Also jet pilots have years of training whereas users are presented to "intuitive" interfaces where they have no reason not to push every button just to test them out.

I really hope the people who are looking for intercontinental missles have some training.

This isn't the guy looking for it, this is the guy running the emergency alert system. It's likely to be a contractor who gets meagre pay, limited benefits, and no job security as the contract probably turns over to a new vendor every 2 or 3 years.

The "training" they have is, if anything, an MS word document with a bunch of screenshots or a flash animation showing each of the functions that the contract required the developer to build in.

The military monitors for intercontinental ballistic missile launches.

If they detect one then they assess it. If after assessment they determine there is a threat to anyone they notify the appropriate agencies.

A civilian in a totally different government agency is the one who pushes the notification button.

How is the notification sent from the military to the civilian agency? Does the civilian agency validate the notification? Why is it necessary or preferable for a human to do this instead of a computer?

To underline this, here's what happens when something goes wrong with an ejector seat:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lincolnshire-37475298

We probably won't ever know how many people died as a direct result of the Hawaii BMD mis-alert, but I'd be surprised if the number was non-zero (think in terms of car crashes, stress-aggravated cerebrovascular accidents, and so on).

Similarly, consider the warning signage deployed around high tension electrical substations, and the consequences of ignoring it or failing to understand its significance.

The point is, in these types of situation bad design can kill, and we need to design accordingly and unambiguously.

That guy's death was apparently complicated by a chain of failures: user error with the safety pin, user error with the firing handle, maintenance/construction error with some bolt, and several aspects of the M/B design that allowed all failures to happen at once. Overall, those seats have saved some 7500 pilots (search for the tie club) and maybe killed a few: similar odds and debate to airbag deployments.

ref https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Sean_Cunningham_(pilo...

>but I'd be surprised if the number was non-zero (think in terms of car crashes, stress-aggravated cerebrovascular accidents, and so on).

I'm assuming you meant you'd be surprised if that number was zero. It's awfully hard to, in good faith, directly associate a message with a death. I mean if you wanted to make it seem bigger than it was, you could associate any crash or heart related death that happened in that 38 minute (?) period as directly a result of the warning, but I don't think that would be in good faith.

It shouldn't be hard to check if there's a spike in mortality above the median background around the period of the test.

Statistical significance will depend on the size of the spike.

Ya, but like you said, it would have to be a significant spike, particularly for a 38 minute window. I haven't heard anything reported.

> consider the warning signage deployed around high tension electrical substations, and the consequences of ignoring it or failing to understand its significance.

"not only will it kill you, it will hurt the whole time you are dying"

Formatting the quote like this makes it too wide to be readable on my phone without repeatedly scrolling right then left. Even in landscape mode the first line ends with the "b" of "brightly painted".

A lot of people format quotes with italics, as in this example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485333

HN formatting documentation:

https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

Ejection at a moment's notice has to be simple and easy, and so accidental ejections still occur:

* http://www.vfp62.com/f14_rio.html

* https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/02/south-africa-p...

I'd argue that very few computer applications need something that works like an ejector seat lever. In most software applications you have more than milliseconds or seconds to make decisions about big, dramatic (and potentially irreversible) changes, and thus they should have multiple levels of confirmation.

There's a lot we can learn from aviation: accident retrospectives, checklists, master caution alarms, crew relationship management, human factors research, etc.

However, my knowledge of these things is a bit piecemeal and anecdotal. Does anyone know a good book on these things?

> crew relationship management

At least with airlines this seems to be largely abandoned now. My wife worked for a large middle eastern airline for a few years, and the crews were just assigned randomly. Well I guess there is a complicated algorithm that figures it out, but given the company has nearly 15,000 cabin crew it’s unlikely you’ll see someone you flew with again on another flight.

Also from the stories I heard people were promoted to managerial roles (on big flights there’s usually a senior for each class, and then a purser who reports to the captain) through seniority, not because they had any specific people skills that made them a good manager.

op probly meant Crew Resource* Management which has nothing to do with crew assigment and is alive and well (on non-shit airlines that is).

oops, yeah, Crew Resource Management is what I meant — things like making sure a junior officer can question a senior officer when she sees a problem.

Crew Relationship Management is probably something else ;-)

I actually would recommend this book: http://atulgawande.com/book/the-checklist-manifesto/

yep, you're not the first to recommend it. I was hoping there were a few others in the same vein

Hey that text block is unreadable on mobile. Here it is readable

>In the cockpit of every jet fighter is a brightly painted lever that, when pulled, fires a small rocket engine underneath the pilot's seat, blowing the pilot, still in his seat, out of the aircraft to parachute safely to earth. Ejector seat levers can only be used once, and their consequences are significant and irreversible.

>Applications must have ejector seat levers so that users can "occasionally" move persistent objects in the interface, or dramatically (sometimes irreversibly) alter the function or behavior of the application. The one thing that must never happen is accidental deployment of the ejector seat.

>The interface design must assure that a user can never inadvertently fire the ejector seat when all he wants to do is make some minor adjustment to the program.

Several indents like that make code blocks, which respect original new line placements and are usually unreadable on mobile.