Comment by Zhyl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Zhyl | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting seeing a TV drama (and, more widely, a great miscarriage of justice turned into a public outcry) centred around an IT issue.

This should be something for the HN community to take note, as this scandal is for Fujitsu the chickens coming home to roost for an issue that started in 1999. We as software developers, the maker of the tools and the facilitators of change and advancement have responsibilities, and those responsibilities can have wide reaching consequences.

We saw in Myanmar that not understanding the locality and not having adequate moderation can have consequences, we see with this case that absolute faith in a system can be damaging and mixed with other factors (such as the UK's obscure Draconian laws around the mail service being able to prosecute people) can be catastrophic.

So, friends, when you are approaching a deadline and you feel as though you need to ship even though you know the product is bug riddled, just take a moment to write some extra tests or to document the shortcomings more thoroughly. Someone you don't know may be depending on it.

So, friends, when asked if 1 + 1 = 472, don't say "of course it does, you filthy thieving criminal" because you don't want to admit you or someone else working on your innovative reimagined system maybe possibly made a mistake.

What point did you think GP was trying to make? I'm confused by your comment

The software this scandal centres around was known for recording incorrect numbers. Numbers that were then relied upon to accuse postal employees of theft. blitzsr is saying that you should be prepares to speak up when your software is fucking up. Essentially a more consise way of saying what zhyl did.

If you are going to sit in court and say the system is flawless and could not possibly make a mistake, despite your extra unit tests and documentation of the shortcomings then you might as well just go home early and skip the extra work.

Honesty comes before all else.

In fact very few of prosecutions relied on actual numbers. The problem was that Horizon handles both POS and accounting, and would shut down the entire store unless SPMs signed off on the accounts. Then if there was a dispute, the PO helpline would tell SPMs "just accept the accounts, we'll investigate later". The investigators would then decide it was fraud, but drop the fraud charge in return for a guilty plea to false accounting - which technically did happen when the SPM first accepted the disputed figures.

So none of the criminal trials ever got as far as actually looking at the disputed figures, because the defended would plead guilty or the PO would just lie about how the system worked to "prove" false accounting. As Justice Fraser wrote in the 2019 common issues judgement:

"This means that, even for disputed items going back as far as the year 2000, this litigation is the first time that there will be any independent consideration of disputed items showing in the branch accounts for the vast majority of the Claimants."

Indeed many of the disputes were not even caused by software errors but human error on the part of the SPM. Errors that they attempted to resolve but could not due to the way PO handled disputes.

So this is far more than just a code quality problem.

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