Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

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>> But every so often, a computer system hiccups, and an ordinary person ends up staring down the barrel of a gun for no reason at all.

> "Aww shucks, you know, bugs happen and sometimes guns get pointed at people because of them". Pardon my language but: What the actual fuck? How does a site write that with a straight face?

At the end of the day, the worst bug I could write might delete an object from a bucket. No bug I create will ever cause physical harm or death to the end user or anyone. No bug I create will ever cause a medical device to give erroneous results causing a patient to be misdiagnosed. This is by design. I don't want to ever be responsible for anything like that. Do people working on these kinds of products just dissociate their work from the potential negative effect their work could have?

Nope. Like people working in all sorts of safety-critical jobs around the world, we exercise care and (hopefully good) judgement.

I always find it interesting that everyone outside the industry focuses on the downside and completely ignores the positives like, you know, actually keeping people alive.

Regardless of the number of people kept alive, having one person not because of a bug I created would not sit well with me. Sure, you can hand wave it away by saying nobody down stream caught it either, but it wasn't their fingers that created the bug. Some people can dissociate that kind of thing. I don't want to find out if I can because I won't work in the fields that require me to need that ability. This isn't a military mindset where "if I don't get them they will get me". This is I fucked up regardless of intent or how complicated the process was. I'm happy you can and are okay with it. Medical equipment is necessary and a good thing so I can appreciate those willing to do it. Flock cameras are not necessary and while maybe not a bad thing they aren't a great thing either. Those that work on shit like Flock are no better than the waste of space and resources those that work in adtech are.

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