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Comment by exDM69 | Hacker News Reader

> They should focus A LOT on the noisy part of the message. > And feel shame. And then do something about it.

No the MongoDB team should not feel ashamed, the author of this bug report should. This kind of aggressive writing is unprofessional, rude and childish.

People make mistakes, even good engineers do. They should not be yelled at like this even if they screw up badly. Writing software is a team effort, and the users of open source software should be a part of that team and take the collective responsibility of finding, reporting and fixing bugs in an effective and civilized manner.

The tone of this bug report does not help fixing this bug faster or better, but it does make the reporter look like an ass.

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Resisting the urge to comment, but suffice to say I disagree entirely. The level of fail on display here is indicative of a total lack of understanding of the basic principles of working in C, with the CPython API, or as a company, any regard for quality control – even still 4 years after a trivially machine-detectable bug was introduced.

They don't even need Coverity, there are numerous cheaper and free static analysers that could have caught this before it left 10gen's offices.

Marketing a database server that crashes with such C-101 style bugs due to the shape of the data being stored is simply beyond.

I disagree that publicizing stupidity like this can do harm – the crash is clean enough that any trivial crash restart loop (e.g. just about any production web server) will catch it. In the meantime the company are much more motivated to provide a fix that I need, that I should never have needed in the first place.

For all the "responsible disclosure" idiocy on this thread, in most cases the crash is not remotely exploitable unless some API directly stores JSON objects provided by a user, and even then, amounts to little more than a slow request – a crash triggering a potentially expensive restart of the failed process. Useful for a DDoS perhaps, but not an immediate national security threat.

We happen to want this functionality since its one of the main "it's just JSON" selling points of Mongo to begin with, we want index visibility for the user data, and we think it's ridiculous that we should have to double-serialize the user data (and write our own indexing) in order to avoid obvious bugs.

I agree that the bug itself has "n00b mistake" written all over it. It should have not been made and should have been noticed in code reviews.

But would you go yell like that at a real person in real life when working at the office? If not, why would it be ok to do it in a bug tracker anonymously?

I can't think of any offense I could do that would make it acceptable to yell at me in an irate manner as in the bug report. I'm really glad I don't work with people who consider this kind of behavior acceptable.

>But would you go yell like that at a real person in real life when working at the office?

Definitely YES.

I'll just leave this here for you: http://danielmiessler.com/wp-content/uploaded_content/2008/1...

It's Paul Graham's hierarchy of disagreement.

No, the author of this bug report should not feel ashamed, you should. This kind of aggressive knee-jerk reaction is unprofessional, rude and childish.

People make mistakes, even good engineers do. They should not be derided like this even if they lose their temper. Writing software is a team effort, and the users of open source software should be a welcomed part of that team and their feedback taken in an effective and civilized manner.

The prudery of your comment does not help fixing this bug faster or better, but it does make it look like your priorities are severely misplaced.

Oh very good sir. golf clap

Requoting that is ridiculous. Allow me to list why:

1. There is nothing for the parent poster to feel ashamed about. Nothing he said is shame worthy.

2. He wasn't aggressive. It wasn't a knee-jerk reaction. It wasn't unprofessional, rude or childish.

3. The author of the bug didn't make a mistake. They submitted a bug report designed to be as brutal and belittling as possible. They didn't just lose their temper in the heat of the moment, they decided to setup a new account under a pseudoname, then blasted the author of the software product.

4. Writing software is indeed a team effort, but as with any team if one party abuses the other the team rapidly becomes less effective.

5. Feedback doesn't have to be abusive. It's a bit rich to say on the one hand feedback can be abusive, but on the other hand that abusive feedback must be then taken in a "civilized manner". Do you not see the contradiction?

6. There's nothing "prudish" about remarking that abusive bug reports don't make the bug get fixed faster or better. To be a prude, you must be excessively concerned about propriety, and there's nothing in the parent's comment that is excessive.

7. The parent's comment was a general comment, and wasn't an attempt to fix the bug. There's nothing misplaced about the poster's priorities. He's here to comment on HN, and that is indeed what he's done.

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