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Comment by bityard | Hacker News Reader

> we need to force the rest of the industry

Or we could, you know, not force anything and just work together to solve problems instead.

Different industries, environments, and individuals all have vastly different requirements and _your particular_ mindset and methods do not fit all use cases.

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In what use case is non-ephemeral IT infrastructure necessary?

Spacecraft come to mind. Missions take a long time to come to fruition and there are already enough variables to consider. Fixing the mission control computer configuration as far in advance as possible removes one more variable from the equation.

That entire industry needs a level of reliability several orders of magnitude more than any other industry. They couldn't redeploy servers even if they wanted to. I'm by no means an expert Space Systems Engineer. But any NASA technicians reading my original comment would probably agree with me in the general case. Space stuff certainly does not fall under the general case, because it's not possible.

Hi, spacecraft flight software engineer here. If I agreed I wouldn't have commented. It's not that we need several orders of magnitude more reliability than any other industry, it's that for some reason most other industries have decided to accept several orders of magnitude less reliability than they need. The day-to-day pain of dealing with a constant barrage of bugs that never get fixed and forced updates that introduce new bugs on top of the old ones makes me consider just giving up on technology and living in a cabin in the woods semi-seriously on at least a monthly basis.

Embedded systems

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