to be fair, they needed to scale to roughly a thousand concurrent users (where concurrent is used very loosely here). so I wouldn't say that scaleability was really a requirement. 1000 users is nothing.
You think I was rude asking you about your experience. Now think how rude this unsubstantiated allegation of obvious simplicity of the code in question is to the person who wrote it -- with the weight of hundreds of lost lives on their shoulders.
These control systems can get arbitrary complex. We don't know anything about the hardware this runs on and what it has to interface with. We don't know the constraints and age of the codebase. Nothing. To assume that this boils down to a simple if statement is something I would expect from a recent college graduate, or someone who has only worked at a web startup, not a person with 5+ years of real world experience building complex systems.
I agree about all the points about testing and business processes. We have enough evidence to conclude that unforgivable mistakes were made there (and I point to that in my original comment).
"The technical implementation can be roughly inferred by any programmer", "such a foreseeable failure state"... how many years of experience do you have?
All the talk about how crappy Boeing engineering here was is bullshit and speculation and I am surprised PG participates in it. What we can discuss objectively here is incident response in which Boeing allowed the situation to continue after the first crash. How did they not run hundreds of hours of simulations, code reviews etc, etc on the system assumed to be at fault? How did they not immediately change the safety features associated with MCAS to be free and mandatory for everyone? Engineering mistakes happen and are hard to prevent. Business mistakes like this are a sign of terrible culture, lack of priorities and are an existential thread to the company.
Meh, it is not as hard as it seems. Just get yourself 2 kids in quick succession. Adding second one will be both easier than getting first and it will highlight how silly it was to feel that it is difficult when it was just one. Also they will play with each other while you watch TV and drink beer.
I agree. I know some doctors and while they do tell stories about the patients (obviously completely anonymously) and sometimes have a laugh about them, you can always feel certain base level of respect, love and care, not unlike someone telling about their kids doing something silly. Good doctors don't dehumanize their patients, ever.
I wonder if it would be possible to design a system which would power down some of the memory when not plugged to a power source. I do all my dev on an MBP and would be more or less fine if the memory-intensive things were only available when plugged in.
That said, I don't really feel like 16gb limits me in any way except for doing data processing, but that should be happening on the cluster anyways.
Oh man, I don't care (as much) about typewriters but yeah, what a happy story. It's like visiting a town for a day and learning by accident that the band you've loved for years but never seen live is playing there this very night.