[HN Gopher] Including "And. And. And. And. And." in a Google doc...
___________________________________________________________________
Including "And. And. And. And. And." in a Google doc causes it to
crash
Author : patneedham
Score : 1398 points
Date : 2022-05-05 20:25 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (support.google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (support.google.com)
| Normal_gaussian wrote:
| Perfect prank document to send to the team. I'm just hoping it
| holds up until the morning so everyone can join the fun and not
| just those of us with bad work time habits.
| analog31 wrote:
| An odd coincidence, I recall that pressing an operator button on
| an older HP calculator would also cause an error, because the
| stack was 4 levels deep.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Heaven brings forth innumerable things to nurture man. Man has
| nothing good with which to recompense Heaven.
| loxias wrote:
| I _LOVE_ stuff like this. Reminds me of "OpenOffice does not
| print on Tuesdays"
| https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/print_on_tuesday.html
| cybertoad wrote:
| Haha, thanks for sharing
| apanloco wrote:
| Thanks for sharing, that's hilarious :D
| below43 wrote:
| This is another classic from his list "We can't send mail more
| than 500 miles":
| https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/500mile_email.html
| jrd79 wrote:
| That is an amazing bug.
| vldx wrote:
| I'm very curious what may be the root cause of this.
| baisq wrote:
| Probably something to do with the grammar check (blue
| squiggly line)
| the_biot wrote:
| My guess is on an easter egg gone wrong.
| [deleted]
| t_mann wrote:
| My money is on some conflicting rules in grammar / style
| checks.
| likortera wrote:
| Wonder if this was discovered because of a Mars Attack ET using
| it.
| ronald_raygun wrote:
| I can't get the bug to reproduce. But maybe someone else could
| try
|
| Wouldn't the sentence 'I want to put a hyphen between the words
| Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign' have
| been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and
| between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and
| and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after
| Chips?
| mike_d wrote:
| "And." x 5+, case sensitive, new line at the end. Hit refresh
| in your browser and it will throw an error.
| erwincoumans wrote:
| It has been "Fixed. Fixed. Fixed. Fixed. Fixed." now.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| Replicated on my end on OSX & firefox
| oliwary wrote:
| Replicated on Windows 10 and Chrome too!
| pinewurst wrote:
| OSX and Safari replicated
| sharmavinu0024 wrote:
| good tool for everyone.
| [deleted]
| AlexMuir wrote:
| Took me right back one of many detentions I served at school,
| when Mr B Swales set us the challenge of finding a grammatically
| correct English sentence with five ands in a row.
|
| The answer was as follows:
|
| The landlord of the "Dog and Partridge" pub commissioned a
| signwriter to letter a new board outside. On looking at the work,
| the landlord declared that he liked the colour but would prefer
| more spacing between Dog and and, and and and Partridge.
| onionisafruit wrote:
| Why did that lead to detention?
| splatzone wrote:
| I could be wrong, but I think it was a task the teacher set
| during detention
| paconbork wrote:
| It's easy enough to use a single "and" in a sentence, but "and
| and" and "and and and" and so on are more difficult
| hoosieree wrote:
| Clearly you've never taught intro boolean logic.
|
| Try saying "a Nand and an And" in a way that your students
| can understand you.
| porbelm wrote:
| a NAND, and an AND with proper stresses and pauses, it's
| not that hard to say clearly...
| wildmanx wrote:
| May depend on pronounciation .. do you pronounce the NAND
| gate as /aen-aend/ or as a one-syllable world /naend/ ?
| coreyp_1 wrote:
| I heard it with "Fish and Chips".
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| '''Between (("Dog" and "and") and ("and" and "partridge"))'''
| for those of you trying to parse along at home.
| [deleted]
| busterroni wrote:
| > "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo
| buffalo" is a grammatically correct sentence in English
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...
| atxbcp wrote:
| A russian equivalent based on the fact that foreign words
| aren't declined: Chelovek cheloveku volk, a zombi zombi zombi
| [deleted]
| chatmasta wrote:
| It seems like cheating to omit the double quotes around the
| literal instances of "and" while still including them around
| "Dog and Partridge."
| astrobe_ wrote:
| They said grammatically correct, not typographically correct
| ;-)
| elliekelly wrote:
| I would love to know what other tasks Mr B Swales had in his
| detention assignment rotation!
| Affric wrote:
| Curiously, if someone wanted to put that on a sign suddenly you
| can take the story to as many "and"s as one might want...
|
| So, the the trick is using it as a conjunction and a noun.
| nicooo wrote:
| My homework was to write a sentence with 5 ands in a row, so I
| wrote "and and and and and."
| [deleted]
| Moru wrote:
| Swedish sort of joke-sentence you get to learn in school:
|
| "Far, far far far?"
|
| "Nej, far far inte far, far far lamm."
|
| English would be:
|
| "Father, does sheep get sheep?"
|
| "No, sheep does not get sheep, sheep gets lambs."
|
| No, google translate does not make it unscathed through that
| sentence :-)
| DonHopkins wrote:
| The The or Adam and the Ants or Bananarama?
|
| I always wanted to start a Yello cover band called Purple,
| just to perform a song called "Oh No!"
|
| Mmmmm, Ugly... More ugly... Such a bad time... A really bad
| time...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jJkdRaa04g
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Aaron earned an iron urn.
| albrewer wrote:
| This really only gets people with a certain accent though.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| https://yewtu.be/watch?v=Oj7a-p4psRA
| Kosirich wrote:
| For doing that on hard/impossible setting, try doing it in
| Danish as a foreigner. Every person in Denmark I discussed
| language with, at one point gives this example.
| justinpombrio wrote:
| Here's 21 in a row, by Martin Gardner:
|
| Wouldn't the sentence 'I want to put a hyphen between the words
| Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign' have
| been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish,
| and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and
| and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as
| after Chips?
| hackernewds wrote:
| This one does not follow as well
| CaptainNegative wrote:
| Can't one just keep recursing further?
|
| Only with very careful intonation and appropriate pauses
| after a comma can someone read Gardner's above sentence aloud
| such that a listener can fully grok the connection between
| "and" and "and,", and "and," and "and", and "and" and "and",
| and "and" and "and", and "and" and "And,", and "And," and
| "and", and "and" and "And", and "And" and "and", and "and"
| and "and,", and "and," and "and", and "and" and "and", and
| "and" and "and", and "and" and "And,", and "And," and "and",
| and "and" and "And", and "And" and "and", and "and" and
| "and,", and "and," and "and", and "and" and "and", and "and"
| and "and".
|
| (sentence due to Python 3).
| stevage wrote:
| I mean, if you're allowing that, what's wrong with:
|
| > You should have seen this sign, it had 1000 ands in a
| row, and there was too much space between and and and and
| and and and and and ...
| rolandog wrote:
| He has multiplied the ands. Pray he does not multiply
| them any further.
| vijayr02 wrote:
| The ands justify the means
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| It is called the "and bomb".
| eightails wrote:
| "I am become and"
| noisy_boy wrote:
| The Andalorian.
| abelaer wrote:
| If you want to draw the graph where nodes are words from
| your comment, and two nodes are connected when they contain
| the same letters, you would have to draw edges between and
| and and, and and and and, and ...
|
| Explodes even faster.
| mc4ndr3 wrote:
| Grammar check problems strike again.
| blueberrychpstx wrote:
| When I come across posts like these, I just wonder, "How in the
| world did the user discover this in the first place?!"
|
| Let's place bets:
|
| A) The user just let autocomplete "take it away" (not sure about
| this one since they were able to access the console)
|
| B) Pen Testing?
|
| C) Error copy and pasting?
|
| D) Actual dialog in a sci-fi post-apocalyptic love story where a
| robot discovers the Turing test and attempts to set itself into
| an infinite loop.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| This is just a transcript of a stutter. Too much for modern
| technology to handle. :)
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| The same way a lottery winner discovers the correct numbers
| a-dub wrote:
| E) fidgeting/futzing with stuff mindlessly while in
| conversation/doing something else
|
| personally, i've happened across some pretty serious security
| bugs this way.
| dkarl wrote:
| I've heard people say it, speaking like this: "This would be a
| great solution to the problem, except that it would break the
| admin dashboard. And billing. And SSO. And partner test
| environments. And. And. And. And. And. This would break so many
| things I'm sure I could only name half of them if I tried."
| rhizome wrote:
| Yep. I've written that formulation many many times.
| marcusverus wrote:
| Agreed--it seems likely that the user was writing dialogue,
| taking minutes, or something similar.
|
| Skilled speakers frequently use repetitions of a word (like
| 'and') as an interjection[0]. It's a handy way of giving
| yourself a second to think without saying 'uhh' or 'umm'
| (which, for whatever reason, are considered 'bad'
| interjections), and seems to be a kind of defense against
| being interrupted.
|
| [0] https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna42822623 (a Meet the Press
| transcript which contains eight "and, and"s and one "and,
| and, and"!)
| amelius wrote:
| Fuzzing?
| matthberg wrote:
| Apparently from a poem:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31278566
|
| That comment is from the submitter of the issue (and HN post),
| the poem is from Eliza Callahan (copy found here):
| https://durationandthebodyelizacallahan.cargo.site
|
| The relevant excerpt: "I thought about my body. It's past. It's
| present... Which made me think about the word and. And. And.
| And. And. And. Then."
| OhSoHumble wrote:
| Writing a novel and a character within the novel has a stutter
| or is stammering.
| orblivion wrote:
| C seems very likely to me. I often compulsively copy and paste
| things. You might not call it an error as such.
| fnord123 wrote:
| E) Children playing on the tablet/computer.
| t_mann wrote:
| Some more options: Just a demonstration of how Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V
| works. Literal transcript of a stammered conversation. Poetry /
| word-based art.
| [deleted]
| technothrasher wrote:
| Years ago in school, maybe about 1992 or so, I managed to make
| xdm (X Display Manager) crash and dump me a root window by
| simply holding down a key until the buffer ran out. I remember
| wondering how anybody _didn 't_ discover this before me.
| Similar behavior with the university phone system (repeatedly
| pressing '0') eventually dropped me an outside line that I
| didn't have to pay for (yes, for you young folks, we used to
| have to pay for long distance phone calls, on phones that
| didn't fit in our pockets).
| hnick wrote:
| You just reminded me what we found in college (on campus). We
| could dial out to the other college, then back into ours, and
| then externally to get free long distance calls.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I've had a stint or two doing QA.
|
| At one such position (reasonably well-known product within
| the tech world), there was clear pushback not to file bugs of
| this nature.
|
| I didn't stick with that position long.
| hawski wrote:
| I always suspect that software I'm using is not really
| tested. If there are animations or whatever is happening
| asynchronously monkey bashing will trigger lots of issues.
| joseda-hg wrote:
| I seem to remember that a few years ago some versions of
| either TouchWiz or Android, that you could overflow into
| unlocking the phone.
|
| The number required was pretty high, but you could get to it
| by copy pasting an already typed (In the emergeny dialer)
| number for a while, crashing the lockscreen until the next
| reset
| karlding wrote:
| Sounds like CVE-2015-3860 [0].
|
| [0] https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2015-3860
| spullara wrote:
| When I was a teenager, I got dropped into a shell on a VAX by
| doing the same thing when it was trying to identify the
| terminal type.
| merlinscholz wrote:
| Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25843874
| technothrasher wrote:
| Good to know the new guard is still leading the fight :)
| Thorrez wrote:
| And another one:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7531140
| glitchc wrote:
| Option D is rather romantic. Poor robot fell in love with an
| NFA. He'll never hear the end of it.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Who. Who. Who. Who. Who.
|
| However. However. However. However. However.
|
| Why. Why. Why. Why. Why.
| js8 wrote:
| Google engineers should ask "Why." five times to get to the
| root cause.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Whhhhhy
| schmeckleberg wrote:
| did you decide to compress the "5 Whys" into one Why with 5 hs?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys
| a_cardboard_box wrote:
| I just repro'd the bug with 5 whys: "Why. Why. Why. Why.
| Why."
| rikeanimer wrote:
| omg I tried to post a reply on that support page and it errored
| out saying "you need to be signed in ..." while I could literally
| see my sign in logo top right corner of the page.
|
| fking google.
|
| there are good [as well as technical humurous] comments on the
| page.
| valenaut wrote:
| Reproduced in Safari on macOS Monterey.
|
| "And. And. And. And." caused no problems.
|
| "And. And. And. And. And. And." also crashes (5 "And."s is a
| substring, so makes sense).
|
| I cannot imagine how this bug is occurring.
| [deleted]
| pmichaud wrote:
| My wild-ass guess is a grammar check bug. Since it words on
| both "and" and "but," I'm thinking it's some check related to
| conjunctions.
| aimor wrote:
| I think this is the right track. "However. ", "Therefore. ",
| "Also. " cause the crash too.
| twism wrote:
| Repro'd
| dropit_sphere wrote:
| lolwhat, replicated w/Linux and Chrome just now.
| edgyquant wrote:
| This doesn't work on the iOS app, I've pasted it and typed it
| manually
| strictfp wrote:
| And?
| wardedVibe wrote:
| worth a shot, I tried it, and it worked fine. Then again, I
| couldn't reproduce the original
| shreyansh26 wrote:
| Reproduced on Edge on Windows 11 as well. What a bug! Really need
| to know the root cause of this.
| endisneigh wrote:
| I wonder if this is crashing due to some auto completion
| shenanigans
| mikotodomo wrote:
| OMG I showed this to my friends and now someone in my class keeps
| adding it to our documents.
| zciwor wrote:
| Will 100% be pasting this into a coworker's Google Doc with a
| white font color.
| glitchc wrote:
| Sounds like a totally collaborative/supportive workspace.
| fdgsdfogijq wrote:
| haha please do this
| mattrighetti wrote:
| Evil
| ffhhj wrote:
| Send it in your resume to annoy recruiters.
| agitator wrote:
| Yes, yes, let's all put this in our resumes.
| achenet wrote:
| but... I write my resume in markdown and compile it to PDF
| with pandoc ...
| _wldu wrote:
| That's probably a cyber crime in most US states.
|
| Edit: You guys have no sense of humor.
| jjeaff wrote:
| You joke, but comparing to past cases, I see no reason to
| believe it couldn't be considered a crime depending on who
| you do it to. All depends on the existence of some grumpy
| idiot with too much power.
| cyral wrote:
| Sounds like a job for the Highway Patrol
| rawoke083600 wrote:
| Haha
| buryat wrote:
| Hackernews is not a place for jokes
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| It is if the jokes are _really_ sophisticated or clever. No
| reddit style stuff.
| bogwog wrote:
| So why are you here?
|
| (gotem)
| smarx007 wrote:
| Only if it crashes MS Word 2007.
| kappuchino wrote:
| try /s at the end of "offending" sentence, most people will
| look at it more kindly.
| TMWNN wrote:
| loxias wrote:
| Huh, that's confusing to me.
|
| _Big_ Adams, Twain, Barry, Pratchett, and most things
| sardonic, sarcastic, and satiric right here, who's also
| "autistic AF" as the kids say.
|
| "/s" is stupid, always has been. I'm not sure if sarcasm
| _is_ sarcasm if it comes with metadata, but if you 're
| gonna use metadata, use balanced tags!
|
| Edit: I read the link, and laughed at it. If anything, I
| get into trouble using sarcasm /too/ often (esp. as a
| kid), I know a few other aspies like this too. I think
| all one can say on the topic is that if you're on the
| spectrum your "sarcasm center" might be poorly deficient
| OR pumped up into overdrive.
|
| I know it's a long rant on this point but I really wish
| more people understood that with ASD sometimes these
| things manifest as a deficiency...but sometimes as the
| opposite of a deficiency (a surfeit?).
| impendia wrote:
| > Consistently having trouble identifying sarcasm in
| print--without the "help" of idiotic illiterate marks
| like "/s"--is one of the signs of autism
|
| Autistic people exist, and read things on the internet.
| Attempts to help them are neither "idiotic" nor
| "illiterate".
| c1ccccc1 wrote:
| Not many people know this, but similar to image alt text,
| the <s></s> tag was originally introduced for
| accessibility reasons, so that people with autism and
| similar conditions can experience the web in the same way
| as more neuro-typical folks do. The tags should be
| invisible in the average browser, unless you've got
| sarcasm highlighting turned on. Unfortunately, the
| feature hasn't really caught on, and it remains
| unsupported by most software.
| bregma wrote:
| Why does this post appear in yellow?
| TMWNN wrote:
| You're using a sarcasm markup-compliant browser.
| D-Coder wrote:
| This is sarcasm, right?
|
| Right?
| jkhdigital wrote:
| :chef's kiss:
| mellavora wrote:
| Huh, I totally missed that "/s" was a sarcasm flag. I was
| thinking that usually it is ":s/" not "/s", and was looking
| for the completion, or if they really did mean "/s" that's
| not the best way to find ands.
| dorkwood wrote:
| I'm surprised the SarcMark(tm) never took off:
| https://www.sarcmark.com/
| saagarjha wrote:
| I am incredibly upset by the difference in speed of
| writing the text and drawing the SarcMark.
| ManBlanket wrote:
| I'm sure you're great. Nothing against you, but please
| don't do that. Just write what you mean if you can't handle
| some people misinterpreting a sarcastic remark. Let's think
| about this for a second. What's the point of sarcasm? If
| you have to tell people you're being sarcastic, are you
| still being sarcastic? Not sure what territory, "/s"
| blunders into, but I'm confident it's not sarcasm. It's
| something else that seems kinda... dumb... like on a
| fundamental level. Did people think themselves above
| saying, "jk"? Mostly I've just seen, "/s" beg the question
| of why someone would go and ruin a good sarcasm, or whether
| the thing they labeled as such was ever sarcasm to begin
| with. Like the parent comment here for example, it's not
| sarcasm. There's no biting irony, mockery, or criticism.
| It's just a silly non-sequitur joke remark. You'd have to
| be like legitimately autistic or something to not see that,
| and at that point, "/s" is just a drop in a bucket. I mean
| hot-take here, sorry, but let's think twice before adopting
| social queues from reddit.
| u2077 wrote:
| Just as a side note, I thought /s meant serious. I think
| I've might've have seen it used in both contexts.
| c1ccccc1 wrote:
| As the "end of sarcasm" marker, it means both:
|
| "{sarcasm here} /s {seriousness here}"
| ineedasername wrote:
| We need an emotional tone markup language. ETML.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I've never seen that interpretation, but I have to say --
| as someone who is not a fan of the /s, I find the fact
| that it could be interpreted as the exact opposite of the
| standard meaning pretty funny. In fact I think I will
| start using it this way, to sow discord among the /s
| fans. /s
| nephanth wrote:
| Indicating sarcasm is not necessarily ruining it though.
| Look at IRL sarcasm, it will generally be accompanied
| with the right tone of voice and expression / body
| language that make its presence unequivocal. That doesn't
| necessarily ruin it
| Fogest wrote:
| It's the same reason why I often throw a emoji on the end
| of a sentence to a friend. Sometimes the sentence on its
| own can sound aggressive or hostile and a quick fix for
| that is a little emoji that can help make sure my tone is
| clear. I view something like "/s" as being quite similar
| to this. You're not ruining the sarcasm, but instead
| ensuring your tone is properly understood.
| hnick wrote:
| Written works have had sarcasm, irony, and related forms
| of wit for as long as they've existed. While people might
| miss the mark, it doesn't mean we should just give it up
| as impossible just because we're now writing comments
| online.
|
| And it probably says more about me than the writer, but I
| always cringe when I see /s since it seems to be implying
| "Hey, _in case you 're a bit slow_, this is sarcasm. Glad
| to help."
|
| Sarcasm is by definition kind of elitist. You get it, and
| you're in the cool group, or you don't and you go on your
| way. It's a puzzle to solve. Removing all uncertainty
| removes its fundamental essence.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| /s is just a wink, you still have to figure out whether
| the person did really fart and if so how they concealed
| it. You're just here farting and calling it higher
| smelling because you think you're the only one smelling
| it.
| marvin wrote:
| The very best sarcasm is so perfectly balanced and
| indistinguishable from the real deal, that it will leave
| its audience wondering but not missing the _potential_
| for sarcasm. Then the person that delivered it will
| promptly move on, before the audience gets a chance to
| really think about it.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| Social "cue" (as for an actor or musician) not "queue,"
| by the way.
| ViViDboarder wrote:
| To be fair, when vocalizing sarcasm, it is often marked
| by a particular tone. That tone is not easily conveyed
| online.
| porbelm wrote:
| Unless other techniques like bolding/italics etc are
| employed, or you work for DC Comics... because using MORE
| WORDS to correctly convey meaning is SO hard, YESSIR
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| > You'd have to be like legitimately autistic or
| something to not see that, and at that point, "/s" is
| just a drop in a bucket.
|
| I read up to this point thinking you're being overly
| pedantic about the specific use of a sarc mark and overly
| dismissive of the benefit of intent-clarifying hints in
| text. All the while thinking "I'm going to comment about
| how much I value intent-clarifying hints in text... and
| then I have to decide whether I want to mention I'm
| autistic, and prepare for all of the ways I might be
| misconstrued or dismissed further."
|
| So here we are, you've saved me the trouble of making
| that decision. I personally very much appreciate when
| people signal intent when their meaning can be ambiguous.
| It doesn't always feel necessary _for_ me, but it's never
| once felt like it taken away from something I otherwise
| understood as obvious.
|
| My take, which is much cooler than it was when I was
| gathering thoughts leading up to this but still mildly
| hot is: what harm does it do to you if someone
| voluntarily makes something more accessible to someone
| who's not you? If you already grokked /s from a sarcastic
| remark, it's a tiny bit of information you can scroll
| past. I understand not explicitly recognizing and
| endorsing how it might benefit autistic readers, but
| explicitly rejecting it because it might is baffling.
| mtVessel wrote:
| I agree in principle, but if there's one thing internet
| commenting has taught me, it's that a tragically large
| number of people are somehow getting though life with
| broken sarcasm detectors.
| KMag wrote:
| A lot of people have a particularly tough time
| understanding sarcasm in a language other than their
| mother tongue.
| iinnPP wrote:
| You can say this and express it as a joke but the text reads
| like poor criticism.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| I read it as a joke, but I started with an assumption of
| good intent.
| Diesel555 wrote:
| Following the guidelines I see
|
| > Please respond to the strongest plausible
| interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one
| that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| Well not for that reason, but it's always a good reminder
| :)
| bee_rider wrote:
| Is there a stronger plausible interpretation than:
|
| It is a joke, poking fun at our overly aggressive cyber
| crimes laws.
|
| ?
| Diesel555 wrote:
| Not that I know of. I really meant that he is following
| the guidelines. What were you assuming I meant?
| [deleted]
| elektrons wrote:
| I'm curious what this will do to a google form.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| If I had to guess, I suspect this is due to some very weird edge
| case with their recently implemented grammar checker.
|
| Doesn't appear to be an issue for the android app, but that might
| be a cache thing.
| aliljet wrote:
| And here's a link to a document where you can see the bug in
| action. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KKZHZpKRFRBddEvjFc-
| au2LM...
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| Google Docs crashes in Firefox on Windows 10 with your link.
|
| When I re-create the document from scratch, it does not crash.
|
| When I copy the link to my non-crashing document and load it in
| a new tab, the crash then occurs when I edit the document in
| the new tab but not when I edit it in the original tab.
| tyingq wrote:
| Maybe your "spelling and grammar" isn't on by default? Try
| toggling it on in your "from scratch" document (little "A"
| icon with a checkmark).
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| No, it's on, just tried it again, got the blue underlines
| and everything. Original tab doesn't crash, new tabs crash
| (although I can usually get a few characters in before the
| crash), once I close the original tab obviously the crashes
| are permanent.
| aliljet wrote:
| And changing this link to a view-only authorization. It appears
| the bug is fixed.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| It's interesting seeing how many people interact with that
| link. +40 users in a matter of minutes, and some instant spam
| suggestions too. Kind of funny.
|
| Thank you for the repro case!
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| wardedVibe wrote:
| didn't happen in firefox on Ubuntu
| yashg wrote:
| Nothing is happening. Tried in both Firefox and Chrome.
| oblosys wrote:
| Here's a bug I discovered in MS Word in 2004, which has survived
| the past 18 years of updates and is even present in the web
| version: https://1drv.ms/w/s!AgYiBqBjIZZpfkcvO9jnOel9T2o?e=tFA4wp
| If you join the two lines using a backspace at the start of the
| second line, the second line turns into gibberish.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| But it's not some form of this? https://xkcd.com/2109/
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Aw man, the way MS Word leaves bold/italic markers lying
| around [the subject of that comic] and greedily applies
| formatting to stuff you purposefully didn't select, drives me
| bonkers ... mind you I caught LibreOffice emulating this
| behaviour the other day (after an update), I hope it can be
| retamed ...
|
| RIP WordPerfect 'reveal codes'.
| oblosys wrote:
| Unfortunately, I lost the recipe (18 years is a long time),
| but I vaguely recall that the first line had markup that got
| canceled out, and that trying to delete the newline somehow
| deleted the end tag for that markup instead of the newline.
| It also happens when pressing delete at the end of the first
| line.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Show all styles, then select all instances of style where
| it's bold and/or italic.
| Jap2-0 wrote:
| Rewritten for clarity (and because I now actually know what's
| happening):
|
| If you look at the XML (change .docx to .zip) in styles.xml you
| see the declaration of the style "BodyText3":
| <w:style w:type="paragraph" w:styleId="BodyText3"><w:name
| w:val="Body Text 3"/><w:basedOn
| w:val="Normal"/><w:semiHidden/><w:rPr><w:rFonts
| w:ascii="Wingdings"
| w:hAnsi="Wingdings"/><w:i/><w:iCs/><w:strike/><w:color
| w:val="FF0000"/><w:sz w:val="52"/></w:rPr></w:style>
|
| The first line ("paragraph") has its style set to "BodyText3",
| but also has formatting on that section of text itself,
| overriding it. Once the lines are joined into one paragraph,
| the paragraph formatting appears in the second part because
| that text does not have a style to override it.
| oblosys wrote:
| Cool! This was pre-XML Word, and since introducing it became
| impossible at some point, I always just figured it had been a
| bug. Probably the bug was only in the creation, as I do
| remember the sequence of edit actions made no sense. I think
| it even had to include an undo.
| mgdlbp wrote:
| Steps to reproduce:
|
| 1. Create a Word document (most likely using the Blank
| document template, Normal.dotm)
|
| 2. Type text of first line; press Enter; type text of second
| line (technically Word calls these 'paragraphs'--Shift+Enter
| inserts a newline within the same paragraph)
|
| 3. Place cursor on first paragraph
|
| 4. Click a Paragraph Style from the Styles ribbon section to
| apply it (e.g., the second one, No Spacing)
|
| 5. Right click the style; choose Modify...
|
| 6. Change the formatting (e.g., the font to Wingdings)
|
| 7. Confirm the dialog
|
| 8. Select the entire first paragraph (doesn't matter whether
| you include the end-of-paragraph/newline)
|
| 9. Use manual formatting to override your changes to the
| style so the text matches the default style, Normal (e.g. use
| the listbox in the ribbon to change the font back to Calibri)
|
| Done; if you now delete the newline, the second paragraph
| merges with the first and takes on its style, as parent
| points out.
|
| Styles are the "proper" way to format Word documents
| (interesting to see what fraction of users actually use
| them). They're like a mix of HTML tags and styles: each
| paragraph (div) must have exactly one Paragraph Style, and
| each span of text can only have one Character Style. "Manual"
| formatting has highest precedence, followed by Character
| Style, followed by Paragraph Style. The benefits are the same
| as in HTML: semantic correctness and easy restyling of the
| entire document (e.g., by applying Themes from the Design
| tab). This sequence of steps is a fairly good demonstration
| of how they're used.
|
| Edit: clarify
| oblosys wrote:
| Just to clarify, this is not how I created the original
| document in 2004 :-) There were certainly no paragraph
| styles involved, and the edit actions had to include an
| undo, or it wouldn't happen. There was also no style
| inspector yet.
| oblosys wrote:
| Just noticed that with this method, the backspace joins the
| two lines, whereas in the original it reveals the markup,
| but the newline between the lines remains.
| usrn wrote:
| This is why I prefer just writing html/markdown and letting
| pandoc generate docx. Fiddling with the Word GUI when I
| know what I want and how to type it is just frustrating.
| HPsquared wrote:
| So... Working as intended then, seems like.
|
| This kind of thing can be easily debugged using the style
| inspector, "reveal formatting" which shows the formatting
| applied to the selected text and whether it's from paragraph
| formatting or direct text formatting.
| kingcharles wrote:
| How did you create the document? When I hit backspace it does
| "turn into gibberish", but because it seems to inherit the type
| choices from the ether between the two lines to put it into
| Wingdings in red with italic and strikethrough. Did you create
| that type setting?
| oblosys wrote:
| I ran into it while editing an interview text that had colors
| for people's names. It was surprisingly easy to reproduce,
| but creating the buggy documents got fixed at some point. The
| font and styles were altered slightly for dramatic effect.
| fedeb95 wrote:
| lol
| mxuribe wrote:
| Wow, this is pretty silly, odd! :-)
| seangrogg wrote:
| "And." I wrote. "And. And. And. And."
|
| That was the part that led to the apocalypse.
|
| This was not a coincidence, because nothing is ever a
| coincidence.
| [deleted]
| ricardobayes wrote:
| I'm glad I was here when this historical event happened.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Buffalo. Buffalo. Buffalo. Buffalo. Buffalo. doesn't crash it
| queuebert wrote:
| I tried this on my typewriter, and nothing happened.
| peterburkimsher wrote:
| I tried this on my typewriter, And. And. And. And. And.
| <nothing></nothing>
|
| Probably because it's out of paper.
|
| Related: how is paper fed into an Apple Magic Keyboard -
| Hebrew?
|
| Edit: Tried to reproduced with Arabic keyboard, plugged in now.
| Accidentally inverted right-to-left in brain.
|
| dnA. dnA. dnA. dnA. dnA.
| Nitramp wrote:
| I think the engine is just offended by your terrible writing
| style.
| blatherard wrote:
| It's been fixed.
|
| > May 6, 2022 Update: We have fixed an issue in Docs related to
| repetitive use of the word 'and.' This fix should soon be in
| place for all customers.
| glouwbug wrote:
| Maybe we can push to the front page all the issues with gmail
| so they can fix that too
| bitwize wrote:
| I wonder if "James where John had had had had had had had had had
| had had a better effect on his teacher" does someone's grammar
| checker up in knots. Or any of the old standbys, like "Police
| police police police police police".
| queuebert wrote:
| Or "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo
| buffalo".
| jethkl wrote:
| This topic also came up a few weeks ago. I speculate there is
| no upper bound. A similar example using "Hawking":
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30626497#30653029
| petters wrote:
| I had an exam in image analysis once. There was a photo of a text
| "Sea and land".
|
| The task was to "determine the cross ratio between sea and and
| and and and land".
| skerit wrote:
| That was fun!
| mark_prutskyi wrote:
| lol
| daniel_iversen wrote:
| Reminds me of this episode from IT Crowd :-)
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqxLmLUT-qc
| kodeninja wrote:
| Big Andian bug.
| bspear wrote:
| How random. Can't wait to try this
| piemadd wrote:
| sounds like a markov chain going berserk
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| thekiptxt wrote:
| > Google Docs uses a "Markov Chain" to predict the next word for
| autocompletion purposes. In this case, of course, since we've
| already written "And" 5 times, the only logical next word would
| be "And", as showed in Djikstra's 1989 paper on the subject.
| Therefore, the Markov Chain never terminates and hence the memory
| chain overflows with infinite ands.
|
| Does anyone know why this bug doesn't repro for some words other
| than And if this is the case?
| ghayes wrote:
| That statement follows with:
|
| > Obviously, this is partly intentional- Gregory Markov
| modelled his famous Chain after his younger brother, who would
| try to finish all of Gregory's sentences for him. The one way
| Markov could fool him would be to repeat the same word multiple
| times, and then say "Jinx", also I made all of this up, good
| luck Google Docs team
| akersten wrote:
| How is it not code review first comment to limit that lookup to
| like, 10 steps at most? Baffling
| timando wrote:
| Probably because that commenter just made it up.
| [deleted]
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I'm not sure that comment is true based on the second paragraph
| of it:
|
| > Obviously, this is partly intentional- Gregory Markov
| modelled his famous Chain after his younger brother, who would
| try to finish all of Gregory's sentences for him. The one way
| Markov could fool him would be to repeat the same word multiple
| times, and then say "Jinx", also I made all of this up, good
| luck Google Docs team
| Voloskaya wrote:
| That comment is a joke. SmartCompose does not use a Markov
| Chain, it is either still an LSTM or got upgraded to a small
| transformer based model.
| noduerme wrote:
| That was one of the funniest tech comments I've read in awhile.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Sort of related, last night I managed to make Clang crash by
| feeding it a certain C++ program: https://i.imgur.com/r5MC2aK.png
|
| It was very surprising that there was a way to get Clang to
| segfault. Should I report it somewhere?
|
| The code is basically doing a recursive template expansion with
| some C++20 concept constraints. So it's not quite as simple as
| "And. And...", but it's similar in that certain input text causes
| a crash. I just have no idea whether to report it, or where.
| tylerhou wrote:
| Clang segfaulting is somewhat common. It usually doesn't
| happen, but sometimes when I write some cursed template
| metaprogramming code it crashes and I'm not surprised. In your
| case, especially because you are using C++20 concepts, that is
| a newer feature and you probably hit some less-tested codepath.
| nopakos wrote:
| By chance, I was just reading that typing "x = 4.725" on Atari
| ST Basic crashed the computer. Still not fixed 35 years later
| :) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_ST_BASIC#Bugs]
| dzaima wrote:
| Note that it might be worth trying the latest clang version
| first. The latest proper version is 14.0.0 from Mar 25, which
| is only a month old compared to the 7 months of 13.0.0, but if
| it's something that's condensable to a single file, you could
| test it on https://godbolt.org/z/hv41441jK, which has daily
| builds.
| mtoner23 wrote:
| Definitely report it, it'll be fun to see what happens.
| https://llvm.org/docs/HowToSubmitABug.html
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Thank you for the link! Maybe that should've been obvious to
| me, but it really wasn't -- I had no clue where to start. The
| segfault just said "Please attach these files to the bug
| report" with no more info. Really appreciated.
|
| In that case I'll spend some time to clean up the repro case
| and submit it. Thanks again.
| D-Coder wrote:
| > The segfault just said "Please attach these files to the
| bug report" with no more info.
|
| The message should include the URL.
|
| Sounds like a bug that should be reported.
| mshockwave wrote:
| > Should I report it somewhere?
|
| Please do. You can open an issue (Bugzilla has been deprecated)
| on LLVM's github repo: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project
| hoten wrote:
| You should report it to their GitHub repro:
| https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project
| mintplant wrote:
| Relatedly, I have a string of text that, when pasted into Windows
| 11's Notepad, consistently causes it to crash. I don't know who
| to report this to.
| rdudek wrote:
| Don't keep us hanging like this, what's the string?
| mintplant wrote:
| Unfortunately I can't share, as it's related to a not-yet-
| public project.
| neerajsi wrote:
| Do you get the standard reporting error to Microsoft dialog
| when it crashes? Hopefully someone will be able to look at
| that. In typical cases only a small summary with the stack
| is uploaded so your content should not be visible to
| whoever is looking at the dump.
| nograpes wrote:
| Okay, I'll bite. What is the string?
| whoevercares wrote:
| someone cut a sev2
| magneticnorth wrote:
| Reproduced on Brave browser on Mac OSX.
|
| Hypothesis from chatting about this with people nearby - somehow
| this string makes the grammar engine search space too large
| (that's the AI that predicts your next words) and it's running
| out of memory.
| captaincaveman wrote:
| has anyone tried "Or. Or. Or. Or. Or."?
| 8bitben wrote:
| Actually yes. Didn't crash it!
| soperj wrote:
| or "&&. &&. &&. &&. &&."?
| AccountAccount1 wrote:
| I find it very poetic that this crash was triggered by a poem,
| here's the poem:
|
| > Duration and the body: I thought about something I had read a
| while ago which said that a body, the body, is defined by
| duration. That a body in the present is inseparable from its
| previous state, that a body is linked in a continuous strand...
| and so on and so on... I thought about my body. It's past. It's
| present... Which made me think about the word and. And. And. And.
| And. And. Then.
|
| > Now. Now. Now. Now. Now, I felt in the present like I was
| living always alongside a previous body. This is why I had
| expected to find myself in the apartment when I returned home
| from California.
|
| https://durationandthebodyelizacallahan.cargo.site/
| [deleted]
| quakeguy wrote:
| Your username screams for an equal exploit tbh.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| Their password is probably PasswordPassword2
| AccountAccount1 wrote:
| Well shit
| tsukurimashou wrote:
| HunterHunter
| meshaneian wrote:
| Why not PasswordPassword1?
| mellavora wrote:
| naw, it is *** That's what I see, anyway
| eek2121 wrote:
| Guess they already fixed it.
| nofunsir wrote:
| James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a
| better effect on the teacher. (1)
|
| Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
| (2)
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_while_John_had_had_had_h...
|
| [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...
| mtgx wrote:
| graderjs wrote:
| What if you put it in a spreadsheet cell, calendar description,
| drawing text or email?
| iagocds wrote:
| The Android App does not crash, but if i try to open the file at
| the web version it crashes
| calebegg wrote:
| Something I recently found out about is you can go to
| https://docs.new to create a new Google doc.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Favorite comment on that page: "Google is a small indie company
| btw"
|
| So, more seriously, what might cause this (mis)behavior?
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Typing "And. And. And. And. And." did not reproduce the bug, but
| copy/paste the "And [...]" from the title of this post did.
|
| EDIT: Ah, I had to reload the page, thank you child comments.
| mshockwave wrote:
| on my side it didn't trigger the crash right away but if you
| refresh the page, a popup with "Something went wrong" will show
| up
| lopatin wrote:
| Typing worked for me. You have to refresh.
| noobermin wrote:
| Refreshing was the key. Just typing it in does nothing, but
| refreshing or opening a saved document from your documents in
| docs with the text in it already leads to the crash.
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| Does not work for me in Google Docs, no matter if copied,
| or reloaded, refreshed etc. Perhaps they fixed it already.
| draxil wrote:
| Sounds like a feature, not a bug.
| fareesh wrote:
| Did this bug emerge after their Orwell word policing update?
| truly wrote:
| It seems to be fixed now. It would be fascinating to read an
| analysis of what exactly leads to the bug.
| [deleted]
| westonjackson wrote:
| Disable spelling and grammar checks in a separate doc and return
| to the broken doc is a possible workaround
| okaydeveloper wrote:
| The engineer at Google will be sweating now. The secret is out.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| The following also triggers the bug:
|
| Also. Also. Also. Also. Also.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| I couldn't reproduce the bug. Just five and's with periods and
| spaces in the body of a document?
| tnli wrote:
| Little Andy we call him.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Reminds me of this old Star Trek chestnut:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WRtqmHpLvg
| croddin wrote:
| "Also. Also. Also. Also. Also.\n" also breaks it.
| sam1r wrote:
| I'm willing to bet it's related to this. Google docs is trying to
| guess something for autocomplete, similar to their gmail feature
| to complete your sentences.
|
| Which means, on a privacy standpoint, whatever you're writing and
| guessing, they are absolutely processing something.
|
| We the user are the product, apparently. This is mildly creepy to
| me because, I do vent on google docs sometimes. And assume only I
| can read it..
| simonh wrote:
| It's literally called a word processors, so I suppose it
| processes the words. I don't have a problem with that, as long
| as my data is only used for purposes I have approved and to
| provide features I use.
| sam1r wrote:
| How is my comment downvoted?
|
| Top comment mentions it being grammar related, which requires
| processing however many written words before, to provide a
| possible suggestion.
|
| Considering an "and" clause to meet all possible cases of
| suggestions may cause the program to crash.
| nl wrote:
| I think you are probably getting downvoted because it's
| Google Docs, running on Google's Servers, with Google's
| autocomplete and grammer checkers and spell checkers and
| auto-templates and everything else running against it.
|
| Of course "Google" can read your doc. That has nothing to
| do with "you being the product" (infact it's the opposite
| since free Google Docs is a loss leader for their paid
| GSuite product).
|
| That doesn't mean a person _is_ reading it.
| sam1r wrote:
| That is a great point. Thanks for typing this out!
| Appreciate it.
| ayashko wrote:
| Reminds me of an old joke;
|
| - I bet you a beer you can't make a logical, grammatical sentence
| with five ands in a row
|
| - I used to be a sign writer in a previous life and one of the
| jobs I had was to repaint the sign hanging over the door to this
| very pub. Except the publican was adamant that he wanted more
| space between the words. Where exactly I asked? In between the
| Pig and and, and and and Whistle he replied.
| interestica wrote:
| And this joke reminds me of a Garden-path sentence:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Looks like HN is able to handle it just fine, though. :)
| croddin wrote:
| "Anyway. Anyway. Anyway, Anyway. Anyway.\n" will break it too.
| Anyway...
| [deleted]
| vesinisa wrote:
| I remember discovering that pasting a specific emoji to Google
| Slides causes the slide to become "poison". You could not view or
| edit it, the web UI would crash if you clicked on the slide. I
| discovered this by accident, but did not think much of it as I
| was able to work around by deleting the slide from the document
| overview.
| herpderperator wrote:
| Google has responded:
|
| > Dear Google Docs users, we are aware of the issue and working
| on a fix right now. Thank for surfacing this issue and sharing it
| with us. We will keep you posted!
|
| > Deving
|
| > Google Employee
| throw7 wrote:
| I've had emails crash gmail on my phone still to this day.
| Typically it's stuff like output logs. My guess is something to
| do with the repetitive lines, but who knows.
| smcnally wrote:
| "And And! And." was Outspan Foster's band before joining "The
| Commitments"[0] and later The Frames (as Glen Hansard). The
| screenplay was written before gDocs.
|
| [0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101605/quotes/qt0310982
| kklisura wrote:
| ``` TypeError: Cannot read properties of null (reading 'C') at
| Ccf
| (https://docs.google.com/static/document/client/js/157553674-...)
| at Bcf
| (https://docs.google.com/static/document/client/js/157553674-...)
| ```
|
| Has something to do with grammar. The document does not fail when
| `Show grammar suggestion` is turned off.
| sharmavinu0024 wrote:
| google doc. is well used for typing.
| croddin wrote:
| Also, Therefore, And, Anyway, But, Who, Why, Besides, However.
|
| Each in caps 5 times with the same word with a period and space
| after each word and newline at the end is what I have found so
| far.
|
| Can anyone find others?
|
| Edit: added words that work found in other comments, and found
| more.
| JoshuaDavid wrote:
| Probably the weirdest one I've found is "Dearness."
|
| "Although", "Besides", and "Moreover" also trigger the
| behavior.
| ineedasername wrote:
| How did you stumble on Dearness?
| JoshuaDavid wrote:
| Started running through the entire dictionary in batches
| of 500 words to see if each batch of 500 triggered the
| behavior, then binary search within the batch to find the
| problem word(s). Got bored partway through D.
|
| Edit: Got unbored. Discovered that "Firstly", "Secondly",
| "Thirdly", and "Fourthly" trigger the bug, but "Fifthly"
| and above do not.
|
| Edit 2: The first word can actually be any of the
| "problem" words -- "Also. And. And. And. And." also has
| the issue.
| ineedasername wrote:
| That sounds about right for HN, well done.
| hnaccount_rng wrote:
| Upvote for unbored. And a perfect illustration for HN xD
| rob74 wrote:
| How about "Whereas", "Insofaras", "Notwithstanding",
| "Thetruthofthematter", or "Despiteallobjections"? Didn't try
| them, but these were "reserved words" in Go (actually an
| easter egg) until 2017 (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2
| 489803/notwithstanding-...).
| bradfitz wrote:
| They weren't reserved words. The lexer just discarded those
| tokens entirely.
| cormacrelf wrote:
| Given the gay abandon with which people like to sprinkle
| them in fancy sounding sentences, perhaps this was for
| the best.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| whomst'd've'ly'yaint'nt'ed'ies's'y'e
| astrange wrote:
| This is the strangest parsing fact I've learned since PHP
| having a token named T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM. (Because the
| parser was developed in Israel.)
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/592322/php-expects-t-
| paa...
| nonsince wrote:
| I don't speak hebrew but someone online said that this is
| an unnecessarily literal translation of "double colon"
| and it's not what most developers would call it. Take
| that with a grain of salt though.
| stavros wrote:
| Oooh now I wonder if it literally means "dual intestine".
| Pyrious wrote:
| Nope, it's literally "twice colon" where colon is
| specifically the punctuation mark. p`mym nqvdvtyym
| stavros wrote:
| Ahh dreams dashed.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Dashed? Em-dashed? Hyphenated? Or just subtracted?
| cobbal wrote:
| U+1F4A8
| CSSer wrote:
| I thought we were talking about colons?
| pferde wrote:
| The history of that entire fiasco is quite comprehensivly
| summarized at https://phil.tech/2013/wtf-is-t-paamayim-
| nekudotayim/ .
| inimino wrote:
| What a childish rant that blog post is though...
| krageon wrote:
| If you look it up, this token can have two names. It is
| indeed a double colon :)
| mike_hock wrote:
| Seems plausible since afaik the other constants were in
| English, so this seems to be a developer's joke.
| omnicognate wrote:
| Widely known because the token names were surfaced to
| users in error messages, so some common syntax mistakes
| would produce deeply unhelpful "Unexpected
| T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM" errors. Hopefully they eventually
| did something about it, but it was like that for years
| and was one of the many things that put me off PHP for
| life.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > Widely known because the token names were surfaced to
| users in error messages, so some common syntax mistakes
| would produce deeply unhelpful "Unexpected
| T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM" errors. Hopefully they eventually
| did something about it, but it was like that for years
| and was one of the many things that put me off PHP for
| life.
|
| One can like or dislike PHP for a variety of reasons, but
| surely being put off it for life because a non-English
| string is exposed to the end user is a bit much.
| omnicognate wrote:
| As another commenter said it was "one of many things".
| Also, it's not the fact that it was non-English that was
| off-putting. It's more the fact that the T_ identifier
| was used, presumably via a macro.
|
| People are often defensive about PHP, but at the end of
| the day we choose our tools. I wrote a significant amount
| of PHP for a brief period and out of maybe 20 or so
| languages I've used professionally I found it by a wide
| margin the least pleasant to work with. Supposedly it has
| improved a lot, and I'm glad if so. But I have no desire
| to use it again, and am unlikely to ever have a reason
| to.
| chris_wot wrote:
| No, it shows a certain sloppiness around the language.
| This has all been cleaned up and a lot of effort has gone
| into resolving most issues in PHP.
| j0057 wrote:
| "One of the many things", so not the only thing, but a
| thing nonetheless.
| josefx wrote:
| Also the only information available to the developer when
| it was added in PHP 3 in 1997, good luck Googling that
| error. They didn't add the actual token to the error
| message until PHP 5.4 over a decade later.
| cmg wrote:
| Interestingly, "Or. Or. Or. Or. Or." doesn't trigger it.
| hoosieree wrote:
| By DeMorgan's laws, typing this in a Google Doc causes
| OneNote to crash.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| By DeMorgan's Law and Bill and Ted's Excellent Low
| Precedence Right Associative Postfix Sarcastic Not, "Or.
| Or. Or. Or. Or. Not!" crashes.
| chris_wot wrote:
| I love this comment and I live Bill and Ted's Excellent
| Adventure so I transitively love you.
| greggsy wrote:
| Presumably people will start running having all sorts of fun
| fuzzing Google Docs now that they know that it's not an
| infallible, opaque product...
|
| Any web app pentesters here willing throw in their 2c? Could
| this offer insights into the way data is parsed in the backend,
| or might result in something more interesting than a crash?
| [deleted]
| dr-detroit wrote:
| the_snooze wrote:
| Parsing arbitrary user-provided input? What could possibly go
| wrong?
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Ah. So not something with the text data model.
| a-dub wrote:
| does it talk to a grammar check api endpoint or is it done
| locally?
|
| would be funny if it were a remotely exploitable bug in an api
| endpoint.
| r0snd0 wrote:
| Remotely exploitable bug causing grammar check api to fail to
| perform grammar checks? Doesn't sound too exciting.
| a-dub wrote:
| > Remotely exploitable bug causing grammar check api to fail
| to perform grammar checks? Doesn't sound too exciting.
|
| famous last words. finding security relevant bugs is often a
| game of identifying what the original developers might have
| found to be not "too exciting" or places they were out of
| their depth and then focusing intense effort on finding their
| mistakes.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| Probably just getting triggering excessive backtracking on some
| regex.
| ikiris wrote:
| You just triggered probably 50 sres involved in this bug.
| KMag wrote:
| Ironic, from the authors of RE2. They know the correct way to
| implement regexes.
|
| Though, when I worked on Google's indexing system, some
| researchers were having machine learning generate regexes to
| run on every page in the visible web... and mis-implemented
| the feature to re-compile the regex to DFA (which re2
| effectively lazily converts to NFA via memoization) for every
| single page load. The speed of the indexing system dropped in
| half one day, and <Edit: Name Witheld> dug into it. <Name
| Withheld> took the gperf graph showing the giant node for
| regex compilation and wrote a savage meme "Your mother
| doesn't work here. Optimize your own code.", and sent it out
| to the researchers in question and also the indexing team.
| Maybe 6 months earlier, I cut into the same researchers for
| writing and approving C++ header file changes that defined
| (and leaked) macros "DO" for "{" and "OD" for "}" so that
| they could write C++ a bit more like Bash. As I remember, the
| macro leak for DO caused compilation errors in SpiderMonkey,
| which I fixed. After fixing the breakage, I just left an
| extra comment on the code review "Really? Leaking DO and OD
| macros to avoid typing curly braces?" without emailing any
| lists. They were really embarrassed removed DO and OD within
| a couple of days, and <Name Withheld> didn't know that I had
| laid into them a bit 6 months earlier.
|
| (I had implemented some very coarse-grained super-lightweight
| type-based data flow analysis into SpiderMonkey, which is why
| some of the Google headers were being included while
| compiling SpiderMonkey.)
| dllthomas wrote:
| > "DO" for "{" and "OD" for "}" so that they could write
| C++ a bit more like Bash.
|
| Bash (like Bourne shell before it) uses do/done. I think
| DO/OD was in an Algol (68?). I'm not sure where else?
|
| Bash does do the reversing for if/fi and case/esac, though.
| fanf2 wrote:
| Steve Bourne wanted to use `od` to match Algol 68, but
| there was already an `od` utility for printing octal
| dumps.
|
| The original bournegol macros for DO and OD were a bit
| different: #define DO ){ #define OD
| ;}
|
| https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-
| bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/sh...
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| > Ironic, from the authors of RE2. They know the correct
| way to implement regexes.
|
| > Probably...
|
| Conclusions.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| Re2 is also slower, so they might not be using it for high
| volume stuff.
|
| Also I've heard that Google automatically fails people who
| use regex in interviews, so their average engineers
| probably aren't the best at it.
| KMag wrote:
| > Also I've heard that Google automatically fails people
| who use regex in interviews,
|
| Hmm... I don't remember that, and I conducted over 100
| interviews back when I was at Google. A blanket failure
| for using a regex sounds like it's missing some nuance.
| But, maybe that was before or after my time.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if they start out with some
| interview questions that are easy to implement as
| regexes, but then gradually make the question harder and
| more general, where a pushdown automaton is necessary for
| a general correct solution, and fail people who either
| don't get a correct answer or end up implementing a
| pushdown automaton by dynamically generating larger and
| larger regexes.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| I think it's more that you need to give the O(n) of your
| answer, which is generally very difficult to do with
| regex. And even if it's possible, it might not be an
| acceptable O(n).
|
| In general regexes finish instantly for normal sized
| inputs, but the actual O(n) might be quadratic or
| whatever.
| haliskerbas wrote:
| Some people might get off on that kind of culture. But this
| story makes me glad I don't work there for some reason.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Conversely I would prefer to work in a place like that.
| Professionalism at scale isn't achievable by tolerating
| idiotic behaviour and being nice to everyone no matter
| how dangerously stupid they are being.
|
| There is a point where _someone_ has to put their foot
| down and demand things be done properly, otherwise the
| inevitable consequence is a giant mess leading to
| disaster.
|
| You might be used to small startup teams with
| responsible, experienced developers.
|
| Out there in larger industry you get people doing
| absolutely crazy things that break huge, expensive
| systems.
|
| There's a difference between "oops I didn't realise this
| library doesn't scale the way I assumed it did" and
| "rewriting language symbols because I'm too stupid to use
| more than one syntax forever and ever."
|
| _The standard you walk past is the standard you accept._
|
| Are you saying you would walk past C code with DO...OD
| instead of {...}?
|
| Would you accept that standard just to be "nice" all the
| time?
| rawoke083600 wrote:
| >things be done properly
|
| Now if only we could all agree how that looks _exactly_
| runlevel1 wrote:
| There was a time when I would have agreed with that.
|
| What I've learned since then is that, with a healthy
| company culture, you can give frank feedback -- even
| about stupid mistakes -- without it being a rebuke.
|
| It's also important that you target the right problem.
| It's only human for smart people do stupid things
| sometimes. In the specific DO...OD example, I'd be more
| interested in how it got through a code review than the
| mistake itself. (Funny enough, early versions of the C
| source for Bash itself had macros like that.)
|
| Now, if someone exhibits a _pattern_ of ignoring good,
| constructive feedback, that 's a problem. The folks I've
| seen like that both gave terrible feedback and took
| feedback terribly. That's a behavioral problem, and you
| only get so many chances to correct that before it's time
| for them to find other employment.
| jseban wrote:
| > There is a point where someone has to put their foot
| down and demand things be done properly, otherwise the
| inevitable consequence is a giant mess leading to
| disaster.
|
| This is what management is for, too bad tech companies
| are too cool for that and prefer to live out lord of the
| flies.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| I'd rather have software engineers make the decisions
| about software engineering than insist managers do that
| job.
| jseban wrote:
| What if the manager is a software engineer?
|
| I would just like to know exactly how are the engineers
| going to make the decisions, and the key point here being
| that they are in plural.
|
| They all have different opinions, preferences, levels of
| ambition etc, how does this spontaneously merge into a
| cohesive team that pulls into the same direction?
|
| It doesn't, in any other type of group in all of society.
| Every group needs a leader, so how is this spontaneously
| going to "just work" in software engineering?
|
| If you don't want to have a manager, you have to have
| something else. Democracy? Plutocracy? Gerontocracy?
|
| I think it's pretty obvious that just leaving it to
| chance is not going to be efficient or any type of
| healthy environment, and will probably quickly start to
| resemble something pretty nasty, especially because their
| livelihood is on the line.
| a-dub wrote:
| having spent time on both sides of the fence, i've
| noticed that there can be a rivalry of sorts between
| software engineers and ml/ds/researcher types.
|
| researcher types often get to work on problems that swe
| types find interesting, so some swes get grumbly.
| researcher types also tend to write pretty horrific code
| which adds salt to the wounds.
|
| but there also can be a sort of envy that emanates from
| the research side. many are fully aware of their
| shortcomings and are envious of the swes ability to get
| things done on computers cleanly.
|
| it often seems that there can be yearning to wear each
| other's hats from the two groups. if i were running a
| company i think i'd try to break down that wall as it
| would probably make a lot of people happier.
|
| of course, the right answer here isn't a meme... it's
| performance regression tests in the ci suite. and maybe a
| little training on why customizing a programming language
| with macros is bad.
| KMag wrote:
| > maybe a little training on why customizing a
| programming language with macros is bad
|
| Both the author and the reviewer had passed C++ style
| certification. They knew why it was bad. They just got a
| little lazy and wanted to write their code in a way that
| felt familiar to them, and figured it was harmless. I got
| a bit grumpy at having to drop what I was doing right
| away to fix their mistake due to their laziness.
| a-dub wrote:
| also, just to be clear. the macro only included open and
| close curlies?
|
| if so that's silly, as it is literally 2x the work to
| type.
|
| if they also included some sort of state that had to be
| managed, then it starts to verge towards reasonable.
| KMag wrote:
| I think that maybe the author felt like finding the end
| of a loop stood out much better that way, instead of
| trying to distinguish the ends of conditional blocks from
| the ends of loops. If you're used to poorly formatted
| code in an ML PhD program, it does make some sense. I've
| worked with a bit of academic Fortran code for my
| mechanical engineering degree and can sympathize. Also, D
| and O are shorter reaches on the keyboard than { and }.
|
| Yes, "OD" was definitely just "}". DO might have been ")
| {" to allow while (a < b DO ...
| OD
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| That's _hideous_. The unbalanced parenthesis just grates.
|
| The real answer is to just do something like
| } // while
|
| to show that it's the end of the loop rather than the end
| of an if, and not play ridiculous games trying to hide
| the curly braces.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| It would be sorta reasonable in a header that only your
| code uses and is unlikely to be transitively included
| from elsewhere.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| You'd be surprised where your code ends up getting used
| in a monorepo when you have thousands of software
| engineers all working on it.
| a-dub wrote:
| that's the downside. nobody owns anything, dependencies
| and deployments become opaque.
|
| i once had a team lead in a quasi monorepo situation tell
| me straight up to copy-paste some functions i was
| interested in from their code. they made up some fishy
| story about deployments. was the story true? did they
| even know? did anyone know? who even owned it? would they
| even know?
|
| or the guy who got up in arms because i touched his
| team's code and didn't write the unit tests that they
| didn't write when they originally wrote the code.
|
| oh, monorepos.
| [deleted]
| Icathian wrote:
| It's funny you should say that, I definitely was the DS
| who wanted to be an SWE. I switched hats and am just
| thrilled, but I do run into a lot of my new peers who
| wish to go the other direction.
|
| Finding some perfect compromise for those groups would
| probably be a superpower for whichever org pulled it off,
| I agree.
| [deleted]
| jseban wrote:
| This is STEM culture in general, the closer you get to
| the "pure sciences" the more nasty and harsh the
| environment is, and vice versa.
|
| When you go far away from the humanities, you lose some
| humanity.
| KMag wrote:
| There's a good deal of responsibility in writing code
| that is going to run over every single page (and PDF
| document, MS Word doc, the higher ranked Flash
| animations, etc.) in the visible web.
|
| For my part, I once made a bad assumption about how the
| Google SAX-style parser handled callbacks for zero-length
| XHTML start-stop tags. I presumed that <title/> would get
| a callback with the end-of-open-tag and start-of-close-
| tag pointers being equal, at the character after the
| close of the tag. Instead, the parser called the callback
| with the start-of-close-tag pointer after the start-of-
| close-tag pointer. (I had misinterpreted the API as
| passing pointers to the start and end of enclosed
| content.) I had test cases for un-closed <title> tags and
| <title></title>... but when my code hit production, the
| few pages (fewer than 1 in a million) that expressed an
| empty title as <title/> caused my code to try and
| construct a string with negative length and crashed that
| portion of the indexing system. I was right to feel very
| embarrassed for my oversight.
|
| I remember the savage meme so clearly because it was
| quite out of the norm, and I felt bad for the guys since
| they were so quick to fix things even when not publicly
| shamed. (Only the author and reviewer got notified when I
| left a comment on their code review.)
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| Really?
|
| Is there any science showing rude reviews improve some
| metric or some greater good?
| KMag wrote:
| It wasn't the best way to criticize the code review. If I
| could go back in time 15 years, it's also not the first
| mistake I would fix. It stuck in my mind because I felt
| bad about it. I was frustrated that I had been hounded to
| drop what I was doing and fix the build because of clear
| style guide violations that a reviewer let slip. (A
| couple years later, Google implemented every commit
| getting a full compilation and run of all tests that
| code-coverage showed affected the covered code. These
| days, I wouldn't have been hounded to fix a build break
| caused by someone else.)
| jolux wrote:
| What does it mean that you were right to feel
| embarrassed? You were wrong to make the mistake, sure,
| but that happens. That's what a mistake is. It's not
| clear to me what shame helps in this instance. If
| somebody has a pattern of not meeting a quality bar with
| their code that's one thing, but otherwise cutting people
| up for mistakes really seems like bad culture. Aren't you
| supposed to practice blameless postmortems and all that
| at Google?
| mannykannot wrote:
| This may all be a matter of different nuances on words
| like "embarrassment" and "shame", but personally, I would
| put higher trust in someone who firstly recognizes that
| they could have done better and secondly regrets that
| they did not, and I would prefer to be that way myself,
| without being rendered ineffective by it.
|
| One can never, however, be sure that someone really feels
| that way ("The secret to success is sincerity - once you
| can fake that, you've got it made!") Nevertheless, faking
| it involves never saying certain things, and that turns
| out to be hard, so the fallible approach that I aspire to
| is to assume sincerity unless given evidence to the
| contrary.
|
| In this view, blameless postmortems are the right way to
| go, at least up to a point: neither embarrassment nor
| regret are things that can truly be imposed from outside,
| and definitely not sincerity.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| My recollection from my time there, as well as one of the
| biggest cultural differences noticeable between my and my
| workplaces since, is that big chunks of the company
| really do believe in the blameless postmortem ideal.
|
| But culture isn't a magic tool that completely
| neutralizes assholes, and there are assholes in _every_
| organization of sufficient size, like the "[name
| redacted]" character in the previous post
| dang wrote:
| (I've redacted the person's name from the parent comment
| and other comments in this thread. I realize you didn't
| introduce it originally. Probably best not to leave up
| though, and it isn't necessary for any of the substantive
| points here.)
| jseban wrote:
| It's also ironic that the original engineering culture at
| google was explicitly breaking away from this type of
| pennalistic shaming culture, and was seen as a big factor
| in the initial success.
| KMag wrote:
| I probably should have left [redacted]'s name out of it.
| He's a nice guy, but a bit cynical and rough on the
| edges, at least he was 15 years ago. He fit in well in
| New York, brutally honest, but actually generally nice.
|
| Edit: I should point out that we were in Google NYC, as
| were the researchers. We had lunch with them some times.
| I remember the first name and face of the guy who
| submitted the slow code, but forget his family name and
| intentionally left his name out.
|
| New Yorker to New Yorker adds a lot of context. Google's
| corporate culture is generally very Californian, but this
| happened all within the New York office between people
| who generally got along pretty well and knew each other
| decently.
|
| In context, there was a heavy note of respect for
| someone's abilities and disappointment that they weren't
| performing at a top level. He wouldn't have been so harsh
| with someone who was new or was a weaker engineer, or
| someone who wasn't used to New York culture.
| the-rc wrote:
| Yeah, that might have made it sound as if he's always
| like that. To his credit, he was one of those that had to
| be involved when things got desperate, e.g. the insane
| and massive data recovery to prevent the index from
| growing stale during a PCR that wasn't properly planned
| for (if you were around, you know what I'm talking
| about).
| KMag wrote:
| Yea, nice guy and solid engineer. He was actually my TA
| for a systems engineering class back in school. He was
| actually very helpful in solving other people's problems,
| but a bit blunt in encouraging people to reach their full
| potential.
| jseban wrote:
| "What happens in New York stays in New York"? What kind
| of bullshit is this
| wutbrodo wrote:
| > New Yorker to New Yorker adds a lot of context.
| Google's corporate culture is generally very Californian
|
| As a lifelong Californian who moved to NY, this makes
| sense.
|
| Though I don't know if it's a blanket excuse... There's a
| reason that my friends at Goldman would agree that
| Google's culture is better, and a lot of it has to do
| with the difference between CA and NY culture. I
| completely dismiss the claims that the difference is just
| about surface-level abrasiveness, instead of noticeable
| differences in how unkindly people treat each other. I
| regularly see strangers here treat each other in ways
| that I didn't see in 30+ years in California.
|
| Ie, "he's from New York" isn't quite a rebuttal to "he's
| being an asshole at work". The work culture is more
| tolerant of assholes, but that barely makes it better.
| KMag wrote:
| I grew up in the upper Midwest, went to school outside
| Boston, and spent most of my adult life in New York and
| Hong Kong. I haven't spent much time in California, so
| maybe I'm placing too many of the cultural problems I saw
| at Google at the foot of Californian culture. I saw lots
| of pressure to "be Googly", which seemed to result in a
| lot of passive-aggression. That matches the stereotypes
| I've heard of LA and SF cultures.
|
| New York and Hong Kong are both very impatient places
| that don't suffer fools lightly. They're both brutally
| honest places, but with strong shared identities. Both
| places have lots of people from elsewhere who are
| sympathetic to being new to the city.
|
| The quintessential New York story is the woman pushing a
| stroller (buggy, for my overseas friends) out of a subway
| car. A man in a hurry is passing her, looks over his
| shoulder, they make eye contact and silently agree he
| should help. He grabs the front of the stroller, they
| carry it up the stairs, and he sets the stroller down at
| the top of the stairs. They give each other a nod, and he
| runs off. Never a word is spoken. On the other hand, if
| you stop in the middle of the sidewalk to read a map or
| talk on the phone in New York, don't be surprised if
| people bump into you, perhaps on purpose.
|
| I just left Goldman after more than a decade. I actually
| really preferred the corporate culture to the Google
| culture, but most of my time was in Hong Kong. I even
| knew a couple of people who worked at Goldman, went to
| Google, and came back to Goldman. I don't doubt that
| there are some assholes there, particularly in trading,
| but my experience in both Strats and Technology was
| overwhelmingly positive. In my experience, abusive MDs
| didn't last long, but maybe I was very lucky. If you're
| having a tough time, I don't want to give out full names,
| but some pretty unique names: Laurent, Jia, Dunstan, and
| C.K. all really seem to care for their folks. The heads
| of SRE, One Delta Strats, and Flow Strats in Hong Kong
| also seem to be really great managers, but Grahaeme,
| Nick, and Alain are pretty common names.
|
| At Google, a friend of mine managed a couple of small
| teams (on a shoestring budget, using mostly interns) and
| completed a couple of projects ahead of time, only to get
| them cancelled by middle management right before launch.
| One of the projects even had heavy buy-in from upper
| management, but he got essentially zero credit for either
| one because they were cancelled before launching. It was
| incredibly frustrating for him and he left. In my
| experience, Goldman runs projects much better,
| particularly using "Projito" internal contracts that list
| the value proposition, deliverables, timetable, and whose
| budget is paying for it.
|
| Also, despite Goldman's reputation, I saw a lot less
| arrogance at Goldman than at Google. Goldman has a much
| more healthy respect for its competitors, though with
| good reason. I've also seen a few people transition from
| Google to Goldman and take a bit of time to adjust to the
| idea that Google's way of doing things is best in
| Goldman's operating environment. At Google, I got the
| sense that lots of people thought that Google was better
| than its competitors because they were smarter. At
| Goldman, I got the sense that lots of people felt they
| were better than their competitors because they had
| higher expectations of themselves.
| jseban wrote:
| Why am I not surprised that you are actually not a New
| Yorker, always the transplants that project their most
| negative sides onto the city culture as an excuse
| KMag wrote:
| There wasn't a post-mortem in my case.
|
| I had thought of the case for <title/> but basically out
| of laziness talked myself out of writing a separate test
| case for it, presuming the test cases for a zero-length
| title and an un-closed title covered the corner cases.
| (The entire document was guaranteed to be converted to
| valid UTF-8, perhaps with invalid character substitution
| characters, by that late in the Content Converter
| pipeline.)
|
| So, as soon as someone asked me if I had changed the
| title parsing code, I was 50% sure of which corner case I
| had screwed up before looking at any code. It took me
| about 30 minutes to submit a code fix with updated test
| cases. I think less than 1 billion documents had been
| processed, resulting in less than 1,000 pages missing
| updates due to my bug.
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| I don't think laziness (in this comment or the ones about
| the bash-like C macros) is the right word.
|
| I guess there is some
| pressure/tiredness/newness/taste/external factors driving
| the choices, test count, and style guide aberrations.
| KMag wrote:
| Yes, "laziness" is unfair and imprecise, a laziness on my
| part. :(
|
| I think it was an issue of familiarity and comfort, not
| newness. The author joined Google before I did. If you're
| basically working with one other person, and you're
| rarely getting code reviews from outside your coding
| pair, and few other people interact with your code, it's
| easy to develop some bad habits and forget that your code
| choices have externalities. To be fair, the externalities
| were usually rather small.
| andi999 wrote:
| Probably typing on a non english keyboard. When I learned
| C a long time ago, I read somewhere 'isnt it nice that
| one doesnt need a lot of keystrokes like for begin and
| end', and I thought pls give me begin and end instead of
| this unpleasent slow hand movement.
| atq2119 wrote:
| Spot on. It's the reason many non-native speaker
| developers I know nevertheless use an English keyboard
| layout. I personally made my own hybrid layout that is
| basically an English US layout with the letters
| rearranged according to my native layout.
| KMag wrote:
| The author was born and raised in Brooklyn and went to
| Cornell, if I remember correctly. As far as I know,
| English was his only language, and he was almost
| certainly using either US QWERTY or Dvorak keyboard
| layout.
| danuker wrote:
| Parent comment is onto something. You sound traumatized.
| KMag wrote:
| I was a couple years out of school, and felt a lot of
| responsibility. It wasn't really a big deal, but it
| didn't feel like it at the time.
| quakeguy wrote:
| What a great story nevertheless.
| KMag wrote:
| It helped me empathize with young engineers dealing with
| their first high responsibility bug.
|
| About 4 years ago, I was managing a guy right out of
| school who pushed a minor bug that broke real-time risk
| calculations for a major multinational financial
| institution in the middle of the European trading day,
| prior to the NYC open, and people were yelling over email
| that they were trading blind. Someone had committed an
| important change right after his, so a simple rollback
| was highly sub-optimal.
|
| Remembering how I felt years ago, I reassured the new guy
| that people were yelling over email because it was
| important, not because they were mad at him. I told him
| that I thought he was the most familiar with his change
| and the most capable person to fix it, and that he should
| do his best to calm down and focus, but he should let me
| know if he needed help, and I would do my best to calm
| folks down. I told him he would probably remember that
| mistake the rest of his life, but nobody else was going
| to remember it a week later. He had the bug fix in
| production in under an hour.
|
| He sent me an email from home that night worried that he
| had let the team down, and I reiterated that he was going
| to be the only one who remembered the mistake longer than
| a week. The post-mortem follow-up was just to reiterate
| to authors and reviewers the importance of corner-case
| tests, and nobody brought it up later.
|
| I really only remember it because my manager sent me an
| email that night praising how well I handled the new
| guy's first big production bug.
| mattclarkdotnet wrote:
| "I reassured the new guy that people were yelling over
| email because it was important, not because they were mad
| at him"
|
| This is outstanding advice, and very well put. I shall be
| borrowing it, thank you!
| jseban wrote:
| It's your fault, you were the manager, the yelling should
| not even have leaked to the developer, it should have
| stopped with you.
|
| Edit: if you are managing someone who is new in a job,
| it's your job to make sure they don't push bugs to break
| important stuff in the first place.
| KMag wrote:
| The "yelling" was coming to the team email list, asking
| for ETAs and progress updates for when real-time risk
| would be back up. Roughly 4 people at the time knew the
| bug could be traced to the new guy's commit, and none of
| those people were doing the "yelling". And it was
| Goldman, so the "yelling" was kept very professional (no
| swearing, strictly enforced). But, there were literally
| tens of billions of dollars that needed to be dynamically
| hedged, but that wasn't possible without real-time risk,
| the European markets were open, and markets in the
| Americas were going to be open within a couple of hours.
| Trading and management were making sure that that
| everyone on the team email list understood that this was
| drop-everything important, perhaps using all caps.
|
| Yes, I and the person who reviewed the change bear more
| responsibility than the new developer. Also, I say "new
| guy", but the person who had interned with us the Summer
| after "the new guy" had already joined full time at that
| point, so "the new guy" had been working full time with
| the team for at least 9 months at that point. I also
| remember the room where it happened, which wasn't the
| first room we were in, so maybe he had been with us full
| time more like 18 months. In any case, it was the first
| time when he was trying keep the weight of billions of
| dollars out of his head and calmly but quickly fix a bug.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| Did you consider the fact that you probably know nothing
| about the dynamics of their workplace, the structure of
| their management/leadership, etc. before assigning blame?
| webmaven wrote:
| _> It 's your fault, you were the manager, the yelling
| should not even have leaked to the developer, it should
| have stopped with you._
|
| That's impractical in organizations with flatter
| structures and general purpose communication channels.
|
| What would you suggest, kicking everyone off of internal
| IRC/Slack/mailing lists/etc.?
| stavros wrote:
| I don't think we can assign blame in a complicated
| situation based on a two-paragraph retelling, please have
| a bit more empathy.
| bobbieie wrote:
| I have to say you tell good stories about how wonderful
| you are.
| KMag wrote:
| That's a fair criticism. Deep down, I usually have a
| pretty high opinion of my abilities. I think I'm pretty
| good at hiding it in person, but I'm less good at hiding
| it in my writing. I feel happiest and most excited to
| write when I'm thinking about some of my happiest
| memories. I try to also be open about the mistakes I've
| made. I've generally been much more lucky than skilled.
|
| I've definitely written more than one bug where post-
| mortem estimates were over $10,000 in losses.
|
| August 20, 2013, I finished a code change (in Hong Kong)
| to Goldman's global algorithmic trading system and sent
| it out to a colleague in Europe to review. A friend of
| mine was a machine learning person in our Tokyo office
| and was in town for work, so a bunch of us had dinner and
| a small number of drinks. I stopped by the office on my
| way home to check if the change had been approved. It
| had, and I hesitated a bit to put it in production,
| because I had a couple of drinks and it was late at
| night. However, rationalized that I had written all of
| the code while awake and without a drop of alcohol, and
| pushed the change into production.
|
| I woke up the next morning to read news [1] that Goldman
| had lost up to 100 million dollars in an automated
| trading problem within 1-2 hours after I pushed my
| change. I couldn't see how my change could possibly have
| caused that error, but was still a bit panicked until I
| reassured myself that my cell phone would have been
| called once a minute until I woke up if I had made a
| change that caused a loss of that magnitude.
|
| I went into the office and saw that a chat window I had
| open with a friend in the NY office showed "presence
| unknown". An email sent to them bounced. So, I walked
| over to the derivatives (Flow) Strats desk, sat down in
| an empty chair next to one of my friends, and just
| quietly said "... so " and the name of my friend in NY.
| My friend on the Flow desk's eyes got wide and he said
| "how did you know?". I actually didn't know until the
| Flow Strat's reaction confirmed my guess.
|
| My friend in New York was actually very careful, but he
| had been working under time pressure late at night and
| pushed a bug into production. He'd been more responsible
| than I had the night before. I got really lucky, and he
| got really unlucky. He's actually a really solid
| engineer. He caught plenty of very subtle bugs in other
| people's code, at least once when he hadn't been asked to
| review the code.
|
| After August 20, 2013, if at all possible, I push changes
| into production before noon, and not on Fridays.
|
| If memory serves the "maybe $100 million" ended up being
| around $28 million.
|
| And that's the time that I could have easily caused a $28
| million loss.
|
| There was also a time I misplaced a paren and had a bad
| actor noticed, they could have used 60 million customer
| computers in a DDoS UDP traffic amplification attack. My
| test cases weren't matching my hand-worked-out examples,
| but I eventually just gave up and assumed my code was
| correct and put incorrect values in the message
| authentication code test vectors. Never roll your own
| crypto, especially if your test vectors aren't coming out
| as you expect. That was 2004.
|
| [1] https://www.cnbc.com/id/100976404
| koide wrote:
| For someone who sort of justified a humiliating response
| to a mistake a few comments above, this seems really well
| done! Congratulations.
| vl wrote:
| But why it even happened?
|
| Typically you run Flume over docjoins in your project's
| quota. If you screw up, all that should happen is that your
| Flume job is out of quota.
| KMag wrote:
| This was in the Borg days, pre-Flume. As I remember, we
| had at least one Borg cluster to ourselves for indexing.
| Our quota was a cluster.
|
| We cared because indexing latency is important. Engineers
| get paged and woken up in the middle of the night when
| indexing latency gets high. Doubling CPU usage meant
| doubling indexing latency. The pre-Percolator indexing
| system ran roughly 1,000 threads per box on roughly 1,000
| Warp18 boxes. Of course, most of those threads were
| blocked on I/O. (Warp18 was something like 16 cores per
| box... I think those were the RevE Opterons that had the
| memory fence bug that caused the glibc semaphore
| implementation to not actually synchronize operations.) I
| personally would have written things using more async
| and/or non-blocking I/O, but the main reasoning in Google
| at the time was that massively multithreaded blocking I/O
| is a simpler programming model and closer to what was
| being taught in school those days.
|
| Also, the indexing system's quota is huge. Someone made a
| mistake in their benchmark program that they thought got
| maximum utilization out of the Warp18 hardware. The
| indexing system actually got higher utilization than the
| hardware stress-test, resulting in cooling being under-
| provisioned in the Atlanta datacener (more than a decade
| ago, I'm sure indexing has moved now). There was a couple
| day stretch one hot Summer where we needed to stay on the
| phone with staff inside the Atlanta DC to keep track of
| the temperature inside the datacenter. When the
| temperatures started to get above something like 80 F, we
| needed to dial back on the number of workers in our Borg
| jobs.
|
| While testing the prototype for the Percolator indexing
| system, we were luckily sitting right next to an engineer
| who planned datacenters. We luckily overheard him saying
| he couldn't figure out why the power usage seemed to be
| swinging so wildly. It was literally the power usage of a
| decent sized town suddenly ramping up and down. We asked
| him the exact times power usage was ramping up and down,
| and figured out it was when Frank and Daniel were
| starting and stopping the Percolator prototype.
|
| My best guess is that the indexing system right before
| Percolator was a bit more energy efficient than
| Percolator, but maybe not. In any case, doubling CPU
| usage was a big deal. Real money, and in Atlanta,
| probably real carbon footprint. (The Dales was hydro, but
| I don't think much of Atlanta's power was renewable at
| that time.)
| caffeine wrote:
| Hey, I just wanted to say that your comments in this
| discussion are awesome and I'm having a lot of fun
| reading them. Thanks!
| exikyut wrote:
| Regarding the Percolator prototype's energy usage, that's
| a really interesting scheduling and coordination problem.
| I'm curious how you solved that - perhaps by teaching
| Borg to correlate CPU load with physical energy usage and
| stagger task initiation.
|
| It _sounds_ like it would be even cooler to coordinate
| with the local electricity suppliers to spin up and shed
| extra load a few minutes in advance, but I 'm not sure if
| this would actually have a practical benefit.
| the-rc wrote:
| > As I remember, we had at least one Borg cluster to
| ourselves for indexing. Our quota was a cluster.
|
| > Also, the indexing system's quota is huge.
|
| Well, it might no longer be the case, but for a number of
| years the indexing cluster was the largest in the entire
| fleet, especially when it came to memory. I don't know if
| you were around in the days of yl-i (I think), but it was
| edifying to rank it against the Top500...
|
| Was the datacenter engineer Peter P?
| tus666 wrote:
| Makes sense. I was thinking something to do with document
| compression but that sounds more likely.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| I see Google has finally implemented the Zombie Strunk & White
| AI like I requested years ago.
|
| I did not expect them to weaponize it, but Skynet does as
| Skynet does.
| lqet wrote:
| Yup, it is also partially underlined in blue and a popup
| suggests to replace "And. And." with "And And" just before it
| crashes.
| srinathkrishna wrote:
| What's pretty annoying is that users are providing free QA for
| Google!
| tmalsburg2 wrote:
| Can't replicate this bug in current Firefox on Ubuntu 21.10.
| They've probably fixed it.
| goody71 wrote:
| Will Pat Needham get any Google Bux for finding this?
| [deleted]
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| I'm surprised Google didn't fuzz Google Docs.
| patneedham wrote:
| Discovered by Eliza Callahan triggered by a poem in the middle of
| her novel. (Friend of a coworker) That poem can be found here:
| https://durationandthebodyelizacallahan.cargo.site/ - if viewing
| on mobile you have to Request Desktop Site for some reason, at
| least on Android it initially shows up as a Lorem Ipsum page
| roughly wrote:
| As arguments for the thesis that the tech world needs to
| embrace the humanities go, an author discovering a bug in a
| google product by writing a poem is pretty good, if maybe a bit
| too on the nose.
| hackernewds wrote:
| Perhaps that is the missing link for why tech is so
| artificial and not humanly. we could use some more art than
| capitalistic efficiency in the Apple logo
| pvillano wrote:
| it appears to be bugs all the way down
| raldi wrote:
| On iPhone Chrome it doesn't show up either way.
| _rf wrote:
| I know you didn't write that poem, but I'm 99% certain the
| apostrophes in "I thought about my body. It's past. It's
| present." have no business being there :)
| burkaman wrote:
| Might be intentional, simultaneously talking about the past
| and present of a body and also literally that it is past. It
| is present. It would not be weird to have that kind of
| wordplay in a poem.
|
| But also this was from an early draft so it could be a
| mistake.
| fluoridation wrote:
| Seems like it could go either way.
| munk-a wrote:
| And thus has Eliza Callahan suddenly found themselves a poet with
| a lot more name recognition among tech workers.
| dang wrote:
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31278734.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| arjvik wrote:
| At the very least, you're forgetting that non-binary
| individuals can have feminine-sounding names.
| munk-a wrote:
| I've found gender to be generally irrelevant to most of my
| social interactions. I'm, personally, in a committed
| relationship and not picky genderwise anyways so, as a habit,
| I've been trying to remove any and all gendered pronouns[1]
| from my speech. I find it pretty silly that gender plays so
| central a role in grammar. It, IMO, elevates it above how we
| should conceive of it - just one of many attributes a person
| has and a not particularly central one at that.
|
| I'm sorry if this habit of mine caused you offense but it's a
| pretty silly thing to get annoyed by.
|
| 1. Edited - originally just pronouns (not gendered pronouns).
| JasonFruit wrote:
| munk-a wrote:
| "Themselves" is, at least as far as I learned english, a
| proper usage in that context. I adjusted "pronoun" to
| "gendered pronoun" above just in case, in this modern
| world, the meaning wasn't somehow clear. This feels like
| an unnecessary amount of pedantry for a simple comment.
| dataflow wrote:
| "Someone came into this room. I don't know them, but they
| took it upon themselves to take everything."
|
| What would be the correct pronouns here in your view?
| munk-a wrote:
| I'm suddenly very interested in the distinction here - as
| yea themself also works in both of these contexts but
| themselves feels like a very distinct connotation and not
| incorrect. I can't point to a specific grammatical rule
| or learning to base this feeling off though - I don't
| know why it feels correct it just does.
| OJFord wrote:
| Not who you're asking, but I would say 'themself' here. I
| can't see that it's ('themselves' is) not plural.
|
| (Edit: Actually the more I think about that the less I'm
| sure what I'd say..)
| dataflow wrote:
| Unfortunately themself is a spelling error according to
| my browser, and I have to admit it sounds like the most
| jarring option.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| Honestly, while I might _say_ such a sentence, I wouldn
| 't allow myself to _write_ it.
| dataflow wrote:
| I'm curious what the closest sentence you would allow
| yourself to write would be.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| I'd go with, "Someone I don't know came into this room
| and took everything," or even, "Someone came into this
| room. I don't know them, but they took everything." I'm
| not against a neuter pronoun where it's justified, but
| there was no need for "themselves" here, and it was worse
| than several alternatives.
| dataflow wrote:
| Okay, I guess that answers my immediate sub-question, but
| it misses the point about the plurality of the pronouns.
|
| > or even, "Someone came into this room. I don't know
| them, but they took everything."
|
| "Them" would still be plural by your earlier logic
| though. Unless you're suggesting that you think
| "themselves" is plural and "themself" would be the
| singular?
| rilezg wrote:
| it's pretty common to use 'they' when gender is unknown
| or irrelevant
| [deleted]
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _" Themselves" is still a pronoun, and a plural one, at
| that._
|
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/themselves,
| see "Can they, their, them, and themselves be used as
| singular pronouns?"
| mgdlbp wrote:
| I've contemplated a sort of 'minimally offensive' register
| of language where you _do_ remove any and all pronouns
| (that is, the ones someone might object to, along with all
| other language that might be objected to) while being as
| natural as possible so that no one notices your _lack_ of
| usage of any bit of language (though someone analysing the
| corpus of your writing certainly would). Seems like a
| technique a corporation seeking to avoid controversy would
| employ, though I suppose by its very nature I wouldn 't
| notice if one were successful in doing so!
|
| I always find it interesting to consider other languages
| when discussing things like this. It's generally easy to
| eliminate arbitrary words from your personal dialect, but
| grammatical gender can't be so simply ignored in most Indo-
| European languages, nor can it be eliminated, the status
| quo of gender agreement (e.g., of adjectives and the nouns
| they modify) being a crucial part of the evolved flow of
| information in each natural language.
|
| However, I still think there's an 'elegant' resolution,
| which is to consider grammatical gender as 'yet another
| noun class system'. You can then, in a language-neutral
| way, move all people (optionally also animals, etc.) to one
| grammatical gender (now we argue over whether the 'one
| gender' should be the existing masculine or feminine--not
| all languages have the neuter!). All other words would
| retain current their grammatical genders (and m/f/n might
| be renamed to something like class 1/2/3). Words for people
| (e.g., man/woman) could also be moved, but _don 't have
| to_, since their noun classes would now be entirely
| orthogonal to people's gender.
|
| This is still too large of a change to convince people to
| actually adopt, but it's certainly more reasonable than the
| drastic alternative and more elegant IMO than the other
| proposals I've seen. Plus, it was never the case that
| grammatical genders could be always be made to agree (take,
| for example, two nouns of differing gender in apposition or
| coreference), and there's already a case like this in the
| German 'Madchen' ("girl"). As a diminutive, it's
| grammatically neuter, so words modifying it also take the
| neuter. Distant anaphors formally also do, but colloquially
| they're often feminine.
| munk-a wrote:
| I think that would probably end up with us in a generally
| better place from a technical perspective than reusing
| the gender neutral pronouns but given how aggressive some
| people have been at misgendering folks I think it'd take
| a rather long time to actually gain adoption.
| Additionally, unlike say German, there isn't really any
| standard board of English and it's an international
| language so getting countries to actually agree to such a
| change seems difficult.
|
| I also, honestly, don't think it'd be significantly more
| difficult to switch each gender over to he or she than to
| use one of the novel pronouns like "ye" or "xhe" though
| pronunciation would take a while to normalize.
|
| Themselves/themself is a bit tricky (as pointed out in a
| sibling thread) but they are tools that exist today and
| are pretty serviceable - I really don't think you could
| put "And thus has Eliza Callahan suddenly found
| themselves a poet with a lot more name recognition among
| tech workers." in front of anyone and get genuine
| confusion about what I was saying back - it's perfectly
| legible, even if some of the grammar might be off.
| bbhunt wrote:
| > _Seems like a technique a corporation seeking to avoid
| controversy would employ_
|
| I expect it would backfire quickly, as people notice
| their attempts at language modification and this rapidly
| becomes controversial in itself.
|
| Sort of similar to the uproar over using purportedly
| gender-neutral language to discuss women's reproductive
| issues, as we've seen recently in discussions on _Roe v.
| Wade_ - women being referred to as "birthing bodies",
| "pregnant people" and suchlike. Which of course many find
| to be offensively dehumanizing or an example of female
| erasure.
| iamyatin wrote:
| 6th May, with the "And. And. .." crash found on Google Docs
| Skynet rose to the surface.
| Ansil849 wrote:
| This reminds me of when Google claimed that the number one was
| copyrighted [1]
|
| [1] https://www.pcmag.com/news/google-drive-flags-text-files-
| con...
|
| I don't recall that the reason for that bug was ever explained. I
| wonder if the reason for this one will be.
| kabes wrote:
| Is this fixed? Can't seem to reproduce this (chrome on ubuntu)
| Patrol8394 wrote:
| Once a customer was able to destroy an old ES cluster because
| they copy pasted some text from a PDF into a search box ... that
| text got sent directly to the ES cluster without much escaping
| ... there were lots of "*" in there.
|
| The query complexity exploded, ES ran out of memory, and the
| index got corrupted and I don't remember why, it could not
| recover.
|
| We had to re-index all the data. Lots of fun.
|
| Lesson learned: prepare for the impossible, keep your
| infrastructure up to date, escape queries :)
| rawoke083600 wrote:
| Yup seen that in a few online "stores" or companies where they
| use SOLR or ES. Putting in ' _' will make boxes _ explode* (ok
| not really).
|
| What is twice is bad as that the worst of these, fail (at least
| to my eye) on two fronts.
|
| 1) Allowing SINGLE character searches. I.e No min query-length.
|
| 2) Not escaping querying - lucene(solr/es) syntax.
|
| You can sometimes see the front-facing "html/js/api" is just a
| thin layer over ES/SOLR.(Which is not bad by itself) it's when
| you don't know the limitations or what sort of queries are x100
| harder to do than orders.
| ffhhj wrote:
| Maybe escaping the character wouldn't help if every * is
| telling the server to process a long loop, but some max range
| or time to perform the task. I can't tell which company, but I
| managed to do exactly that you described a few months ago, with
| a valid query, and it's one of those companies you can guess if
| I tell you the first letter of its name.
| fortran77 wrote:
| It crashes for me in Chrome on windows 11, but not Edge.
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