[HN Gopher] A 23-year-old first-time Firefox coder fixed a 22-ye...
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A 23-year-old first-time Firefox coder fixed a 22-year-old bug
Author : jdblair
Score : 85 points
Date : 2023-10-11 04:33 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| pstuart wrote:
| A bittersweet love letter to open source software.
| jdblair wrote:
| right? Linus's law updated: "given enough eyeballs, and
| unlimited time, all bugs are shallow"
| informatimago wrote:
| Best proof that we need more people in the world! ;-)
| m463 wrote:
| But like all history, this young kid is fixing the ills of his
| parents.
| JCharante wrote:
| Was always the case. Adding more monkeys with typewriters will
| get you Shakespeare sooner which is why I'm excited for the
| future of entertainment & software.
| dosssman wrote:
| While I understand the sentiment, I think we might not
| necessarily need more people in the world, but enable more
| people who already came to life to live up to their potential.
| Too much human potential is wasted in under developed regions.
| MrVandemar wrote:
| > Too much human potential is wasted in under developed
| regions.
|
| Too much human potential is wasted in highly developed
| regions as well, but it's not a question of access to
| resources, it's a question of living in a dysfunctional
| society driven by a lot of things that aren't "hey, how do we
| make the world better?"
| mvncleaninst wrote:
| > "I just searched for 'tooltip' in the entire code base,
| examined stuff for possible candidates, and inserted debugging
| print statements to follow the execution,"
|
| This guy gets it
| jeffrallen wrote:
| This guy debuks.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| I kinda dislike this sensationalism regarding XY years old bugs.
| Every large old projects have such old bugs and it's quite normal
| that if it's so low impact, it doesn't get prioritized.
| jdblair wrote:
| This bug isn't just old, it was a bug that probably every
| Firefox user has experienced and learned to work around. Just
| because it was "low impact" didn't mean it wasn't personally
| experienced.
| nickm12 wrote:
| 21 year old bug. June 2002 is not 22 years ago, despite what
| Bugzilla thinks.
| mycall wrote:
| That would be ironic if this is also a 22 year old Bugzilla
| bug.
| nly wrote:
| Humans are great at talking about problems for extended periods
| of time, ad nauseam, and less good at just getting starting on
| the solution.
|
| There are at least 6 or 7 bugs and tiny missing features in the
| software I own at work that would improve the dev and support
| experience, but I always feel guilty stopping work on my main
| tasks to tackle them.
| jdblair wrote:
| oops, this is a dupe of
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37836378
|
| also, here's the original submission of the bugzilla ticket:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37827995
|
| I liked the Ars Technica story in addition to the bugzilla ticket
| b/c of the information about the actual bug fixer themself.
| isaacfrond wrote:
| Bugzilla ticket:
|
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=148624
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(page generated 2023-10-11 16:02 UTC)