Hacker News Reader

Comment by geek_at | Hacker News Reader

I love bugs like this. As a developer or Sysadmin you'd think the users are crazy again but then you dig deeper until you lose all hope and already book flights to become a farmer in the midwest and then you find something like thís

View on HN

Maybe you've already seen this one, but maybe there are some people who haven't... I get a kick out of it every time I reread it, anyway. :)

http://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles

Edit: And the FAQ: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html

Probably my fifth read through and still love it.

Wait. How come it wasn't ~280 miles then?

EDIT: Never mind, answered in the FAQ.

My first time. Absolutely hilarious!

Fun to read. Thanks for sharing!

With the risk of sounding a bit arrogant, am I the only one who immediately thought about a timeout issue on the first description of the problem?

As a fan of online gaming I'm painfully aware that ping (and distance to server) matter. Especially when I was in Japan and tried to play with my friends in Germany, the fact that packets were routed over the US to Europe resulting in ~250ms pings was a constant annoyance.

The best hardware related one remains the classic Magic/More Magic switch:

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

This one, and the 500-mile email story, are my all-time favourites. :)

I can't find it, but a while ago there was a post on some StackExchange page (SuperUser maybe?) and reddit that had the following problem: Whenever a specific person passed a specific cubicle, one of the monitors would turn black/lose signal and turned back on after the person was away again. I don't remember how it got resolved or rather what the problem was. Since it only happened on a specific person people were guessing it was about static electricity from the specific clothing(-style) or similar in the early process. Maybe someone else had heard of this or can find it?

That sounds like a feature if I could somehow tie it to my boss

https://superuser.com/questions/1406140/monitor-screen-that-...

Also, some reddit makes it seem like a Titanium pin in his shoulder was to blame: https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/2rsivw/monitor...

At university, we once built a networked doorbell system for the offices. Lots of small displays with a button outside the doors, connected on a CAN bus to a controller, that you could configure, and another device in the office to make noise and control the screen.

We had a problem, though: The door display devices would randomly crash and require somebody to go over and reboot them. This was very annoying, and we could never reproduce it. We added monitoring for it, and after a while the problem mostly went away on its own. But half a year later, it was back. It seems the system worked fine in summer, but started crashing in winter.

We finally, after much testing and deliberation, realised it was caused by the devices having a metal front plate which would easily attract static shocks, which would crash the device. And in winter, the dry air and wooly clothing would cause a lot more static discharges.

Wow, nice find. Although that is not the story I was looking for. Seems like it isn't as unique then.

I have a similar issue with my desktop computer: when I suspend or hibernate it, it sometimes wakes up again when I'm standing, getting up from my chair or leaving the room. This also occasionally happens (when hibernated) after I have physically switched off the power of the computer and switch it on again. The issue occurred first a few years after I bought it, but right now I have just given up debugging it, as I have absolutely no idea what the cause could be. It's mildly annoying sometimes as I have to check that it's really staying put, but I can deal with it.

A very simple version of this: I used to find that my macbook was randomly going to sleep all the time when I was working with it. Eventually realized that it was because I was using my ipad pro right next to it, with its very strong magnets for the smart keyboard---and magnetic sensors are also how the macbook tells the screen is closed. Could probably put one to sleep by just waving a sufficiently strong magnet in front of it...

There was a story on HN at one point about laptops that would immediately go dark when placed on top of another laptop.

The magnet in the lid of the bottom laptop would put the top laptop to sleep.

If you have a nicer mouse with a quality sensor, a pretty slight bump or vibration to the desk can cause it to move and wake the computer. Try disabling wake on mouse so you can only wake with the keyboard.

Yup. I puzzled over this one for a while when it happened to me. My mouse was on a pull-out surface from the desk and thus any vibration was amplified. It was sensitive enough to wake the computer merely from walking up to it.

Depending on how it's configured to wake, my guess is it's your mouse. When you stand you move the desk just enough to cause the mouse to wake it. Happens to me all the time when I bump by desk when getting out of my chair.

Unfortunately, I can still reproduce it when the mouse is disconnected completely (tried it in the past as my first guess)

I have a pair of Trickers boots with a rubber sole that give me and everyone who touches me massive static shocks when I'm in the office.

It never happens anywhere else, so it must be something about the office carpet, and maybe inadaqute earthing of the desks or something.

But every single time I wear those boots to work I will shock myself a dozen or more times that day.

Useful tip: carry a metal object (keys, soda can) with you. Grab it with as much surface area as possible (holding the twisting part of the key, or the whole of the can) and use the tip of the key or lid of the can to touch metal. Because you've spread out your contact over a much larger area, you won't feel the shock. You can use this to get some really impressive sparks - I've gotten as much as 5-6 mm long.

My most recent one was that 3 minutes after someone else would SSH into my workstation, my X11 session would crash, but when I would SSH into my workstation, there was no error.

It turns out the default configuration for systemd-logind is to sandbox it away from networking; it's an NIS setup where I am, but I had a local passwd entry for myself so that my home directory would be local. There was a 3 minute timeout on something NIS related, which would cause an error. Then systemd-logind would restart system-wide, including my local login.

My favorite one is the one where engineer notices that he can login on terminal only when sitting down. When standing up, login fails.

wait really?

Ok don’t leave us hanging here what was the cause?

> Turns out that some joker pulled out two keys from the keyboard and switched their places. [...] They were both relatively good at typing and didn't look down at the keyboard when typing when sitting. But typing when standing is something they weren't used to and had to look down at the keyboard which made them press the wrong keys.

Once in college, somebody thought they'd be clever and remove all the keytops on the only CRT in one small timesharing computer lab. Didn't bother me, because I was a touch typist - didn't need to see the keys at all.

https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/3v52p...

Not as interesting as initially hoped for :D

Not the same one, but very recently, this problem has been cropping up for real all over the place! https://twitter.com/royvanrijn/status/1214162400666103808?s=... People having screens that turn off when you sit down or stand up.

SPOILER: its the gas compression in the shockabsorber causing an EM spike or something like that.

it happens to me all the time with a colleague that sits in front of me. every time he stand up, my monitor start glitching. i found that cause a couple of weeks ago, and now i find it hilarious

Last Friday's xkcd happens to be very relevant! https://xkcd.com/2259/

And that XKCD reminded me of a couple other seminal debugging stories:

- "The Case of the 500-mile email" https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html

- Brendan Gregg demonstrates the effect of screaming at hard drives: https://youtu.be/tDacjrSCeq4

Reply on news.ycombinator.com