Anybody in the world can add an AfD tag to an article and put it up for deletion. Go ahead, try it: you can get DHH or Paul Graham listed right now. But without a clear consensus to delete, the article isn't going anywhere. Moreover, once the article survives an AfD, it is harder to delete in the future.

This article is running 2-1 keep. I've never seen an AfD succeed with half that opposition. All you can do at this point is piss the WP hobbyists off, have the delete discussion devolve into an argument about "voting versus debating", and make the discussion that much harder for the deleting admin to assess.

Sorry, I know it's a slow news day, but this doesn't count.

There seem to be a lot of people that think their projects somehow require funding. Your online social alarm clock is not a startup.

Stop imagining how you're going to make money off of crappy widgets. Get out there, be curious and build things that solve actual problems.

Not that a debugger helped that much after they managed to get a fairly reliable but convoluted repro. It turned out that really stressing the scripting system with certain patterns would cause the crash to happen much more frequently, so I could see it in the debugger. It didn't help all that much, it was an apparently random memory stomp, and by the time it crashed, it was much too late to tell where it came from. I forget how I figured this out but I eventually managed to narrow the cause down to garbage collection runs. Now, GC runs were periodic, but consoles place hard limits on memory. You can't just swap to disk when the going gets tough, so we had memory budgets for each game component, including the scripting system. So if scripts got particularly greedy, they'd run out of memory before the next GC run.

Now, as the memory limits were hard, some clever sod had put a GC call in the Lua malloc hook that was supplying the memory to run when there was no memory available (and the game would have crashed) - no doubt in order to fix an earlier bug. Most of our scripts didn't create hash tables, arrays, and strings frequently, so this bug hadn't been a big enough problem for what must have been years. In Lua, those types of objects require two allocations, one for the base object and one for the data storage. You can see where this is going.

If Lua ran out of memory halfway through creating a hash table, array, or string, that is, after successfully creating the base object, but failing on the data store, it would trigger a GC run. Thankfully this was actually not that hard to hit, as the data store memory generally was way bigger than the 16 or so bytes used for primitive types (i.e. base objects, numbers, ...) so the probability of not having enough contiguous space was much higher than not having a 16-byte slot. In any case, the hash table (etc) constructor had of course not returned yet, and therefore there were no references to the hash table object yet, and it promptly got collected. The memory was initialised as a hash table and returned from the constructor, and it was just a matter of time until another allocation wrote straight over that. Not just any allocation of course, as re-allocating it as a (legal) primitive type wouldn't have caused a crash.

The fix was of course easy once the cause was known: don't put the base object in the allocated list for GC consideration until the whole object had been assembled.

Took me days. And I wasn't even the first person to be assigned the bug, it was one of those hot potatoes that went round all the senior people until it landed on the junior tech programmer's list. (mine)

I looked in the checkin history for the malloc hook, and they had shipped at least one game with that bug in. (records didn't go back far enough to rule out the game before) If you figure out what scripts to trigger repeatedly, you can make that game crash.

I can't really blame just one person for this. Putting the GC call in the malloc was thoughtless. Maybe I would have done the same without checking that it was safe. In Lua itself, that was a pretty careless way to handle object creation given that the malloc hook is user-defined, so Lua has no control what goes on in there.

More bedtime war stories another time.

Every time I put down my coding manuals to read some guide to Making Money Online™ I feel a little dirty, but damn it seems tempting and more achievable than building and selling a tech startup.

What a bad writer.

His achievements are certainly impressive. I would be content to draw half as well and be half as imaginative. Great product and tool creator and has a band? Come on, do not crush us.

Thanks and keep up the good work!

Don't worry about that -- it happens very rarely, but I suspect that even from those few cases the vast majority are dealing with graduate students where there's a real question as to who had which ideas.

He needs to find a buddhist teacher and an LSD dealer to get over his fear of death. He's going to die, his body is going to rot and his greying, decayed, stinking flesh is going to be churned into worm poop, his memory and personality will dissolve, as the thing that observes all that (an is the same behind my eyes as yours, that you can see by considering your self image for a long time, and then asking "if I'm looking at me, what is doing the looking?") discards the used up vehicle and suits up for the next adventure as a different one of these trippy humans, which will have a different set of ultimately illusory relationships with this fact through waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep, all before the sun supernovas and destroys every single hint of anything he did with his life, all of which is not only going to happen, but already happening because time is an illusory construct perceived by an illusory ego. The sooner he spends 2 or 3 weeks in a psych word processing that after eating a quarter sheet of acid and screaming about it for twelve hours while burning his retinas out staring at the sun and directly perceiving it, the better off and closer to the truth his community will be.

This critique of AI was a highlight for me. People who think they can mimic consciousness on computers have more in common with magical thinking then with science because they have absolutely no deep understanding of consciousness.

I was just struck by how elegantly and simply those few words got such an important and fundamental point across.