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

The weirdest bug I've seen yet

engineering.gusto.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 334 posts

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#191

Post by saagarjha »

crazygringo wrote: post #131

tl;dr: a certain GIF would crash a Chrome tab, but only when the desktop version of Grammarly was installed. (Not a Chrome extension.) That's insane! Can anyone think by what possible mechanism the installation of Grammarly could affect whether a .gif file would crash Chrome? The company seems to be on Macs since they report that the problem doesn't surface in Safari. Is there some kind of dynamically-linked GIF deco…

This would be strange since macOS should not let Chrome load libraries that aren’t signed by Google.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#192

Post by saagarjha »

FrankWilhoit wrote: post #93

Error code 5, on Windows, means that the code tried to dereference a null pointer. I'm guessing that the GIF content is corrupt, containing some 0x00 bytes where they shouldn't be. Then the question becomes, whose responsibility is it to program defensively against things like that? If, as may well be, Chrome is using some third-party library nested several layers deep to render GIFs, then would there be any action t…

Considering they’re trying Safari I suspect they’re on macOS.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#193

Post by saagarjha »

orbv wrote: post #27
flutas wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean, you basically do! You can just go check out the chromium source. It's mentioned in the bullet points in the "trouble reproducing the bug" section that chromium wasn't affected. > Using open-source Chromium instead of Chrome did not cause crashes, so we couldn’t see what Chrome code was failing either.

Google provides symbols for Chrome release builds, including source indexing so source code should be available. See sections symbol server and source indexing at https://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/debugging-on-win...

Only for Windows. For some reason they don’t make their symbols for Mac public…

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#194

Post by mplewis »

sfink wrote: post #167

Next time this happens, I recommend just letting people use a different browser. Firefox in particular has gotten much better at importing bookmarks, passwords, etc. from Chrome. It was a Sign from the universe that it was time to make the switch. Who are we to reject Signs? (Full disclosure: I'm an engineer on Firefox. But that has nothing whatsoever to do with my advice here, no siree Bob, not in the least.)

This is explicitly stated as a workaround in the linked article.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#195

Post by mattnewton »

jvanderbot wrote: post #165
pavel_lishin wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read comments online, and in my experience the most difficult writing to parse isn't from foreign speakers who drop articles or mis-conjugate things - it's from people whose writing is just, for the lack of a better term, bad . This is very common on places like Nextdoor or Facebook. It's things like: - total stream-of-consciousness gibberish that could probably be assembled into a coherent statement if the writer…

> - total stream-of-consciousness gibberish that could probably be assembled into a coherent statement if the writer would re-read what they wrote and edit it This drives me nuts . Did anyone see this [1] on HN the other day? People in comments were springing up to defend this atrocious writing style. Make a paragraph. Make a point. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38275905

I think that writing style has a point in _realtime_ text chat, where you are racing to get your comment in and turn in the conversation. It’s like a way of streaming your thoughts, not unlike voice conversation - many of the defenses seemed to be talking about that. Not defending it in non-realtime scenarios though.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#196

Post by callalex »

robocat wrote: post #135
michaelcampbell wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know what you mean, but this caused me a second of "wait, what?" > all pages in a single-page-web-app

Good point. This was the Elizabethan days when computers ran on coal: IE when we were explorers of The Internet. We were bleeders, but there still existed a vestigial login page, and some other evil cthulic pages (I know whence they were begat for I was their father).

In the USA, 20% of computers still run on coal!

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#197

Post by codethief »

gelatocar wrote: post #152

As I was reading this I was thinking to myself "I wonder if it is grammarly related" because I experienced a bug some time ago that presented itself in a similar way. It was impossible to reproduce but affecting lots of people internally within certain departments. Eventually we figured out the thing they had in common was that they had the Grammarly extension installed. The other key thing was that the bug only appe…

> It turned out it was because of a bad regex in the grammarly extension that caused the page to hang if the domain name was more than about 100 characters.

Just today I debugged a regex that would DoS our backend whenever the user enters the wrong thing in a form.

Now I'm reading up on regex engines: https://swtch.com/%7Ersc/regexp/regexp1.html

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#198

Post by jacquesm »

mardifoufs wrote: post #189
gumby wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Last I checked US students rank well and are near the top in most education global rankings, so I think bad education is more of a global problem than Americans think it is. US is at the bottom of the OECD PISA rankings (as it is with life expectency too), though on a global basis you're right (better than Morocco or Indonesia on both criteria). Shockingly Australia has fallen quite a bit from the initial PISA stud…

Honestly what surprised me the most from your very informative link was that France is lower than the US! I'm probably biased but I've always considered the French education system to be quite rigorous and well rounded, with a few different education paths to fit different student profiles from a pretty early stage. Especially compared to canada, which in my experience has a rather weak and rigid curriculum. (Though…

> You're basically boxed in to your specific domain or degree that you often don't even really choose and changing or switching careers is almost impossible.

This was true 50 years ago but hasn't been true since the 90's or so. France may well be the exception in this, but then again, France is an exception in many ways.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#199

Post by codethief »

saagarjha wrote: post #188
nonethewiser wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the theory would be that grammarly desktop sees the gif (what? How?) and calls some browser accessibility function on it (or?) which chrome cant handle and it crashes?

Perhaps it has an extension that it installs that does this?

They did try disabling browser extensions, according to the blog post.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#200

Post by nonethewiser »

chatmasta wrote: post #155
saulpw wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't the Grammarly extension, it was the desktop app.

I guess I just assumed the extension was installed too, and communicating with the desktop app. But now I see the post doesn't mention the extension. If it was triggered even without the presence of the extension then that's quite strange, and even more suspicious - is that gif triggering a call to a localhost endpoint? Is the grammarly desktop app interacting with browser elements without using the extension? (IIRC…

> Is the grammarly desktop app interacting with browser elements without using the extension? (IIRC the grammarly app uses some accessibility privileges to inject into textareas across all apps)

It seems like that must be the case. If we have the details right about desktop app only (which seemed pretty clear).

Post reply on HN