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Comment by nend | Hacker News Reader

When it comes down to it, most software bugs don't matter. Reimburse the customer, wait a few days for a dev to fix something, whatever, it'll get resolved and everyone will be whole again. Contrast this with construction, if there's a "bug" in the building, people can die, or lose housing, or companies can lose large amounts of money. Bug in a billing system? Just try and pay again next week.

In industries where software bugs do have large consequences, well they tend to be heavily regulated industries already: finance, aerospace, government systems, automated cars, elevators, medical devices.

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Not to mention that buildings are equally full of all kinds “bugs” that are more toward the annoying end of the spectrum. You learn to live with them or fix them.

Realistically, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen something created by humans that was entirely bug-free.

Yes, it's not an industry problem, it's just that most software isn't critical. When software is critical, it's also handled differently. I worked on critical car software, where a bug is expected to cause a safety hazard, and can lead to a car crash. The development process is completely different from some non-critical web service. FMEA analysis, breaking down the software into ASIL levels per component so some components get the very thorough ISO 26262 procedures, every code change has to be traced to a requirement and reviewed by two people. Tooling requires 100% branch coverage in tests, anything that's manually excluded from tests has to have a written justification and manual analysis. Code to be written strictly in MISRA C, any non-compliance detected by static analysis blocks the merge until resolved or manually verified and documented.

Developing that kind of software is so different from most non-critical software that it might as well be different industries altogether.

The article claims is that stability on a national level involves a large number of these non-critical systems all working correctly on a systemic level.

well that's true not just for software. For society has a whole to work, you need a bunch of non-critical system to work well together. It doesn't mean you are required to have a license to be alive (However, that would make a great plot for a Black Mirror episode I guess)

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