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The Therac-25 Incident (2021)

(thedailywtf.com)
449 points lemper | 1 comments | 27 Aug 25 06:57 UTC | HN request time: 0.207s | source
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vemv ◴[27 Aug 25 08:45 UTC] No.45036986[source]▶
My (tragically) favorite part is, from wikipedia:

> A commission attributed the primary cause to generally poor software design and development practices, rather than singling out specific coding errors.

Which to me reads as "this entire codebase was so awful that it was bound to fail in some or other way".

replies(2): >>45037358 #>>45038872 #
1. ycombobreaker ◴[27 Aug 25 12:43 UTC] No.45038872[source]▶
Sibling reply notes the "process" is the problem, amd I would second that. I would also like to add, it's perfectly possible to produce a high quality code base with poor practices. This can happen with very small, expert teams. However, certain qualities become high-variance, which becomes a hazard over time.