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War story: the hardest bug I ever debugged

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462 points jakevoytko | 1 comments | 24 Mar 25 14:37 UTC | HN request time: 1.584s | source
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koliber ◴[27 Mar 25 08:01 UTC] No.43491325[source]▶
And somewhere out there is a person reading this post and coming to the conclusion "How can Google be stupid enough to hire people stupid enough to have abs() return a negative value."

Love the story! There is so much complexity in the world around as that seemingly obviously wrong things happen through the most unlikely chains of dependency.

replies(1): >>43491883 #
1. noisy_boy ◴[27 Mar 25 09:56 UTC] No.43491883[source]▶
> And somewhere out there is a person reading this post and coming to the conclusion "How can Google be stupid enough to hire people stupid enough to have abs() return a negative value."

Weird things can happen anywhere but I was wondering why this issue wasn't caught by test cases before it escaped to production? I would think that a compiler team would have low-level tests for such common functions.