Jake Poznanski writes personal essays on engineering, advertising, and self-driving cars, best known for a debugging story set in Eastern Europe.
HN repeatedly recommends "Debugging Behind the Iron Curtain" as a good story whenever threads turn to odd hardware faults and hard debugging.
I used to collect these kind of stories:
When I flush my toilet my computer reboots:
http://www.techtales.com/tftechs.php?m=199712#66 (the first story on the page)
If I buy vanilla ice-cream my car wont start:
http://www.netscrap.com/netscrap_detail.cfm?scrap_id=501
A specific cargo routing crashes system:
https://www.jakepoz.com/debugging-behind-the-iron-curtain/
Tape-drive failure only within large print jobs:
http://patrickthomson.tumblr.com/post/2499755681/the-best-debugging-story-ive-ever-heard
Interplanetary debugging with the Mars Rover:
https://www.eetimes.com/the-trouble-with-rover-is-revealed/#
The rate of cosmic rays impacting hardware should be extremely low, unless there's some kind of environmental factor (like being at a very high altitude). Or maybe there was a special train going by as in: https://www.jakepoz.com/debugging-behind-the-iron-curtain/
Except for the case in the USSR when gamma rays were an issue at a train depot computer system due to radioactive cows from near Chernobyl: http://www.jakepoz.com/debugging-behind-the-iron-curtain/
I think that even worse are the fake download buttons served with free software that lead users to adware:
http://jakepoz.com/why_do_google_ads_point_to_adware.html
In addition to the others people have mentioned, I'd add "Debugging Behind the Iron Curtain"[0]
[0] https://www.jakepoz.com/debugging-behind-the-iron-curtain/
Debugging Behind the Iron Curtain is also a good story:
https://www.jakepoz.com/debugging-behind-the-iron-curtain/