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Comment by tsomctl | Hacker News Reader

That feels like an additional sentence was added every time someone screwed up their machine and called support.

I forget where this was posted, but there was a multiline comment along the lines of

  "DO NOT ATTEMPT TO OPTIMIZE OR REFACTOR THIS CODE. 
  When you ignore this warning and fail, increment this tally mark: IIII"

http://bash.org/?947444

    //
    // Dear maintainer:
    //
    // Once you are done trying to 'optimize' this routine,
    // and have realized what a terrible mistake that was,
    // please increment the following counter as a warning
    // to the next guy:
    //
    // total_hours_wasted_here = 25
    //

Do we know what the current tally is?

Is the code still in use?

Likely from this SO answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/482129

You know what they say. Regulations are written in blood.

Well, in aviation. Not so sure for software engineering.

The 737 Max attempted pioneering work in this area.

What do you mean attempted? Boeing successfully slaughtered 346 people with their negligence.

And they didn't even get any new regulations written that I've seen. The hand wheels for the horizontal stabilizer trim became too hard for average pilots to physically operate if the aircraft is going too fast and out of trim far enough (even without being outside the safe operating envelope). There was no regulation limiting how much force the trim wheels can need while within the operating envelope. AFAIK, there's still no such regulation. So the "fixed" 737 Max models didn't change the hand wheels, meaning the physical backup in case of a trim runaway might not actually be usable. Yet they certified it without changes, because there's no regulation saying that the safety backup wheels have to be physically usable by average pilots in the event the primary powered system fails!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

A small fraction of software developers work on safety-critical software. Safety-critical software is (or at least should be) developed with quite different methodologies, as the cost/benefit assessment is very different regarding development speed against number and nature of defects.

If there are lessons written in blood for the development of safety-critical software, they haven't propagated to the wider field of software development.

(Disclaimer: I don't work on safety-critical software.)

NASA's guidelines are not written in blood, but certainly in lost spacecraft. The most famous is the Mars Climate Orbiter that was lost due to ground system and orbiter using different units of measurement, but that's not the only example [1]

1: https://www.csoonline.com/article/3404528/8-famous-software-...

> NASA's guidelines are not written in blood

I can think of at least three NASA missions that resulted in deaths: Apollo 1[1], and the Challenger[2] and Columbia[3] space shuttles.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disas...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaste...

Only one of those particularly affected guidelines. After, anything that might end up in a pure oxygen atmosphere had to be non-inflammable, and very uncomfortable.

Are we living in the same world? Encryption, weed, appliances don't do their jobs in the name of efficiency?

Seems like half the time it's the blood of the lobbyist or spook who didn't realize how heavy that suitcase full of benjamins was and the other half of the time it's the blood of whoever got trampeled when the moral panic turned into a moral stampede.

Cheap quips like "regulations are written in blood" are just high brow ways of saying "because I said so".

As the top level commenter points out, these sorts of messages coming from untrustworthy entities who's best interest only aligns with yours in passing are not held in high regard unless they come with some sort of justification since the entities in question (be they oracle or the EPA) do not have the reputation for honesty that they can rely on. If there's really a hazard, communicate the hazard and don't lie about it. The vast majority of the regulation of which you speak is far closer to the "no user serviceable parts inside" end of the spectrum than the "warning, landmines" end and that is why it's not taken seriously.

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