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rachelbythebay.com

186 pointscurtis58 comments

Can someone give me some context? Who is rachelbythebay? I gather she is probably someone well known for her writing on software, tech culture, etc in the HN community, but I am not that immersed in the community(hence my ignorance). Thanks!

If you think someone is a bit of a local celebrity on HN, you can click the domain name on a story like this and see what their blog was submitted for. Usually useful information.

Oh, wow, I never knew this. Thanks for the tip!

I fat finger downvoted you. Here's my verbal upvote.

This was news to me, thanks.

These days there's an "unvote" text link added next to their name, or "undown" for the case of a downvote.

In addition, on my mobile, when I accidentally or intentionally hit the downvote, it doesn't take the first couple of times. This has saved me numerous unintentional downvotes. Thanks, HN!

https://medium.com/wogrammer/rachel-kroll-7944eeb8c692

https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon16/speaker-or-organi...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lf4RwlOdppg

She's Rachel Kroll, a veteran sysadmin now at Facebook.

And frankly, she is amazing and the last time I read her blog it was to discover to my amazement that Apple was using shims for stuff like git... which led me to write about it a bit more here;

http://randomtechnicalstuff.blogspot.com.au/2016/05/os-x-and...

Basically, I wish I could do what she does. I don't go anywhere near her level of complexity, but due to a variety of reasons I seem to lately be diagnosing and discovering insane things in Windows 7, in particular Windows Update and SxS assemblies.

https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon16/speaker-or-organi...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lf4RwlOdppg

https://medium.com/wogrammer/rachel-kroll-7944eeb8c692

'Rachelbythebay' is Rachel Kroll. She is currently an engineer at Facebook.

She has lots of fascinating debugging stories; I spent a Saturday years ago reading most of her blog. It was well worth it.

I had the pleasure of working with her at Rackspace before she moved to Google. Easily the smartest Linux tech I've ever met.

In case Rachel's reading this: I've missed her posts. I'm getting out of the troubleshooting part of the industry because it sucks (or rather, it's not where I want to put my energy anymore), but her stuff has always been a real treat to read and a reminder that no matter what's in front of me, someone's probably got a much tougher problem in front of them.

Always sad to be reminded how many good people get their careers swallowed up by a corporation. The public sphere suffers.

I have a lot of anger towards Google in particular, who seems to relish in having private resources, secrets, learning and technology that only the annointed may access. I should probably talk to my therapist about that.

But that's capitalism in practise.

For what it's worth, Google is one of the places which is less likely to swallow your work whole. At least it isn't Apple.

Honest question: how else do you pay the bills?

Work somewhere that public output is part of how you're compensated and promoted. See: https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/07/how-much-should-you-pay-d... "One important principle of Stack [Overflow] is that we do as much as we can publicly, and we try to leave public artifacts of all the work we do."

Offer her an interview!

My philosophy: sell luxuries in narrow channels but distribute medicine broadly.

It's pretty subjective what fits in which bin, people should decide for themselves. But Google certainly has resources that they consider to be "medicine" for their employees and yet they keep those products in-house.

Damn, how did you survive the 80s/90s!

(I think I can guess the answer).

Things could always be better, but at least it's routine now for stuff like Swift, GoLang, Rust, Protobufs, Cassandra, etc. to get built for internal use and then shared with the world. A far cry from software's dark ages.

You know what, the whole grenade metaphor? I don't need it. It's just a damn web site. People _do_ sometimes use it to communicate in critical situations... but none of us working there are ever in any risk of bodily harm because someone pushed a bad config.

Given that people are dealing with actual wars, I can lose it. It's easy to lose sight of such things when you're sheltered from them.

Updated.

I'm in a similar field (surprise surprise) and the most impactful thing someone has ever said to me is that we're making websites, not curing cancer. Respect for making the change.

Misbehaving binary and no source?

xxd -> vi -> xxd -r

Fierce. Love it.

It isn't even that there is no source - the code is available (upstream is here: https://people.freebsd.org/~abe/ ).

She figured that since it was a 1-bit bug, xxd -> vi -> xxd -r was going to be quicker and simpler than downloading, modifying and recompiling the source.

Was that the final solution or just for debugging purposes? It doesn't seem like you'd want to make binary patches the next time that software got updated

In the article she indicates it was for proving her hypothesis regarding the source of the problem. She then sent an actual patch upstream to fix it. It was faster this way because of the way the binary did bitwise flags for options. Flipping a single bit in the binary was quicker than recompiling bit twiddling code to for testing purposes.

Where does she work now? I can't tell from the post

Google suggests it's Facebook

https://facebook.com/wogrammer/posts/1748187012080407:0

you get less and less productive the more experiense, as you can think of more and more stuff that can go wrong. Im glad she found an employer that put use of her experience

Ah, "heisenbugs". I'm glad there's another person on the planet using this term. :)

It's a reference to the principle right?

I guess you're referring to the uncertainty principle, but this one is more related to the observer effect[1] (also described by Heisenberg): Observing a system alters its state.

In terms of software, it describes bug that change their behaviour (usually vanish) when being investigated. The reason is often a racing condition that swaps to one side due to blocking one thread through a debugger or additional delay through print statements.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect_(physics)

I didn't think it was that uncommon.

Nearly all erlang devs knows it. It is the class they try to get rid of by using erlang.

What was up with the non-sequitur bags of water link?

I haven't read the article, but I would assume any mention of 'bags of water' would be a reference to a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. Specifically, the episode where the crew of the Enterprise encounters a silicon-based life form capable of communication with humans. Humans are three quarters water, so the silicon lifeforms (rightly?) refer to the humans as 'ugly bags of mostly water'.

To put this into context, it's not uncommon to have the set of people who use and work with technology overlap with the set of people who are sci-fi fans. This is prevalent enough that the culture itself overlaps. Here, I would guess a non-sequitur referring to 'bags of water' is a form of signalling; 'I'm one of you', or something to that effect.

I would go so far to say that knowledge of certain sci-fi tropes, plot lines, and even quotes is a requirement for working on certain teams. At the very least, active displays of ignorance of sci-fi culture should be avoided.

But then again, I haven't read the article linked to by the OP. It's just a guess.

>>I would go so far to say that knowledge of certain sci-fi tropes, plot lines, and even quotes is a requirement for working on certain teams.

In other words, know your shibboleths[1] to enhance in-group cohesiveness.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth

Another famous source of the "bags of water"/"bags of meat" phrase is the short story They're Made Out of Meat by Terry Bisson.

http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html

Officer: "Sir, Do you classify as human?"

Korbin: "Negative, I am a meat popsicle."

meatbags also functions in Bender's lingo in Futurama

The inference I made was that it had a second meaning to do with water flowing downhill, since the context is how people will always take the easiest path & can be relied on to ignore any safeguards that aren't strictly required

Sometimes I hide things in my posts that I hope someone will find amusing or interesting. Some are obvious. Others? Not so much.

I know its a common phrase like "hair on fire", but seriously, "jumping on live grenades" is super gross. That probably happened last week in Syria.

I get it, its just an expression we use in the industry. Its all good to hear it, but lets maybe stop using it.

Yeah, I don't need it to make my point.

Though on the other hand, hair on fire is just as likely to have happened in a warzone. How will you run away from all the analogies which make random strangers on the internet queasy?

Perhaps somebody doesn't like hcf opcodes because they remind them of when their house burned down. Is the concept of running into a blaze owned solely by firefighters? Do soldiers own the concept of battle?

True, at some point you just stick to it and that's that.

That said, the grenade thing happened because, well, that's what some of us (internally) actually call that sort of outage situation sometimes -- you didn't make it happen, but you're there and are able to do something to fix it, so you do.

It doesn't work nearly as well on the outside, so I changed it and admitted my error. That's about the best you can do in a world where we're all speaking slightly different languages.

I mean, I inadvertently set my hair on fire at a party one time. (It was a good party.) Despite not having actually run around that way, I'd be ready to argue that it's not as specific or uncomfortable a metaphor as that of jumping on a grenade.

And what do you do about Syria? Politically correct language on an Internet message board achieves exactly nothing.

hang out to dry

beat a dead horse

bang for your buck

pull X out of your a--

cut off at the knees

sweat bullets

squeeze blood from a turnip

i'd rather kill myself than work with c++

That seems rather extreme. Although I suppose refusing a job that offers C++ could in very rare circumstances result homelessness, hunger, and finally death.

You'll find that gratuitous hyperbole with no actual content in your post will get you down-voted pretty fast here. The community has developed a pretty aggressive immune system to the typical reddit post.

Who is rachelbythebay?

(Don't expect an answer. This is a rhetorical question)

Does it matter? It was an interesting read full of neat debugging war stories.

In this case you can literally type:

whois rachelbythebay.com

And get the answer :-)

Have you been by the bay?

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