Null
popey.com
Null
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Re: Null
#2Somebody should write a book like the original "Programming Pearls" for weird hacks and anecdotes like the author's. Pretty fun stuff.
Re: Null
#3Reminds me of https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/
Numerous cases of encoding out of band data as a special case of in-band data.
Re: Null
#4Somebody should write a book like the original "Programming Pearls" for weird hacks and anecdotes like the author's. Pretty fun stuff.
If I'm honest my reason for submitting this was a hope that any traction it received would be met with other odd stories in the comments. So yeah, there is some market for your book suggestion.
Re: Null
#5Declarative programming is something that helps deal with weird edge cases like this right? I'm learning Elixir currently and the subtle semantics around the 'traditional' assignment operator (=) are quite cool. It means you can ditch most if blocks and provide a list of pattern-matchable functions (matched on their arity) to define logic which helps deal with edge cases a little better.
I'm curious how such a declarative paradigm _may_ help with the wacky usage of software old mate Mr. Null endeavours in. No one paradigm solves all problems I feel but perhaps some allow us to harvest some low hanging fruit for free?
Re: Null
#6Reminds me of https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/ Numerous cases of encoding out of band data as a special case of in-band data.
My browser is set to not accept cookies from sites I don't have a relationship with, because … well, frankly, I don't know why the rest of y'all still let shady people on the Internet use your hard disk for their ad tracking.
So, that link (like so many), just plain doesn't work. It just loads a white screen.
There are many sites like this on the Internet. Twitter waffles between working and "Ooops! something went wrong!". I've sent patches to Rust's documentation to fix it to work with cookies disabled. (But it won't persist any settings you change, of course, which is what it uses the cookies for.)
That link has the double the fun: not only is the page completely white, it's logging errors to the JS console as fast as it can.
Re: Null
#7>While I’m not a QA or security professional, I have developed a knack for doing “stupid” things with software which causes it to malfunction.
A person after my own heart.
I've had many a dev go "why would you do that"
In which I answer "it doesn't matter, but if you accept my input it's your job to ensure the app doesn't crash"
Re: Null
#8Declarative programming is something that helps deal with weird edge cases like this right? I'm learning Elixir currently and the subtle semantics around the 'traditional' assignment operator (=) are quite cool. It means you can ditch most if blocks and provide a list of pattern-matchable functions (matched on their arity) to define logic which helps deal with edge cases a little better. I'm curious how such a declar…
I don’t see how a string “null” would break anything besides a very stupidly written program (e.g., one which tries to eval() the input) or an ordinary program written in a very stupid language (e.g., one which tries to coerce strings to other types—PHP, is that you?).
I’m a big fan of pattern matching (especially statically verified pattern matching so sorry elixir), but I don’t see how it would help here.
Re: Null
#9Declarative programming is something that helps deal with weird edge cases like this right? I'm learning Elixir currently and the subtle semantics around the 'traditional' assignment operator (=) are quite cool. It means you can ditch most if blocks and provide a list of pattern-matchable functions (matched on their arity) to define logic which helps deal with edge cases a little better. I'm curious how such a declar…
I don’t see how a string “null” would break anything besides a very stupidly written program (e.g., one which tries to eval() the input) or an ordinary program written in a very stupid language (e.g., one which tries to coerce strings to other types—PHP, is that you?). I’m a big fan of pattern matching (especially statically verified pattern matching so sorry elixir), but I don’t see how it would help here.
Even PHP finds null==“null” to be false.
Re: Null
#10I worked on an API that regularly got requests from the mobile app for GET /users/(null). I think that's Swift, or Obj-C's way of to-string'ing a null?
I have a generational suffix on my name. I often include it, and quite often as the proper Unicode character, e.g., "Ⅲ". (Assuming HN displays it after I post this, try to select it; that's one character.) That wreaks a fair bit of havoc.
When I was in high-school, I took physics. I was assigned to room, say, 309, to a teacher whose name I didn't recognize. But I knew the teacher in room 309, and she even taught physics. So, I approached her, and asked, "I've been assigned 'Ms. Stewart', but it lists her as being in your room. Do you know what the correct room number is, Ms. Cook?" Right room; it was her maiden name, of course.
In my company's HR system, we have to note some contacts, for things like life insurance payouts. My fiancée is one. Then we transitioned to a new system, and the data from the old system was migrated over. Now she's my "fiancée". (And in a separate system, she's a he, because there was no option for "fiancée", only "fiancé".) Similarly (and a long time ago) I had to fix a contact/directory system when it escaped a '. E.g., it would emit "Marie O\'Conner". PHP magic quotes… shudders
(Character encodings and anything outside of ASCII, in particular, are an unending fountain of bugs.)
Just today, Azure's support system can't handle (among many things) the outlandish characters of "". Which is great fun, since it's not like anyone would file a highly-technical support request with Azure… right?
The missing hour in the DST spring-forward and the duplicate one on the fall-back are great hunting grounds for bugs, too. E.g., Google Calendar has issues with them.
We have a git branch prefix at work that triggers a special CI action. Let's call it "branchprefix/". Every now and then a dev will make a branch with "BranchPrefix/" and the OS X machines all start having issues since OS X's file hierarchy isn't case sensitive. (We've also had issues w/ two files, same name different case. git supports it, but OS X can't cope.)
(All the names in this post are changed from their originals, of course. But you get the idea.)