One of the most interesting things to me when reading this was that it was treated as a bug even though it was that hard to reproduce. Most dev shops would not have the bandwidth and management but in to spend the time to dig into something like that unless it was high severity, and also it sounds like it was also getting caused from a modded version of the software
My favorite paper on it doing a clever workaround:
Almost impossible
if you haven't read the factorio devblog before, please do!
after HN, it's one of my favourite places on the internet because i constantly learn new, random, insane things almost every time. imho it teaches you how to think + shows you what great engineering taste looks like. sorry if i'm overly effusive but each post is so deeply technical and well-written that i can't believe it's free.
you don't need to know anything about factorio or gamedev btw (i don't), just pick a random number between 1 to 438 and start reading :)