8 ms·

Do you have experience with aircraft engine design, or landing protocols, or insight in to the meetings when the engines were designed? If so, I'll take back m

Do you have experience with aircraft engine design, or landing protocols, or insight in to the meetings when the engines were designed? If so, I'll take back my words but considering the manufacturer doesn't know exactly why this happened, and the engineers on the ground said it seems like a "software bug", it seems a bit presumptuous and frankly a bit comical to start saying things like: "Surely a better solution would be to just"... Ah well, glad a 5 sentence comment on the internet can resolve an issue in a hardware, software, and social engineering challenge decades in the making.

maxxxxx 8y ago
I always love it when you have worked on something for months and someone new comes by and says "Why don't you just X?".
- markholmes 8y ago
  In this case, possibly years
- ergothus 8y ago
  It's worse when they are right though. I wish I could say that had not happened to me.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    I am fine with that. In most cases they aren't though. Or they don't understand the whole environment.
    - jiveturkey 8y ago
      My experience is about 50/50, both with my own mistakes and with others. Generally when one is very close to the problem, one sees the environment as immutable. Because, well you spent very many hours building that environment, for very good reasons. And your complex solution "has to" work within the constraints of that complex environment. Whereas, the "mind of a child" that doesn't grok the environment, also doesn't have a fixed notion of it. This is anecdotal of course, but maybe half the time what I see happen is that it's easier/better to change the environment and this can only be seen with fresh eyes. It's not the spoon that bends, and it's not you that bends around the spoon. There is no spoon.
  - Retric 8y ago
    Is that from other experts with a very close understanding of the specifics, or random people online? What I find is you start with several viable approaches, pick one and go down the path enough to figure out the downsides. At which point you need to decide to backtrack or keep going. That’s the hard part not simply coming up with a seemingly simple solution.
    - jlg23 8y ago
      > Is that from other experts with a very close understanding of the specifics, or random people online? These groups are not mutually exclusive, membership can only be assigned by a domain expert and is finally irrelevant if the other is right.
      - sabarn01 8y ago
        This can be right when things change over time and people still operate under their initial assumptions. Times change constrains change but on some teams assumptions and choices are not revisited.
      - Retric 8y ago
        Constraints define good decisions. A new team member making a viable suggestion is very different from a random person tossing out a wild ass guess that happens to be right. The difference is the random commentator has no real way to judge how viable something is, and thus is simply tossing out ideas.
    - bigiain 8y ago
      Not "random people online", but I've got a few friends I think of as "terrifyingly smart", and one of their common characteristics is how they've all, in areas of expertise I've been investigating/researching/working in for weeks or months and which they have barely a passing interest in, quite obviously thought about a problem I'm describing and thought through a bunch of the obvious options, categorised them, and made conclusions about which avenues are workable and which should be discarded, and come up with either a workable solution or options I'd not even considered yet - all just in the course of a conversation over coffee... (Somewhat frighteningly, two of those people are doing that at Facebook right now...)
- Xcelerate 8y ago
  I always appreciate those comments. Sometimes they include something obvious I never thought of.
  - da_chicken 8y ago
    Yeah, it shows someone is trying to understand the problem. I mean, sure, most often the response is, "because that would require data that does not yet exist when the decision must be made," or, "there are legitimate circumstances where that would be the exact wrong response," but it does get you thinking. It is less appreciated when people phrase things in a condescending manner, though.
- 4thaccount 8y ago
  I found that I now distrust a lot of articles as people tend to get the things in my field blatantly wrong all the time. Things are complicated and rarely as simple as they seem. On the other hand, I've worked on things for hours before for someone to glance at the problem and solve it. Always a humbling experience.
  - monochromatic 8y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
    - 4thaccount 8y ago
      I never knew there was a name for this, but I feel like everyone has come across this feeling at some point in their life.
- ricardobeat 8y ago
  They are right more often than you’d expect. Irrational escalation, loss aversion, confirmation bias, etc play their part everywhere causing senseless projects to be pushed to completion.
  - arkades 8y ago
    > They are right more often than you’d expect. When the "they" is at least another expert in the same field and not a total stranger completely ignorant of pretty much every relevant detail, and the "you'd expect" part starts at a baseline of nearly 0% for people walking in out of the street unfamiliar with the specific problem at hand, then yes, "they" are right more often than I'd "expect."
- breischl 8y ago
  Had someone do that this morning. They ran across a problem that has been the focus of a multi-year effort involving dozens of people. Fixing the problem is a big part of the literal #1 priority for the company. Anyway, he hit an example of the issue, and wanted to just put in a bug ticket to one team, and didn't understand why that was not useful or necessary. My analogy is that it's like showing up at NASA in 1965, and wanting to submit a ticket that says "Your rockets can't actually go to the moon. Fix rocket so that it can go to the moon."
- koonsolo 8y ago
  The best part is when your project is running late or having issues, and the non-technical manager plans a meeting with all the other dead-weight people. "Explain the problem to us, and since we know absolutely nothing about it, our stupid questions might give you new insights". Facepalm.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    Exactly. "Let's all take a step back" or "I'd like to challenge that". Makes you sound insightful while knowing nothing.
- threeseed 8y ago
  HN is the worst for it. Especially when it comes to tech stacks. If you use anything other than non-SPA, Go, PostgreSQL then it's over engineered and doomed to fail.
  - imsofuture 8y ago
    Tech is the worst. Fetishizing disruption leads to neophytes thinking they're breaking new ground when they're just re-discovering long dismissed ideas.
- axaxs 8y ago
  I for one love this type of question, and was the one asking it as I started out. 10-20% of the time, the asker has a valid suggestion. The rest of the time, the explanation as for why it will not work or is not a good idea fosters a better understanding for the asker, and reinforcement brush up for the answerer.
ChuckMcM 8y ago
Reminds me of the quote, "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken One of the things I have experienced in my career is the mind boggling complexity of the software in systems that are capable of killing people. The more people it can kill the more complex the software. As a result when I read articles like the one posted I find it tantalizing to speculate about the requirements behind the story. Taking the story at face value that Boeing has thought a lot about it and that is how the software has to be, what prevents the other solution of disabling the reverser? My guess is that you want the reverser to work in the event of software failure so it has to always work, but if the pilots pull it while you are flying that would probably rip the engines off the plane. Perhaps the compromise is to take the reverser off during flight and relight the engines using aerial pressure to spin up the engines. (which has me wondering if airlines still have a turbine they can drop down to start an APU which can then be used to start the engines). Which leads me to wondering if the pilots turn off the reverser right away do they have enough residual engine power to relight? Versus when they got to the end of the runway and had nothing? Clearly the 777 doesn't have an APU running when it lands since they would have used that to do an engine start at the end of the runway or if it does, it isn't running. It is one of those things that my like minded systems friends could sit around lunch and make a good hour and a half discussion out of.
- TremendousJudge 8y ago
  Relevant article: "Reality has a surprising amount of detail" http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-detail http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...
  - dTal 8y ago
    This is very good.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- SomeHacker44 8y ago
  Yes, Boeing still puts the RAT - ram-air turbine - electrical backup system on their planes.
98codes 8y ago
Welcome to the internet, where everyone's an expert, the problems are real, and the points don't matter.
cmurf 8y ago
My answer to the question is no, but I am a pilot, and my expectation is an invalid input is recorded but is a no op. It is fly by wire so why not just no op the request? The idea such input suggest sabotage, is more paranoid than cautious. And shutting down the engines is hardly fail safe. It's just less fail danger than engaging the thrust reversers. Quite a few turboprops have beta range that is supported for use in-flight. The purpose is to increase the rate of decent, similar to slipping the plane. So it's not always an invalid input; it's make/model/phase of flight specific.

maxxxxx 8y ago

I always love it when you have worked on something for months and someone new comes by and says "Why don't you just X?".

markholmes 8y ago
In this case, possibly years
ergothus 8y ago
It's worse when they are right though. I wish I could say that had not happened to me.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  I am fine with that. In most cases they aren't though. Or they don't understand the whole environment.
  - jiveturkey 8y ago
    My experience is about 50/50, both with my own mistakes and with others. Generally when one is very close to the problem, one sees the environment as immutable. Because, well you spent very many hours building that environment, for very good reasons. And your complex solution "has to" work within the constraints of that complex environment. Whereas, the "mind of a child" that doesn't grok the environment, also doesn't have a fixed notion of it. This is anecdotal of course, but maybe half the time what I see happen is that it's easier/better to change the environment and this can only be seen with fresh eyes. It's not the spoon that bends, and it's not you that bends around the spoon. There is no spoon.
- Retric 8y ago
  Is that from other experts with a very close understanding of the specifics, or random people online? What I find is you start with several viable approaches, pick one and go down the path enough to figure out the downsides. At which point you need to decide to backtrack or keep going. That’s the hard part not simply coming up with a seemingly simple solution.
  - jlg23 8y ago
    > Is that from other experts with a very close understanding of the specifics, or random people online? These groups are not mutually exclusive, membership can only be assigned by a domain expert and is finally irrelevant if the other is right.
    - sabarn01 8y ago
      This can be right when things change over time and people still operate under their initial assumptions. Times change constrains change but on some teams assumptions and choices are not revisited.
    - Retric 8y ago
      Constraints define good decisions. A new team member making a viable suggestion is very different from a random person tossing out a wild ass guess that happens to be right. The difference is the random commentator has no real way to judge how viable something is, and thus is simply tossing out ideas.
  - bigiain 8y ago
    Not "random people online", but I've got a few friends I think of as "terrifyingly smart", and one of their common characteristics is how they've all, in areas of expertise I've been investigating/researching/working in for weeks or months and which they have barely a passing interest in, quite obviously thought about a problem I'm describing and thought through a bunch of the obvious options, categorised them, and made conclusions about which avenues are workable and which should be discarded, and come up with either a workable solution or options I'd not even considered yet - all just in the course of a conversation over coffee... (Somewhat frighteningly, two of those people are doing that at Facebook right now...)
Xcelerate 8y ago
I always appreciate those comments. Sometimes they include something obvious I never thought of.
- da_chicken 8y ago
  Yeah, it shows someone is trying to understand the problem. I mean, sure, most often the response is, "because that would require data that does not yet exist when the decision must be made," or, "there are legitimate circumstances where that would be the exact wrong response," but it does get you thinking. It is less appreciated when people phrase things in a condescending manner, though.
4thaccount 8y ago
I found that I now distrust a lot of articles as people tend to get the things in my field blatantly wrong all the time. Things are complicated and rarely as simple as they seem. On the other hand, I've worked on things for hours before for someone to glance at the problem and solve it. Always a humbling experience.
- monochromatic 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
  - 4thaccount 8y ago
    I never knew there was a name for this, but I feel like everyone has come across this feeling at some point in their life.
ricardobeat 8y ago
They are right more often than you’d expect. Irrational escalation, loss aversion, confirmation bias, etc play their part everywhere causing senseless projects to be pushed to completion.
- arkades 8y ago
  > They are right more often than you’d expect. When the "they" is at least another expert in the same field and not a total stranger completely ignorant of pretty much every relevant detail, and the "you'd expect" part starts at a baseline of nearly 0% for people walking in out of the street unfamiliar with the specific problem at hand, then yes, "they" are right more often than I'd "expect."
breischl 8y ago
Had someone do that this morning. They ran across a problem that has been the focus of a multi-year effort involving dozens of people. Fixing the problem is a big part of the literal #1 priority for the company. Anyway, he hit an example of the issue, and wanted to just put in a bug ticket to one team, and didn't understand why that was not useful or necessary. My analogy is that it's like showing up at NASA in 1965, and wanting to submit a ticket that says "Your rockets can't actually go to the moon. Fix rocket so that it can go to the moon."
koonsolo 8y ago
The best part is when your project is running late or having issues, and the non-technical manager plans a meeting with all the other dead-weight people. "Explain the problem to us, and since we know absolutely nothing about it, our stupid questions might give you new insights". Facepalm.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  Exactly. "Let's all take a step back" or "I'd like to challenge that". Makes you sound insightful while knowing nothing.
threeseed 8y ago
HN is the worst for it. Especially when it comes to tech stacks. If you use anything other than non-SPA, Go, PostgreSQL then it's over engineered and doomed to fail.
- imsofuture 8y ago
  Tech is the worst. Fetishizing disruption leads to neophytes thinking they're breaking new ground when they're just re-discovering long dismissed ideas.
axaxs 8y ago
I for one love this type of question, and was the one asking it as I started out. 10-20% of the time, the asker has a valid suggestion. The rest of the time, the explanation as for why it will not work or is not a good idea fosters a better understanding for the asker, and reinforcement brush up for the answerer.

ChuckMcM 8y ago

Reminds me of the quote, "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken One of the things I have experienced in my career is the mind boggling complexity of the software in systems that are capable of killing people. The more people it can kill the more complex the software. As a result when I read articles like the one posted I find it tantalizing to speculate about the requirements behind the story. Taking the story at face value that Boeing has thought a lot about it and that is how the software has to be, what prevents the other solution of disabling the reverser? My guess is that you want the reverser to work in the event of software failure so it has to always work, but if the pilots pull it while you are flying that would probably rip the engines off the plane. Perhaps the compromise is to take the reverser off during flight and relight the engines using aerial pressure to spin up the engines. (which has me wondering if airlines still have a turbine they can drop down to start an APU which can then be used to start the engines). Which leads me to wondering if the pilots turn off the reverser right away do they have enough residual engine power to relight? Versus when they got to the end of the runway and had nothing? Clearly the 777 doesn't have an APU running when it lands since they would have used that to do an engine start at the end of the runway or if it does, it isn't running. It is one of those things that my like minded systems friends could sit around lunch and make a good hour and a half discussion out of.

TremendousJudge 8y ago
Relevant article: "Reality has a surprising amount of detail" http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-detail http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...
- dTal 8y ago
  This is very good.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
SomeHacker44 8y ago
Yes, Boeing still puts the RAT - ram-air turbine - electrical backup system on their planes.

98codes 8y ago

Welcome to the internet, where everyone's an expert, the problems are real, and the points don't matter.

cmurf 8y ago

My answer to the question is no, but I am a pilot, and my expectation is an invalid input is recorded but is a no op. It is fly by wire so why not just no op the request? The idea such input suggest sabotage, is more paranoid than cautious. And shutting down the engines is hardly fail safe. It's just less fail danger than engaging the thrust reversers. Quite a few turboprops have beta range that is supported for use in-flight. The purpose is to increase the rate of decent, similar to slipping the plane. So it's not always an invalid input; it's make/model/phase of flight specific.