|
| WhitneyLand wrote:
| The fact that as more ice cream is eaten more people tend to
| drown, can be useful in discussing how correlation is different
| than cause.
| jplona wrote:
| This was a puzzler on Car Talk at least once. There are more like
| it: https://www.cartalk.com/radio/puzzler
| huehehue wrote:
| Oh man, I'm currently fighting a problem with a mid-70s coupe
| that's driving me equally batty.
|
| Randomly during longer trips, the car will just die for no
| discernible reason. It's the Car of Theseus at this point with
| how much I've replaced, but the issue persists, and the nature of
| these intermittent problems makes debugging a nightmare. More
| puzzling still that the car starts up fine after a short nap.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| I'm sure you've tried a bunch, so my comments might be talking
| into the void.
|
| I had a similar issue that turned out to be a slightly loose
| battery connection. While the battery clamp was making contact
| with the battery terminal, I didn't tighten it enough and it
| made poor contact.
|
| Is it correlated to temperature at all? If it is, I wouldn't be
| shocked if something, like a relay, is building up heat and
| increasing resistance to the point of operating incorrectly. A
| short nap might give that component enough time to cool off.
| pryelluw wrote:
| What brand model is it?
| huehehue wrote:
| Mercedes 450SLC
| jacquesm wrote:
| Wiring harness issue. Reseat any and all connectors from
| the battery to the distribution box (there may be two of
| those depending on the model year) and reseat all of your
| fuses, if any of them go in too easy then use a small
| screwdriver to force the contacts to be closer together (or
| slightly twist the fuse tab, not the most elegant solution
| but sometimes those contacts in the fuse box are so far
| recessed that you can't get at them). Good luck!
| legitster wrote:
| Assuming there are not a lot of electronics on a 70s car, this
| sounds like a fuel issue.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| I had a Toyota pickup that would die randomly, sometimes at
| highway speeds. Although in those cases, the engine would
| restart after a second so it felt like you hit a brick wall
| then kept going. A friend suggested a bad fuel pump. OK,
| replace the pump and filter (it was cheap and an easy R/R) but
| no change in behavior.
|
| After a while, I correlated the problem to very high humidity:
| usually happened during heavy fog or rain. So, it's probably an
| ignition problem, right? Replace spark plugs. Nope. Distributor
| cap/rotor. Nope. High performance plug wires. Nope.
|
| Drove me nuts for about two years. Then one day I'm in my
| garage looking for something and I move my timing light out of
| the way. Hmmm, didn't think about that...
|
| After two years, problem turned out to be timing slightly out
| of spec. Fixed in five minutes!
| convFixb wrote:
| Cracked fuel line? Might let air into the system in certain
| operating points; might make the fuel pump unhappy (refuses to
| prime) in some situations. I figured mine out when it finally
| broke completely: All the other issues went away after
| replacing it.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I find it incredible that not only a family would eat ice cream
| every, but that they would travel to get it everyday instead of
| just having it on hand in the house.
| jallen_dot_dev wrote:
| Or that a store would put it's vanilla ice cream in a separate
| case in the front and all it's other flavors in another in the
| back, instead of putting all it's frozen foods together in the
| same area for logistical reasons.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Yes, now that you mention it, another part of the story that
| is suspect.
| Arrath wrote:
| Hardly?
|
| My local grocery store has a selection of ice creams in an
| end-cap cooler at the face of an aisle. The complete frozen
| goodies selection is down at the back end of the store. I
| almost always snag what I want from the up front cooler
| rather than making the trek to the back.
|
| Plus the hand-held frozen goodies, like ice cream truck
| fare, are usually in their own cooler separately from the
| big stuff.
| genewitch wrote:
| all (and i mean all 6) convenience stores around me have a
| separate "good humor" chest freezer in the front, directly
| adjacent to the entrance, and the rest of the ice cream (here
| it's blue bell invariably) is in a vertical case in the rear
| of the store. I can go take pictures, if HN doesn't believe
| the pervasiveness of this sort of thing!
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I did not even imagine the possibility of shopping for ice
| cream, daily, at a convenient store due to the extra costs
| from convenient store pricing. But I guess it is in the
| realm of possibility.
| fragmede wrote:
| the good humor company pays the convenience store to have
| their freezer in that location in the store, and are the
| ones responsible for keeping it stocked, unlike the rest of
| the store.
| TurboTveit wrote:
| In addition I find it incredible that a commercial car would
| get vapor locked after driving to get ice cream.
| timmorgan wrote:
| My son's laptop screen kept shutting off while he was playing
| American Truck Simulator. His truck would drive off the road
| while the screen was black.
|
| Every time I played on his laptop, this did not happen. He swore
| he was cursed.
|
| This went on for many days, with many instances where it would
| happen for him but not for me. Then one day I just sat and
| observed him while he played, looking for any difference. That's
| when I noticed his watch band is metal with a magnetic clasp. The
| position of his wrist on the laptop was tripping the hall sensor,
| making the laptop think the lid was closed.
|
| Him and I (and his mother) were glad to find out he is not
| cursed. :-D
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| And this bug made Apple move to a different sensor for the
| screen angle. And Apple being Apple they now had the excuse to
| serialize the sensor:
|
| https://www.ifixit.com/News/33952/apple-put-a-hinge-sensor-i...
| w-m wrote:
| While screens of earlier MacBooks could be turned off with a
| single magnet, my 2020 Intel MBP requires both the left and
| the right sensor (around the tab and the enter key) to
| trigger at the same time to consider it closed. It would be
| nearly impossible to trigger that accidentally. For starters,
| you'd need to wear two watches..
| sjackso wrote:
| Maybe this has been fixed in recent models, but ten years
| ago it was easy to experience baffling laptop sleep states
| if you happened to set a working macbook down on top of
| another, similarly-sized macbook with its lid closed.
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| Probably helped as before this it was a magnet.
| taneq wrote:
| A couple of weeks ago I got back from a remote site, the only
| diagnostic info we had beforehand for one of the issues was that
| the mobile equipment would trip out with a CANbus error. The
| operator would isolate the equipment, then it'd come good. I was
| struggling to find the software fault since, if a simple off-and-
| on-again fixed it, clearly it was a software problem.
|
| I got to site and found a loose connector on an IO module under
| the operator's movable arm rest. It was the connector that
| carried the CAN comms. I plugged it in. No more dramas.
|
| I can only surmise that the process of them slamming the arm rest
| up, tromping down the stairs, flicking the isolator off and on,
| tromping back up the stairs, and slamming the armrest down was
| enough to re-seat the loose connection temporarily.
| bell-cot wrote:
| This reminds me of a GM minivan that my youngest brother-in-law
| drove, back in the '80's. He'd gotten it from his father, who was
| a career GM automotive engineer - and complained that,
| occasionally & randomly, it would not start. It seemed like the
| minivan's whole electrical system was dead...
|
| Brother-in-law was known to be "not so good" with cars - so his
| automotive engineer father didn't take the complaints seriously.
|
| Complaints and emotions escalated, until brother-in-law convinced
| his dad to swap vehicles for a month, so (he hoped) his dad could
| experience the problem for himself.
|
| After the problem manifested in the parking lot of the GM
| Technical Center, and the whole crowd of GM engineers surrounding
| the vehicle couldn't figure out why the heck the electrical
| system seemed to be dead, my brother-in-law felt pretty
| vindicated.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| GM cars are notorious for (sometimes) developing strange
| problems that would have you think they are possessed with the
| devil. (Despite post-1990 GM cars being near peers to Japanese
| cars for reliability overall)
| westmeal wrote:
| What are you talking about the 90s was the worst era for GM
| they cheaped out on everything possible.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I dunno. When my son needed a car to get to work we found a
| 1996 Buick Park Avenue in almost perfect condition at
| 100,000 miles. He didn't like the look of modern cars,
| didn't want a touchscreen, besides a 2010 Japanese car can
| cost almost new prices and they wanted $9k for a Chevy
| Sonic with 180,000 miles (didn't know they went that far!)
|
| Granted the traction control and anti-lock brakes
| occasionally fail to boot up, but it seems to be a pretty
| good car, but it was close to the top of the line. Gets 27
| mpg which is not bad for a big ass car. I like how it has a
| lot of the feel of a 1970s boat but it has airbags, OBD II
| and most of the good features of a modern car... And we
| didn't need to get a loan to afford it. Driving home though
| I was looking in the mirror and seeing it dwarfed by
| today's XXL trucks and SUVs.
| c22 wrote:
| I had a 1989 Chrysler LeBaron that developed insane
| electrical issues. Windshield wipers would randomly turn on,
| the radio would change stations by itself. It really did seem
| possessed.
| kup0 wrote:
| When I was a kid my (not wealthy) family had a Lincoln
| Towncar that was probably purchased used and fixed up and
| it ended up with some freaky electrical problems like you
| describe- most notably (because it freaked me out as a
| small child) I remember the automatic door locks would
| start locking/unlocking themselves rapidly, and they were
| big chunky metal switches that pop up and down and made an
| awful sound when this happened
| dylan604 wrote:
| i learned that these things typically are grounding issues.
| it usually came down to a single source of ground being a
| loose connection which is why it was intermittent. as a
| personal anecdote to this, as a first car as a teenager, i
| drove a GM/Chevy S-10 that one day started to have issues
| where all of the gauges on the dash would just go crazy and
| the lights would go on and off, and then suddenly just start
| working again. after taking it to the shop my dad
| recommended, a mechanic walked out to greet me. after i told
| him the symptoms, he stepped back to look at the truck model,
| asked me to confirm the year model. he promptly opened the
| driver side door, reached under the dash, located a specific
| screw, hand tightened it as a test, and everything worked. he
| came back with a screw driver to properly tighten in before
| sending me on my way free of charge. he told me that specific
| model was notorious for the screw holding the ground wire to
| come loose. it would cost him more in time to write up a
| sales slip to charge me.
| dkarl wrote:
| > Despite post-1990 GM cars being near peers to Japanese cars
| for reliability overall
|
| American carmakers really needed that kick in the ass from
| Japan. Around 1990 was when my parents went from being
| protectionist, "buy American" to never buying another
| domestic car again in their lives. They were angry, angry at
| the reliability difference and angry knowing that domestic
| carmakers could have done better but instead relied on people
| like them to buy the flag.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> GM cars are notorious for (sometimes) developing strange
| problems that would have you think they are possessed with
| the devil.
|
| Like turning on the backup lights in a parking lot when the
| engine isn't even running.
| [deleted]
| danaris wrote:
| I mean...it's possible they've improved a lot compared to
| where they were 30+ years ago, but to call GM's cars "near
| peers to Japanese cars for reliability" just doesn't hold up.
|
| On Consumer Reports' list of car brands by reliability[0],
| none of GM's brands even crack the top 10. GMC and Chevy are
| 20 and 21, respectively, out of 25 brands. (The top 5
| include, unsurprisingly, Toyota, Lexus, and Honda--your
| classic reliable Japanese brands.)
|
| [0] https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-reliability-
| owner-s... (may be paywalled...?)
| hinkley wrote:
| I learned a lot of things from my father. Unfortunately a lot
| of them were what not to do. Don't buy cheap tools that
| you'll have to replace three times in the lifespan of one
| that costs 50% more. And don't buy GM.
|
| Mechanically they may be reliable, but 90's GM forgot how to
| make paint stick to metal and had to pay to repaint a massive
| number of vehicles that simply pealed if parked outside for
| too long. How?
|
| And there is absolutely no forgiveness in my soul for the
| Chevy Citation. I joked when I moved to Seattle that the main
| problem is since there is no salt, there are still Citations
| on the road and that is unnatural. Their place in the natural
| order is the junk yard.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| >I joked when I moved to Seattle that the main problem is
| since there is no salt, there are still Citations on the
| road and that is unnatural. Their place in the natural
| order is the junk yard.
|
| This was the fate of many British Leyland cars, even the
| ones that people genuinely liked such as as the classic
| Mini and the MGB were practically hygroscopic.
| hinkley wrote:
| I will say I was somewhat delighted by the number of good
| looking mustangs and british roadsters there were. And so
| many Beetles. My roadster had a little too much bondo for
| my liking.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I loved the Mini, but I loved my Maxi even more. That was
| the most useful car ever bar none.
| bregma wrote:
| After owning my 1988 Chevrolet Beretta for about a year,
| the paint came off in one big sheet one morning when I was
| brushing a light dusting of snow off with my wool toque.
|
| The first call to GM revealed that it was the acid rain
| (acid rain in the 1980s was what global warming is today --
| the cause of all evil). Exposing my car to rain voided the
| warranty.
|
| The second call to GM revealed that ultraviolet light
| destroyed the bond between the paint and the primer.
| Exposing my car to sunlight voided the warranty.
|
| I spent hours researching this issue through the trade mags
| and published court filings. Plenty of legal findings about
| implied warranties of fitness for purpose. Evidently GM had
| an unpublished policy that it would pay the cost of a
| repaint to dealers for this situation, and the dealer was
| expected to provide the work for free.
|
| Of course, the greasy grin of the dealer as he quoted full
| price while knowing he would collect the same from GM was
| enough to make me drive the car with no paint for the next
| 10 years so everyone could see, and recommend nobody
| purchase any GM product ever again.
|
| I'll say this though: that primer sure prevented rust.
| joshmarinacci wrote:
| Why in the world did GM make a car with the name Citation?
| Are there any good connotations of that word?
| hydrok9 wrote:
| Citation just means to be noted for something ("Cited for
| valour.")
| dotancohen wrote:
| But in the context of motor vehicles, the term is highly
| associated with infractions and monetary fines.
| toast0 wrote:
| I mean, people like fast cars, so the Chevy Speeding
| Ticket should be a good seller.
| dotancohen wrote:
| You do have a point!
| dotancohen wrote:
| > Are there any good connotations of that word?
|
| A few other GM vehicles have this issue, Chevy in
| particular. A well known example is the market failure of
| calling a car Nova (No-Va) in South America.
| danaris wrote:
| Except that's not actually true:
| https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/chevrolet-nova-name-
| spanis...
| dotancohen wrote:
| You know, I've heard that rebuttal, but I've been told
| this anecdote of the car's notoriety by family members
| from Columbia and more recently from a friend from
| Argentina. So perhaps "no va" and "Nova" are pronounced
| differently, and perhaps the car did sell well, but the
| Spanish-speaking peoples most certainly did find the term
| "no va" in the car's name.
|
| You should know what they say about the Mitsubishi
| Pajero, too!
| bombcar wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cessna_Citation_family
|
| Relatively famous business jet.
| tacon wrote:
| >Are there any good connotations of that word?
|
| Of course there are: "a mention of a praiseworthy act or
| achievement in an official report, especially that of a
| member of the armed forces in wartime" Don't focus on the
| North American usage of "a traffic citation". Citation is
| almost a contranym, which is a word that has at least two
| meanings that are opposites of each other, i.e. bolt,
| bound, buckle, cleave, clip, consult, ...
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:English_contranym
| s
| jstanley wrote:
| Simple, it's so that every time someone reads "citation
| needed" on Wikipedia, it triggers the buy impulse.
| dmurray wrote:
| It's also the name of a brand of private jet, and of what
| used to be the most successful racehorse in the world.
|
| I'd guess both the car and the plane owe their names to
| the horse.
| hinkley wrote:
| Technically Chevrolet did but the entire thought process
| for that vehicle was questionable so the name is IMO a
| harbinger. This is not a place of honor.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I think it's funny how GM came out with the "Cavalier" to
| compete with Honda's "Civic". Or that matter, there was a
| Chevy Cobalt (e.g. a "Kobold" is a demon that causes mine
| accidents) or an AMC Gremlin.
| jstarfish wrote:
| There's always the business-school legend about the
| failure of the Nova with the Spanish market.
| istjohn wrote:
| > The statement refers to a popular anecdote in
| international business and marketing about a supposed
| blunder made by American automaker Chevrolet with the car
| model, "Nova."
|
| > According to the story, when Chevrolet tried to market
| the Nova in Spanish-speaking countries, the car
| reportedly did not sell well because in Spanish, "no va"
| translates to "doesn't go". This led people to joke that
| a car named "doesn't go" wouldn't be a popular choice.
|
| > However, it's important to note that this is largely a
| myth. In reality, the Chevrolet Nova was relatively
| successful in Spanish-speaking markets. "Nova" as a word
| is understood to mean "new star" in Spanish, and it's
| unlikely Spanish speakers would naturally break up the
| term into "no" and "va", just like English speakers
| wouldn't naturally break up "notable" into "no" and
| "table".
|
| > But the story remains popular as a cautionary tale of
| the consequences of not considering linguistic and
| cultural differences when naming products for
| international markets.
| genewitch wrote:
| Dat Soon?
| danaris wrote:
| ...But cobalt is both a color and an element...?
|
| Sure, the name is derived from "kobold", but that's like
| saying you should never call anything good "terrific",
| because it derives from the root "terror". Etymology
| isn't destiny.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| There's also the aircraft series:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cessna_Citation_family
|
| Those are named after a race horse. Car may also be for
| the race horse. Or maybe the car's named after the
| plane(s).
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| I would love to drive a Chevy Potoooooooo
| astrange wrote:
| > Mechanically they may be reliable, but 90's GM forgot how
| to make paint stick to metal and had to pay to repaint a
| massive number of vehicles that simply pealed if parked
| outside for too long. How?
|
| Could be an older component stopped being available. Like
| when Apple switched to environmentally friendly lead free
| solder, but then the NVidia laptop GPUs got so hot they
| unsoldered themselves.
| rectang wrote:
| Heisenbugs are manifestations of whole-system design failings,
| where projects are not engineered to facilitate
| troubleshooting, subsystems are strongly coupled, and
| everything is just barely held together with baling wire and
| bubblegum.
|
| That GM vehicles from this infamous era would suffer from
| maddening, mysterious electrical glitches makes perfect sense.
| reedf1 wrote:
| Tell me you only use memory managed languages without telling
| me...
| freedomben wrote:
| please expand to include more explanation for why you think
| this is a memory managed lanugage problem. I used C and C++
| professionally for years and ran into all sorts of issues
| like this. Interaction between subsystems doesn't care at
| all what language you're using inside each component, they
| care about design patterns and architecture.
| rectang wrote:
| GP is correct that I generally prefer memory managed
| languages, I just think it's right to emphasize that this
| preference is informed by experience. I've spent large
| amounts of my career writing C code, and now when I have
| a choice I'd prefer Rust for systems projects.
|
| The higher-level point is that _Heisenbugs are an
| emergent phenomenon of complex systems when fundamentals
| are lacking._
|
| * C systems are lacking because the language is very old
| and we've learned that we need additional infrastructure
| to avoid memory errors.
|
| * 1980s GM systems were lacking because of a management
| culture which didn't value reliability, leading to
| inevitable issues in e.g. poor grounding and electrical
| isolation.
|
| It's my belief that many contemporary tech companies have
| management cultures similar to 1980s GM, and subsequently
| waste tremendous resources when troubleshooting complex
| systems which are not designed to facilitate
| troubleshooting. That's why the original article
| resonates strongly with me.
| rectang wrote:
| But I don't?
|
| A formative early experience of mine was learning valgrind
| to track down a Heisenbug for a C project I was working on
| (which turned out to be an invalid read in a dependency).
| I'm indeed thinking of this anecdote when generalizing
| about whole-systems failings, since troubleshooting memory
| errors is so difficult.
|
| I think there's an analogy to be drawn when designing large
| systems on top of unsound foundations.
| addaon wrote:
| I have a 2009 Mercedes SLK that had the same symptom. It was
| absolutely fine 99.9% of the time, but one time in a thousand
| it wouldn't even try to start. No clicks, no indication that it
| even knew I was in there turning the key. Just dead. And then
| seven or eight hours later... it would start fine, as if
| nothing ever happened. Couldn't correlate it to anything.
|
| Had it towed to a service center a few times when this
| happened. Every time, by the time they got around to trying it
| (a few hours later)... it would start fine, with nothing to
| diagnose.
|
| Then, it was 99% of the time it was fine. I was with a group of
| folks car-camping off road to fly a human powered airplane for
| a couple days, and... no start. Finally started -- with no sign
| of any problems -- around noon the next day, and I high-tailed
| it out of there a day before the rest of the group, because
| getting stuck there /after/ the rest of the group would have
| started pushing my comfort level. So at this point it's
| actually interfering with my life.
|
| I've tried all the usual stochastic troubleshooting (swapping
| out fuses, light to moderate percussive maintenance, alternate
| keys) and nothing. Finally it fails to start in my driveway,
| and I get it towed to an independent mechanic. It's short tow,
| and it fails to start when it gets there! So now he's seen the
| problem, and is as puzzled as I am. Of course, when he tries
| again the next morning, it starts fine.
|
| He proposes two possible fixes: replacing some ECU module, or
| replacing the fuse box itself (under the theory that it's the
| connector or connection into the bottom of the fuse box that is
| having some moisture ingress or intermittent connection). Of
| course whatever we choose, I won't know if it was right or not
| until the next time I'm stuck. The ECU is multiple thousands of
| dollars, and the fuse box is < $200 with labor, so I make the
| easy choice.
|
| This was six or seven years ago, and that car is still my main
| and only car. Hasn't had a single mechanical issue since
| swapping out that fuse box. A good independent mechanic and a
| good guess!
| [deleted]
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| I have seen similar behavior on vehicles that have a dying
| alternator. The issue is that one vane of the rotor (or maybe
| stator?) has shorted and no longer functions. If when the car
| is shut off and the rotor stops in a particular position the
| alternator won't work. Give it some time and with
| heating/cooling moving things around just a bit plus the act
| of repeatedly trying to turn it on potentially making it move
| just a bit, and it works fine.
| addaon wrote:
| Alternators aren't needed for starting. Perhaps a similar
| issue with the starter motor? But even then you'd hear the
| thunk of the starter solenoid. Any audible clue definitely
| makes root-causing simpler.
| bombcar wrote:
| I have a crank sensor that is going out, and though it
| still works most of the time if the crankshaft stops in
| just the right position it becomes an absolute bear to
| start, and runs in limp mode when it does.
|
| Any of the other positions it works just fine.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I had a truck do this kind of behavior once.
|
| Finally figured it out after months when I moved a wire and
| it started, then move the wire close to another wire and it
| would no longer start. These were wires that would typically
| be close, so my guess is one of the wires was now generating
| enough noise that it was bleeding over into some other system
| and causing it to fail. As the car bounced around the
| proximity of the wires changed and lead to the random
| behavior.
| xenadu02 wrote:
| EMF can do some seemingly crazy things. I built a kiln
| controller and the initial version would sometimes randomly
| lockup, reboot in the middle of an operation, or do other
| seemingly "crazy" things. Sometimes even the hardware
| watchdog would stop functioning.
|
| Turns out contactors pulling in and out a 5000w load
| generates some strong EMF and sometimes that EMF is enough
| to cause random glitches to the CPU or other hardware.
|
| Switching to high power solid state relays completely
| solved the problem while keeping the system compact. The
| actual silicon transistor was so big you could have drawn
| the mask by hand and it was attached to a heat sink half
| the size of an adult fist. I was initially worried about
| reliability but (knock on wood) 8 years later the system is
| still working without issue.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Yeah. I wrote the code for a controller that managed the
| temperature of a lubricant. The heater was a propane-
| fired burner that was mounted on the same skid. Every so
| often we'd get a random reboot. Finally, when it was very
| quiet, I heard a soft 'tic' just before I noticed that
| the CPU had rebooted again. EMI from the spark gap that
| ignited the propane was coupling back into the I/O lines
| and would occasionally reset the CPU.
|
| One of those things where if it had happened 100% of the
| time we'd have figured it out quickly. But it was so
| infrequent that no one thought of that as a cause.
| hommelix wrote:
| Most likely this solid state relay has a builtin flyback
| diode that was not in the circuit of the contactor. The
| diode should be as close as possible to the load to
| reduce the EMF.
| freedomben wrote:
| What happened with the human-powered airplane?? Is that a
| thing normies can do?
| addaon wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DaSH_PA
|
| I don't know if Alec Proudfoot counts as a normy, but DaSH
| PA flew a bunch of times, with many different pilots. That
| particular event, which was an attempt to try some records,
| was a bust; there had been rain recently and the dry lake
| beds weren't. Landing gear was a recurring problem (light
| weight and robust don't go together), and even some last-
| minute attempts to build a runway out of 4x8 plywood sheets
| was unsuccessful.
|
| I have some very, very fond memories of flight days at
| Moffett, though. I had gotten to work on the Moffett runway
| for work previously (so cool out at the bay end of the
| runway at night, totally silent), and getting back there to
| help run ground ops (including assembling DaSH PA before
| sunrise so first flights would hit the calmest possible
| air) was just lovely.
| m463 wrote:
| wonder if removing and replacing the fuse box (reseating all
| the fuses, reconnecting all wires, etc) would have done the
| same thing? sigh.
| addaon wrote:
| It would have required removing and replacing the box
| itself... the fuse box has a connector going into the back
| side, and then a separate harness inside the box that
| splits out the individual fuse sockets; that connector
| seems to have been the problem. At various points I
| swapped/reseated every fuse in there trying to fix things,
| never occurred to me to remove the box itself.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Interesting that your car is a Mercedes...
|
| I know an older guy at church, whose kids all graduated
| college - except for one.
|
| His "failed" son is the top mechanic at a Mercedes
| dealership. He does some supervision, training, etc. But the
| reason the dealership is paying him $200K/year is his skill
| at figuring out and fixing problems like that, for the
| dealership's most desirable and profitable customers.
|
| (That I've heard, none of the mechanic's "successful"
| siblings are making that kind of money.)
| ekidd wrote:
| Troubleshooting can be a very valuable skill.
|
| I know a story of a certain large engineering firm, dating
| back to the second World War. They had a senior engineer
| who habitually came to work drunk and slept through
| meetings. Every once in a while, they'd wake him up, and
| he'd save them a couple of million dollars. He had a gift
| for finding clever solutions.
|
| He probably would have had a better life if he'd gotten his
| act together. But knowing how to fix subtle issues, or how
| to design good processes, can be a ridiculously valuable
| skill.
| kortex wrote:
| That definitely sounds like a loose connection, not an ECU
| problem. Usually it's a bad clamp on the battery terminal.
| Often it's the ground clamp in particular.
|
| The easiest diagnosis is to rotate the cables on the terminal
| several times to rub off oxide build up, then leave them in
| an orientation so that the natural tension of the cable
| forces the clamp into good contact.
|
| A "dead" (low voltage) battery will still cause some
| indicators/lights to come on when you crank, while a bad
| connection usually acts like zero volts.
| taejo wrote:
| Plenty of cars that intermittently won't turn on in this
| thread, but I once had a car that intermittently wouldn't turn
| off... or at least the headlights wouldn't. I assume a relay
| somewhere was overheating and that was making it stay closed,
| but I never debugged it, and nor could my cousin who was an
| auto mechanic. We never tried too hard, though: I would just
| take the fuse out if it happened and put it back the next
| morning.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| True story: I had that happen to an airplane. I was a student
| on a long solo flight and on the last two legs of that
| flight, the engine wouldn't shut off using the usual method
| of pulling the throttle back to idle and turning off the
| magneto.
|
| It's been long enough that I don't remember what I did to get
| it shut off (maybe I toggled a circuit breaker?), but when I
| got back to base, I made a note in the airplane log about the
| problem and also left a note for my instructor, who was out
| that day.
|
| When I came in for my next lesson, instructor mentioned that
| the next person to use the airplane, also a student on a solo
| cross-country, got stranded 100 miles away because when the
| engine wouldn't shut off, he panicked and pulled the throttle
| hard enough to rip the cable through the firewall. Airplane
| had to be put on a flatbed to get it back home.
|
| Guess he didn't see my note!
| bombcar wrote:
| Sounds like it might have been dieseling - enough carbon
| buildup glowing hot that even with both magnetos off it can
| still ignite the next rotation.
|
| Usually there was a fuel disconnect along with the throttle
| that would eventually starve the engine.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| That's probably what I did. Thinking back, the first time
| it happened, it just took about 10-15 seconds to shut
| off. The next time, when I was back at my home airport,
| it wouldn't stop running at all and I think I turned the
| fuel cutoff to get it to stop.
| grecy wrote:
| The radiator fan in my Jeep did that in Sudan when it was
| 48C. Better to have it stuck on that stuck off in those
| temps!
|
| I just tapped the relay with a wrench and it un-stuck and
| turned off.
|
| Funny enough that was almost 5 years ago, and it hasn't done
| it once since in more than 80,000 miles of driving. Not in
| -35C, not in +45C. Odd little relay.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| I'm going to armchair and guess that your brother needed a new
| battery.
|
| My (GM) car gets really funky startup behavior when the battery
| gets old. It will often turn the starter fine, but the
| electronics can get stuck in weird states until I disconnect
| the battery (essentially a hard reset).
| Filligree wrote:
| If it was surrounded by a crowd of engineers, surely someone
| would have tested the battery?
| wolverine876 wrote:
| A friend who is an automotive engineer shared once that
| most colleages were not so great with cars. Engineering new
| cars is one thing; fixing them is another. It's like asking
| a programmer to do system administration - two different
| jobs.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| It's not much different than computers.
|
| Lots of programmers that would struggle to diagnose basic
| stuff when their laptop when it goes wrong.
| roel_v wrote:
| This is the point where I would tell the story of how I
| once got lost in Porto, while in a group of 25 geographers
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| But zero cartographers.
| vGPU wrote:
| The problem with having a bunch of experts is that experts
| usually forget to check the basics.
|
| I'm sure we've all been caught trying to troubleshoot a
| problem where the actual issue was a loose cable.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I worked tech support that included a device for software
| developers that had Ethernet connectivity. I learned very
| quickly to say "Try reseating the Ethernet cable" because
| if I said "Is the Ethernet plugged in" about 1/3 of the
| people would respond very negatively (e.g. "I'm not a
| fucking moron") but by having to reseat the cable, they
| would sometimes discover it's not plugged in.
| fragmede wrote:
| The other technique is to ask the customer to turn the
| cable around.
| dotancohen wrote:
| The classic way to get the consumer to power cycle the
| hardware is to ask them which color ring is at the base
| of the DC plug. It doesn't really matter what color it
| is, what matters is that it was removed and the hardware
| definitely restarted.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| I once has this happen with my father's new standing
| desk. He, PhD with an Electrical Engineering degree,
| couldn't get it working. Turned out the C13 power cable
| was only 90% inserted, and felt firmly in place but did
| not have enough connector to power the desk.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Subaru just had a class action lawsuit about their stupid car
| infotainment systems draining the battery.
|
| https://www.subarubatterysettlement.com/
|
| The dealers wanted a ton of money to diagnose the issue, even
| though I suspected it must have been the infotainment system
| draining the battery. I just ended up replacing the
| infotainment system with a cheap CarPlay compatible one and
| the problem went away.
|
| Problem is I cannot get money from the class action
| settlement since the original infotainment system is already
| out and I fixed it myself.
| xethos wrote:
| > Problem is I cannot get money from the class action
| settlement since the original infotainment system is
| already out and I fixed it myself.
|
| You only fixed it _because_ it was a problem though. Not a
| /your lawyer though, so good luck and have fun navigating
| the American legal system!
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| But I cannot prove it without reinstalling the original
| infotainment system. That is many, many hours of work for
| little gain.
|
| What I do not understand is how the settlement did not
| require Subaru to compensate all Subaru owners for the
| faulty design. Why was there proof required, other than
| the purchase of their car with the faulty components?
| [deleted]
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| See also: https://xkcd.com/1172/
| tysam_and wrote:
| Is this the new 500 mile story (or the second-place replacement?)
|
| I don't know whether this is true or not, but either way:
| incredible. Love this, and love the company for actually sending
| someone on company time (!??!?!?!?) to check it out. <3 :'))))
| maweaver wrote:
| > Moral of the story: even insane-looking problems are sometimes
| real.
|
| To me the moral of the story (and my experience) is: user's
| problems are usually real, but don't trust their ability to
| diagnose the actual cause.
| karmakaze wrote:
| Stated another way, distinguish observations (facts) of a story
| from the inferences--don't dismiss the observation/facts when
| rejecting inferences. This is analogous to an XY problem.
| dotancohen wrote:
| When the client states that he has a problem, he is always
| correct. When he tells you what the problem is, he is always
| wrong.
| Raineer wrote:
| _Sometimes_ wrong...
|
| I have the role of "chief troubleshooter" in my engineering
| group. I have a bit of a nervous tic that forms when I hear
| absolutes like this.
|
| Don't assume the customer is always an idiot. Don't assume
| ANYONE is always an idiot. It limits you as an engineer.
|
| Listen to everything. You don't have any need to abide any
| of it, but listen to it all.
|
| I've had some of the least-qualified people throw out
| something which absolutely ended up being insightful,
| although sometimes in a way they didn't expect.
| macintux wrote:
| Related: as a troubleshooter, don't get locked into a theory
| too quickly. You can easily overlook other information that
| doesn't fit.
| tantalor wrote:
| There's a big difference between the proximate cause and root
| cause.
|
| Proximate cause: buy vanilla ice-cream
|
| Root cause: vapor lock
|
| The letter didn't assert that the ice cream was the root cause,
| but made it very clear it was the proximate cause.
|
| The Pontiac President, and the person who wrote that "moral of
| the story", may have confused the two. But the engineer in the
| study didn't.
| astrobe_ wrote:
| Indeed. A timing problem was my first thought when I read the
| title which was obviously provocative, maybe that's because I
| deal with timing problems often so I got lucky there, but I
| rejected the idea, thinking the user would have noticed it too.
| Nope.
|
| I used to do some help desk as part of my dev job, and from my
| experience, users easily assign any random fact as the source
| of the problem. Often things like "correlation is causation" or
| *post hoc ergo propter hoc" (after that, therefore because of
| that). Good as heuristics, but bad when they are substitutes
| for reasoning.
|
| Users cannot diagnose at all because they have no idea of how
| the thing they are using works (which often normal - we are the
| engineers, they are the users) (in this regard, users that
| think they know "that stuff" are among the most difficult to
| deal with). One cannot properly diagnose something one doesn't
| understand well.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| I have an 83 Land Cruiser and knew immediately what the problem
| must have been related to from the outset. It actually has a fan
| that will kick on when the engine is turned off and the car
| parked to blow on the carburetor and cool it off.
|
| Incidentally, I still don't believe a word of this story (at
| least as it's told here). The short delta of time difference
| between walking _further_ into and out of a store would not have
| enough impact on the cooling of the engine to make a such a
| substantial difference as to it starting or not. It simply will
| not bleed off that much more heat unless this store is a mile
| long and it's an additional 20 minutes to get a different flavor.
|
| The only reason I express the doubt over it is because it makes
| the story a contrivance, which makes it pointless. If the
| person's different activities _actually_ resulted in a
| significant difference of time the car has been sitting, it's
| likely the owner themselves would be able to easily deduce what
| could really be the issue. By pretending the issue introduces
| some very small delta of time, it arbitrarily masks the true
| cause (which is the entire point of the story).
|
| https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cone-of-silence/
| jerf wrote:
| "If the person's different activities _actually_ resulted in a
| significant difference of time the car has been sitting, it's
| likely the owner themselves would be able to easily deduce what
| could really be the issue."
|
| Oh, I wouldn't even remotely bet on that. Even in my
| professional sphere of programming I've been caught by what I
| call "cognitively available" theories of what the problem is
| that turn out to be entirely wrong in the end, because the real
| problem is something I wasn't even remotely considering before
| hand, and possibly even would have dismissed if it had crossed
| my mind.
|
| If you don't even know what "vapor lock" is, and I assure you
| this will describe the majority of car owners, why would you
| think "time in store" is the difference?
|
| What is cognitively available to this person is that they buy
| different sorts of ice cream and that causes the problem. It
| puts the spotlight of cognition on that factor to the exclusion
| of other things. Even the engineer trying to solve the problem
| was probably slowed in his investigation by such an appealingly
| available issue being proposed first; again, I've certainly
| experienced this in my own professional sphere where someone
| proposes some explanation that ultimately turned out to be
| completely spurious, and it takes actual effort to get both
| myself and my team off of that line of thought.
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| Is that what that's for? My Mini Cooper does the same,
| sometimes. I assumed it was something to do with the engine
| space being so small and cramped, so the fan had to continue
| for a bit after shutdown to prevent residual heat from getting
| to the electronics or something.
| LanceH wrote:
| My wife's car right now is low on windshield wiper fluid. It
| warns us at a particular spot while we are driving. Not a
| particular distance from home, a specific geolocation. First
| thoughts were that it was the amount of time as she went to
| something and came back. But it does the on screen and audible
| warning at that location every time, no matter what was driven
| before that, whether it was 5 minutes, 5 miles, an hour, or 60
| miles. The only additional clue is that exact same spot is a dead
| zone for most phones/carriers.
|
| We got the wiper fluid filled, so the mystery is in remission,
| but I'm wondering if all warnings will pop up right then. I'm
| guessing it has something to do with the telemetry of the car
| being nudged in that spot, waking up and saying something.
| zackkitzmiller wrote:
| Same exact thing with my wifes 2023 BMW. Exactly the same spot.
| virogenesis wrote:
| Experiencing this same issue acutually these days on a 2019 VW
| Passat, it triggers when you accelerate or break or you are
| doing a turn for a longer period. It's just the fluid being
| moved around in the container. I think today I cleaned my
| windshield for a bit just to make the car keep the low signal
| light always on.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Hilly area? Is the car at a particular angle in that spot? :)
| pphysch wrote:
| Is there anything notable about the terrain at that point? A
| sharp turn, bumpy road, etc.
| oktwtf wrote:
| My thoughts too. I would often induce a quick g-force to get
| the last few drops out of the same fluid tank. I could see
| the same triggering a sensor under similar circumstances.
| LanceH wrote:
| Long slow bend on completely flat road, 40mph. No braking or
| acceleration for a quarter mile each direction.
|
| The road is like that for miles with some lights, traffic
| circles, etc... Only warnings in one spot.
|
| I really didn't believe my wife, or thought maybe it was
| happening a few times when she made a regular trip like
| getting drive thru coffee and coming right back. But then we
| ran a bunch of errands all afternoon and got one warning
| there on the way out, and one warning on the way back.
| wildzzz wrote:
| Could be related to terrain a certain distance/time before
| that spot in the road. The car may only trigger the warning
| after the fluid level has stabilized which a flat road
| would contribute to.
| amluto wrote:
| > Long slow bend
|
| That's probably it.
|
| If I were designing a wiper fluid warning, I would use some
| sort of fluid level sensor and I would denounce it
| aggressively: the indicator would only light up if the
| sensor detected a low level for more than a couple seconds.
| That way traffic circles, bumps, etc would not cause many
| false positives. I might even couple it to some kind of
| acceleration sensor so a warning would not turn on during
| or shortly after any heavy vibration or acceleration.
|
| A long slow bend would cause a prolonged, steady
| centrifugal force and/or sideways acceleration due to a
| banked road, which would defeat these mechanisms.
| amluto wrote:
| edit that's too late to edit: debounced, not denounced.
| bbarn wrote:
| The question then is does it only happen in one
| direction? If the answer is yes, than I think you've
| solved it. If the answer is no, it might still be the
| problem but the sensor might be top or bottom mounted and
| not side mounted from the center I suppose.
| drivers99 wrote:
| Is it a Subaru? Mine is currently doing that when I go
| through a long turn in a highway interchange. I'm sure I
| need to add fluid but it's on the edge where it only shows
| up when the force of gravity is pulling the remaining fluid
| a certain way.
| s28l wrote:
| Maybe it's a combination of the "bend" and the "long slow"
| part.
|
| If you are making a turn the centrifugal force will push
| the fluid away from the axis of rotation. There is likely a
| level sensor only on one side of the tank, so the turn
| might push the fluid away from the sensor enough to trigger
| a warning.
|
| The sensor likely has a time component to avoid triggering
| every time you make a turn, but if this bend is long
| enough, maybe the fluid is displaced long enough that it
| overcomes that minimum time.
| thecosas wrote:
| Perhaps it's long and slow enough to make the fluid move to
| a certain point and stay there long enough for the
| light/alarm to come on. If it's electronic vs solely
| mechanical, I'm sure they've got some smarts so that
| certain changes are ignored for a period of time
| (incline/decline, sharp turns, short stops).
|
| Maybe you found the sweet spot at a certain point in that
| long, slow bend?
| mavamaarten wrote:
| I have a similar situation but in my case it's very obviously
| the gentle bend in that location combined with the relatively
| high speed that makes the fluid hug one side of the reservoir.
| I'm pretty sure that the sensor is mounted to the opposite
| side.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| Could be an incline is making the fluid level low at the sensor
| point at that location. Does it have an unusual incline in any
| axis?
| LanceH wrote:
| Absolutely flat. There is a mild bend there, but nothing
| compared to corners and the traffic circle. For that matter,
| we can get out and drive all afternoon and it said nothing
| until that spot.
| supergeek wrote:
| A lot of those sensors average the reading over quite some
| time to avoid false positives. It's possible that the last
| few miles of road have just enough average slope or contain
| just enough curves that the sensor averages "low" right at
| that spot with the speed of traffic.
| ezfe wrote:
| My Subaru warns me about the wiper fluid on highway exits
| exclusively because of the speed and inclination changes
| valbaca wrote:
| Sounds like an area with strong EM interference. Maybe a stop-
| light with those underground sensors? or under a high-power
| line? or near a power transfer station? or high-power radio
| antennae?
|
| Could be giving just enough weird EM interference to bump the
| sensor from "enough fluid" to "low"
|
| (I know I sound like Scully from x-files but could just be?)
| rafaquintanilha wrote:
| Funny thing the first time I heard this anecdote was by a priest
| (he was formerly an electrical engineer). The conclusion was
| similar: how many times a seemingly illogical issue has a very
| logic explanation (even if it looks illogical to you at first).
| Lolaccount wrote:
| For some nostalgia, go to the root ...
|
| https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wkw/
|
| Took me straight back to University ...
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Even the author's ICQ number is listed...
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| Appreciate it, I'd been looking passively for this story for a
| year or two. I thought I heard it as a Car Talk puzzler, but it
| was probably this page.
| dwighttk wrote:
| How was that car the only one to have vapor lock?
|
| How was that the only occasion he tried to start his car that
| quickly after shutting it down?
|
| Why did the family always buy ice cream by itself?
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| I read a story about a university IT guy with a professor
| complaining that he couldn't access any websites hosted more than
| 100 miles away. (Or thereabouts, I forget the exact numbers.)
| Which is obviously nonsense; computers don't know "miles", only
| network relays.
|
| Long story short, an idle timeout variable had been set to 0
| milliseconds, so any connection that took 1+ ms failed, so you
| could only connect to systems within 0.5 light-milliseconds of
| the university, which is about 100 miles.
| kfarr wrote:
| Related https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37576633
| rawling wrote:
| And we've come full circle, since I presume OP found this
| article linked from the comments on that one.
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| I'd actually read the story years and years ago, thus the
| poorly-remembered details. Total coincidence that it was
| posted here today. Unless someone here read one article and
| was inspired to post the other :)
| rawling wrote:
| Oh yeah, I didn't mean you!
| rsynnott wrote:
| > Vanilla, being the most popular flavor, was in a separate case
| at the front of the store for quick pickup.
|
| This feels very contrived; who organises a supermarket like that?
| "Where's the ice-cream?" "Which flavour? We keep them separately,
| to make an anecdote work."
|
| (Like, the moral of the story still works, but the specifics feel
| very dubious...)
| zie wrote:
| Lots of stores have end-cap coolers which have product they
| really want to sell in there, usually at a discount.
|
| I could def. see Vanilla Ice Cream being in that container for
| a while for whatever reason.
|
| Or it could be a small/local grocery store and the
| owner/manager really likes Vanilla, and did it for their own
| convenience.
| valbaca wrote:
| But I guess that would make the timing part be obvious and kind
| of ruin the "fun" of the story. Though I fully agree, the
| difference between "front of store" and "back of store"
| icecream couldn't be that much and also doesn't make much
| sense.
|
| Or I could imagine something like a Sonic drive-through, where
| you often pull up in to a slot and turn off your car, but only
| until your order gets brought to you by a bellhop:
|
| - works when I order a burger (burger takes a few minutes to
| cook)
|
| - doesn't work when I order a hot dog (those are hot and ready
| to go)
|
| or something like, works when I order a chili dog (because they
| have to heat up the chili)
| Ekaros wrote:
| Could be also that it was certain large shipment they wanted to
| get rid off. My local hypermarket does have freezer sometimes
| with icecream next to check out lanes with lot off other stock
| they want to get rid off.
| saalweachter wrote:
| Hell, I'm skeptical vanilla is the most popular flavor,
| although that may change by year.
|
| At the very least, chocolate is neck and neck and on the only
| sales chart I could find (which I think was for the UK?)
| chocolate sold more than vanilla.
| dang wrote:
| One past thread. Others?
|
| _Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13347852 - Jan 2017 (133
| comments)
| tornato7 wrote:
| I was trying to fix the flaky Bluetooth connectivity on my
| Subaru. There was one post on the forums that said "Just slam the
| glove compartment closed really hard."
|
| Knowing that this was bullshit, I tried everything else to no
| avail. I finally caved and slammed the glove compartment. To my
| surprise, Bluetooth has been solid ever since...
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| The president of Pontiac got involved? An engineer spent multiple
| days on the problem?
|
| X doubt
| Aurornis wrote:
| It's an engineering allegory, not a literal historic account.
| You're supposed to learn from the engineer who diligently takes
| notes until they discover the obscure correlation that clues
| them in to the real problem. The true problem is not always
| what we assume it to be, but you can't dismiss the existence of
| a problem because it seems unlikely.
|
| The included details of the narrative are deliberately fanciful
| to make it obvious that it's not intended to be taken
| literally.
|
| Of all the details people are trying to pick apart, I'm
| surprised nobody mentioned how strange it was that they drove
| to the store every single night for ice cream rather than just
| buying a few large containers and putting them in the freezer.
| :)
| mondobe wrote:
| It's a law in my family that no matter how many containers of
| ice cream we buy - or how large - they will always get eaten
| in the next 24 hours. So we end up doing the same thing
| (though not every day).
| mempko wrote:
| I once sent a message via linkedin to a VP of an error I was
| getting on their company's website. He answered and had one guy
| on their team to look into it. They fixed it the next day.
| Sometimes people answer their messages!
| [deleted]
| lkbm wrote:
| Some versions say it's the dealership, not the manufacturer,
| being contacted, which seems more probable.[0] (It's also from
| the 70s, which also helps it be a little more believable, imo.)
|
| [0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cone-of-silence/
| thefourthchime wrote:
| I agree it seems unlikely, but it's still a fun story.
| localhost wrote:
| Many years ago I was at a small group meeting with Terry
| Myerson who ran the Windows phone org and had just assumed
| responsibility of the entire Windows org. I had a Nokia 1520
| (the giant phone) and he asked me what I thought of it. I said
| I loved it, and then complained about how it kept on dropping
| bluetooth with my car's head unit, a new Subaru STi.
|
| The next day there was an engineer sitting in the back of my
| car with a bunch of test devices capturing traces of the BT
| comms with the head unit. Apparently Subaru didn't sell enough
| units to warrant its own certification process for BT so this
| was the first time engineers had looked at it. IIRC it did get
| better a few updates later; it was maddeningly unusable out of
| the box.
| Twirrim wrote:
| It does happen, sometimes. Sometimes it's a case of who you
| know.
|
| When I was at Amazon, Jeff sent out a question-mark email after
| a complaint from a customer, something he used to do when a
| direct email complaint caught his attention in some particular
| way. The complaint was that some amazon hardware was having
| difficulty with this customers wifi network. I want to say it
| was a 1st gen Echo, but it has been close to a decade since,
| and I only saw the report that was produced from the situation,
| that I honestly forget the particulars.
|
| That question mark email ended up with Amazon sending some
| senior engineers around to go figure out what was going on at
| the customer's home, and figure out what that meant for the
| device and how it might be mitigated. It ended up being some
| weird combination of physical properties of the house, the wifi
| arrangement, and some suboptimal behaviour in the Amazon device
| that was fixed via a subsequent software update.
| t3rabytes wrote:
| Ford has been known to send corp engineers to dealerships to
| help diagnose and resolve recurring issues in specific vehicles
| (has happened to a coworker of mine, and the engineer did end
| up fixing the issue!) -- I wouldn't entirely doubt.
| wizerdrobe wrote:
| My mother has a Jeep Patriot with a water leak where it kept
| getting into the ceiling lights, drip on the interior, or on
| the driver even.
|
| After 3 or 4 trips across the county to the dealership she
| threatened to invoke the Lemon Law on the new vehicle and
| wouldn't you know it, Jeep sent out an engineer to Beaufort,
| SC and he spent a week on this vehicle. Was fixed and never
| had a leak again.
| toast0 wrote:
| Sending mail to the President doesn't mean it was handled by
| the President. They've got a staff to handle customer service
| requests.
| deelowe wrote:
| Reminds me of a short book I like that talks about these sort of
| tings titled "An Engineer's Guide to Solving Problems." It starts
| with a similar situation - "The Dog Barks When the Phone Rings."
| Eventually, you get to a section called "If I Could See it, I
| Could Fix it!" which discusses the importance of understanding
| the problem before attempting fixes.
| rmnclmnt wrote:
| Understanding the problem usually comes later, first step is to
| be able to reproduce the problem!
| deelowe wrote:
| Correct. That chapter actually might be more about
| reproducibility. It's been a while since I read it.
| m463 wrote:
| > "The Dog Barks When the Phone Rings."
|
| Went to a friend's house years ago, and knocked on the front
| door. Loud running, then BOOM door moves as dog jumps up onto
| other side. After some finagling, my friend finally gets the
| door open and says "Use the doorbell next time, he hasn't
| figured it out"
| aaronax wrote:
| How about a bunch of iPhones in a medical facility being disabled
| because of some amount of helium being leaked when they were
| charging the MRI machine?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18340693
| cmorrow415 wrote:
| I used to have wireless infrared headphones. Sometimes, the audio
| would go crazy, but only in a certain area of my office. As it
| turns out, the IR blaster on my TV was interfering with the
| signals. It was really interesting to hear the clicks of data
| being sent over IR, though.
| azinman2 wrote:
| The most incredible part is that you could write a letter to an
| auto manufacturer and they would send an engineer to your home.
| Dork1234 wrote:
| Since 2000 we they have publicly disclosed Janet Jackson crashing
| harddrives:
|
| https://www.billboard.com/music/pop/janet-jackson-rhythm-nat...
|
| and moving a controller crashes the PS1.
|
| https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/my-hardest-bug-eve...
|
| Makes me thinks there are tons of these issues out there.
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| Can you imagine an engineer turning up to your house to solve a
| problem with your car these days? Manufacturers now would just
| tell you to buy a new one.
| kup0 wrote:
| This reminds me of the "my monitor blinks every time I sit down
| in my office chair" turning out to be EMI spikes from the gas
| lift affecting the signal traveling on monitor cables.
|
| A DisplayLink KB article even mentions it (and the associated
| white paper about the issue), stating:
|
| _Surprisingly, we have also seen this issue connected to gas
| lift office chairs. When people stand or sit on gas lift chairs,
| they can generate an EMI spike which is picked up on the video
| cables, causing a loss of sync. If you have users complaining
| about displays randomly flickering it could actually be connected
| to people sitting on gas lift chairs. Again swapping video
| cables, especially for ones with magnetic ferrite ring on the
| cable, can eliminate this problem. There is even a white paper
| about this issue._
| valbaca wrote:
| got a link to the whitepaper? or name?
| kup0 wrote:
| woops, yeah I should have linked the DisplayLink article and
| whitepaper both probably, was just going quickly
|
| DisplayLink Article: https://support.displaylink.com/knowledg
| ebase/articles/73861...
|
| Direct whitepaper link (warning: PDF):
| http://www.emcesd.com/pdf/eos93.pdf - if people prefer to
| search themselves and not use my direct PDF link - it is
| entitled "A New Type of Furniture ESD and Its Implications"
| by Douglas C. Smith, from 1993
| valbaca wrote:
| much appreciated!
| tboerstad wrote:
| I was debugging a Heisenbug once, developing embedded FW for a
| mobile phone.
|
| After some time, I noticed that the phone seemingly only crashed
| in one area of the open office floorplan where I was working.
|
| I started walking around the office testing this theory, not
| really believing it. But after a while, I had hard evidence that
| the bug would only manifest once I entered that part of the
| office.
|
| When I came to terms that I wasn't hallucinating, I realised what
| the problem was. There was poor reception in that part of the
| office, causing the phone's modem to switch from 4G wideband to
| narrowband (glossing over details here), which triggered the bug.
|
| Easy to see with hindsight, but I was very confused there and
| then
| raajg wrote:
| Have you noticed that in the last few months, Github goes down
| every Tuesday?
| janc_ wrote:
| Reminds me of that bug where people couldn't print on
| tuesdays....
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8171956
| kamel3d wrote:
| Why they have those posts as text file?
| dghughes wrote:
| I had a Dodge truck with a similar problem but it was never
| resolved. If I went to an ATM or convenience store on a muggy day
| when I left my truck transmission stuck in 1st gear. It was
| obviously the short time stopped and start up again but no clue
| why. The dealership looked a few times even taking it for a drive
| with a test tool but nothing happened. It did it until I sold the
| truck for about 17 years.
| hobomatic wrote:
| This reminds me of a strange recurring experience I used to have
| with electronics in my house.
|
| In that house,on certain days of the week at midnight, something
| that sounded like recordings of political speeches from WW2 would
| be audibly (but faintly so) from all of stationary electronics.
| It was so faint, that it was usually hard to pinpoint any one
| source, and the words used weren't understandable, so it usually
| sounded like it was coming from everywhere all at once, and like
| it was an old recording.
|
| This would happen even if they were unplugged. Even if my power
| went out.
|
| I though I was either going crazy, or my house was literally
| haunted by hitlers ghost.
|
| Well one day I was in my car and recognized something on the
| radio that reminded me of this spooky problem I had.
|
| It was the signon of a Catholic am radio station that opened up
| with Gregorian chanting, and a sermon. This signon happened at
| the same time on the same days of every week.
|
| Turns out, the wiring in that house was somehow functioning as an
| am radio receiver, and some common components would vibrate out
| the audio encoded in the radio signal.
| Arrath wrote:
| That is amazing. I would have been putting salt barriers around
| my windows, jeez.
| guyzero wrote:
| AM radio is a terrible transmission format in many ways but
| it's good because as you note it's extremely easy to decode
| into sound!
| kyleee wrote:
| Jesus works in mysterious ways
| cosmojg wrote:
| > I speak with the Comcast attorney about my call to State's
| Attorney's office. She says she was unaware that State's
| Attorney has denied the request to drop the charges, and that
| she will write another letter to ensure that the situation is
| taken care of. She also asks about whether the video trap has
| been installed and is working correctly. I tell her that
| everything is blocked except for 2 religious channels, 1
| Spanish language channel, and the video portion of E! TV. She
| says something along the lines of, "I guess the signal of the
| Lord manages to find its way through somehow."
|
| Source: http://telecom.csail.mit.edu/judy-sammel.html
| bandyaboot wrote:
| Engineer's notes: (resolution) recommended customer park at back
| of lot and purchases ice cream in larger quantities.
| MobileVet wrote:
| Like all prefunded startups we rented a crappy apt to work out
| of. Outside of the neighboring fire station which woke us at all
| hours, everything worked fine.
|
| A month into summer, the internet started to die at around 1pm...
| then magically restore itself in the early evening before the
| tech would arrive. This went on for a solid week or more.
|
| Eventually the provider agreed to send a tech immediately after
| we called. On first inspection, everything looked good.
| Thankfully he was diligent and found that an old pin based IC was
| likely expanding in the heat and every so slightly unseating
| itself in its socket. Properly seating it and adding some hot
| glue solved the issue.
|
| Never underestimate heat dissipation in product design.
| [deleted]
| demondemidi wrote:
| Fabricated anecdotes like this miss the point: debug is a multi-
| layer approach, not a think-it-through logic puzzle. In reality,
| the driver would have encountered vapor lock in multiple
| situations, not just shopping, and as a result I think this
| example does more damage than good by promoting a furrowed-brow
| approach.
| mike_ivanov wrote:
| Hold my beer. I once had a fairly large CRT monitor which most of
| the time worked fine, but sometimes would show a warped,
| distorted image. After a while I noticed that warping was
| happening only on rainy days. I opened the case and discovered
| gooey stuff smelling cat urine on the monitor's electronics.
| Washing it with pure alcohol solved the problem. I have no idea
| what was going on there, but I consider my cat was an extremely
| lucky dude as I almost never turned that monitor completely off.
| monitron wrote:
| Before you blame your cat, consider the possibility of an
| exploded electrolytic capacitor. Among many other foul
| comparisons, I've heard people say they can smell like cat pee
| after they die.
| SleekEagle wrote:
| This reminds me of the case of the 500 mile email:
|
| https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
| notwhereyouare wrote:
| probably why this was posted:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37576633 the 500 mile
| email was just posted yesterday
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Yeah, that isn't how this works. Popular things are closer to the
| back of the grocery store -- milk, eggs, meat, produce, higher-
| volume soft drinks -- in order to force you to walk past
| everything else to reach them.
|
| Ice cream is not that popular, so it could reasonably be stocked
| near the front of the store. But all the flavors are stored
| together, as you'd expect.
|
| Engineers who make house calls are also not a thing in Detroit.
| You _might_ see that happen in Japan, where airline CEOs have
| been known to make pilgrimages to call on the families of crash
| victims. But I 'd be (pleasantly) surprised if the car companies
| have ever done anything like that.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > Popular things are closer to the back of the grocery store --
| milk, eggs, meat, produce, higher-volume soft drinks -- in
| order to force you to walk past everything else to reach them.
|
| > Ice cream is not that popular, so it could reasonably be
| stocked near the front of the store. But all the flavors are
| stored together, as you'd expect.
|
| This part is actually more plausible than you'd expect,
| especially if you assume that details are slightly garbled by
| the N'th retelling.
|
| Last year, we went to a convenience store to pick up some ice
| cream treats after a big hike. There was one of those mini
| freezers with a set of frozen treats right next to the
| entrance, facing the cashier. But there was also a line of
| full-sized freezers containing all the usual frozen goods
| (including frozen ice cream treats) in one of the aisles.
| Depending on which frozen treat you wanted, you'd either be
| picking it right up by the front door, or having to wander down
| an aisle to find it.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Yep, same with the grocery stores around here, they all have
| last-minute snacks and drinks at the checkout stands.
|
| Ice cream tends to be somewhere close to the middle of the
| store. But if you're after staple foods in larger-than-snack-
| size quantities, you'll be doing some walking.
| 14 wrote:
| What is most incredible about this story is that the president
| heard about the story himself and that an engineer was sent to
| investigate. Now days if a car has problems under warranty it is
| often assumed the driver is at fault and of course problems never
| happen when you are showing the mechanic.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| After 500 miles email story y'day now this.
|
| https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles
| dylan604 wrote:
| These are the kinds of stories that made Car Talk so much fun. It
| was so much more than just hearing about mechanics repairing
| cars. It was the fact that the situations were so odd and unusual
| that the stories were interesting. It was also fun hearing how
| these mechanics had been around so long and seen so many of these
| unusual situations that they became normal to them. It didn't
| hurt that they were good story tellers
| m463 wrote:
| "Go to your mechanic and find the oldest guy in the shop. He
| might be able to work on a carburetor."
| genewitch wrote:
| these days it's "just buy a new carburetor" - i remember
| rebuilding a few like 20 years ago - on small engines, but
| now a rebuild kit is, say, $12 and a new carburetor is $20.
| For an extra $8 you only have to remove two bolts and fasten
| the new one in, rather than take a carburetor apart and
| replace gaskets and floats (or whatever, it's been 20 years).
|
| word to the wise - never use the shutoff switch on anything
| with a carburetor - use the fuel shutoff valve. This prevents
| gasoline from varnishing your carburetor bowl.
|
| I probably won't use that word again for a year, now,
| heavens.
| c0nsumer wrote:
| I acquired a generator from a family member, and unknown to
| me when I needed it to power the house the thing wouldn't
| run unless the choke was held closed with a wire tie. You
| can imagine how well that ran...
|
| So, that sounds like a carb rebuild, right? Come to find
| out that for about $17 shipped a seller on eBay with
| something like 200K feedback will sell me a brand new carb.
| Fitted that, it starts on first pull. There's absolutely no
| reason to mess around with a rebuild on something like
| that.
| grecy wrote:
| > _He might be able to work on a carburetor_
|
| I'm absolutely a car guy, and I'm 41 years old.
|
| Strangely enough, I've never owned a carburettored engine,
| and it seems unlikely I ever will (except, maybe, for a
| chainsaw)
| wink wrote:
| I sat in one when it started burning on the highway,
| because of the carburetor :D
|
| I think it was a Renault 11 and I'm not exactly sure how
| old I was, probably a bit before I got my license, so late
| 90s.
| m463 wrote:
| I suspect a common reason would be for a classic car or
| motorcycle.
| nimish wrote:
| Or general aviation since they use engines derived from
| ancient automotive designs. Fuel injection isn't common.
| grecy wrote:
| I consider the OG S2000 a classic car :)
| dataveg wrote:
| I liked their advice - "go to the auto store and buy a bottle
| of something with 'miracle' in the name."
| teddyh wrote:
| We're doing straight up urban legends now? Flagged.
| bluesmoon wrote:
| Reminds me of the 500 mile email (2002):
| https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Which was discussed yesterday:
|
|
| (It's an HN perennial.)
| jjbinx007 wrote:
| We had a similar problem at work in the late 90s. A member of
| staff reported that their mouse would stop working between
| certain hours of the day. It had apparently been okay in the
| morning, stopped working over lunchtime then started again later.
|
| On some days it would work perfectly all day long, but on others
| it would stop working between those hours.
|
| The biggest clue was it would always work perfectly on overcast
| days, but on sunny days this strange behaviour would manifest
| again.
|
| Turns out the problem was related to the mouse being a cheap
| mouse. The case had very thin plastic.
|
| The mouse was a ball mouse, and it worked by shining an LED into
| a sensor on each of the X and Y axes. On sunny days the sun would
| completely overpower the sensor due to the plastic case being
| very thin and on overcast days it would not. On sunny days the
| mouse would only work when the sun had moved around the sky to
| cast a shadow over where the mouse was being used.
|
| Perfectly logical but baffling at first.
| aidos wrote:
| This happened to me in my first job and it took me weeks to
| figure it out. The penny dropped and I put tape around the thin
| gap in the casing where the top joined to the bottom and it
| fixed it immediately.
| kqbx wrote:
| Reminds me of a problem that I had (many years ago) with my
| iPhone 4 - if I tried to boot it in a dark place, it would get
| stuck on the Apple logo in an infinite boot loop.
|
| Turns out some versions of the Pangu jailbreak for iOS 7.1.x
| would crash during boot if the reading from the ambient light
| sensor was below some threshold. To this day I don't know the
| exact explanation of this bug, but it seems that Pangu included
| some unnecessary code that messed with the light sensor [1].
|
| If you don't believe me, there is a huge reddit thread[2] with
| a lot of people confirming this.
|
| [1]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/jailbreak/comments/294wob/jailbreak...
| [2] https://www.reddit.com/294wob/
| chronicsonic wrote:
| Engineers love problem solving. I always see it as a
| challenge. No matter how unimportant.
| asddubs wrote:
| Another similar anecdote I heard before was related to a
| wireless device, and some employees flying a drone during their
| break, generating interference.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| My parents have some old Gateway amplified computer speakers.
| Came with the 386!
|
| They still work perfectly... except for a regular pop of
| noise every few seconds that would intermittently show up,
| that scaled with the volume setting.
|
| It turned out, their portable phone (read: landline with
| short-distance wireless RF handset) would ping from the base
| station to the handset, if it were off the cradle, which was
| being picked up by the unshielded line-level audio cable and
| amplified.
|
| Moved the base station further from the cable, pop
| disappeared.
| valbaca wrote:
| Remember how old speakers would let you know if you were
| about to get a cellphone call. It was like digital
| precognition haha
| genewitch wrote:
| you can still hear cellphone and wifi noise in crappy
| amplifiers - i have two sets of active muff hearing
| protection - the ones with microphones on each earpiece,
| and if you get inbetween a beamforming WAP or near any
| wifi antenna, or near a cellphone, you get "brrz bz bz bz
| bzzzzzz tiktiktiktiktik".
|
| But this is different than the old <2g/edge phones, which
| wouldn't interfere unless you were about to get a call -
| because the tower said "where's _this phone_? " and your
| phone would max out it's tx and say "here i am!" and
| that's what you heard. This is probably incorrect, but
| based on my observations this is what occurred.
|
| Remember the doodads you could put on your startac style
| phones on the antenna bit, with LEDs in them - they'd
| light up when you were about to get a call, as well, by
| design!
| astrange wrote:
| Speakers haven't really changed in 50-60 years, it's the
| phones that changed there. If you got a call on 2G today
| it'd still happen.
| oaktowner wrote:
| OMG had forgotten all about that.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| We did a lot of wireless (2.4GHz range) sensor development at
| my last job. It was a rule of thumb to avoid any testing at
| lunch time since the microwave generated so much
| interference, everything would fail when someone wanted to
| heat up their meal.
| robocat wrote:
| "Microwave oven to blame for mystery signal that left
| astronomers stumped":
| https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/05/microwave-
| ov...
| MalcolmDwyer wrote:
| We have a countertop ice maker that gets jammed up and
| overloaded with ice on sunny days for a similar reason.
|
| There's an infrared beam and sensor. When the ice tray is full,
| it is supposed to block the beam, and then the machine stops
| making ice.
|
| On a sunny day, there's enough bright light in our kitchen to
| fool the sensor so it keeps making ice.
|
| We have a random magazine that we put on top of it to make it
| work correctly.
| 13of40 wrote:
| I had a VCR back in the day that refused to function if you
| opened its case. It turned out that instead of using physical
| switches inside it used pairs of lights and detectors that
| would give false positive results when ambient light shined
| on them.
| aksss wrote:
| as in an optocoupler? Those are the coolest, especially for
| dealing with different voltages.
| m463 wrote:
| I have a garage door that will not close on sunny days.
|
| Same sort of problem. The obstruction sensor at the bottom of
| the door is confused by the strong sunlight and the door
| stops closing part way and re-opens.
|
| I've tried a toilet-paper tube around the sensor but that
| isn't always successful. I really wish there was a laser
| sensor to replace it with.
| kuroguro wrote:
| The sad thing is there are certain IR wavelengths that are
| a lot less affected by the sun and nobody bothered to check
| for an outdoor product...
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The garage door obstruction sensors are located inside
| the garage, so it technically might be an indoor product.
|
| Although, the possibility of a garage being oriented such
| that the sunlight would directly hit the sensors while
| the garage door is open seems like it could be a not
| infrequent occurrence.
| djmips wrote:
| Maybe experiment with filters.
|
| Also it could be 'fun' to swap out the LEDs?
| sharadov wrote:
| Similar problem toilet-paper hack worked.
| giraffe333 wrote:
| I have this exact problem and (mostly) fixed it by swapping
| the sensor and transmitter. I just cut the wires and
| spliced with electrical tape. Now the problem still happens
| but only sometimes in the fall and spring when the sun's
| angle is just right. This is with a west facing garage
| about 41degN latitude USA.
|
| But yeah, why this isn't laser based, or using a light
| frequency that is less affected by sunlight? Probably cost,
| or ignorance.
| tbyehl wrote:
| What sucks is those sensors are designed so you can't just
| jump a wire to permanently defeat them.
|
| You can, however, tape the sender and receiver together.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| I'm amazed an IT department would troubleshoot deeply enough to
| figure out it was the thin plastic letting in interfering light
| on sunny days.
|
| I would have guessed they'd shrug at the first sign of trouble,
| swap it out with a known-working mouse and mark the ticket
| resolved... unless all the replacement mice were thin plastic
| too, I suppose.
| geph2021 wrote:
| reminds me of testing out a pinewood derby track in my backyard
| for our cub scouts pack. It had an IR sensor that would detect
| the cars at the finish line. When someone was standing next to
| the finish line, it worked flawlessly. Otherwise, it was very
| flaky and randomly would trigger without the cars trigger it. I
| pretty quickly surmised it was interference from the direct
| sunlight, so we put up a pop-up shade over it and it worked
| flawlessly (without someone standing nearby, coincidentally
| casting a shadow). The other dads were amazed that I figured it
| out, but it's just one of those things you learn from
| experience (and some background knowledge).
| 98codes wrote:
| I had a similar problem, but in the opposite direction. My
| cable internet speeds at home were fairly good (for the US,
| anyway), but sometimes would absolutely bottom out. Not dead,
| just glacially slow. After troubleshooting everything under the
| sun, I came to realize that the problems would happen not when
| it was raining per se, but when it was heavily foggy or
| misting. Normal to heavy rain was fine.
|
| Called the cable company, tech came out. Everything inside was
| fine, but the cable from the main line to the house had a tiny
| cut in one spot, not enough to really affect the connection,
| but enough for ambient moisture to work its way in and foul the
| connection.
| donalhunt wrote:
| Common issue in Ireland for DSL customers. Damaged copper
| cabling would leak water when it rained causing dropouts and
| lower speeds. Telecom engineers would call out on days when
| the copper had dried out and be unable to find any fault.
| Turns out correlating such reports with weather reports is
| hard. :/
| fullspectrumdev wrote:
| I'd suspected that, but kept it to myself because it
| sounded a bit mad
| jeiebx83 wrote:
| I ran into a similar issue, except internet and phone would
| get really bad on a cold morning.
|
| Tech showed up around noon, saw I was indeed having a bad
| connection, went and checked the signal at the junction box
| for the street (can't remember what you call these) and
| everything was normal there, so he closed it back up again
| and double checks the signal at the house again, but it was
| fine. He walks the lines to double check but everything
| looked normal.
|
| His best guess was that moisture was condensing ever so
| slightly inside the junction box that morning, and was let
| out as soon as he opened it at around noon, which fixed the
| problem.
| lxgr wrote:
| Having had to debug many of such cable issues in the past,
| it's baffling to me that cable companies aren't proactively
| monitoring for things like this.
|
| They have all the data available on their end, as far as I
| can tell! (Unless DOCSIS modems somehow don't have a standard
| "signal receive report" functionality?)
| Animats wrote:
| Telcos used to monitor their copper outside plant for
| moisture. This was called Automatic Line Insulation Testing
| in the Bell System. The ALIT system ran in the hours before
| dawn. It would connect to each idle line, and apply, for
| tens of milliseconds, about 400 volts limited to very low
| current between the two wires, and between each wire and
| ground, measuring the leakage current. This would detect
| moisture in the cable. This was dealt with by hooking up a
| tank of dry nitrogen to the cable to dry it out.
|
| Here's a 1960s vintage Automatic Electric line insulation
| test system at work in a step-by-step central ofice. [1]
| Here's the manual for automatic line insulation testing in
| a 5ESS switch.[2] 5ESS is still the major AT&T switch for
| copper analog phone lines. After that, it's all packet
| switching.
|
| For fiber, of course, moisture doesn't affect the signal.
|
| This led to an urban legend: "bell tap". While Western
| Electric phones were designed to not react to the ALIT test
| signal, many cheap phones would emit some sound from the
| "ringer" when the 400V pulses came through, some time
| before dawn.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wt1GGdDa5jQ
|
| [2] https://www.manualslib.com/manual/2755956/Lucent-
| Technologie...
| swores wrote:
| Great comment, thanks!
|
| (I've sent a quick email suggesting it be added to
| https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights :)
| yafbum wrote:
| In my observation, to a first approximation, cable
| operators take off-the-shelf equipment, connect it, power
| it on, and bill customers for it. They don't really have
| the r&d capability to innovate and create new monitoring
| solutions quickly.
|
| It might happen that an equipment manufacturer sees an
| opportunity and builds something, but then they have to go
| into a long sales cycles to convince operators to use it.
| Operators are in a duopoly situation in most places, so
| quality of service is kind of a secondary concern for them
| - customers may get annoyed, but as long as the competition
| is not vastly superior, few actually switch. It is not a
| market prone to innovation.
| [deleted]
| genewitch wrote:
| on dslreports or broadbandreports there's at least two
| instances of me complaining about two cable companies
| because, at last, it was figured out there was moisture
| ingress in the LE (line extender, usually on cable lines on
| poles). The only common denominator was it happened during
| prime time, every night, and went away around midnight.
|
| The other common denominator was the cable company refusing
| to believe it was an issue with their equipment; this meant
| it took a couple of months of calling them every night until
| they finally sent a technician and a manager to my house to
| verify that I wasn't wrong, leaving my house, coming back 15
| minutes later to say "it'll be fixed tomorrow, there's a
| problem with the LE balance up the road" - and then the issue
| is resolved.
|
| Now this doesn't sound so bad, until you learn that the first
| time this happened to me, i had _only_ VoIP - so the internet
| would start to foul, i 'd call the cable company, and the
| tier 1 would reset my modem at some point, and then i
| wouldn't be able to call back until after midnight (or
| whatever), when there was no longer a problem. So after a
| week of this, i would walk 30 minutes - one way - to a pay
| phone (remember those?) once the internet slowed, call them,
| explain that i couldn't do anything they wanted me to do
| physically, since they disconnected my phone line every time
| i called.
|
| This is what happens with a de facto monopoly.
|
| I will never pay suddenlink another dime, even if they're the
| only terrestrial provider, for whatever reason.
| Projectiboga wrote:
| That time is an intersection of heavy home use and when the
| dew hits.
| notnaut wrote:
| I think you'd get this problem, monopoly or not, whenever
| cost saving measures are in place (and they always are, for
| good reason) at the customer-interface level.
|
| Maybe there should always be a hidden option that only
| people that meet a certain troubleshooting ability
| threshold get access to when calling in for tech
| support....
| aftbit wrote:
| SHIBBOLEET
|
| https://xkcd.com/806/
| creeble wrote:
| Interesting, I wonder if I'm experiencing something a
| little bit similar that Comcast can't seem to debug.
|
| Almost every day, in the heat of summer, I get one to five
| 10-minute outages as soon as the temp gets over about 80F.
| More when it's hotter, usually. Usually it results in a
| modem reset, so it's hard to tell how long the actual
| outage is.
|
| Been happening for going on 5 years. They replaced the
| under-street cable from our house to the junction box
| across the street to no effect. I suspect it's that
| junction box, but afaict, none of my neighbors that share
| that junction box have the same issue. Not very fun to have
| your WFH day collapse unexpectedly in the middle of the
| afternoon.
|
| Strangely, for the last month we've had several days of 80+
| temps with no sign of outage. So fun.
|
| Edit: yes of course multiple modem replacements and inside
| cable checks, to no avail.
| abofh wrote:
| Yeah, probably very similar thing if that pattern is
| true. It's the shift forcing your modem to change speeds,
| but neither side being willing to accept it.
|
| If you can, try forcing a level at/below the speed you
| get during the breakage and see if it just rides it out.
| If it does, shift it back up and plan your coffee breaks
| around it. Or don't, I'm not your mother
| lostlogin wrote:
| Moisture in copper cables is what slowed me down too. It was
| in a section up the road from me. However now that fibre is
| installed, it's glorious and works in the rain.
| valbaca wrote:
| Had a similar effect with garage door sensors and TVs which use
| infrared. During sunset, the sun would line up juust right to
| blank out the sensors
| jonhohle wrote:
| When it's sunny, my wife's car can't open the garage door, and
| my car requires getting extremely close. Once the sun goes
| down, we can both open the door from the street.
|
| It turns out our solar panels (or the optimizers, or the
| inverter) emit radio frequencies that interfere with our garage
| door opener. When the sun is out and they are producing energy,
| the interference is stronger than the homelink garage door
| opener.
|
| A few years ago the garage door openers started working fine.
| It took a few days to realize it was because the inverter had
| failed.
|
| I'm fairly certain there are some FCC regulations that would
| require our installer to fix it, but that relationship soured
| during installation and I'd rather deal with an unusable garage
| remote than dealing with them for warranty work.
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| Some clip on ferrites on the inverter cables might help.
|
| If you have any amateur radio neighbours they'd probably love
| to help you with a project like this.
| djmips wrote:
| Just curious but did you try any bodged shielding?
| kulahan wrote:
| I love these kinds of problems. There's an old story about a
| bug where some people couldn't send an email further than 500
| miles. Huh?
|
| https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles
| chrisbolt wrote:
| Yesterday's discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37576633
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| Someone in my extended family had a Toyota Highlander which would
| randomly decide "you don't need window defog today", leading to a
| near inability to drive the car if fogging was an issue. The
| dealer didn't believe him until one day it actually happened
| while they were watching. They had no idea what to do or how to
| fix it. Solution: Trade the thing in against a Honda Passport.
| He's had that for quite a while now and I haven't heard any
| complaints.
|
| On the other hand, my previous Honda Civic with its dual voltage
| electric system (computer thinks the battery needs charging?
| Generate 14.4V. Computer thinks it doesn't? Generate 12.6V)
| caused us considerable grief until we just started driving around
| with the headlight switch on all the time (this forced it into
| the higher charging voltage). This "feature" is not well
| known/understood even by mechanics and has probably caused untold
| numbers of alternator replacements.
|
| Current Civic is so automated that even the headlight on and
| high/low beam is under the computer's control. Hopefully no weird
| chronic computer bugs in this one.
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| Sell it to someone living in Phoenix. Don't need the defogger
| here.
|
| Although the AC and car fans do overtime here.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I currently have a Raspberry Pi that consistently loses its
| network stack at some point in the early morning.
|
| The likeliest correlation is that I have the Pi dump backups at
| that time, and it may be crashing the network stack due to
| unexpected hardware output because running a hard drive and the
| internal wifi simultaneously under-volts the system. But it sure
| does look like it just gets visited by demons in the pre-twilight
| hours.
| slurpee2 wrote:
| not related to cars but how improbable news can be true : Martha
| Mitchell effect
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Mitchell_effect
| husamia wrote:
| common sense in hind sight helps
| yosser wrote:
| So this guy never ever restarted his car after a short interval
| except for when he bought vanilla ice cream? Additionally, he
| never varied the time intervals in the shop when he was buying
| aforementioned ice cream?
|
| Is it is an understatement to suggest this is a highly unlikely
| circumstance?
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Doubtful. We all fall into patterns in life; and regular
| activities where we go in and out have very predictable times.
| Kerb_ wrote:
| You don't think it's likely that the regular 5 minute stops
| were the first warning sign and most common time he restarted
| his car after a short interval? Especially vapor lock on a hot
| day when one is likely to buy ice cream? Maybe he would've
| noticed it in more places if it got worse. And since he was
| going for ice cream, he was unlikely to dawdle around waiting
| for the product to melt?
| barryrandall wrote:
| The customer's location would have been helpful information.
| That kind of determinism seems impossible in Los Angeles, but
| very likely in Solon, IA.
| kijin wrote:
| A lot of men are extremely efficient shoppers. They know what
| they want and where it is. They don't browse around at all.
| They have the cash or card ready. Walk in, pick up the ice
| cream, pay, walk out. Could be done in 30 seconds if there are
| no other customers.
| shireboy wrote:
| I miss Car Talk with "Click and Clack the Tappit Brothers". Not
| sure if this was on the show, but seems like it could have been.
| Definitely check it out if you enjoyed this anecdote.
| jefftk wrote:
| https://cartalk.com/radio/puzzler/finicky-volare
| [deleted]
| tornato7 wrote:
| I can't vouch for the veracity of this story, but an older
| engineer who worked on a particle accelerator once told me this
| story from the 1980s:
|
| The particle accelerator would start overheating every day right
| after lunch time. They eventually figured out that enough people
| were using the bathroom after lunch that it was affecting the
| water pressure in the cooling system!
|
| I'm not very good at retelling stories.
| knodi123 wrote:
| I guess there's precedent:
|
| https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/74326789852998041...
| hk__2 wrote:
| This is a urban legend: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cone-
| of-silence/
| xpe wrote:
| This story is a playful example of confounding:
|
| > In causal inference, a confounder (also confounding variable,
| confounding factor, extraneous determinant or lurking variable)
| is a variable that influences both the dependent variable and
| independent variable, causing a spurious association. Confounding
| is a causal concept, and as such, cannot be described in terms of
| correlations or associations. The existence of confounders is an
| important quantitative explanation why correlation does not imply
| causation. Some notations are explicitly designed to identify the
| existence, possible existence, or non-existence of confounders in
| causal relationships between elements of a system. / Confounds
| are threats to internal validity.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding
|
| Here is a sketch of a statistical model that shows a confounder
| (a variable affecting both the dependent and independent
| variables) S = f(H, I, T) `S`:
| car starting or not (dependent variable) `H`: how hot is
| the car engine (independent variable) `I`: ice cream type
| chosen (independent variable) `T`: time taken to buy the
| ice cream (a confounder)
|
| Explanation: `T` influences `S` because a shorter time leads to
| `H` (a hotter engine, which is prone to vapor lock). And `T` also
| influences `I` (type of ice cream chosen) because the placement
| of vanilla ice cream allows for quicker purchase. Voila, now we
| have a spurious relationship between `I` and `S`.
| mkwarman wrote:
| This is an interesting explanation, but wouldn't `I` influence
| `T` rather than the other way around? Since the type of ice
| cream determines the amount of time taken in the store.
| gnicholas wrote:
| My DSL internet would get incredibly slow at certain hours of the
| day when web traffic would be expected to be heavy (evening, as
| people are getting home, and around 10, as people are watching
| Netflix). AT&T refused to believe that the cause was congestion.
| No no, they said, it must be that there's a sprinkler that's
| going on at the same time each day, or a microwave that was
| causing a problem with your internet. Eventually they sent
| someone out and discovered that it was, in fact, a congested
| circuit that I was on. I couldn't believe they were so steadfast
| in claiming that it was some crazy-sounding external cause.
| euroderf wrote:
| Another classic:
| https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/magic.html
|
| Disclaimer: I worked for a startup named after this bit of
| folklore.
| alargemoose wrote:
| I have one of these to share. My first job out of college the
| office had an issue where at ~3pm every day, the network would go
| down for a minute or two, then be slow for a while after coming
| back up. This as a digital marketing company, so lots of
| file/image/video uploads happening all the time. We ultimately
| determined it was the router hitting max load, crashing then
| rebooting and having to manage all the pending uploads. From
| everyone realizing it was getting close to the end of the day,
| and making sure their video uploads were started. The company had
| grown a lot in the last year, but was still using a home grade
| router/wap combo. I replaced it with a UniFi AP and an UniFi
| edgerouter. And the problem went away!
| ctenb wrote:
| Why did the car only fail to start in front of the ice cream
| shop? Surely there are more occasions where you turn off the
| engine and turn it back on again within a short time?
| ggreer wrote:
| Because the story is fiction. There are so many variables that
| would change the amount of time the engine is stopped: where
| you parked, how long the line at the register is, whether you
| had exact change or not. Also the ambient temperature would
| change both the likelihood and duration of vapor lock.
| singlow wrote:
| Yes. There are so many details in the story that are
| unbelievable. I will possibly believe that there was some
| original true story with some subset of these circumstanced
| but it got rearranged and exaggerated for effect.
|
| I will never believe that GM sent an engineer to troubleshoot
| this problem. Maybe in a small town a local dealer's mechanic
| spent some time troubleshooting but he probably figured out
| it was based on the short shut off time. Then he speculated
| that it took less time to get Vanilla than the other flavors?
| I doubt that is true - most likely it was random. It is
| amazing how often a random sequence will have an extended
| sequence that our brains won't believe is random.
|
| Not sure I even believe there was any genuine observation of
| correlation from the owner. These type of apocryphal
| technical support stories are almost always formed backward
| from a problem and someone tries to think of the most insane
| way it could have manifested. But people love to believe
| them.
| rhuru wrote:
| This reminds me of my village story. Two brothers married and
| lived next to each other. The wives hated each other and competed
| on everything. If brother 1 got something brother 2 had to buy
| the same thing but bigger.
|
| Over time they ended up building homes in this manner too and one
| of the brothers purchases the largest available plastic watertant
| on roof. Offended the other brother decided that he will build
| even bigger water tank. So they built a massive concrete water
| taken on the roof.
|
| However the problem with this tank was that it would simply not
| retain the water which was pumped into it via a small motor pump
| which pulled the water from nearby well.
|
| This resulted into the brother accusing the brother of "black
| magic" and engaging in daily fist fights and abuse.
|
| Eventually someone figured out that the person who connected the
| intake pipe connected it at the bottom of the tank. So wehn the
| tank was full the water would simply go back to the well.
| NamTaf wrote:
| My parents have an early '50s MG, which they rarely drive. For
| most of my adult life, I've lived about an hour away from them so
| I'd sometimes take it out if I was there. Needless to say, it had
| a never-ending list of quirks due to being so old and also rarely
| being driven, but it's a lovely old car all the same.
|
| One day, I dropped by to say hi, but they were both out. I
| decided instead to take the car for a spin around the local
| beachfront to give it a turn over. A few minutes into the drive,
| I started to lose engine power, so I pulled over. The engine then
| completely died on me, so I let it sit for a moment before trying
| to kick it over again.
|
| The fuel pump is such that when you first turn the key to power
| the accessories, you hear it go tickticktick tick tick.. tick...
| tick...... - the ticks slow as the pump builds up fuel pressure.
| It's a good audio cue as to when you can then turn it to ignition
| and kick the engine over. In this case though, the ticking wasn't
| slowing - just the same tickticktickticktick. I tried to kick it
| over several times, but no matter which deity I invoked, no luck.
|
| Empty fuel tank then. I checked the fuel level (walk to the tank
| on the back and poke a special bit of wood in to see how full it
| is) but lo and behold, plenty there. So I let it sit for a few
| minutes more and try again, hoping it may be to do with a flooded
| carburetor after my several attempts to restart it. The same:
| tickticktickticktick.
|
| I gave Dad a call, describe the problem, tell him what I'd done
| to solve it and that I'd concluded the fuel pump must be cactus.
| I asked if he was going to be home soon to come give me a tow
| home. At this point, I learnt that he was some hours away and Mum
| was overseas, so no luck there. As I'm mentally preparing to push
| the car home for over an hour, he interrupts - "open the bonnet,
| grab the spanner out of the toolbox there and give the pump
| several hard whacks".
|
| "...what?"
|
| "Beat the bejeezus out of the fuel pump a few times."
|
| So I did, and I turned back on the accessories. Ticktickticktick
| ticktick tick tick... tick.... tick.......
|
| Dad then explains that this problem's been around for decades.
| Very occasionally, a bubble of air will end up in the fuel feed
| line. It then blocks the pump, which can't clear it, but a bit of
| suitably percussive maintenance consistently dislodges it and the
| pump can draw fuel in again.
|
| As they say, old cars definitely have character, and I think that
| comes about largely because people can understand, fault-find and
| fix these sorts of analogue issues that arise. New cars are much
| more reliable and don't face nearly as many random faults, but
| those that do happen are almost impossible for Joe Public to
| resolve on the side of the road.
| vGPU wrote:
| Percussive maintenance is the second step to take for a car
| that has been sitting for a while, right after the Italian
| tuneup.
| doodpants wrote:
| > Vanilla, being the most popular flavor, was in a separate case
| at the front of the store for quick pickup.
|
| Vanilla is the most popular flavor? That makes me skeptical of
| the whole story. ;-)
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Have you ever given ice cream to young children?
|
| I was a picky eater as a kid, yet I still can't fathom why so
| many kids prefer vanilla over other flavors.
| Kerb_ wrote:
| It's reasonably complex while not typically being
| overwhelming in my experience
| BashiBazouk wrote:
| Vanilla accounts for about a quarter of all ice cream sales in
| the US. Chocolate is a close second but I think vanilla wins as
| it is also the most common to serve with other desserts. Apple
| pie a la mode is always with vanilla ice cream for example...
| Finnucane wrote:
| It is, certainly would have been at the time anyone would be
| driving a Pontiac. But it is dubious that the store would have
| a separate case for it. And making a trip for it every night
| after you've had dinner? And an engineer spent days working on
| the problem in person? THe story is weird.
|
| Also, vanilla is good.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > And an engineer spent days working on the problem in
| person?
|
| This is the only slightly credible bit IMO; companies
| sometimes do this! If you have a really weird problem in
| something you've sold a few million units of, you really,
| really want to know what that problem is, before more people
| start complaining.
|
| The supermarket layout is clearly contrived to make the story
| work, though, and doesn't otherwise make any sense.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| It's the most popular flavor in the same way the Settlers of
| Catan is the most popular Euro board-game. It's rarely
| anybody's favorite, but very few people hate it.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Given that it's become a synonym for 'conventional', I'm not
| sure why you'd be sceptical. It's the least common denominator
| flavour.
| macintux wrote:
| Same reason grayscale cars are very common: even if a family
| likes bright colors, they may not like the same bright
| colors, and may not trust they'll be able to sell it to
| someone else later.
| 5555624 wrote:
| Vanilla consistently ranks as the most favorite ice cream
| flavor. A search for "most popular ice cream in the world" has
| as the top result: "According to statistics, vanilla ice cream
| is the most popular ice cream in the world. From the USA across
| to China, its appeal is universal."
|
| An example of the top 21 flavors (in America):
| https://www.krqe.com/news-resources/ranking/the-21-most-popu...
| schainks wrote:
| One night while in the computer science lab doing a Java
| assignment, my professor for that class happened to walk by the
| lab and quipped to me, "oh, good luck on _that_ machine."
|
| He explained: once upon a time, the machine refused to run _any_
| Java programs, and would spectacularly crash and burn instead.
| C++ fine, python fine, anything Java was a hard nope. He didn't
| believe this at first until his program also started crashing the
| machine.
|
| It took a tech, him, and another professor about two weeks to
| work out that the JVM happened to allocate the same RAM address
| to the integer 12 on that particular machine every time the JVM
| started. The actual chip of RAM that contained that hardware
| address was faulty, so whenever the machine tried to allocate to
| that address, it would crash.
|
| Swapping out the bad RAM stick immediately solved the problem.
| js2 wrote:
| > At this point, there are two natural conclusions: either I
| have a severe hardware issue, or there is a wild memory
| corruption bug in the binary.
|
| https://marcan.st/2017/12/debugging-an-evil-go-runtime-bug/
|
| I won't spoil the conclusion. It's a long and winding path to
| get there and a good read. HN discussion:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15845118
| going_to_work wrote:
| Honestly, you would have to be pretty stupid to take this at face
| value.
|
| I immediately went to time, location, etc.
| system2 wrote:
| Probably a folktale and not real. A problem like this could be
| solved with 3-4 step of process of elimination.
| artur_makly wrote:
| reminds me of this classic :
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/a26tzt/four_engineer...
| dumbfounder wrote:
| This is a secondhand anecdote, but it's pretty funny. Back in the
| days of server rooms, a friend's server for his company would
| reboot every day around 5pm. They checked everything they
| possibly could with the OS, they would be logged in and running
| checks on it and it would spontaneously go offline for about 5
| minutes and reboot every day. Finally they decided to go stand in
| the presence of the server around the time it goes down every
| day. They watched a cleaner come into the room, unplug the server
| rack, plug in their vacuum and vacuum around the servers, and
| then plug the server rack back in.
| going_to_work wrote:
| This story is older than the internet.
| skipkey wrote:
| I personally had a similar situation. We had an accounting firm
| whose servers we were maintaining, and occasionally the print
| server would reboot, always between 9 and 10 am. So I sat in
| there for a week between those hours and noticed the light
| would dim and occasionally the reboot would happen.
|
| It turned out that the lawyer next door would come in, turn on
| his PC, printer and coffee pot simultaneously because they were
| all on the same power strip, and the drain was causing an
| undervoltage on the circuit the server was on during startup.
| We had it on a UPS, but it turns out that at the time consumer
| grade UPS systems only handled outages.
|
| I measured drops as low as to 85 volts, in practice anything
| under 95 or sou would reboot.
| krisoft wrote:
| Oh I have a similar one. This one is first hand, I was in the
| room when we were debuging the issue.
|
| We were developing a smart camera product which were counting
| traffic on a road. So for example a city council would install
| this camera somewhere on a road and it would generate
| statistics of how many lorries, and passenger vehicles, and
| motorbikes used that road.
|
| One of our cameras exhibited a problem where it restarted every
| day around roughly the same time. It wasn't exactly the same
| second though, in fact there was a clear pattern to it. One day
| it would restart at 19:12:10 and the next day two second later,
| then again the third day two more seconds later. (not the real
| timestamp and i don't remember the real time deltas either, but
| there was a clear progression)
|
| After much debuging we learned that the issue was that as the
| sun was settling some street furniture projected a shadow in
| front of our camera. Our software wrongly concluded that it is
| a vehicle and started collecting information about it for
| classification. But of course shadows creep a lot slower than
| real vehicles so it run out of memory before the "shaddow
| vehicle" has passed out of the frame. And once we run out of
| memory the system froze and then got restarted by a watchdog.
|
| Turns out the pattern we have seen in the timestamps was caused
| by the angle of the sun changing which made the shadow trick
| our algorithm just a little bit later every day.
| drivers99 wrote:
| Definitely an urban legend at this point. A reddit thread[0]
| mentions it being collected in 1990 from computer stories going
| around in the 80s[1]
|
| [0]
| https://old.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/5yrs1...
|
| [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3227607-the-devouring-
| fu...
| bhickey wrote:
| The story probably endures because things like this actually
| happen [0, 1]
|
| 0. https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/27/us/janitor-alarm-freezer-
| rens...
|
| 1. http://www.st-v-sw.net/Obsidian/Martin/gravity.htm (search
| sprinkler)
| drzaiusapelord wrote:
| Essentially all these stories are apocryphal. Even this vapor
| lock story.
|
| Sorry but even before today, having a automotive engineer
| sent to a random person's home over what clearly sounds like
| a quack letter seems implausible to me. The dictates of
| capitalism, human resources, and the politics of the
| workplace would make this difficult if not impossible. Even
| in the past when there was more human capital in support
| positions and more of a sense of customer service.
|
| Way, way too many suspicious stories involve high-level
| people being involved in trivial issues. I just find it all
| pretty suspicious. Real stories tend to start with poor
| customer service at the dealership and being mocked by
| managers and mechanics. Not some unrealistic ideal white
| knight manager sending off engineers to people's homes.
| Imagine how many weird letters a place like pontiac gets.
| They don't have the manpower to do this if they actually
| chose to do it, and engineers might balk at the idea of doing
| at-home support too.
|
| Pretty much any "idealized Americana" business story should
| set off BS alarms in us. "Oh a trivial problem with your car?
| No problem ma'am, I'm sending our top engineers over
| tomorrow," doesn't happen because its costly and
| unsustainable. Instead ask anyone who has odd car problems.
| Its endless painful calls and visits to dealerships and
| mechanics. There's a reason we have lemon laws for cars. Its
| because whats described in this story doesn't actually happen
| and people demand restitution.
|
| I don't doubt that someone had a famous vapor lock shopping
| story (ive heard different versions of this story, usually
| about a housewife picking up her child from a nearby
| elementary school), but over the years these stories get
| modified into memetic structures based on dishonesty because
| most people are social capital seeking and having a humorous
| story provides them the immature ego boost they need. So "wow
| my car had vapor lock when I make quick trips" became "So the
| CEO of Ford came to my house to look at my ice cream car..."
| The latter is just more interesting in the market of
| storytelling.
|
| That is to say, the ONLY reason this story is here is because
| its been modified to be memeticly attractive. A "boring" (i
| find old technology faults interesting, personally), but a
| "boring" story about vapor lock wouldn't make it to places
| like HN or reddit, which are memetic responders
| (upvote/downvote mechanisms) and lowest-common denominator
| (by this demographic) popularity machines. But dress up that
| boring story and now everyone is repeating it, often times
| claiming its their story and they know the people in it! The
| same way the comment you're responding to probably doesn't
| actually know the famous "unplug the server at 5pm" person.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| Every now and then a ceo will do somethings like this. If
| this is true idk. Good for PR.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> Essentially all these stories are apocryphal. Even this
| vapor lock story._
|
| The vapor lock ice cream story might go back to this 1997
| Car Talk Puzzler, where Ray claims it was a customer of
| his: https://cartalk.com/radio/puzzler/finicky-volare
| omoikane wrote:
| It's a fun story to read, whether it's fact or fiction. We
| are not too concerned about whether a large company would
| really send an engineer to investigate a seemly absurd
| claim, in the same way that we are not too concerned about
| whether one single shoe is able to uniquely identify
| Cinderella and no one else.
| Tangurena2 wrote:
| I used to work for General Motors as a field engineer.
| Basically, I was the "mechanic of last resort" for some
| issues. The most certain method of getting something fixed
| was to write a letter to someone at the top, or very close
| to the top. When the request rolled downhill to "fix this",
| no one knew if this was a whim or something serious (like
| it was the CEO's neighbor). So those service requests got
| absolute priority.
|
| I remember one incident where that "fix it" letter came
| from high enough that I drove out to the customer's house
| and swapped out their radio in their driveway. At night.
|
| When GM bought EDS, Ross Perot ended up on the board. He'd
| do all sorts of silly things. Like when something went
| wrong with his car, he'd take it to a dealership. And
| report back to the board how _that_ went. The first few
| times, they just told him to hand the keys to the valet at
| the executive garage and tell them what needs fixing. The
| plant I worked out of made radios. Other branches of the
| division that I worked for made engine computers and
| instrument clusters. If someone at the executive garage had
| a radio problem, one of my tasks was to go out to the
| assembly line, grab a radio, test it, then get it to the
| Kokomo airport for the GM jet to pick up. FedEx (tagline:
| _when it positively has to be there the next day_ ) wasn't
| fast enough. That fleet of jets would carry parts from
| plant to plant. And the executive garage was the best
| equipped and best staffed GM dealership on Earth.
| guidoism wrote:
| Delco! I now live in one of those small factory towns in
| Indiana. It's fascinating to me how so many little towns
| in the Midwest existed just to make one small part for
| Detroit.
| bombcar wrote:
| You soon learn at a big company that almost any expense
| is justifiable to the boss if it prevents his boss from
| asking inconvenient questions.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| By coincidence, I have witnessed this just last night. No
| details will be provided to protect identity, I'll just
| say you probably heard of the company.
|
| It's staggering.
| genewitch wrote:
| I've had the CEO of a municipal water company at my house
| looking at what his contractors did to my property frontage
| and potentially my well. Also, my other story in this
| thread is documented in posterity on a forum, you can see i
| didn't embellish any of it, and that involved a manager or
| supervisor having to drive quite a long time to my house at
| 10 PM with a technician to source a problem i had had for
| weeks or months.
|
| So, in essence, "it depends". Good stories, in the memetic
| sense, will have hooks to ensure that the moral or point of
| the story is remembered; in a great story, the memetic
| hooks are so great that you can repeat the story nearly
| verbatim to other people, after hearing it yourself.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Wow, you used "memetic" three times. Very erudite.
| bityard wrote:
| Frankly I found the whole thing to be shallow and
| pedantic.
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| Without vast knowledge, many unreasonable things are seen
| as reasonable. How much of our history's truth is based on
| what was told to the gullible majority? Should we not talk
| about Mythology because a skeptic questions it's
| authenticity?
|
| Comedians make up stories all the time to entertain
| audiences. These stories don't require accuracy, they are
| more about delivering specific results; a laugh, a story to
| share, confirmation bias, etc.
|
| Many people lie, believing they're telling the truth. I
| think you will have a hard time truth policing people who
| don't and won't care, but focusing on truth and validity is
| probably a useful skill for you in many parts of your life.
| fragmede wrote:
| If I tell you something I believe to be true, but
| actually isn't, I'm not lying, just wrong. Lying involves
| an intent to decieve, so if I don't know the truth, it's
| not a lie.
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| That is true, in addition, outcomes are not defined by
| intentions. It was my hope to draw attention to why we
| perpetuate this behavior (results) and I was less
| concerned with the definition of a lie.
|
| There is a lot of gradation, the differences between
| stating misinformation you believe is true vs stating
| what the majority believes to be true due to laziness vs
| an intentional lie, etc.
| Ikatza wrote:
| Your lack of faith is disturbing, specially when there are
| first hand accounts of [Apple/Microsoft/Insert Co] sending
| engineers to people's houses to diagnose unique problems.
| This could be a perfectly real story, a different thing
| would be that you choose not to believe it.
| genewitch wrote:
| during the PPC 603 era of Macintosh Performa series, we
| had a bad motherboard, and apple sent an engineer to our
| house to replace it. This is around the time that the
| story of apple sending engineers to houses to remove
| motherboards, raise them 2 feet above a flat surface, and
| drop them was being passed around. Something about
| reseating chips that one of their pick and place machines
| was misaligned on or something.
| astrange wrote:
| Those might be field engineers, but I have heard of the
| WiFi teams at computer companies going out to people's
| houses to test especially weird situations.
| djmips wrote:
| When I worked my first job in retail in the mid eighties
| - we were selling Atari ST and there was an official
| Atari bulletin to do exactly that. It would reseat the
| socketed chips.
| genewitch wrote:
| interesting; i doubt my memory is _that_ faulty, so it 's
| possible the story went through some iterations, making
| it an apocryphal story about apple, instead. Or,
| possibly, the major pick and place manufacturer had a
| slew of alignment issues in the 80s!
| mrguyorama wrote:
| I thought the apple "lift and drop the computer" story
| was about the Apple 3. It had no vents, so it was always
| overheating and "unseating chips" like the Xbox 360 heat
| issues.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_III#Design_flaws
|
| And so it doesn't become apocryphal but stays a real
| story, there 100% were people who "Fixed" their RRoD Xbox
| 360s by wrapping them in towels for an hour so they
| cooked themselves even more, or they put the mobo in the
| oven on a low temperature. That fix was also 100% used
| for fixing certain graphics cards unseating in the mid
| 2000s as well.
| permo-w wrote:
| would it be surprising if this has happened more than once?
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > Back in the days of server rooms
|
| Huh? Yesterday? Or are you referring to the fact that servers
| are now often offsite, in 'clouds'?
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| Man I've heard this story so many times, this guy must have a
| million friends in a hundred countries he's told this story to.
| :-)
| fernandotakai wrote:
| funny thing, something like this happened to me. we were on
| site doing some implementation and went back to the hotel at
| about 3am.
|
| less than an hour later, we get an email from nagios (i think
| it was nagios? it was a GOOD while back) complaining the
| server was offline. we got into a cab and went back straight
| up (this server was not supposed to be offline ever).
|
| guess what? a maintenance guy turned the server off by
| mistake while cleaning up the server room -- even worse, he
| was not even supposed to be there!
|
| this triggered a bunch of security checks and the company
| found out that most employees had access to any room in the
| building.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| The key to making friends is having a good story.
| dkarl wrote:
| I think it's more like a common experience. My wife and I
| both work, so we have cleaners come in every two weeks for a
| deep clean. We've used several different companies, and
| apparently it's standard practice to unplug things when a
| power outlet is needed. They don't unplug computers that have
| monitors, and they don't unplug things with visible clocks
| that would need to be reset, so they do take some care not to
| inconvenience us, but they'll unplug anything else, including
| NAS appliances, DVRs in the middle of recording shows, etc.
| When we hire a new company, we make sure they mark down a
| _special request_ that they not unplug anything, pointing out
| that we have ample outlets and can help them find one or free
| one up if necessary. I also replace any network connectors
| that lose their little plastic locking tabs, because they 're
| likely to slip loose when things get jostled around during
| cleaning.
| gav wrote:
| It is a common story and sometimes those get put in the
| collective blender and we get apocryphal stories out of it.
| Here's two stories of my own:
|
| Back in the mid 90s, I built out a system that gave every
| school in a district their own webpage that was carved out
| of some government funding for providing internet access.
| There was no budget for hardware though, so it ended up
| running on a repurposed workstation in somebody's office.
| One Tuesday even the cleaners unplugged it to vacuum and it
| didn't power back up after being plugged in. On Wednesday
| somebody helpfully stuck a piece of paper saying "don't
| unplug" to it, which seemed to solve that problem until the
| whole project was mothballed.
|
| In the late 90s, I worked at a company where we started
| getting complaints from the staff about machines being
| getting slower over time. Nobody took it seriously until
| there was an inventory of machines taken and we found that
| a large amount had significantly less memory installed than
| they should have, somebody was stealing half the memory
| sticks from each. Hidden cameras were installed in the
| office and it turned out that somebody on the cleaning crew
| came with a screwdriver and ESD bags and knew how much to
| take to leave the machines working.
| bombcar wrote:
| Goes again to show the usual thing that gets you caught
| is repetition.
|
| Had he struck once or twice and then left the rest alone
| nobody may ever have figured it out.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| I would expect the repetition generally comes out of
| necessity. If he's selling the parts to feed himself or
| his family he's that much less likely to choose to stop
| if it means giving up some source of income, however ill-
| gotten.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's more likely from "I got away with it, I'll get away
| with it again" - but I've not done deep research into
| thefts, but the ones I know were along the lines of "I
| need more money for more drugs, this will get me some
| money".
| Freestyler_3 wrote:
| For critical devices you could use red outlets. Different
| colored outlets are scary.
| heywhatupboys wrote:
| this is why denmark has an additional slanted plug for IT
| equipment and a winky one for hospitals
| genewitch wrote:
| In the US the "winky" receptacles that go (-|) or ([?]|) -
| except the T faces the other way - are 20 amp outlets, 120
| volts. every receptacle that differs from the "shocked face"
| means something. Our standard shocked face receptacles are
| 15A. In hospitals, you need a guarantee that your monitors or
| assistive devices aren't going to trip a breaker somewhere if
| someone plugs in a vacuum; making it impossible to use the
| receptacle for something else is something that only matters
| after it's too late, i'd think.
| fragmede wrote:
| In hospitals, they're colored differently to denote which
| sockets are on backed up lines vs not.
| r0m4n0 wrote:
| I'll add to the crazy anecdotes with something that happened to
| me a few months ago.
|
| I had a brand new AC/heater hvac system installed last year.
| Encountered this problem, the AC would just turn off. First time,
| called the AC company and they come out. After a few visits, they
| pinpoint the problem as the condensation pump, it's just a small
| water pump that's down in my basement to push water out a little
| PVC pipe. When the water fills up in the reservoir, a pump kicks
| on and moves water. If the water gets too full, a sensor turns
| the AC off. After the rd visit they decide that "the grade isn't
| gradual enough and the pump turns off". They replace the pvc.
| Fourth attempt they replace the pump, pump must have failed.
| Fifth visit, they replace the pump with a different brand. Sixth
| visit they disconnect the automatic shutoff of the AC, my
| basement floods with water. Seventh call they change the pvc pipe
| again. Eighth call they are baffled, say everything is working as
| it should, give it time.
|
| After they leave, my wife goes "whenever I turn the basement
| light on, I hear a weird noise". I immediately turn the switch
| off and walk down into the basement and test the outlet. The
| light oddly enough controls a random outlet the pump was
| connected to. Every time a tech came over, they turned the switch
| on.
|
| I still wonder how many more phone calls it would have taken
| before they figured it out.
| azmarks wrote:
| When I moved into my last house, I had a fun electrical problem.
| We moved in October and I would end the day by taking the trash
| out. Now, my garbage can was outside the door from my garage to
| the backyard. One night the light outside that door didn't go on.
| It was late, so I figured I'd look at it the next day. Worked
| fine all day, then at night it didn't work again. It was a new
| house, so I called the builder.
|
| The electrician came out to check it and gave me the most
| incredulous look when I told him it didn't work at night. But he
| went to take a look. Came back later and said that the wire was
| barely touching the light fixture. So, at night, when it go
| colder it would slightly pull back and no longer be touching.
| During the day it would warm up, expand and would work just fine.
| genewitch wrote:
| my wellhead does this when it's below 20F outside. Oxidization
| on the wires throughout the year mean that any shift of the
| wire causes a disconnect.
|
| haven't figured out a solution, i just run a drip that is loud
| enough i notice if it stops so i can go out and reseat the
| wire, otherwise the stuff outside the well can freeze and that
| costs money to replace.
| c0nsumer wrote:
| Sounds like you just need a better mechanical connection.
| There are silicone-filled waterproof wire nuts available.
| Maybe if you clean the wires and secure them with those all
| will be good?
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