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Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash

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Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash

#171

Post by KMag »

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #141
KMag wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 would get a callback with the end-of-open-tag and start-of-close-tag pointe…

Really? Is there any science showing rude reviews improve some metric or some greater good?

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.)

Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash

#172

Post by mgdlbp »

Jap2-0 wrote: post #114
oblosys wrote: post #81

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.

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": 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 beca…

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

Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash

#173

Post by JasonFruit »

munk-a wrote: post #167
JasonFruit wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

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…

No post body was provided.

Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash

#174

Post by jjeaff »

_wldu wrote: post #28
zciwor wrote: post #15

Will 100% be pasting this into a coworker's Google Doc with a white font color.

That's probably a cyber crime in most US states. Edit: You guys have no sense of humor.

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.

Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash

#175

Post by jiggawatts »

haliskerbas wrote: post #131
KMag wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sy…

Some people might get off on that kind of culture. But this story makes me glad I don’t work there for some reason.

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?

Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash

#177

Post by onionisafruit »

AlexMuir wrote: post #144

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 an…

Why did that lead to detention?

Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash

#178

Post by KMag »

a-dub wrote: post #156
haliskerbas wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people might get off on that kind of culture. But this story makes me glad I don’t work there for some reason.

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.…

> 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.

Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash

#179

Post by the-rc »

KMag wrote: post #164
wutbrodo wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 h…

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).

Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash

#180

Post by munk-a »

JasonFruit wrote: post #173
munk-a wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Quoted post unavailable.

"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.
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