4 ms·

Intriguing stories in computer science

46 points by gregsadetsky 2mo ago

potatium 2mo ago
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.
- gshubert17 2mo ago
  Susan Stepney's web page https://www-users.york.ac.uk/~ss44/cyc/p/fbug.htm 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_malfunction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariner_1#Cause_of_the_malfunc... . (I misremembered this as a similar Fortran error.)
alexpotato 2mo ago
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!!!"
Zecc 2mo ago
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_334663 https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_33466...
- gwynforthewyn 2mo ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bug_%28engineering%29#History), its usage is traced back to the 1870s.
  - Zecc 2mo ago
    It's not a myth, as far as I can tell. Note I didn't say they invented the term (though, granted, I inadvertently did imply it I suppose). In any case it likely helped popularize it.
  - satiated_grue 2mo ago
    This event is not mythical. That is why the log entry says "First /actual/ case of a bug being found". It's a humorous pointing out of "We've called them bugs for a long time, but this time it actually was a real, physical bug, and here it is - ha ha." The myth is that people for some reason started thinking that was the first use of the word "bug" in this context.
fn-mote 2mo ago
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.
- floren 2mo ago
  Many of the "stories" just go to generic Wikipedia pages: DNS, garbage collection, etc. They're interesting and important things but not "stories".
anArbitraryOne 2mo ago
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)
tcp_handshaker 2mo ago
List needs to include this one: "Cloudflare Reverse Proxies Are Dumping Uninitialized Memory" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718752

46 points by gregsadetsky 2mo ago

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.

gshubert17 2mo ago
Susan Stepney's web page https://www-users.york.ac.uk/~ss44/cyc/p/fbug.htm 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_malfunction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariner_1#Cause_of_the_malfunc... . (I misremembered this as a similar Fortran error.)

alexpotato 2mo ago

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!!!"

Zecc 2mo ago

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_334663 https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_33466...

gwynforthewyn 2mo ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bug_%28engineering%29#History), its usage is traced back to the 1870s.
- Zecc 2mo ago
  It's not a myth, as far as I can tell. Note I didn't say they invented the term (though, granted, I inadvertently did imply it I suppose). In any case it likely helped popularize it.
- satiated_grue 2mo ago
  This event is not mythical. That is why the log entry says "First /actual/ case of a bug being found". It's a humorous pointing out of "We've called them bugs for a long time, but this time it actually was a real, physical bug, and here it is - ha ha." The myth is that people for some reason started thinking that was the first use of the word "bug" in this context.

fn-mote 2mo ago

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.

floren 2mo ago
Many of the "stories" just go to generic Wikipedia pages: DNS, garbage collection, etc. They're interesting and important things but not "stories".

anArbitraryOne 2mo ago

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)

tcp_handshaker 2mo ago

List needs to include this one: "Cloudflare Reverse Proxies Are Dumping Uninitialized Memory" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718752