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Comment by Brajeshwar | Hacker News Reader

I found the mention of "Heisensubscribe" three times in the article but it assumed that the reader understood the meaning. I really want to learn this term which is new to me. I have a vague idea from reading the article and I might even be able to form a sentence and use it but I want to know how/where/why this comes from. I did searched but no satisfactory answer.

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It's a pun on Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle

Normally HN isn't the place for jokes, but this seems like the right time for this (very old) one:

Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Ohm are in a car.

They get pulled over. Heisenberg is driving and the cop asks him “Do you know how fast you were going?”

“No, but I know exactly where I am” Heisenberg replies.

The cop says “You were doing 55 in a 35 miles per hour zone.” Heisenberg throws up his hands and shouts “Great! Now I’m lost!”

The cop thinks this is suspicious and orders him to pop open the trunk. He checks it out and says “Do you know you have a dead cat back here?”

“We do now, thanks to you!” shouts Schrödinger.

The cop moves to arrest them. Ohm resists.

Is resistance the law, or currently against the law?

It's potentially against the law.

I assume it's a play on `heisenbug` which is a bug that is not easily reproducible, or more strictly a bug that is unlikely to happen when you are specifically trying to observe it (by enabling debug logging for example).

I assume the use here extends the uncertainty part of the problem to the unsubscribe workflow.

I've never heard of a Heisenbug, but that is clearly a play on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle [0]. It's unlikely that the author was referring directly to a Heisenbug, instead I'd guess both are different plays on the same name.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle

It is a play on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle as is a Heisenbug, which are bugs that happen differently or don't happen when you are observing the code execute. The typical case is you have a crash you can reproduce, but when you attach the debugger to the process the crash no longer happens due to subtle differences in code execution timing.

It's something like settings will change while you look for them and also a play on the ambiguseless text descriptions for their UI toggle switches (reobserved 3 days ago in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39342649).

Edit: My guess is Heisenberg and the Uncertainty Principle.

I can’t find the answer online either. Sounds like a half German half English word that means something like “my name is subscribe” or maybe it’s referring to Breaking Bad. I dunno either.

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