• bvs23bkv33 (unregistered)

    this comment isn't broken, no need to fix it now

  • my name is missing (unregistered)

    This comment was assembled by requesting individual letters from Mechanical Turk people, sending to politicians, using the third letter from each response, write a novel in which each villain's first name spells out the contents of a C program that when run writes out a php script that when run orders a machine from amazon where the instruction manual contains nothing of interest and the comment was generated by a guru intern on a mountaintop.

  • 🤷 (unregistered)

    Hopefully the anonymous intern now has a job that pays well. That's quite a feat he pulled off there.

  • Peter Wolff (unregistered)

    Maybe that intern was a mathematician (maybe student)?

    Programs that ran, actually did what they were expected to do, and did so flawlessly and with every possible (ab)use case taken account of, were quite common back when most programmers were mathematicians.

    (It took a lot longer to get software into production then, and software was much more expensive, but that just demonstrates that you get what you pay for (money and patience).

  • Andrew Falanga (unregistered)

    This is one of the best I've read in a while. I enjoyed this. I'm currently in school to be an Applied Mathematician. During the last semester, I took "Intro. to Computational Math." This quote from today's article, " Code, in these contexts, is written to answer specific questions, driven more by mathematics than program design. That’s a polite way of saying that the vast majority of the code is unreadable nonsense that no one can explain." is absolutely correct. Having been a programming now for nearly 20 years, I have come to appreciate descriptive variable names. The tendency of applied mathematicians to write their code as though working the problem on scratch paper is humorous at best. 'x', after all, is hard to write, emboldened, if working with a vector and scalars may often have subtle properties that aren't properly conveyed with 'x'. Then, there's the case of writing your function, f(x), which must use g(x) for computation, but in the context g(x) doesn't warrant it's own function. The possibilities are endless.

  • (nodebb)

    It's a good thing they can pass this off as a cloud transition. Other places mandate that you use PaaS, which means stuff has to be rewritten. And once again I ask, what was the point of going to the cloud? There's software, it works perfectly, on premise hardware probably costs next to nothing, there's no need for 99.99% uptime. What is it with people and blindly following cults???

  • (nodebb) in reply to bvs23bkv33

    Error on line 1: expected 'frist'

  • Brian Boorman (google)

    I don't believe the story. Several MySQL interfaces in PHP have been deprecated over the years and throw loud warnings into the middle of generated output - mysql_connect() being one of them. If this story is true, then the real WTF is a cloud provider offering a new service with a 10 year old PHP installation.

  • Dave (unregistered) in reply to Mr. TA

    There's little more expensive in IT than running your own hardware. Oh, to start with you have a server in a broom cupboard or some such, but before you know it you'll have dedicated facilities and staff. Maybe a new building.

    I've seen smallish companies spending quarter of a million quid a year running an email server etc, when Google would charge a thousand or so for the same. It was barmy, but they'd got to that point incrementally.

  • WilliamF (unregistered)

    Eric Veach, now a distinguished software engineer at Google, wrote GLUTesselator as an intern at SGI in 1991, and it's still in GLU and used by graphics code worldwide, including my project.

    https://github.com/mbebenita/GLUTesselator/blob/master/src/tess.h

  • 🤷 (unregistered) in reply to Brian Boorman

    If this story is true, then the real WTF is a cloud provider offering a new service with a 10 year old PHP installation.

    Boy do I have news for you.... also, there's nothing indicating that they host this stuff externally. They might just as well run their own servers.

  • I'm not a robot (unregistered) in reply to Brian Boorman

    PDO existed in 2007. Whether or not the intern used it is a different matter, but it's at least possible.

  • Appalled (unregistered) in reply to Brian Boorman

    We were never told the contents of start.txt and end.txt. Perhaps connection strings, credentials, templates, etc. are present and can be easily changed should MySql (or PHP) deprecate or change something, hopefully rare. Most databases and languages should be upwardly compatible over the years or they go out of business. "It hasn’t broken in 13 years" means the App not the containers, which I would bet HAVE crashed over the years and been easily fixed via those text files.

  • K (unregistered) in reply to Mr. TA

    In doubt... The customers may have heard how the cloud is superior, and want it too. In the end you do what gets paid, and risking the business case by educating customers about their actual needs, wouldn't be a good business decision.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Dave

    Email is highly commoditized, so cloud has become cheap and easy. However in this particular case, it's all pain and virtually no gain. Mind you, while email is cheap, VMs and cloud databases are expensive.

  • Angela Anuszewski (google) in reply to Brian Boorman

    Agreed. Our ISSO here "upgraded" the version of PHP on our webserver because the security powers that be said so without consulting anyone who was a developer on that webserver. I got to learning enough PHP to fix it really fast.

  • Big Billy Columns (unregistered)

    Found the bug.

            c=c+1;
        i(1)=i(1)+1;
	i(2:10)=0;
	k=sum(i);
	P(c)=sum(log(XY-k+1:XY))+(XY-k)*lp0+sum(i.*lp)-sum(lf(i+1));
	W(c)=sum(i.*w);

    That i(2:10)=0; should read:

     i(2:11)=0;
  • NULLPTR (unregistered) in reply to a person

    bvs tries to break that meme (same with my nullpointer jokes)

  • tlhonmey (unregistered)

    Looking at the variable names chosen, they may be all single letters, but I'd bet that if you knew which equation it was actually calculating it would actually make perfect sense.

    Oh, and Dave: Google only charges a thousand or so for email hosting, but they get that cost reduction only partly through economy of scale. They make the rest by running analytics on every single internal email your company sends. Oh, and at various times their usage agreement has included that they automatically get a perpetual, world-wide, royalty-free license to use anything you send via their servers for any purpose worldwide. So depending on what the business is it might be worthwhile to keep trade secrets actually secret.

  • Diane B (unregistered)

    I love the success hidden within failure theme of today's wtf.

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