I wish developers--new and old alike--pay attention to the commit messages that goes into the kernel. Granted, it takes a subject matter expert to really understand what's being said, but the general format and layout of commit messages is instructive. Commit messages helps the reader/reviewer get their bearings; they also help to build the case from the bottom up.
The fact that the development team is globally distributed both necessitates this kind of knowledge serialization and preserves it for posterity. It's completely different from tapping a colleague sitting next you on the shoulder, and saying "psst, can you approve this quick? It's just a bunch of fixes".
Yes! The retransmission logic in Linux NFS is independent of transport (see the `retrans` option in `mount.nfs`).
Weirdly enough this also means that if you’re running with TCP you can have retransmits at the NFS/SunRPC level and at the TCP level depending on your configuration.
> A higgs-bugson is a bug that is reported in practice but difficult to reproduce
This was the first time I heard of "higgs-bugson". The term sounded so forced that I had to know how it differed from Heisenbug. In short, it doesn't[1].
Then why did it even exist?
The term somehow made it to the "Heisenbug"'s Wikipedia page[1], so I checked the sources. There were two and both end up at the same site: Jeff Atwood's blog post[2] quoting some StackOverflow answers to a poll-like question ("what's a programming term you coined?") because he wanted to remove lighthearted content from the site as he thought it clashed with SO's mission of educating people and advancing their skills[3].
There was a proposal on Meta StackExchange about undeleting that question with the answers, but it was refused by Jeff Atwood again because it invited "made up stuff"[4] among other reasons.
So, Wikipedia in the end, has this term in Heisenbug page because someone just blurted out something in 2010, it was copy-pasted to a blog, and then got scooped up by some news outlet. There are no other sources. Kagi doesn't find any instances of the term before it was coined on StackOverflow in 2010. For all we know, "gingerbreadboy" from England invented it.
The irony is that the term somehow made it to the literature -hence the blog post here- because someone was just having fun at StackOverflow. It obviously either sounded good, or just clicked that others started using it. StackOverflow deleted the content that actually made a small part of computer science history because it wasn't "serious".
In other words, StackOverflow cut off one of its history-making parts because it had an incomplete and simplistic view of useful. I think it might be possible to draw a line from their understanding of communities and societal dynamics to the downfall of StackOverflow after the emergence of AI[5].
I think Heisenbug refers to a bug that stops repro’ing during debugging (the act of observing the system changes the system behavior). This bug was different: it was very rare and debugging it didn’t make it go away.
> because he wanted to remove lighthearted content from the site as he thought it clashed with SO's mission of educating people and advancing their skills[3].
No; he wanted to remove discussion and socialization, because it clashed with SO's mission of presenting useful information without parsing through others' discussion.
> In other words, StackOverflow cut off one of its history-making parts because it had an incomplete and simplistic view of useful.
How does this in any way demonstrate that the view of usefulness was "incomplete" or "simplistic"?
How is the deleted content "useful"?
> I think it might be possible to draw a line from their understanding of communities and societal dynamics to the downfall of StackOverflow after the emergence of AI[5].
What downfall?
Before you point at any of the incoming-question-rate statistics: why should they be interpreted as representing a "downfall"? That is, why is it actually bad if fewer questions are asked?
Before you answer that, keep in mind that Stack Overflow already has more than three times as many publicly visible questions about programming as Wikipedia has articles about literally anything notable.
> why should they be interpreted as representing a "downfall"?
I agree, but also SO has certainly gone through ups and downs. It does feel as though it's now in a terminal "down" having invested its limited resources in things lots of the dedicated members didn't seem to want, instead of basic improvements to moderation and to chat features.
I love the term "Higgs Bugson". Its much better than what I usually do which is just call a system haunted.
I was used to the more common Heisenbug, but I find Higgs-Bugson more funny.
Haunted? Hell, it's positively possessed.
https://lists.openwall.net/linux-kernel/2025/03/19/1374
I wish developers--new and old alike--pay attention to the commit messages that goes into the kernel. Granted, it takes a subject matter expert to really understand what's being said, but the general format and layout of commit messages is instructive. Commit messages helps the reader/reviewer get their bearings; they also help to build the case from the bottom up.
The fact that the development team is globally distributed both necessitates this kind of knowledge serialization and preserves it for posterity. It's completely different from tapping a colleague sitting next you on the shoulder, and saying "psst, can you approve this quick? It's just a bunch of fixes".
"The normal timeout logic can take care of retransmission in the unlikely case that one is needed."
NFS can be run over TCP or UDP. Does the retransmission occur when using UDP?
Yes! The retransmission logic in Linux NFS is independent of transport (see the `retrans` option in `mount.nfs`).
Weirdly enough this also means that if you’re running with TCP you can have retransmits at the NFS/SunRPC level and at the TCP level depending on your configuration.
> A higgs-bugson is a bug that is reported in practice but difficult to reproduce
This was the first time I heard of "higgs-bugson". The term sounded so forced that I had to know how it differed from Heisenbug. In short, it doesn't[1].
Then why did it even exist?
The term somehow made it to the "Heisenbug"'s Wikipedia page[1], so I checked the sources. There were two and both end up at the same site: Jeff Atwood's blog post[2] quoting some StackOverflow answers to a poll-like question ("what's a programming term you coined?") because he wanted to remove lighthearted content from the site as he thought it clashed with SO's mission of educating people and advancing their skills[3].
There was a proposal on Meta StackExchange about undeleting that question with the answers, but it was refused by Jeff Atwood again because it invited "made up stuff"[4] among other reasons.
So, Wikipedia in the end, has this term in Heisenbug page because someone just blurted out something in 2010, it was copy-pasted to a blog, and then got scooped up by some news outlet. There are no other sources. Kagi doesn't find any instances of the term before it was coined on StackOverflow in 2010. For all we know, "gingerbreadboy" from England invented it.
The irony is that the term somehow made it to the literature -hence the blog post here- because someone was just having fun at StackOverflow. It obviously either sounded good, or just clicked that others started using it. StackOverflow deleted the content that actually made a small part of computer science history because it wasn't "serious".
In other words, StackOverflow cut off one of its history-making parts because it had an incomplete and simplistic view of useful. I think it might be possible to draw a line from their understanding of communities and societal dynamics to the downfall of StackOverflow after the emergence of AI[5].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenbug
[2] https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/
[3] https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/01/04/stack-overflow-where-w...
[4] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/122164/can-we-un-de...
[5] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-...
I think Heisenbug refers to a bug that stops repro’ing during debugging (the act of observing the system changes the system behavior). This bug was different: it was very rare and debugging it didn’t make it go away.
> because he wanted to remove lighthearted content from the site as he thought it clashed with SO's mission of educating people and advancing their skills[3].
No; he wanted to remove discussion and socialization, because it clashed with SO's mission of presenting useful information without parsing through others' discussion.
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2950
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19665
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/131009
> In other words, StackOverflow cut off one of its history-making parts because it had an incomplete and simplistic view of useful.
How does this in any way demonstrate that the view of usefulness was "incomplete" or "simplistic"?
How is the deleted content "useful"?
> I think it might be possible to draw a line from their understanding of communities and societal dynamics to the downfall of StackOverflow after the emergence of AI[5].
What downfall?
Before you point at any of the incoming-question-rate statistics: why should they be interpreted as representing a "downfall"? That is, why is it actually bad if fewer questions are asked?
Before you answer that, keep in mind that Stack Overflow already has more than three times as many publicly visible questions about programming as Wikipedia has articles about literally anything notable.
> why should they be interpreted as representing a "downfall"?
I agree, but also SO has certainly gone through ups and downs. It does feel as though it's now in a terminal "down" having invested its limited resources in things lots of the dedicated members didn't seem to want, instead of basic improvements to moderation and to chat features.
Yeah, stack overflow is dying, we all know it.
With millions of LoCs, it is no surprise there are bugs.
Worse yet, the kernel runs in supervisor mode.
This kernel design is bankrupt. There's much better available, such as seL4+Genode.
TIL higgs-bugson and Heisenbug
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