Intriguing stories in computer science | Hacker News Reader

Intriguing stories in computer science

inventwithpython.com

46 pointsgregsadetsky11 comments

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.

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.

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.

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!!!"

List needs to include this one:

"Cloudflare Reverse Proxies Are Dumping Uninitialized Memory" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718752

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".

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)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com