gnfargbl|15day ago

Calling this a "Higgs-Bugson" doesn't make a lot of sense. There's nothing uncertain or difficult to reproduce about the Higgs.

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.

alexpotato|15day ago

Regarding NFS, I've always loved this quote from the CTO at a hedge fund I once worked at:

"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])