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Comment by sh1mmer | Hacker News Reader

To summarise the brown M&Ms were a "canary" to indicate if all the details of the contract had been attended too. If there were brown M&Ms then the rest of the contractual points would be examined with more stringency.

It's interesting that they used this as a careful "get out clause" or an indicator of other more serious ones.

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A canary is a kind of bird. The parent poster is alluding to the phrase "canary in a coal mine". Coal miners supposedly carried caged birds down the shafts as fore-warning of suffocating conditions or gases, as the small bird would be affected before the humans. The generic idea here is to use a cheap sensor to check for impending failure in a system.

Let's not bring the reddit memes to HN.

Wait, what? For people not in the US (or perhaps Newcastle in the UK), there's no way they'd know the "canary in a coal mine" idiom. This is a very, very, very America-centric idiom.

/I teach English, SAT, ACT, GMAT, GRE, and other tests to native and non-native English speakers on the side.

A canary is also a random value placed on the stack so the program can detect a buffer overflow. If the canary has been overwritten the program can terminate before malicious code is executed. I suspect a significant portion of Hacker News users is familiar with this terminology regardless of where they learned English.

As a non-programmer, I had no idea that this usage was so widespread. That's actually rather cool, and I'm going to ping my editor to add it to the reference books.

Bit off-topic, but the Rsync project als has a canary for when things go wrong: http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt

> For people not in the US (or perhaps Newcastle in the UK), there's no way they'd know the "canary in a coal mine" idiom.

Movies, books, general interest... Sure, I'm not even a native English speaker, but I'm pretty sure I was aware of that expression as a teenager. Also, most serious C programmers know about placing a "canary" at the end of a buffer to check for overflows. Even if anyone was confused, wikipedia offers "Canaries were formerly used by miners to warn of dangerous gases." - which a typical person reading HN should be able to find without any problems.

I'd risk a guess that people reading these pages are quite familiar with most US/UK idioms... Sorry - your comment just struck me as a bit weird, especially when you put 4 acronyms (mostly US-specific) in the last sentence while defending the "canary" explanation.

Ok, can we all get along now and go back to the main thread now? :)

I'm not sure why you would think we don't know about this in the UK. Canaries were used in UK mines until around 1987. I'm pretty sure it's a well know saying, at least among the people that I know.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/december/30...

indeed I thikn the practice started here in the UK!

> Wait, what? For people not in the US (or perhaps Newcastle in the UK), there's no way they'd know the "canary in a coal mine" idiom. This is a very, very, very America-centric idiom.

I know that idiom from junior school. That was in USSR, perhasp as close to un-American as you can get.

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