Coding Machines (2009)

https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/coding-machines/

by djoldman • 5 years ago

28 6 5 years ago

Buckaroo9• 5 years ago

Great read. I could feel the emotion of the character's throughout. The story reminds me of a previous post I saw on HN about a tech support guy trying to solve mysterious bad code appearing in a professors program, only for him to fall down the rabbit whole and discovering a student had tampered with the compiler's code in a similar fashion. If someone could find and link the story, I would be very grateful.

NobodyNada• 5 years ago

I remember that one too, I was able to find it by searching comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26553390

carbonguy• 5 years ago

I have been looking for this exact short story since I first encountered it via a now long-forgotten HN comment - thank you, djoldman, for bringing it back to my attention! I'll make sure to bookmark it this time :)

djoldman• 5 years ago

I have your exact same reaction to a few posts. Happy to help.

vokep• 5 years ago

So...this is fiction...r-right?

hultner• 5 years ago

Remind me of a bug I encountered working on IoT industrial control systems a couple of years ago, a newly graduated coworker couldn’t make sense of some network traffic from a PoE Ethernet powered sensor, wireshark weren’t picking up whatever was happening and a router we were using kept locking up if we triggered the bug. We ended up debugging it with an oscilloscope and where I could clearly see the bad packets which didn’t show up in wireshark, in any dumps or software taps. I don’t remember what it was but, this was 5+ years ago but I think it might have been some sort of malformed broadcast packet causing havoc when it penetrates networks. There’s something especially satisfying in decoding TCP or UDP packets with an oscilloscope.

I was kinda expecting the story to not be fictional but rather a ambitious write up of some particular involved malicious code. Kinda like stuxnet which was harmless in most cases but infects certain programming environment and infects the code it produced without showing up in source.

Coding Machines (2009)

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