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

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

#481

Post by jen729w »

lupusreal wrote: post #290
krisoft wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have been only 5 "former Captain of the USS Zumwalt". That is a very small subset of humans. There have been more humans walking on the moon than former Captains of the USS Zumwalt. Their names are a matter of public record and one can answer which works as a CEO with 5 simple google searches. If they didn't want to name the company they shouldn't have identified it willingly and precisely.

Making clear allusions to the company without directly naming it allows anybody in this conversation who cares to figure it out easily, but doesn't get this discussion automatically indexed with that company's name. Naming the company in a response is rude and unnecessary.

Disagree. I sometimes have cause to comment here and obliquely reference my own project, without its name.

Because its name isn’t important to the context, and mentioning it seems gauche; I don’t want to ‘make the conversation about me’.

It’s not because I really don’t want anyone here to know about it: if that was the case, I would have kept my trap shut in the first place.

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

#482

Post by immibis »

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #472
immibis wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also caused one accident, where both pilots thought the controls were jammed because the other pilot was pulling in the opposite direction. This is no better than averaging. At least Airbus gives an alarm.

Which accident was that? Thanks!

Don't remember, sorry.

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

#483

Post by rglullis »

sixQuarks wrote: post #402
rglullis wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t know how you can say that. The whole fiasco with open AI recently was a good example of how Twitter was the place where you could really stay up-to-date with everything going on. All the main players were posting there. I love HN, but just because there wasn’t a lot of links to Twitter doesn’t mean it’s not the center of tech discussion

Do you care about the channels used by the "main players" to broadcast their message, or where the conversation about the events were happening?

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

#484

Post by snakeyjake »

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…

>What's wild to me is the assumption that Iran would suddenly launch a single F-14 fighter to attack a ship.

Limited hit and run attacks were typical Iranian behavior at the time.

The US tested to see if the F-14 could launch a Harpoon anti-ship missile just a couple of years prior to this because Iran had both F-14s and Harpoons. The test was successful.

It is highly unlikely that Iran ever equipped the F-14 with Harpoons but the thought that they would because it was a capability they possessed was a very real fear at the time.

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

#485

Post by JumpCrisscross »

immibis wrote: post #421
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something being inevitable is different from it being justified. Hamas’ and Palestinian Jihad’s violence is a predictable response to Israel’s abandonment of two-party talks and its right wing’s ascendency within its politics. That doesn’t justify gunning down kids at a concert. Similarly, the IDF levelling much of Gaza in retribution was a predictable repercussion of killing Israeli civilians, including children. Th…

If your choices make something inevitable, do you have full rights to complain about what you made inevitable happening?

> do you have full rights to complain about what you made inevitable happening?

No, it undermines the complaint’s legitimacy.

That doesn’t mean we must be unsympathetic; but it is a factor. Also, these decisions are often made by individuals within groups. Collective punishment is immoral. It’s also quite likely to produce blowback.

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

#486

Post by [deleted] »

dang wrote: post #208
xkbarkar wrote: post #87

What a terrible platform to present an interesting story. What wrong with a good old fashioned article style blog ? I admit I am so turned off by the format I only made it hlf way throught the thread.

" Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting. " (I know these things are indeed annoying—but that's why we have this rule.) https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[deleted]

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

#487

Post by outworlder »

next_xibalba wrote: post #414

> every large aircraft in the world is equipped with a device called an IFF -- "identification friend or foe." This is weird, I'm sure I don't have all the facts. In a conflict, why would a military aircraft ever want to identify itself?

I have tried to find the sentence you quoted in the article and was not able to. But it is not true that "every large aircraft (...) carries an IFF". IFF is strictly military. What civilian aircraft do have (large and small) is a transponder. The article talks about this but in a confusing way.

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

#488

Post by JumpCrisscross »

thereddaikon wrote: post #317
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Cont…

Why do cars need to be patched OTA? Why isn't the code for something as mission critical as a car not written right before it was shipped? I never needed an ECU update on a car before? And my infotainment rarely needed one to the point where the handful of times it did get a firmware update it was handled during servicing just fine.

> Why isn't the code for something as mission critical as a car not written right before it was shipped?

We OTA spacecraft. We update planes’ software as part of maintenance. We have never written software once. We just accepted the bugs and defects as part of the product’s basket of tradeoffs, marvelling when the occasional manufacturer got it right in the first manufacturing runs.

> never needed an ECU update on a car before?

There were always weird bugs associated with models that you learned to deal with, or a tendency towards certain failure modes. In extreme cases we recalled.

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

#489

Post by cameldrv »

vigormortis wrote: post #469
waihtis wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 would recommend Ed Hutchins' "Cognition in the Wild". He examines the performance of the crew of a ship acting as distributed intelligence and the many factors that go into making them an effective unit (or not). Ed was also part of the UCSD Cognitive Science department at the time of the Vincennes incident and I suspect it was his work, along with Don Norman's, that drew the attention of the Navy. At the time, I w…

I find the glass cockpit airspeed/altitude tapes to be significantly worse overall than analog dials. Not only is it easier to see rate of descent, but it's very easy to see whether the absolute number is where you want it to be. Normally if you're cruising, you will be at an even thousand or 500 foot increment. The big hand should either be pointing straight up or straight down. You can even see out of the corner of your eye if you're a little too high or low. On the tape you have to read a 4-5 digit number. Similar thing with airspeed. Once you are familiar with a plane, you know what angle the airspeed needle should be pointing for a particular phase of flight. It's much quicker cognitively to see the angle of a pointer than reading a number.

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

#490

Post by outworlder »

InsomniacL wrote: post #330
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 ca…

I wonder if this issue is behind all the reports of people randomly crashing into weird obstacles. Often it's claimed that they are confusing the break and accelerator pedals and one pedal driving is cited. But there's a bunch of other EVs that also have one pedal driving and they seem fine.

Mind you, my (much cheaper) EV will beep at me if I try to engage a mode and it refuses. Be it forward, reverse or park. But in the 'ready to drive' state it has never refused reverse or drive; I don't know why it ever would.

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