31–40 of 92 posts
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I like the term "defect" it's more accurate than "bug."
Is it? I think the definition of Bug is literally defect. Maybe it carries a different 'weight' for some people?
A “defect” is a declaration that something is evidently faulty with a clear onus on the vendor to fix.
It seems like there are almost daily HN front page items about aviation, and a lot of pilots in the comments. I've wondered about the reasons for such an overlap in interests among people here. I fit this myself: I grew up playing flight simulators, studied computer science as an undergrad, was a military helicopter pilot for a while, and then went to grad school for computer science. Along the way, I've personally m…
Makes sense if your software is responsible for keeping people alive. Most of us don't need to work to such a standard (thankfully).
If you want to become a better developer through aviation, I can't recommend anything more highly than reading through NTSB accident reports. Learn from others the many, many ways small problems and misjudgements become accidents. It'll change the way you build things.
I'm really glad I stumbled on your comment. I train people in conflict resolution and emotional leadership and I've been looking for places to learn more about conflicts and causes and I think these NTSB reports could provide me a lot of examples from which to learn. They remind me of how at college I had a class on business communication and we discussed the communication issues that led to the Space Shuttle Challen…
a major focus has been on encouraging less-experienced members of the flight crew to speak up if they notice something wrong, and ensuring that the more-experienced pilots are open to receiving that feedback instead of adopting an "I'm more senior, I know what I'm doing, don't question it" attitude.
If you want to become a better developer through aviation, I can't recommend anything more highly than reading through NTSB accident reports. Learn from others the many, many ways small problems and misjudgements become accidents. It'll change the way you build things.
It takes two major failures or errors today to cause the crash of a commercial transport aircraft. All the single points of failure have been fixed. You'll see this repeatedly in NTSB reports. Failure or event A happened, and then failure or event B happened. Single-event crashes of airliners are very, very rare.
Now you've jinxed it!
Makes sense if your software is responsible for keeping people alive. Most of us don't need to work to such a standard (thankfully).
It seems like there are almost daily HN front page items about aviation, and a lot of pilots in the comments. I've wondered about the reasons for such an overlap in interests among people here. I fit this myself: I grew up playing flight simulators, studied computer science as an undergrad, was a military helicopter pilot for a while, and then went to grad school for computer science. Along the way, I've personally m…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The cliff note version: More people die because they're in a hurry/feel pressured and push a marginal situation when they should have known better than you could possibly believe.
This is one of the sadder reasons why scheduled aviation is so safe. When flying planes is your job, why would you ever push your luck? I feel so tired, that storm looks pretty nasty, or the maintenance guy seemed like he had no idea why it's doing that - fuck it, we're not going, get the airline to put you on another plane if there is one, otherwise get them to pay for your hotel, I'm not flying anywhere today. One…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it? I think the definition of Bug is literally defect. Maybe it carries a different 'weight' for some people?
I think for many people “Bug” can imply something that crawled in from outside and messed up the system, “defect” implies that there was an avoidable deficiency in the specification or the implementation. The engineering mindset might prefer “defect” since it implies that we can fix the process and improve the quality of future products, whereas “bug” implies these things are just a fact of life and you can’t expect…
That’s really not how 99% of software problems happen. They are defects because the software was defective from the moment it was conceptualized or typed in.
“Bug” tries to soften/downplay the developer’s role in producing a defective program.