Bug #915: Solved

Pretty funny how the entire HN rallied together to solve some github issue on someone's personal repo. I'll try posting some of my bugs here to see if it'll work for me as well.

Re: Bug #915: Solved

#5

Post by dang » Tue, Jan 14, 2020, 10:07 PM UTC

alpb wrote: post #4

Pretty funny how the entire HN rallied together to solve some github issue on someone's personal repo. I'll try posting some of my bugs here to see if it'll work for me as well.

There's a power-law dropoff when it comes to follow-up submissions, since the hivemind craves novelty. But it would be fun to try. Maybe it could become a thing: Bug HN!

The trick would be to make the bugs interesting: weird or hard, preferably both.

Re: Bug #915: Solved

#6

Post by ehsankia » Tue, Jan 14, 2020, 10:13 PM UTC

alpb wrote: post #4

Pretty funny how the entire HN rallied together to solve some github issue on someone's personal repo. I'll try posting some of my bugs here to see if it'll work for me as well.

To be fair, it was a great nerd snipe, as it was a mysterious bug that happened when things aligned perfectly, yet still had a very good repro making it easy to test.

Re: Bug #915: Solved

#7

Post by ehsankia » Tue, Jan 14, 2020, 10:14 PM UTC

So the final answer is basically, there's nothing the author can do. The problem was half with the user's code mocking with internals, and half with downstream library not cleaning up properly.

Re: Bug #915: Solved

#8

Post by hinkley » Tue, Jan 14, 2020, 10:17 PM UTC

The first really bizarre bug I fixed was a file descriptor bug. The code was streaming data and in some cases the app would just stop processing network packets. He or I figured out that keyboard input would temporarily unblock things.

He had a compound conditional without enough parentheses in it, and one of the possible outcomes resulted in fd=1, which is stdin on many operating systems. My general advice now is to assume a 5th grade reading level for math (which consists of +-x/), and use parentheses for everything else. Especially if you think yourself to be clever (narrator: he did).

Re: Bug #915: Solved

#9

Post by yhoiseth » Tue, Jan 14, 2020, 10:30 PM UTC

This made me laugh out loud:

> Hacker News can be helpful, in spite of the tangents about shell redirection, authorship attribution, and GitHub monoculture.

Re: Bug #915: Solved

#10

Post by AdmiralAsshat » Tue, Jan 14, 2020, 10:31 PM UTC

alpb wrote: post #4

Pretty funny how the entire HN rallied together to solve some github issue on someone's personal repo. I'll try posting some of my bugs here to see if it'll work for me as well.

Soon: "Hacker News Code Review As A Service"