I learned how not to get rid of a whale at least.

In case I’m ever asked about that...

Yes some of the options would have been fairly spectacular at least.

HN is a lot of amazing experts in a particular subject mostly talking about something else. It's fascinating in this way.

I just re-read that old thread and to be honest, on the whole the advice there is sound. I saw comments discounting the fanciful speculation outnumbering the speculation by at least a multiple of two.

There are silly ideas in every forum. I've been on plenty groups comprised entirely of tech experts and I can confidently say that foolish ideas will be proposed even in the most elite of circles, even in their areas of specialty. It happens, and as long as there are other reasonable voices it's fine.

It's the classic "expertise is universal" fallacy. When we see someone who is an expert in their field, we assume that expertise carries over to totally unrelated fields, when this is emphatically not the case. Being a genius does not prevent someone from being ignorant; the finite nature of time means every genius is almost completely uninformed on almost every topic, and without information what you get is GIGO.

There's a whole industry around ship recovery and they know how to do things like patch things back together with some light underwater welding and then pump the water back out the hole in the bottom with compressed air. Lots of times, this is done while the ship is busy worrying itself to death on a reef.

Ship salvage is a combination of batshit crazy and real-time engineering marvel with a healthy dose of understanding tides waves and currents. There's also a strange maritime law business going on where the captain and or insurance company have to sign a contract. IF the ship is a 'wreck' the salvage company gets what ever they can save or whatever it's agreed on in the contract. If it just needs some help, the contract will be lighter. But many ships have sunk completely while the insurance company and salvage company have argued over whether it was a total loss or just suck in a low tide.

I always find the salvage stories to be super interesting. Seeing people do hard ball business while the ship is breaking up under them is really something else.

The smartest ones are maybe not the ones providing suggestions?

Then again, it's fun to speculate, and what are these threads for if not to provoke thought? Maybe it's fine for people to imagine and try to put themselves in the place of the professionals working on the problem. You can interpret the comments here as an indicator of dangerous human hubris if you want, but I think most of the people here understand that they can't do any harm by posting naive speculations on HN.

In my opinion, we should save our outrage for people who make an active attempt to be taken seriously and affect the actions of more qualified people, such as the guy who posted the bizarre (and possibly satirical?) account of his attempt to build a system for guiding doctors' treatment decisions.

The way I look at it is, if I’m here, then there’s a strong statistical probability that a bunch of other clueless superficially intelligent people like me found their way here too. I just hope anyone I encounter is smarter than I am.

As correct as that is, I don't think anyone was actually thinking those were good ideas. There's something really innocently funny about this episode of history, and honestly it's fun to just think about what-ifs. Could you build surge walls all the way along and use some kind of dam? Combine all the power of every helicopter to lift the whole thing? Big ships are fun, unwieldy objects getting stuck are fun, sometimes it's just fun to mess around.

I wonder if there is a forum of marine engineers somewhere speculating on how Google (or whoever) should fix a service outage...

I enjoy reading all the various ideas people come up to solve a complex issue. I know it's mostly not realistic but always good to see how imagination come forth.