The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster • Hacker News Board

Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

#221

Post by sixQuarks » Wed, Nov 29, 2023, 1:14 PM UTC

ImaCake wrote: post #114

JimDabell wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the recent OpenAI events that were posted here were links to Twitter and I’ve seen plenty of people point this out as evidence that Twitter still is at the centre.

This is part of the current cycle of fragmentation. Twitter is no longer the centre, but it still holds certain cultural niches. Other niches have migrated to Mastodon or elsewhere. I am personally pretty excited to see this diversification and fragmentation as it should help provide more niches for more people.

Mastodon… lol. Is that even still alive? Are you gonna say that Threads is thriving as well?

Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

#222

Post by gregsadetsky » Wed, Nov 29, 2023, 1:14 PM UTC

quietbritishjim wrote: post #204

Another good write up of this incident is on the excellent Admiral Cloudberg blog: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-shadow-of-war-t... Another article in that series is also related to a UX mistake: Air France Flight 447. This crashed, in part, because the inputs from two control sticks (one for pilot and other for copilot) were averaged if they disagreed, unlike on a Boeing (at the time at least) where t…

The tragic AF447 flight comes up somewhat regularly on the site — see this recent conversation [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37089363

Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

#223

Post by bionsystem » Wed, Nov 29, 2023, 1:14 PM UTC

bigfudge wrote: post #121

bionsystem wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hamas is using civilians as human shields pretty much literally. They set this war up so that there is as much civilian casualties as possible on their side to claim it's a genocide. In this particular case, Hamas has a written constitution claiming the destruction of Israel and the jewish people ; Hamas ARE the genociders, despite being the weak army in this war. Ukraine is NOT using its population as human shields.…

To open: I am not apologising for what Hamas has done at all. I think their actions are revolting. Whatever your view of the history of the region, the aim to eliminate Israel as a Jewish state is unrealistic, extreme and counterproductive. Nonetheless, I do find the claim they are using human shields as interesting. Whatever you think of Hamas' aims and methods (and I strongly disapprove of both), Palestinians engag…

It's bogus to compare french resistance to Hamas. French resistants had no intention of destroying Germany or killing all germans. If anything, the german military were the one committing a genocide (albeit not against the french I can give you that).

All politicians leaders of Palestinian people have eventually refused a 2-states solution. Israël does recognize a few groups as valid diplomatic partners but not Hamas, who is in charge right now. And yes that will lead to a lot of harsh suffering for Palestinian people, partly/mostly because of the way Hamas has handled things.

Note that I'm not downplaying what Israël has done in the region so far, and I'm not giving them excuses ; they do what they think is best for their security, rightfully or wrongfully, given that their neighbour is lead by a terrorist group. I'm not sure how I would react as a civilian or a leader of either country and I would certainly not advise anything to anyone. But clearly Hamas is the agressor just like Russia is the agressor in Ukraine (and both have intention of destroying not only the state but also the people).

Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

#224

Post by smcl » Wed, Nov 29, 2023, 1:16 PM UTC

astrobase_go wrote: post #177

subroutine wrote: post #160

Interesting to see this on HN. I currently work for the company that redesigned the HMI/UI following this incident. Or rather, it's how my company was founded. In the aftermath, the US Navy Command in San Diego contacted several UCSD professors in the Cognitive Science and Psychology department who specialized in high-impact decision making under stress and cognitive load. The Navy was apparently impressed with the d…

I think your company is PSE, correct?

I think if they wanted to name the company they would have done so in the comment

Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

#225

Post by JumpCrisscross » Wed, Nov 29, 2023, 1:16 PM UTC

ImaCake wrote: post #108

m463 wrote: post #94

I wonder when a tesla will show up in a courtroom with a situation like this. I'm not talking about autopilot. I'm talking about the continuous (past ridiculous) removal of physical controls from their vehicles. For example, the original model S/X had dedicated controls for lots of functions - turn signals, gear shift, wipers, autopilot, steering wheel tilt, etc. On the steering wheel, there were two buttons and a sc…

Its not just Tesla. Recent Jeep models have a digital speedometer with no analog backup. From an engineering perspective these changes just introduce needless risk of complex failure for no real gain. Surely the speedometer is not the make or break cost item on a car?

> these changes just introduce needless risk of complex failure for no real gain

Analog speedometers are more complex and can’t be patched OTA. Eliminating them from the fleet means one less part to procure and inventory for manufacturing and service. Given the downside is losing precise speed awareness (you should still be able to judge rough speed visually—that’s the back-up), this seems like a fair trade-off.

Contrast that with e.g. brake lines, where digital systems can add redundancy. (That doesn’t mean they always do.) Or physical mirrors, which add critical redundancy to cameras.

Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

#226

Post by klez » Wed, Nov 29, 2023, 1:16 PM UTC

lynx23 wrote: post #133

klez wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you made this about accessibility in the first place, (and avoided the useless war between the poor with the LGBTQ people here) I bet your post would have been better received. By the way you make a very good point about accessibility and the fact that you basically need two operating systems (the actual OS running on your PC and a modern Web Browser) to read simple text that should have been rendered as such in t…

The poor? Are you refering to people with disabilities by any chance? I hope not, because that would be quite condescending. Being forgotten by society might feel like alienation, but to assume people with disabilities are automatically poor is quite a stretch. Some of us have paying dayjobs, you know... Besides, why do I have to out myself as a blind user to be allowed to ask for plaintext postings without being imm…

> The poor? Are you refering to people with disabilities by any chance?

I reckon that's a figure of speech in my language that probably doesn't translate well (or possibly at all) to English. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be condescending or to imply people with disability are actually poor. It's something more akin to the term "rat race", but not quite.

> why do I have to out myself as a blind user to be allowed to ask for plaintext postings without being immediately downvoted/punished?

You don't have to and that's not what I said. I said "If you made this about accessibility in the first place".

EDIT:

Oh, and I didn't downvote, but probably the downvotes are more about the "as bad as Meta" comment without specifying you were actually talking about accessibility.

Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

#227

Post by sixQuarks » Wed, Nov 29, 2023, 1:16 PM UTC

itsoktocry wrote: post #148

kortilla wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a stupid comparison because the USSR intentionally shot down a plane without trying to contact it and then didn’t cooperate at all on search efforts. Additionally, the pilot positively identified it was a passenger jet due to the double decker windows but shot anyway because they were shooting down “spy planes”, not anything that was an actual threat. This is in contrast to the US incident where they tried to…

> That’s a stupid comparison because the USSR intentionally shot down a plane without trying to contact it and then didn’t cooperate at all on search efforts. I don't know much about either incident, but your summary sounds exactly what the OP is saying: "Here are the reasons the Russians did it. It's different, because they're evil". One side was lying about thinking it was a spy plane, but the other side legitimate…

Exactly, you would think people would start seeing the games being played.

Look up “mass control hypnosis” if you’ve never heard the term.

Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

#228

Post by cies » Wed, Nov 29, 2023, 1:16 PM UTC

ben0x539 wrote: post #129

gifvenut wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot to mention that Ronald Reagan apologized to the Iranian government and the US paid $60 Mil in compensation to the families.

After having become an expert on the incident from having skimmed half of the wikipedia article, I note that it mentions both Reagan considering his letter an apology and the US government not having made a formal apology, so I imagine there is some clever political distinction between the two.

There also has been no apology for US' use of agent orange in Vietnam, nor has there been a payment of compensation.

Why not formally apologize for such a fuck up (Iran aircraft), except for arrogance/exceptionalism?

Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

#229

Post by JumpCrisscross » Wed, Nov 29, 2023, 1:17 PM UTC

2-718-281-828 wrote: post #181

When a foreign country kills US citizens, it's terrorism. When the US kills foreign civilians it's collateral damage or a UI disaster ... business as usual.

> When a foreign country kills US citizens, it's terrorism

No, it’s an act of war if deliberate. As this would have been. It is unusual (though not unprecedented) to refer to the actions of states’ militaries as terrorism.

Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

#230

Post by berdario » Wed, Nov 29, 2023, 1:18 PM UTC

peppermint_gum wrote: post #188

itsoktocry wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That’s a stupid comparison because the USSR intentionally shot down a plane without trying to contact it and then didn’t cooperate at all on search efforts. I don't know much about either incident, but your summary sounds exactly what the OP is saying: "Here are the reasons the Russians did it. It's different, because they're evil". One side was lying about thinking it was a spy plane, but the other side legitimate…

Russia has declassified documents that confirm what the GP said: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007#So... > It's actually astonishing that anyone who's been on this planet for more than a couple decades can take any of these narratives seriously. The only astonishing thing is that you reflexively rushed to Russia's defense instead of looking up the facts.

These are two separate incidents, with similarities but also important differences.

We don't know how the US military would've reacted if Iran Air 655 would've overflown restricted airspace above the US.

For sure the Soviets fucked up by not trying to call on 121.5 MHz, but is that worse than the US fucking up by being so close (arguably intruding) another country space, and yet not having equipment to monitor civilian air traffic control in the area? I'm not sure.