The reason that it took so long to find was that the cross-section of production is very low, the decay signatures are hard to separate from the background, the specific energy scale it existed at was not well-defined, and building the LHC was (to put it mildly) difficult and expensive.

Roughly, if you'll forgive a bad analogy from a long-lapsed physicist, it was the equivalent of trying to find a very weak glow from a specific type of bug hiding at an unknown location in a huge field of corn. Except that your vision was very bad, so you had to invent a new type of previously-unimaginably excellent eyeglasses to see the thing. Also before you could even start looking you had to expend a painful amount of time and money building a flashlight so incredibly huge that it needed new types of cryogenic cooling inventing, just to stop it from melting when you switched it on.

If you had a software bug that you were almost certain was there, but you needed half of the world's GPU clusters for three years to locate and prove it, then that would be a Higgs-Bugson.

"NFS is lot like heroin:

at first, it seems amazing.

But then it ruins your life"

(This is a place that did almost EVERYTHING via NFS including different applications communicating via shared files on NFS mounts. It also had the weird setup of using BOTH Linux AND Windows permissions on NFS mounts shared between user desktops [windows] an servers [linux])

>NFS with Kerberos

secure, simple, battle tested. no crazy architecture

works so well a bug showed up in the kernel :-)

I know, not directly related to the article. Just needed to vent bitterly.

NFS can be run over TCP or UDP. Does the retransmission occur when using UDP?

This was the first time I heard of "higgs-bugson". The term sounded so forced that I had to know how it differed from Heisenbug. In short, it doesn't[1].

Then why did it even exist?

The term somehow made it to the "Heisenbug"'s Wikipedia page[1], so I checked the sources. There were two and both end up at the same site: Jeff Atwood's blog post[2] quoting some StackOverflow answers to a poll-like question ("what's a programming term you coined?") because he wanted to remove lighthearted content from the site as he thought it clashed with SO's mission of educating people and advancing their skills[3].

There was a proposal on Meta StackExchange about undeleting that question with the answers, but it was refused by Jeff Atwood again because it invited "made up stuff"[4] among other reasons.

So, Wikipedia in the end, has this term in Heisenbug page because someone just blurted out something in 2010, it was copy-pasted to a blog, and then got scooped up by some news outlet. There are no other sources. Kagi doesn't find any instances of the term before it was coined on StackOverflow in 2010. For all we know, "gingerbreadboy" from England invented it.

The irony is that the term somehow made it to the literature -hence the blog post here- because someone was just having fun at StackOverflow. It obviously either sounded good, or just clicked that others started using it. StackOverflow deleted the content that actually made a small part of computer science history because it wasn't "serious".

In other words, StackOverflow cut off one of its history-making parts because it had an incomplete and simplistic view of useful. I think it might be possible to draw a line from their understanding of communities and societal dynamics to the downfall of StackOverflow after the emergence of AI[5].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenbug

[2] https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/

[3] https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/01/04/stack-overflow-where-w...

[4] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/122164/can-we-un-de...

[5] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-...

Worse yet, the kernel runs in supervisor mode.

This kernel design is bankrupt. There's much better available, such as seL4+Genode.