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Comment by colanderman | Hacker News Reader

Nitpick, I assume by "race condition" you mean "used lots of CPU". This is a common colloquial conflation, but race conditions [1] (which are not generally identifiable without aid of a debugger and the application's source code) and high CPU usage are unrelated concepts.

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

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What are you going on about here? I have never once heard someone confuse "race condition" with "high CPU usage."

Now you have: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14522211

That's not a nitpick. These are entirely different things and calling high CPU usage a "race condition" is really confusing and misleading.

Do people actually do that? Where did that come from?

> Where did that come from?

Maybe because it makes your machine's fans sound like a race car?

Honestly this is the first I've heard of this usage as well.

And also, please can we refer to computers as hard drives. Especially desktops.

You're right. I didn't throw a debugger at it. It seems to randomly ramp up CPU load and stay high until I kill the process.

Do look up what a race condition is.

It's a subset of race conditions to be sure, but I think it's reasonable to look at a thread that gets stuck in a do-nothing loop while the app continues to run and guess it's probably the fault of buggy multithreading and bad luck on the timings.

> which are not generally identifiable without aid of a debugger and the application's source code

Random behavior is usually an indication that there may very likely be a race condition without needing the source code.

I've never heard of those two things being conflated.

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