A few years ago I designed a way to detect bit-flips in Firefox crash reports and last year we deployed an actual memory tester that runs on user machines after the browser crashes. Today I was looking at the data that comes out of these tests and now I'm 100% positive that the heuristic is sound and a lot of the crashes we see are from users with bad memory or similarly flaky hardware. Here's a few numbers to give you an idea of how large the problem is. 1/5

They always say computers are so good with numbers, but you can’t even store 2000 numbers in a single file!!

Try it out for yourself:

seq 1 2000 | tr '\n' ' '
cat > /tmp/wat.txt
<copy&paste the 2000 numbers from above, press enter, then ctrl+d to end input>
cat /tmp/wat.txt
wc /tmp/wat.txt

Or see my screencast here: https://asciinema.org/a/fLhMt640MqFWGuug

On a Mac, I can save even fewer numbers! But at least I get feedback that the line is full. How many numbers can your computer save?