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Comment by lukeadamson | Hacker News Reader

One of my favorites:

I was working a large project for a wafer fab company, and occasionally the compiler would crash during full builds with SIGILL (illegal instruction, for those who aren’t familiar with the signal). Compiler bugs are never fun, and this was particularly vexing because it was so inconsistent.

It took me awhile, but eventually I got around to thinking: What could cause the compiler to execute an illegal instruction? What could cause an illegal instruction at all?

I removed the outer case from my computer, and sure enough, all of the fans had died. The CPU was overheating during intense, long-running builds. Replaced the fans and the “bug” went away!

*This is my first comment since I created my account in 2009. I hope I did it right! ;-)

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A friend of mine recently bought a computer with a really decent GPU (he needs to process significant amounts of non-English content through Whisper, which requires him to use the large model), and Whisper was running much, much slower than expected. It was a custom build, assembled by a small-ish company here in Poland. He opened the machine up, and it turned out there was some kind of foam inside that the company put there to secure all the components during transport. Thankfully, it was discovered and removed early enough not to cause any damage, but we were all very surprised.

It somehow made me recall an amazing story of debugging one Go bug (not by me), which included heating memory :) [1]

[1] https://marcan.st/2017/12/debugging-an-evil-go-runtime-bug/

Holy duck, that's some hardcore debugging. There's more story and suspense than in many Hollywood thrillers, thanks for sharing.

That reminds me of one of my childhood PCs.

It was a hand-me-down K6-II with (I think) 233 MHz clock rate. The thing had a tiny fan on top of the cooler that was roughly 4x4cm (if even that). The poor thing generally worked quite nicely, but had stuck bearings so it required a little nudge to spin every time the machine was turned on. I didn't have the side panel on because that was just too much of a hassle and usually would just reach in and start the thing blindly.

I forgot that one day and the machine had been running for about an hour (low load, so nothing too bad). I reached in and promptly gave myself quite a nasty burn blister because I touched the cooler instead of the fan.

Nice story. I've had something similar happen to myself. My computer generally worked well, the few times I tried to game though, it crashed after a while like clockwork. Turns out the fans on the PSU had died. Replaced it and never had those issues again.

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