Hacker Remix

Software Folklore

148 points by ColinWright 6 days ago | 32 comments

AlotOfReading 2 days ago

Long ago I worked on the firmware for a game controller. We started getting reports back of ghost inputs like stuck buttons and false presses after we sent some early hardware to media reviewers. Given the power of game media at the time, this was an immediate code red. We took shifts playtesting various video games for nearly a week straight just to try and replicate the issues. No luck, only the reviewers could manifest it. We were about to put reviewers on a plane to demonstrate the issue in person when I decided to clean my desk. In doing so I tossed a bare PCB running debug to the other side of the desk and my console went wild.

Turns out the PCBs were shock/pressure sensitive, and the debouncing was just a bit off. Reviewers were getting really into their games and mechanically stressing the controllers. Stressed hard enough, the PCB would bend slightly, causing line level fluctuations and eventually ghost inputs. Back in the office we were just doing a job and not getting too emotionally involved in our playtesting.

Some new molds and review units later we shipped the working system. Percussive debugging has solved a number of otherwise intractable bugs over my career.

HeyLaughingBoy 2 days ago

Had a bug about two years ago that I just could not reproduce. In fact, only the engineer who reported it could reproduce it. Finally, I did "go to gemba" and went into the test lab and watched him use the machine.

He was doing a complex operation and was young and fast enough to overcome the keypress reporting interval. Literally it was just someone doing something we didn't expect and doing it fast enough that the sequence got messed up.

forrestthewoods 2 days ago

> Percussive debugging

S-tier term. Will need to add that to my repertoire.

gsck 2 days ago

Nothing a bit of percussive maintenance cannot solve!

whitten 2 days ago

As the old cartoon said: the repairman charged $5000 to come fix a machine. When he showed up with a hammer, walked up to the machine and gave it a whallop with a hammer and it immediately started working.

The bossman asked for an invoice which he wrote up on the spot.

It consisted of two lines:

1) tapping the machine $5

2) knowing where to tap: $4995

Grin

WillAdams 2 days ago

Arguably, _The Jargon File_:

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/index.html

and _Zen and the Art of the Internet_

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/34

should be a part of the school curriculum covering the internet.

While specific to the Mac, one wishes:

https://folklore.org/0-index.html

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/40492.Revolution_in_T...

was more widely read (and that it was updated with stories of turning OPENSTEP into Mac OS X), and if there is a similar site for Windows which collected stories such as:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...

piltdownman 2 days ago

Folklore.org starts off as an engaging and fascinating whistle-stop tour of a bunch of mad geniuses creating a personal computing revolution.

It ends up being a series of cautionary tales about Steve Jobs from a defeated and depressed Woz. Mostly about how he can't understand how someone can act so devoid of empathy.

WillAdams 2 days ago

Yeah, it was kind of saddening when watching a video interview which covers the later timeframe:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42585332

piltdownman 2 days ago

The saddest story of the lot though was about WozFest and the complete scumbag Bill Graham

https://folklore.org/US_Festival.html?sort=date

StableAlkyne 2 days ago

I wish the jargon file was still updated, it's such an interesting window into the compsci culture back then

gopalv 3 days ago

Dealing with a "more magic switch" this week with Claude.

The AI prompting business feels a lot more like the analog circuit where something being "near" something else causes capacitance or inductance without actually being connected.

What is old is again new!

gonzo41 3 days ago

Yeah there's going to be AI version of row hammer attacks where you pollute the training data to get a favourable bias somehow.

We should have skipped this phase of AI development and just created terminators.

TacticalCoder 2 days ago

I'm playing a lot with AI but...

To me these tools are pointless unless they're 100% reproducible. If they're not reproducible, they create more problems than they solve.

Thankfully local models are a thing and the proper ones already have a "random" seed and given the same seed an the same prompt shall always give the same picture / answer / etc.

If they can't do that, they're the road to impossible to fix bugs, impossible to diagnose products defects.

Many who rely on non-deterministic models are in for a world of hurt that's going to make these post-modern of insane bugs look like cheap stakes.

whitten 2 days ago

I’m trying to track down an old story about the network not working in a firm on Wednesday morning near 7 am.

I remember the details being that only on Wednesday did they use the freight elevator to deliver donuts to an all-staff meeting and when they did, the network would fritz.

It turned out that if you move a very large electromagnet (on the elevator) along the network cable, it makes the network go crazy.

Combine that with cable-pullers that rather than putting holes in multiple ceilings and floors in the cable closet, saw that the elevator shaft was a pre-existing hole between floors anyway, simply took the path of least resistance and hilarity (and a real hard network debugging problem) ensues.

Does anyone know when or where this anecdote occurred ?