Hacker News Reader

Comment by eddythompson80 | Hacker News Reader

This is just a symptom of “Looks good let’s ship it and monitor logs” practice that almost every company has moved to, or an issue with some external driver.

For the latter, it’s unfortunate but you’ll rarely find a company diss`ing another company. Especially so if they are a Fortune 500 companies or if they are a major B2B company. Microsoft is both a Fortune 500 (Fortune 2?), and a major B2B company. You’ll never find a major B2B company dissing their B customers.

In the Linux world, the first is usually addressed with a “oh! the config for that moved from X to Y. We didn’t write a migration script, but did you not follow our open source development mail list? Recreate your config files following this example. We’ll write an update to handle it” or “fuck Nvidia/Intel/AMD, they are fucking morons and fucked up their drivers. Fucking idiots”

View on HN

> “Looks good let’s ship it and monitor logs”

The best part of that approach is that it is completely unable to deal with anything that isn't logged in the first place, such as bricking a device.[1]

Similarly, it can't collect good info on performance issues such as intermittent lockups or freezes.

NVIDIA drivers for example collect an absurd amount of telemetry, but to this day their drivers freeze my computer completely (can't even move my mouse!) for about 10 seconds a short while after logging in.

No log, no problem.

[1] Oh sure, you're about to say that they can log the "started patching" event and then monitor for "didn't come back up" event afterwards. They could, but they don't. For years I had issues with blue-screens after forced semi-annual upgrades, and Microsoft was blithely unaware.

Oh yeah. I absolutely agree. The answer from management (or even your direct dev manager) is “we should log more”. It absolutely doesn’t matter how much you’re logging because there is always gonna be a drill-down question you can’t answer. “log more” is almost always the answer. At my current work we’re at a place where every function call has boilerplate of

    func someBullshitFunction() {
        logger.info(“started”);
        defer performance.Meausure(“someBullshitFunction”)
        …
    }

There are definitely frameworks, languages features, and libraries that reduce the need for such tedious and redundant boilerplate code.

True, but how often do you get to change your company’s/team’s/product’s entire framework/language/library because you got an ask vs “ok, just bolt on this call whenever you’re doning I/O”

No offense, but this is wrong.

There is a metric-fuck ton of telemetry on a windows machine (really any sufficiently sophisticated software/device).

Not only do they correlate the update start event with the update end event, they also have a billion other metrics that nosedive if the machine can’t actually reboot.

That doesn’t make it any more acceptable, but it’s the truth. It’s totally possible the first metric report doesn’t show up for a day, too. So, it’s doubly not ok for them to push something so haphazardly.

How do you think they caught this in a “preview update” then?

The 10 second freeze is infuriating. It's been driving me crazy and had me convinced my PC was busted.

It could also turn out into a business model in future wherein the "enterprise" feature (to delay these updates) will cost a premium subscription - similar to how Youtube releases a premium version which only stops their crappy ads.

I think the “future” is closer than you think :)

I'm actually 100% fine with this business model, if it's cost acceptable. I use YouTube for an hour+ a day and YouTube music for hours, having access to both of those services ad-free is fine by me. Their service is 6-13usd/mo (depending on your location) and gives daily entertainment, while other streaming services want you to pay 10-30usd/mo for maybe 1-2hrs/week of content, for maybe the length of a single series season.

What annoys me is creators double-dipping and adding sponsor reads throughout their video, to the point I have to run an extension (SponsorBlock) to get passed those. Or them gating arbitrary application specific features (PIP being a big one) behind their premium service.

Youtube premium still shows ads, but because they’re not a specific kind of injected non-skippable ads that interrupts the content, it’s somehow not an “ad” because content creators can hide behind the term “sponsored content”. It’s an ad by another name.

Yes. And according to recent reports, Youtube is also testing something called "sponsor block"[1] for their subscription tier. The AI will try to intelligently detect and skip that sponsored content in a video.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OX-OthHWAA

So much for my Dan Becker videos. All he does is talk about camping gear. It is like a shopping channel

Reply on news.ycombinator.com