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Ask HN: What is the funniest bug you encountered?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the funniest bug you encountered?

#51

Post by malux85 »

mtmail wrote: post #2

A cluster of 10+ machines was processing data for a whole week (7 days). Think Hadoop with counting and grouping numbers. The output was slightly over 2GB. The user specified his home directory as output. The home directory was NFS-mounted and didn't support files over 2GB, thus no file was written and the job had to be rerun.

There’s a similar right of passage for Deep Learning engineers using python and Keras - every single one of us has been burned by waiting for a week for a model to train, only to find “h5py” is not installed, exception is thrown and all work lost. (That’s the python module used for persistence of the model weights)

Then the young grasshoppers learn about checkpointing and using our dev ops systems to make sure the environment is up to spec, but I feel this has to happen at least once to each Deep Learning researcher

Re: Ask HN: What is the funniest bug you encountered?

#52

Post by milesokeefe »

petemc_ wrote: post #39

This isn't exactly side-splitting, but my home isp, virgin media uk, does dns hijacking for domains they cannot resolve. If you try to access http://bugzilla.anynonworkingdomain.com for some reason it interprets that as a search for the term "porn". I have lots of tabs open to our bugzilla in work (where bugzilla.mycompany.com resolves correctly) so when I take laptop home, open it up and chrome refreshes tabs it loo…

Interesting, seems to only trigger when the search term contains the substring 'bugzilla' exactly:

http://advancedsearch2.virginmedia.com/main?FailedURI=bugzil...

Re: Ask HN: What is the funniest bug you encountered?

#53

Post by Toast_25 »

jeanmichelx wrote: post #24
billconan wrote: post #11

I 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

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from chaos.

Oh, wait, those were regexes.

Re: Ask HN: What is the funniest bug you encountered?

#54

Post by newtronic »

Back in the late 1980's, apple released a version of Unix called A/UX. In order to get excitement going about it, they sold Macintosh computers with A/UX preloaded to developers. The combo was cheaper than the equivalent Mac. So I bought two of them. I also bought the biggest displays for them; they weighted like 50 lbs. Probably 400 x 512; I don't remember. Anyway, I hooked both up to their displays and both booted to this message:

When in Danger

Or in Doubt

Run in Circles

Scream and Shout!

Apple eventually admitted that A/UX didn't support those giant monitors. I installed Mac OS and it ran fine.

Re: Ask HN: What is the funniest bug you encountered?

#55

Post by JeanMarcS »

mooseburger wrote: post #17

One I wrote myself. Frustrated with some bizarre bug that I struggled to reproduce, I added two popups, to two separate conditionals that should have been exclusive (either one or the other executes, but never both). The first one said "What", and the second one "the fuck". I eventually managed to get both to show up, correctly forming the expletive, but it wasn't enough to help me solve the bug. There were more bugs…

A classic one ! Once I did the same one, just an echo in a php page. It was at the bottom of the page, after the footer. It was a job for a web designer I was helping.

It's his son who saw it. So we removed it before the client (or anyone, it was in production) feedback to us.

Bullet dodged !

Re: Ask HN: What is the funniest bug you encountered?

#56

Post by tgb »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #37
tgb wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

No, inlining replaces it at the place of call. Every call, even if there's multiple of them in the same file. The idea is that, by putting the implementation in the .h file, you're signaling that you don't want to pay the overhead of the function call. (Same thing with the "inline" keyword.) Now, if your function is sufficiently complicated, the compiler may choose to not inline it anyway (with the definition of "suf…

Now I'm googling this and it looks like what you wrote would be a compiler error (assuming Foo.h was included into at least two files) unless the keyword inline was used so that the same function could be defined multiple times. That clears up my confusion with your "default inline" statement.

Re: Ask HN: What is the funniest bug you encountered?

#58

Post by synicalx »

Not strictly an error or bug, but rather the cause of one.

Back in my ISP days, we sold IPTV packages, which we in turn received from the IPTV company via satellite. And because of this elaborate distribution method we would get THE BEST outage/disruption notices.

For example;

"Urdu News will be unavailable from approximately 1AM GMT to 8PM, due to HIGH ENERGY SOLAR ACTIVITY."

How much better is that than telling your customers "Your news is unavailable because Barry doesn't understand BGP"?!

Re: Ask HN: What is the funniest bug you encountered?

#59

Post by shashwat986 »

malux85 wrote: post #51
mtmail wrote: post #2

A cluster of 10+ machines was processing data for a whole week (7 days). Think Hadoop with counting and grouping numbers. The output was slightly over 2GB. The user specified his home directory as output. The home directory was NFS-mounted and didn't support files over 2GB, thus no file was written and the job had to be rerun.

There’s a similar right of passage for Deep Learning engineers using python and Keras - every single one of us has been burned by waiting for a week for a model to train, only to find “h5py” is not installed, exception is thrown and all work lost. (That’s the python module used for persistence of the model weights) Then the young grasshoppers learn about checkpointing and using our dev ops systems to make sure the en…

Something very similar happened to me. To this day, I don't run any python script without the `-i` flag

Re: Ask HN: What is the funniest bug you encountered?

#60

Post by GFischer »

togusa2017 wrote: post #57

Wrote a rate limiter in C. It broke when time got adjusted due to day light savings . Didn't take into account negative time delta. It was an ahuh moment when I realized the next day

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1883/

And yes, I do hate working with timezones - and so does everyone else I guess, Outlook still fails to correctly send appointment invites across timezones when DST is involved.

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