Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is how every software UI should be designed as well.
Hopefully without people having to die first.
does the developer dying inside a little bit while making it count?
The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster
381–390 of 695 posts
Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster
#382A 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…
The price in cents is the way "it was always done" in retail, back when POS terminals were not directly connected to cash registers and the worker had to manually type in the amount. But yeah, sudden change in US design will causemany errors everywhere.
I’m adding a tangent to a tangent, but “POS terminals” has to be one of the greatest naming decisions in history.
Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster
#383> 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…
"Captain, why where you derelict in your duty to protect your ship and crew?"
"Well, I just thought a single F-14 was probably not that big of a deal."
Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
The analog speedometer it replaced has been digital behind the scenes for ages. The cluster is just sat on a CAN (or similar) bus and controlling a servo for the analog gauge. The pure digital speedometer is significantly less failure prone (and indeed when it does fail, it’s obvious).
A German professor of mine worked at BMW before grad school. He worked on the firmware of the tachometer. The behavior of the tachometer needle was dictated by the marketing department. A BMW engine accelerates smoothly and confidently. The tachometer needle never shakes, it rises smoothly and confidently.
This is wholly unsurprising to me - the tachometer on my BMW is audibly out of sync with the engine.
Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster
#385Interesting 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…
Any good reading on this? Might be some interesting learning opportunities for (cyber)security monitoring, which is a total mess right now. Stakes are a bit less severe, but still.
I suggest you check out the work of Gary Klein and the Naturalistic Decision Making community, as the Vicennes work was one of the founding projects. He features it in his 1997 book _Sources of Power_.
Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Where did you get this unicorns pooping rainbows bullshit? It's called "humanism," and it's not bullshit. It mostly says that killing people is wrong. Of course, you think otherwise, so it might seem like bullshit to you. EDIT: > So Nazi Germany was fiction? No. The notion that all soldiers fighting on the Germany side in WW2 were monsters is, however. If the world subscribed to your ideology, there'd be a catacomb…
> No. The notion that all soldiers fighting on the Germany side in WW2 were monsters is, however. If the world subscribed to your ideology, there'd be a catacomb of millions buried under Nurnberg (there's no such thing, if you wondered). This is known as "the clean Wehrmacht myth", a belief that somehow, somewhere in the German military, there were units that did not have the blood of innocents on their hands. At lea…
> but out in the public, by regular units, on the streets and roads of cities and villages all across Europe.
Interesting, I just posted a family story illustrating one of these crimes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38460975
I couldn't believe in the "clean Wehrmacht" myth even if I wanted to. I'm still not convinced all the Wehrmacht soldiers were inherently bad people or monsters. I'm not defending them - what they did across Europe, what led to millions of graves, was wrong. What I'm cautious about, though, is the hatred and emotional judgment that leads to more, not less, bloodshed.
The lack of a catacomb is good. The absence of any punishment for people outside those 7k convicted, however, is not.
Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
This happens all the time. There is a documentary for example on the HMS Elizabeth carrier from the UK and how they deliberately navigated through Crimea waters (together with the Dutch navy) to make a point that they're allowed to do so because that water is Ukrainian and not Russian. In the same documentary you also see Chinese ships follow around the British group, and Russian jets overflying it. All in internatio…
The Montreux Convention[0] prohibits large warships from transiting the Bosporous Strait. That carrier displaces 65,000 tons, the upper limit of the treaty only permits warships of 15,000 tons or less. The UK is one of the signatories to that treaty. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreux_Convention_Regarding_... 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Elizabeth-class_aircraft...
It was actually the HMS Defender, a destroyer, which sailed into the Black Sea, and the Royal Netherlands Navy’s HNLMS Evertsen, a frigate.
Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Do you believe they bombed the theater because they were actively trying to kill Ukrainian children? Yes. They are also actively bombing clinics (including the maternity ward in Mariupol too, look it up) and they have done that in Syria too. It's pretty well documented. They are evil, but more than that, it's a strategy. They are currently also bombing civilian areas, fully aware that they are civilian areas. There…
> They are currently also bombing civilian areas, fully aware that they are civilian areas. They might be "fully aware" that those areas are used by the "enemy" to stockpile materiel and gather personnel. That would make those areas legitimate targets. Can you prove a) there were no military targets there, or b) the attackers were "aware" there were no military targets there? I can't - nobody can. That's why when you…
> They might be "fully aware" that those areas are used by the "enemy" to stockpile materiel and gather personnel.
You are approaching this from the wrong end. People like doctors or firefighters are multipliers, that is, they make the whole group stronger by a disproportional amount. A doctor can aid themselves and others with above average effectiveness. The same applies to firefighters. A professional firefighter is far more effective in putting out fires, removing debris, and saving people than an untrained civilian. Rationally it makes perfect sense to prioritize them in targeting, as Russians have done. By shooting at field hospitals or doing double-tap missile attacks on cities (first hit a crowded shopping center, and then send another missile 30 min later to hit first responders), you can murder doctors, paramedics and firefighters and harm the whole group by a disproportional amount.
Such perfect rationality combined with utter lack of humanity is why most people would call it pure evil.
Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet the Cuban missile crisis with the stake of the entire world didn't escalate.
There were some close calls during the Cold War. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...
Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster
#390I 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…
What sort of "physical control" would be appropriate for a radar-guided beyond-visual-range anti-air missile?
Typically two different jettison mechanisms, one with a dedicated "emergency jettison" pushbutton.
Also a bunch of physical HOTAS controls, from four-way switches to the small joystick under pilot's left thumb.