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Comment by salesguy222 | Hacker News Reader

As a foil to your claim that people don't die from bad code:

In 1999, when the US was engaging in a bombing campaign in Serbia against "military targets" that were staffed by civilians, the US bombed the Chinese Embassy, killing several and injuring dozens of civilians.

The US later "apologizied" by saying "sorry, we programmed the coordinates improperly."

Now, I'm not sure if that means some CIA intern college kid task monkey supplied the wrong coordinates to the bomb programmer, or if the bomb programmer typed the (correct) coordinates improperly.

But, software absolutely does kill people when wielded by lazy, incompetent, and often, diploma-holding programmers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_bombing_of_the...

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One of the problems with GPS designators was when you changed batteries it reset to your current location which has lead to more than one blue on blue

Wow, that's brutal. I wonder if those American lives are considered collateral damage too to those pushing for war

Yes it was a bug in the embedded software as I recall - the testing did not make it squaddie proof.

Pretty sure operational missile targeting isn't done by programmers.

Do you think a typographer can enter coordinates into a system from the late 80s?

The pilots themselves can't even enter the coordinates. These planes were programmed by the CIA.

I believe they are entered by authorized service officers using methods typical in other industrial data entry applications (e.g. serial console). Entering waypoints and target coordinates has nothing to do with computer programming. Just like when you bum an extra trailing zero in your Excel spreadhseet it's not a programming error.

While I can agree with you that entering waypoints is not quite analogous to software engineering, I think we are arguing over semantics.

Especially in 1999 and especially with legacy systems, the word "programming" means "providing computers with coded instructions for the automatic performance of a task".

This is similar to how a television network would "program" a list of shows to occur in order automatically.

I suppose my overriding point here is that there are credentialed people with smart sounding degrees whose maximum extent of interacting with computers is typing in instructions.

And therefore, we should be extremely wary when we use credentialing as the litmus test for "should they enter bomb coordinates that will be flying over civilian heads"

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