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Comment by logicallee | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity, have you ever built anything big? I say this because the tone of your comment is dismissive, however it seems quite low-effort. I can translate your criticisms into criticisms of building subways in 1863:

  - if you build a subway it will be the biggest underground railway ever built.
  - Rocks.  They could fall in front of a subway car and cause a huge accident.
  - safety.  what if all the lights and power go out?  Also how would anyone breathe down there.

And my criticisms seem stronger, not weaker, than yours. Today all cities with robust subway systems benefit hugely from them and all of these issues have been resolved.

The criticism you've offered seems equally low-effort, so this is why I'm curious if you've ever helped design and build any large-scale project.

I don't like gratuitous negativity on HN and it's against the rules here.

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Also, planes are a terrible idea. I mean how do you evacuate people from them if something goes wrong? I think this whole airplane thing is just vaporware.

That isn't exactly a solved problem though. Almost all of the time it's "everyone dies". We just have failure rates low enough and it's convenient enough that people accept it.

This is normal. You either handle failure gracefully or ensure the failures are very rare.

The question isn't "will this ever work?", the question is (while keeping with your airplane analogy) is Elon Musk's design closer to the Wright brothers airplane or Da Vinci's ornithopter. I'd guess the latter personally.

The Wright brothers had a bicycle shop, whereas Da Vinci was more of a painter.

The main thing Musk has in common with the Wrights is running an electric car transportation company and sending private rockets into space via SpaceX.

I think you should revisit whether that makes it more Wright brothers or Da Vinci.

What are you arguing? You wouldn’t take the position that it’s guarenteed to succeed, that seems absurd to me. The person you replied to only made the point that it could fail. And in your reply you actually took the opportunity to degrade artists and thinkers, which seems cruel and unnecessary.

You’ve found a flaw, I think a pedantic one, in the example they gave.

Here’s an example that is less flawed, and I think if you had considered their point rather than sought minute flaws you could see this yourself: the palm note vs the iPhone. Hopefully, even if my analogy is not literally flawless, you can take my point.

Also, sorry for spamming you, something you wrote struck me and I wanted to see what else you wrote. Hope you don’t mind this.

The question is if we want to accept the risks. In the early days of subways, trains, planes and cars, accidents were frequent and many people died until we figured out the safety aspect. Today's society is much more risk averse. I don't think the general public would accept several fatal crashes before the system is safe.

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