[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What's the weirdest bug you ever had?
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       Ask HN: What's the weirdest bug you ever had?
        
       What's the weirdest bug you have encountered?  For me, it occurred
       during university on an assignment. We were supposed to create a
       SOAP C# integration, and I kept receiving the same error. I spent
       three days trying to resolve it, finding only two pages on the
       internet that detailed the bug--one in Russian and one in Chinese.
       When I finally asked my professor, he simply mentioned, "Oh, you
       just installed the wrong version."  Yeah... the wrong version. I
       never figured out why this was a problem.
        
       Author : martinbaun
       Score  : 7 points
       Date   : 2024-06-14 21:09 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
       | ahfeah7373 wrote:
       | Our JSP server would crash but only when the moons of Jupiter
       | were aligned and the bakery across the street was serving the
       | blueberry scone (CNR with the ham & cheese)
        
         | martinbaun wrote:
         | sounds like a delicious bug, Klaus Schwab would be proud :D
        
         | mtmail wrote:
         | Reminds me of the recent
         | https://x.com/CupiaBart/status/1793930355617259811
         | 
         | Engineers train a AI model to play an old game. One day their
         | AI performs worse, on multiple hardware. Turns out the game has
         | extra logic when it's full moon. "The player character is
         | luckier, werewolves appear in their animal form, and the dogs
         | howl ominously"
        
       | helph67 wrote:
       | Our health database was being used in many states but one
       | hospital reported error messages of "Invalid patient postcode" to
       | our Client Support. C.L. couldn't duplicate the problem so I was
       | sent to investigate, after checking that our same version was not
       | giving the same errors. Long story --> Short; the operator
       | inputting the postcode data was had been using `l' instead of
       | '1'. The font in use made it difficult to detect the differences.
        
         | martinbaun wrote:
         | These are annoying. Reminds of two bugs I had as well.
         | 
         | 1. One guy used tabs instead of spaces for fun and we couldn't
         | find the records. 2. One.... "person" decided to put some
         | values as null, for fun. :D Didn't break the system, but the
         | client thought it was a bug.
        
       | slyall wrote:
       | Around 2000 I worked for an ISP. We had some customers reporting
       | that they couldn't get to some websites. Narrowed it down
       | customers who were:                 * Running Mac OS 9 (not Mac
       | OS X)       * dialed into an Ascend NAS (Not other vendors)
       | * Assigned a Dynamic IP       * Accessing ASP-based websites
       | 
       | they would get a blank page on the website.
       | 
       | We actually had a computer in the office we could replicate it on
       | but gave up at that point since we didn't have something to debug
       | the network traffic. For the single-digit number of customers we
       | gave them static IPs or something.
        
       | romanhn wrote:
       | Once upon a time I had to track down an issue where very rarely,
       | with no discernible pattern the web app would produce garbled
       | PDFs. We would restart all servers, everything would be fine for
       | a month or two, then random bad output. Turned out this happened
       | when an admin account remotely connected to an app server, which
       | caused a reset of default screen resolution (only for admin
       | accounts, not regular remote connections), which messed up the
       | PDF library that relied on a specific resolution (it was HTML-to-
       | PDF conversion). Lived with it for a couple of years at least
       | before tracking down the root cause (after many many failed
       | attempts). The fact that only the server with the reset
       | resolution caused the problem confounded the issue.
        
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       (page generated 2024-06-14 23:02 UTC)