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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

The next time you're having a frustrating debugging session, comfort yourself with the knowledge that you're not debugging a hardware issue on a computer built 50 years ago where it takes 45 hours to produce the output of every single command, and where failure means the loss of one of humanity's most important scientific relics.

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only slightly more frustrating that using console.log before IE 9. In those versions, if you called console.log and the console was not enabled (F12), the statement who primary purpose was to debug code, would itself cause an error.

> Please note that in IE, unlike in Firefox, if the developer tools are not active, window.console is undefined and calling console.log() will break. Always protect your calls with window.console && console.log('stuff');

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2656730/how-can-i-use-co...

I don’t know about their process, but if I was in charge of such work, I would create a replica system to mimic the response without the wait, and the risks, it might not eliminate all of them, but definitely will minimize them.

There are replicas but there may also be differences because of the large amount of human effort required to build one. I saw a replica complete with wire-wrapping over a decade ago. This technology looks very foreign to any recent computer engineer. As such, the more practical approach is to write software that can validate most commands you would send. I wonder what level of emulation they have achieved (if any) on modern hardware.

Replicating the bits of hardware destroyed by radiation in the correct place and to the correct degree may be bit tricky.

People often say stuff like this and it's usually somewhat nebulous but... yeah. You're right.

I honestly can't think of a more difficult debugging scenario.

I wonder how many people have to carefully analyze and sign off on every command and update that is sent to the probe?

Probably less than you would imagine. Only so many people are qualified to be able to scrutinize anything for these probes. It’s likely that whatever small team is doing this debugging has the capability within the group to sign off.

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