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Where have I been these past few years?

rachelbythebay.com

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Re: Where have I been these past few years?

#51

Post by throwanem »

microcolonel wrote: post #40
rachelbythebay wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I don't need it to make my point.

Though on the other hand, hair on fire is just as likely to have happened in a warzone. How will you run away from all the analogies which make random strangers on the internet queasy? Perhaps somebody doesn't like hcf opcodes because they remind them of when their house burned down. Is the concept of running into a blaze owned solely by firefighters? Do soldiers own the concept of battle?

I mean, I inadvertently set my hair on fire at a party one time. (It was a good party.) Despite not having actually run around that way, I'd be ready to argue that it's not as specific or uncomfortable a metaphor as that of jumping on a grenade.

Re: Where have I been these past few years?

#52

Post by codinghorror »

rachelbythebay wrote: post #47
erikpukinskis wrote: post #34

Always sad to be reminded how many good people get their careers swallowed up by a corporation. The public sphere suffers. I have a lot of anger towards Google in particular, who seems to relish in having private resources, secrets, learning and technology that only the annointed may access. I should probably talk to my therapist about that.

Honest question: how else do you pay the bills?

Work somewhere that public output is part of how you're compensated and promoted. See: https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/07/how-much-should-you-pay-d... "One important principle of Stack [Overflow] is that we do as much as we can publicly, and we try to leave public artifacts of all the work we do."

Re: Where have I been these past few years?

#53

Post by jankins »

wanderingjew wrote: post #12
robertk wrote: post #11

What was up with the non-sequitur bags of water link?

I haven't read the article, but I would assume any mention of 'bags of water' would be a reference to a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. Specifically, the episode where the crew of the Enterprise encounters a silicon-based life form capable of communication with humans. Humans are three quarters water, so the silicon lifeforms (rightly?) refer to the humans as 'ugly bags of mostly water'. To put this into cont…

The inference I made was that it had a second meaning to do with water flowing downhill, since the context is how people will always take the easiest path & can be relied on to ignore any safeguards that aren't strictly required

Re: Where have I been these past few years?

#54

Post by anondon »

codinghorror wrote: post #52
rachelbythebay wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: how else do you pay the bills?

Work somewhere that public output is part of how you're compensated and promoted. See: https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/07/how-much-should-you-pay-d... "One important principle of Stack [Overflow] is that we do as much as we can publicly, and we try to leave public artifacts of all the work we do."

Offer her an interview!

Re: Where have I been these past few years?

#55

Post by MaxGabriel »

uiri wrote: post #15
noonespecial wrote: post #13

Misbehaving binary and no source? xxd -> vi -> xxd -r Fierce. Love it.

It isn't even that there is no source - the code is available (upstream is here: https://people.freebsd.org/~abe/ ). She figured that since it was a 1-bit bug, xxd -> vi -> xxd -r was going to be quicker and simpler than downloading, modifying and recompiling the source.

Was that the final solution or just for debugging purposes? It doesn't seem like you'd want to make binary patches the next time that software got updated

Re: Where have I been these past few years?

#56

Post by [deleted] »

MaxGabriel wrote: post #55
uiri wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't even that there is no source - the code is available (upstream is here: https://people.freebsd.org/~abe/ ). She figured that since it was a 1-bit bug, xxd -> vi -> xxd -r was going to be quicker and simpler than downloading, modifying and recompiling the source.

Was that the final solution or just for debugging purposes? It doesn't seem like you'd want to make binary patches the next time that software got updated

[deleted]

Re: Where have I been these past few years?

#57

Post by dfcowell »

rachelbythebay wrote: post #35

You know what, the whole grenade metaphor? I don't need it. It's just a damn web site. People _do_ sometimes use it to communicate in critical situations... but none of us working there are ever in any risk of bodily harm because someone pushed a bad config. Given that people are dealing with actual wars, I can lose it. It's easy to lose sight of such things when you're sheltered from them. Updated.

I'm in a similar field (surprise surprise) and the most impactful thing someone has ever said to me is that we're making websites, not curing cancer. Respect for making the change.

Re: Where have I been these past few years?

#58

Post by zaphar »

MaxGabriel wrote: post #55
uiri wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't even that there is no source - the code is available (upstream is here: https://people.freebsd.org/~abe/ ). She figured that since it was a 1-bit bug, xxd -> vi -> xxd -r was going to be quicker and simpler than downloading, modifying and recompiling the source.

Was that the final solution or just for debugging purposes? It doesn't seem like you'd want to make binary patches the next time that software got updated

In the article she indicates it was for proving her hypothesis regarding the source of the problem. She then sent an actual patch upstream to fix it. It was faster this way because of the way the binary did bitwise flags for options. Flipping a single bit in the binary was quicker than recompiling bit twiddling code to for testing purposes.

Re: Where have I been these past few years?

#59

Post by zaphar »

lapsock wrote: post #23

i'd rather kill myself than work with c++

That seems rather extreme. Although I suppose refusing a job that offers C++ could in very rare circumstances result homelessness, hunger, and finally death.

You'll find that gratuitous hyperbole with no actual content in your post will get you down-voted pretty fast here. The community has developed a pretty aggressive immune system to the typical reddit post.

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