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

#321

Post by withinboredom » Wed, Nov 29, 2023, 2:46 PM UTC

mavhc wrote: post #281

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…

The left scroll wheel can: play/pause/next/previous/vol up/down in Normal mode If you press the wiper button on the steering wheel it can change wiper speed Long press is a custom function When there's a call it answers/declines, mute/unmute, and ends a call The right one actives autosteer/tacc/fsd, adjusts follow distance and max speed There's 3 buttons for left/right/high beam on the left, and on the right, buttons…

> When there's a call it answers/declines, mute/unmute, and ends a call

Literally do not care about a phone call when it is raining. Hopefully, it at least has coyote time on it so when you adjust the wiper speed it will ignore a phone call.

> Not sure I need a button for steering wheel tilt, should only be when stopped.

I've had to adjust while driving. I don't remember for what reason, but I know I've had to do it a few times in my hundreds of thousands of miles of driving.

> do I change gear so often I need a dedicated stalk? It's not a manual car. Direction/park is only done when stopped too.

When you need it, you need it. I was once driving towards a non-gated, non-indicated railroad crossing in my hometown. There was only a train about once a day that went through there, but that day, there was a train that should not have been there. I slammed on the brakes, pulled the emergency brake, and threw the car into park. I stopped with less than an inch between me and the train.

I also destroyed my transmission by putting it in park at high speed. Worth it.

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

#322

Post by davidmurdoch » Wed, Nov 29, 2023, 2:47 PM UTC

moritz64 wrote: post #209

A quite recent UX disaster at Paypal. The Paypal iOS app used to behave strange with numbers. The interface was designed that you had to type in the amount you wanted to send in cents. If you wanted to send USD 50, you had to type 5000. Paypal then would add a comma after the second digit from the right. What made it even stranger: The numbers were aligned right, so it had the feeling of typing backwards. I never rea…

Using a "comma" to refer to the decimal separator when talking about USD while writing in English about software (written in a computer language that uses a decimal point) took me on a mental rollercoaster. So much so that it led me to read the Wikipedia page on the decimal separator. My favorite part:

> Unicode defines a decimal separator key symbol (⎖ in hex U+2396, decimal 9110) which looks similar to the apostrophe. This symbol is from ISO/IEC 9995 and is intended for use on a keyboard to indicate a key that performs decimal separation.

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

#323

Post by dataworm » Wed, Nov 29, 2023, 2:48 PM UTC

klibertp wrote: post #307

dataworm wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just look at the facts. russians aren't bombing civillian areas because they are legitimate targets, but because they want to and are encouraged to kill as many civillians as possible. How do you explain Bucha? Were the civillians who were shot also 'legitimate targets'? It's not 'choosing sides' and 'framing events', russia started this war and russia is the bad guy in this war. Why does anyone have to prove anythin…

> but because they want to and are encouraged to kill as many civillians as possible? How do you know that? Link please. > it won't convince you to stop supporting russia anyway. Exactly this. I'm saying that killing people is wrong and war shouldn't happen, and you're telling me I'm supporting Russia. That's precisely the level of irrationality I was talking about, thanks for demonstrating it.

> I'm saying that killing people is wrong and war shouldn't happen, and you're telling me I'm supporting Russia

You are literally excusing the killing of civillians by russians, how is that not supporting russia?

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

#324

Post by leetcrew » Wed, Nov 29, 2023, 2:49 PM UTC

smcl wrote: post #239

> they saw this contact heading towards them labeled as an F-14 fighter. What's wild to me is the assumption that Iran would suddenly launch a single F-14 fighter to attack a ship. Was there no moment where they thought "maybe there has been a mistake?" - like where Stanislav Petrov chose to interpret the Soviet early warning system telling him an ICBM was incoming as being a result of some faulty instruments. Grante…

a US frigate (uss stark) was severely damaged by a single Iraqi plane in the previous year. the captain did not expect an Iraqi attack, so he tried to warn the plane off multiple times, ultimately allowing it to fire two missiles which hit his ship. the missiles would likely have been shot down if the Stark's countermeasures were working correctly. but they weren't, and 37 Americans died.

given that context, it doesn't seem wild to take an Iranian plane as a serious threat.

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

#325

Post by nova22033 » Wed, Nov 29, 2023, 2:49 PM UTC

naasking wrote: post #193

nova22033 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

these warships even doing in the PERSIAN gulf Iran doesn't own the PERSIAN gulf any more than India owns the INDIAN ocean.

Sure, so if a Iranian helicopter carrier parked itself in international waters near New York City, everyone would be totally chill with that right?

international waters near New York City, everyone would be totally chill with that right?

I don't know why you think this is a gotcha...The USN would probably sniff around but that's it..They're international waters

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

#326

Post by areyousure » Wed, Nov 29, 2023, 2:51 PM UTC

modo_mario wrote: post #235

gpderetta wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another US ship was attacked by Iraqi Exocet missiles beyond visual range on the same region just one year before. US had also attacked Iran assets in the year before after one US ship was damaged by Iranian mines. Tensions were very high.

>US had also attacked Iran assets in the year before after one US ship was damaged by Iranian mines. Wasn't this in Iranian territorial waters. I don't quite see how that held up as a justification for the retaliations.

> Wasn't this in Iranian territorial waters.

In case anyone is curious, the topic of discussion appears to be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Samuel_B._Roberts_(FFG-58)...

All sources appear to indicate that the mine was in international waters.

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

#327

Post by thereddaikon » Wed, Nov 29, 2023, 2:53 PM UTC

matheusmoreira wrote: post #274

thereddaikon wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Propaganda doesn't mean its necessarily a lie or misleading. Its just government marketing. It can be truthful or deceitful. Back to the core issue of accidental shootdowns. I think its important to note that while these tragedies have continued to happen after the US incident in the 80's, none of them involved the US military since. That does lead credibility to their claim it was a UI and procedural problem that wa…

> Propaganda doesn't mean its necessarily a lie or misleading. > Its just government marketing. All marketing is inherently a lie or misleading due to inescapable conflicts of interest. They have every reason in the world to want you to believe certain stuff. Therefore you should be skeptical and disbelieve them by default. > That does lead credibility to their claim it was a UI and procedural problem that was fixed.…

>All marketing is inherently a lie or misleading due to inescapable conflicts of interest. They have every reason in the world to want you to believe certain stuff. Therefore you should be skeptical and disbelieve them by default.

What? No it isn't. The easiest marketing is when you don't have to because the good act stands on its own. Marketing is often a lie but it doesn't have to be.

>I don't doubt it was. The author of the mastodon posts this thread is about made very convincing arguments as far as I'm concerned.

Yeah I was familiar with the incident before this post and it seems pretty open and shut to me. These things have happened a few times in the past but this is as far as I know the only case of a US air defense system accidentally shooting down a civilian aircraft. It was taken serious at the time and hasn't happened since. What I find more troublesome is that the details of the investigation and the actions taken were made public yet other nations didn't take similar steps so similar mistakes have been made by other parties since. Notably, Iran themselves.

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

#328

Post by semi-extrinsic » Wed, Nov 29, 2023, 2:54 PM UTC

mannykannot wrote: post #256

ImaCake wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

While it is important for cars to have speedometers so that drivers can learn to judge their speed, with a little bit of caution, a journey during which the speedometer fails can be completed both safely and within speed limits.

On the Volvo 240, the analog speedometer tends to get sticky after you've done a couple hundred thousand miles. Sometimes it will reset if you just hit the dash hard enough, sometimes you just have to guess the speed based on the RPM and gear and experience.

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

#329

Post by rglullis » Wed, Nov 29, 2023, 2:56 PM UTC

sixQuarks wrote: post #296

ImaCake wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OP link is to a very much alive mastodon instance… so yes its doing fine. No idea about Threads but apparently some people use it.

But your claim is that twitter is no longer the center and many niches have migrated to Mastodon. I highly doubt this, unless you can point out an actual niche where Mastodon has more active discussions than twitter.

My claim is not "many niches migrated to Mastodon", but "Twitter is not at the center of tech discussion". At least, not for the hacker types. Even here, the majority of HN links that show up as a Twitter thread are about technology "businesses", not tech itself.

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

#330

Post by InsomniacL » Wed, Nov 29, 2023, 2:56 PM UTC

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…

I have a disaster storey to share about this.

Sometimes the car does not want to go in to drive/reverse for some unknown reason.

Not long after I first got my tesla, I was making a 3 point turn to go on to my driveway. I moved forward, then stopped, turned the wheel, pressed the stalk to go in to reverse, pressed the accelerator and WENT FORWARD, right in to my old car denting the door. There was no indication the car declined to go in to reverse apart from the icon on the screen.

Now, Tesla released an update so the car makes an audible noise when changing to drive/reverse and a separate noise when the car refuses your instruction. It's much better but annoyingly the car still refuses quite often to go in to Drive/Reverse when you tell it to, especially when you just get in to it. I now out of habit press the gear stalk 4 or 5 times when first getting in to drive it.