Hacker News Reader

Comment by Doctor_Fegg | Hacker News Reader

You're missing the word "sorry" from your response.

My wife's a primary school headteacher (or K-12 as you say in the States). Her MacBook was disabled by this. Yes, she takes weekly backups, but schools don't have free money to spend on spare laptops for a few days' work, nor on unnecessary technician time to fix it. Fortunately I spotted this posting (thanks, HN poster!) on blearily checking HN this morning and instantly recognised this was what's happening.

Have some decency for the people whose lives you've just affected and apologise to them.

View on HN

I understand the frustration, but please don't attack someone like this when they come to HN to supply information. It creates a hostile environment and disincentivizes people who have inside knowledge about a situation from showing up here. That makes HN a strictly worse place. It also breaks the site guidelines, which ask us all to Be kind, regardless of how strong and justified one's feelings are.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Not intended personally to @norberg, but corporately to Google.

OK, but norberg is the person you blasted, and intent unfortunately doesn't express itself on the internet.

Understood. Difficult to get the tone right when a poster is clearly posting as a corporate spokesperson (esp. a first-time poster as here), but I'll consider that next time... though I'm rather hoping not for an omg-my-mac-won't-boot next time!

A truth stated passionately doesn't become false. A falsehood stated calmly doesn't become true. This is at the heart of why appeals to emotion are almost always logical fallacies.

I don't think dang is saying that the commenter was making false claims or anything. Just that it's very unlikely an upset comment will cause an overhaul in the google auto-update system. But it is very likely an upset comment will scare developers away from commenting on future situations like these. It just affects the health of HN negatively while not affecting Google. There's probably a reason norberg chose to register and comment on HN and not somewhere else like Reddit.

Content is wrong or it isn't. Tone is a logical fallacy.

Your true statement that tone will often matter is an interesting discusson on society and education. That it is also relevent on a site otherwise dedicated to intelligent discourse was the nugget I was hoping people would think about.

> You're missing the word "sorry" from your response.

Couldn't help but notice most of the posts from the Chrome team lacked any sort of apology. Including this support post https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/15235262

Bit disappointing when this bug has bricked multiple machines.

It's not even right:

> If you have not taken steps to disable System Integrity Protection and your computer is on OS X 10.9 or later, this issue cannot affect you.

SIP came in with 10.11. Any machine on 10.9 or 10.10 is vulnerable.

You're getting immediate tech support about a very specific issue in one for the first places you'd look. Don't be a dickhead.

Do you want only PR people on HN trying to talk to you? Because this is how that happens.

I'm addressing Google corporately. I presume @norberg is posting on behalf of his employers given that he states his job title immediately.

One of the first places "I'd" look? It's not my Mac. I'm not sure how many primary headteachers read Hacker News or have a spouse who does. I'm guessing <1%.

When the world's biggest software company actually bricks people's Macs with a software update, then "sorry" is the least I expect, frankly. But if you want to dismiss this with "dickhead", you do you.

> I presume @norberg is posting on behalf of his employers given that he states his job title immediately.

I'm torn on that one. I want direct communication to be possible without running it though PR or people with PR training, to improve response times especially in such "busy" situation. This requires us on the receiving end to be somewhat lenient. But on the other hand, I also don't find something better elsewhere, including the more official announcement[0] linked to. Thus this style seems like company policy and certainly deserves criticism.

[0] https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/15235262

I'm curious, why did she disable SIP?

In the comments section of the linked article people are reporting that even on their SIP enabled machines they are still being bricked.

You're missing the word "thanks" from yours.

Thanks for making my computer KP?

To be fair why does she have SIP disabled?

Pre-SIP OS (10.10).

Ok, why hasn't she updated to a supported macOS version then? Support ended for 10.10 in August 2017....

eh? this is a mac bug. any software could trigger it. just happens that keystone is maybe the only one to be so dumb as to modify a system dir. that doesn’t excuse the root cause which lies in mac os.

How is this a Mac bug? /var has been a symlink on OS X for nearly 20 years now. What business does a web browser have modifying /var?

The keystone team accepted this as a p0 bug.

yeah i see the details now. i thought it was a permissions change from earlier description but now i see it is removal.

/ also shouldn’t be writable so it’s understandable how this wouldn’t have been caught. writable / is not sane and it’s unlikely you’d test that case.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com