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Show HN: God mode in production code – a new way to debug in Scala

takipi.com

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Re: Show HN: God mode in production code – a new way to debug in Scala

#41

Post by LinaLauneBaer »

spuz wrote: post #28

This looks simliar to Chronon which is a similar debugging tool that works on Java (though not other JVM languages) applications.

I have used Chronon for several weeks during a very strange project. The project was about integrating a highly complex financial system in our own infrastructure. The challenging part about this financial system was that it was written in a multitude of languages (Java, Perl, C, C++, ...) and that it had to communicate with external services and it had hard timeouts built in which were enforced externally. So if something went wrong and I wanted to find out I had only 20 seconds in the debugger to find out because then the timeouts would kick in and there was nothing I could do about it. With Chronon I was able to step through the code after it had already run with no time constraints. Saved me weeks...

Chronon is also useful to find all thrown exceptions - even the ones who are catched properly.

I am not an employee of Chronon Systems and I only used their tool once but it helped a lot.

Re: Show HN: God mode in production code – a new way to debug in Scala

#42

Post by baboo »

sillysaurus wrote: post #34
nivstein wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moment you sign-up for Takipi a secret AES-256 key is generated for you (and never stored by Takipi in any way or form, and you manually enter it on your machine when installing the agent). This key is used to encrypt every piece of application data which leaves the machine. The source code is also encrypted similarly. The source code and the data are only decrypted in your browser when viewing the details of the…

This makes no sense whatsoever. Their application is doing the encrypting. That means their application can do whatever it wants, including making it trivially easy to reverse the encryption. I get that the intentions are good, but https would provide exactly the same trust guarantees, and ultimately it bothers me that they would try to mislead people into a false sense of security like this. If their application is…

They are probably either lying or incompetent.

If they really had no access, then their server cannot do any "analysis" beyond storing it, and the app could as well just store it locally, or with Amazon S3 or whatever storage system the website already uses.

Obviously not everything is encrypted, or otherwise they don't realize that there is no reason for them to provide a simple storage service, considering most websites already have some way to store data.

Or maybe they want to hold the data hostage.

Re: Show HN: God mode in production code – a new way to debug in Scala

#44

Post by sillysaurus »

baboo wrote: post #42
sillysaurus wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes no sense whatsoever. Their application is doing the encrypting. That means their application can do whatever it wants, including making it trivially easy to reverse the encryption. I get that the intentions are good, but https would provide exactly the same trust guarantees, and ultimately it bothers me that they would try to mislead people into a false sense of security like this. If their application is…

They are probably either lying or incompetent. If they really had no access, then their server cannot do any "analysis" beyond storing it, and the app could as well just store it locally, or with Amazon S3 or whatever storage system the website already uses. Obviously not everything is encrypted, or otherwise they don't realize that there is no reason for them to provide a simple storage service, considering most web…

No, there's no reason to go looking for conspiracies. Nor do I think their intent was malicious. I think they genuinely believed that this was beneficial. We should support them if they change their presentation from "we can't access your data" to "we're not evil, so if you trust that, then use us." We should let their actions speak for themselves.

Re: Show HN: God mode in production code – a new way to debug in Scala

#45

Post by j_s »

kstenson wrote: post #33
mpeg wrote: post #7

I'd give my firstborn for a debugger/profiler like this in .NET

Closest I know of is IntelliTrace: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/vstudio/dd264915.asp...

Which requires Visual Studio Ultimate, listed at $13300/seat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_Studio#Editio...

http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/productI...

Re: Show HN: God mode in production code – a new way to debug in Scala

#46

Post by mseebach »

shpxnvz wrote: post #14
nivstein wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The product consists of a slim JVM agent which connects and offloads the heavy crunching to Takipi's backend.

Given the nature of JVM agents, this means that the Tikipi backend, should it choose, may access all the data in the production application. Correct? ETA - Thanks, missed that page on the site.

For tons of applications this falls somewhere in the range "impossible" -> "totally unacceptable" -> "very worrisome, requires extensive debate before signoff"

Re: Show HN: God mode in production code – a new way to debug in Scala

#47

Post by [deleted] »

shpxnvz wrote: post #14
nivstein wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The product consists of a slim JVM agent which connects and offloads the heavy crunching to Takipi's backend.

Given the nature of JVM agents, this means that the Tikipi backend, should it choose, may access all the data in the production application. Correct? ETA - Thanks, missed that page on the site.

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: God mode in production code – a new way to debug in Scala

#48

Post by timdorr »

elvinj wrote: post #4

I know that at least from my experience debugging our apps in production did become harder as we scaled out in terms of servers, users and code. I do wonder if its something that should be handled at the code level (by being more defensive, taking a more immutable approach) or by having better debugging tools. Anyone knows if this supports Ruby?

Passenger Enterprise supports a live irb and debugger: https://www.phusionpassenger.com/enterprise#debugger_support

Re: Show HN: God mode in production code – a new way to debug in Scala

#49

Post by baboo »

j_s wrote: post #45
kstenson wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Closest I know of is IntelliTrace: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/vstudio/dd264915.asp...

Which requires Visual Studio Ultimate, listed at $13300/seat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_Studio#Editio... http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/productI...

http://tpb.piraten.lu/torrent/7963590/MICROSOFT_VISUAL_STUDI...

Re: Show HN: God mode in production code – a new way to debug in Scala

#50

Post by taeric »

wereHamster wrote: post #6
elvinj wrote: post #4

I know that at least from my experience debugging our apps in production did become harder as we scaled out in terms of servers, users and code. I do wonder if its something that should be handled at the code level (by being more defensive, taking a more immutable approach) or by having better debugging tools. Anyone knows if this supports Ruby?

Or by using a better type system. Or by using the type system that's available in the language. Because it's all too easy to ignore the types and for example call `get` on a Scala Option value, or `fromJust` on a Haskell Maybe. Both will throw an exception at runtime if the Option/Maybe is empty.

Of course, the retort there is as much "write simpler programs" as it is "use the type system." I've seen and been a part of many a tangled knot in a type system that, while ostensibly safe, was so much more involved to do the simple things that I think it caused more bugs.
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