from Hacker News

Facebook bug 'kills' users in 'terrible error'

by xufi on 11/13/16, 1:24 AM with 24 comments

• by jrockway on 11/13/16, 5:26 AM

  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 ;)

• by tbveralrud on 11/13/16, 4:03 AM

  "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.

• by lsmod on 11/13/16, 3:23 AM

  "An unusual bug on Facebook briefly labelled many people as dead."

• by yawaramin on 11/13/16, 8:46 AM

  You know, I bet it was something to do with `memorializeUser` again (see https://www.columbia.edu/~ng2573/zuggybuggy_is_2scale4ios.pd... slide 46). In fact I would go so far as to say this is the kind of thing that should be encoded in the type system so it's a compile error to try to do this.

• by lalaithion on 11/13/16, 3:49 AM

  Thirty years from now: Same headline without quotes.

• by rhizome on 11/13/16, 3:28 AM

  I have to wonder what the attempted feature was that resulted in this.

• by inimino on 11/13/16, 3:33 AM

  Let's wait for the post-mortem on this one.

• by warsaw on 11/13/16, 3:56 AM

  Who uses Facebook?