Failed intercept at Dhahran caused by a software error in handling of timestamps
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HN comment orderEven better, the timeline: - February 11th: Vendor informed of the issue - February 25th: 28 people die because of the issue - February 26th: The vendor ships a fix I'd have loved to be a fly on the wall for that phonecall on the 25th (or early on the 26th).
This was covered in our C classes in college, and it is probably more interesting for programmers here if you understand what the bug actually was. The "software error" Wiki alludes to is that the Patriot missile kept track of its internal clock with floating point numbers. When the machine had been booted in the recent past, such as every time in testing, the floating point number spent most of its precision to the right of the decimal point. This…
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- Breakout years
- 2
- Total points
- 317
- Total comments
- 160
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010-09-06 | Patriot missile software failure, 28 soldiers died. Fix: reboot the systemFirst breakout | bl4k | 110 | 74 |
| 2018-02-28 | Failed intercept at Dhahran caused by a software error in handling of timestampsBest thread · Latest 20+ point return | sine | 205 | 86 |
| 2019-05-05 | MIM-104 Patriot | godelmachine | 2 | 0 |