Comment by enlyth

2 years ago

Without studying the minified code I wouldn't assume malice just yet, this could be just an inexperienced developer trying to lazily fix some browser-specific bug, or something that accidentally made it to production like you say

You think they let inexperienced developers touch the YT code base without proper code review? Even if that were the case, which is an extremely charitable assumption, that itself would be malice in my opinion.

  • > You think they let inexperienced developers touch the YT code base

    Uh, yes? We were all inexperienced at some point. Just the linked file is like 300k lines of unminified code, I doubt it's all written by PHDs with 20 years of experience

    • Some would argue that owning a PhD degree does not necessarily guarantee half decent engineering skills.

there is such a thing as overextending the benefit of the doubt, to the point that malicious actors will abuse it.

It could even just be a timeout as part of retry logic or similar. A lot of people seem to be saying that there is no reasonable reason to have a `sleep` in a production application. But there are many legitimate reasons to need to delay execution of some code for a while.

As the saying goes: "we like naked girls, not naked sleep". Even the interns should know that, naked sleep is just bad - not fixing anything.