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Chilling story, the key point to me as a programmer is: >According to Petrov and other sources, the false alarm was eventually traced to the satellite, which p

by fjcp 8y ago

Chilling story, the key point to me as a programmer is: >According to Petrov and other sources, the false alarm was eventually traced to the satellite, which picked up the sun's reflection off the tops of clouds and mistook it for a missile launch. The computer program that was supposed to filter out such information was rewritten. Every programmer should read this as a reminder of how a software bug can have catastrophic consequences. And I know it's hard, as deadlines come closer, the time dedicated to find bugs drops accordingly.

yetihehe 8y ago
It probably wasn't really a bug, but untested behaviour or designers didn't think there could be such strong reflections from clouds. I suppose there wasn't too much real data to test detection algorithms against.
- hellbanner 8y ago
  Untested behavior leading to unexpected results.. is still a bug.
  - phendrenad2 8y ago
    Not a bug caused by programmers, but a bug caused by the domain experts who wrote the specifications for the code. I doubt the programmers writing the code were experts on cloud/satellite imagery interactions.
mercer 8y ago
It's mildly depressing and comforting at the same time to realize that none of the code I've written or am writing will even remotely have anything close to 'catastrophic consequences'. At worst, the number of visitors will drop to 0 for a short while, or clients/internal users won't be able to do their job for said short while. This will quite possibly impact the bottom line of company that relies on that particular site/app/system, but any effect will be lost in the noise (and probably even underestimated, because that's how this happened in the first place!). While it's sort of nice that there are real-world stakes to the worst-case scenario, it's also both comforting and depressing to contemplate how relatively meaningless these stakes really are, personally.

by fjcp 8y ago

yetihehe 8y ago

It probably wasn't really a bug, but untested behaviour or designers didn't think there could be such strong reflections from clouds. I suppose there wasn't too much real data to test detection algorithms against.

hellbanner 8y ago
Untested behavior leading to unexpected results.. is still a bug.
- phendrenad2 8y ago
  Not a bug caused by programmers, but a bug caused by the domain experts who wrote the specifications for the code. I doubt the programmers writing the code were experts on cloud/satellite imagery interactions.

mercer 8y ago

It's mildly depressing and comforting at the same time to realize that none of the code I've written or am writing will even remotely have anything close to 'catastrophic consequences'. At worst, the number of visitors will drop to 0 for a short while, or clients/internal users won't be able to do their job for said short while. This will quite possibly impact the bottom line of company that relies on that particular site/app/system, but any effect will be lost in the noise (and probably even underestimated, because that's how this happened in the first place!). While it's sort of nice that there are real-world stakes to the worst-case scenario, it's also both comforting and depressing to contemplate how relatively meaningless these stakes really are, personally.