
Facebook bug 'kills' users in 'terrible error' - xufi
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37957593
======
jrockway
The biggest thing I take away from this is that users have learned to tolerate
minor problems in software. I always make it a personal goal to have 0 bugs,
but never succeed. It is good that users cut us some slack, because it means
we can spend some time pushing the featureset forward, rather than making
everything 100% perfect 100% of the time. (Be more careful if you're working
on life-critical software, though. Features are not necessarily the most
important thing there ;)

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tbveralrud
"We hope people who love %s will find comfort in the things others share to
remember and celebrate %s life." is one of the most insincere code commits of
that day. Let others write about a lost loved one, not robots.

~~~
avg_dev
I don't know, my microwave flashes "Enjoy your meal" every time it's done
heating something and I like that little touch.

~~~
joshmn
What kind of microwave is that? Mine just swears at me. Consecutively.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Microwaves are the most aggressive robots.

"Hey! Hey! Your food has been ready for zero seconds! Hey!"

. . .

"Hey! F#$face! Your burrito has been ready for five seconds! Eat your g-d food
meat bag!"

. . .

"Ten seconds?! REALLY?! Are you serious?! We're enemies forever now! Eat this
crap for f's sake!"

~~~
terinjokes
I see you've met my dishwasher.

"Hey, the wash cycle is over" Yes, but everything is still as hot as lava.

"Hey, it's been 5 minutes." Still hot.

And then it beeps a "Hey!" every five minutes thereafter.

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lsmod
"An unusual bug on Facebook briefly labelled many people as dead."

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yawaramin
You know, I bet it was something to do with `memorializeUser` again (see
[https://www.columbia.edu/~ng2573/zuggybuggy_is_2scale4ios.pd...](https://www.columbia.edu/~ng2573/zuggybuggy_is_2scale4ios.pdf)
slide 46). In fact I would go so far as to say this is the kind of thing that
should be encoded in the type system so it's a compile error to try to do
this.

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lalaithion
Thirty years from now: Same headline without quotes.

~~~
taneq
"It turns out these users had been dead for several years, but due to a glitch
in payroll, they had still been physically alive. We, uh, just fixed the
glitch."

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rhizome
I have to wonder what the attempted feature was that resulted in this.

~~~
agildehaus
If it's anything like my bugs, it's a single-character typo in the template.

~~~
ben_jones
I feel like Facebook must do a phased roll out of their front-end
modifications such that they'd detect that before it was big enough to matter
(or perhaps during language normalization which must be huge for them). My
guess is they were running something on the back-end to "clean up" dead users
and it went haywire.

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inimino
Let's wait for the post-mortem on this one.

~~~
avg_dev
(lol) do they usually give such? I'd love to know what happened here.

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warsaw
Who uses Facebook?

~~~
dang
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