Hacker News Reader

I wonder if anyone else instantly gets a visual after reading your story:

“Business woman on plane: Are there a lot of these kinds of accidents?

Narrator: You wouldn't believe.

Business woman on plane: Which car company do you work for?

Narrator: A major one.”

I heard the story decades ago, and the problem had been fixed some years prior to that. There are undoubtedly hundreds of similar issues across the tech industry, most get quietly fixed before much damage is done. I only tell the story because it's an example of how obscure details come together in unexpected ways to cause failures. That happens everywhere.

And how brittle the borders we programmers see a strict, as a branching condition, "this should never happen". But in hardware, things are different.

How do you even protect against such a thing you just described? Put the airbag on a diffent microprocessor?

Maybe put some code directly before bag deployment code that disarms the system. So even if the execution reaches it directly through the branches, nothing will happen

Sure but what if the address bus glitches past that block?

Maybe put arming code somewhere completely different?

Of course it's possible to create more and more improbable scenarios. That's not to say those never happen; I've seen really improbable occurrences.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com