And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway • Hacker News Board

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#351

Post by milesvp » Wed, Aug 19, 2026, 4:50 PM UTC

Espressosaurus wrote: post #313

quietbritishjim wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Wikipedia article the previous commenter linked doesn't mention this, and I've looked at a few sources linked from it and they don't mention it either. They mention that previous Therac machines had "hardware interlocks" to prevent this sort of issue - maybe those are the safety fuses you're both talking about? - but it says they were never included in Therac-25 in the first place, because the software was assume…

Yeah, the lack of hardware interlocks are part of what makes it a (literal!) textbook case for software engineering ethics. I remember talking about it several times over my college career, and for good reason. To this day when people start talking about software in the loop in a safety context I get extremely twitchy. I don't let that shit happen on my watch.

I had an interview once for a firmware position dealing with (relatively) high wattage transmitters. They wanted to know how I’d deal with some conditions where I’d need to turn off the power quickly. After talking a bit about my experience with hard real time deadlines, I sheepishly asked why they didn’t have diodes to mitigate the problem. I think it was one of the questions that got me an offer. Apparently having firmware engineers with even minor EE background and will think about analogue design is a little uncommon.

Today, I’d ask about more ways to push the responsibility away from the firmware to stop catastrophic failures. If the debugger pauses the CPU you can’t use the CPU to regulate things. I’ve worked on things where the failure mode can be explosive and it makes dev really harrowing if you can’t rely on hardware interlocks.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#352

Post by mrguyorama » Wed, Aug 19, 2026, 5:05 PM UTC

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #152

cardanome wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ideal number of jails and homeless people is zero. Obviously you will not reach that literally. That's why it is an ideal number, not a real number. It is still a good and worthy goal. Finnland for example has nearly eradicated homelessness. It is not literally zero but 0.08% which is pretty good. You can also reduce the crime rate dramatically by better social security, education, easier access to mental health…

>Finnland for example has nearly eradicated homelessness. It is not literally zero but 0.08% which is pretty good. If we had Finland's winters, I think we could eradicate homelessness by January.

Maine has hundreds and hundreds of homeless people still, despite below 0 weather for much of the year, including a famous case of a guy who lived in the woods for like a decade.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#353

Post by Hugsbox » Wed, Aug 19, 2026, 5:12 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #329

OroPla wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of my time in a large dormitory. The first time the fire alarm went off at night without there even being a fire, I went outside. All the other times - and I lost track of counting - I just ignored it and went back to sleep.

I once worked at a building that decided it was a good safety practice to test the fire alarms every 3 months.

My job does it weekly. It's a massive factory too, so the alarms are absolutely ear-splitting. They make a big deal out of safety, and wearing ear protection out on the production floor when I go out there, and all this other stuff, yet on a weekly basis they're absolutely shattering my ear drums. Love it.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#354

Post by nirui » Wed, Aug 19, 2026, 5:12 PM UTC

> I asked him about the incident - he talked about how they built the SMS infrastructure, what they did to secure it, how they prevented spam, and how one day armed men arrived.

Maybe this confusing can be resolved if you view the authority, spammers, and "armed men" as equals. For example, you can treat them as interest groups, but with different level of power. It's a game, it's about incentives, desire, promise and payment, nothing about "do the right thing" or "for the people".

Now it's the Armed Forces got the top power, so you obey them until either they get replaced, or your own power grown so you don't have to continue pretending. The rule is just that simple.

And on the referenced "Civic Hygiene" article:

> But! Shock horror! After creating the database, the Government loses the election and the homophobes at UKIP get in to power! Now they have a database of every gay in the village, and can harass then, try to "cure" them, or make their lives a living hell.

Then, you just get cured ;) It's like a magic. Previous day you are a guy with a deeply lovely boyfriend, today you are seeking to marry the most beautiful woman available, because the cure they give you make you realized how disgusting the hairs on man's legs really are, ew! puke! Just lie, everybody can do that. Truth only belongs to people you love and love you, not the people who don't care about you, not even the neutral public.

BTW: Completely off-topic here: There was an article titled "Incentives are for losers" posted few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49227652. It was beautifully put together, the leftist part of me almost convinced.... But, the rest of me realized that if you look the real "successful" people out there, the rich and powerful etc, you'll found that they all succeed by chasing the right incentives. Interesting uh?

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#355

Post by bigstrat2003 » Wed, Aug 19, 2026, 5:14 PM UTC

ubertaco wrote: post #244

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US spewing all the alarms at the line level employees and fatiguing the shit out of them is a direct (and predictable, but of course everyone who complained in advance got sneered at by the usual demographics) result of OSHA policy. Same bunch of moronic incentives that result in there being a policy against everything and employees technically violating the rules to work normally. Whenever you see an alarm fa…

Yeah, if only the government didn't regulate that pesky checks notes workplace safety, then for-profit companies could be free to act for the good of all, like they always do!

Nobody has said that, so you're arguing against a strawman. The parent poster made the argument that there's too much government regulation such that it causes fatigue and ignoring the rules, not that there should be zero.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#356

Post by jollyllama » Wed, Aug 19, 2026, 5:19 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #303

quietbritishjim wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't think that was about too many alarms going off and so that a real one was being ignored, and re-reading the article doesn't give that impression either. It was more to do with a bug in the user interface (it appeared that you were re-editing a field you'd just filled in but actually weren't) and a memory corruption bug, along with assuming that software always works so doesn't need any additional checks. Are…

The alarms were safety hardware interlocks. Nobody asked why and found the UI bugs that was causing this. The hardware interlocks were removed because the system had been working safely for so long. This was really feedback - nobody informed the developers that safety hardware interlocks were locking all the time. Edit: see replies, originally I wrote fuses, but hardware interlocks is more correct.

The miscommunication between GGP and GP ITT exposes the contextual minefield of ambiguity we navigate daily. What is an "error"? A mistake made by the developer, or a fault condition exposed to users?

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#357

Post by Hugsbox » Wed, Aug 19, 2026, 5:27 PM UTC

nerdsniper wrote: post #155

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can set your phone to filter these out, but then you'll also miss the notification about North Korea commencing artillery bombardment. Do you know why there aren't more granular controls? On my phone in the US the toggleable alert options are: Extreme Threats Severe Threats AMBER alerts (child abduction alerts) Public Safety Messages State and Local Tests

I would have thought so too, but it turns out that the USA seems to have the exact same problem! Millions of Texans were woken up at 4AM to an "EXTREME" level alert because one police officer was shot when he went to serve an arrest warrant to a suspected burglar at his apartment at 11pm earlier the same night. The officer recovered and was back on duty 5 weeks later. This shooting happened in one of the most remote…

I'm in Nova Scotia, Canada, and we had an even more (in my opinion) egregious case about two months ago that I'm still fuming about.

Got woken up at just around 3:20 in the morning (I get up to go to work at 5) to an emergency alert blasting over mine and my wife's phones:

"WOMAN WITH DEMENTIA MISSING FROM CARE FACILITY IN [town that's an hour from us]"

What the hell am I supposed to do about it? Get up and start walking around my town to see if she's somehow walked all this way? I felt bad for the lady, but this isn't a "wake everybody up in the middle of the night" scenario, just get the cops involved and look around the area where she went missing.

Fiiiiinally just about get back to sleep (took a while because I was fucking furious), must have been about 4:30 and it starts going off again.

"FOUND: MISSING WOMAN IN [town] HAS BEEN LOCATED AND IS SAFE"

Found. They woke me up to let me know there was no emergency. Do not even get me started on the absurdity of it, I'm genuinely still absolutely pissed. Best part is? We can't shut off our emergency alerts. The CRTC mandates that there must not be a way to opt out of them.

Sorry for the rant, your story reminded me of this bullshit and got me all fired up.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#358

Post by bigstrat2003 » Wed, Aug 19, 2026, 5:31 PM UTC

inigyou wrote: post #251

californical wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m guessing there’s a bit of breathing room at the lower end of the system - there will be people who become drug addicts or have major mental health breaks and lose everything. And ideally we have good safety nets that find these people and give them resources and treatment, but some people will refuse everything and end up in bad situations of homelessness due to their drug and/or mental health crises. And even in…

Has anyone studied why homeless people refuse help? It's usually because the "help" isn't help. E.g. "you can sleep here but only if you haven't used drugs in the last week, so we'll test your blood before we let you in"

That is help. A drug addicted homeless person has two serious problems, and it's not generally viable to try to solve the homelessness problem without solving the drug addiction. Even if you were to straight up give each drug addict his own house, a lot of them will wind up selling the house to buy more drugs because it's that hard to resist the temptation when you're addicted. So, in order to help with the homelessness, you generally have to help with the drug addiction at the same time.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#359

Post by rkuykendall-com » Wed, Aug 19, 2026, 5:46 PM UTC

decimalenough wrote: post #118

> But it is easy to see why some people feel this might open the gateway to messages which, at best, are irrelevant If you're in South Korea, you can expect to get around half a dozen emergency notifications every day . Typical contents include "it's cold, so dress warmly", "roads are icy, so drive carefully", and "Mrs Kim, 79, suffers from dementia and was last seen in Seoul wearing a black coat". You can set your p…

In Texas, you get alerts for anything the government wants to virtue-signal about. Silver for elderly, Blue for police, Amber for children, Clear for adults, and of course Camo for veterans. If a cop is shot anywhere in the 250,000+ square miles of the state, the entire population gets woken up by the same blaring noise they use for tornados.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#360

Post by bigstrat2003 » Wed, Aug 19, 2026, 5:48 PM UTC

worthless-trash wrote: post #178

cobbzilla wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No you were not lied to. and thank you for heeding the good advice to not be a jerk. Whether you see it or not, the vast majority of people /are/ generally good, and more importantly they want to be around other people who value being good, not being a jerk. Folks who are all about money and power hang in different circles; I can’t speak to their happiness levels, but regular folks steer clear of them and warn others…

> Whether you see it or not, the vast majority of people /are/ generally good No mate, the entire world is -not- like this. Thank your lucky stars you haven't had to deal with this.

Nobody said the entire world is like that. We know it isn't. But I think the parent poster is correct that more people are good than bad in this world.