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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

> So what is the right way to handle these updates?

Require updates to be sent to a government entity, which will test the code for X miles of real traffic, and then releases the updates to the cars. Of course, costs of this are to be paid by the company.

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Current development of cars is done with safety as a paramount concern. There is no need to filter everything through a government entity. However the automobile companies are responsible for their design decisions. This should absolutely apply to software updates. That does mean complete transparency during investigations, a complete audit trail of every software function invoked prior to a crash.

So, no filter, but government penalties and legal remedies should be available.

I agree. I think companies should be losing serious money and individual should be losing jobs over crashes like these, much like in the aircraft sector.

"Current development of cars is done with safety as a paramount concern."

That's exactly the impression that I don't get from Tesla very much. Instead I see the follwing:

Get that thing to market as quickly as possible. If the software for safety critical systems is sub-par, well, can be fixed with OTA updates. That's fine for your dry cleaning app. For safety critical software that's borderline criminal

Hype features far beyond their ability (autopilot). Combine this with OTAs, which potentially change the handling of something that is not at all autopilot, but actually some glorified adaptive cruise control. For good measure: Throw your customers under the bus if ineviteble and potentially deadly problems do pop up

Treating safety issues merely as a PR problem and acting acordingly. Getting all huffy and insulted and accusing the press of fake news when such shit is pointed out

I could go on. But such behavior to me is not a company signaling that safety is of paramount concern.

"That does mean complete transparency during investigations, a complete audit trail of every software function invoked prior to a crash."

Let's just say that Tesla's very selective handling and publication of crash data does not signal any inclination for transparency.

Seriously ? so instead of taking x amount of time it will take x amount of time + a few years.

Testing is absolutely necessary. We're talking about millions of cars here, which are potentially millions of deadly weapons. You don't want companies pushing quick fixes, which turn out to contain fatal bugs.

That sounds like a great way to stall all further progress, which has a horrific human cost of its own.

Government has a valid role to play, though, by requiring full disclosure of the contents of updates and "improvements," by setting and enforcing minimum requirements for various levels of vehicle autonomy, and by mandating and enforcing uniform highway marking standards. Local DOTs are a big part of the problem.

Yeah, because we know governments are really good at giving certifications and doing tests that mean sonething. Lets put every design decision in the hand of governements then! or better, nationalize car companies! Problem solved?

In any case, let a third party control the actual updating, so that we know when and how often cars are updated. Require at least X months of time between code submission and deployment to cars. We don't want a culture of "quick fixes".

This is a popular idea: Just put someone in charge! It ignores the incentives for those gatekeepers, who are now part of the system. In practice I don't think you're going to get better updates, you're going to get "almost no updates".

See also: The FDA and drug approvals.

So you want to do away with the FDA? Put BigPharma in charge and let them regulate themselves? That sounds a lot less appealing to me.

fdareview.org - the fda kills more people in late/non approvals than it saves through denials. this is why compassionate use has been on the rise

It does not, in any way, imply that pharmaceutical companies would do a better job if left to their own devices and market pressure.

There's a lot of sunlight between letting pharma companies run rampant and having the FDA. One could imagine private non-profit testing and qualifications standards organizations along the lines of the underwriters laboratories

And who will manage all that testing? A government entity? Because that would bring us back to the original point.

UL is not "managed" by a government.

It is not completely out of this world to imagine multiple private entities involved in pharma dossier reviews instead of having the FDA. The FDA employs tons of private consultants anyway so they bring virtually no value.

It took years for the FDA to investigate Theranos in case you are not aware. And they only did when the press started digging up. Poor, poor track record.

Flying in an airplane is safe because of direct intervention by the government.

Cars have been made safe for us also by direct intervention by the government. From important things like mandating seat belts and crash safety to smaller things like forcing the recall of tens of millions of faulty air bag inflators.

These are just a few of the many things Uncle Sam has done to make things safer for us.

Isn’t flying mostly safe because of post hoc safety analysis followed by operating requirements? I don’t think the FAA tests every change made to aircraft before they can fly?

De facto the FAA indeed does that very thing.

First, any change in design (or in configuration, in the case of repairs) is backed by PEs or A&P mechanics who sign off on the changes. Their career rides on the validity of their analysis so that's a better guarantee than some commit message by a systems programmer.

Second, the FAA basically says "show us what you are changing" after which they will absolutely require physical tests (static or dynamic tests, test flights, etc., as appropriate to the scope of change).

And I'd say flying is so safe mainly from the blameless post-mortem policy that the American industry instantiated decades ago and which is constantly reinforced by the pros in the NTSB. It's a wonderful model for improvement.

I think that the FAA's role is theoretically as you express, but in practice, there is significantly less oversight (especially direct oversight) than implied.

As an example, the crash of N121JM on a rejected takeoff was due (only in part) to a defective throttle quadrant/gust lock design that went undetected during design and certification, in part because it was argued to be a continuation of a conformant and previously certificated design. (Which is relevant to the current discussion in that if you decide to make certification costly and time-consuming, there will be business and engineering pressure to continue using previously certificated parts, with only "insignificant changes".)

https://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=20140531-...

PS: I 100% agree on the NTSB process' contribution to safety.

That's fascinating, it's kind of a collectivizing of the responsibility for safety.

If I, as an engineer, sign of on changing the screws on the flaps for cheaper ones and the plane crashes because the flaps go loose due to the screws being unable to handle the stress, my career can be assumed over if I have no good explanation.

If an engineer signs off a change they sign that they have validated all the constraints and that for all they know the machine will work within the specs with no faults.

If a software engineer commits code we may run some tests over it, look a bit over it. That's fine. But if the software ends up killing anyone, the software engineer is not responsible.

And yes, to my knowledge, every change to an aircraft is tested before flight or atleast validated by an engineer that understands what was just changed.

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