It's totally reasonable to chalk it up to cosmic rays (2007)

[jordigh]

http://lwn.net/Articles/219983/

[btilly]

This reminds me of a PC game which included an automatic crash reporting system, and would also periodically conduct stress tests to be able to identify (and therefore automatically exclude) machines that looked like they were producing random memory errors. (The usual cause of which was overclocking.)

Software crashes due to hardware issues are generally not software bugs.

[Micaiah_Chang → btilly]

For those interested, guild wars is the game, and the process is covered below in the 'Your Computer is broken' section:

http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/whose-bug-is-this-anyway

HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4939144

[personjerry]

The cosmic rays remind me of the xkcd comic about "real programmers".

Link: http://xkcd.com/378/