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Comment by bena | Hacker News Reader

Because, and I'll say this in the spirit of your recommendations, that's fucking stupid.

The problem was sscanf calling strlen. You're going to fire your management and development team because one dev used sscanf where it's probably appropriate?

Then hire a guy who may or may not have actual game development experience and give him $100k because he took who knows how many hours to trace through and find this thing. The guy himself the fix would probably take a day to implement.

Finding it could have taken longer.

You want to call Rockstar incompetent, but you're simply going to ignore everything else that goes right in not only GTA Online, but across all of their games.

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It’s not stupid to hire a guy with profiling experience when you have no profiling team that could address an obvious, outstanding, almost game-definitive issue which players hate and often quit after a disconnect. Maybe not this guy, but at least some.

And what is that guy going to do the rest of the time?

I'm sorry, no company is going to pay someone only to arbitrarily profile their software looking for potential bottlenecks to remove.

The only reason this story is notable is that there was a conclusion. He could have easily found nothing to fix.

It's just a stupid, knee-jerk reaction to call for the heads of everyone remotely responsible and replace them with the guy who happened to find the issue. And of course it looks like a straight shot from noticing the problem to finding the problem. I'm not going to put in every single dead end. Unless they happen to be interesting or relevant.

While the past looks like it obviously leads to the present, it only does that because we've already walked the path.

I agree that bloody solutions are excessive, but at the same time this line of reasoning is why we still have half-an-hour windows updates that overwrite maybe 500Mb in total, which costs few seconds on modern hardware. I bet that this “stupid knee-jerk reaction” brought e.g. Macs and iPhones to where they are instead of a lifeless dump full of mediocre alternatives.

And what is that guy going to do the rest of the time?

That’s classic pre-devops dilemma. Let’s fire all these slackers and get screwed next week. How about nothing to do means they’re doing an excellent job.

But in general, given this idiotic reality, you’re probably right. I just don’t adore it as much.

Having nothing to do could also mean that the original developers are doing an excellent job.

It's probably those sort of reactions that got Jobs booted from Apple the first time.

This is kind of like hiring someone who won the lottery to be your financial advisor.

I disagree.

Just for the record your swearing makes you uncivilised. I was just offering my opinion. I’m allowed to do that. I was giving my professional opinion. All your replies not only make you look like you can’t take criticism but they are also IMO mostly poor and short sighted. However I appreciate your time and input and will try and reflect on them. Have a good day man and for what it’s worth Rockstar has always been one of my favourite companies over the past 2 decades.

My opinion is if I was management in that company I would accept my fate if such a transgression occurred on my watch. I wouldn’t be butthurt about people thinking I should be fired.

You are obviously not seeing the problem. The problem was not that some dev used sscanf which lead to slow code. The problem here is that this was undiscovered for YEARS and it literally cost minutes of every single GTA online player. Management did not prioritize literally burning lifetimes away. That is the problem.

Time doesn't work like that.

Ten people wasting 6 minutes doesn't necessarily waste an hour. No one is curing cancer with the time "saved" from loading GTA Online. More likely than not, they're playing GTA Online 6 minutes less.

And to be fair to Rockstar, which the author was, this problem lurking in the standard library isn't really to be expected. You expect your standard libraries to be decently optimized.

And why it was undiscovered for years has a very simple answer: It wasn't a priority.

Why should that problem be prioritized over everything else? Everything else that could "burn lifetimes away"? Everything that could make the game crash? Or cause people to stop playing? It's quite possible that this issue was always slightly less important than whatever else may have come up.

> Ten people wasting 6 minutes doesn't necessarily waste an hour. No one is curing cancer with the time "saved" from loading GTA Online. More likely than not, they're playing GTA Online 6 minutes less.

That's an assertion. One I don't accept without some strong backing. The extra 5 minutes might mean a discussion somewhere is a bit longer leading to valuable insight. It might mean just trying that last thing before finishing up which you wouldn't try because it shouldn't work anyway. You can imagine any world changing situation which only occurs because of those extra few minutes.

> Why should that problem be prioritized over everything else?

Because it's burning away lifetimes. Besides no one would have complained if this was in the game for a few months and then fixed. It was in the game for YEARS. That is not "prioritzed over everything else" that is "the priority is so low you have to dive to the mariana trench to find the ticket".

>One I don't accept without some strong backing.

I need to see some data on this.

I never thought someone as seemingly obtuse as you could exist but you explained why rockstar failed to capitalise further on their market domination

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