I love a good bug, especially ones that are initially hard to explain but then ...

impure functions and their consequences

The moon phase cycle is 29.5 days. The reported bug cycle is 49 days. Yet somehow, “Not strictly the cycle of the moon but close”.

With that sort of logical analysis ability, no wonder this guy struggles with stupid bugs.

@WalrusByte@lemmy.world
link
fedilink
English
49M

That code has a werewolf in it!

tldr: the code worked differently when a signed version of gettickcount was negative, giving a change that repeats over 49.7 days

mox
link
fedilink
409M

“We can’t send mail farther than 500 miles from here…”

http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html

hallettj
link
fedilink
English
139M

I love these stories! There’s also,

And now that I’ve gone searching for these I see that they’ve all been helpfully collected on http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/index.html

Those are great stories, thanks for sharing!

Apparently, back in the days when a hard drive was the size of a clothes dryer, some enterprising engineering students would hack the device drivers so they could make the thing gradually scoot itself across the room using nothing but well-timed drive head thrashing.

That’s awesome. What a student thing to do, as well!

Create a post

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person’s post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you’re posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don’t want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev



  • 1 user online
  • 1 user / day
  • 1 user / week
  • 1 user / month
  • 1 user / 6 months
  • 1 subscriber
  • 1.21K Posts
  • 17.8K Comments
  • Modlog