[moate]

And if that bug cost his company say, $80,000 for some reason, there's plenty of instances where his company just has to eat that.

I've literally made tens of thousands of dollars in mistakes over my careers (try not to make the same one twice) and 9 out of 10 times the company would go "shit dude, don't ever let that happen again!"

[EpicEng]

And what if it were 1M? 500M? 1B? They just go out of business? Your logic doesn't scale well and seems overly harsh. They offered $500 and a pair of tickets. The guy lost nothing, I think that's fair.

[iends]

You may be surprised to learn that software bugs put companies out of business. They also can kill people.

[EpicEng]

I'm certain I wouldn't considering I've spent my entire career in cancer diagnostics and finance.

This is a completely reversible mistake and no one was harmed in any way (feelings don't count). Let's not go off the rails and start making Therac-25 like comparisons. This isn't some abstract problem; the issue is well defined, so let's stay within the realm of reason.

[iends]

Do you also think bugs in HFT code should be able to "undo" their mistakes instead of losing lots of money?

[EpicEng]

And how do you propose that would be done? You've totally jumped the shark here. Comparing this, an easily reversible incident, to HFT is simply nonsense. Thousands (probably a lot more?) of transactions would have occurred within the context of the bug, and decisions were made based on bad data once the bug was in the wild. There's no way you could undo that.

[goobynight]

If your company could create a ToS to get out of it, they would though.

There are reversible mistakes too.