Oh, it was! And there was no way to "prove" it, it's just like "look, the equation this way actually makes a lot of sense and is very clever and produces results that seem reasonable and much respect to whoever designed it... and the equation the way it is in code now... does not. It seems like clearly it got accidentally transposed at some point?"
And the response was just like "We disagree, we think it makes sense the way it is and the product is correct"
That's kind of the end of the argument, there's nothing more one can say!
It didn't help that I came in assuming that of course everyone would see which version was correct (as you just did! although i didn't find it obvious, it took me lots of study to figure out), instead of producing a narrative designed to gently persuade them that. (That's on me -- I think I've learned something about technical communications around bugs and disagreements since then, although I'm still far from perfect).
The real answer, I think was given in one of the reddit thread comments -- the way it's broken for the most part _doesn't matter_ in the usual operations of reddit, it matters only in edge cases, and not very important ones, so really people mostly don't notice and we don't care.
Fair enough, I guess? But they did fix it three years later? I forget how I even found out they had fixed it; I can't at this point find any context for _why_ they fixed it, or who with power finally noticed/agreed it could use fixing why.
(And if it had happened three years after that, it would not have been in public source, and my gloating satisfaction would have been stolen!)
And the response was just like "We disagree, we think it makes sense the way it is and the product is correct"
That's kind of the end of the argument, there's nothing more one can say!
It didn't help that I came in assuming that of course everyone would see which version was correct (as you just did! although i didn't find it obvious, it took me lots of study to figure out), instead of producing a narrative designed to gently persuade them that. (That's on me -- I think I've learned something about technical communications around bugs and disagreements since then, although I'm still far from perfect).
The real answer, I think was given in one of the reddit thread comments -- the way it's broken for the most part _doesn't matter_ in the usual operations of reddit, it matters only in edge cases, and not very important ones, so really people mostly don't notice and we don't care.
Fair enough, I guess? But they did fix it three years later? I forget how I even found out they had fixed it; I can't at this point find any context for _why_ they fixed it, or who with power finally noticed/agreed it could use fixing why.
(And if it had happened three years after that, it would not have been in public source, and my gloating satisfaction would have been stolen!)