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Comment by aruggirello | Hacker News Reader

> is line 89 of search.php valid?? "$user 0 && ..." ? aren't we missing an comparison operator?

Good job. And perhaps that's the culprit. Everybody assumed it was a plain syntax error, but I don't think it's possible. Rather, it seems me that:

    if ($user <something else ... ) {
        was written here
        but we'll never know because
        the browser mistook it for an HTML tag,
        and the user probably copied page contents
        instead of saving it.
    };

    if (user_was_working_at_facebook_in_2007())
        possibly_confirm('?');

    /* lots of missing code may follow... until */

    if (who knows what > 0 && ...

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Maybe. I think that's less likely than syntax error, for two reasons.

#1, if you look in index.php, there's a < on line 228 and a > on line 258, correctly rendered. Granted, the < is part of a <=, which weakens that argument.

#2, if you look at the surrounding code, $user > 0 makes logical sense given what the code is doing (and assuming 0 represents an invalid/nonexistent userid, which I believe it does given that facebook userids increase monotonically).

Except that a syntax error isn't likely at all - this was production code.

BTW just running "php -l" would have nailed this error - PHP refuses to run a script that cannot pass the tokenization step, resulting in a blank page (and the error being logged), so such a macroscopic error would probably be short-lived even in their test environment.

not sure what the reason was, but it's simply a missing >. other files were leaked, and you can see the same pattern elsewhere:

  if ($user > 0 && is_unregistered($user))

searching the web for this comment might be helpful if you'd like more source code:

  $user can be < 0 in AIM mode, just use 0 there

This might be due to the code pasted in some markdown editor at a point. This often strips the < and > characters.

So there's an unknown amount of Spaghetti Code still missing from this mess?

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