Bank of America hired 1000 contractors to patch software flaws exposed by Mythos | Hacker News Reader

Bank of America hired 1000 contractors to patch software flaws exposed by Mythos

cnbc.com

38 pointsmirzap14 comments

What good is "perfect" code when it's used for criminal purposes?

> I.E. Bank of America fined $1.2B for money laundering and sanctions violations [0]

How dense are executives thinking that their crimes will go unnoticed, like some janky lines of code in millions of LOC, that themselves just got exposed by Mythos?

Now, I suppose that these two kinds of scrutiny are somehow positive, but I suspect that universal surveillance might have priority these days.

Doing good for people or subjugating them always was a CHOICE. How often do we choose wisely?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50082398

I suspect ai adoption and development work will be driven by jevon's paradox for the forseeable future. It won't be exactly the same work as before, (see here: fixing software flaws found by an AI), but it'll be interesting.

And then Mythos found bugs in those patches, so another 1000 contractors were hired to patch the new bugs which led to more bugs and so on.

I remember an IBM study that showed you get a new bug for every two you fix.

Exponential decay

perfect recipe for spaghetti code

Why hire contractors if the AI is so good? Isn't the point to be buying tokens?

Banking software is extremely regulated and controlled, both by governments and within the industry itself (one small mistake can wipe out entire institutions within a day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Capital_Group, banks are extremely risk-averse with technology). So likely they were comfortable using agents to _read_ their code but not to write it.

So critical that the work is done in-house. Contractors are for audits. I wonder what’s going on here.

The people who didn’t immediately reduce headcount are all busy rewriting their stack from the ground up and you won’t hear much from them right now.

Unless you are somehow a new bank or a fintech company, it is unlikely. There are a few entities in US ( from the old guard section ) that can rewrite their own stack; and the vast majority of them are hopelessly caught in vendor procurement hell.

Oh definitely, I was speaking more in terms of moral absolutes. The people I knew who wanted to run a financial institution more than they wanted money are all dead.

I can't for the life of me figure out why Knight didn't DK those trades. Exchanges cancel trades all the time.

A lot of the activity did trigger circuit breakers (https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2012-2012-151htm), but a lot of the trades weren't far enough from normal to invalidate. Presumably exchanges don't want to normalize "if your algorithm is shitty we'll give your money back"

Have you ever discussed something like this with an executive? I think the most honest response I got on a project I was involved in that required some legitimate legwork was:

'We can get some cheap remote resources for this'

And the funny thing now.. those resources will likely be using tokens anyway..

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