My Hardest Bug Ever (2013) (opens in new tab)

(gamasutra.com)

60 pointsDavesjoshin8y ago7 comments

7 comments

js28y ago

Reminds me of the slightly more recent (2015) "The Discovery of Apache ZooKeeper’s Poison Packet":

https://www.pagerduty.com/blog/the-discovery-of-apache-zooke...

This is a great article. I remember reading this a few years ago during my undergrad- my big takeaway from it was that sometimes you will encounter bugs which you can't solve alone. I always assumed any error I came across was my fault, but that's not good (it's also not good to just assume it's someone else's). Fixing problems in an organization is often a team effort that requires good communication and incentive for improvement- not just one genius coder that knows the whole source code.

balls1878y ago

This is from 2013, and has been posted nearly a half dozen times now: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=http:%2F%2Fwww.gamasutra.com%2...

flashm8y ago

...?

Nearly half a dozen? So five? In four years.

It's still interesting, and I don't suppose many people are searching for it so what's the issue with it being posted again?

yomly8y ago

Anyone a bit more savvy on hardware able to shed a bit more light on this?

The following line tickles my fancy...

> This is the only time in my entire programming life that I've debugged a problem caused by quantum mechanics.

nategri8y ago

I've got a PhD in physics and I have no idea what he's talking about here. Seems like the mainboard layout had issues at higher frequencies which is easily a 100% classical electromagnetism problem. Inductance, impedance and what have you. As another commenter alluded, its only 'quantum' in the sense that all semiconductor behavior is.

I think this is another case where 'quantum' is confused with 'apparently spooky.'

heavenlyblue8y ago

Neither is it entirely clear to me, but this could be a pun related to him saying:

> bits to get dropped... and the data lost... and the card corrupted.

So as to say that's the Schrodinger's bug that causes several issues at the same time.

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