
My Hardest Bug Ever (2013) - Davesjoshin
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DaveBaggett/20131031/203788/My_Hardest_Bug_Ever.php
======
js2
Reminds me of the slightly more recent (2015) "The Discovery of Apache
ZooKeeper’s Poison Packet":

[https://www.pagerduty.com/blog/the-discovery-of-apache-
zooke...](https://www.pagerduty.com/blog/the-discovery-of-apache-zookeepers-
poison-packet)

------
xatan_dank
This is a great article. I remember reading this a few years ago during my
undergrad- my big takeaway from it was that sometimes you will encounter bugs
which you can't solve alone. I always assumed any error I came across was my
fault, but that's not good (it's also not good to just assume it's someone
else's). Fixing problems in an organization is often a team effort that
requires good communication and incentive for improvement- not just one genius
coder that knows the whole source code.

------
balls187
This is from 2013, and has been posted nearly a half dozen times now:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=http:%2F%2Fwww.gamasutra.com%2...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=http:%2F%2Fwww.gamasutra.com%2Fblogs%2FDaveBaggett%2F20131031%2F203788%2FMy_Hardest_Bug_Ever.php&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

~~~
flashm
...?

Nearly half a dozen? So five? In four years.

It's still interesting, and I don't suppose many people are searching for it
so what's the issue with it being posted again?

------
yomly
Anyone a bit more savvy on hardware able to shed a bit more light on this?

The following line tickles my fancy...

> _This is the only time in my entire programming life that I 've debugged a
> problem caused by quantum mechanics._

~~~
nategri
I've got a PhD in physics and I have no idea what he's talking about here.
Seems like the mainboard layout had issues at higher frequencies which is
easily a 100% classical electromagnetism problem. Inductance, impedance and
what have you. As another commenter alluded, its only 'quantum' in the sense
that all semiconductor behavior is.

I think this is another case where 'quantum' is confused with 'apparently
spooky.'

~~~
heavenlyblue
Neither is it entirely clear to me, but this could be a pun related to him
saying:

> bits to get dropped... and the data lost... and the card corrupted.

So as to say that's the Schrodinger's bug that causes several issues at the
same time.

