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Comment by gph | Hacker News Reader

Weird, but really shouldn't almost the entire focus be on the terrible design and the people responsible for it in the first place? Why does Miyagi still have his job? Unless the "button pusher" was also the developer I don't see what having him cooperate really accomplishes. I think we all generally know what he did. He clicked the wrong thing. This was practically an eventuality.

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The focus is surely going to be on finding a scapegoat to blame quickly and coming up with a story that the public can understand that makes this all that scapegoat's fault. The scapegoat will not have the word "manager" in his title. The button pusher should be only talking to his union rep and/or lawyer at this point.

Everyone "in the know" already knows HI-EMA has incompetent management because such a bad user interface was allowed to be in use. This hunt for a scapegoat just sends a signal that the management also has no intention to improve themselves.

Like Abu Ghraib before the Bush torture memos were leaked. It's easy to convict people without power, everyone else keeps doing what they've always been doing.

>...really shouldn't almost the entire focus be on the terrible design and the people responsible for it in the first place?

I was just thinking that!

I can just imagine (in my own head, of course) that this guy has been banging pots and pans talking to executives and those above him to set aside the time and/or budget to fix the terribly archaic and sensitive system. Now he's sitting there looking guilty as possible and his only way out is to throw everyone who ignored him under the bus.

Why do I assume that things are this way? I feel like I've dealt with 20-30 different situations like this in my ~12 years programming and of course they were WAY smaller in comparison but there is no "clean way out". Feelings are going to get hurt and the work place's fabric could be torn to shreds. Nobody wants to be responsible for that.

That’s just bad leadership. Leadership is about taking responsibility. “Here’s what happened, here’s what we learned, and here’s what we’re doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again.” It’s doesn’t have to end badly for anyone.

> I think we all generally know what he did.

We all know stories about what appeared to or was claimed to have happened that reached the media through official and unofficial channels before any internal investigation.

Hmmm, so you think it's possible that the UI was designed with the proper checks and the government officials in charge have decided not to correct the public narrative because...?

...Because "HEMA can’t publicize the actual screen because of security concerns — the system could then then be vulnerable to hackers"

http://www.civilbeat.org/2018/01/hawaii-distributed-phony-im...

(Quite a load of BS, that statement.)

My adblocker makes that page show nothing. Your article is perhaps related:

http://www.businessinsider.com/hawaii-emergency-agency-passw...

I think its quite likely there are system design, procedural, and other problems with both how the alert happened and how it remained uncorrected for as long as it did that have not been revealed yet; the reasons they haven't been probably involves a mixture of people not interested in exposing their own failings (and those people certainly have an incentive not to correct the public narrative) and even the involved people not individually being aware of the whole picture and no one having yet put all the pieces together.

I suspect that the picture of the UI problem that has become public is likely accurate as far as it goes, but is also far from a complete picture.

Sure, but they probably want to know who was in the room with him, what was their reaction, what was his reaction, did they realize anything was immediately wrong? did they know who to contact? etc...

If an air traffic controller was involved in a plane crash in a non-culpable manner, I'm sure people would feel very strongly that he should cooperate with investigators. Why is this situation different?

Air crash investigations cannot be used in court

I've never heard of this before. Do you know what law or precedent establishes this?

49 C.F.R. § 835.2

> Pursuant to section 701(e) of the Federal Aviation Act of 1958 (FA Act), and section 304(c) of the Independent Safety Board Act of 1974 ( 49 U.S.C. 1154(b)) (Safety Act), no part of a Board accident report may be admitted as evidence or used in any suit or action for damages growing out of any matter mentioned in such reports.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/49/835.2

You may also want to read more about how we got here, too:

http://www.aircraftbuilders.com/files/2716/File/lr2000d.pdf

I would like to know why it was established.

From the link in basseq's response to my question: "The investigations are meant to be litigation neutral in order to promote impartiality and foster cooperation so that the NTSB’s mission of finding the cause of an accident can be accomplished in order to prevent similar ones from occurring."

Crucially, the National Transportation Safety Board's purpose is to make safety recommendations, not to enforce law.

That sounds like one of the best uses of public funds today.

I think that's what the law should be. Identify why something failed as opposed to trying to figure out who to punish.

This should be done in more places like hospitals and even the police

Comrad buttonpusher implicated himself as guilty before the bureaucrazy and promised to better himself in a camp through self-reinforced labour and reconditioning. "All hail mother UsSiA!" was his final statement. Seriously the guy shouldnt have said a thing at first. His bosses bailed on him, he realized to late that he was a blame sock puppet on the frontlines between federal law and local law.

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