HN Explorer

24 comments

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lsmod
"An unusual bug on Facebook briefly labelled many people as dead."
rhizome
I have to wonder what the attempted feature was that resulted in this.
agildehaus
If it's anything like my bugs, it's a single-character typo in the template.
ben_jones
I feel like Facebook must do a phased roll out of their front-end modifications such that they'd detect that before it was big enough to matter (or perhaps during language normalization which must be huge for them). My guess is they were running something on the back-end to "clean up" dead users and it went haywire.
overload119
When someone on Facebook dies, you can memoralize their account. The check the determined whether or not an account is memoralized failed.
inimino
Let's wait for the post-mortem on this one.
avg_dev
(lol) do they usually give such? I'd love to know what happened here.
lalaithion
Thirty years from now: Same headline without quotes.
rch
This was the dry run.

P.S. I took a screenshot of my profile while I was dead, and just set a reminder to post the 'memory' next year.

taneq
"It turns out these users had been dead for several years, but due to a glitch in payroll, they had still been physically alive. We, uh, just fixed the glitch."
tbveralrud
"We hope people who love %s will find comfort in the things others share to remember and celebrate %s life." is one of the most insincere code commits of that day. Let others write about a lost loved one, not robots.
quickben
But then people may not 'share'. This way they are explicitly instructed.
avg_dev
I don't know, my microwave flashes "Enjoy your meal" every time it's done heating something and I like that little touch.
joshmn
What kind of microwave is that? Mine just swears at me. Consecutively.
InclinedPlane
Microwaves are the most aggressive robots.

"Hey! Hey! Your food has been ready for zero seconds! Hey!"

. . .

"Hey! F#$face! Your burrito has been ready for five seconds! Eat your g-d food meat bag!"

. . .

"Ten seconds?! REALLY?! Are you serious?! We're enemies forever now! Eat this crap for f's sake!"

terinjokes
I see you've met my dishwasher.

"Hey, the wash cycle is over" Yes, but everything is still as hot as lava.

"Hey, it's been 5 minutes." Still hot.

And then it beeps a "Hey!" every five minutes thereafter.

Declanomous
I find it strange when I microwave a sock full of dry beans to use as a hand warmer, or a piece of metal that I need to make slightly larger though. My other microwave displays a generic "EnJ0Y!" blinking a few times which is much more applicable in those situations.
taneq
> Let others write about a lost loved one, not robots.

The humans are dead. (Yes we checked and they're dead.)

jrockway
The biggest thing I take away from this is that users have learned to tolerate minor problems in software. I always make it a personal goal to have 0 bugs, but never succeed. It is good that users cut us some slack, because it means we can spend some time pushing the featureset forward, rather than making everything 100% perfect 100% of the time. (Be more careful if you're working on life-critical software, though. Features are not necessarily the most important thing there ;)