
1195725856 and other mysterious numbers - hprotagonist
https://chrisdown.name/2020/01/13/1195725856-and-friends-the-origins-of-mysterious-numbers.html
======
mzs
Before I click:

    
    
        $ echo 'obase=16; 1195725856' | bc | xxd -r -ps | od -cb
        0000000    G   E   T                                                    
                  107 105 124 040                                                
        0000004
        $ 
    

Looks like HTTP.

~~~
thestoicattack
printf "%x" 1195725856 will save you one bc process.

~~~
mzs
even better, thanks

    
    
      $ printf '%032x\n' 1213486160 542393671 | xxd -r -ps | xxd -g4 -c16
      00000000: 00000000 00000000 00000000 48545450  ............HTTP 
      00000010: 00000000 00000000 00000000 20544547  ............ TEG
      $

------
martincmartin
_Maybe we should start printing ASCII in future in some of the error paths..._

I work on image processing; when we get an image we don't recognize, we print
out the first few bytes in hex & ascii. Often, it's an error message or HTML
error page. The user's code takes the results of an HTTP fetch and sends it to
us, forgetting to check for errors.

------
notacoward
I remember fixing a bunch of bugs in 1990 because someone started running
SATAN against our hosts and there mere act of sending ill-formed requests to
various ports would cause the associated daemons to crash. What's amazing is
that this still happens. In half a day I'll bet I could find at least a dozen
_super popular services_ that can be crashed by sending random data to one of
their network ports using a default configuration.

~~~
gdhfgh
>SATAN against our hosts

oh, well...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-36_(missile)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-36_\(missile\))

~~~
teddyh
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_Administrator_Tool_fo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_Administrator_Tool_for_Analyzing_Networks)

------
storyinmemo
Meanwhile, four years ago at Facebook :)

[http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2016/02/21/malloc/](http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2016/02/21/malloc/)

~~~
salgernon
This is a good takeway from that page:

> I guess this means 1213486160 is going on my list of magic numbers. Also, it
> means that 2008-06-14 23:29:20 UTC is, in a strange sense, "HTTP time". If
> you see either that number or that date (with possible adjustments for your
> local time zone) showing up in your life inexplicably, this might just be
> why.

------
rachelbythebay
Someone owes me a steak if the thing sending GETs and HEADs (and/or fb303
calls) to any listening port on Facebook machines turns out to be procprint.

Also, we did this debugging. Years ago.

~~~
rrauenza
What is procprint? Googling didn't get me anything that seemed relevant, a
company in Brazil and some SAS references.

~~~
rachelbythebay
It's an internal FB thing. But the post was about that, too.

(No, I don't work there... any more.)

------
asiachick
> the entire company trends towards peak levels of procrastination, doing
> literally anything and everything to avoid the unspeakable horror of having
> to write a few paragraphs of text. ;-)

the entire company trends towards peak levels of procrastination, doing
literally anything and everything to avoid the unspeakable horror of having to
write a few paragraphs of BS marketing speak ads for their fellow employees

there, fixed that for ya.

I hate perf! All want to say is Jill does great work, Joe does ok work. Bill
might need to work on something else has he doesn't seem into it.

Instead I'm told to write several paragraphs of ad copy trying to make unique
and interesting sentences that don't sound the same but basically all say the
same thing "Jane does good work". They want specifics like

"Vlad's work on the ABC protocol really took things to the next level. If it
had not been for his tireless effort on the ABC protocol discussion list it's
likely a different spec would have been ratified and we'd all be stuck with 6
months more work in our implementation."

Now (1) I didn't actually know that because I was head down working on my own
stuff so I had to go spend time 30 minutes looking that shit up and (2) That's
one out of 6 paragraphs, and everyone better sound completely unique like it
was meant to be presented in a magazine.

And, when it's all done it was worthless. What I wanted to write

"Vlad's great, he does good work and I like working with him"

Is all they really wanted to here but the "process" is instead a huge waste of
time for everyone.

------
irrational
"Last week was the final week for this half’s performance review at Facebook,
where we write summaries of work and impact we and our peers had over the last
half year. Naturally, that can only mean one thing: the entire company trends
towards peak levels of procrastination, doing literally anything and
everything to avoid the unspeakable horror of having to write a few paragraphs
of text."

Ugh, I can relate so strongly. Right now I'm supposed to be filling out my
mid-year performance sheet, including team success goals, team player actions,
effective communicator actions, achieving business results actions, business
goals, personal goals, individual development plan, etc. I've been working on
it for 2 days and have hardly anything done. This kind of work is so
incredibly difficult for me. It is supposed to be written with maximum
business jargon. I'd rather put in a week of all nighters writing some code
than working on this.

~~~
Spooky23
Totally agree. These exercises suck because they are obvious wastes of time
that are often ignored, but cannot be done frivolously as they have impact on
real things sometimes.

As a manager in one particularly toxic org, you had to strike a balance where
you showed constant forward motion, but not too much. Too little and you'd be
tortured with meetings with a PMO, too much progress, you'd be declared a
genius and the PMO would either appoint you as a "champion" to get shit done
or take your people away.

~~~
freepor
It’s no more a waste to write these than it’s a waste for servers to use disk
space writing out logs.

~~~
__david__
Server logs are not manually written by humans. Obviously no one is worried
about the disk space. I’m ok with wasting cpu cycles writing something that
might never be read but wasting humans time is just rude. [I don’t thrive in
bureaucratic environments so my perspective may be skewed]

------
lloydde
The link above doesn’t work for me, but the following one does:
[https://chrisdown.name/2020/01/13/1195725856-other-
mysteriou...](https://chrisdown.name/2020/01/13/1195725856-other-mysterious-
numbers.html)

~~~
cdown
I had no idea anyone would find this so fast, so I thought it would be safe to
change the url to match the final title before posting anywhere -- how wrong I
was.

It's back now. Thanks!

~~~
ar_lan
Still down for me :/

EDIT: My browser cached your redirect. Opened in private and I'm OK now.

------
wolf550e
Also see this about the same topic:
[https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2016/10/07/magic/](https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2016/10/07/magic/)

~~~
lelf
And related HN discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13132688](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13132688)

------
rys
[https://chrisdown.name/2020/01/13/1195725856-other-
mysteriou...](https://chrisdown.name/2020/01/13/1195725856-other-mysterious-
numbers.html)

That seems to be the URL now.

------
femto113
I've always been weirded out by C's 4 character constants, but they're useful
for this sort of thing:

    
    
        printf("%d\n", 'GET ')
        1195725856

------
tsss
So his first instinct was to waste hours on this debugging instead of just
googling the error message and finding the cause within seconds?

~~~
hinkley
I've generally been of the Don't Reinvent the Wheel school of programming for
a long time. However, I've been digging into Jonathan Blow videos again and he
seems to be pretty worried lately about how little time developers spend
working on fundamentals, and I agree that is either a problem, or will become
one soon enough.

I haven't quite figured out how to incorporate that into my philosophy. I'm
still pretty damn sure I don't want your exercise in fundamentals to be
running in production, but I also don't want to be surrounded by people who
only know how to look things up.

------
stevefan1999
oh wow, this is why I got these esoteric errors in my dmesg?

------
pvtmert
on the other side, i use my name as magic number (4 chars)

so both hex and dec representations got me (close numbers)

many protocols and simple ciphers use similar methods btw.

------
lonelappde
TL;DR on the annoyingly vague title: they are short ASCII strings encoded as
integers.

~~~
stanferder
It's a shibboleth. The joy experienced by someone who's already "in the
circle" for 1195725856 justifies the vagueness. For those who aren't, the post
brings them in on the joke.

------
rachelbythebay
“Production hosts”. “NFS traffic”. How quickly we regress.

~~~
AdamJacobMuller
Are you suggesting you think NFS is never suitable for production use?

~~~
peterwwillis
Depends what you mean. If you mean " _can_ you use it in production", sure. If
you mean " _should_ you use it in production", no, never.

