A German word for:“It only works when I try to show you how it does not work”? | Hacker News Reader

A German word for:“It only works when I try to show you how it does not work”?

german.stackexchange.com

201 pointsbcaa7f3a8bbc74 comments

That translation is wrong. It’s almost the opposite.

Vorführeffekt is when you are trying to show something works (for example to an audience/in a presentation) and it does NOT work in said presentation.

Remember this oldie but goldie for USB Plug and Play on Windows? https://youtu.be/IW7Rqwwth84

PS: thanks for all the comments! Didn't realise the double negation would work too. (Trying to show a bug you found in a meeting/to an audience but then it turns out it actually behaves unexpectedly as originally intended. No bug.)

Well depends... When you want to present a bug and it does not show up again.

It happens all the time to people asking me for help with their computers. They are a lot more annoyed by this than me.

That's just normal Vorführeffektsgewöhnungsgelassenheit, i.e. you being chill about it because you're already used to the Vorführeffekt.

Are those fantastically long German composite words easy to read for native speakers or is part of the pleasure having to stop and squint?

i learned a bunch of German years ago, and while i don't really know what the particular components mean, it's pretty easy for me to decompose the word into parts. do you see a "ge-" or a "be-"? its probably the beginning of a verb; an "-ung" or "-eit" are usually noun endings; etc. and this happens pretty much subconsciously

I'd guess it's similar to using a lot of English words to make compound nouns, except it is slightly worse to read, so if the word is new you'd usually slow down a bit to properly parse it.

On the upside, you don't have to guess where the compound noun ends end the rest of the sentence starts, which can also cost time or cost confusion.

It's not a big deal if you know each individual word but if you don't then it's hell.

I did a google search for that long word, and it shows how fast google's index updates.

I still can't believe they used to wear suits for tech demos.

> That translation is wrong. It’s almost the opposite.

It's exactly the same thing, isn't it? You just negate the predicate you want to show everywhere.

Absolutely: it's when you want to show that it doesn't work and it does not doesn't work :)

> it does NOT work in said presentation.

You mean like the Vorführeffekt when you're trying to show the bug and then it isn't there? :)

The bug works, but when I try to show it, it vanishes, so it does NOT work no more (but will probably reappear as soon as the presentation is over).

Excatly. German speaker here, parent is correct. I looked for a description in English, I found this exchange on reddit which IMO describes it exactly:

"What never works exactly as it's supposed to?" "Opening YouTube videos on a PowerPoint" "It works fine until the actual presentation"

But it can also refer to a bug that usually happens not happening when you try to show the bug to someone else. E.g. having no TV reception for some reason and getting someone to look at it, but when they show up, the reception is perfect.

It just means "demonstration effect", right?

Yep

Yes, demonstration (as in presentation) effect.

Parent comment is wrong, as you just demonstrated with your statement about the bug not occurring.

Parent comment is correct, because you try to show the bug but it won't rear it's ugly head when you do, so the bug does NOT work.

Sooo was the famous Windows 98 BSOD a case of the Vorführeffekt or not? Plug'n'play functionality for the scanner did not work when demonstrated to the audience in that instance.

Yes, if what usually happens in private (and what you are hoping to demonstrate to another person or an audience) is different from what happens when you demonstrate it, you can [0] call it Vorführeffekt.

[0] since it's not an actual effect [0a], kinda like Murphy's law isn't a real law, you can call it that way, but you're not required to.

[0a] other than maybe nervousness of the presenter affecting things, but I don't think Windows is ever nervous about crashing.

No. Vorführeffekt is used for anything that suddenly behaves differently when an audience is present. Be that features that suddenly don't work when observed, or bugs that suddenly don't reproduce anymore, etc.

A sign that you may be beset by goblins bent on causing you mischief.

Ok, but that doesn't make the translation any better. It's still wrong.

To all the oh-so-smart downvoters:

The translation is wrong because it makes things unnecessarily complicated. The term Vorführeffekt is used when something suddenly behaves differently in a not desired way when shown to others. The argument about double negation is logically right, yet entirely theoretical, as no sane person would ever describe or translate the effect in such a doubly-negated way to someone else.

That's how I use the word, too. It's a Heisenbug, though only one that manifests itself when you try to present something.

A Heisenbug can be observed in many situations. The Vorführeffekt happens only in front of an audience.

I think I get what you're trying to say, but by definition an observation requires an audience, even if it's an audience of 1. Maybe say an increased audience size?

I think a "presenter" is required.

That's how I use the word, too. It's a Heisenbug.

If you abstract "non-function" as the thing that is meant to be demonstrated, then it surely is a Vorfuhreffekt (literal translation: demonstration effect). More formally, the Vorfuhreffekt is "I just observed X so I wanted to demonstrate it, but then while demonstrating it, X did not occur". Now just substitute X for "non-function" and resolve the double negations by DeMorgan's law.

I'm wondering whether the Vorfuhreffekt can be explained in terms of statistics, similar to regression to the mean. I.e. the observation that something worked or worked very well is often an outlier, so when repeating the experiment, one get a worse outcome in expectation. It is a kind of selection bias.

I've been thinking patience might play a role; I had this issue often as a kid.

When you have a computer problem and do some things to fix them, it doesn't work, you call a parent over and they do exactly the same thing and it does work... hm.

Maybe the computer was just stressed by my constant attempts and clicking and going away for a short time gave the system time to sort its internals and be ready for input again? shrug (a kid's reasoning)

When you can't type the umlauts the correct way is using an additional e after the vowel, like this: Vorfuehreffekt. One more example: "schoen" instead of "schön" and not "schon".

Vorfuhreffekt is different and just sounds wrong. The German ear tries to understand this like this: "the effect of having gone ahead", but in German you don't conjugate substantives, so using the past of "fahren" ("fuhr") doesn't work here. This is irritating, at least for me.

For "schön" and "schon" however it does really matter because these words are in English "beautiful" and "already".

The former is my family name, and unfortunately following our immigration to the U.S. many people here interpret it as two separate syllables!

Herzliches Beileid!

Danke!

I just realized that my post could be interpreted as suggesting that I personally had immigrated to the U.S. from Germany. In fact, my grandfather did. But the two-syllable interpretation has affected every subsequent generation.

"Vorführeffekt" can be used in this situation, but it's broader and not specific enough to describe exactly what the question is asking for.

No, typically you've set up everything for failing. Then you show it in front of customer support, to demonstrate the problem. The thing then beautifully works the first time. That's still the Vorführeffekt.

Definition incomplete. It's also used for the other way around. like when something broke, you call the help desk. Technician shows up and it works then!

It's not used in this case.

The answer also has a great piece of wisdom in its footnote:

> "That's why we prefer to use power point presentations and (maybe even faked) screen shots to present software in early stages of development, instead of really running a live installation of the program."

When I was giving speaker training, I was always telling people to avoid live demos. There are many things that can go wrong and ruin your presentation with the main culprit being the WiFi connection at the venue (or lack thereof).

Invariably, people would not listen to the recommnedation, to only have their presentation fail miserably exactly for that reason. Even those with no live demos where not immune, since they hosted their presentation online.

Why not both: do the live demo but have some slides prepared just in case.

Almost twice as much work?

With camel casting, the German word you are looking for is: EsFunktioniertNurWennIchDirZeigeWieEsNichtFunktioniert

Without camel casting, the word is: Scheisse

Scheiße works in every kind of situation. Sort of like блядь in Russian. (Still amazing that you can have both strings in one message, as well as my dribble in what goes for English, thanks unicode!) I wonder how other languages handle this kind of situation (I am vaguely aware of merde)

Dutch has the word "kut" for those sort of situations, it pretty much has the same role as "fuck" in english. (Though these days "fuck" is a perfectly well understood word in dutch too)

I'd be highly surprised if there are languages out there without such a universal word.

I like to call it the Admin Effect. It got so bad to the point where anytime I approached a user to fix an issue, the first thing they said was "It'll probably just work now that you're here... yep, there it goes, thanks I guess".

Back when I was doing tech support at a school I'd be getting calls just to come over so it'd work. Oh well, at least it's an excuse to go for a walk and have a bit of a chit chat.

I really enjoyed learning the word "verschlimmbesserung" from my colleagues (the act of by trying to improve something, making it worse). In the context of programming it works really well.

Surprisingly google translate does a rather nice job on that word, It translates it to "disimprovement" which seems perfectly cromulent to me.

Also known as "effet Bonaldi" in French: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jérôme_Bonaldi#L'«_effet_Bonal...

Definitely, this blimped into my mind. The Bonaldi effect is more like « demoing something with great hype, that was working perfectly at rehearsal time, will ultimately fail with an audience, in proportion with the hype/reality ratio », but yeah it ended up being generalised enough to be a superset of Vorführeffekt.

For non French readers, the Bonaldi effect is generally understood as having catastrophic side effects, causes, or downright coincidences way beyond the intended demo not working: the climatic example being a demo of a vacuum cleaner that was met with the studio’s mains breaker triggering and outright killing the live broadcasting, millions of TV viewers being suddenly met with static (post mort en showed the vacuum cleaner was not in cause). An analogy would be demoing some totally harmless piece of code and encounter a kernel panic or a LAN/WAN takedowns.

In spite of Bonaldi trying increasingly hard for such events not to happen, they still did, and the audience was increasingly watching the show both for the often cheesy devices demonstrated, the comedic effect of the hype of such obvious cheesiness and the unexpected ways things would go sideways.

I thought the english term "Demo effect" is widely used as well? Is it not?

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=demo%20effec...

One thing learned growing up in a German household (my parents are from there, I was born in the US) is that there are special words and phrases and putdowns in German for almost anything. My grandmother also spoke Yiddish which confused the hell out of me as I thought some things I heard were German but weren't. My favorite putdown was always "Brat mir einen Storch und macht die beine recht knusprig" (spelling might be wrong).

Roast me a stork and make the legs extra crispy? Hmmm...

Aren't these German words just compound expressions? It's just that they don't put hyphens or spaces between words.

While they are in a technical sense, it still feels different to use a compound word vs a sentence expressing the same idea.

Compare in english: bedtime vs time to go to bed.

Friendly reminder that German compounds aren't that special compared to English ones. We just don't separate their components with spaces.

Exactly, I never understood the Internet's dumbfounding with German compound words.

The whole stuff somehow reminds me of the classic "magic and more magic switch":

http://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html

In russian this is called "General's effect", where general is an army general. Basically, something is working as long as a higher rank official is present and not working otherwise.

That's the opposite. The soldiers make it work for the general whereas the German word would be used if it works 'in general' but doesn't when it's demonstrated to the general during an inspection.

So it works in general, but not for generals.

Wild guess: someone heard the word "Heisenbug" once and couldn't recall it, so asked StackExchange for help?

EDIT: it even is mentioned in the comments.

(German here) "Heisenbug" is not the same at all! That's... about a bug (also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenbug -- although I dislike being a "definition fanatic", here it's even in the word itself - "...-bug")

"Heisenbug" does not have anything to do with the main feature ("Vorführ-Effekt" -- meaning "demonstration[/presentation] effect"), that you try to present it to others. It also occurs when you debug it on your own and even when you are not looking, unlike the Vorführeffekt which specifically happens when you demonstrate something (not a bug, but can be a bug - anything).

If it is something that is supposed to work but it does not when you demonstrate it, there does not have to be a "bug" somewhere for this effect! It can just be that the power goes out city-wide. Which does not have to be due to a bug in that outside system either, you could just have overlooked scheduled maintenance. Or somebody trips over the power cable. The reason for the failure can be completely external and outside the thing you are trying to present.

Vorführeffekt is much more general. The other comments have quite a few good examples and explanations.

"Vorführeffekt."

lol

With blurry glasses, i read that as 'f*ck you effect"

In UK, "sod's law" is essentially the same thing, though more general than just "only works when I demonstrate that it doesn't"

Inverse: "A schrödinbug or schroedinbug . . . is a bug that manifests itself in running software after a programmer notices that the code should never have worked in the first place." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenbug

I told my co-workers that Murphy’s law only fails when you try to demonstrate it - they were all from India and had never heard the term before, thought I was being serious and dedicated a guy to learning all about it. I like this word better though, sounds very cool when you say it. I think this is going replace Murphy.

It doesn't fail: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong, including demonstrating Murphy's law.

In Russian, the word is визит-эффект (https://ru.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B7%D0%B8%D1%8...)

Basically it is like Murphy’s law.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy%27s_law

Bill Gates presents Windows 98 and plugs USB device in -> blue screen!

"Demo effect" is the English version for this.

English translation: doh!

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