
Programmer excuses - hjc89
http://www.programmerexcuses.com/
======
c16
My favorite excuse so far:
[http://i.imgur.com/X0aFVfy.png](http://i.imgur.com/X0aFVfy.png)

~~~
sdsk8
"it was up when i went to bed!"

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paulftw
Great idea, but after trying it dozen times I still didn't get the most common
excuse: "works fine on my machine"

~~~
lfuller
This is why Vagrant / Chef is so great.

~~~
giblaz
Yesir. I'm using Puppet myself and it's saving me boatloads of time and energy
and brainwracking.

The fact that it can be used not just for Vagrant but for setting up your
nodes on a cloud infrastructure is kind of overpowered :D

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cruppstahl
That's an interesting webpage. it has a hidden google ads-field in an iframe.
I'm not web-savy enough to fully understand how it works.

The "click me as often as you can" contents for sure generate a lot of clicks.
genius!

~~~
jrs235
I see my GET request for show_ads.js is failing. So perhaps that nonloading
javascript is suppose to make it appear but it's non working at the moment...
Now, which excuses from the site would apply here?

Here's the first one that might make sense that showed up on my refresh: "It
worked yesterday"

UPDATE: Must be Ad Block blocking it.

~~~
koesterd
Are you using Adblock or similar software?

~~~
jrs235
Yup, it was Ad Block.

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TinamousSteve
I got 500 Internal Server Error with an additional 404 Not Found for the
ErrorDocument, I had to wonder if that was a real excuse or genuine server
error! Theirs a certain amount of irony to it anyway.

~~~
manmal
Actually, that's a feature

~~~
michaelmcmillan
That comment really made me laugh.

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reitanqild
Related (and my favorite): Things to Say When You're Losing a Technical
Argument

[http://www.pigdog.org/auto/mr_bads_list/shortcolumn/1914.htm...](http://www.pigdog.org/auto/mr_bads_list/shortcolumn/1914.html)

------
fbernier
git commit -m "$(curl -s programmerexcuses.com | sed -n '/<a. _>
/{s/<[^>]_>//g;p}')"

~~~
vardump
I'd like to commit a bugfix:

    
    
      git commit -m "$(curl -s programmerexcuses.com | sed -n '/<a.*>/{s/<[^>]*>//g;p}')"

~~~
ShaneOG
And for any OS X user (* BSD based sed)

    
    
      curl -s programmerexcuses.com | sed -n -e '/<a.*>/{s/<[^>]*>//g;' -e 'p' -e '}'
    
      git commit -m "$(curl -s programmerexcuses.com | sed -n -e '/<a.*>/{s/<[^>]*>//g;' -e 'p' -e '}')"

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michaelhoffman
On one reload I got a standard internal server error message. Next reload it
was gone. If that was on purpose, it is a nice touch.

~~~
dasil003
I got this twice and I went to go look at the response to see if it was
actually a 200 implying that it was purposeful, but once I loaded up the dev
console to see the headers I couldn't reproduce.

~~~
jrs235
Try DoSing the page by holding down F5 for a second or two...

Status comes back as 500 not 200.

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madeofpalk
12 months ago while I was bored on a SFO to JFK flight I made a clone relevant
to where I was working at the time
[http://frsexcuses.com](http://frsexcuses.com) which got featured by 9to5Mac
[1] and still to this day gets a little bit of traffic as the domain is about
to expire

[1]: [http://9to5mac.com/2013/08/02/frs-excuses-website-
showcases-...](http://9to5mac.com/2013/08/02/frs-excuses-website-showcases-
some-possibly-familiar-statements-from-apple-stores/)

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joeblau
Where is "It works on my box"? I'm guilty of using that one a few times.

Edit: "It's user error" is another popular one.

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zerni
"The bug must come from changes colleague XY has made after me!
_pointingfingers_ "

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danielweber
Reminded of the old BOFH calendar with daily excuses: "Sunspots."

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pandatigox
Nice site, but seems weird wrapping the text in a <href> and wrapping that in
a center. As somebody else said on the comments, why couldn't be just plain
text/have a plain text header?

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stronglikedan
"That wasn't in the specification"

An excuse being an attempt to justify a fault, I don't consider that an
excuse. That one is a fact, and it's not the programmers fault when it
happens.

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Dorian-Marie
Here is the full list of excuses:
[https://gist.github.com/Dorian/28a49b82ee9f026e5823](https://gist.github.com/Dorian/28a49b82ee9f026e5823)

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logfromblammo
I got "The third-party API is not responding" the first time, and I thought
for a second that it was a 500-class server error. Then I reloaded, and
laughed.

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arethuza
I have actually seen something that was thought to be an application error
tracked down to a faulty firewall device - that was a fun bug to investigate
:-)

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BCM43
Similar:

[http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ballard/bofh/bofhserver.pl](http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ballard/bofh/bofhserver.pl)

~~~
whafro
I used to have a BOFH excuse calendar. A classic.

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dn2k
"I heard there was a solar flare today"

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wil421
Everything looks fine on my end! It looks like its a browser compatibility
issue.

Ha! I said both of these this morning. No I am blaming the plugin.

------
sgt
Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to
complete your request.

Is this another excuse?

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JasonFruit
Some of those give me a twinge of embarrassment: "I didn't receive a ticket
for that," indeed.

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notduncansmith
It's amazing how many of these I've said with a straight face. Guess I am a
lazy programmer.

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gabriel34
The first time I loaded the page I was expecting some writeup on programmer
excuses, instead I was presented with a page that said "Our servers are too
slow to cope with the demand" or something similar and I thought "OK, a bit
too honest calling their servers slow, but the message is clear" so I decided
to wait a bit until HN traffic died down

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vardhanw
What about the heisenbugs, the ones which disappear as soon as I try to debug
them?

~~~
notduncansmith
First time hearing "Heisenbugs", think I'm gonna hang onto that one.

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thehal84
looks like an Ad click generator since DoubleClick is hidden in the page.

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simgidacav
Is there a "hey, it passed all the unit tests"?

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spuz
Does anyone know where to find the full list of excuses?

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m0skit0
"Internal Server Error" is also an excuse?

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ixtli
You say lazy like it's a bad thing.

