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The weirdest bug I've seen yet

engineering.gusto.com

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Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#111

Post by kube-system »

MattDaEskimo wrote: post #106
kube-system wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They don't address why they didn't just run Chromium. Or Firefox. Probably: 1. Because it is reasonable to expect the application to work in Chrome. 2. Chromium isn't intended for production use cases. Back when IE and Chrome had about equal market share, I worked somewhere that had one team insisting that all employees must use IE for one of their applications, and another team insisting that all employees use Chr…

I don't think the post you quoted is implying that they should've closed their eyes. It makes much more sense to try a different browser first and see if the problem persists. Instead of test versions and extensions.

The post I quoted itself quoted the article saying they did test in Chromium. The article also says they tested Firefox and Safari.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#112

Post by IshKebab »

trehalose wrote: post #98
gostsamo wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This one is a legend. I love it, but you can find the debunking on the fact checking sites.

The Snopes page doesn't really seem to debunk it, but merely points out that the legend's been retold with many variations and contradictory explanations. Suspicious, definitely, but it doesn't seem clear that none of the variations could ever have happened?

It's a just-so story. The null hypothesis is that it's not true.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#113

Post by thaumaturgy »

ecshafer wrote: post #87

I don't think I would believe myself if I found this being a specific gif. This is a great amount of coincidences in code to cause this. Grammarly is an application that I don't get. The fact that people are installing, basically spyware, on their computers just to get grammar suggestions to make their writing more boring and add a spellchecker (which is already inside web browsers) is pretty astounding to me. The fa…

People that are comfortable with text-based forums may not realize the extent of illiteracy and semiliteracy in the US. Decades ago, a small company was able to convince most of the education system (public and sometimes private) to use a teaching method based on junk science. The end result is that there are many millions of adults in the current workforce who can barely read, and many of them work in office settings. Some of those would install anything that would help them through text-based communications.

[1]: "How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers" https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...

[2]: "Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong" https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/

[3]: "According to the U.S. Department of Education, 54% of U.S. adults lack proficiency in literacy, reading below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level" https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/rqulik/til_t...

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#114

Post by JohnMakin »

gwbas1c wrote: post #78
JohnMakin wrote: post #28

I have a saying that isn't perfectly true but often will apply to "fixes" like this - If you don't know why the fix worked, you may not have actually fixed it.

But they couldn't fix the bug: The bug was in another product that they couldn't access source code or submit patches. The best they could do was work around it. Sometimes workarounds are the best you can do until your vendor provides a real fix.

I didn't mean literally fix the underlying bug. They also don't really know why their workaround worked, which means it could not really be fixed at all.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#116

Post by hbn »

MattDaEskimo wrote: post #106
kube-system wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They don't address why they didn't just run Chromium. Or Firefox. Probably: 1. Because it is reasonable to expect the application to work in Chrome. 2. Chromium isn't intended for production use cases. Back when IE and Chrome had about equal market share, I worked somewhere that had one team insisting that all employees must use IE for one of their applications, and another team insisting that all employees use Chr…

I don't think the post you quoted is implying that they should've closed their eyes. It makes much more sense to try a different browser first and see if the problem persists. Instead of test versions and extensions.

> As urgency waned because our users were using other browsers as a workaround, progress on this bug slowed to make way for other priorities. We didn’t have much left to go on without being able to reproduce the bug. However, we wanted to resolve it since users had bookmarks/settings/preferences in Chrome. We believed that we shouldn’t have to ask our users to avoid the world’s most popular browser, and we were also still getting periodic pings from various users asking whether we had made any progress on this bug.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#117

Post by sethammons »

> The code for our main navigation bar has a fair amount of metaprogramming, and chasing down threads here was often more confusing than not.

One more point for Don't Be Clever. As Brian Kernighan put it: “Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.”

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#118

Post by mardifoufs »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #113
ecshafer wrote: post #87

I don't think I would believe myself if I found this being a specific gif. This is a great amount of coincidences in code to cause this. Grammarly is an application that I don't get. The fact that people are installing, basically spyware, on their computers just to get grammar suggestions to make their writing more boring and add a spellchecker (which is already inside web browsers) is pretty astounding to me. The fa…

People that are comfortable with text-based forums may not realize the extent of illiteracy and semiliteracy in the US. Decades ago, a small company was able to convince most of the education system (public and sometimes private) to use a teaching method based on junk science. The end result is that there are many millions of adults in the current workforce who can barely read, and many of them work in office setting…

I'm not sure that's specific to the US, and I don't even think that particular teaching method has been used here in Quebec, yet we still see broadly similar literacy rates and levels.

Last I checked US students rank well and are near the top in most education global rankings, so I think bad education is more of a global problem than Americans think it is. Maybe that's outdated though, I'll do my research.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#119

Post by ja5087 »

We used to develop software that used the Windows Accessibility APIs (UI Automation). On certain versions of Excel with some files it would crash the client application with a null pointer exception once you try to read the window name/class. It would be interesting to see the cause of the crash e.g. a core dump/user-mode dump/event viewer log.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#120

Post by bluesmoon »

Reminds me of the time back in 2010 when a piece of CSS on the Yahoo Search page would cause a complete desktop crash on Red Hat Linux: https://tech.bluesmoon.info/2010/04/can-website-crash-your-r...

To the author, did you ever consider contacting the Chrome dev team about this? They're pretty responsive to bug reports.

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