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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?
#2A 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.
Re: Ask HN: What is the funniest bug you encountered?
#3One amusing one springs to mind: an image thumbnailer on a website for a very popular all-girl band. It was "smart" and cropped images to the right aspect ratio based on entropy in the image. In practice, this manifested itself as a foot fetish – if a photo included feet, it would centre the thumbnail on the feet almost every time. The gallery index pages looked quite odd.
Re: Ask HN: What is the funniest bug you encountered?
#4Tester worked a later shift (noon to 8pm) and was running scenarios. Got a really odd error that made contracted pricing incorrect. Developer came in the next morning and ran the scenario just fine. Tester repeated the scenario at 6:30PM and got the same error. Both thought the other was nuts and this went on for a week. Found out it was an interaction issue when using the time (UDT) to get the current market date.
Lesson: if anything goes wrong at night but not during the morning, look at all the date code.
Re: Ask HN: What is the funniest bug you encountered?
#5Reset line for an embedded device coupling onto another line, error caused by noise on line was detected and handled in the debounce time for the reset line. Caused reset reason to report as an error even during normal resets.
Re: Ask HN: What is the funniest bug you encountered?
#6When I was young I wrote a system that had an error message that was "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" for a small local business (back in the 90's).
6mths after it was in production I got an email saying "The system won't work and it keeps calling me Dave!, I'm not called Dave, my name is Chris!".
Lesson learnt right there, never put funny error messages in with the intention of replacing them later and never swear in error messages.
Re: Ask HN: What is the funniest bug you encountered?
#7"ERROR: Task completed successfully"
Re: Ask HN: What is the funniest bug you encountered?
#8A finance quant created a strategy with amazing results. He discovered the theory, tested it, refined it, and set up a presentation to the portfolio manager to start running it. problem was that he inverted PnL, and had spent the previous couple weeks figuring out how to maximize losses.
INBF "do the opposite." Markets don't work that way.
Re: Ask HN: What is the funniest bug you encountered?
#9Not really a bug, but..
An early release of our product (not to be named), contained a database that contained a perl script that was written out to a web server. The person who took over maintaining this script looked at the original author's code and put a comment line in containing the descriptive phrase "Chicken Goat Fuck Logic" (aka "CGF Logic"). We accidentally forgot to remove that comment before producing the "gold" CD.
A couple of weeks later, a very large national youth organization (also not to be named) contacted us, saying they would be unable to use our software, because their CyberNanny software had detected swear words in the output.
Arguably, if this hadn't happened, we would have become Amazon before Amazon became Amazon. Ooops!
Re: Ask HN: What is the funniest bug you encountered?
#10A finance quant created a strategy with amazing results. He discovered the theory, tested it, refined it, and set up a presentation to the portfolio manager to start running it. problem was that he inverted PnL, and had spent the previous couple weeks figuring out how to maximize losses. INBF "do the opposite." Markets don't work that way.
What Silicon Valley startup did he land in after he was fired?