Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Significant raise of reports

lwn.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 164 posts

Re: Significant raise of reports

#11

Post by LatencyKills »

glimshe wrote: post #4

The last paragraph is interesting: "Overall I think we're going to see a much higher quality of software, ironically around the same level than before 2000 when the net became usable by everyone to download fixes. When the software had to be pressed to CDs or written to millions of floppies, it had to survive an amazing quantity of tests that are mostly neglected nowadays since updates are easy to distribute." Was so…

I was a developer at Microsoft in the 90s (Visual Studio (Boston) and Windows teams). I won't claim that software back then was "better," but what is definitely true is that we had to think about everything at a much lower level.

For example, you had to know which Win32 functions caused ring-3 -> ring-0 transitions because those transitions could be incredibly costly. You couldn't just "find the right function" and move on. You had to find the right function that wouldn't bring your app (and entire system) to its knees.

I specifically remember hating my life whenever we ran into a KiUserExceptionDispatcher [0] issue, because even something as simple as an exception could kill your app's performance.

Additionally, we didn't get to just patch flaws as they arose. We either had to send out patches on floppy disks, post them to BBSs, or even send them to PC Magazine.

[0]: https://doar-e.github.io/blog/2013/10/12/having-a-look-at-th...

Re: Significant raise of reports

#12

Post by dieulot »

themafia wrote: post #5

An AI enthusiast having a breathless and predictive position on the future of the technology? No way! It's almost like Wall Street is about to sour on the whole stack and there is a concerted effort to artificially push these views into the conversation to get people on board. Then again, I'm a known crank and aggressive cynic, but you never really see any gathered data backing these points up.

Could you back up your assertion that Willy Tarreau — who used to maintain the Linux kernel — is “an AI enthusiast”? I can’t find anything about it.

Re: Significant raise of reports

#13

Post by siruwastaken »

It's interesting to hear from people directly in the thick of it that these bug reports are apparently gaining value and are no longer just slop. Maybe there is hope for a world where AI helps create bug free software and doesn't just overload maintainers.

Re: Significant raise of reports

#15

Post by dspillett »

psyklic wrote: post #10
glimshe wrote: post #4

The last paragraph is interesting: "Overall I think we're going to see a much higher quality of software, ironically around the same level than before 2000 when the net became usable by everyone to download fixes. When the software had to be pressed to CDs or written to millions of floppies, it had to survive an amazing quantity of tests that are mostly neglected nowadays since updates are easy to distribute." Was so…

> Was software made before 2000 better? At the time of release, yes. They had to ensure the software worked before printing CDs and floppies. Nowadays they release buggy versions that users essentially test for them.

Also in terms of security, there was generally a much smaller potential attack surface and those surfaces were harder to reach because we were much less constantly connected.

Re: Significant raise of reports

#16

Post by sevg »

stratos123 wrote: post #2

"On the kernel security list we've seen a huge bump of reports. We were between 2 and 3 per week maybe two years ago, then reached probably 10 a week over the last year with the only difference being only AI slop, and now since the beginning of the year we're around 5-10 per day depending on the days (fridays and tuesdays seem the worst). Now most of these reports are correct, to the point that we had to bring in mor…

Is there a reason you’ve copy pasted the first paragraph from the link? It doesn’t add anything to the discussion, and also doesn’t help as a tl;dr because it’s literally the first paragraph. Genuine question!

Re: Significant raise of reports

#17

Post by empath75 »

glimshe wrote: post #4

The last paragraph is interesting: "Overall I think we're going to see a much higher quality of software, ironically around the same level than before 2000 when the net became usable by everyone to download fixes. When the software had to be pressed to CDs or written to millions of floppies, it had to survive an amazing quantity of tests that are mostly neglected nowadays since updates are easy to distribute." Was so…

> Was software made before 2000 better?

Literally the moment everyone got on the internet, pretty much every computer program and operating system in the world was besieged by viruses and security flaws, so no.

Re: Significant raise of reports

#18

Post by throwatdem12311 »

Reports being written faster than bugs being created? Better quality software than before the 2000s?

Oh my sweet summer child.

This is some seriously delusional cope from someone who drank the entire jug of kool-aid.

I’d love to be proven wrong but the current trajectory is pretty plain as day from current outcomes. Everything is getting worse, and everyone is getting overwhelmed and we are under attack even more and the attacks are getting substantially more sophisticated and the blast radius is much bigger.

Re: Significant raise of reports

#19

Post by Xenoamorphous »

glimshe wrote: post #4

The last paragraph is interesting: "Overall I think we're going to see a much higher quality of software, ironically around the same level than before 2000 when the net became usable by everyone to download fixes. When the software had to be pressed to CDs or written to millions of floppies, it had to survive an amazing quantity of tests that are mostly neglected nowadays since updates are easy to distribute." Was so…

Just think of 8 and 16 bit video console games. Those cartridges were expensive so just how sure they had to be they were bug free before making millions of them?

Re: Significant raise of reports

#20

Post by 1970-01-01 »

glimshe wrote: post #4

The last paragraph is interesting: "Overall I think we're going to see a much higher quality of software, ironically around the same level than before 2000 when the net became usable by everyone to download fixes. When the software had to be pressed to CDs or written to millions of floppies, it had to survive an amazing quantity of tests that are mostly neglected nowadays since updates are easy to distribute." Was so…

It was a simpler time. Not better. Not worse. Programs still had bugs, but they weren't sloppy UI bugs, they were logic bugs and memory leaks. If software was better back then, we'd still be using it!
Post reply on HN