Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by joekim 1569 days ago
Also, a good signal for programmers to dig deeper into strange software behavior.
2 comments

If a C or C++ programmer did that they'd never find their way out of the rabbit hole.
Sadly, in the tech world, phrases like "It's acting weird, try a reboot." are the opposite of this.

Every time something isn't behaving as it should, somewhere in the bytes of RAM will be the reason it isn't working properly. You could dump that ram and single step the code to find the fault. And then fix it for the millions of other people out there.

Or you could just reboot, and the problem will be erased, and probably never happen again to you for many years, by which time you'll have moved onto new hardware anyway.

In the tech world the "huh, that's weird" can apply to users using your app to solve problems in unexpected ways.
Because 99% of the time understanding the root cause is not interesting or valuable. When you find a bug you won't accidentally discovery the cure for some disease. You'll fix it, and a low impact, intermittent issue that could be mitigated with a restart is now gone.
When you find a bug you shall be able to learn and not make the same mistake again.