The weirdest bug I've seen yet • Hacker News Board

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#301

Post by flippinfloppin » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 9:45 AM UTC

resonious wrote: post #236

I gotta say, the ending was pretty disappointing. I was so hyped to learn why Grammarly crashes when Chrome loads a particular gif. What about the gif was different? What part of Grammarly made that happen? I hate to say it but this is modern web dev in a nutshell. Remove stuff until you find where the bug is, tweak it randomly until it's fixed, done. No root cause analysis or anything deep. This is a great post anyw…

And when you consider they end with the pitch "If you also enjoy collaborating with relentlessly curious people, we are hiring!"

What is effectively guessing which is what this article entails - without knowing the actual cause - hardly qualifies one as "relentlessly curious".

Personally I deeply dislike the random walk towards insanity that modern dev takes with the constant churn and layers of fixes upon fixes - react state is no good! use redux! use this! use that! And before you know it knowing what is actually going on becomes nearly impossible!

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#302

Post by jspaetzel » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 9:50 AM UTC

I've run into something similar to this a few years ago where chrome randomly introduced a rendering bug that resulted in a similar crash and only affected our application in seemingly random fashion. I don't remember the full context but I think it was something involving layers & transparency.

We finally figured it out when a coworker couldn't replicate and we noticed they were a version of chrome behind. We were able to track down the specific commits in chrome that broke & fixed it in our case which was pretty cool to see at the time.

If you have any more time I recommend reading through the commit log and see if you can find the changes that broke/fixed this for you. I'd bet on another rendering bug.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#303

Post by cristeigabriel » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 9:57 AM UTC

If Chrome is able to generate a crash-report, nothing would prevent you to intercept it.

> Unfortunately, with access to neither the Chrome source code [...]

I mean, it's still very possible to debug (especially with the fact in mind that Chromium is open-source, and for me has been a very useful source when reverse-engineering and debugging Chrome), but I understand why web developers would not be trained in reverse-engineering techniques.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#304

Post by cristeigabriel » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 10:02 AM UTC

neilv wrote: post #63

> Using open-source Chromium instead of Chrome did not cause crashes, so we couldn’t see what Chrome code was failing either. They don't address why they didn't just run Chromium. Or Firefox. (This is potentially better than the 'solution' they much later ended up with, in which they probably only relieved a symptom of an underlying problem that can exhibit again, and in the meantime is a zero-day exploit waiting to…

Maybe Grammarly doesn't work for Chromium? (guessing)

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#305

Post by mrweasel » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 10:10 AM UTC

ecshafer wrote: post #87

I don't think I would believe myself if I found this being a specific gif. This is a great amount of coincidences in code to cause this. Grammarly is an application that I don't get. The fact that people are installing, basically spyware, on their computers just to get grammar suggestions to make their writing more boring and add a spellchecker (which is already inside web browsers) is pretty astounding to me. The fa…

Grammarly is perfectly reasonable product, the major issue is that no adults seems to be in charge at Grammarly This is clearly a product that should never ever be sold a service. This needs to exist solely as a local installation, there is no way to justify the current implementation and someone in charge at Grammarly should have pull the emergency break and demanded a re-implementation.

I understand why Grammarly sells their product as a service, but it's irresponsible and they are just waiting for their Okta moment.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#306

Post by bradley13 » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 10:15 AM UTC

It is so satisfying to finally identify the root cause of such an obscure bug. Of course, along the way, you will shed tears. Sometimes literally.

I had a funny one a couple of weeks ago: Text on a button would sometimes not display. After much experimentation, it turned out that the text would display unless the character 'D' was present. It turned out that the sizing of the buttons was just barely large enough for the font-size selected, and apparently the 'D' in the selected font was microscopically taller than other characters.

FWIW I have to thank ChatGPT for helping solve that one. I explained the problem, and it gave me a list of things to try...

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#307

Post by roflmaostc » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 10:17 AM UTC

aquafox wrote: post #160

I randomly had the issue that after booting up Linux, I didn't have any sound. Turns out it was related to my Windows dual-boot setup! When restarting from Windows, Windows doesn't shut down my realtek audio device, but only puts it to sleep and Linux fails to start it. Only solution is to always do a shutdown from Windows and then hitting the power button. The issue is still there: https://askubuntu.com/questions/10…

once observed similar behavior with my bluetooth device years ago.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#308

Post by jon-wood » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 10:27 AM UTC

The thing that struck me here is that Chrome crash reporting is disabled for security reasons, presumably not wanting to risk customer information being sent to a third party, but Grammerly is apparently fine? How is a tool that sends literally everything you type to a third party ok, but one that maybe sends something if the browser crashes isn't?

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#309

Post by windowsworkstoo » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 10:33 AM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #246

I agree with the others here about the ending being a total letdown. Unfortunately, with access to neither the Chrome source code nor the Grammarly source code, we can only guess. Is this what the "open source" movement has created --- developers who are totally lost without source code and refuse to dig deeper? Of course the corporate interests who don't want us to know the truth, because their profit depends on it,…

Very well said - even with open source there seems to be a general lack of willingness to actually read code, let alone crack open the disassembler or attach a debugger - the skill is apparently not taught anymore

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#310

Post by jaggirs » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 10:33 AM UTC

jon-wood wrote: post #308

The thing that struck me here is that Chrome crash reporting is disabled for security reasons, presumably not wanting to risk customer information being sent to a third party, but Grammerly is apparently fine? How is a tool that sends literally everything you type to a third party ok, but one that maybe sends something if the browser crashes isn't?

Because doing that is a core part of Grammarly, i.e. they can argue in court that the user should obviously expect grammarly to send the data to their servers. Sending crash report data is not so, as it is not essential to using the service.