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Comment by pmichaud | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why this comment was voted down, but I think he could be right -- given the correct resources (time mainly), and assuming the right talent level, I think we could consistently build rock-solid software. The constraint seems to be a (logical and necessary) trade off between total cost and total utility.

As we all know, something that works 95% of the time at 5% the price is very often better than a "perfect" solution. With critical systems like plane navigation, the tradeoff doesn't make sense, so you pay full price for near-perfection... your niche e-commerce site? 95% is sufficient.

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Plane navigation is in someways easier to e-commerce sites as well. The environment that the plane is in, isn't actively malicious. You can collect accurate statistics on weather, where as the attacks and usage (with bots/scraping etc) consistently change.

Not at all man. The physical environment can be much more malicious than you seem to think.

I've done some software for buses, it's toy in comparison (with planes) but you get issues with noise, power supply, vibration, temperature, light (UV killing a touch screen) and probably lots more i've never encountered. The physical world can be every bit as unpredictable as the virtual one.

The major difference is that environmental agents are generally deterministic or stochastic, i.e. obey the law of physics. On the other hand, realms with intelligent agents, such as humans, are inherently unpredictable due to their free will (which is unpredictable by definition).

I don't know about you but if I was writing a program to fly a plane I'd want to make damn sure I took into account an intelligent malicious agent trying to crash my plane.

You also have the free will of humans messing with the system (in my case, fraud prevention), also consider animals interacting the machinary while someone is not watching. I remember hearing a story about a huntsman spider regularily tripping a sensor for a program that measured the weight of lorries.

The only consistent thing you can state is that all these "real world" issues are to do with hardware whereas yours are more softwarey. However the consideration of such issues is necessary across the board.

E-commerce has been around for >15 years now, and there how many tens or hundreds of thousands of e-commerce sites? It's a very well known problem by now.

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