Why do some people put funny lines (bug killers) at the beginning of their articles?
Some earlier versions (mid-80s) of news had a bug which would drop the first 512 or 1024 bytes of text of certain articles. The bug was triggered whenever the article started with whitespace (a blank or a tab). A fix many people adopted was to begin their articles with a line containing a character other than white space. This gradually evolved into the habit of including amusing first lines. The original bug has since been fixed in newer version of news, and sites running older versions of news have applied a patch to prevent articles from losing text. The “bug-killer” lines are therefore probably no longer needed, but they linger on.
Some earlier versions (mid-80s) of news had a bug which would drop the first 512 or 1024 bytes of text of certain articles. The bug was triggered whenever the article started with whitespace (a blank or a tab). A fix many people adopted was to begin their articles with a line containing a character other than white space. This gradually evolved into the habit of including amusing first lines. The original bug has since been fixed in newer version of news, and sites running older versions of news have applied a patch to prevent articles from losing text. The bug-killer lines are therefore probably no longer needed, but they linger on.
