Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The weirdest bug I've seen yet

engineering.gusto.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 334 posts

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#141

Post by saulpw »

tetha wrote: post #88
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.

Someone once said, there is accidental function, and deliberate function. If your system doesn't work, and you just plonk around at values, until, very surprisingly, the system starts behaving well and you the call it working... well it might be working now. But it's just accidental correctness. As soon as something causes the system to bank left, something's gonna break and no one knows how to fix it - and you're ba…

On the other hand, I've spent weeks with a team looking for a bug, and by the time we found something that appeared to fix it, we were way behind on everything else that really needed to get done. How long would it take to find the root cause? We tried. It wasn't worth weeks or months of effort, to anyone. This isn't JPL and human lives weren't on the line. We just needed it not to crash so we could all get on with the "real" task of shipping useful and profitable software.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#143

Post by aaaronic »

This is _so_ familiar!

I have seen accessibility tools in Chrome lead to this kind of issue in the past with a dropdown menu -- to the point where it could be replicated with a miniscule amount of HTML. The particular bug I hit 2 years ago was in Chromium-Edge, but the symptoms and cause were very similar.

Grammarly almost certainly leans on some of the accessibility tools in Chrome. These tools are somewhat different in the various Chromium flavors (Edge, Brave, Chrome, etc.).

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#144

Post by notpachet »

Muromec wrote: post #134
natbennett wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of people whose professional outcomes are meaningfully constrained by their ability produce clear business English. I know a guy who used to get inexplicable feedback about his communication that boiled down to “write better.” This limited his ability to get promoted. He runs all his comms through ChatGPT and asks it to “make this more professional” and doesn’t get that feedback anymore.

I suspect it all started with two Ukrainian who got tired of checking how much of "a" and "the" they forgot to sprinkle into their texts.

I have far more understanding and patience for non-native English speakers making those sorts of mistakes than I do for native speakers.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#145

Post by trelliscoded »

orbv wrote: post #27
flutas wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean, you basically do! You can just go check out the chromium source. It's mentioned in the bullet points in the "trouble reproducing the bug" section that chromium wasn't affected. > Using open-source Chromium instead of Chrome did not cause crashes, so we couldn’t see what Chrome code was failing either.

Google provides symbols for Chrome release builds, including source indexing so source code should be available. See sections symbol server and source indexing at https://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/debugging-on-win...

I wish this was upvoted more. This is the correct way to troubleshoot the bug, full stop. You can get symbolic stack traces with full arguments and source code on Windows in about 5-10 minutes for any Chrome crash by following these instructions. I always have a last change exception handler that fires up a WinDBG script on Windows for our chromium-based test runners, which reduces troubleshooting time to just a couple minutes in order to find the symbol in their bug database. Playing blackbox what-if games like the Gusto team is a waste of time and doesn't contribute any situation-specific knowledge to bugs.chromium.org.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#146

Post by generationP »

toddmorey wrote: post #139

Once my college professor was working on her research paper and told me she was struggling get text to stay underlined. Assuming a simple user error, I expected to help her out in 5 minutes. Over three hours later, we discovered that the combo of her specific video card driver version along with her specific printer driver version would keep text from printing out underlined.

Huh? How does a video card affect printing?

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#147

Post by cyco130 »

bee_rider wrote: post #53
cyco130 wrote: post #43

The weirdest one I saw was this: User claims that the wording of the info they enter into a certain form changes when they save. At first I suspected someone else editing the same form at the same time unbeknownst to each other but it wasn't the case according to the logs. And I saw the correct wording on my own computer. Then I noticed in their screenshots that some of the menus had weird wording too. Turns out they…

What was translating from English to American or something?

From English to Turkish but Google won't just leave the parts that are already in Turkish alone and subtly reword them instead for some reason.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#148

Post by generationP »

_jal wrote: post #103
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…

> Grammarly is an application that I don't get. You write like a native speaker, so I'm not surprised. But imagine having a few years of school-German, and then taking a German language job. I'd bet there would be times you'd want a writing assistant, too. There are also plenty of native English speakers who for whatever reason got a crappy education, and didn't get a lot of writing feedback. As far as corporate secu…

Learning a language at school, you will soon be better than natives at grammar. It's the vocabulary, idioms and implicatures that will be tripping you up. Does grammarly really help with those?

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#149

Post by issung »

toddmorey wrote: post #139

Once my college professor was working on her research paper and told me she was struggling get text to stay underlined. Assuming a simple user error, I expected to help her out in 5 minutes. Over three hours later, we discovered that the combo of her specific video card driver version along with her specific printer driver version would keep text from printing out underlined.

How does one discover something that niche in ~3 hours?

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#150

Post by cyco130 »

robocat wrote: post #73
cyco130 wrote: post #43

The weirdest one I saw was this: User claims that the wording of the info they enter into a certain form changes when they save. At first I suspected someone else editing the same form at the same time unbeknownst to each other but it wasn't the case according to the logs. And I saw the correct wording on my own computer. Then I noticed in their screenshots that some of the menus had weird wording too. Turns out they…

I added to all pages in a single-page-web-app after discovering some bug or other with Chrome screwing up the page. Apparently the new incantation to fix an app (can be applied to an element) is (ugly: I presume it isn't CSS to avoid supporting dynamically changing it): https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Global_att... Every now and then I would look at the meta tags for a major single page app and disc…

I wouldn't want to disallow translation, but in this case it was unnecessary anyway.
Post reply on HN