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462 points jakevoytko | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.237s | 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. yfontana ◴[] No.43493115[source]
I think the hardest bug I've had to work on was just plain irreproducible. Once we exhausted all other ideas, we just attributed it to some sort of bit flip. Not a very satisfying resolution, but kinda cool to have encountered such an issue at least once.