7 ms·

Anyone else look at the headline and feel this is one of the dumbest headlines ever. It makes it sound like NASA's incompetent. 'Why haven't you fixed Hubble ye

Anyone else look at the headline and feel this is one of the dumbest headlines ever. It makes it sound like NASA's incompetent. 'Why haven't you fixed Hubble yet?'. There doesn't seem to be any nuance or respect that they're trying to repair an orbiting telescope that was launched 30 years ago and designed 40 years ago - and that people are patiently trying to sort through a fully autonomous system 400 miles above the surface of the Earth with a very large set of failure options. For me - huge props to NASA and other organizations that do this kind of work and keep these systems running for decades. I need to reboot Windows every 2-3 days

spockz 5y ago
To me this title comes across as just factual and not diminutive in any way.
- foxpurple 5y ago
  Can’t work out gives a sense that they have tried everything and failed. “Haven’t worked out yet” is still factual and implies that they are still working on it.
mhh__ 5y ago
> Anyone else look at the headline and feel this is one of the dumbest headlines ever. It makes it sound like NASA's incompetent. 'Why haven't you fixed Hubble yet?'. I didn't get that impression. This does intrigue me - I like browsing hackernews, but I often get the impression that some people (not the PC specifically) here are either ridiculously anal about English or genuinely do not parse sentences the way I do.
- skissane 5y ago
  > I often get the impression that some people (not the PC specifically) here are either ridiculously anal about English or genuinely do not parse sentences the way I do. People with autistic traits sometimes parse sentences in an overly literal or precise manner. I rarely do this anymore, but when I was a child and teenager I did it more often. When I'm speaking of "autistic traits", I'm not speaking just of people diagnosed with autism/ASD (who are of course represented here), but also people with broad autism phenotype (BAP), the subclinical manifestation of ASD. BAP is when you have more of the symptoms of ASD than the average person does, but not enough to justify an actual diagnosis of ASD. BAP is quite common in software engineers, and STEM professionals more generally, so I think there are likely a lot of people on this site with BAP (albeit most of them have probably never heard of it.) The people you are talking about quite possibly do have some degree of BAP, and this behaviour is quite possibly a manifestation of their BAP.
  - not2b 5y ago
    But the headline is literally and precisely true, at least at present. At some point they may be able to figure out the issues enough to restore operation, but not yet.
    - skissane 5y ago
      Sometimes, how this trait manifests itself, is in a difficulty in seeing that a sentence could have multiple meanings; the mind focuses on one particular meaning and struggles to perceive the other possibilities. Usually there are several different ways to read something in an overly literal/precise manner; the fact that one of them is true doesn't do much good if one's mind has decided to fixate on one of the others that isn't.
    - spfzero 5y ago
      They use “can’t”, meaning “can not”. Unable. That’s misleading, and no doubt intentional, to create more drama. The more accurate word would be “haven’t”, or “haven’t yet”, but that’s not alarming enough.
davesque 5y ago
Yeah, I hear you on that. Another possibility is that NPR is trying to manufacture a sense of mystery or surprise as journalists often do with science stories. A bit less nefarious but also sort of annoying in its own way.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  It's more than annoying. It comes part and parcel with the dumbing down of society.
  - geoduck14 5y ago
    Most of my work could benefit from a journalist > Overworked Engineer misses semicolon. All night review session finds it, data gets loaded! > Management insists Jira stories be routed to new Epic. Team Lead spends hours learning Jira API before giving up and doing it "the hard way"
    - tharkun__ 5y ago
      Completely not related to the topic at hand but ;) I love this "spend hours figuring out the API" then giving up. Maybe it's just me but I have noticed that a lot (and it mean a lot) of devs will overestimate greatly on anything manual they need to do that they don't like. And spend hours if not days trying to automate it. Which is fine if it's gonna be needed again soon or over and over. But really, what is so bad in spending literally 5 minutes doing the above manually with a Jira filter and bulk edit? And by extension sometimes there's not even a bulk edit and you need to do something by clicking the same 5 steps 50 times to acgieve something. Again 5 minutes of actual work. Just put on a nice fast song from whatever music genre you happen to love and do it. Done. Is it just me?
      - ravel-bar-foo 5y ago
        I discovered this in my PhD. I spent 3 months trying to automate a process (running a finite element model atop very fragile software platform). I couldn't figure out how to automate my way around the errors the system would give me, every run was unpredictable in duration due to the errors, and I ended up spending a lot of time holding the system's hand. Eventually gave up on the automation and resolved to spend a few weeks clicking every 15 minutes to complete the simulations. It was very hard to stay motivated, but I got two papers out of it. The disadvantage is now my CV says I'm an expert at an FEM framework which I never want anything to do with ever again.
bamboozled 5y ago
No, I just read it like they must have a really hard problem and hope they find a solution soon.
jacobwilliamroy 5y ago
I think you may be projecting some self esteem issues here.
asymptosis 5y ago
I thought they were riffing on recent UFO hype.
tambourine_man 5y ago
Is Windows still like that or was that tongue in cheek? I run my Mac for months, only restart for updates.
- wruza 5y ago
  Still? It got exponentially worse last few years. I deliberately turn off unplanned auto-updates by any means because windows 10 reboot/shutdown (when I really need one – drivers, etc) takes minutes because of mandatory updates. When I still had windows laptop and had to bring it somewhere I hibernated it instead of turning off, because turn off would mean “please wait for 20 minutes of battery stress test” or few hours if it’s that lucky day of not-a-service-pack-4.
Waterluvian 5y ago
I hear you. But I’ve also learned as an engineer that nobody really cares to hear from you how difficult and impressive it is.
IncRnd 5y ago
> There doesn't seem to be any nuance or respect that they're trying to repair an orbiting telescope that was launched 30 years ago and designed 40 years ago - and that people are patiently trying to sort through a fully autonomous system 400 miles above the surface of the Earth with a very large set of failure options. That's what the article says. The headline is clickbait.
TideAd 5y ago
I've worked on some legacy code in my time but debugging this thing has gotta be completely nuts.
code_duck 5y ago
Saying “can’t figure out” gives me the impression that they’ve tried their hardest and have concluded they are unable to diagnose or solve the problem, which is not accurate.

spockz 5y ago

To me this title comes across as just factual and not diminutive in any way.

foxpurple 5y ago
Can’t work out gives a sense that they have tried everything and failed. “Haven’t worked out yet” is still factual and implies that they are still working on it.

mhh__ 5y ago

> Anyone else look at the headline and feel this is one of the dumbest headlines ever. It makes it sound like NASA's incompetent. 'Why haven't you fixed Hubble yet?'. I didn't get that impression. This does intrigue me - I like browsing hackernews, but I often get the impression that some people (not the PC specifically) here are either ridiculously anal about English or genuinely do not parse sentences the way I do.

skissane 5y ago
> I often get the impression that some people (not the PC specifically) here are either ridiculously anal about English or genuinely do not parse sentences the way I do. People with autistic traits sometimes parse sentences in an overly literal or precise manner. I rarely do this anymore, but when I was a child and teenager I did it more often. When I'm speaking of "autistic traits", I'm not speaking just of people diagnosed with autism/ASD (who are of course represented here), but also people with broad autism phenotype (BAP), the subclinical manifestation of ASD. BAP is when you have more of the symptoms of ASD than the average person does, but not enough to justify an actual diagnosis of ASD. BAP is quite common in software engineers, and STEM professionals more generally, so I think there are likely a lot of people on this site with BAP (albeit most of them have probably never heard of it.) The people you are talking about quite possibly do have some degree of BAP, and this behaviour is quite possibly a manifestation of their BAP.
- not2b 5y ago
  But the headline is literally and precisely true, at least at present. At some point they may be able to figure out the issues enough to restore operation, but not yet.
  - skissane 5y ago
    Sometimes, how this trait manifests itself, is in a difficulty in seeing that a sentence could have multiple meanings; the mind focuses on one particular meaning and struggles to perceive the other possibilities. Usually there are several different ways to read something in an overly literal/precise manner; the fact that one of them is true doesn't do much good if one's mind has decided to fixate on one of the others that isn't.
  - spfzero 5y ago
    They use “can’t”, meaning “can not”. Unable. That’s misleading, and no doubt intentional, to create more drama. The more accurate word would be “haven’t”, or “haven’t yet”, but that’s not alarming enough.

davesque 5y ago

Yeah, I hear you on that. Another possibility is that NPR is trying to manufacture a sense of mystery or surprise as journalists often do with science stories. A bit less nefarious but also sort of annoying in its own way.

kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
It's more than annoying. It comes part and parcel with the dumbing down of society.
- geoduck14 5y ago
  Most of my work could benefit from a journalist > Overworked Engineer misses semicolon. All night review session finds it, data gets loaded! > Management insists Jira stories be routed to new Epic. Team Lead spends hours learning Jira API before giving up and doing it "the hard way"
  - tharkun__ 5y ago
    Completely not related to the topic at hand but ;) I love this "spend hours figuring out the API" then giving up. Maybe it's just me but I have noticed that a lot (and it mean a lot) of devs will overestimate greatly on anything manual they need to do that they don't like. And spend hours if not days trying to automate it. Which is fine if it's gonna be needed again soon or over and over. But really, what is so bad in spending literally 5 minutes doing the above manually with a Jira filter and bulk edit? And by extension sometimes there's not even a bulk edit and you need to do something by clicking the same 5 steps 50 times to acgieve something. Again 5 minutes of actual work. Just put on a nice fast song from whatever music genre you happen to love and do it. Done. Is it just me?
    - ravel-bar-foo 5y ago
      I discovered this in my PhD. I spent 3 months trying to automate a process (running a finite element model atop very fragile software platform). I couldn't figure out how to automate my way around the errors the system would give me, every run was unpredictable in duration due to the errors, and I ended up spending a lot of time holding the system's hand. Eventually gave up on the automation and resolved to spend a few weeks clicking every 15 minutes to complete the simulations. It was very hard to stay motivated, but I got two papers out of it. The disadvantage is now my CV says I'm an expert at an FEM framework which I never want anything to do with ever again.

bamboozled 5y ago

No, I just read it like they must have a really hard problem and hope they find a solution soon.

jacobwilliamroy 5y ago

I think you may be projecting some self esteem issues here.

asymptosis 5y ago

I thought they were riffing on recent UFO hype.

tambourine_man 5y ago

Is Windows still like that or was that tongue in cheek? I run my Mac for months, only restart for updates.

wruza 5y ago
Still? It got exponentially worse last few years. I deliberately turn off unplanned auto-updates by any means because windows 10 reboot/shutdown (when I really need one – drivers, etc) takes minutes because of mandatory updates. When I still had windows laptop and had to bring it somewhere I hibernated it instead of turning off, because turn off would mean “please wait for 20 minutes of battery stress test” or few hours if it’s that lucky day of not-a-service-pack-4.

Waterluvian 5y ago

I hear you. But I’ve also learned as an engineer that nobody really cares to hear from you how difficult and impressive it is.

IncRnd 5y ago

> There doesn't seem to be any nuance or respect that they're trying to repair an orbiting telescope that was launched 30 years ago and designed 40 years ago - and that people are patiently trying to sort through a fully autonomous system 400 miles above the surface of the Earth with a very large set of failure options. That's what the article says. The headline is clickbait.

TideAd 5y ago

I've worked on some legacy code in my time but debugging this thing has gotta be completely nuts.

code_duck 5y ago

Saying “can’t figure out” gives me the impression that they’ve tried their hardest and have concluded they are unable to diagnose or solve the problem, which is not accurate.