Intriguing stories in computer science

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potatium•about 2 hours 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•about 1 hour ago

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.)

alexpotato•about 1 hour 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!!!"

Intriguing stories in computer science

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Discussion (3 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews