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Post Mortem: A single whitespace character

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Re: Post Mortem: A single whitespace character

#151

Post by robomartin »

DanBC wrote: post #132
robomartin wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only noise if it has no value. A post such as mine would not have to appear too frequently for HN readers who might be having difficulties with such words to understand the problem and correct their writing. Not going after perfect English, few of us could approach that. But I see a few common patterns on HN all the time and nobody takes a second to say "hey buddy, just in case this wasn't clear to you, here's a…

> But I see a few common patterns on HN all the time > A post such as mine would not have to appear too frequently Which is it? All the time or not too frequently? And while you might only make rare posts some people would point out every error and mistake and difference in style. People downvote your post to dissuade those other posts. About your downvotes: I'm guessing they're for your incredible arrogance. https:/…

It's easy to make someone sound arrogant by (a) taking comments completely out of context and (b) not bothering to understand the frame of reference by at least asking the question.

HN only does well with well defined technical discussion. On everything else it has degraded to almost what happened to every USENET list in the past. USENET did not have any voting mechanism to make opposing views disappear. In that case those who wanted command of the list and felt ownership of it simply resorted to brutal flaming attacks. Some lists were really horrible places for anyone to say "I disagree".

HN can be like that, in a different way, if you are not a 20-something drinking from the same koolaid bowl. To the point of someone taking the time to take something out of context and then using it to call someone arrogant.

So, come to HN to agree with the herd or risk being called arrogant for presenting a different point of view. Brilliant.

Re: Post Mortem: A single whitespace character

#152

Post by lnanek2 »

linuxlizard wrote: post #142
goleksiak wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We would really like to use HTTPS but it's not supported by the Arduino chipset as I understand it. Though I'm not the hardware guy here at eatabit...

Why not ROT13? Or a simple substitution cypher? Not trying to be silly. But if the only goal is to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks such as someone mangling the data, why not "corrupt" the data such that the phone company in the middle can't read it? You control both ends. You can make your own "security". You're not explicitly worried about security. You're not worried about Evil Person reading your messages. You j…

Last I checked, you have to use some sort of special sockets add on to use raw TCP instead of HTTP over TCP with heroku. So you are making your heroku setup more complicated and potentially more expensive since they sometimes charge for add ons. It may disable some of their routing and load balancing capability as well. It is kind of silly to start rewriting standard transport layers anyway since you are going to spend a long time doing that instead of working on your product.

Re: Post Mortem: A single whitespace character

#153

Post by robomartin »

thathonkey wrote: post #134
DanBC wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't downvote. People downvote corrections because they're usually noise. When someone makes a typo - and homophones are usually slips equivalent to typos - it's noise to point it out.

This is true but typos/misspellings/etc still reflect poorly on the author in most situations. After all, isn't the subject of this post a rather critical typo?

Misspellings don't tend to bother me as much these days because of, well, the iPad. Seriously, I hate typing on that thing with a vengeance. The problem is exacerbated in my case (and those of others) because I have to turn off auto-correction. Why?

Because I communicate in multiple languages and auto-correction/completion makes it very difficult. Switching the keyboard back and forth doesn't help either because it isn't uncommon to use more than one language within a single email or comment (in other words, mixing languages).

My little post was about pointing out a mistake in usage that isn't a spelling problem but rather using the wrong words altogether. I see this A LOT in technical websites, writing, job posts and resume's.

Look around and see how many job positions are asking for a "Principle Engineer" instead of a "Principal Engineer". The first is some kind of a moral cop position within the company, I guess, the second is an engineer in charge of a project or department.

But, yes, you are right. If I know that someone is a native English speaker and they have bad typos, misspellings and generally can't communicate well in written form it does reflect poorly. If they are not native it is a matter of their position. I would expect someone with a university degree to not confuse "principle" with "principal" or "your" with "you're" (and other such examples).

Re: Post Mortem: A single whitespace character

#154

Post by jrochkind1 »

srtjstjsj wrote: post #77
lostcolony wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean so long as everyone standardizes around a non-standard, rather than the actual specifications of the standard, it'll work? I think I prefer just adhering to the standard in the first place.

That's what "strict in what you issue" means

If you are always going to blame the issuer for not being strict... what's the point of the accepter being liberal?

I agree that the issuer should always be strict; and if accepters were strict too, then buggy issuers would be detected immediately and never make it into production. Instead they make it into production, where they will sometimes work and sometimes not, depending on the accepter stack in use at the time and context and how the accepter stack chooses to interpret 'liberal'.

Re: Post Mortem: A single whitespace character

#155

Post by dantiberian »

Xylakant wrote: post #18
jrochkind1 wrote: post #7

This very example -- requests were technically illegal all the time without devs realizing, but something in the stack changed to start rejecting them -- demonstrates the fallacy of the "be liberal in what you accept, strict in what you issue" principal. If all the web servers involved had been strict in rejecting the illegal request from the start, they would have noticed the bug in development before deploying to f…

I don't agree that "be liberal in what you accept, strict in what you issue" is a fallacy. The client actually failed to adhere to the "be strict in what you issue" principal, just as the Cowboy was not liberal in accepting. All software will sooner or later exhibit bugs or be stricter or more lenient about a standard. I think the fallacy is to assume that once stuff works in production, only your changes can trigger…

This goes double if you're hosting on Heroku as you won't be able to correlate the changes Heroku makes with issues showing up for you. They're lucky that they hadn't pushed a change at the same time as Cowboy changed, or the debugging could have taken even longer.

Re: Post Mortem: A single whitespace character

#156

Post by kstrauser »

imanaccount247 wrote: post #148
kstrauser wrote: post #79

If this were my team, I would be unsettled by the fact that we never caught it in testing. Did no one write tests to exercise this part of the app - the one where we're handcrafting HTTP requests? Objectively, you need to write more tests. At the minimum, this bug should have a regression test so that it can never accidentally happen again (say when a dev merges an old branch in for whatever reason).

>Objectively, you need to write more tests That is precisely the opposite of objective. Personal thoughts, feelings and opinions are subjective by definition. 2+2=4 is objective. "You need to put more cheese on that pizza" is subjective.

"We don't have enough test coverage to ensure that we're generating RFC-compliant output" is objective. That's not a personal though, feeling, or opinion. If you wish, you may generalize that to "we don't have enough tests to catch an error that made it into the shipped product".

Re: Post Mortem: A single whitespace character

#157

Post by goleksiak »

Heroku came back and said:

Looking through the system, I see that you were sent two emails (in August and September) as several of your apps were migrated to the new routing stack (https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-improved-router). As mentioned in the documentation, the new router follows stricter adherence to the RFC specification, including sensitivity to spaces.

...and sure enough, there is a line that says:

The request line expects single spaces to separate between the verb, the path, and the HTTP version.

So the lesson is: RTFM

-G

Re: Post Mortem: A single whitespace character

#158

Post by ldng »

pilif wrote: post #50

Likely "Cowboy" is a transparent proxy added by your mobile service provider. I had a similar thing happening a year ago when the mobile provider used by most of our barcode scanners decided to add a transparent proxy into the loop (without telling anybody). The solution for this problem: Use SSL. I mean: There are already many good reasons to use SSL, but whenever you need to send any kind of mission critical data o…

What's wrong with transparent proxy ? Isn't how HTTP caching is supposed to work ? I would think the cache headers are the solution rather than SSL.

It feels like you are kind of throwing the baby with the bath water. IMHO, badly configured transparent proxy does not mean the concept is bad, does it ?

Re: Post Mortem: A single whitespace character

#159

Post by stevekemp »

lmm wrote: post #110
gpvos wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then the server may still decide that an empty segment is so meaningless that it will refuse it. In fact, it would not be a smart move to just treat double slashes the same as single ones, because of relative URLs: a ".." segment only removes one slash, so the hierarchy levels would get messed up. thttpd is doing the smart thing here. As one of my teachers at university would say: the empty segment is also a segm…

The server can of course interpret the path as it wants, but it should allow an application running under the server to give 'foo//bar' a meaning if that application wants to, IMO.

Agreed.

(The problem in my case was just stupid spiders that were crawling my sites.)

Re: Post Mortem: A single whitespace character

#160

Post by angersock »

philh wrote: post #136
Alupis wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HTTPS would be great but we don't transmit any personal data so it's not a high priority right now. You are sending people's orders around the web. I'd consider that "personal". None-the-less, use SSL, there is little reason not to use it these days. And as others have pointed out, it's the only good and easy way to guarantee what you send to one of these printers is what it actually received (no carrier tampering…

If SSL isn't supported by the Arduino chipset, then that sounds like more than a "little" reason not to use it. That sounds like it might be an "it would be a whole lot of work" reason not to use it. (I don't actually know how much work would be involved, but goleksiak says they would really like to use it, so I assume it's not trivial.)

SSL on the Arduino--usually a little 8-bit (!) chip--is a bit resource intensive, in both memory and processing time.
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