4 ms·

Fast-forward 20 years, a plane crashes, they find and open the black box and in the flight logs they can see the cause clearly: "undefined is not a function".

stevebygane 11y ago
Did you read the article? It's about the inflight entertainment system, and has nothing to do with the flight recorders.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- joegreen 11y ago
  Thus the "Fast-forward 20 years" part :-)
  - stevebygane 11y ago
    What makes you think anyone is planning to use NodeJS in avionics in 20 years? Where have you got that information, and how is it relevant to this discussion?
    - nerdstep 11y ago
      Where's your sense of humor? It was a funny stab at JavaScript. I for one got a chuckle out of it.
      - oldmanjay 11y ago
        we don't do joke threads well here on purpose
    - solids 11y ago
      Relax
    - repop 11y ago
      never change, HN.
    - coldtea 11y ago
      Perhaps you missed the whole obvious joke thing? What makes the joke relevant to the discussion is that this is the first thought on lots of people's mind: "gee, I hope they don't ever use it for the actual flying system". It sure was the first thought I had, even before seeing the parent's joke.
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        > What makes the joke relevant to the discussion is that this is the first thought on lots of people's mind: "gee, I hope they don't ever use it for the actual flying system". That's the second thought for me. The first was "thank goodness the airline I'm flying intercontinental with next week uses Boeing planes at that route".
        SmellyGeekBoy 11y ago
        Hopefully not a 737 though, hey? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11611058/Cybersecurity-researcher-made-plane-climb-after-hacking-in-flight-entertainment-system.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1...
      - enraged_camel 11y ago
        >>Perhaps you missed the whole obvious joke thing? What's remarkable about HN is that most jokes are heavily voted down with responses like "go back to reddit", and jokers regularly complain that HN has no sense of humor. And yet every now and then a joke gets voted to the top. I've yet to wrap my mind around this phenomenon, personally...
        jessaustin 11y ago
        Perhaps it means that HN's cumulative sense of humor differs in some respect from your own?
        enraged_camel 11y ago
        I don't know whether to laugh at the suggestion that a crowd as diverse as HN has a "cumulative sense of humor" or be offended by the implied suggestion that my sense of humor matches that of Reddit's.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - bryanrasmussen 11y ago
    Yes, it's clever because it implies how entertainment slowly but inexorably manages to take insinuate itself into and corrupt every essential application.
- verelo 11y ago
  In flight entertainment systems have certainly been the cause of crashes in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swissair_Flight_111 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swissair_Flight_111 "the crash was generally believed to have been caused by faulty wiring in the cockpit after the entertainment system in the plane started to overheat" It's not too far fetched to think you could end up with an infinite loop (or other random issue) in some inflight entertainment system code, causing it to overhead and potentially ignite. I'm sure there are plenty of safeguards, but they too could fail...and this is why we still have circuit breakers and a master switch in planes that a human can control. Sadly humans too can (and often do...) fail to make the right decision. Any system other than flight surfaces, avionics and the source of propulsion to an aircraft add some degree of risk that we could otherwise fly without. Edits: Spelling and general sillyness.
  - dominotw 11y ago
    To be fair, that had nothing to do with software running inflight entertainment.
    - verelo 11y ago
      I'm not sure I agree. While its possible the overheating was due to a failed fan or something physical, but its also very possible that the software running on this hardware caused it to overheat.
  - pkaye 11y ago
    This seems to be a hardware issue.
    - verelo 11y ago
      People seem to be missing my point. To be clear, i'm trying to suggest that there is a high chance that the hardware fault that was triggered by overheating, was potentially caused by a software fault.
      - 11y ago
Joeri 11y ago
Sure beats 'segmentation fault'
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Not really; the latter is usually followed by "core dumped", and some amount of useful information written to the disk.
- verelo 11y ago
  No that is simply not true, seg faults provide useful debug info in any potential core dump they provide. Also, for something as important as an aircraft, I'd prefer to have a developer who knows what a seg fault is writing the code for any aviation equipment over someone who thinks "'undefined' is not a function" is equivalent to a seg fault.
  - jeremy_wiebe 11y ago
    Isn't this story just about the entertainment system? I don't think anybody would advocate using node.js for avionics.
    - verelo 11y ago
      Correct, however given that any addition to the plane has the potential to cause unintended conflicts with critical systems (i.e. in the downed Swissair flight 111 example I gave in another comment) I was suggesting that these should still be treated just as seriously. Don't get me wrong though, I don't think that using JS in a plane is a bad idea. In fact I think the aviation industry is extremely slow moving and it frustrates me, fortunately the experimental category has access to some interesting tools but for certified aircraft you're very restricted in what you can and cannot do to modify the aircraft.
  - geofft 11y ago
    > No that is simply not true, seg faults provide useful debug info in any potential core dump they provide. I'm not sure I understand this. Can't you get a backtrace out of a JavaScript exception just as well as you can get one out of a segfault? The segfault itself doesn't carry any information other than at best the faulting instruction and the nature of the fault, and you can surely get that out of a JavaScript exception. Furthermore, a segfault is very often a sign of memory corruption that has already happened, possibly in the stack frames themselves. "undefined is not a function" is not. JS code that crashes with that error is in a much more debuggable state than native code that crashes with a segfault. And you can certainly configure your interpreter to take a coredump on an uncaught JS exception, which will definitely be more debuggable than a coredump post-memory corruption. (Your personal attack is not an argument.)
iSnow 11y ago
>and in the flight logs they can see the cause clearly I know it's a joke, but still: the in-flight entertainment system doesn't log to the flight data recorder.

stevebygane 11y ago

Did you read the article? It's about the inflight entertainment system, and has nothing to do with the flight recorders.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
joegreen 11y ago
Thus the "Fast-forward 20 years" part :-)
- stevebygane 11y ago
  What makes you think anyone is planning to use NodeJS in avionics in 20 years? Where have you got that information, and how is it relevant to this discussion?
  - nerdstep 11y ago
    Where's your sense of humor? It was a funny stab at JavaScript. I for one got a chuckle out of it.
    - oldmanjay 11y ago
      we don't do joke threads well here on purpose
  - solids 11y ago
    Relax
  - repop 11y ago
    never change, HN.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    Perhaps you missed the whole obvious joke thing? What makes the joke relevant to the discussion is that this is the first thought on lots of people's mind: "gee, I hope they don't ever use it for the actual flying system". It sure was the first thought I had, even before seeing the parent's joke.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      > What makes the joke relevant to the discussion is that this is the first thought on lots of people's mind: "gee, I hope they don't ever use it for the actual flying system". That's the second thought for me. The first was "thank goodness the airline I'm flying intercontinental with next week uses Boeing planes at that route".
      - SmellyGeekBoy 11y ago
        Hopefully not a 737 though, hey? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11611058/Cybersecurity-researcher-made-plane-climb-after-hacking-in-flight-entertainment-system.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1...
    - enraged_camel 11y ago
      >>Perhaps you missed the whole obvious joke thing? What's remarkable about HN is that most jokes are heavily voted down with responses like "go back to reddit", and jokers regularly complain that HN has no sense of humor. And yet every now and then a joke gets voted to the top. I've yet to wrap my mind around this phenomenon, personally...
      - jessaustin 11y ago
        Perhaps it means that HN's cumulative sense of humor differs in some respect from your own?
        enraged_camel 11y ago
        I don't know whether to laugh at the suggestion that a crowd as diverse as HN has a "cumulative sense of humor" or be offended by the implied suggestion that my sense of humor matches that of Reddit's.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- bryanrasmussen 11y ago
  Yes, it's clever because it implies how entertainment slowly but inexorably manages to take insinuate itself into and corrupt every essential application.
verelo 11y ago
In flight entertainment systems have certainly been the cause of crashes in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swissair_Flight_111 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swissair_Flight_111 "the crash was generally believed to have been caused by faulty wiring in the cockpit after the entertainment system in the plane started to overheat" It's not too far fetched to think you could end up with an infinite loop (or other random issue) in some inflight entertainment system code, causing it to overhead and potentially ignite. I'm sure there are plenty of safeguards, but they too could fail...and this is why we still have circuit breakers and a master switch in planes that a human can control. Sadly humans too can (and often do...) fail to make the right decision. Any system other than flight surfaces, avionics and the source of propulsion to an aircraft add some degree of risk that we could otherwise fly without. Edits: Spelling and general sillyness.
- dominotw 11y ago
  To be fair, that had nothing to do with software running inflight entertainment.
  - verelo 11y ago
    I'm not sure I agree. While its possible the overheating was due to a failed fan or something physical, but its also very possible that the software running on this hardware caused it to overheat.
- pkaye 11y ago
  This seems to be a hardware issue.
  - verelo 11y ago
    People seem to be missing my point. To be clear, i'm trying to suggest that there is a high chance that the hardware fault that was triggered by overheating, was potentially caused by a software fault.
    - 11y ago

Joeri 11y ago

Sure beats 'segmentation fault'

TeMPOraL 11y ago
Not really; the latter is usually followed by "core dumped", and some amount of useful information written to the disk.
verelo 11y ago
No that is simply not true, seg faults provide useful debug info in any potential core dump they provide. Also, for something as important as an aircraft, I'd prefer to have a developer who knows what a seg fault is writing the code for any aviation equipment over someone who thinks "'undefined' is not a function" is equivalent to a seg fault.
- jeremy_wiebe 11y ago
  Isn't this story just about the entertainment system? I don't think anybody would advocate using node.js for avionics.
  - verelo 11y ago
    Correct, however given that any addition to the plane has the potential to cause unintended conflicts with critical systems (i.e. in the downed Swissair flight 111 example I gave in another comment) I was suggesting that these should still be treated just as seriously. Don't get me wrong though, I don't think that using JS in a plane is a bad idea. In fact I think the aviation industry is extremely slow moving and it frustrates me, fortunately the experimental category has access to some interesting tools but for certified aircraft you're very restricted in what you can and cannot do to modify the aircraft.
- geofft 11y ago
  > No that is simply not true, seg faults provide useful debug info in any potential core dump they provide. I'm not sure I understand this. Can't you get a backtrace out of a JavaScript exception just as well as you can get one out of a segfault? The segfault itself doesn't carry any information other than at best the faulting instruction and the nature of the fault, and you can surely get that out of a JavaScript exception. Furthermore, a segfault is very often a sign of memory corruption that has already happened, possibly in the stack frames themselves. "undefined is not a function" is not. JS code that crashes with that error is in a much more debuggable state than native code that crashes with a segfault. And you can certainly configure your interpreter to take a coredump on an uncaught JS exception, which will definitely be more debuggable than a coredump post-memory corruption. (Your personal attack is not an argument.)

iSnow 11y ago

>and in the flight logs they can see the cause clearly I know it's a joke, but still: the in-flight entertainment system doesn't log to the flight data recorder.