My company today has been in meltdown because we ran out of numbers.
I'm fascinated by bizarre bug stories.
This one, retold by @ferlatte, happened in the mid-2000s.
The chain of decisions that made this possible could make a book-sized history of computing.
But if you only take one lesson: please, validate your inputs.pic.twitter.com/EfHDaOsrmX
-
-
-
I have a friend who can help out if you need a new supplier: https://brooklynintegers.com/
-
Problem solved. Thanks.
End of conversation
New conversation -
-
-
My favourite story was how someone missing a WHERE clause from a query accidentally made all the items for sale on Target's web site have the description of a Diaper Genie.
-
Actually, no, absolute favourite was a CSS change that took down Etsy's site so hard that someone had to go into the datacentre and manually reboot servers.
-
I'm trying to imagine how a CSS change would do that. Referencing a background image from the wrong host cluster?
-
Heh. Close. It was removing an IE6 include of some sort. It was fine in dev, but a race condition on deploy meant some calls tried to include a non-existent file, which threw an error. The error page included the faulty stylesheet. Hard looped every Apache child on every box.
-
oh WOW.
-
Right? The engineer in question was in his first week, as I recall. Won an award for it.
-
that award better have been hand made, because that is one artisinal batch of errors :D
-
Yep. A handmade, three-armed sweater, commissioned from an Etsy seller. It’s awarded each year.
- 3 more replies
New conversation -
-
-
This whole thread is amazing. I wrote down a few of those myself. Here’s one:https://medium.engineering/the-curious-case-of-disappearing-polish-s-fa398313d4df …
-
These are both so, SO good. Thank you!
-
The coda to the above is that CSS renamed “system” to “system-ui” because of this article. :·)https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-family …
-
woah, thanks, great stories. also added to https://dbrgn.ch/stories-from-the-internet.html … :)
End of conversation
New conversation -
-
-
Wait, does that mean renaming a *.txt file to *.exe would cause a similar issue in ye olde win32?
-
Only on 32-bit Windows (and you'd actually get a prompt to install NTVDM first, because DOS and Win16 support is not installed by default even there).
End of conversation
New conversation -
-
-
Totally thought you were taking about actual
at first. Lol.Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
-
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.