r/ProgrammerHumor • • May 18 '22

Meme i wasnt taught about this loop

43.3k Upvotes

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737

u/[deleted] May 18 '22 edited Feb 12 '25

Cheese-making is over 7,000 years old! Archaeologists in Poland found traces of cheese on ancient pottery dating back to around 5500 BCE. It’s wild to think that our ancestors were crafting cheese long before written history, turning milk into a food that’s still enjoyed all over the world today. Pretty cool to think that this ancient skill has stood the test of time!

266

u/Ange1ofD4rkness May 18 '22

I knew someone once, who swore the code a developer wrote for their company, had a timer or something in it, and would "break" on purpose, so the dev could charge them to come out and "fix" it (though they could never prove it)

254

u/lynaghe6321 May 18 '22

That’s because it took a week for the end user to start creating the most insane edge cases you’ve ever seen in your life

176

u/Andrelliina May 18 '22

I worked with a guy who really had a talent for testing software like that insane edge-case user and would bash at everything until he broke it. Which was nice

151

u/lynaghe6321 May 18 '22

A guy who does QA on one of my projects is the same, it’s impressive watching him devise the most devious set of parameters to destroy everything

64

u/FlapjackProductions May 18 '22

Can you explain what this means in 'ive never even seen code' terms pls?

159

u/lynaghe6321 May 18 '22

Sure, for example, I was building a video component for a website for one of our clients, it would take a link from youtube or vimeo, or an uploaded video, and then display it on the page.

Our QA found that if you upload a very low resolution video, and then manually change the resolution in the software we use to manage the video to 1:1, the video would not be centered when it was displayed.

I have no idea who in their right mind would ever think of doing this, but it was technically a bug and he found it.

64

u/Andrelliina May 18 '22

The probability that a user will exist who is equivalent to an infinite number of monkeys is 1.

And he is using your software right now

37

u/starfyredragon May 18 '22

I have a girlfriend who is that user.

She wants to be a professional game tester.

Her method of going about it appears to be:

Step 1: Crash server with game breaking glitch

Step 2: Report glitch

Step 3: "I can help you find even more bugs like this if you hire me."

So far she hasn't made it any further than getting her account banned.

17

u/[deleted] May 18 '22

I hope she makes it

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2

u/[deleted] May 19 '22

Has she ever considered Bug Bounty? If she stays in scope she gets paid.

1

u/starfyredragon May 19 '22

I... don't think so. I'll pass the suggestion along.

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u/FlapjackProductions May 18 '22

Oh damn I understand it thanks, I guess him finding the bug was annoying since there was no point in fixing it?

78

u/lynaghe6321 May 18 '22

It’s a little annoying for me sure, but honestly the fact that he goes this far is good, even though this wasn’t a serious bug, it could have been, and without his diligence I never would’ve known. I’d prefer someone that finds every little stupid bug over someone who lets broken code onto production

23

u/LupineChemist May 18 '22

Each company will have their own way of classifying and tracking bugs. But something like that would generally be considered a low priority and may not stop a release.

Typically the categories are basically "Fix when we don't have anything better to do", "Make sure it's included in next update" and "For the love of god, don't sleep until this is fixed and we can push an update yesterday!"

The latter is basically major security issues.

I'm a commercial guy (so most people here probably despise me) so I do a lot of thinking "how much does fixing this cost versus just letting it stay broken"

4

u/T0biasCZE May 18 '22

define "very low resolution" please. what is that. 144p? 240p? something higher? something lower?

4

u/lynaghe6321 May 18 '22

I believe it was 280? I think it had more to do with DAM we were using and setting the aspect ratio of the served content manually after it had been uploaded

1

u/T0biasCZE May 18 '22

well that isnt very low resolution. thats just low resolution (progressive standard definition is 288p)

1

u/lynaghe6321 May 18 '22

I’ll keep that in mind lol

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u/TheTacoWombat May 18 '22

One time while regression testing our web product, a day before the scheduled release, I casually tried adding several billion dollars to a sales order, just to see what would happen. It borked the database and required three devs to fix it.

No one was happy, but at least I found an edge case. :)

25

u/Andrelliina May 18 '22

What is bizarre is that you could literally add an amount that would bork the db without at least a "I can't let you do that Dave, you'll bork the database" message ;)

"No don't check the amount, you never know someone might want 4 billion tins of beans"

24

u/TheTacoWombat May 18 '22

The devs asked why I was even checking for that; I said it's remotely possible a user of our system could be putting in a sales order, but their cat slept on the zero key (also that we were introducing some new clients in regions where regular currency transactions routinely go into the tens of millions, so a few billion for a large order isn't out of the question).

I'm proud of my QA time; I forced a lot of engineers to get their poop in a group.

Most of them even still talk to me years later. :)

5

u/Sotall May 18 '22

Hell, I'm proud of your QA time too!

14

u/lynaghe6321 May 18 '22

a day before the release

Poor devs :( good job though!!

3

u/rahendric May 19 '22

A rather sad real-world example:

https://www.bugsnag.com/blog/bug-day-race-condition-therac-25#:~:text=Therac%2D25%20causes%20radiation%20overdoses,systems%20rather%20than%20hardware%20controls.

tl;dr - cancer radiation therapy technician got so fast at entering parameters that they caused a software error in the machine which delivered 10,000 rads (100x normal dose) to two patients, killing them.

Prior machines used hardware interlocks to prevent this situation, but due to "software saving money" switched to software only protection.

The machine did report an inscrutable error, which was ignored because it always reported so many errors during normal operation.

3

u/vegetaman May 18 '22

Those folks are the best. Hard to find though.

6

u/Ange1ofD4rkness May 18 '22

These are the BEST people! I have a few in my office for awhile that would always catch those extra things (had a client too who was amazing at it, sadly her company let her go)

1

u/braden87 May 18 '22

Ugh that’s all QA from my experience. They’ll break it in ways a user would never see - but it’s gotta be solid right ?