Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Regex was not the main issue. The main issues were:

1. Rendering a page fails/does not terminate if some non essential subtask (rendering a single code block) fails/does not terminate.

2. They do not try to detect bad data (the way they certainly try to detect bad code)

3. Load balancing based on the rendering time of a single page

Code bugs triggered by bad data will happen again, with or without regular expressions.




> 2. They do not try to detect bad data (the way they certainly try to detect bad code)

It was actually the sanitization function regex that became unresponsive. So they killed the page by trying to stop bad data coming in.

Agreed on your other points though.




Consider applying for YC's Summer 2025 batch! Applications are open till May 13

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: