Sky net may have needed help from humans to maintain itself, like the Stephen King short story “Trucks”, where the eponymous living trucks force humans to refuel them
Power-On-Self-Test (POST) calibration loop or training.
Not as far fetched. RDRAM does something similar when it comes online: it has to "train" the physical link every time the system is booted by generating bogus traffic and timing it (and can also retrain on certain errors). Complicated stuff, RDRAM. Also, anything with a differential pair may employ training like this.
As I type this, I am -literally- in the process of writing a self-timing loop using a binary increase of iterations to find average execution time plateau.
Another area is real-time profiling on cpus with stepping support - I run a loop like that every 2-3 sec to figure out the actual Instructions Per Second at current stepping. Applicable both to desktop and mobile CPUs nowadays.
If you're looking for a young guy working in cobol in the y2k vicinity, that was me (19 at the time). not only I added 2 more digits to some microfocus app, I also saved the world :) My first professional gig was with cobol, and it was almost cool.
We salute you. Thanks for saving the world; to all greater y2k saveaists. What an unseen fix, you guys, all you y2k fixers, I mean, really did it. Thanks man(s).
man s might also mean women etc whatever all the new forms of people and identities goes on. We salute everyone.
Happy ending to my YouTube video on where all the code came from in The Terminator. I tracked down the author of one piece and emailed him out of the blue.
Ed: corrected link. The article itself would be a great hn submission - a comparison of time (writing+execution) of a simple program in basic, Pascal and cobol..
Came to say the same thing. Fascinating look into a time machine—what problems are we still wrestling with and what celebrated innovations then do we see as problematic legacies now (e.g., when a language allows 1 + ‘1’ to equal 2)? Very fun read.
What a great find! I guess back then, they didn't think too much about the "rights" for a fragment of code lifted from a magazine. I don't think movie studios would do this today.
Please don't use multiple accounts to comment on or vote for your own posts. You succeeded in getting this perfectly good submission buried by our software. I had to manually restore it.
You should make a biography about what it took [you] to moderate HN once this site blows over, then you can just spill anything, man. Insert Deity; I guess this is hard work; or some wayfaring good algorithms.
Thanks man. I'll troll less, knowing how much dung (huh) you're in daily.
Please write the tricks once HN goes under or whatever.
I appreciate that! also, I don't think I've seen that inflection of dang before.
It would be nice if HN continued beyond all of us, though. Sounds grandiose and dumb, but why not? There's already a rich archive (a dozen years' worth and counting) and the site has certain properties that prevent it from growing too much.
Maybe eventually we (or our successors) will come up with an anti-abuse system that makes the current one obsolete and then we can publish the old one and HN can have a retro thread about it, like about 1980s Lisp AI programs.
i looked at your tumblr and dont see any discussion of copyrights or attribution. I thought that's what parent was talking about. Maybe i missed it on your site -- i didn't read the entire blog.
HR: tell me about the most exciting project you did.
Me, Senior Developer in Cyberdine: actually, T-800, despite of our customer insisted on using Cobol
