Hacker News Reader

Comment by icambron | Hacker News Reader

The most interesting part of this story to me is actually that his wife noticed that the printer didn't work on Tuesdays. I'd have never, ever put that together, no matter how many times I saw it succeed or fail. I'd actually be more likely to figure it out by debugging the CUPS script than I would be observing my printer's behavior. Can a lot of people pick up on correlations like that? "Ever notice how it's always Tuesday when the printer won't work?"

View on HN

I remember a time when I was a relatively computer-illiterate youngling and my favourite game was not particularly stable. I remember churning through many progressively more elaborate superstitions in search of some correlation I could exploit to prevent the dreaded crashes.

Of course, I never succeeded. But the point should stand: people are built around finding and exploiting correlations to their benefit, and we're actually quite good at it. It is not terribly surprising to me that somebody quickly noticed that the annoying bad thing that is consistently happening today also happened consistently for a day precisely one week ago. When the pattern repeats again for a third time...

only someone who doesn't understand computers would notice it, programmers would say "that doesn't matter" :)

You'd figure it out eventually, especially if it was exceedingly annoying and/or your job depended on it.

Example: what if your internet drops out for an hour every Sunday morning at 2am? You'd notice. (Mine does. Damn it Comcast!) If guy's wife relied on the printer similarly, it might be as acute as losing internet for you.

You wouldn't notice if you printed things on average once a week. But if you printed multiple times a day you'd soon notice the pattern, I suspect.

Every Tuesday morning I have to re-authenticate the 2FA that lets me connect to various things at work, and it isn't documented anywhere, but you'd better believe I figured out the pattern real fast. Being annoyed at the same time of the work week is very noticeable.

I have a Google Hangouts Tuesday mornings. Once a month, reliably, I'd suddenly be kicked off my own Hangout because Google has decided it's time for me to type my password back in.

Of course I do, reliably pushing the problem another month down the road.

Not having preconceptions about likely causes surely helped but it's possible that her use of the printer was not uniform across weekdays which might make it stand out more.

Yes, I would have never put those together either. One of the duplicate bugs has a similar thread, where a user describes reinstalling his system three times and failing to print every time. But after running updates after the third install, it suddenly worked again.

A helpful response then pointed out that after the third reinstall, his system clock must have gone past midnight, which means it was no longer Tuesday...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com