Today I noticed that the longer my game ran, the faster all the animations ran. At first I thought I was imagining it. I had accidentally find/replaced the delta time since last frame with time since app start.
Ask HN: What is the funniest bug you encountered?
21–30 of 66 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the funniest bug you encountered?
#22> What is the funniest bug you encountered?
Spiders.
Customer put one of our server in a shack outside the main building. Spiders and other bugs got in the server causing the hardware to fail. We never never thought of testing our against an arachnid infestation.
Re: Ask HN: What is the funniest bug you encountered?
#23Tester worked a later shift (noon to 8pm) and was running scenarios. Got a really odd error that made contracted pricing incorrect. Developer came in the next morning and ran the scenario just fine. Tester repeated the scenario at 6:30PM and got the same error. Both thought the other was nuts and this went on for a week. Found out it was an interaction issue when using the time (UDT) to get the current market date. L…
I also found a test breaking on Mondays. Never on any other day. It tested a sum for the current week but made the mistake of creating models for "yesterday" which is on another week if it's the first day of the week (depending on location, Monday in Europe, Sunday in the USA).
Had an office where, every Thursday, one developer's machine would reboot at the same time late in the evening. It didn't happen to anyone else. Eventually he decided to stay late one Thursday and watch it to see what happened.
At the appointed time the cleaner came by, unplugged his machine from the power socket and plugged in the vacuum cleaner to clean the room, and when done, plugged the machine back in.
Re: Ask HN: What is the funniest bug you encountered?
#24I had this bug that can reproduce only on a specific hp notebook, after running certain stress test for days. The issue (a crash) was in a device driver we were developing, but the root cause was because 1 single bit in the host memory was flipped randomly. My coworker joked that this bug was due to strong sunspot activities during those days (We indeed saw news about strong sunspot activities at the time.), so that…
That's what we want you to think, but the hardware is at least as much of a mess as the software
Re: Ask HN: What is the funniest bug you encountered?
#25Not really a bug, but.. An early release of our product (not to be named), contained a database that contained a perl script that was written out to a web server. The person who took over maintaining this script looked at the original author's code and put a comment line in containing the descriptive phrase "Chicken Goat Fuck Logic" (aka "CGF Logic"). We accidentally forgot to remove that comment before producing the…
Rather humorously, it appears the person who wrote the script created this website to commemorate the birth of CGF Logic : http://chickengoatfuck.com/
Re: Ask HN: What is the funniest bug you encountered?
#26An embedded system written in C++ had a Singleton. The Singleton pattern means that you have one instance, which has to live somewhere. This implementation had the instance as a static variable in the getInstance() method, e.g.: Foo* getInstance() { static Foo; return foo; } This is perfectly valid. Unfortunately, getInstance() was implemented in Foo.h, not in Foo.cpp. But in C++, functions in header files are inline…
Love the bug and it's been a while since I've done anything in C++, but isn't your description slightly wrong? There would be one instance per .cpp file that #include'd Foo.h, not one per getInstance() call. I don't think that "inline by default" is an accurate description of what would happen, and I have to imagine that if inline-ing a function caused different behavior, then that would be considered a compiler bug. Rather, I assume you mean it was "inlined" into the file at the #include point (and not once per call). Not that any of that changes the bug qualitatively.
Re: Ask HN: What is the funniest bug you encountered?
#27It wasn't funny at the time. I helped develop and app + hardware for measuring the force generated when luge / ski cross / boarder cross athletes start. The handles measure the force and sent the data to an iPad which also recorded video.
Worked fine in the office. Every time we went up on the mountain to test, the video didn't work. Go back to the hotel it worked fine.
Whole project was going to fail because of this. Finally it worked once on the mountain, so we proved the system could work.
Finally I found the bug. When setting the video orientation, I was passing in device orientation instead of UI orientation. In my office, I always have my iPad on a stand, so device orientation matched ui orientation and everything worked fine.
When I was on the mountain, I held the iPad flat so I could shield it from the sun with my body, then I'd lift it up when the athlete was about to start. The video would fail to record if device orientation was 'down' since that isn't a valid orientation to rotate video.
I only ended up finding it because I ended up leaving my iPad stand at home one day.
Re: Ask HN: What is the funniest bug you encountered?
#28A bug that occurred only on Wednesdays: https://gyrovague.com/2015/07/29/crashes-only-on-wednesdays/
Re: Ask HN: What is the funniest bug you encountered?
#29I had this bug that can reproduce only on a specific hp notebook, after running certain stress test for days. The issue (a crash) was in a device driver we were developing, but the root cause was because 1 single bit in the host memory was flipped randomly. My coworker joked that this bug was due to strong sunspot activities during those days (We indeed saw news about strong sunspot activities at the time.), so that…
I had a similar one (almost 20 years ago!) where I came back from lunch to a panic about all the sites being down.
The errors on all the sites were reporting a broken sql query - something like "select * from qccounts...". I guess the way ASP worked meant that the code was stored in a common location in memory for all the sites.
I like to imagine some cosmic event millions of years ago flipped that bit...
Re: Ask HN: What is the funniest bug you encountered?
#30One amusing one springs to mind: an image thumbnailer on a website for a very popular all-girl band. It was "smart" and cropped images to the right aspect ratio based on entropy in the image. In practice, this manifested itself as a foot fetish – if a photo included feet, it would centre the thumbnail on the feet almost every time. The gallery index pages looked quite odd.
I built a similar tool early in my career, only it used facial detection with haar cascade classifiers. It was kinda poorly written in PHP but it worked!