When something that was working, suddenly doesn't work when demoing to others • Hacker News Board

Re: When something that was working, suddenly doesn't work when demoing to others

#51

Post by bobthepanda » Thu, Aug 15, 2024, 7:05 PM UTC

omoikane wrote: post #40

marcosdumay wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's the alternative: * The program works flawlessly * Somebody finds a bug on the code that is executed in a test * The relevant test now fails consistently Both are probably because you changed something on the environment when you looked at the code.

Another common cause is that the code you were looking at wasn't actually the code you were running. Between "I added this line and then I removed this same line, and now it works", the executable might have been recompiled.

hot reloading can cause weird behaviors like this in particular

Re: When something that was working, suddenly doesn't work when demoing to others

#52

Post by happytoexplain » Thu, Aug 15, 2024, 7:53 PM UTC

copypasterepeat wrote: post #31

happytoexplain wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean attempting to demonstrate something broken, only for it to work properly.

Wouldn't this term still apply? If the goal of your demonstration is to show failure, and then that succeeds, that makes your demonstration a failure.

I don't how it's used in German, but based on other comments, it does sound like it can be used either way!

Re: When something that was working, suddenly doesn't work when demoing to others

#53

Post by aa-jv » Fri, Aug 16, 2024, 2:01 PM UTC

Whats the antipode to this, where, as a programmer going to investigate a user bug, my mere presences makes the bug disappear, and the user frustrated at trying to reproduce it for me?

Because this happens a lot to me these days, no kidding. The bug happens, some user delights in calling me over, I take a look, they simply can't reproduce it, I walk away - they get the bug again - and, yeah, I kind of have to race ahead of things to understand the nature of the users situation.

Happen to anyone else? I don't think its quite like Vorführeffekt, and is maybe a bit more like Daseinsvermögung oder etwas ..

Re: When something that was working, suddenly doesn't work when demoing to others

#54

Post by eska » Fri, Aug 16, 2024, 5:28 PM UTC

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #47

What's the equivalent word for "Your computer suddenly becomes slow and unresponsive, you try to open Task Manager (or run `top` in a terminal) to see what's bogging down your resources, but the resource monitor itself refuses to respond for a few seconds until the lag vanishes, at which point the utility finally renders and everything under the CPU/Memory utilization appears normal" ?

If you anticipate that this will happen when you open task manager, possibly because it has happened before, you start chanting in German “watch me, I’m about to pull a trick 17!” before opening task manager, having ensured that the whole room is paying attention whether you succeed. When people ask how you knew or why it worked you just shrug smugly to hide the fact that you don’t actually now, and let everybody bask in your aura.