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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   2249 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 3, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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What's the stupidest computer bug you've ever made/seen?

I was having problems in a script because 0.12 < -3.45 when you compare the strings alphabetically.

Far and away the most frustrating ones are when I misspell a variable exactly once in an awkward spot.

Although, R has this thing where the logicals (booleans) TRUE and FALSE can also be replaced with T and F for conciseness (you can pass something like ‘param=T’ without typing the whole thing, which is awesome) … but T and F unlike TRUE and FALSE are not reserved key words! Once I accidentally assigned (capital) T or F as a variable and that was a nightmare to figure out why random things were breaking all over.

The other infrequent but annoying thing is “factors”. In data analysis often you have categorical variables with preset and limited values. You can make these into “factors” but really it’s stored as a named integer vector. Say we are storing HTML codes, 200, 404, whatever. You might in some common analyses cases treat them as strings, and categorical, although obviously they are maybe still ‘numbers’ in your head. If you aren’t careful, you might accidentally write ‘as.numeric(HTML_codes)’ but that will return the integers that are used as internal representations, (like 1,1,2,4,1) rather than the numbers (really strings) themselves. Because they aren’t strings anymore, they are factors as a data type, and R decided rather than have a special unique data type they would just implement it as an integer with metadata (the actual “value” eg “200” is stored as a “name” attribute). Honestly there are good reasons for that, but still a major gotcha. (A very common package import makes this a lot less mistake prone but sometimes coding in a hurry you might forget)

I ran into a bug once in a unique ID generation scheme because the system clock ran monotonically backwards for thirty seconds, then started marching forward again.

Writing a mitigation was actually surprisingly fun. It's not often you have to explain to a reviewer why the "didTimeTravelHappen" variable is in there.

That's what you call self-documenting code. didTimeTravelHappen is there to tell you if time travel happened. Obviously.

Was this Javascript or Python?

lol, I wish. It was in Macro Script Command Language (and not even the latest version of it). I use python whenever possible at work, but still end up spending a lot of time on ladder logic, MSCL, or other strange programming languages.

That’s a good one. I’ve definitely caused it…more than once.

The problem is that it works perfectly fine for anything between 0.01 and 9.99.

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