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Comment by sdhgaiojfsa | Hacker News Reader

My big takeaway from all of this is that, given the choice between driving your boat into a hurricane and doing something else, something else should be the default.

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Another conclusion was that a tiered subscription model that withholds life-saving information is a business I never want to be in. El Faro subscribed to the Bon Voyage System for weather updates, but they didn't subscribe to the routing guidance and always received six hour-old information. The stale data is a critical part of this story.

http://www.stormgeo.com/solutions/shipping/on-board-services...

Another important part are the flashy graphics. People always trust you more with flashy graphics against a list of coordinates

..and buggy software.

As a professional curmudgeon, I have the same reaction to shiny graphics that I do to salesman I’m fancy suits: I’m not buying.

Charting data accurately is really really hard. On one team we had a guy who said charts are for asking questions, not making decisions, and I’ve found that to be a pretty safe default.

Another conclusion is to never be in a business that tries to save pennies by not subscribing to life critical data.

The stale data seemed to be partially a result of the software glitch. Therefore it's not clear at all that adding a "routing guidance" model on top of the same data would have been any better solution. The captain already established his own route given the same, largely wrong, data.

What they needed was hourly updates, which they had from the other service they subscribed to, which was ignored by the captain. Despite the staff being fully aware.

And the captain and staff should always be reading weather data from two sources anyway, for redundancy and accuracy.

These guys had plenty of information but over-relied on one which was 6-12hrs out-of-date at the worst time, which no indication it was old data.

These are solvable problems that have little to do with tiered pricing or a cheapness on part of the company. Both by the above redundancy and the weather company dating their data, and fixing software bugs for such critical software.

That's a pretty bad take away - no one wanted to drive trough the hurricane. The captain thought he was further away from the storm than he was, perhaps because of his use of an outdated weather feed.

A better take away might be, for important decisions, you should deeply understand the data(and importantly, it's limitations) you are using to make the decision.

The report seems to suggest that his decision to drive where he did was baffling, even with the information he had available. All his officers were telling him to do otherwise, multiple times.

He was looking at different data then they were looking at.

If that were all it was, then why are the investigators surprised by his decision-making?

Why?

I mean, there seems to be no reasonable reason why that should be the case, he can see (and be notified) of everything they're seeing and he can substantiate his decision by pointing towards the data, and should do so - because in this case the other officers might have noticed problems with that data.

"...you should deeply understand the data(and importantly, it's limitations) you are using to make the decision."

Very apt also for the Air France 447 crash this author wrote about.

Another conclusion is to stick to land-based activities.

Or be able to go deep underwater when things get really nasty.

For a guy who grew up on a dryland wheat farm 400 miles from ocean, that is going in the wrong direction for me.

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