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> Our entire field is bad at what we do. Our entire field is bad at what we do, because it's full of coders instead of engineers. Think about it. Building air
by doublesCs 6y ago
> Our entire field is bad at what we do.
Our entire field is bad at what we do, because it's full of coders instead of engineers.
Think about it. Building airplanes reliably has been figured out by aircraft engineers, building elevators safely has been figured out by building engineers, and building software reliably has been figured out by software _engineers_ (the NASA kind, who landed a spacecraft on the moon).
However, this isn't the experience you have on your regular job. "Oh, oops, everything failed because I forgot to do X". Can you imagine if the moon lander crashed because some guy forgot to do that manual thing he's always supposed to do? Of course you can't imagine, because they put actual engineers in charge of that, not coders.
- ForHackernews 6y ago> building software reliably has been figured out by software _engineers_ This is patently untrue when it comes to security. OpenBSD is the closest thing I'm aware of to a "secure" widely used system, and I'm sure that OpenBSD machines are compromised every day. The day that a network exploit is treated with the same seriousness as a commercial jetliner crash is the day I'll believe software security has grown up.
- doubleCs 6y agoWell when I said reliably I wasn't really thinking about something as difficult as security in a system as complex as an OS...
- shireboy 6y agoYou mean like the 125m Mars orbiter lost due to engineers forgetting imperial/metric conversion? https://www.simscale.com/blog/2017/12/nasa-mars-climate-orbiter-metric/ https://www.simscale.com/blog/2017/12/nasa-mars-climate-orbi...
- doubleCs 6y agoI could answer, but I'm not going to because I don't like your sarcasm.
- the-dude 6y agoFlying is only safe because people actually die.