1947: Harvard engineers working on the Mark II computer find a moth stuck to one of the relays. They tape it to a logbook and write "First actual case of a bug being found" and introduce the words 'bug' and 'debug' in the context of programming.
Not sure if it's more of an urban legend, but the old story went that one (or two?) Soviet Mars probes in the 80s went wildly off course because of the typo in their nav software, allegedly written in Fortran. A comma was misplaced for a dot.
I disagree with the author about Black Lives Matter and abolishing ICE (more like abolishing the leaders who enable ICE to do terrible things - maybe there's some common ground there)
1947: Harvard engineers working on the Mark II computer find a moth stuck to one of the relays. They tape it to a logbook and write "First actual case of a bug being found" and introduce the words 'bug' and 'debug' in the context of programming.
https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_33466...
Sadly, this one's a myth. If you check the wikipedia page for Bug as an engineering term (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bug_%28engineering%29#History), its usage is traced back to the 1870s.
Not sure if it's more of an urban legend, but the old story went that one (or two?) Soviet Mars probes in the 80s went wildly off course because of the typo in their nav software, allegedly written in Fortran. A comma was misplaced for a dot.
Susan Stepney's web page https://www-users.york.ac.uk/~ss44/cyc/p/fbug.htm describes a Fortran bug urban legend, in which
when DO I = 1.100 was used instead of DO I = 1,100
Mariner I, a spacecraft bound for Venus, was lost July 22, 1962 due to a combination of hardware failure and software error, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariner_1#Cause_of_the_malfunc... . (I misremembered this as a similar Fortran error.)
Fun story:
- I signed my offer letter to work at Knight Capital on July 27th, 2012
- I resigned July 30th
- Knight Capital had their $400 million outage August 1st
- I went to work there anyway
- Pager Duty app was not really a thing back then so Knight instituted a SMS based notifier
- iOS rolled out the weather and amber alert notifications around this time
- one of the above goes off while everyone is at work
- someone yells: "OH GOD, NOT AGAIN!!!"
The author confesses that they had an “LLM compiler [sic] a list”.
Reassuringly, they say they have checked that the links don’t go to click farms.
This kind of LLM-generated content (by its own admission) should not be on HN.
Many of the "stories" just go to generic Wikipedia pages: DNS, garbage collection, etc. They're interesting and important things but not "stories".
List needs to include this one:
"Cloudflare Reverse Proxies Are Dumping Uninitialized Memory" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718752
I disagree with the author about Black Lives Matter and abolishing ICE (more like abolishing the leaders who enable ICE to do terrible things - maybe there's some common ground there)