301–310 of 495 posts
Having the number of unique machines would be great to see how skewed this estimate is.
Firefox is about the only piece of software in my setup that occasionally crashes. I say "occasionally" for lack of a better word, it's not "all the time", but it is definitely more than I would want to. If that was caused by bad memory, I would expect other software to be similarly affected and hence crash with about comparable frequency. However, it looks like I'm falling more into the other 90% of cases (unsurpris…
Just check your memory with memtest. Two years ago, I've had Factorio crash once on a null pointer exception. I reported the crash to the devs and, likely because the crash place had a null check, they told me my memory was bad. Same as you I said "wait no, no other software ever crashed weirdly on this machine!", but they were adamant. Lo and behold, I indeed had one of my four ram sticks with a few bad addresses. N…
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I've been honestly amazed people actually buy stuff that's not "workstation" gear given IME how much more reliably and consistently it works, but I guess even a generation or two used can be expensive.
Very few applications scale with cores. For the vast majority of people single core performance is all they care about, it's also cheaper. They don't need or want workstation gear.
You mean like compilers and test suites ? Very few professional workloads don't parallelize well these days.
Certain data is more sensitive as well and requires extra protection. Pointers and indexes obviously, which might send the whole application on a wild goose chase around memory. But also machine code, especially JIT-generated traces, is worth to be checksummed and verified before executing it.
I've told this story before on HN, but my biz partner at ArenaNet, Mike O'Brien (creator of battle.net) wrote a system in Guild Wars circa 2004 that detected bitflips as part of our bug triage process, because we'd regularly get bug reports from game clients that made no sense. Every frame (i.e. ~60FPS) Guild Wars would allocate random memory, run math-heavy computations, and compare the results with a table of known…
As a mobile dev at YouTube I'd periodically scroll through crash reports associated with code I owned and the long tail/non-clustered stuff usually just made absolutely no sense and I always assumed at least some of it was random bit flips, dodgy hardware, etc.
As an aside, Apple and Google's phone home crash reports is a really good system and it's one factor that makes mobile app development fun / interesting.
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I don't understand why ECC memory is not the norm these days. It is only slightly more expensive, but solves all these problems. Some consumer mainboards even support it already.
Why? Intel making and keeping it workstation/Xeon-exclusive for a premium for too long. And AMD is still playing along not forcing the issue with their weird "yeah, Zen supports it, but your mainboard may or may not, no idea, don't care, do your own research" stance. These days it's a chicken and egg problem re: price and availability and demand. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29838403
Firefox is about the only piece of software in my setup that occasionally crashes. I say "occasionally" for lack of a better word, it's not "all the time", but it is definitely more than I would want to. If that was caused by bad memory, I would expect other software to be similarly affected and hence crash with about comparable frequency. However, it looks like I'm falling more into the other 90% of cases (unsurpris…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> code for radiation hardened environments I’m aware of code that detects bit flips via unreasonable value detection (“this counter cannot be this high so quickly”). What else is there?
For safety critical systems, one strategy is to store at least two copies of important data and compare them regularly. If they don't match, you either try to recover somehow or go into a safe state, depending on the context.
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Didn't they launch a remake of gw1 recently. Maybe I can get my kids hooked on that instead of this Roblox crap.
For what it's worth, Roblox is how I discovered code at age 10.
But when you take a bird's eye view, it's interesting and great to see how over the years, games where you can build your own games remain popular and a common entryway into software development.
But also how Epic went from ZZT via Unreal to Fortnite, with the latter now being another platform (or what Zucc wanted to call a metaverse) for creativity.
Other notable mentions off the top of my head where people can build or invent their own games (in-game, via an external editor or through community support) or go crazy in besides Roblox are Second Life (...I think), LittleBigPlanet, Warcraft/Starcraft (which led to the genre of MOBAs), Geometry Dash, Mario Maker, TES, Source engine games, Minecraft, etc etc.
Firefox is about the only piece of software in my setup that occasionally crashes. I say "occasionally" for lack of a better word, it's not "all the time", but it is definitely more than I would want to. If that was caused by bad memory, I would expect other software to be similarly affected and hence crash with about comparable frequency. However, it looks like I'm falling more into the other 90% of cases (unsurpris…