Locknote: Programming’s Greatest Mistakes - Mark Rendle

Most of the time when we make mistakes in our code, a message gets displayed wrong or an invoice doesn’t get sent. But sometimes when people make mistakes in code, things literally explode, or bankrupt companies, or make web development a living hell for millions of programmers for years to come.

Join Mark on a tour through some of the worst mistakes in the history of programming. Learn what went wrong, why it went wrong, how much it cost, and how things are really funny when they’re not happening to you.

[Russtopia]

Love the QR code t-shirt! Was tough reading it with him moving around but worth it

[marklee]

Little known fact about Stanislav Petrov is that you'd think there'd be a universe where he didn't save the planet, but there isn't. He's just that good.

[remrevo]

27:18 Rust actually has something called "null pointer optimization", which guaranties that an Option of a pointer that can't be null is represented as the same pointer, but with null. So you don't have to pay more memory, but still have do be explicitly check for null.

[GeorgeTsiros]

I particularly like how they had 6 characters available for the dog identifier, which would allow 999, 999 dogs if they used a digit for each character, or 2, 176, 782, 335 dogs, if they used A-Z and 0-9 (case INsensitive, even), which would allow to track every dog on the planet... but noooo let's use ROMAN NUMERALS which have been obsolete for A THOUSAND YEARS. This disaster required serious effort.

[mog]

One of my greatest hits was an error message in an OWL/WinNT popup dialog which said "Something is very wrong here. This should not have occurred!" Years went by. Eventually it happened and I got a very confused call from our customer support group.

[FlameRat_YehLon]

21:30 funny enough, I've heard that the reason HAL Laboratory (the game studio behind the Kirby series) was named as such exactly because they want to be one letter ahead of IBM.

[williamdavidwallace]

At least one Cobol compiler was "fixed" to accommodate Y2K. It translated long dates from the data base to short dates or vice versa, I forget.

[marklee]

The units for the climate orbiter weren't feet and meters, it was two different kinds of amounts of thrust.

[dpduser]

Ok, I have to admit... I've been just been rickrolled... Nice tshirt btw! Anyone else?

[ankor]

You have a mistake at around 44:30 - when you say that Arian 5 was the most powerful rocket built outside of US, which is incorrect. It may be the most powerful rocket built by countries of European Union, but Soviet Union had in late 80-s 2 launches of Energia rocket, which was about 3 times heavier than Arian 5, and could theoretically launch about 5 times more to Low Earth Orbit.

[ari_archer]

for anyone wondering the qr code on marks shirt is a yt link to a rickroll

[GG-uzus]

Very curious that critical system is still in use and crashes every 24 minutes lol

[killia]

I spent so damn long trying to scan that QR code on your shirt... well played, but f*ck you man :P

[patricknelson]

lol, pièce de résistance is JavaScript. Just JavaScript, that’s it. 😅

[kybernetiks]

Ha ha ha, I programmed in Gupta SQL :-)

[CanoTheVolcano]

Annoyed at him calling recursion the same as loops. Yes its better in most circumstances but recursion *is* more powerful than loops

[BryonLape]

Perhaps it is a billion in 1966 dollars.

[bflopolska]

If you want to understand how a QUANGO works, check "Yes, Minister."

[Bolpat]

The metric system is essentially the compromise between an actually sensible system and the imperial system.
1 liter (1 dm³) of water does not weigh exactly 1 kg, only close.
Time units are not decimal, except sub-seconds. There is not kilosecond, but 60-based minutes and hours, then it gets even messier because what exactly is a year?
Weight units are also weird. There’s the gram, but for whatever reason, SI decided to make not it, but the kilogram its base unit. 1000 kg is not a kilokilogram (that would be silly), but neither is it a megagram, it’s a ton. So you have regular sub-grams like milligram and microgram and nanogram etc., the “regular” kilogram (which is the base unit) and you have tons and super-tons like kiloton and megaton etc. In 1953, Italy proposed using _bes_ (unit symbol: b) for weight (1 kg = 1 b) to get rid of this nonsense, but that was rejected.
If you think it cannot be dumber, in SI, angles are declared dimensionless because some fool thought they were “the ratio of lengths” and experts believed that nonsense. To convince you it’s not, take degrees: If angle were dimensionless, the ring symbol for degrees would mean a factor of π/180 the same way k means factor 1000. Thus, I weigh about 4600° kg.