[HN Gopher] 1195725856 and other mysterious numbers
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1195725856 and other mysterious numbers
Author : hprotagonist
Score : 285 points
Date : 2020-01-13 16:49 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (chrisdown.name)
(TXT) w3m dump (chrisdown.name)
| rys wrote:
| https://chrisdown.name/2020/01/13/1195725856-other-mysteriou...
|
| That seems to be the URL now.
| irrational wrote:
| "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.
| woobar wrote:
| Sometimes it pays to experiment a little. We had a similar
| annual performance reviews in an old BigCo. Everyone had to
| write a paragraph of text for 8-10 goals, plus an overall self-
| review. Then a manager had to review and provide comment for
| each section. I put something like "I think I did alright this
| year" in overall comment, and ignored other goals. Later during
| performance convo I saw that my manager put "Agree" as his
| comment, and told me that my review was easiest to do. No one
| really cared about that shit (with the exception of PIP).
| LifeLiverTransp wrote:
| Its the same crap every year- train a neuralconvo to write it,
| replace the names with variables.
|
| Reviewing something already near fitting is actually easier
| then writting it.
| the_watcher wrote:
| When I still had to do these, I hated the actual experience of
| writing them at first, as at FB you were pretty strongly pushed
| to quantify _everything_. While this made some amount of sense
| to me, I wasn't naturally thinking of my work throughout the
| half in terms of how I'd quantify it. I also quickly realized
| the value (to my ultimate rating) of quantification in that I
| often my collected metrics directly referenced in my review
| (saving your manager time is helpful!)
|
| I never got to the point of not strongly disliking the
| experience of writing reviews, but I was able to make things a
| lot easier for myself by regularly sharing anything
| quantifiable related to my work, since I could just look back
| at what I had shared. It also worked decently well as a forcing
| function, as I used the heuristic "feels like I have shared
| anything quantifiable in a while" for "am I sure I'm working on
| something valuable?"
|
| Note that the above is purely about how I managed the actual
| experience of writing reviews as an IC at FB, not whether or
| not it's optimal. My personal opinion is probably that it's a
| wildly suboptimal system that's still orders of magnitude more
| effective than not having one at all (for me).
| lowdose wrote:
| Take notes along the way.
| pkaye wrote:
| So happy I'm in a small team right now... I used to really hate
| doing this as an engineering manager. I had to do it for seven
| engineers plus submit one for my manager and one for a peer.
| And then I had to coach my team members on their peer reviews.
| And for each review you had to fill out a paragraph on seven
| topics some of which sounds similar. And then I have to clarify
| any major discrepancies between my review and two peer reviews
| for each engineer. And HR seems to reinvent the forms every
| year.
| bb88 wrote:
| That's because they want the goals of the business to align
| with the goals of your team. Non-technical managers can't
| read software nor can they talk the talk, so this is the
| primary way of making sure every employee rows the same
| direction.
| phkahler wrote:
| But most engineers treat it as a bullshit exercise and its
| hard to see how that helps anyone. Maybe we need more
| technical managers?
| bb88 wrote:
| Well the result is already pre-determined, typically --
| the manager knows how he's going to review the team. So
| yeah, it is bullshit.
| jcims wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jcims wrote:
| The headspace i get into when dictating is that I'm on
| the phone with someone explaining it. I can pretty easily
| get lost in the stream of consciousness and the resulting
| text definitely needs tightening up before shipping.
|
| I think my biggest problem with writing is that i can't
| get into the conversational flow and build sentences
| block by block. It's exhausting.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| I'm glad you've found a solution, then. For me I can get
| to the same headspace by deliberately writing chattily
| and typing out stuff like "so, like, then maybe we
| wanna..."
| jcims wrote:
| Do you type fast? I wonder if it could be as simple as i
| type too slow to ride the word wave.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| I'm in the middle, I think.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Do it little by little throughout the year. I keep a work log.
| At the end of every week I take 60 seconds or less to write
| down what I accomplished that week. By the time review season
| rolls around, I have all the content I need. No need to
| dread/sweat it.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Totally agree. These exercises suck because they are obvious
| wastes of time that are often ignored, but cannot be done
| frivolously as they have impact on real things sometimes.
|
| As a manager in one particularly toxic org, you had to strike a
| balance where you showed constant forward motion, but not too
| much. Too little and you'd be tortured with meetings with a
| PMO, too much progress, you'd be declared a genius and the PMO
| would either appoint you as a "champion" to get shit done or
| take your people away.
| freepor wrote:
| It's no more a waste to write these than it's a waste for
| servers to use disk space writing out logs.
| __david__ wrote:
| Server logs are not manually written by humans. Obviously
| no one is worried about the disk space. I'm ok with wasting
| cpu cycles writing something that might never be read but
| wasting humans time is just rude. [I don't thrive in
| bureaucratic environments so my perspective may be skewed]
| decebalus1 wrote:
| > These exercises suck because they are obvious wastes of
| time that are often ignored, but cannot be done frivolously
| as they have impact on real things sometimes.
|
| Not really. They're ammo for whatever the manager wants to do
| with the target of your review. Management can spin this
| feedback to fit the agenda. They can also serve as a paper
| trail for managing someone out.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| "Maximum business jargon"? Is that autocorrect run amok? If
| not, what's the rationale for it?
| the_jeremy wrote:
| Business doesn't care that you upgraded to Python3. They care
| that you "integrated legacy software into a more performant
| and secure runtime environment" (or whatever; I suck at
| jargon).
| irrational wrote:
| My manager is 100% a business person. He doesn't
| know/understand tech jargon at all. If it isn't full of
| phrases like "breakthrough strategies", "proactively engage",
| "future possibilities", "cultivates innovation", "compelling
| picture of the vision", etc. (these are real examples from
| his template of what he wants our versions to look like) then
| we will be sent back to rework it until it is sufficiently
| obtuse.
| stallmanite wrote:
| From an actual time / money standpoint isn't generating BS
| actually useless? I don't understand the fetish so-called
| business people have for it. Can anyone make the business
| case? Why isn't market competition culling this behavior?
| storyinmemo wrote:
| Meanwhile, four years ago at Facebook :)
|
| http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2016/02/21/malloc/
| salgernon wrote:
| 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.
| rachelbythebay wrote:
| "Production hosts". "NFS traffic". How quickly we regress.
| mc3 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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, 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 and
| on.
| AdamJacobMuller wrote:
| Are you suggesting you think NFS is never suitable for
| production use?
| peterwwillis wrote:
| 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.
| lonelappde wrote:
| TL;DR on the annoyingly vague title: they are short ASCII strings
| encoded as integers.
| stanferder wrote:
| 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.
| mzs wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Impressive! Before I clicked I thought this was going to be
| an(other) article about number theory!
| thestoicattack wrote:
| printf "%x" 1195725856 will save you one bc process.
| martincmartin wrote:
| _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]
| wolf550e wrote:
| Also see this about the same topic:
| https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2016/10/07/magic/
| lelf wrote:
| And related HN discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13132688
| mzs wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| tsss wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It was an interesting story. And they already established that
| they were trying to procrastinate.
| pvtmert wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| oh wow, this is why I got these esoteric errors in my dmesg?
| lloydde wrote:
| The link above doesn't work for me, but the following one does:
| https://chrisdown.name/2020/01/13/1195725856-other-mysteriou...
| cdown wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Still down for me :/
|
| EDIT: My browser cached your redirect. Opened in private and
| I'm OK now.
| rachelbythebay wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What is procprint? Googling didn't get me anything that seemed
| relevant, a company in Brazil and some SAS references.
| coryfklein wrote:
| Parent sounds like an FB engineer, so probably a tool for
| internal use only.
| notacoward wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >SATAN against our hosts
|
| oh, well...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-36_(missile)
| teddyh wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_Administrator_Tool_fo.
| ..
| anon1253 wrote:
| That might be worth spending the half a day if you can get some
| bug bounty money for those bugs!
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(page generated 2020-01-13 23:00 UTC)