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$10 million a minute -that’s about how much the bug in software developed for stock market cost Knight Capital. In less than an hour, company’s computers executed a series of automatic orders that were supposed to be spread out over a period of days. The problems happened because of new trading software that had been recently installed. The resulting loss was about $440 million.
What's the toughest bug you ever found and fixed?
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Software sent over a 1'000'000 emails of error messages in no time.. The only way was to turn off the exchange server.. By chance we saw it before the entire system crashed and it had no financial impact..
The signature is in building process.. Please wait...
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A place I worked at once sent a few hundred text messages to the phone of a Scottish woman before we killed the process.
This was over 10 years ago and her phone could only store 10 messages.
Took quite a bit of deleting on her part to get through them all.
Very little impact on anyone but her.
“I believe that there is an equality to all humanity. We all suck.” Bill Hicks
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I took us the entire morning to delete these mails... Apart that the outlook system was very slowly for everyone that morning, nobody else noticed..
The signature is in building process.. Please wait...
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A client of my last firm asked for a 'quick entry' mode for trades - simple text field and break to four values "direction quantity stock price", IIRC.
So trader would enter:
+10XY1000
And low and behold that creates an order to BUY 10 XY @ 1000 pence. Nice and simple.
A trader reversed the numbers on a sell order and basically offloaded the entire liquidity for the instrument onto the market for what amounted to nothing.
We'd done it so a confirmation was displayed, but the client decided it was 'too slow' and so removed that and any price checks before sending it onto the street. 
speramus in juniperus
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The absolute idiocies that are built to meet trader demands is astonishing. Traders has the data discipline of 2 yo. I know a system that allows them to enter 1.2m as a value instead of typing all those difficult zeros.
Bah take the lot of them out, give them all a good smack around the ear and make them clean up their own f***ing data.
Please don't wind me up on traders again it hurts!
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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Mycroft Holmes wrote: Traders has the data discipline of 2 yo
Couldn't agree with you more.
Mycroft Holmes wrote: allows them to enter 1.2m
Actually, at one of my jobs we did that and it was a good idea; on a volatile market traders are normally entering orders rapidly and this reduces mistakes. Also, trades are normally in magnitudes of '000 so having short-cuts for thousand and million makes sense.
We actually went further by giving Derivative Traders [the retarded 2yo's] a special on-screen number pad, that they could configure for quantities:
+========+========+========+
| | | |
| 10,000 | 5,000 | 2,000 |
| | | |
+========+========+========+
| | | |
| 1000 | 500 | 200 |
| | | |
+========+========+========+
| | | |
| 100 | 50 | 20 |
| | | |
+========+========+========+
Then to enter an order for 23,000, they hit the three buttons 10,000, 2,000 & 1,000.
Gumbies!
speramus in juniperus
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Nagy Vilmos wrote: Then to enter an order for 23,000, they hit the three buttons 10,000, 2,000
& 1,000.
That would only be 13,000. 
The good thing about pessimism is, that you are always either right or pleasently surprised.
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Okay, it should have been 13,000 - but you get the idea.
speramus in juniperus
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psst! the glitch occurred in 2012
speramus in juniperus
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Ok, not that long ago but pre-dating sites like CP and Stack Overflow I wrote a server in C++ using WinSocks 2.0 (not that the version matters) and when I was reading bytes forget to check that the number of bytes requested was the number of bytes returned thus some of the strings from the protocol were getting chopped. Didn't discover the error until after we packet sniffed the network. Unfortunately, the thing was intermittent.
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Significant bugs[^]
It's something to code a bug that costs your employers (or someone else) hundreds of millions, something else to code one that costs lives.
“I believe that there is an equality to all humanity. We all suck.” Bill Hicks
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Certainly, but I think this is the one that says the most about our cherished vocation:
In order to fix a warning issued by Valgrind, a maintainer of Debian patched OpenSSL and broke the random number generator in the process. The patch was uploaded in September 2006 and made its way into the official release; it was not reported until April 2008. Every key generated with the broken version is compromised (as the "random" numbers were made easily predictable), as is all data encrypted with it, threatening many applications that rely on encryption such as S/MIME, Tor, SSL or TLS protected connections and SSH.
Debian is, among other things, used as an embedded OS, and I guess that means that there is a lot of embedded systems with broken security.
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Quote: What's the toughest bug you ever found and fixed?
Well, I haven't fixed it yet; however, after reviewing the code for https://www.healthcare.gov/[^] I found that it wasn't a bug at all but rather a hoax. No one thought the plan would go into effect so they never finished the site.
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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Years back, I was asked to send automated FOREX telex messages to machines at the bank's branches. The SA provider Telkom could not automatically route the messages to the test branch I selected. I sent sample messages every two hours which had to be delivered by hand to the branch by a lad on a bike. He came out four or five times in one day and was quite puffed when he got there as it was a bit of a hilly delivery. His dedication was appreciated especially as nobody at the branch knew who the telexes were intended for. My PM (an arsewipe) explained to the branch manager and apologised for not telling them what we were doing. A couple of days later the lad's boss got a phone call asking if the lad could go to the branch at lunchtime. When he did, the press office were there and he appeared in the bank's magazine. I recall he was given a free account with a bit of money credited to it. So, not so much a "bug" but an unfortunate sequence of events with a happy outcome. 
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
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I had an "auto-dialer" system call 911 about 800 times in about 5 minutes... effectively crippling 911 service in the area for a short time.
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I've probably been responsible for somewhere in the range of $500,000-$700,000 in downtime for one system I worked on, but we had no idea how much the system actually saved the company at the time. Another project I worked on for about 3 months made over a million in the first few months after launch, but it was considered a failure because it was under what was expected.
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3,000 emails sent to mostly the wrong people - using a pass through SQLquery in SAS with an order by clause in the SQL.
We(meaning I) didn't realise that SAS would re-order the order by once the data was outside of the pass through query.
Not hugely expensive but embarrassing all the same.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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But my Member ID is: 10381491
10,381,491 > 10,187,527
Hello World!
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If you can't work out the answer to that then I don't see you have any future in software development, project management, or cleaning the toilets.
If you are so adamant you are not a troll, how about shutting up for a bit, having a bit of a watch and a think, and trying to add some value to the site.
“I believe that there is an equality to all humanity. We all suck.” Bill Hicks
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DNFTT
speramus in juniperus
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DNTMNTFTT! 
The only instant messaging I do involves my middle finger.
English doesn't borrow from other languages.
English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar.
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DNFTFT
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No need for that language!
The only instant messaging I do involves my middle finger.
English doesn't borrow from other languages.
English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar.
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