2 ms·

TIL Stack Overflow is not just the name of a website.

• defrost 3y ago
  If that's a serious TIL then you might enjoy the Ye Olde Timey classic Smashing The Stack For Fun And Profit (1996) (OG Phrack link) http://phrack.org/issues/49/14.html http://phrack.org/issues/49/14.html (Text-zine) (TISM Berkeley CS coursework) https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs161/fa08/papers/stack_smashing.pdf https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs161/fa08/papers/stack_smas... (PDF)
  • tedunangst 3y ago
    But unrelated to the stack overflow in Tim sort.
    • defrost 3y ago
      Not entirely - I wrote a lot of numerical backend code intended for 24/7/365 continuous use in the face of potentially any input .. aquisition | instrumentation equipment failures can produce glitch inputs just as damaging as delibrately crafted malicious inputs from a hacker reverse engineering existing code. The common ground being code that has to be robust in the face of any input has to be (correctly!) verified, constrained within hard resource limits, have graceful fail over behaviour, some measure of sanity checking, etc. Otherwise, if an e\/il hax0r doesn't get you .. mother nature and sheer bloody chance will.
• seabass-labrax 3y ago
  I would really recommend trying to write a little C program that deliberately causes a stack overflow. It is completely harmless and is good fun if you've never encountered this kind of low-level systems code before. It's also pretty fun to try asking for weird amounts of memory with 'malloc' or seeing how many times you can ask the OS for no memory before something fails. You might need to force-reboot your computer after that though!