Did you read the article? It's about the inflight entertainment system, and has nothing to do with the flight recorders.
"the crash was generally believed to have been caused by faulty wiring in the cockpit after the entertainment system in the plane started to overheat"
It's not too far fetched to think you could end up with an infinite loop (or other random issue) in some inflight entertainment system code, causing it to overhead and potentially ignite. I'm sure there are plenty of safeguards, but they too could fail...and this is why we still have circuit breakers and a master switch in planes that a human can control. Sadly humans too can (and often do...) fail to make the right decision.
Any system other than flight surfaces, avionics and the source of propulsion to an aircraft add some degree of risk that we could otherwise fly without.
Edits: Spelling and general sillyness.
Often when you review critical failures you find multiple things went wrong at once to cause the catastrophic failure. I would place a good bet that there was a failed fan, poorly secured heatsink or maybe just a clogged air filter that meant the hardware was unable to handle the additional heat being produced.
What makes the joke relevant to the discussion is that this is the first thought on lots of people's mind: "gee, I hope they don't ever use it for the actual flying system".
It sure was the first thought I had, even before seeing the parent's joke.
That's the second thought for me. The first was "thank goodness the airline I'm flying intercontinental with next week uses Boeing planes at that route".
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1...
What's remarkable about HN is that most jokes are heavily voted down with responses like "go back to reddit", and jokers regularly complain that HN has no sense of humor. And yet every now and then a joke gets voted to the top. I've yet to wrap my mind around this phenomenon, personally...
People overestimate how different they are from the average person all the time, but regression to the mean is a thing. That's how we get a general culture (in the broad sense) -- even if there are subcultures within it.
Besides, how diverse is HN? If anything it's one of the more targeted communities -- most people here already are focused in programming and startups, and have a same-ish background even when from different countries. Contrast with something like YouTube or Reddit (general channels), where people are from all walks of life.
If 9gag, which also gets people from all around the world and with all kinds of interests and ages, can develop a "cumulative sense of humor" (and it has) then surely HN can too. This doesn't mean that everyone on HN will agree on some funny thing -- just that a large percentage will.
Someone deduced that it was the time that the comment was created that mattered. If a large number of jokesters are on at one point then their up votes will create the critical mass to push the comment to the top and keep it there.
I also believe that once a post is at the top fewer people will downvote it, either because they are afraid to go against popular opinion or merely respect it and leave it as it is.