5 ms·
> "When did this start? A few days ago, you said, but did anything change in your systems at that time?" > "Well, the consultant came in and patched our serve
by js2 5y ago
> "When did this start? A
few days ago, you said, but did anything change in your systems at that time?"
> "Well, the consultant came in and patched our server and rebooted it.
> Having established that--unbelievably--the problem as reported was true,
and repeatable
As far as problems go, this is an easy one to solve. Accurate description of the problem. Accurate reporting of what changed. Problem is consistently repeatable.
Compared to a problem that doesn’t reliably reproduce and for which the person reporting it claims nothing changed, this one is child’s play.
But it’s still amusing to read every time.
I had something similar occur in the early 2000s on a patch release of Solaris 2.6 (I think) where the sleep call was broken and would always return almost instantly. This caused all sorts of weird behaviors on the running system.
I also recall the first time I ran into an issue with MTU on a dedicated frame relay link we had to admin our web farm in the late nineties. One day a developer reported they could login to our bastion but when they ran “ls -l” in a big enough directory their ssh connection would hang. It turned out the connection would hang whenever a packet was generated near the MTU and we eventually tracked it down to an issue with the frame relay connection. We played with MTUs until we found out what worked. It then took a while to convince our provider what was going on but they eventually replaced a line card on the far end of the connection which allowed us to re-raise the MTU to 1500.
Another fun problem I had was an email to SMS gateway I wrote for myself that worked by posting to a Verizon web form. I developed it on a Mac (probably 2002 or so) where it worked fine but when I deployed it to my Linux box on my same home network, the script couldn’t connect to Verizon’s site. It turned out the Linux box was a setting a flag on the TCP connection (ECN I think) that was tripping up Verizon’s web firewall. The work-around was disabling ECN on the Linux box.
- ethbr0 5y ago> Compared to a problem that doesn’t reliably reproduce and for which the person reporting it claims nothing changed, this one is child’s play. You forgot +inaccurate reporting of the problem. We had an employee in IT at a client who would tell us "It's broken." This went on, for every report, for three years, with us asking the same follow-up questions every time. For who, in what way, when doing what, what changed, etc. As far as I know, that individual still works there. People like that are the best argument for why a basic income and removing some folks from the workforce would increase efficiency.
- dataflow 5y agoThe point of basic income isn't to remove anyone from the workforce though; it's to decouple people's basic necessities from their work. They'll still want to work to get a more comfortable lifestyle. In fact it seems entirely plausible to me that the less people have to stress about basic necessities, the more they could focus on work.
- ethbr0 5y agoYour statement converts to 'no one will be satisfied with basic necessities." Which is false, in my experience. Some people absolutely will be, and they won't work.
- dataflow 5y agoNot quite. I'm not saying that won't happen for anyone. I'm saying that's not the goal, nor would it be necessarily true for the kind of person mentioned.
- ethbr0 5y agoFair, but I think it's a good bet to say that people who aren't (for lack of a better word) "present" at their jobs would be perfectly fine not being there, if they weren't required to be. And I know HN is fairly skewed towards people who want more from life, but there's a lot of people who just don't. And I feel like they'd be over-represented in an opt-out-of-work cohort, if a basic income allowed for it. I don't imagine a person like that goes into work saying "I'm going to do a bad job today." I think they just don't value the work they do enough to try to do it well. And they'd rather not, if that were an option.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]