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Comment by mtarnovan | Hacker News Reader

These stories of SV excesses (especially Juicero) remind me of the anecdote telling how the NASA spend a lot of money to develop a ball point pen than could write in zero gravity. The Russians? They took pencils.

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It's a funny story, but it's also not true. You don't want pencils in space (not because they don't work, but because you don't want graphite dust everywhere).

A source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-n...

That's why I said "anecdote", i.e. "an account regarded as unreliable or hearsay."

I like the part where you skipped right over "a short and amusing or interesting story about a real incident or person" so you could quote "an account regarded as unreliable or hearsay".

It's okay to be wrong. I distinctly remember believing the (false) pencil story once, before reading more about it and learning the (far more interesting) actual story. And also realizing that the false pencil story pushes certain goals and agendas, too, so probably isn't accidental.

Funny, funny story.

The US used graphite and paid ridiculous amounts of money for it. The USSR greased pencils or out right crayons instead.

I love that story because it reminds me to always look for the deeper reasoning behind shallow first impressions - the only reason a pen seems like an expensive waste is because I'm ignorant of the full complexity behind the decision to use pens over pencils. As a programmer, it's easy to walk into a room full of seemingly simple manual processes and tell everyone they need to be automated out of a job, but it's highly disrespectful to their years of specialized experience.

Always good to be humble and remember that I'm not smarter than a rocket scientist in their own field.

Both NASA and the Russians used pencils in the beginning. Once a pen the worked in zero gravity was developed (by a private US company, and not by NASA or with NASA money), both NASA and the Russians started to buy and use those pens.

That story of Russian pencils is a myth.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-n...

Actually, the Russians bought the same pens from the same American company.

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