Computer
Should the Autism Spectrum Be Split Apart?
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Wordle Game Show In the Works At NBC
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A Unique Mistake
Henrik spent too many hours, staring at the bug, trying to understand why the 3rd party service they were interacting with wasn't behaving the way he expected. Henrik would send updates, and then try and read back the results, and the changes didn't happen. Except sometimes they did. Reads would be inconsistent. It'd work fine for weeks, and then suddenly things would go off the rails, showing values that no one from Henrik's company had put in the database.
The vendor said, "This is a problem on your side, clearly." Henrik disagreed.
So Henrik went about talking over the problem with his fellow devs, working with the 3rd party support, and building test cases which could reproduce the results reliably. It took many weeks of effort, but by the end, he was confident he could prove it was the vendor's issue.
"Hey," Henrik said, "I think these tests pretty convincingly show that it's a problem on your side. Let me know if the tests highlight anything for you."
The bug ticket vanished into the ether for many weeks. Eventually, the product owner replied. Their team had diagnosed the problem, and the root cause was that sometimes the API would get confused about record ownership and identity. It was a tricky problem to crack, but the product owner's developers had come up with a novel solution to resolve it:
Actually we could add a really unique id instead which would never get repeated, even across customers, it would stay the same for the entity and never be reused
And thus, the vendor invented primary keys and unique identifiers. Unfortunately, the vendor was not E.F. Codd, the year was not 1970, primary keys had been invented already, and in fact were well understood and widely used. But not, apparently, by this vendor.
[Advertisement] Plan Your .NET 9 Migration with ConfidenceYour journey to .NET 9 is more than just one decision.Avoid migration migraines with the advice in this free guide. Download Free Guide Now!
Can Cory Doctorow's 'Enshittification' Transform the Tech Industry Debate?
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Your Next Phone Might Come Without a USB Cable
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Security Bug In India's Income Tax Portal Exposed Taxpayers' Sensitive Data
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Micro Center Partners With iFixit
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Sora 2 Watermark Removers Flood the Web
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
OpenAI Bans Suspected China-Linked Accounts For Seeking Surveillance Proposals
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Anthropic and IBM Announce Strategic Partnership
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Qualcomm Is Buying Arduino, Releases New Raspberry Pi-Esque Arduino Board
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Without Data Centers, GDP Growth Was 0.1% in the First Half of 2025, Harvard Economist Says
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Play Store Changes Coming This Month as SCOTUS Declines To Freeze Antitrust Remedies
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Youtube's Biggest Star MrBeast Fears AI Could Impact 'Millions of Creators' After Sora Launch
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
RGB LED Is Getting Its Time in the Spotlight. Will TV Shoppers Tune In?
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Apple Turned the CrowdStrike BSOD Issue Into an Anti-PC Ad
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Denmark Aims To Ban Social Media For Children Under 15, PM Says
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
OpenAI's Computing Deals Top $1 Trillion
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Irish Basic Income Support Scheme For Artists To Be Made Permanent
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
California Law Forces Netflix, Hulu To Turn Down Ad Volumes
Read more of this story at Slashdot.