jdwithit

Settle down, Beavis. Not everyone is running Linux in a 24/7 production environment. I hear some people even fart around with it at home for fun.

I've been in pager rotations for most of the last 20 years so I'm sympathetic to that. If some genius symlinked unzip to 7z with no testing in production and caused an incident I'd be real mad. But uh I don't think that's remotely what OP was suggesting here.

I wish I could recall the details better but this was 20+ years ago now. In college I had an internship working at Bose, doing QA on firmware in a new multi CD changer addon to their flagship stereo. We were provided discs of music tracks with various characteristics. And had to listen to them over and over and over and over and over and over, running through test cases provided by QA management as we did. But also doing random ad-hoc testing once we finished the required tests on a given build.

At one point I found a bug where if you hit a sequence of buttons on the remote at a very specific time--I want to say it was "next track" twice right as a new track started--the whole device would crash and reboot. This was a show stopper; people would hit the roof if their $500 stereo crashed from hitting "next". Similar to the article, the engineering lead on the product cleared his schedule to reproduce, find, and fix the issue. He did explain what was going on at the time, but the specifics are lost to me.

Overall the work was incredibly boring. I heard the same few tracks so many times I literally started to hear them in my dreams. So it was cool to find a novel, highest severity bug by coloring outside the lines of the testcases. I felt great for finding the problem! I think the lead lost 20% of his hair in the course of fixing it, lol.

I haven't had QA as a job title in a long time but that job did teach me some important lessons about how to test outside the happy path, and how to write a reproducible and helpful bug report for the dev team. Shoutout to all the extremely underpaid and unappreciated QA folks out there. It sucks that the discipline doesn't get more respect.

Yeah the Centralia story is wild. Who knows when the fire might ever go out? It's caught the imagination of many writers over the years, who have either been inspired by it or used it directly as a setting. Mostly in horror/paranormal content. As the Wikipedia entry notes

"Centralia has been used as a model for many different fictional ghost towns and manifestations of Hell. Prominent examples include Dean Koontz's Strange Highways and David Wellington's Vampire Zero."

Agree 100%. Not the most important example, but I used to be heavily into World of Warcraft. The go-to place for discussion of high end play was a forum run by the guild "Elitist Jerks". Everything was there out in the open, to be read and indexed and discussed and preserved indefinitely. The forum eventually went away, but the info was still available thanks to the Wayback Machine.

Fast forward to 2020 when Blizzard put out WoW Classic (basically the original 2004 state of the game again, as a nostalgia trip). I was bummed to find that all discussion of the game had moved into discord servers. And not just one. There was a separate discord for every single class (mage, warrior, priest, etc). Sometimes more than one if the community couldn't agree on which was best. Every guild had their own discord. Special purpose servers existed for niche topics. If you wanted to find a piece of information, you had to hope that a helpful moderator had pinned it somewhere, or else rely on a crappy search feature. If a server is shut down or you get banned, all of that info is lost forever. It's a nightmare.

Discord is a perfectly good tool for real time chat. It is a TERRIBLE tool for summarizing and preserving knowledge. But unfortunately it's increasingly being used for that purpose and I do not for the life of me understand why.

They exist, and are very valuable, but I've never worked at a company that employed even one full time technical writer. If I go on a caffeine bender and write the 20 page doc OP described, nobody is coming back around to clean that up for me. At best some peers might tell me "hey, great effort there, but could you cut the word count by 75%?" Access to full-time professional editors seems like a luxury of very large organizations.

> You call a contractor and tell them everything you want done and then ask for an estimate and they tell you, "I don't know. It'll cost what it costs. Every project is different and I won't know until I'm done."

I see you haven't needed to hire many building contractors. "I won't know until I'm done" wasn't how the engagements started, but it's how they all ended up. When the budget's gone and they're only halfway done what are you gonna do, live with a hole in the wall and no running water? If you got a home renovation done on time or on budget (I refuse to believe both), congrats on catching a unicorn.

I've had a contact in my phone named "The Beast" with phone number 666 for more than 20 years now. Originally came about as a joke for some high school buddies when we were EXTREMELY into Iron Maiden. Now just a dumb easter egg for myself, or I guess anyone as weird as I am who gets hold of my phone and tries calling 666.

Get on Maine's level. They have Mexico, Poland (home of Poland Springs!), China, Peru, Norway, Sweden, Denmark... that's not even delving into another dozen or two towns named for foreign cities rather than nations. The history of why the heck this happened is interesting [0]

0: https://www.mainepublic.org/maine/2015-09-24/why-are-so-many...

I vividly remember watching Battle Royale with my college roommate, and when it was over, we looked at each other and said "this would be an incredible premise for a video game". This would have been like 2004. We even tried to mod it into the original FarCry engine (the island setting was perfect), but it was too difficult for us. Too bad we didn't actually have the chops to do it, could have gotten the jump on Fortnite/PUBG by over a decade lol. Really wish we had stayed motivated, looking back on it.

edit: But yes, Battle Royale is a great movie, and Hunger Games totally rode its coattails.

Very cool story. Not what I expected to find on HN but glad it was linked! I was born and raised in Massachusetts and know the Zildjian brand, but had absolutely no idea they were based there.

I mean the patch notes for this issue literally do this, so they seem to be off to a good start.

Yeah I think this is a good point. Around ~8th grade I got pretty far into making a Final Fantasy 6-inspired JRPG in QBASIC with some friends. Obviously it was not remotely professional quality. But the delta between it and a "real" game wasn't THAT insane. There's only so much you can pack into little 8 or 16 bit sprites. It's very easy to write a 2D tile based engine, there was a lot of info on the Internet about it even then back in the late 90s. I didn't need to know college level math to do basic 2D rendering and effects. If making a somewhat presentable game in the 90s interested you, it was all pretty attainable with study and work.

Nowadays, for my own kids, the equivalent would be trying to write... Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom from scratch? Which is like asking them to solve cold fusion based on a middle school understanding of science. It's laughable. Making "old grandpa games" doesn't motivate them. Which is a bummer, because hacking on that crappy QBASIC RPG definitely set me on the path to a lifelong interest and career in tech. (Unfortunately it was never finished, because my HDD died, and the backup I periodically dumped to a floppy was unreadable, so several years of effort were lost. Great early lesson about backups not meaning shit unless you regularly test that you can restore them...).

I've definitely committed debug messages before. Probably everyone who writes code has at some point. Thankfully it's never been anything TOO embarrassing. These days I try to always do a git diff and search for "print" (or whatever the language equivalent is) before I commit and push as a final sanity check.

In high school, my friend had a habit of titling draft papers something inappropriate. Which was funny when we were peer editing each other. But inevitably, one time he forgot to change it back. We sat down in English class and as the teacher was walking around collecting papers, he glanced down at his and suddenly UH I GOTTA GO TO THE BATHROOM. He sprinted out the door straight to the computer lab and printed off a copy that didn't have a bunch of profanity in 24 point font at the top. I about died laughing.

It cuts both ways, though :) My son is obsessed with the Switch Zelda games, Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. You can save at almost any time, plus the game autosaves constantly. He always tries to pull BUT DAD I GOTTA SAVE GIMME A FEW MORE MINUTES. Sorry bud, I saw the autosave icon pop up 10 seconds ago, you're good.

US 287 between Fort Collins, CO and Laramie, WY is notoriously dangerous and your map certainly bears it out. Click on any random stretch and it is absolutely full of pins :( Crazy because it is a wide open rural highway for the most part where you can see for miles. But it's only one lane on either side which leads people to try to pass recklessly. Plus there are some sudden turns and changes in elevation. Connecting two college towns probably doesn't help, either.

Thanks for sharing (and good luck keeping the site up). It's the definition of morbidly interesting.

I feel like this would be more plausible if the bug hadn't been introduced more than 3 years ago.

I've never personally used paid Vault but what you said, that they "asked way too much" is the constant refrain I've heard about it. Much like Splunk, it seems like there's an extra zero on the quote for smaller use cases.

Employees gotta eat, I don't begrudge them trying to sell the software. But it seems like they went for the Lamborghini business model when maybe what the market was looking for was Honda.

Clicking "parent" on this post a couple times yields some more context. Seems like the claim the throwaway account is making is that IBM pulling Vault into their IBM Cloud offering was the catalyst for relicensing everything. Terraform and other Hashi projects just got caught up in a blanket policy change.

Had not heard the IBM angle before and spent a few minutes digging.

Apart from the actual book content, I enjoy your appropriately retro and minimalist web design. It's giving me a huge nostalgia hit. Fond memories of hand crafting my own sites with a 6 inch thick book titled something like "HTML 3.2 UNLEASHED!!!!" on my desk :)

Or for a less out-there example, Ken Thompson's classic "Reflections on Trusting Trust". At some point unless you are literally producing all of the hardware and software yourself you have to trust someone. The challenge is figuring out where that line of acceptable risk lies for you. It's going to be very different for an indie game dev vs a FinTech company vs the US DoD.

This still seems orthogonal to the fact that a law was passed requiring them to publish salary bands and they gave the finger to it by publishing a range of $0 to $infinity. Maybe everyone has the title "software engineer" but come on, you are still putting new hires into a pay band based on experience and interview results etc. You've complied with the letter of the law and it should have been written better assuming bad actors. But this childish "gotcha", anti worker behavior is a bad look.

I've never worked at Netflix so accept or disregard my takes as you wish. I do know several people personally who used to work there and left voluntarily because they found it to be a poor work environment on diversity grounds.

Netflix literally does (or at least did) this. It's not even a hypothetical.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/90000-to-900000-pay-transpare...

Looks like the fix is in Mozilla's core UI widget code, nothing specific to Firefox. So yes, it should be fixed in TB too.

When I was in college (so like... almost as long ago as this bug was filed, yikes!) I spent a lot of time volunteering for Mozilla. I started out doing bug triage for their QA team, which involved things like making sure it was in the proper Bugzilla component and had sane steps to reproduce and so on. Even this was very enlightening, as someone with absolutely zero real world experience. Seeing how a large scale project was run, watching how the "real" devs worked through fixes and features. Introducing concepts like diffs and patches and CI/CD (it was nightly builds in those days so not actually Continuous, but moving in the right direction).

Later on I figured out how to build the apps, which was a bear, especially on Windows. Firefox, Thunderbird, and the whole Mozilla Suite which was still a thing back then, with integrated browser, mail, HTML editor etc. And finally contributed some bug fixes of my own. Nothing significant, we're talking like fixing typos and misaligned icons, but it still felt incredible to be shipping code that literal millions of people would use.

All of this was immediately useful in my first job out of school. I started out doing IT support and QA at a startup but quickly found they had no build and deploy automation. Someone would push to SVN and you might not find out for days that it broke the build. I got them set up with a build server using what I had learned from Mozilla (Buildbot? Cruisecontrol? Hudson? Been too long) that would do a build on push and email the team if it couldn't compile or failed tests. Was pretty fun having a bunch of seasoned developers ask me "how the hell does our IT guy know about all this shit?" I was able to carve out a DevOps role for myself before that term existed, thanks to everything I learned playing with Mozilla in my free time.

This is a roundabout way of saying I totally agree, hacking on Mozilla projects is a great way to get real world experience :)

To be honest my job changed during the pandemic so I have not made the trip in several years. Before making my post I went on the Amtrak website and priced out a trip in mid October. It was about $225 each way before tax etc. If you were willing to get on the 6am train it was a few bucks cheaper. I'm happy to concede that you could get better deals booking further out etc, I didn't spend time checking.

Hell, I'd love to be wrong. Because again, I enjoy traveling by rail. If I somehow accidentally priced the literal worst case, that's good to know.

I used to take the Amtrak Acela from Boston to NYC a few times a year for business travel and it was very enjoyable. I always looked forward to the ride, which is absolutely not something I would ever say about driving or flying these days. Comfortable, scenic, quiet, possible to work (or just relax and watch a movie) in your seat, reasonable food and drink available in the dining car. Step off the train and you're in the heart of the city.

That said it would be much tougher to justify if work wasn't footing the bill. A single round trip is up around $500 per person unless you are willing to leave at the crack of dawn. Doing this regularly, or with a family, would get prohibitively expensive for most people. I definitely wish rail travel was more viable and accessible in the US, it's got so much going for it.

This reminds me of our own security team, who as far as I can tell do nothing but run POC's of new security tools. And then maybe once a year actually buy one, generating a ton of work (for others) to replace the very similar tool they bought last year. Seems like a good gig.

At least in part, I don't have the time or energy to care anymore. In my 20s I loved reading long form articles on AnandTech about the latest chip or motherboard. Nowadays when the kids are in bed at 9:30 or later and I finally have a moment of downtime, I just want to watch a tv show with my wife and go to sleep.

I still think new hardware is neat but I don't have the mental bandwidth to follow it closely and in depth at this stage.

Extremely relatable post. I worked someplace that had a policy of absolutely never changing your Active Directory username because it was the primary key in like a dozen internal systems. Someone finally made a massive stink about it to HR when their name had legally changed but IT was forcing them to use their old name (and they were absolutely right to complain. It was a ridiculous policy only in place due to terrible architecture). They still defaulted to telling people no but they did at least document all the highly tedious manual steps necessary to change the name in all affected systems if (when) another employee refused to take no for an answer.

Was certainly a great lesson in schema design, among other things.

This would have been incredible. But I guess I get the angle of not wanting to risk pissing off the audiophile CTO paying you 10 figures per month. Cause he can TOTALLY hear the difference listening to Dark Side of the Moon on vinyl via Monster Cables.