In addition to this guy having a total misunderstanding of how this worked and why it eventually failed ("control structures"?!") the article glosses over how this behavior relates to configuration options such as vm.overcommit... it doesn't even use the correct term (overcommit), so readers don't manage to even leave with the ability to rapidly learn more about the subject.

Yet, I have now been tricked into seeing it twice, as in addition to being on the HN home page for over 6 hours (with not that many upvotes, but still way too many) it was renamed by a moderator from the original title it was posted with ("Malloc never fails", weirdly in the opposite direction of the policy of "use the original title" that is normally cited for legitimizing renames) so you couldn't recognize "oh, this is that wrong article from earlier".

Worse, a somewhat informative comment on this site from the user "khm", one that links to a better article that discusses these issues with the right terminology an in context with the OOM killer, is marked [dead], caught by some spam filter or maybe even dowvoted/flagged to death by readers.

Frowny pants.