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Comment by JabavuAdams | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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? :)

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.

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

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.

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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