Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 166 posts

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#41

Post by Nicholas_C »

cddotdotslash wrote: post #19
gaur wrote: post #17

Another case of a rambling article burying the lede. I skimmed the article and still can't figure out why we're weeks away from a point of no return. Is the search going to be called off? Is there a transponder that's going to give out? Why can't the journalist just put the important information up front , instead of a bunch of irrelevant crap about someone's sleep deprivation?

In the fifth paragraph, it says "Without fresh clues, the hunt should end about June, when four ships are due to finish combing the seas off western Australia." I imagine that the news would be quite boring if every article were written as a bullet-point list of points. Sometimes people enjoy reading a story, not just a two minute summary.

Isn't there an add on or an app or something that summarizes articles via NLP? It would be nice to have an interstitial pop up with the article summarized and the ability to click out and read the full thing for more color.

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#43

Post by AnimalMuppet »

TrevorJ wrote: post #40
imglorp wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just bad journalism. The first few lines should be who-what-when-where-why. Then you fill in the details and backstory at length.

It's the business model. The longer you are on a web page the more ad cycles you see. I agree with you, its' not good writing, but I think that is where it comes from.

But the more you annoy the reader that's just looking for the reason the search is going to fail in 30 days. And the more you do that as a business, the more a bunch of readers (those who prefer that you not waste their time) get inoculated to you, and quit clicking on links to you. That's bad business.

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#44

Post by hluska »

0xffff2 wrote: post #34
melling wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's Bloomberg's comment not mine. Not sure where the sudden need to downvote is coming from. My point is that it's now a free service to track planes. It was possible to track MH370, for example, but it required a fee.

Yeah, I know what quotation marks mean... My point is that the quote makes it seem much easier to track an airplane than it actually is. It's great that Inmarsat is providing the service for free now, but the quote makes it seem like the service is trivial to provide when it really isn't.

Your comment would be better if you weren't so aggressive.

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#46

Post by mikestew »

samstave wrote: post #39
willvarfar wrote: post #4

"The company already offers a similar service for ships and boats, which use Inmarsat’s network free of charge for distress signalling." Interestingly, back when I was an intern, BT used to charge an exorbitant rate for those distress calls. I once wrote-up the whole internship thing http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/17282439831/an-ei... "I was pretty uncomfortable when I found that mayday calls were being c…

Why don't we have an additional distress beacon on all planes that says their gps coords to Inmarsat continuously no matter what? Basically why can't we use the Inmarsat network for more than distress but any and all planes report to some tamper proof system every minute? (Yes I know how many flights there are, but you don't need to store the data once a plane has reached its destination successfully)

I was thinking about this on a motorcycle trip to Alaska. For $250 one can buy a consumer device that updates my location via satellite every few minutes to display on a web page. $35/month, and they have cheaper plans. Were I to have been eaten by a bear, or splattered by a semi on the Dalton Highway, my wife would have at least known where to recover the body.

Any yahoo with $250 and a shipping address can have one of these, yet two years later we still don't know where this Malaysian flight went to?

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#47

Post by jml7c5 »

Nicholas_C wrote: post #41
cddotdotslash wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the fifth paragraph, it says "Without fresh clues, the hunt should end about June, when four ships are due to finish combing the seas off western Australia." I imagine that the news would be quite boring if every article were written as a bullet-point list of points. Sometimes people enjoy reading a story, not just a two minute summary.

Isn't there an add on or an app or something that summarizes articles via NLP? It would be nice to have an interstitial pop up with the article summarized and the ability to click out and read the full thing for more color.

See https://www.reddit.com/user/autotldr

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#48

Post by mariuolo »

"Forever" is a long time.

It could be found in a few years or in a few decades. Although reading the flight recorders by then could be problematic.

It's not the first time anyway, a British plane disappeared on the Andes in 1947 (after sending a cryptic Morse message BTW) and was found 50 years later, so I wouldn't despair.

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#50

Post by gusmd »

ggreer wrote: post #11
[deleted] wrote: post #6

[deleted]

The article's line, "In a world where a $100 smartphone can be tracked for free..." is dishonest. Services like Find My iPhone only work if: 1. The phone can determine its location via GPS, cell tower, and/or wifi positioning. 2. The phone has Internet access. (Cell or wifi.) As you might suspect, the south Indian Ocean doesn't have many cell towers or wifi hotspots. GPS signals don't penetrate water, nor do the freq…

How is that relevant at all?

GPS works pretty much anywhere in the world, even in the middle of the Indian Ocean. It would not penetrate water or survive the crash, which means it couldn't be tracked NOW. Nonetheless, you could know the position a few minutes (seconds?) before the crash, which would make finding the aircraft MUCH easier.

Post reply on HN