[HN Gopher] The case of the 500-mile email (2002)
___________________________________________________________________
The case of the 500-mile email (2002)
Author : thunderbong
Score : 343 points
Date : 2021-11-13 20:50 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ibiblio.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ibiblio.org)
| geoffmunn wrote:
| At a very large bank here in Australia & NZ, all XML messages
| going through the main message bus had a trailing space character
| appended to the end, which broke XML validation on the receiving
| endpoint.
|
| So the solution was for all endpoints to trim the very last
| character - not just if it was a space, but to chop off the last
| character. Apparently this had been the solution for years.
|
| This worked really well until one day someone (probably a new
| grad) saw the character issue and figured they'd fix it.
|
| A bank-wide P1 incident occurred because every single XML message
| was now unparsable due to the malformed closing '</xml ' tag.
| Every single application in the bank had to do an emergency
| update on its XML parser.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| Chesterton's Fence
|
| https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
| potamic wrote:
| Why didn't they just rollback the fix instead?
| ozychhi wrote:
| D'oh! How did they not think of that
| ukj wrote:
| How do you rollback typos in messages you've already sent?
| jacoblambda wrote:
| What do you mean "rollback". You say this like this bank had
| version control and it wasn't just recently introduced.
| lqet wrote:
| Isn't XML with trailing whitespace still valid XML?
| reificator wrote:
| Not if your validation is `/</xml>$/`.
| darekkay wrote:
| If you like reading such debugging stories, check out danluu's
| repository: https://github.com/danluu/debugging-stories
| IncRnd wrote:
| While an extremely interesting read, I've read this about once a
| month on HN. The story keeps getting posted.
| beebeepka wrote:
| Back in the day, I had a Nokia E71 smartphone that I used to keep
| next to my work provided laptop.
|
| My laptop would freeze for a couple of seconds right before each
| incoming call. Every single time.
|
| It wasn't all that baffling to me so I decided to test the thing
| while placing the phone on top of my huge desktop tower. My over
| clocked computer simply restarted itself instead of freezing.
| Props to Lenovo, I guess
| dang wrote:
| Past related threads (less than I expected given how often it has
| been reposted):
|
| _We can 't send email more than 500 miles (2002)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23775404 - July 2020 (135
| comments) (<-- thanks ayewo for finding this!)
|
| _The case of the 500-mile email (2002)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14676835 - July 2017 (56
| comments)
|
| _Every time we lift a pallet from the shipping room, the server
| times out (2006)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13347058
| - Jan 2017 (82 comments)
|
| _The case of the 500-mile email_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10305377 - Sept 2015 (1
| comment)
|
| _The 500-mile email (2002)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9338708 - April 2015 (139
| comments)
|
| _The case of the 500-mile email_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1293652 - April 2010 (24
| comments)
|
| _The case of the 500-mile email_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=385068 - Dec 2008 (28
| comments)
|
| _The case of the 500-mile email_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123489 - Feb 2008 (7
| comments)
| J-Kuhn wrote:
| An other story (don't know if there is a nice write up) is
| "OpenOffice can't print on Tuesdays":
| https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/file/+bug/248619
|
| Edit: Here is one:
| https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161...
| thot_experiment wrote:
| A classic and wonderful piece of internet lore. If I ever have
| kids this is one of the ones I'll be telling around the
| campfire. The one about the internet going down because the
| delivery truck blocked LoS is a good one too.
| BMorearty wrote:
| Could you please link to the truck story? I can't find it.
| abeppu wrote:
| I would enjoy seeing a "greatest hits" list of pages that are
| repeatedly submitted and discussed here.
| ayewo wrote:
| You somehow forgot this one that made a showing in 2020:
|
| _We can 't send email more than 500 miles (2002)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23775404 - July 2020 (136
| comments)
| dang wrote:
| Added above--thanks! No idea how that escaped my search
| (which was something like https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=a
| ll&page=0&prefix=true&que...)
| trollied wrote:
| I think I read about this for the first time on a dialup BBS in
| the 90s :)
| kingcharles wrote:
| I tried to read about it on that BBS, but it was more than 80
| miles from my house and I couldn't afford the long distance
| phone charges.
| desireco42 wrote:
| I almost feel younger people will not understand what you
| are referencing :) I was SysOp of FidoNet node.
| zenexer wrote:
| I know this gets posted quite often, but I still enjoy reading
| it every time.
| ghayes wrote:
| Agree, I will always upvote it because it's a good story for
| those who haven't read it, and it begets really good comments
| and other war stories from seasoned devs.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| What baffles me is that nobody seems to have called out the
| fact that the story is utter nonsense.
|
| I posted a longer explanation in a lower level comment, but
| the biggest problem is that the author has a fundamental
| misunderstanding of both the speed of propagation, and how
| TCP works.
|
| There is no way _any_ of what he wrote actually happened,
| including "sendmail defaults to a few ms timeout."
| ayewo wrote:
| The original author offered additional explanations on HN
| when the article was re-posted in 2015:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TreyHarris
| Svetlitski wrote:
| All of this is addressed in the FAQ about the story:
| https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html
| MertsA wrote:
| I can believe there was a bizarre bug setting the timeout
| to zero and that there was a small delay handling the
| timeout leading to only quite low latency connections
| working. I don't for a second believe that the author
| didn't intentionally dream up a large chunk of this
| story. The FAQ claims that it wasn't actually 3
| milliseconds and that he came up with this time by
| calculating the "adjusted" time for a given distance. But
| then he also claims that he took the timeout and used
| units to confirm the 500 miles. This is a blatant
| tautology, the speed of light had very little to do with
| this, the "epiphany" moment was definitely made up. Then
| there's the handwaving away the problem that sendmail V5
| wouldn't have worked at all with a V8 config file. "Oh
| Sun must have patched their version to run like that".
|
| That whole FAQ reads very much as "I didn't lie, I just
| made up all the details". I'm less convinced of the
| veracity of the story after reading his explanations of
| all the holes in his story.
| [deleted]
| ww520 wrote:
| This reminds me a problem I'm currently having. My iPhone freezes
| completely sometimes when I ride BART, requiring a hard reboot. I
| notice it happens when passing the Daly City station. It seems
| there's a strong signal tower nearby that the strong signal
| causes the problem. It's probably the strength level read by the
| hardware causing an out of bound error somewhere and corrupting
| the phone's memory.
| jrockway wrote:
| Does this happen to anyone else? There aren't a ton of iPhone
| variants out there, so if it's a baseband-level defect, it
| would be happening a lot.
|
| I'll also say, if it's just the signal strength being too high,
| it seems unlikely that would cause memory corruption. The
| signal strength is probably just an integer, and there aren't
| any operations defined on integers that involve using other
| bytes of memory. (If you have an uint8 and add 1 to 255, you
| just get 0; it doesn't upgrade the integer to a uint16 and
| overwrite adjacent memory.)
| ww520 wrote:
| It's an iPhone XS model. Occasionally I would get a "no
| carrier detected" error at the location while the signal bar
| is full. Looks like it's signal related and it's the path of
| handling error or exception.
|
| Also does iPhone use ECC memory for all chips? Another
| possibility is my phone's EM shielding is not good, and a
| strong EM/microwave signal scrambles the memory in one of the
| chips, probably the signal receiving chip. The freeze only
| happens occasionally.
| not1ofU wrote:
| Do you have an IMSI Catcher [0] detection app on your phone? I
| used to have the same issue (EU country), using Metro. One
| single stop which was above ground and near International
| conference centre. Evertime I went through that staion my phone
| would lock up. Needed Hard hard reboot (remove battery), Until
| I removed the IMSI catcher detection software. After that I
| used in flight mode using that metro line.
|
| Edit: rooted / android / HTC phone. [0]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMSI-catcher
| ww520 wrote:
| I don't have IMSI detection catcher app running. Good to hear
| a similar case happens, not just my phone going crazy. And
| it's signal related.
| 3np wrote:
| Probably just someone broadcasting a new 0-day
| atsaloli wrote:
| In a similar vein: sysadmin war story "the network ate my font".
|
| http://verticalsysadmin.com/blog/sysadmin-war-story-the-netw...
| kingcharles wrote:
| In the mid-90s I used to repair PCs. Customer brought PC in where
| left mouse button did not function.
|
| Easy. Replace mouse. NOPE.
|
| OK, software issue. Reinstall mouse driver. NOPE.
|
| OK, deeper software issue. Replace HDD from working PC. NOPE.
|
| OK, replace RAM? NOPE.
|
| OK, replace motherboard and all add-in cards. NOPE.
|
| At this point we have a different HDD, motherboard, CPU, RAM,
| video card and mouse. Still left mouse button doesn't work. Mouse
| moves fine. Right button works.
|
| Only thing left is the case and the PSU.
|
| Replace PSU. Left mouse button works perfectly.
|
| FML.
| glitchc wrote:
| Wha? Was it a PS/2 mouse? x86 system? More details please.
| lostgame wrote:
| This is just _such_ a classic story describing the Murphy's Law
| of working with computers. This gave me a chuckle.
|
| Solving programming problems is sometimes similar.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| It's a cute story but one that is utter nonsense.
|
| Anyone who is above junior level system or network administration
| should be able to instantly tell, on point #2 alone. If they
| don't, they do not understand the basics of TCP.
|
| 1)Wave propagation through copper wiring is a bit more than half
| the speed of light. Strike one.
|
| 2)His mail server sends a SYN which is acknowledged by an SYN-ACK
| back. His mail server does not know instantaneously that the
| other mail server is accepting the connection; it has to wait for
| a reply back. A mail server that is '3ms away' even assuming
| speed of light transmission and no switching/routing/transmission
| delay would be ~250 miles, not ~500.
|
| 3)A mail server does not instantaneously reply to a SYN packet,
| so there's delay there. Strike three.
|
| 4)There are multiple routers involved (at least two) and
| especially circa 2002 routing and switching probably accounts for
| a significant amount of delay. Routers and switches tend to be
| store-and-forward; they receive the entire packet, an interrupt
| is generated by the NIC, a routing decisions is made, the packet
| is shoved into the buffer of the outgoing NIC, etc. That doesn't
| even cover firewalling. 3ms delay through multiple circa-2002
| routers, firewalls, and switches is not believable.
|
| 5)Transmission delay. Packet take longer than just "distance
| divited by the speed of light" to arrive somewhere. Given typical
| LAN/WAN connection speeds of the day, packet transmission delay
| would be a factor. Ie the time it takes for a complete packet's
| bits to be transmitted.
|
| 6)Jitter. Even the slightest jitter would have wildly affected
| his testing. Just 2-3ms of jitter (if we follow this guy's
| calculations) would result in undeliverable mail to almost
| _anywhere_ , yet he claims mail within the radius was reliably
| delivered. The campus network (particularly inter-building
| links), internet uplink, backbones, other network, and other mail
| server all have jitter that combined would easily exceed 2-3ms.
|
| I also find it extremely difficult to believe that sendmail on
| SunOS defaults to a 3ms timeout and lacks a sane default when not
| specified; 3ms isn't remotely sane even today, much less 2002.
| Anything less than 30 _seconds_ would surprise me. Lot of old
| software had very long timeout values because of how common slow
| links and systems were.
|
| This looks like a viral story told by an unemployed sysadmin to
| get his "I'm looking for a job" message out.
|
| If he truly had the knowledge commensurate with 10+ years as a
| sysadmin, he knew it was bullshit, and I think he might have been
| very cleverly looking for places where technical knowledge was
| lacking and thus he'd either be the smartest guy in the room or
| have an easy time of things.
| kazen44 wrote:
| > Routers and switches tend to be store-and-forward; they
| receive the entire packet, an interrupt is generated by the
| NIC, a routing decisions is made, the packet is shoved into the
| buffer of the outgoing NIC, etc. That doesn't even cover
| firewalling. 3ms delay through multiple circa-2002 routers,
| firewalls, and switches is not believable.
|
| this acutally hasn been true for high level routers since the
| late 90's.
|
| On an Juniper M and MX series device for instance, a packet is
| broken up into a "parcel" (the first 256 bytes of an IP packet)
| and is saved in shared memory. Further packet processing is
| done by dividing up parcel lookups to the routing table across
| different linecard processors. (depending on the linecard, this
| can differ wildly).
|
| This setup has been in place since the late 90's, although not
| on "lower end" hardware. As far as i am aware, cisco has a
| similair mechanism in their higher end products for atleast a
| decade or two.
| eminence32 wrote:
| If you haven't already, read the accompanying FAQ:
| https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| The only takeaway from that I get from that FAQ is that he's
| annoyed people think it's fake _despite the fact that he
| admits he made up almost every aspect of the story._
|
| It's an entertaining story without changing numbers to bogus
| ones. So why did he basically lie about everything? _Because
| it never happened_ and when he concocted the story he wasn 't
| very smart.
|
| Notice he doesn't admit that the sole purpose was to spam "I
| need a job" to the mailing list?
| eb0la wrote:
| It happened to me, too. Back in 1995 I was in charge of the Sparc
| server that handled email. I got a call telling me the we
| couldn't send mails outside Spain. Back then, we had a slow
| internet connection (128K if I remember well) and sometimes the
| academic network had issues speaking with the outside world. Two
| days later we had more complaints. This time it couldn't be a
| network issue. We had the same problem: one OS upgrade made
| sendmail use a default config, not ours. Fortunately mail didn't
| bounce, and after the fix the server was above 20 load average
| for two days.
|
| Good news was no spam came that week.
| kylesteger wrote:
| TIL: `units` TILold: `man units`
| hoppla wrote:
| I worked for a company where a proxy server was used for all
| internet access. Every now and then a pages would not load. Error
| logs pointed me to the usual culprit - dns. When looking at dns
| traffic in tcpdump everything looked normal, except some dns
| replies came from rfc1918 addresses instead from the dns servers
| public IP address. When I talked to the ISP, they blamed me (the
| proxy) for reusing UDP sockets, and it was by design that their
| load balancer would only support one DNS request at a time per
| UDP socket. If there were two or more in flight, only the first
| response would be NATed properly. Luckily, I knew that the ISP
| used the same proxy product internally, so when I asked how they
| configured their proxy to avoid this issue, they fixed the load
| balancer within the hour
| js2 wrote:
| > "When did this start? A few days ago, you said, but did
| anything change in your systems at that time?"
|
| > "Well, the consultant came in and patched our server and
| rebooted it.
|
| > Having established that--unbelievably--the problem as reported
| was true, and repeatable
|
| As far as problems go, this is an easy one to solve. Accurate
| description of the problem. Accurate reporting of what changed.
| Problem is consistently repeatable.
|
| Compared to a problem that doesn't reliably reproduce and for
| which the person reporting it claims nothing changed, this one is
| child's play.
|
| But it's still amusing to read every time.
|
| I had something similar occur in the early 2000s on a patch
| release of Solaris 2.6 (I think) where the sleep call was broken
| and would always return almost instantly. This caused all sorts
| of weird behaviors on the running system.
|
| I also recall the first time I ran into an issue with MTU on a
| dedicated frame relay link we had to admin our web farm in the
| late nineties. One day a developer reported they could login to
| our bastion but when they ran "ls -l" in a big enough directory
| their ssh connection would hang. It turned out the connection
| would hang whenever a packet was generated near the MTU and we
| eventually tracked it down to an issue with the frame relay
| connection. We played with MTUs until we found out what worked.
| It then took a while to convince our provider what was going on
| but they eventually replaced a line card on the far end of the
| connection which allowed us to re-raise the MTU to 1500.
|
| Another fun problem I had was an email to SMS gateway I wrote for
| myself that worked by posting to a Verizon web form. I developed
| it on a Mac (probably 2002 or so) where it worked fine but when I
| deployed it to my Linux box on my same home network, the script
| couldn't connect to Verizon's site. It turned out the Linux box
| was a setting a flag on the TCP connection (ECN I think) that was
| tripping up Verizon's web firewall. The work-around was disabling
| ECN on the Linux box.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _Compared to a problem that doesn't reliably reproduce and
| for which the person reporting it claims nothing changed, this
| one is child's play._
|
| You forgot +inaccurate reporting of the problem.
|
| We had an employee in IT at a client who would tell us "It's
| broken." This went on, for every report, for three years, with
| us asking the same follow-up questions every time. For who, in
| what way, when doing what, what changed, etc.
|
| As far as I know, that individual still works there.
|
| People like that are the best argument for why a basic income
| and removing some folks from the workforce would increase
| efficiency.
| dataflow wrote:
| The point of basic income isn't to remove anyone from the
| workforce though; it's to decouple people's basic necessities
| from their work. They'll still want to work to get a more
| comfortable lifestyle. In fact it seems entirely plausible to
| me that the less people have to stress about basic
| necessities, the more they could focus on work.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Your statement converts to 'no one will be satisfied with
| basic necessities."
|
| Which is false, in my experience. Some people absolutely
| will be, and they won't work.
| dataflow wrote:
| Not quite. I'm not saying that won't happen for anyone.
| I'm saying that's not the goal, nor would it be
| necessarily true for the kind of person mentioned.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Fair, but I think it's a good bet to say that people who
| aren't (for lack of a better word) "present" at their
| jobs would be perfectly fine not being there, if they
| weren't required to be.
|
| And I know HN is fairly skewed towards people who want
| more from life, but there's a lot of people who just
| don't.
|
| And I feel like they'd be over-represented in an opt-out-
| of-work cohort, if a basic income allowed for it.
|
| I don't imagine a person like that goes into work saying
| "I'm going to do a bad job today." I think they just
| don't value the work they do enough to try to do it well.
| And they'd rather not, if that were an option.
| [deleted]
| ronzensci wrote:
| We have a banking website which refuses to login when I connect
| on the 5G Wifi but allows me to login when I connect on the
| regular 802.11 WiFi (non-5G mode). How does the website login
| know which WiFi speed am I connecting on?
| hoppla wrote:
| Perhaps if they try to call JavaScript functions that are not
| available yet... I would check the developer console for errors
| 3np wrote:
| Could it be that one of the networks assign IPv4 or IPv6 and
| the other doesn't, and you therefore end up hitting different
| IPs?
| jancsika wrote:
| Could you build this into a protocol?
|
| Like an ssh setting that only allows incoming connections that
| can prove (well, suggest) their proximity by a series of latency
| tests?
| dataflow wrote:
| I think DRM would be a much better use case than security
| (SSH).
| rtkwe wrote:
| You could but it's much easier to get servers in a near-by area
| with AWS and other easy virtual hosting providers.
| betaby wrote:
| You can set a TTL limit in the kernel. Close enough to a
| latency limit.
| MertsA wrote:
| That's actually used for neighbor discovery on IPv6 to
| unconditionally limit it to unrouted packets.
| fanf2 wrote:
| TTL checks are sometimes used by mobile providers to try to
| prevent tethering.
| convolvatron wrote:
| that is so foul
| netflixandkill wrote:
| There's no reason you couldn't, but distance is not the only
| source of latency, so you're unlikely to find an existing case
| of someone doing that intentionally.
|
| Easy enough to whitelist geo-ip matches or large net block
| ranges for a similar result.
| PhilRodgers wrote:
| On a similar theme, I remember reading a story about a server
| that would crash mysteriously every couple of weeks. They
| eventually worked out that this happened whenever there was a new
| moon or a full moon, and the resulting high tide caused a
| battleship moored in a nearby harbour to rise just high enough
| that its powerful radar would interfere with the server.
| Thlom wrote:
| I once experienced a moored ship whose satellite Internet was
| extremely unreliable. It worked for 2 seconds and then it
| stopped working for two seconds, over and over. Only time it
| worked reliably was when there were no wind at all. After
| checking satellite images and corresponding to antennas
| pointing angle and ships position we eventually figured out
| that the antenna was pointing directly towards a wind mill. So
| when the rotor was turning it was intermittently blocking the
| signal between the satellite and the antenna. Luckily they were
| able to move the ship 50 meters forward and magically the
| Internet started working again.
| jolmg wrote:
| You remind me of a similar story, only failures would be a
| couple of times a year because of the positioning of the sun:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28688090
|
| The first reply to that has a story that seems similar to the
| one you remember:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28689288
| moepstar wrote:
| Heh, i remember a story of a server somewhere in train-station
| in Russia (iirc) - that'd sometimes spontaneously reboot...
|
| Turns out, this always happens once a train with radioactive
| waste on it passes by - causing a few bits to flip in memory
| and a subsequent crash...
|
| Can't seem to find the story online tho...
| rini17 wrote:
| Had a customer next to railway tracks, who had some desktop
| computers freeze/reboot when train passed by. No
| radioactivity fortunately but apparently infrasound
| vibrations. Bought new computers with differently shaped
| towers or laptops and it was ok.
| qznc wrote:
| Crash Cows: http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/crash_cows.html
| beebeepka wrote:
| What a crazy and horrible story.
|
| Best wishes to everyone who was ok with providing
| irradiated cows to the plebs.
| qznc wrote:
| This one maybe: http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/high_tide.html
| hinkley wrote:
| I recall in the early days of WiFi, the advice around ops
| circles was that if you were trying to bridge two buildings
| using wireless, you had to set it up in the summer, not the
| winter. Because the water in the leaves of deciduous trees is
| enough to attenuate the signal. So now you've gone from "it's
| working" to "we have to start over," or worse, "yeah we can't
| actually do this."
| clavicat wrote:
| I leech the Wi-Fi connection of a nearby convenience store
| from my home and have noticed that it's much harder to get a
| strong signal in the summer than in colder months.
| mrtksn wrote:
| There must be a site with all of these stories but could not
| find it right now. The story about the car that would break
| down if you buy vanilla Ice Cream is one of my favorites.
| There's also the story about the switch that is not connected
| anywhere but crashes the server every single time.
| Sophira wrote:
| And, of course, the bug where OpenOffice wouldn't print on
| Tuesdays! [0]
|
| (It turned out to be a bug in 'file', not in OOo.)
|
| [0]
| https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161
| wisty wrote:
| http://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html
| gabriel_fishman wrote:
| On a much smaller scale, I once worked for a wireless ISP. We
| had a customer who called in late September saying her service
| had been out for a few weeks. I went to her house and
| discovered that she was in a wheelchair and couldn't reach the
| controls for her air conditioner, so she was turning it on and
| off using the on/off switch on a power strip that was sitting
| on a desk. Her router was plugged into the same power strip. So
| as soon as the weather got cool enough to not need the AC, she
| lost her internet.
| tardismechanic wrote:
| In all the best ways possible, this reads like an Asimov short
| story.
|
| Sigh, I miss him so much...
| mrlonglong wrote:
| Seen this a few times but I'll leave you with this:
|
| https://xkcd.com/1053/
| tempestn wrote:
| Less of a crazy bug than a funny one: I had a friend named Peter
| March. When his pay check fell on April 1st and was made out to
| Peter April he obviously thought it was an April Fools joke. It
| wasn't.
| asicsp wrote:
| See also: https://500mile.email/ - curated list of absurd
| software bug stories
| j0e1 wrote:
| $ units 586 units, 56 prefixes ...
|
| Can someone share/point to a larger units file I could load. The
| one in the post has 1311 units, 63 prefixes. Notably, I do not
| have millilightseconds
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| You could check which one Fedora uses. It has
| millilightseconds.
| sodality2 wrote:
| https://github.com/ryantenney/gnu-units/blob/master/units.da...
| perhaps
| bnegreve wrote:
| This file is actually interesting to look at. It almost reads
| like a history book about measurements.
| darkwater wrote:
| And that's why, kids, we invented configuration management tools.
| ryanmarsh wrote:
| This story never gets old and I hope to see it again.
| a1371 wrote:
| A lot of this story and why it sticks is the narration. This
| sort of storytelling is rare amongst technical people but
| certainly something to aspire to.
| abalaji wrote:
| No matter how many times this gets posted, I make sure to read
| it. Such a good story, especially the ending using oft unused
| unix tools
| post-it wrote:
| It's a lot like the SR-71 speed check story for me.
| mbirth wrote:
| While that's great I like the low-flyby-almost-crash a bit
| better.
| zoomablemind wrote:
| Anyone experienced an old VisualStudio (was it with VC6 still)
| bug, where the compiler would flag the last line of the source
| file as an error, when it did not terminate with a CR/LF newline?
| All code would clearly look correct in the editor, yet could not
| be built.
| relaxing wrote:
| I don't remember a bug around that behavior, but flagging a
| missing EOL as an error is correct.
|
| The C standard says all source files must end in a newline.
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