Intriguing stories in computer science

(inventwithpython.com)

20 points | by gregsadetsky 5 days ago

2 comments

  • alexpotato 6 minutes 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!!!"

  • potatium 1 hour 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.