10 ms·

1195725856 and other mysterious numbers

426 points by hprotagonist 7y ago

lloydde 7y ago
The link above doesn’t work for me, but the following one does: https://chrisdown.name/2020/01/13/1195725856-other-mysterious-numbers.html https://chrisdown.name/2020/01/13/1195725856-other-mysteriou...
- cdown 7y ago
  I had no idea anyone would find this so fast, so I thought it would be safe to change the url to match the final title before posting anywhere -- how wrong I was. It's back now. Thanks!
  - ar_lan 7y ago
    Still down for me :/ EDIT: My browser cached your redirect. Opened in private and I'm OK now.
rys 7y ago
https://chrisdown.name/2020/01/13/1195725856-other-mysterious-numbers.html https://chrisdown.name/2020/01/13/1195725856-other-mysteriou... That seems to be the URL now.
irrational 7y ago
"Last week was the final week for this half’s performance review at Facebook, where we write summaries of work and impact we and our peers had over the last half year. Naturally, that can only mean one thing: the entire company trends towards peak levels of procrastination, doing literally anything and everything to avoid the unspeakable horror of having to write a few paragraphs of text." Ugh, I can relate so strongly. Right now I'm supposed to be filling out my mid-year performance sheet, including team success goals, team player actions, effective communicator actions, achieving business results actions, business goals, personal goals, individual development plan, etc. I've been working on it for 2 days and have hardly anything done. This kind of work is so incredibly difficult for me. It is supposed to be written with maximum business jargon. I'd rather put in a week of all nighters writing some code than working on this.
- jcims 7y ago
  One thing that helps me is to dictate it into some kind of speech to text system. Or just record it and transcribe later. You’ll still hate it but the content will be there at least.
  - iudqnolq 7y ago
    That's a great idea, I'll have to try it. As a student, what helps me with similar is calling something a "zeroth draft" and just writing whatever crap comes to my mind along with my opinions on the whole process (plenty of them contain lines like "this prompt is so dumb..."). I've found once I have a few pages of crap I'm not paralyzed by where to start anymore. Plus I've never been good at outlining, so I have to write to see how to structure what I'm writing. The zeroth draft is ideally completely thrown out, but in the worst case it can be tweaked and improved and handed in if there's no time left.
    - blotter_paper 7y ago
      I know of no studies to back this up, but based on anecdotal interactions I strongly believe that some people have an easier time writing off the cuff and others have an easier time speaking. I've known people who could speak in complex sentences but lacked the ability to write without significantly more time, and others who could write on the spot but would trip over their words when speaking. I think you and GP are describing approximately the same method of drafting, and which one works better will be highly dependant upon the individual. I don't think I'm contradicting anything you said, just adding my own thoughts.
      - iudqnolq 7y ago
        That makes a lot of sense. I weakly believe I'm better at speaking off the cuff, but can "cheat" this by writing a stream of consciousness like how I'd talk. A similar-ish technique for when I'm stuck trying to figure out how to phrase something: rubber duck saying it without the constraint of needing it to sound fancy/formal/academic/smart, and then remove all the "likes" and make it concise.
rachelbythebay 7y ago
“Production hosts”. “NFS traffic”. How quickly we regress.
- AdamJacobMuller 7y ago
  Are you suggesting you think NFS is never suitable for production use?
  - peterwwillis 7y ago
    Depends what you mean. If you mean "can you use it in production", sure. If you mean "should you use it in production", no, never.
- mc3 7y ago
  Interesting comment, but for those of use who don't do infra but are curious, what is the problem with NFS, and what do you use instead? My ears always prick up when someone says ... or implies ... to not use something in production!
  - peterwwillis 7y ago
    Start with the second answer: don't use network filesystems for production, period. To explain that you explain the first answer: network filesystems are flaky, applications and operations that depend on them often come up with weird bugs, they aren't very fast, they aren't very secure, they introduce problematic dependencies and problematic design patterns. There are locking issues, time sync issues, permission mapping issues, there are bugs in kernel and usermode drivers, there are conflicts between clients and servers from different vendors, there are bugs in implementations of standards (and different standard versions), there are varying degrees of support, there is always an intermittent network outage that causes hard to detect bugs, you have to decide between hard and soft process locking for i/o threads, performance turning for either throughput or speed, sync or async, export security rules, encryption or no encryption (and does everything you use support it), to say nothing of dedicated or shared network gear, finding an admin to run your expensive enterprise gear implementing the server (open source nfs implementations are a joke and lack critical features), or basic maintenance like expanding storage or replication. The list goes on and on.
wolf550e 7y ago
Also see this about the same topic: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2016/10/07/magic/ https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2016/10/07/magic/
- lelf 7y ago
  And related HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13132688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13132688
- mzs 7y ago
  good idea for the timestamps too > I guess this means 1213486160 is going on my list of magic numbers. Also, it means that 2008-06-14 23:29:20 UTC is, in a strange sense, "HTTP time". If you see either that number or that date (with possible adjustments for your local time zone) showing up in your life inexplicably, this might just be why.
lonelappde 7y ago
TL;DR on the annoyingly vague title: they are short ASCII strings encoded as integers.
- stanferder 7y ago
  It's a shibboleth. The joy experienced by someone who's already "in the circle" for 1195725856 justifies the vagueness. For those who aren't, the post brings them in on the joke.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
rachelbythebay 7y ago
Someone owes me a steak if the thing sending GETs and HEADs (and/or fb303 calls) to any listening port on Facebook machines turns out to be procprint. Also, we did this debugging. Years ago.
- rrauenza 7y ago
  What is procprint? Googling didn't get me anything that seemed relevant, a company in Brazil and some SAS references.
  - coryfklein 7y ago
    Parent sounds like an FB engineer, so probably a tool for internal use only.
  - rachelbythebay 7y ago
    It's an internal FB thing. But the post was about that, too. (No, I don't work there... any more.)
martincmartin 7y ago
Maybe we should start printing ASCII in future in some of the error paths... I work on image processing; when we get an image we don't recognize, we print out the first few bytes in hex & ascii. Often, it's an error message or HTML error page. The user's code takes the results of an HTTP fetch and sends it to us, forgetting to check for errors.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
notacoward 7y ago
I remember fixing a bunch of bugs in 1990 because someone started running SATAN against our hosts and there mere act of sending ill-formed requests to various ports would cause the associated daemons to crash. What's amazing is that this still happens. In half a day I'll bet I could find at least a dozen super popular services that can be crashed by sending random data to one of their network ports using a default configuration.
- gdhfgh 7y ago
  >SATAN against our hosts oh, well... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-36_(missile) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-36_(missile)
  - teddyh 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_Administrator_Tool_for_Analyzing_Networks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_Administrator_Tool_fo...
- anon1253 7y ago
  That might be worth spending the half a day if you can get some bug bounty money for those bugs!
- serf 7y ago
  I still wear my SATAN tshirt monthly. Thanks for reminding me that other folks are old, too. I hadn't heard anyone mention it in years.
mzs 7y ago
Before I click: $ echo 'obase=16; 1195725856' | bc | xxd -r -ps | od -cb 0000000 G E T 107 105 124 040 0000004 $ Looks like HTTP.
- mc3 7y ago
  Impressive! Before I clicked I thought this was going to be an(other) article about number theory!
- thestoicattack 7y ago
  printf "%x" 1195725856 will save you one bc process.
  - mzs 7y ago
    even better, thanks $ printf '%032x\n' 1213486160 542393671 | xxd -r -ps | xxd -g4 -c16 00000000: 00000000 00000000 00000000 48545450 ............HTTP 00000010: 00000000 00000000 00000000 20544547 ............ TEG $
- d0mine 7y ago
  Python >>> 1195725856 .to_bytes(4, 'big') b'GET '
storyinmemo 7y ago
Meanwhile, four years ago at Facebook :) http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2016/02/21/malloc/ http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2016/02/21/malloc/
- salgernon 7y ago
  This is a good takeway from that page: > I guess this means 1213486160 is going on my list of magic numbers. Also, it means that 2008-06-14 23:29:20 UTC is, in a strange sense, "HTTP time". If you see either that number or that date (with possible adjustments for your local time zone) showing up in your life inexplicably, this might just be why.
tsss 7y ago
So his first instinct was to waste hours on this debugging instead of just googling the error message and finding the cause within seconds?
- JoBrad 7y ago
  It was an interesting story. And they already established that they were trying to procrastinate.
- hinkley 7y ago
  I've generally been of the Don't Reinvent the Wheel school of programming for a long time. However, I've been digging into Jonathan Blow videos again and he seems to be pretty worried lately about how little time developers spend working on fundamentals, and I agree that is either a problem, or will become one soon enough. I haven't quite figured out how to incorporate that into my philosophy. I'm still pretty damn sure I don't want your exercise in fundamentals to be running in production, but I also don't want to be surrounded by people who only know how to look things up.
pvtmert 7y ago
on the other side, i use my name as magic number (4 chars) so both hex and dec representations got me (close numbers) many protocols and simple ciphers use similar methods btw.
stevefan1999 7y ago
oh wow, this is why I got these esoteric errors in my dmesg?
femto113 7y ago
I've always been weirded out by C's 4 character constants, but they're useful for this sort of thing: printf("%d\n", 'GET ') 1195725856
asiachick 7y ago
> the entire company trends towards peak levels of procrastination, doing literally anything and everything to avoid the unspeakable horror of having to write a few paragraphs of text. ;-) the entire company trends towards peak levels of procrastination, doing literally anything and everything to avoid the unspeakable horror of having to write a few paragraphs of BS marketing speak ads for their fellow employees there, fixed that for ya. I hate perf! All want to say is Jill does great work, Joe does ok work. Bill might need to work on something else has he doesn't seem into it. Instead I'm told to write several paragraphs of ad copy trying to make unique and interesting sentences that don't sound the same but basically all say the same thing "Jane does good work". They want specifics like "Vlad's work on the ABC protocol really took things to the next level. If it had not been for his tireless effort on the ABC protocol discussion list it's likely a different spec would have been ratified and we'd all be stuck with 6 months more work in our implementation." Now (1) I didn't actually know that because I was head down working on my own stuff so I had to go spend time 30 minutes looking that shit up and (2) That's one out of 6 paragraphs, and everyone better sound completely unique like it was meant to be presented in a magazine. And, when it's all done it was worthless. What I wanted to write "Vlad's great, he does good work and I like working with him" Is all they really wanted to here but the "process" is instead a huge waste of time for everyone.

426 points by hprotagonist 7y ago

The link above doesn’t work for me, but the following one does: https://chrisdown.name/2020/01/13/1195725856-other-mysterious-numbers.html https://chrisdown.name/2020/01/13/1195725856-other-mysteriou...

cdown 7y ago
I had no idea anyone would find this so fast, so I thought it would be safe to change the url to match the final title before posting anywhere -- how wrong I was. It's back now. Thanks!
- ar_lan 7y ago
  Still down for me :/ EDIT: My browser cached your redirect. Opened in private and I'm OK now.

rys 7y ago

https://chrisdown.name/2020/01/13/1195725856-other-mysterious-numbers.html https://chrisdown.name/2020/01/13/1195725856-other-mysteriou... That seems to be the URL now.

irrational 7y ago

"Last week was the final week for this half’s performance review at Facebook, where we write summaries of work and impact we and our peers had over the last half year. Naturally, that can only mean one thing: the entire company trends towards peak levels of procrastination, doing literally anything and everything to avoid the unspeakable horror of having to write a few paragraphs of text." Ugh, I can relate so strongly. Right now I'm supposed to be filling out my mid-year performance sheet, including team success goals, team player actions, effective communicator actions, achieving business results actions, business goals, personal goals, individual development plan, etc. I've been working on it for 2 days and have hardly anything done. This kind of work is so incredibly difficult for me. It is supposed to be written with maximum business jargon. I'd rather put in a week of all nighters writing some code than working on this.

jcims 7y ago
One thing that helps me is to dictate it into some kind of speech to text system. Or just record it and transcribe later. You’ll still hate it but the content will be there at least.
- iudqnolq 7y ago
  That's a great idea, I'll have to try it. As a student, what helps me with similar is calling something a "zeroth draft" and just writing whatever crap comes to my mind along with my opinions on the whole process (plenty of them contain lines like "this prompt is so dumb..."). I've found once I have a few pages of crap I'm not paralyzed by where to start anymore. Plus I've never been good at outlining, so I have to write to see how to structure what I'm writing. The zeroth draft is ideally completely thrown out, but in the worst case it can be tweaked and improved and handed in if there's no time left.
  - blotter_paper 7y ago
    I know of no studies to back this up, but based on anecdotal interactions I strongly believe that some people have an easier time writing off the cuff and others have an easier time speaking. I've known people who could speak in complex sentences but lacked the ability to write without significantly more time, and others who could write on the spot but would trip over their words when speaking. I think you and GP are describing approximately the same method of drafting, and which one works better will be highly dependant upon the individual. I don't think I'm contradicting anything you said, just adding my own thoughts.
    - iudqnolq 7y ago
      That makes a lot of sense. I weakly believe I'm better at speaking off the cuff, but can "cheat" this by writing a stream of consciousness like how I'd talk. A similar-ish technique for when I'm stuck trying to figure out how to phrase something: rubber duck saying it without the constraint of needing it to sound fancy/formal/academic/smart, and then remove all the "likes" and make it concise.

rachelbythebay 7y ago

“Production hosts”. “NFS traffic”. How quickly we regress.

AdamJacobMuller 7y ago
Are you suggesting you think NFS is never suitable for production use?
- peterwwillis 7y ago
  Depends what you mean. If you mean "can you use it in production", sure. If you mean "should you use it in production", no, never.
mc3 7y ago
Interesting comment, but for those of use who don't do infra but are curious, what is the problem with NFS, and what do you use instead? My ears always prick up when someone says ... or implies ... to not use something in production!
- peterwwillis 7y ago
  Start with the second answer: don't use network filesystems for production, period. To explain that you explain the first answer: network filesystems are flaky, applications and operations that depend on them often come up with weird bugs, they aren't very fast, they aren't very secure, they introduce problematic dependencies and problematic design patterns. There are locking issues, time sync issues, permission mapping issues, there are bugs in kernel and usermode drivers, there are conflicts between clients and servers from different vendors, there are bugs in implementations of standards (and different standard versions), there are varying degrees of support, there is always an intermittent network outage that causes hard to detect bugs, you have to decide between hard and soft process locking for i/o threads, performance turning for either throughput or speed, sync or async, export security rules, encryption or no encryption (and does everything you use support it), to say nothing of dedicated or shared network gear, finding an admin to run your expensive enterprise gear implementing the server (open source nfs implementations are a joke and lack critical features), or basic maintenance like expanding storage or replication. The list goes on and on.

wolf550e 7y ago

Also see this about the same topic: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2016/10/07/magic/ https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2016/10/07/magic/

lelf 7y ago
And related HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13132688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13132688
mzs 7y ago
good idea for the timestamps too > I guess this means 1213486160 is going on my list of magic numbers. Also, it means that 2008-06-14 23:29:20 UTC is, in a strange sense, "HTTP time". If you see either that number or that date (with possible adjustments for your local time zone) showing up in your life inexplicably, this might just be why.

lonelappde 7y ago

TL;DR on the annoyingly vague title: they are short ASCII strings encoded as integers.

stanferder 7y ago
It's a shibboleth. The joy experienced by someone who's already "in the circle" for 1195725856 justifies the vagueness. For those who aren't, the post brings them in on the joke.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

rachelbythebay 7y ago

Someone owes me a steak if the thing sending GETs and HEADs (and/or fb303 calls) to any listening port on Facebook machines turns out to be procprint. Also, we did this debugging. Years ago.

rrauenza 7y ago
What is procprint? Googling didn't get me anything that seemed relevant, a company in Brazil and some SAS references.
- coryfklein 7y ago
  Parent sounds like an FB engineer, so probably a tool for internal use only.
- rachelbythebay 7y ago
  It's an internal FB thing. But the post was about that, too. (No, I don't work there... any more.)

martincmartin 7y ago

Maybe we should start printing ASCII in future in some of the error paths... I work on image processing; when we get an image we don't recognize, we print out the first few bytes in hex & ascii. Often, it's an error message or HTML error page. The user's code takes the results of an HTTP fetch and sends it to us, forgetting to check for errors.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

notacoward 7y ago

I remember fixing a bunch of bugs in 1990 because someone started running SATAN against our hosts and there mere act of sending ill-formed requests to various ports would cause the associated daemons to crash. What's amazing is that this still happens. In half a day I'll bet I could find at least a dozen super popular services that can be crashed by sending random data to one of their network ports using a default configuration.

gdhfgh 7y ago
>SATAN against our hosts oh, well... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-36_(missile) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-36_(missile)
- teddyh 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_Administrator_Tool_for_Analyzing_Networks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_Administrator_Tool_fo...
anon1253 7y ago
That might be worth spending the half a day if you can get some bug bounty money for those bugs!
serf 7y ago
I still wear my SATAN tshirt monthly. Thanks for reminding me that other folks are old, too. I hadn't heard anyone mention it in years.

mzs 7y ago

Before I click: $ echo 'obase=16; 1195725856' | bc | xxd -r -ps | od -cb 0000000 G E T 107 105 124 040 0000004 $ Looks like HTTP.

mc3 7y ago
Impressive! Before I clicked I thought this was going to be an(other) article about number theory!
thestoicattack 7y ago
printf "%x" 1195725856 will save you one bc process.
- mzs 7y ago
  even better, thanks $ printf '%032x\n' 1213486160 542393671 | xxd -r -ps | xxd -g4 -c16 00000000: 00000000 00000000 00000000 48545450 ............HTTP 00000010: 00000000 00000000 00000000 20544547 ............ TEG $
d0mine 7y ago
Python >>> 1195725856 .to_bytes(4, 'big') b'GET '

storyinmemo 7y ago

Meanwhile, four years ago at Facebook :) http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2016/02/21/malloc/ http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2016/02/21/malloc/

salgernon 7y ago
This is a good takeway from that page: > I guess this means 1213486160 is going on my list of magic numbers. Also, it means that 2008-06-14 23:29:20 UTC is, in a strange sense, "HTTP time". If you see either that number or that date (with possible adjustments for your local time zone) showing up in your life inexplicably, this might just be why.

tsss 7y ago

So his first instinct was to waste hours on this debugging instead of just googling the error message and finding the cause within seconds?

JoBrad 7y ago
It was an interesting story. And they already established that they were trying to procrastinate.
hinkley 7y ago
I've generally been of the Don't Reinvent the Wheel school of programming for a long time. However, I've been digging into Jonathan Blow videos again and he seems to be pretty worried lately about how little time developers spend working on fundamentals, and I agree that is either a problem, or will become one soon enough. I haven't quite figured out how to incorporate that into my philosophy. I'm still pretty damn sure I don't want your exercise in fundamentals to be running in production, but I also don't want to be surrounded by people who only know how to look things up.

pvtmert 7y ago

on the other side, i use my name as magic number (4 chars) so both hex and dec representations got me (close numbers) many protocols and simple ciphers use similar methods btw.

stevefan1999 7y ago

oh wow, this is why I got these esoteric errors in my dmesg?

femto113 7y ago

I've always been weirded out by C's 4 character constants, but they're useful for this sort of thing: printf("%d\n", 'GET ') 1195725856

asiachick 7y ago

> the entire company trends towards peak levels of procrastination, doing literally anything and everything to avoid the unspeakable horror of having to write a few paragraphs of text. ;-) the entire company trends towards peak levels of procrastination, doing literally anything and everything to avoid the unspeakable horror of having to write a few paragraphs of BS marketing speak ads for their fellow employees there, fixed that for ya. I hate perf! All want to say is Jill does great work, Joe does ok work. Bill might need to work on something else has he doesn't seem into it. Instead I'm told to write several paragraphs of ad copy trying to make unique and interesting sentences that don't sound the same but basically all say the same thing "Jane does good work". They want specifics like "Vlad's work on the ABC protocol really took things to the next level. If it had not been for his tireless effort on the ABC protocol discussion list it's likely a different spec would have been ratified and we'd all be stuck with 6 months more work in our implementation." Now (1) I didn't actually know that because I was head down working on my own stuff so I had to go spend time 30 minutes looking that shit up and (2) That's one out of 6 paragraphs, and everyone better sound completely unique like it was meant to be presented in a magazine. And, when it's all done it was worthless. What I wanted to write "Vlad's great, he does good work and I like working with him" Is all they really wanted to here but the "process" is instead a huge waste of time for everyone.