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Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

This is the greatest thing I've read today.

I love when software and the real world have entirely unexpected interactions. And by love, I usually mean hate, especially when I'm the one that has to debug them.

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I remember a story about a car that consistently refused to start after a family went to the store to buy vanilla ice cream but it worked fine when they bought chocolate ice cream. (My apologies for any inaccuracies in my recollection of it). They had a manufacturer engineer verify it happened even.

Turned out to be an overheating issue. The chocolate ice cream was at the back of the store while the vanilla ice cream was at the front, effectively changing how much time the car had to cool down properly before attempting to start it again.

Snopes said it is a legend? https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cone-of-silence/

These sorts of things make for good war stories. I find a trick to improve my attitude while dealing with them is to remind myself "this will be a good story at least, and I'll be glad it happened once I'm regaling others with it".

Oh, you know it! That's going to be a great tale to bust out for years to come.

I call this “Type 2 Fun”. As in it’s more fun to tell the story than be experiencing it.

As an example: many backpacking trip stories are type 2 fun.

my favorite story on this is a town in north east usa changed it's traffic lights from energy wasting old fashion lights to new fancy low energy lights. The unexpected result: in winter time these lights did not melt the snow away and the lights were opaque with white snow.

Technology Connections did an episode on this kind of stuff. GE just installs heaters in their streetlights now.

Heaters plus LED light… reminds me of technology where you get both at once!

I mean, at least now the heater only has top burn power during the winter (I hope)

even better. it only has to heat when it's actively snowing.

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