The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Not so DDoS

by Charles Robinson in Feature Articles on 2017-06-27

Joe K was a developer at a company that provided a SaaS Natural Language Processing system. As Chief Engineer of the Data Science Team (a term that make him feel like some sort of mad professor), his duties included coding the Data Science Service. It provided the back-end for handling the complex, heavy-lifting type of processing that had to happen in real-time. Since it was very CPU-intensive, Joe spent a lot of time trying to battle latency. But that was the least of his problems.

The rest of the codebase was a cobbled-together mess that had been coded by the NLP researchers- scientists with no background in programming or computer science. Their mantra was “If it gets us the results we need, who cares how it looks behind the scenes?” This meant Joe’s well-designed data service somehow had to interface with applications made from a pile of ugly hacks. It was difficult at times, but he managed to get the job done while also keeping CPU usage to a minimum.

26 comments - Last comment @ 11:28

Plurals Dones Rights

by Ellis Morning in CodeSOD on 2017-06-26

Today, submitter Adam shows us how thoughtless language assumptions made by programmers are also hilarious language assumptions:

39 comments - Last comment @ 13:09

Perfectly Logical

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2017-06-23

"Outlook can't open an attachment because it claims that it was made in Outlook, which Outlook doesn't think is installed...or something," writes Gavin.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2017-06-26

I Need More Space

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2017-06-22

Shawn W. was a newbie support tech at a small company. Just as he was beginning to familiarize himself with its operational quirks, he got a call from Jim: The Big Boss.

57 comments - Last comment @ 2017-06-26

A Lazy Cat

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2017-06-21

The innermost circle of Hell, as we all know, is trying to resolve printer driver issues for all eternity. Ben doesn’t work with the printers that we mere mortals deal with on a regular basis, though. He runs a printing press, three stories of spinning steel and plates and ink and rolls of paper that could crush a man.

Like most things, the press runs Linux- a highly customized, modified version of Linux. It’s a system that needs to be carefully configured, as “disaster recovery” has a slightly different meaning on this kind of heavy equipment. The documentation, while thorough and mostly clear, was obviously prepared by someone who speaks English as a second language. Thus, Ben wanted to check the shell scripts to better understand what they did.

28 comments - Last comment @ 2017-06-25

The CMS From Hell

by Jane Bailey in Feature Articles on 2017-06-20

Contracting can be really hit or miss. Sometimes, you're given a desk and equipment and treated just like an employee, except better paid and exempt from team-building exercises. Sometimes, however, you're isolated in your home office, never speaking to anyone, working on tedious, boring crap they can't convince their normal staff to do.

22 comments - Last comment @ 2017-06-26

Highly Functional

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2017-06-19

For a brief period of time, say, about 3–4 years ago, if you wanted to sound really smart, you’d bring up “functional programming”. Name-dropping LISP or even better, Haskell during an interview marked you as a cut above the hoi polloi. Even I, surly and too smart for this, fell into the trap of calling JavaScript “LISP with curly braces”, just because it had closures.

Still, functional programming features have percolated through other languages because they work. They’re another tool for the job, and like any tool, when used by the inexpert, someone might lose a finger. Or perhaps someone should lose a finger, if only as a warning to others.

36 comments - Last comment @ 2017-06-24

@TitleOfErrord

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2017-06-16

"I asked my son, @Firstname, and he is indeed rather @Emotion about going to @ThemePark!" wrote Chris @LASTNAME.

33 comments - Last comment @ 2017-06-22