6 ms·
Source of the recent outagelet
We have a list of phrases that get replaced in titles and their replacements (which can be the empty string if we simply want to remove something). A moderator accidentally added an identical pair to it.
- minimaxir 13y agoSo a tautology broke Hacker News?
- cypherpunks01 13y agoInfinite loop?
- glimcat 13y agoProbably used "while" instead of "for each" when matching.
- aaronem 13y agoPresumably a hit on any of the "before" keys triggers not just a replacement with the corresponding "after", but another pass through either a subset of the replacement list starting from the key that matched, or the entire replacement list from the top down; otherwise an identical pair wouldn't have a chance to be pathological.
- mikhael 13y agoi wonder whether other cycles would cause the same problem.
- jemka 13y agoI spent entirely too much time trying to parse 'outagelet'.
- tokenadult 13y agoMaybe this term "outagelet" should be added to list of terms to automatically replace in article titles.
- stormbrew 13y agoFor some reason my brain insists on adding an extra 'l' so it reads as "outlagelet" every time.
- abruzzi 13y agoyup. It took me literally several minutes before I saw the word "outage" in there for some reason. For some reason the non-word "gelet" overwhelmed my brain so I kept seeing out-a-gelet. Kind of like port-a-potty. Then I migrated to outa-gelet->ou-tage-let->o-utage-let->(I skipped ou-tagel-et because that looked like a german word sandwiched between two french words)->outage-let---eureka, where's my bath tub!
- IvyMike 13y agoI read "outragelet" which is something else that occasionally happens around here.
- keville 13y agoI guess "outagelet" is a replacement for "downtime".
- pg 13y agoIt wasn't straight downtime. For a while we were up but you couldn't submit stories or comments.
- samstave 13y agoIll get my team to incorporate this in their lexicon and include it in post mortems. Minimizes perceived downtime.
- kevinmchugh 13y agoI've seen this called badtime. Outagelet seems too cute, when I think of downtime as serious business. (TBF, that is when I am a paying consumer or a paid developer. I'm upset about neither the HN badtime nor the phrase outagelet.)
- ChristianMarks 13y agoA cute wordlet.
- gargarplex 13y agoA cousin of the Googlewhack.
- angersock 13y agoThese things happen. :)
- aalpbalkan 13y agoThat's why, have tests and a staging environment.
- adamb0mb1 13y agoThis is HackerNews. It's not called PerfectSoftwareDevelopmentPracticesInActionNews. Just saying.
- faddotio 13y agoBased on the nitpicking, I thought it was!
- aalpbalkan 13y agoI was able to keep a 10k/min request website up and running when I was 15. I feel sorry about who's taking care of this website.
- cia_plant 13y agoRight ... websites with tests and a staging environment never experience downtime.
- aalpbalkan 13y agoHmm, that sounds like quite n0nsense to me. Maybe it's because "less downtime" is better than "more downtime"?
- greatsuccess 13y agoWhy none of us should quit our day jobs...
- sokoloff 13y agoBut that's exactly what pg/YC wants you to do!
- United857 13y agoOut of curiosity, what are some of those phrases?
- lutusp 13y agoDon't know about phrases, but exclamation points are automatically removed, so "!" -> "" in this case. The problem arose because someone replaced an unidentified X with X, resulting in an infinite recursion.
- staunch 13y agoThings like "Top 10 Reasons X is Y" becomes "Reasons X is Y" I believe.
- elwell 13y agoFor a hardcoded list that is manually edited frequently, maybe a duplicate-safe data structure would be preferably. It might require an extra line to parse out duplicates, but at least a page won't fail if something like this happens again.
- spicyj 13y agoI'd assume that they've added a check for that now, but it's hard to predict beforehand what things will break.
- _pmf_ 13y ago> We have a list of phrases that get replaced in titles and their replacements (which can be the empty string if we simply want to remove something). A moderator accidentally added an identical pair to it. This should prove once and forever that tail recursion is dangerous and does not help with real world problems. Clearly, blowing up the stack would have been the appropriate and safer response here.
- rtpg 13y agoI think you mean that TCO is dangerous. Besides, this is probably more of an implementation problem. Do you really want to be applying a filter like this multiple times? If I had to implement this, I would just imagine that just taking your mapping, and for each key,value , do a title.replace(key,value). I would be a "good enough" solution , and in the worst case you still have human editors on HN.
- michaelt 13y agoIf you have one wordfilter to map "!"->"" and another to replace "cunt"->"asdf" and you got the input "cu!nt" what should the output be?
- rtpg 13y agogood point. I understood this to be more of a counter to non-malicious intent than otherwise.
- cousin_it 13y agoInterestingly, distinguishing between "non-loopy" and "potentially loopy" sets of rewrite rules seems to be equivalent to the halting problem :-( The key phrase would be "tag systems".
- mst 13y agoI'm not sure I particularly care so long as it produces some output before the heat death of the universe.
- 13y ago
- lutusp 13y ago"Outagelet"? That's too cute by half.
- aruggirello 13y agoissue: code 403 (Forbidden). I think you should do your best to always return an appropriate HTTP status header, and in this case it is status 503 (Service Temporarily Unavailable). You really want to reserve 403's for those pesky w00t w00ts :) , ' aNd 1=1 and the likes. Getting 403's with my personal account, but gaining (slow) access through another browser, I was convinced that the issue had to do with my account being blocked.
- kogir 13y agoIn this case using nginx allow and deny statements was much easier than doing bit fiddling in Lua and returning 503s. Any time spent researching other options would have been time not spent determining the problem. Often getting to the root of the problem as quickly as possible while simultaneously keeping the site up (practical) wins over always using correct HTTP response codes (pedantic).
- lucb1e 13y agoServing 403s to w00tw00ts is for casuals. Face those leet haxors!
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- mjcohen 13y agoYou just need enough cores so the infinite loop completes in a finite amount of time.