"the crash was generally believed to have been caused by faulty wiring in the cockpit after the entertainment system in the plane started to overheat"
It's not too far fetched to think you could end up with an infinite loop (or other random issue) in some inflight entertainment system code, causing it to overhead and potentially ignite. I'm sure there are plenty of safeguards, but they too could fail...and this is why we still have circuit breakers and a master switch in planes that a human can control. Sadly humans too can (and often do...) fail to make the right decision.
Any system other than flight surfaces, avionics and the source of propulsion to an aircraft add some degree of risk that we could otherwise fly without.
People seem to be missing my point. To be clear, i'm trying to suggest that there is a high chance that the hardware fault that was triggered by overheating, was potentially caused by a software fault.
It is not good that the software malfunctioned but it should be totally isolated from rest of airplane function. Also if software could cause overheating, someone should have redesigned the hardware (heatsink/fan for example) because it was already marginal.
Yep. Likely multiple failures. The software shouldn't cause extra heat, the hardware should be able to handle it, the insulation in the plane shouldn't have caught fire, the pilot should have pulled the circuit breaker sooner...the list goes on.
I'm not sure I agree. While its possible the overheating was due to a failed fan or something physical, but its also very possible that the software running on this hardware caused it to overheat.
Often when you review critical failures you find multiple things went wrong at once to cause the catastrophic failure. I would place a good bet that there was a failed fan, poorly secured heatsink or maybe just a clogged air filter that meant the hardware was unable to handle the additional heat being produced.
Yes, it's clever because it implies how entertainment slowly but inexorably manages to take insinuate itself into and corrupt every essential application.
What makes you think anyone is planning to use NodeJS in avionics in 20 years? Where have you got that information, and how is it relevant to this discussion?
What makes the joke relevant to the discussion is that this is the first thought on lots of people's mind: "gee, I hope they don't ever use it for the actual flying system".
It sure was the first thought I had, even before seeing the parent's joke.
>>Perhaps you missed the whole obvious joke thing?
What's remarkable about HN is that most jokes are heavily voted down with responses like "go back to reddit", and jokers regularly complain that HN has no sense of humor. And yet every now and then a joke gets voted to the top. I've yet to wrap my mind around this phenomenon, personally...
I've seen the phenomenon on Reddit where two identical comments will have completely polar votes. One might have -50 and the other 50.
Someone deduced that it was the time that the comment was created that mattered. If a large number of jokesters are on at one point then their up votes will create the critical mass to push the comment to the top and keep it there.
I also believe that once a post is at the top fewer people will downvote it, either because they are afraid to go against popular opinion or merely respect it and leave it as it is.
I don't know whether to laugh at the suggestion that a crowd as diverse as HN has a "cumulative sense of humor" or be offended by the implied suggestion that my sense of humor matches that of Reddit's.
> What makes the joke relevant to the discussion is that this is the first thought on lots of people's mind: "gee, I hope they don't ever use it for the actual flying system".
That's the second thought for me. The first was "thank goodness the airline I'm flying intercontinental with next week uses Boeing planes at that route".
"the crash was generally believed to have been caused by faulty wiring in the cockpit after the entertainment system in the plane started to overheat"
It's not too far fetched to think you could end up with an infinite loop (or other random issue) in some inflight entertainment system code, causing it to overhead and potentially ignite. I'm sure there are plenty of safeguards, but they too could fail...and this is why we still have circuit breakers and a master switch in planes that a human can control. Sadly humans too can (and often do...) fail to make the right decision.
Any system other than flight surfaces, avionics and the source of propulsion to an aircraft add some degree of risk that we could otherwise fly without.
Edits: Spelling and general sillyness.