some of us (internally) actually call that sort of outage situation sometimes -- you didn't make it happen, but you're there and are able to do something to fix it, so you do.
It doesn't work nearly as well on the outside, so I changed it and admitted my error. That's about the best you can do in a world where we're all speaking slightly different languages.
I mean, I inadvertently set my hair on fire at a party one time. (It was a good party.) Despite not having actually run around that way, I'd be ready to argue that it's not as specific or uncomfortable a metaphor as that of jumping on a grenade.
That seems rather extreme. Although I suppose refusing a job that offers C++ could in very rare circumstances result homelessness, hunger, and finally death.
You'll find that gratuitous hyperbole with no actual content in your post will get you down-voted pretty fast here. The community has developed a pretty aggressive immune system to the typical reddit post.
>> And oh, please stop using the war metaphor. You are bringing in way too much aggression into something that can be done with a lot more calm and composure.
Agree with you on that part. However, this specific article wasn't aggressive at all.
