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A comment on What I learned by living without artificial light. Parent comment

Re:What I learned by living without artificial light by ajnin on Thursday April 26, 2018 @02:04PM (#16934100)
> 100% of those software engineers have a plethora of safety checks

Well, this is simply not true. I suspect you conjured that figure out of thin air. Case in point, the famous Therac-25 accidents caused by a software bug causing large over-irradiations of cancer patients : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

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Re:What I learned by living without artificial light by kungtotte on Thursday April 26, 2018 @02:45PM (#16934438)
Yes, software from 40 years ago is absolutely relevant to this discussion. You think there are a lot of developers using those same practices today?

Bugs happen, but with software you have several layers of safety checks to prevent them from becoming dangerous or fatal. A common one is having the code reviewed by one or more other developers. The odds of all those developers being unable to detect bugs at 9 AM are kind of long, wouldn't you say?

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Re:What I learned by living without artificial light by bartread on Friday April 27, 2018 @01:49PM (#16942731)
Not really, sad to say. I had a PR approved during the day yesterday by one of the smartest guys I've ever worked with and that passed all tests yet, due to a subtle issue, caused a problem in production this morning. It wasn't the end of any worlds, but this kind of thing happens all the time with complex systems.
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