Hacker News Reader

It was one of the standard examples in my introductory computer science classes, along with the Ariane overflow and the inaccurate system clock on some missile defence system that got a bunch of soldiers killed in Iraq when someone missed the scheduled restart hack.

View on HN

The missile defense system issue:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIM-104_Patriot#Failure_at_Dha...

> The Patriot missile battery at Dhahran had been in operation for 100 hours, by which time the system's internal clock had drifted by one-third of a second. Due to the missile's speed this was equivalent to a miss distance of 600 meters.

Brief summary of the Patriot missile failure in Saudia Arabia in 1991: http://www-users.math.umn.edu/~arnold//disasters/patriot.htm...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com