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At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says

(www.nytimes.com)
628 points xbryanx | 1 comments | 11 Jul 25 11:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.253s | source
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hyperman1 ◴[11 Jul 25 13:00 UTC] No.44531640[source]▶
I'd love to see a technical analysis of what went wrong with the software and what to do about it. Similar to when airplanes crash etc... This is another case like Therac-25 that should be tought in every IT master class.
replies(1): >>44531834 #
1. rwmj ◴[11 Jul 25 13:21 UTC] No.44531834[source]▶
I did read a very technical report about this which obviously now I can't find :-( My takeaways were: (1) They didn't bother with double-entry bookkeeping. (2) It was a distributed system which no one fully understood and was not based on any normal distributed system principles. (3) Developers made ad hoc changes to the code and even database to temporarily patch things up, even going so far as to hard-code database ids into special cases throughout the code.

Edit: I think this one: https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/bates-v-... Also related article: https://www.benthamsgaze.org/2021/07/15/what-went-wrong-with...