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

Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–480 of 1001 posts

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#471

Post by sn41 »

brutusborn wrote: post #408
Aeolun wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’d expect companies that sell these kinds of tours for 250k a pop to be vetted though? If it’s uncle bob in his garage I’d be fine with lack of regulation, but when he starts commercially selling his trips he’d need to pass safety standards.

No, you’d only expect that if you have authoritarian values. In a truly free world, people are allowed to make dumb, risky decisions.

In such a truly free world, you might have to check every piece of chicken for salmonella contamination. You might have to stop your truck at every turn to see if people are racing from the opposite direction. You might not be very sure that your alcohol is not actually methanol....

Regulations do make our life smooth, even if there is a tendency to go overboard.

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#472

Post by [deleted] »

neither_color wrote: post #359
ethbr0 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pressure hull >> ballast control >> thrusters >> everything else I'm not sure why everyone is taking potshots at a company for trying something crazy with willing passengers . Everyone involved knew what they were getting into. Kudos to them for trying, even if they're dead. > See: the fact that they lost their diving vehicle. That's an awful lot of keyboard engineering, given nobody knows what happened yet.

>Everyone involved knew what they were getting into. Not necessarily. For extreme sports like skydiving, bungee jumping, hang-gliding scuba and the like customers still expect a high level of adherence to safety and quality products and certifications exist. Would you want to parachute off an uncertified plane with an un-licensed pilot and inexperienced jumper?

[deleted]

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#473

Post by brutusborn »

toss1 wrote: post #462
brutusborn wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you’d only expect that if you have authoritarian values. In a truly free world, people are allowed to make dumb, risky decisions.

No, it is not authoritarian to regulate things like safety for the general public. It is a necessary component of a complex society. The main distinction between a self-determined vs authoritarian govt is the independence or lack thereof of all of the govt and society's institutions, including he legislative, executive, & judicial branches of govt, and in general society the press, industry, academy, religious orgs,…

This is not the general public, this is a few adventurers. Very different.

Also, desiring to give up power to an authority is authoritarianism (at least according to Oxford): “ the enforcement or advocacy of strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom.”

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#474

Post by ehnto »

jart wrote: post #409
ehnto wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The major difference is serving the public I suppose. I would admire a scrappy vessel for research (SV Seeker for example) but if you are essentially building a transport service for the consumers, you are now being irresponsible. All credit to SV Seeker, it is a wildly impressive project, but I don't think they would be mad if I suggest they had the resolver spirit while putting that vessel together.

Are you saying consumers lives matter more than researchers?

No.

Consumers/the general public are less aware of the risk, and as another reply said more likely to trust a company on it's safety. They aren't marine engineers so they have to. That's why it's a regulated industry.

Researches are making an entirely different risk/benefit calculation and it's useful to society that they can make different risk tradeoffs. Key example, astronauts.

In that is an implication that research is more important to society than a holiday activity.

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#475

Post by rdtsc »

brutusborn wrote: post #404
reaperman wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a difference between Jacques Cousteau building a janky submarine rig for himself vs. Creating a business model of selling tickets to random strangers on that janky submarine.

There is definitely a difference, but it doesn’t really matter philosophically speaking. If people want to take huge risks, then so be it. Whether they build the sub themselves or pay and give that responsibility to a proxy, it is still up to them to make their own risk assessment.

It's one thing for them to take the risk for themselves, but it's a whole other level selling to others. For example, if someone wants to drink a refreshing glass of strychnine soda, it's hard to stop them. But opening a stand and selling at the street corner is a bit different.

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#476

Post by brutusborn »

sn41 wrote: post #471
brutusborn wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you’d only expect that if you have authoritarian values. In a truly free world, people are allowed to make dumb, risky decisions.

In such a truly free world, you might have to check every piece of chicken for salmonella contamination. You might have to stop your truck at every turn to see if people are racing from the opposite direction. You might not be very sure that your alcohol is not actually methanol.... Regulations do make our life smooth, even if there is a tendency to go overboard.

The difference is scale and ability to measure risk. We know how to make chicken safe and a lot of people eat it, so regulation works well.

For subs, it is a tiny number of people and risks are nearly impossible to assess.

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#477

Post by LeoPanthera »

gbear605 wrote: post #376
LeoPanthera wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tesla hasn't re-invented the wheel on life-critical safety systems. Haven't they? They've removed radar from their cars and now the AEB system uses image recognition. Does any other manufacturer do that?

Most cars don’t have radar at all, so it’s hardly like they’re sacrificing consumers by not including it.

I don't think that's true at all.

"General Motors said Wednesday that automatic emergency braking will be standard on 98% of its new vehicles by Aug. 31, the end of this model year. The four remaining automakers were close to hitting 95% in December."

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-05-31/us-safety-...

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#478

Post by sn41 »

brutusborn wrote: post #476
sn41 wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In such a truly free world, you might have to check every piece of chicken for salmonella contamination. You might have to stop your truck at every turn to see if people are racing from the opposite direction. You might not be very sure that your alcohol is not actually methanol.... Regulations do make our life smooth, even if there is a tendency to go overboard.

The difference is scale and ability to measure risk. We know how to make chicken safe and a lot of people eat it, so regulation works well. For subs, it is a tiny number of people and risks are nearly impossible to assess.

Yeah, I agree to that. It is a bit avant garde, so people signing up must know that it is more miss than hit, so buyer beware.

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#479

Post by pajko »

dmonitor wrote: post #95
ethbr0 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, if one had the budget to do all those things, from scratch, better than an existing component manufacturer. Not many companies have NASA levels of "throw money at it until it works, and every part has been signed off on five times." Absent that, I'm having trouble seeing how custom > COTS. In all probability, anything in-house would have been worse and added new failure modes. Better to buy, analyze, and adapt a…

If you can't afford to qualify the components on your 4000m diving vehicle, you can't afford to make a 4000m diving vehicle. See: the fact that they lost their diving vehicle.

> If you can't afford to qualify the components on your 4000m diving vehicle

... which you are taking paying passengers with

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#480

Post by simonblack »

jibe wrote: post #429
2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lack of emergency beacon is the real WTF. Not even an inflatable buoy. Using a game pad is probably OK. But no emergency method to mark their last location or even surface?

They did have multiple emergency methods to surface. Neither those, nor a beacon help if it imploded under pressure.

Seeing that everything stopped at once, I'd bet that is exactly what happened.

Shades of the Thresher disaster. No doubt we'll hear a few months down the track that the Navy's sound receivers did actually pick up the implosion noise.

Post reply on HN