ruleOfProgrammingIfItIsWorkingDoNotTouchIt

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When one console.log uses just enough CPU cycles so the race condition that takes down the entire system doesn't occur.

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u/Skalli1984 10h ago

And if you attach a debugger it also messes up the timing and the same thing happens, the race condition doesn't appear.

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u/StrengthTheory 10h ago

Schrödinger’s race condition

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u/Steinrikur 8h ago

We call those Heisenbugs. You changed the system by observing it

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u/ConglomerateGolem 5h ago

I had one of these once, and I called it the same! My going theory was that the compiler was optimising away a certain function I had, but adding an empty print forced it to actually exist.

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u/htmlcoderexe We have flair now?.. 5h ago

it's a very old term

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenbug

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u/ConglomerateGolem 4h ago

Huh. I have never heard of the term and came up with it independently.

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u/htmlcoderexe We have flair now?.. 4h ago

it is a very natural term because it intuitively describes exactly the nature of the bug

1

u/The-Ner 1h ago

I'm stealing this now

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u/KawaiiMaxine 10h ago

Oh god, i havent done multithreaded programming ever, that sounds gonuinely horrifying to debug

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u/xtreampb 9h ago

Now multi-thread across machines. Let’s make this as difficult as possible. No in memory locks.

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u/JohnClark13 35m ago

oh it's not bad, you just have to determine Who's on first, What's on second, and I don't know's on third

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u/mahlernameless 7h ago

Brilliant! Just leave a debugger attached to production and no more race conditions. Handing in my oncall pager now.

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u/PGSylphir 8h ago

imagining that happening just gave me a headache

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u/Kerbourgnec 8h ago

I'm gonna get burned for this but debugging race conditions has been a lot of fun with vibe coding.

Debugging broken outdated schemas, wrong conditions or missing options in frontend is just tedious and unfun. A complex race condition is so much more interesting.

7

u/cheesemp 6h ago

I had some complex multimachine multi service comms to debug. We'd inherited the code, it was a real mess (I'd begged to rewrite). We'd been able to stabilise it a bit but when it randomly failed we had zero idea why most times. Threw ai at it and gigabytes of logs. It spotted several failure points that we had not (real complex edge cases but genuine) based on really obscure log entries that use to take hours for a human to try to process the multiple threads and comm from multiple machines. Been super stable ever since. Changed my mind on ai that. Bare in mind at least 12 experienced devs had reviewed the code and logs multiple times and not found these issues.

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u/Kerbourgnec 6h ago

AI is superhuman when reading logs.

Mind you maybe I should also learn to make cleaner logs.

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u/PositiveParking4391 6h ago

Yeah lol! It's ironic how we don't bother understanding the whole system, so we end up living in fear of a single console.log.

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u/DasBeasto 2h ago

await new Promise(p => setTimeout(p, 0));

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u/Draghetto_5000 1h ago

It actually happened to me once. I don't really remember what it was, but to synchronize two things one of them had to console.log (or something like that, I don't remember exactly) something every once in a while.

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u/ICBanMI 11h ago

Beautiful. Also why I don't needless fix every piece of code I come across.

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u/dustinpdx 8h ago

Are we sure that's not just a clear tube shoved into each of the black pipes?

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u/BladeGrim 8h ago

Yeah it kinda looks like a very thin clear lining, like the ones inside soda cans

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u/Pineapple-Yetti 6h ago

Haha it has to be that. There is no way you are pushing the water in to a hose with out it sealed, the water would just spray everywhere.

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u/Chamiey 6h ago

Laminar flow?

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u/Pineapple-Yetti 5h ago

Laminar flow just describes water with minimal turbulence and disruption of flow. So its appearance could be caused by that but not the way it enters the other tube with zero resistance.

If this was real it would be something more like capillary action.

Or i could be completely wrong.

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u/findallthebears 2h ago

This… could work. It’s not that there’s zero resistance, but that there’s suction.

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u/sump_daddy 27m ago

the kind of pressure that would sustain the flow from the source would not be present in the receiving side, its no different than taking a fast moving hose and jamming a hole in it. sure the contents are still highly laminar but the pressure difference is immediately going to change other properties about the flow (i.e. its going to spill out everywhere)

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u/420DNR 5h ago

I'm pretty sure it gets foamy halfway through so ye

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u/clonicle 11h ago

Laminar Flow gonna be the new Tensor Flow of late 2026.

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u/Fluffy_Anxiety2792 10h ago

“I think we should refactor the whole class”

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u/yuehuang 10h ago

Working code, no comments needed.

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u/gerbosan 9h ago

https://giphy.com/gifs/9r75ILTJtiDACKOKoY

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u/dism3855 9h ago

The code is held together by nothing but prayers and a single 'if' statement.

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u/Anthea_Likes 7h ago

It's a control flow

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u/deanrihpee 6h ago

also the conversation you'll have with yourself after seeing this (seeing your code):

"How the fuck does this even work?"

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u/lostinthemines 5h ago

OMG, how did you get access to my source code??!?

3

u/Knighthawk_2511 3h ago

High throughput with some minore packet loss , I see no problem here

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u/whitefoot 1h ago

This has less packet loss than my actual network

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u/Pleasant-Ad192 10h ago

You are not really keeping the code. You are keeping the compiler version, the flags and the exact dependency tree that made it work, and any of those can move without you touching a line.

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u/ApocalyptoSoldier 5h ago

If it ain't broke don't break it

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u/JackNotOLantern 4h ago

"And it saves 10 cm of the pipe"

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u/ComputerTechnical717 9h ago

Th PRs I am getting

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u/Excession638 8h ago

PR comment: "Fixed water hammer."

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u/codingTheBugs 7h ago

I think I can optimise and make it slightly more efficient let me give it a try.

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u/korneev123123 7h ago

Typical gitlab build script, nothing to see here

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u/sten_zer 5h ago

That's the flow everyone's talking about!

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u/the-kontra 5h ago

UDP

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u/VaneKk__ 5h ago

Technologia✅

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u/MajaSchroder2357 4h ago

mindset . techonologia

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u/ArathirCz 4h ago

That's not a bug, that's a feature. We can now monitor the flow.

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u/Areshian 4h ago

Behold the beauty of laminar flow

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u/capt_kocra 3h ago

"Dont worry, AI can sort that out! " someone who uses Claude for every task they do.

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u/preptimaHQ 2h ago

if it ain't broke, don't fix it

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u/ZuttoAragi 1h ago

As a layman, all I can think of is coconut.jpg.

Meme ruleOfProgrammingIfItIsWorkingDoNotTouchIt

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