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462 points jakevoytko | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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BobbyTables2 ◴[] No.43490119[source]
Interesting writeup, but 2 days to debug “the hardest bug ever”, while accurate, seems a bit overdone.

Though abs() returning negative numbers is hilarious.. “You had one job…”

To me, the hardest bugs are nearly irreproducible “Heisenbugs” that vanish when instrumentation is added.

I’m not just talking about concurrency issues either…

The kind of bug where a reproduction attempt takes a week, not parallelizable due to HW constraints, and logging instrumentation makes it go away or fail differently.

2 days is cute though.

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1. Terr_ ◴[] No.43490459[source]
This repro was a few times per day, but try fixing a Linux kernel panic when you don't even have C/C++ on your resume, and everyone who originally set stuff up has left...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37859771

Point being that the difficulty of a fix can come from many possible places.