> A higgs-bugson is a bug that is reported in practice but difficult to reproduce

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-...

I think Heisenbug refers to a bug that stops repro’ing during debugging (the act of observing the system changes the system behavior). This bug was different: it was very rare and debugging it didn’t make it go away.

> 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].

No; he wanted to remove discussion and socialization, because it clashed with SO's mission of presenting useful information without parsing through others' discussion.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2950

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19665

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/131009

> In other words, StackOverflow cut off one of its history-making parts because it had an incomplete and simplistic view of useful.

How does this in any way demonstrate that the view of usefulness was "incomplete" or "simplistic"?

How is the deleted content "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].

What downfall?

Before you point at any of the incoming-question-rate statistics: why should they be interpreted as representing a "downfall"? That is, why is it actually bad if fewer questions are asked?

Before you answer that, keep in mind that Stack Overflow already has more than three times as many publicly visible questions about programming as Wikipedia has articles about literally anything notable.

Like they say, "Stop trying to make fetch happen!"

Yeah, stack overflow is dying, we all know it.