5 ms·

It didn't - but most errors are simply tolerated because imperfect automation still has absurd economy of scale, very few applications are on a regulated field

It didn't - but most errors are simply tolerated because imperfect automation still has absurd economy of scale, very few applications are on a regulated field or have a well-defined quality standard to meet, and unreliable software tends to at least fail consistently, so it's still a win to diagnose and fix processes compared to humans making creative mistakes.

MattGaiser 6y ago
It is also replacing humans most of the time as well, who are prone to making all sorts of errors. Worse, humans can make the same error twice even after being corrected.
- 7thaccount 6y ago
  Software can also make the same mistake, thousands of times per second or more :)
  - jeffasinger 6y ago
    Those types of errors are usually pretty easy for humans to find and fix.
  - king_panic 6y ago
    "same" is the operative word. Easier to correct the same mistake every time than a different mistake on unpredictable executions.
redis_mlc 6y ago
Well, actually it did. Some of the reasons are: 1) Most applications use very reliable databases as a store. Back in the day, programmers used to write their own one-off BTREE libraries, which stopped with msql/mysql, jet, dbm and sqlite. (A holdover from that era is when interviewers asked you to roll your own sort algorithm, which you should almost never do for production apps.) 2) Some software is fuzzed. 3) Some software has managed memory. 4) Some software has tests.
- johnisgood 6y ago
  5) Some software is formally verified Formal verification is huge these days I would like to think.
  - doteka 6y ago
    Huge? I have worked in this industry for a while now and never heard anyone outside of HN even mention it. It’s decidedly not huge for any definition of huge (outside of academia maybe?)
    - TheUndead96 6y ago
      The "big production" example that kept being referred to in university was a (Belgian?) metro system. I think it was well suited to formal verification because it had a finite number of valid states, and the cost of failure was sufficient to justify the investment. EDIT: I now think it was French, source https://www.prover.com/portfolio-items/ratp-paris/ https://www.prover.com/portfolio-items/ratp-paris/
    - lecunn 6y ago
      https://aws.amazon.com/security/provable-security/?nc1=h_ls https://aws.amazon.com/security/provable-security/?nc1=h_ls
    - deckplecksetter 6y ago
      It's used to some extent in the aviation industry for flight-critical software. So maybe huge in some contexts.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- tehjoker 6y ago
  There was this item on HN recently. :) https://probablydance.com/2016/12/27/i-wrote-a-faster-sorting-algorithm/ https://probablydance.com/2016/12/27/i-wrote-a-faster-sortin...
swiley 6y ago
Correct software has surprisingly little business value.
TheUndead96 6y ago
The phrase "imperfect automation still has absurd economy of scale" is more insightful than many full-length books.
tester34 6y ago
> because imperfect automation still has absurd economy of scale That's what FULL AFK botting in games taught me, kinda random % values, so in my experience it was Automating 80% of stuff is easy, can be done in 1h 90% is starting getting tricky 95% requires you to spend days of testing and writting various scripts 100% is additionally limited by BOT API and would require you to write your own stuff and talk to bot via e.g file system and try to handle things like client/bot crashes, networking maybe, damn... But yea, having to do something once a day for 10min instead of playing 10h is great enough Just to clarify: those are private servers where everybody's botting.
- galkk 6y ago
  > Just to clarify: those are private servers where everybody's botting. I don't think that you need that clarification. The greed of many game developers doesn't have any borders. Artificial delays that force you to spend money to work around them, ridiculous drop rates etc - I, personally, would never judge badly someone who bots, if its doesn't affect other players. Cheating (such as aimbots, wallhacks, radars, nethacks etc) is totally different story though
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  Which games, out of curiosity? Sounds like a whole new way to enjoy games.
  - tester34 6y ago
    Tibia Some random thoughts because I'm kinda busy Game is great and insanely addictive(seriously, I can talk about this more if youre interested), but community on private servers is insanely toxic and uneducated (I don't really like saying this like that, but seriously that's something you tend to do not experience in other games) due to... well, that's interesting topic. This game has relatively high entry level because it's like 23 years old game which has A LOT of content, even more if you do not use spoilers for quests/missions. If you don't play on private servers, then you have to buy "premium account" to be able to play the game to its full potential which costs like 10 euro for a month Dying in this game is very punishing, but it used to be worse like decade ago because nowadays you can buy ingame_currency relatively cheap. Dying decade ago without "protections" could waste your like 2-3 hours of exp and some items, add to that fact that you can be killed on PvP servers by anyone "just because" :P This game is also interested from programming perspective - Private servers are an initiative by programmers to recreate this game engine and host their own server. Nowadays it's mature. One of the most popular private server engines: https://github.com/otland/forgottenserver https://github.com/otland/forgottenserver It's really impressive project. When it comes to botting FULL afk scripts You have to write code which goes to the exp place, don't get stuck somewhere, exp there for a hours (using spells, drink health/mana potions, take loot from corpses, run on the more or less complex spawns (map), go back to the city if you don't have potions, sells loot, take cash to the bank, and repeat Many things can go wrong during that cicle - like other played blocked your "road" to the exp for 1min, or you character just died due to PK(players), lag and maaaaaaaany other. Your script has to consider a lot of those different conditions and trade offs (sometimes you don't want to kill monsters that are between your city and your spawn because it would take 10min, so you just want to run through them, but you can get "trapped" (sorrounded) by them, so you have to consider this) It's not easy to do this good enough that you can start bot on VPS and it will running for a day, week or something similar.
twblalock 6y ago
The other major factor is fault tolerance. Software has bugs, and hardware breaks, but that's accepted. Programmers in industry have invested a lot of time in routing around the problems. That buys time for human operators to get paged and fix things. For every major outage that makes the news, there are thousands of smaller problems that users never notice because of CDNs, failover, graceful-ish service degradation, autoscaling and/or overprovisioning, and fallbacks. Services can be reliable even when the software and hardware that backs them is not. In other words, "reliability" is a property of the whole system, including the human operators, not just the code. The code can actually be pretty bad, yet the entire system can still be reliable in terms of being available and functional when the users want to use it.

MattGaiser 6y ago

It is also replacing humans most of the time as well, who are prone to making all sorts of errors. Worse, humans can make the same error twice even after being corrected.

7thaccount 6y ago
Software can also make the same mistake, thousands of times per second or more :)
- jeffasinger 6y ago
  Those types of errors are usually pretty easy for humans to find and fix.
- king_panic 6y ago
  "same" is the operative word. Easier to correct the same mistake every time than a different mistake on unpredictable executions.

redis_mlc 6y ago

Well, actually it did. Some of the reasons are: 1) Most applications use very reliable databases as a store. Back in the day, programmers used to write their own one-off BTREE libraries, which stopped with msql/mysql, jet, dbm and sqlite. (A holdover from that era is when interviewers asked you to roll your own sort algorithm, which you should almost never do for production apps.) 2) Some software is fuzzed. 3) Some software has managed memory. 4) Some software has tests.

johnisgood 6y ago
5) Some software is formally verified Formal verification is huge these days I would like to think.
- doteka 6y ago
  Huge? I have worked in this industry for a while now and never heard anyone outside of HN even mention it. It’s decidedly not huge for any definition of huge (outside of academia maybe?)
  - TheUndead96 6y ago
    The "big production" example that kept being referred to in university was a (Belgian?) metro system. I think it was well suited to formal verification because it had a finite number of valid states, and the cost of failure was sufficient to justify the investment. EDIT: I now think it was French, source https://www.prover.com/portfolio-items/ratp-paris/ https://www.prover.com/portfolio-items/ratp-paris/
  - lecunn 6y ago
    https://aws.amazon.com/security/provable-security/?nc1=h_ls https://aws.amazon.com/security/provable-security/?nc1=h_ls
  - deckplecksetter 6y ago
    It's used to some extent in the aviation industry for flight-critical software. So maybe huge in some contexts.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
tehjoker 6y ago
There was this item on HN recently. :) https://probablydance.com/2016/12/27/i-wrote-a-faster-sorting-algorithm/ https://probablydance.com/2016/12/27/i-wrote-a-faster-sortin...

swiley 6y ago

Correct software has surprisingly little business value.

TheUndead96 6y ago

The phrase "imperfect automation still has absurd economy of scale" is more insightful than many full-length books.

tester34 6y ago

> because imperfect automation still has absurd economy of scale That's what FULL AFK botting in games taught me, kinda random % values, so in my experience it was Automating 80% of stuff is easy, can be done in 1h 90% is starting getting tricky 95% requires you to spend days of testing and writting various scripts 100% is additionally limited by BOT API and would require you to write your own stuff and talk to bot via e.g file system and try to handle things like client/bot crashes, networking maybe, damn... But yea, having to do something once a day for 10min instead of playing 10h is great enough Just to clarify: those are private servers where everybody's botting.

galkk 6y ago
> Just to clarify: those are private servers where everybody's botting. I don't think that you need that clarification. The greed of many game developers doesn't have any borders. Artificial delays that force you to spend money to work around them, ridiculous drop rates etc - I, personally, would never judge badly someone who bots, if its doesn't affect other players. Cheating (such as aimbots, wallhacks, radars, nethacks etc) is totally different story though
runawaybottle 6y ago
Which games, out of curiosity? Sounds like a whole new way to enjoy games.
- tester34 6y ago
  Tibia Some random thoughts because I'm kinda busy Game is great and insanely addictive(seriously, I can talk about this more if youre interested), but community on private servers is insanely toxic and uneducated (I don't really like saying this like that, but seriously that's something you tend to do not experience in other games) due to... well, that's interesting topic. This game has relatively high entry level because it's like 23 years old game which has A LOT of content, even more if you do not use spoilers for quests/missions. If you don't play on private servers, then you have to buy "premium account" to be able to play the game to its full potential which costs like 10 euro for a month Dying in this game is very punishing, but it used to be worse like decade ago because nowadays you can buy ingame_currency relatively cheap. Dying decade ago without "protections" could waste your like 2-3 hours of exp and some items, add to that fact that you can be killed on PvP servers by anyone "just because" :P This game is also interested from programming perspective - Private servers are an initiative by programmers to recreate this game engine and host their own server. Nowadays it's mature. One of the most popular private server engines: https://github.com/otland/forgottenserver https://github.com/otland/forgottenserver It's really impressive project. When it comes to botting FULL afk scripts You have to write code which goes to the exp place, don't get stuck somewhere, exp there for a hours (using spells, drink health/mana potions, take loot from corpses, run on the more or less complex spawns (map), go back to the city if you don't have potions, sells loot, take cash to the bank, and repeat Many things can go wrong during that cicle - like other played blocked your "road" to the exp for 1min, or you character just died due to PK(players), lag and maaaaaaaany other. Your script has to consider a lot of those different conditions and trade offs (sometimes you don't want to kill monsters that are between your city and your spawn because it would take 10min, so you just want to run through them, but you can get "trapped" (sorrounded) by them, so you have to consider this) It's not easy to do this good enough that you can start bot on VPS and it will running for a day, week or something similar.

twblalock 6y ago

The other major factor is fault tolerance. Software has bugs, and hardware breaks, but that's accepted. Programmers in industry have invested a lot of time in routing around the problems. That buys time for human operators to get paged and fix things. For every major outage that makes the news, there are thousands of smaller problems that users never notice because of CDNs, failover, graceful-ish service degradation, autoscaling and/or overprovisioning, and fallbacks. Services can be reliable even when the software and hardware that backs them is not. In other words, "reliability" is a property of the whole system, including the human operators, not just the code. The code can actually be pretty bad, yet the entire system can still be reliable in terms of being available and functional when the users want to use it.