11mo ago

Me after I got fired

69 comments

define it as ( LINE % 10) so that the problem goes away when you add a debug statement
- Makes the error a little too frequent, but does obscure any performance penalty and is some truly evil genius work!
  
  Or just both
- Can someone ELI5 what this does?
  
  That exact version will end up making "true" false any time it appears on a line number that is divisible by 10.
  During the compilation, "true" would be replaced by that statement and within the statement, "LINE_" would be replaced by the line number of the current line. So at runtime, you end up witb the line number modulo 10 (%10). In C, something is true if its value is not 0. So for e.g., lines 4, 17, 116, 39, it ends up being true. For line numbers that can be divided by 10, the result is zero, and thus false.
  In reality the compiler would optimise that modulo operation away and pre-calculate the result during compilation.
  The original version constantly behaves differently at runtime, this version would always give the same result... Unless you change any line and recompile.
  The original version is also super likely to be actually true. This version would be false very often. You could reduce the likelihood by increasing the 10, but you can't make it too high or it will never be triggered.
  One downside compared to the original version is that the value of "true" can be 10 different things (anything between 0 and 9), so you would get a lot more weird behaviour since "1 == true" would not always be true.
  A slightly more consistent version would be
  undefined
  
  ((__LINE__ % 10) > 0)
  
  __LINE__ returns the line of code its on, and % 10 means "remainder 10." Examples:
  undefined
  
  1 % 10 == 1 ... 8 % 10 == 8 9 % 10 == 9 10 % 10 == 0 <-- loops back to 0 11 % 10 == 1 12 % 10 == 2 ... 19 % 10 == 9 20 % 10 == 0 21 % 10 == 1
  In code, 0 means false and 1 (and 2, 3, 4, ...) means true.
  So, if on line 10, you say:
  c
  
  int dont_delete_database = true;
  then it will expand to:
  c
  
  int dont_delete_database = ( 10 % 10 ); // 10 % 10 == 0 which means false // database dies...
  if you add a line before it, so that the code moves to line 11, then suddenly it works:
  c
  
  // THIS COMMENT PREVENTS DATABASE FROM DYING int dont_delete_database = ( 11 % 10 ); // 11 % 10 == 1, which means true
  
  A lot of these replies have high hopes for 5 year olds
  
  __ LINE __ is a preprocessor macro. It will be replaced with the line number it is written on when the code is compiled. Macros aren't processed when debugging. So the code will be skipped during debug but appear in the compiled program, meaning the program will work fine during debug but occasionally not work after compile.
  "__ LINE __ % 10" returns 0 if the line number is divisible by 10 and non-zero if not. 0 is considered false and non-zero is considered true.
  #define is also macro. In this case, it will replace all instances of "true" with something that will only sometimes evaluate to true when the program is compiled.
  
  Every tenth line, this would evaluate to False, while on lines that aren't multiples of ten, it would evaluate to True.
- Decades ago I had to debug a random crash. It only happened on Wednesdays. On Wednesdays in September. On Wednesdays in September after the 10th…
  
  only when your coordinates were within a train depot in Poland?
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrlrbfGZo2k
  
  I kinda want to hear more of this story... care to share the details? i.e. what was the root cause?

This wouldn't pass PR review and automated tests, unless they were a senior dev and used elevated privileges to mess with things behind the scenes.
- It's bold to assume those exist. Maybe there's a reason the coworker left
- rand() will be infrequent < 10 (at least ten in 2^15 times, if not exponentially more), so automated tests are likely to pass. If they don't, they're likely to pass on the second try, and then everyone shrugs and continues. If it's buried in 500 other lines, then it's likely the code reviewer will give it all a quick scan and say "it's fine". It's the three line diffs that get lots of scrutiny.
  In other words, you seem to have a lot more faith in the process than I do.
  
  rand will be called every time true is used, which could be hundreds of times for all we know
- Write a 5 line PR and receive 5 comments. Write a 500 line PR and receive no comments.
  
  lgtm
  
  Attn: security team
  Hi,
  I think someone on Lemmy has hacked into every work environment I've ever coded in
  
  It works on my machine, most of the time.
- you'd be surprised what slips through review
  
  Yeah but even a single automated test would catch it and reject the PR. You just need a single test.

Funny but I call bullshit all day
- Yeah, how did they commit this to anywhere that would hurt?
  
  They did not ✌️

That happened 🙄

Lol I don't think the preprocessor would be too happy with a space after #
- C preprocessor wouldn't care about it
  
  Lol that's news to me!!

A lot of you have a lot of faith in people reviewing PRs. I know a few Sr. developers, that if shit was too busy, would skim it and say 'fuck it, it will be QAs problem. If you put this in the correct sub-system in file that would only be executed once a month, for example a maintenance class, It would be really hard to notice something is wrong if it didn't cause issues seen immediately. Maybe this is the story of an intern that added something that also fucked up boolean comparisons in a subsystem used once a month. Where there is a 2 week lag between the execution and operations noticing something wrong.
- {devs} would skim it and say 'fuck it, it will be QAs problem.
  And then delays until code complete would eat up all of QA's time so they have no real time left to test before app release into production.

That's easy to find, now gremlins is a proper way to quit, but even then it would be easy to fix with git by reverting a commit.
- That's why you gotta slip it in with a very large commit so they don't know what they're looking for and don't want to revert the changes.
  
  or somehow commit it a year prior to leaving, and add a current_time > when_i_leave

But rand() is a number between 0-1, so it will never be >10
Basically this is just #define True = False
- The C standard library function int rand(void) returns a pseudo random integer between 0 and RAND_MAX (which should be at least 2^15, depending on the actual implementation).
  Depending on the distribution of the pseudo random numbers, it will be true for over > 99% of its applications.
  Source: trust me bro, and C++ reference
  Furthermore, there is no integer between 0 and 1, but I guess you mean a real number between 0 and 1.
- You're correct in a lot of languages; Excel comes to mind. Just that's not how int rand() works in C.
  Sorry, I don't why you're getting snark and even being accused of using the word "integer".
- I'm not sure what's worse. The engineer that thought this would work or the company that doesn't do code reviews.
  
  Put it in a package they depend on - nobody reviews those

I hope I learn some day how to code a bug in python that will not show up in any error messages and absolutely ruins a program. I'd love to find a random program at whatever job I end up at and before quitting just ruin it with a random line of code that doesn't output an error code.
- What the hell? Thats not funny or anything it just fucks with your ex-coworkers who probably werent the problem, management isnt affected by that.
  Pro tip, you seem really arrogant (including some other comments) and you need to tone that down before you enter the industry. Its nothing to be ashamed of and I'm not trying to insult you, you just assume your experiences are way more universally valid than they are.
- Easy, it's just... continue programming in python. (large codebases are a mess in python...)
  More seriously: Don't do that, it'll only create headaches for your fellow colleagues and will not really hit those (hard) that likely deserve this.
- Logical errors are an entire domain of programmer troubleshooting. All you'll have to do is attempt to learn programming, and you WILL write something that throws no errors, performs terribly, and confuses you for hours.
  We all do. It's almost a badge of honor to push past a few of them.
  Hell, sometimes it happens when no one has made an error but a particular mix of data or odd arrangement of hardware it ends up running on hits an undiscovered edge case that buggers things up.
- learn C and u will get undefined behaviour for free :)
- It's not hard to do. What would be hard would be getting it through code review. Like the example provided.. how would that ever get through code review for a merge? Must not be a well-protected code base?
  
  Publish your own package to PyPI that on import does some evil stuff. Name the package something similar to a known, but not too well known package. Supply chain attacks are even less defended against than other stuff.
  All this relies on companies being shit though, but well, we all know that's the case in a lot of places.
- That's just called malware
- If you're thinking about rage quitting a job you don't even have yet, maybe take a different career from the beginning?
  What the hell.
- py
  
  import os os._exit(2)

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