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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

Even with telemetry, would you be able to back up the claim that that the issue was rare? All too often, people add telemetry to something in an attempt to try to find things like this, but they end up leaking things elsewhere and not accounting for them. Bad statistics are more dangerous than no statistics, and all that.

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If this is the first instance of this bug being reported, then yes it's rare.

The rarity of a bug is independent from reports of it.

That also depends on the severity of the bug. :)

No, those are directly correlated.

The reports of it are correlated to the rarity, except in instances where reports are not generated, such as apps that do not collect error telemetry.

Users can make reports manually, and you would even expect them to do so at a high rate in bugs like this. This implies a high correlation between bug reports and rarity.

Telemetry does not matter in this case. If a bug occures often, then either the issue ticker will get this bug often, or there might even be a "known bugs" section.

I would like to think so. I used a program that is full of bugs, yet those are not reported[1], nor have they been fixed. :(

Edit:

[1] I did report one (or two?, it has been some time ago) after some time (could have been months, because I could do without it as a compromise for that time being). They did not respond nor did they fix it (so I did not report any other bugs I have found). I recently re-installed it to give it another go, and the easy-to-fix bug still occurs. They just do not give a damn. Their website has been rebranded and everything, but this bug has not been fixed for over a year.

Edit #2:

Wow, I was way off with the "over a year". I checked the bug report of the one I remember reporting. It does seem like some other people have reported it too. Well, it is a bug from 2018, after all. Still open, no word from a developer. :D It is a bug of a crucial feature.

In any case, if for some reason I had to use this software again, I would never report any bugs because it is pretty much futile. They do not answer, they do not categorize bugs, they do not seem to check the bug reports at all. It would be a waste of time.

Then why not report them?

Because the bug happens when you're trying to get something done and you don't have 5 spare minutes to interrupt your flow in order to file a bug. You might make a mental note to report it later and then forget. Or, if the bug is annoying enough, you might just never use that program again and you don't care if it gets fixed. Or your wifi glitched at the same time the bug happened and you've no idea if it is a bug or the glitchy wifi. Or you don't know it's a bug until later and by that time you've no idea what you were doing to trigger it.

There's a million and one valid reasons people don't report bugs.

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