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Justice Clarence Thomas uncovered a seven-year-old bug in my program (2013)
- kmeisthax 5y agoThe real question is: how the hell is Justice Thomas so silent?
- adventured 5y agohttps://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-03-30/why-clarence-thomas-rarely-speaks-from-the-supreme-court-bench https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-03-30/why-clarence...
- ichugwindex 5y ago
- kmeisthax 5y agooof, didn't know that
- ethbr0 5y agoAs someone fascinated by all creole languages and cultures, especially micro regional ones, Gullah is a forgotten and rich gem. It pops up in watered down version in pop Southern culture (e.g. Oh Brother, Where Art Thou) as the old Southern version of a "Fortunate Son"-esque touchpoint, but the reality is much more interesting. Turns out, if you mostly geographically isolate people on barrier islands, they develop a unique culture. See also Tangier Island off Virginia. Vice News did a Gullah segment: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SqDTJogdWmA&t=22s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SqDTJogdWmA&t=22s And here's some spoken word: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iCd5W4gwJsI&t=12m6s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iCd5W4gwJsI&t=12m6s
- CyberDildonics 5y agoDid you mean to post this in a different thread? It doesn't seem to have any connection to this one.
- mardifoufs 5y agoThe article in the GP comment directly mentions the Gulah language though
- lostcolony 5y agoNot to get political, but based on his record of joined/written opinions, I'm not convinced he needs any questions answered to decide on how he's going to vote on any incoming cases.
- ProjectArcturis 5y ago"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt."
- jessaustin 5y ago
- arbitrage 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- amf12 5y agoThe title makes it seem that "Justice Clarence Thomas" uncovered the bug - but that's not true. The bug was uncovered during a routine pre-processing operation.
- 35fbe7d3d5b9 5y agoWithout Thomas taking an action - speaking - the bug would remain undiscovered. I think that counts.
- ethbr0 5y agoCan affirm. I also often discover bugs by speaking.
- jldugger 5y agoThe trick is to not speak for seven years first tho.
- D13Fd 5y agoI disagree. I thought the article's title was misleading. It was Justice Thomas's name that uncovered the bug, if anything. Justice Thomas himself had nothing to do with it other than his name.
- conradev 5y agoThat to me is him triggering the bug, not discovering it
- pohl 5y agoThis thread reminds me of a relevant comic: http://synd.imgsrv.uclick.com/comics/nq/2015/nq150718.gif http://synd.imgsrv.uclick.com/comics/nq/2015/nq150718.gif
- Brian_K_White 5y agoHe caused the bug to be exposed to another, he did not discover it, as he did not know there was a bug or that he had any sort of relation with it. He was part of a phenomenon, someone else was the observer and discoverer of the phenomenon. The lab rat did not discover rna. However, the title says "uncovered" not discovered, and as someone else pointed out you could parse the title as referring merely to the text string and not the person. Those 2 things do kinda make it at least arguable. I think this title would make it through court on a technicality!
- jonny_eh 5y agoIs it just me or is it weird that a Supreme Court justice didn't speak at all in court for 7 years?
- sydthrowaway 5y ago
- saalweachter 5y agoApparently that changed during the Zoom era. He has said that the questioning by the Court is too chaotic, with justices talking over each other and pontificating more than questioning, and didn't feel he gained anything for the loss of dignity. The online format had more formal process of one person then another speaking, and he has apparently taken advantage of it.
- theonething 5y agoOne problem is in his system there are two sources of truth. A list of justices in the preprocessor Perl script and a list in the main Java program. List of justices should be stored in a database or file and read by both.
- ralusek 5y agoWhy are the names hard coded like that? Database or config file, or like...a regex?
- dharmab 5y agoThere's been 115 justices in history, only a fraction of them are recorded and they change infrequently after a long confirmation process. So path of least resistance is to hardcode them into scripts.
- Something1234 5y agoWouldn't we have always kept transcripts of the supreme court?
- TheCoelacanth 5y agoIt appears that they are readily available in digital form only for cases since 1968, available on microfiche in some library collections for 1953 and later, and not consistently available in any form prior to 1953[1]. [1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/availabilityoforalargumenttranscripts.aspx https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/availabilityofor...
- ralusek 5y agoThat still doesn't seem like the path of least resistance. It's much easier to update a YAML or JSON file than update the code.
- JoshTko 5y agoCurious why this made HN front page.
- pohl 5y ago0) It's a bug in software 1) It's amusing 2) He's in the news right now for his spouse being all insurrectiony.
- mywittyname 5y ago2.5) He was the only justice who voted to block the information relating to said activities when he clearly should have recused himself.
- aj7 5y agoFreudian slip.
- d23 5y ago
- throwaway28472 5y ago
- SilasX 5y agoThat seems irrelevant to this topic and I prefer HN discussions not be used to soapbox about such tangents. Am I alone in thinking that?
- pohl 5y agoThat sort of don't-let-my-peas-touch-my-mashed-potatoes instinct is part of the reason that autocratic-aspirants are getting away with so much these days. I'm amazed how there can be a coup attempt and people will just show up to work the next day and go through their scrum ceremonies without mentioning it, because they don't want to risk mixing politics and whatever. Am I alone in thinking that?
- d23 5y agoIt's a weird thing to live through, for sure. One strange thing to note from watching my vote count after I posted this comment. It rocketed sky high within the first 30 minutes, was the top comment, and seemed to be settling to an equilibrium. Then suddenly, over a span of a few minutes, it got massively downvoted to about 33% of the count it had at peak. I've been posting on the internet a while, and I've never seen such a rapid swing.
- gameman144 5y agoI can empathize this, but I think that limited human mental and emotional bandwidth requires some kind of compartmentalization. If I am trying to do my day job and can't avoid getting drawn into political debates, that's exhausting. If I share an interesting article about new Javascript features, it doesn't mean I'm either endorsing or ready to debate the author's climate-change-denial posts from years back: that's also exhausting. If I go to read fan theories of my favorite books, only to have the conversations focus on the author's controversial Tweets du jour, that's exhausting. If I'm watching the Superbowl, and everyone keeps interrupting the game to tell me how awful a person one of the key players is, that's exhausting. Granted, I do think you're totally right that there are places to discuss these things, and I don't know of a one-size-fits-all approach here. That said, the "don't-let-my-peas-touch-my-mashed-potatoes" (new phrase for me, and I love it) instinct is quite reasonable, since otherwise life becomes an infinite stew of pessimism and critique.
- cma 5y agoHeadline is super misleading
- kashunstva 5y agoThat's really stretching the limits of the meaning of the verb "to uncover". Since Justice Thomas rarely speaks in court and only occasionally writes any opinions, it's hard to judge what he does or doesn't understand about a number subjects including software engineering.
- rayiner 5y agoThomas rarely speaks in Court but he's a prolific writer. He wrote the most opinions in 8 of the last 10 terms: https://www.scotusblog.com/2021/07/in-barretts-first-term-conservative-majority-is-dominant-but-divided https://www.scotusblog.com/2021/07/in-barretts-first-term-co.... E.g. 23 last year versus 14 for Breyer and 11 each for Roberts and Kagan. Which makes me skeptical that your opinion of him is actually based on what he's written. For example, his extensive writing on patent law: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3822741 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3822741.
- ecf 5y ago
- rayiner 5y agoAh, the old trope that a POC can only be conservative if a white person brainwashes them into it. Unfortunately not the first time I've heard that gem.
- tptacek 5y agoGross. Don't write stuff like this here, if only to avoid painting the rest of us opponents of Thomas with this fetid brush.
- SilasX 5y agoThis is a little clickbaity. I was expecting that Thomas would point out something in oral arguments or in a ruling that make the author look back and say "oh crap, he's right, that doesn't make sense, and it's an artifact of this bug in the program". To save you the click: the author's program needed to keep a table of Supreme Court Justice names to correctly parse the transcripts, and he forgot to put Thomas on the table. It didn't make a difference, since Thomas never spoke to begin with. Until one day, he did, and the output of the program was obviously wrong, leading to the bug's discovery. So, it's the presence/absence of the name that found the bug (not the Justice himself!), and, if anything, Thomas delayed the discovery of the bug by breaking convention and never asking questions for so long.
- mannykannot 5y agoIf anything, Justice Thomas acted here as a sort of impromptu fuzzer.