Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

What if NASAs decision was largely influenced by social media hysteria and not objective engineering?

Of course NASA would never give into outside pressures - cough, Challenger, cough. And what I read on the internets is so massively factual.



Well, that was probably Boeing's line for the MAX disasters, until the second one occurred.

Boeing is clearly undergoing systemic collapse in engineering ability, so anything Boeing has to be treated with extreme suspicion. Its like hiring a 3-time-felon to babysit, like you can do it, but there will be 0 tolerance for any deviance.


They build a plane with 15M parts every single day. Their worst engineer is better than 99% of those on HN.


Their worst engineers are the ones responsible for shipping planes + systems that have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people.

I don't think I'm a fantastic engineer, but I'm certainly doing better than those people when considering the metric of "how many people has my software killed".


You need to add a metric of "how many people can my software kill if it misbehaves", otherwise your point is moot.


Fair point, but I don't think that makes it moot. If you work on software that can kill people, the responsibility is on you to make sure that it doesn't. If you can't, you should self-select out of working on that type of software.


These are big words.




Consider applying for YC's Winter 2026 batch! Applications are open till Nov 10

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: