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Comment by mediaserf | Hacker News Reader

Due to instability and memory/race condition issues with the new sykpe app, I've been using Pidgin and the skypeweb plugin: https://github.com/EionRobb/skype4pidgin/tree/master/skypewe...

This works well for me since most of my skype traffic is chats, but I have to load the new skype app for calls.

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Nitpick, I assume by "race condition" you mean "used lots of CPU". This is a common colloquial conflation, but race conditions [1] (which are not generally identifiable without aid of a debugger and the application's source code) and high CPU usage are unrelated concepts.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_condition

That's not a nitpick. These are entirely different things and calling high CPU usage a "race condition" is really confusing and misleading.

Do people actually do that? Where did that come from?

> Where did that come from?

Maybe because it makes your machine's fans sound like a race car?

Honestly this is the first I've heard of this usage as well.

And also, please can we refer to computers as hard drives. Especially desktops.

What are you going on about here? I have never once heard someone confuse "race condition" with "high CPU usage."

Now you have: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14522211

You're right. I didn't throw a debugger at it. It seems to randomly ramp up CPU load and stay high until I kill the process.

Do look up what a race condition is.

I've never heard of those two things being conflated.

It's a subset of race conditions to be sure, but I think it's reasonable to look at a thread that gets stuck in a do-nothing loop while the app continues to run and guess it's probably the fault of buggy multithreading and bad luck on the timings.

> which are not generally identifiable without aid of a debugger and the application's source code

Random behavior is usually an indication that there may very likely be a race condition without needing the source code.

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