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Comment by rajandatta | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

It's more than annoying. It comes part and parcel with the dumbing down of society.

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"

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?

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.

Normally if your eyes and hands are synchronized to do an operation, it can be automated.

Sometimes problems come from trying to automate at the lowest level, when maybe screenshotting a vm and sending a click at a specific position if the pixel colors change to the error condition could be done a bit faster.

At least automating it can be kind of fun and educational.

The real engineers spend weeks analyzing the pros and cons of a manual, one-time fix vs. building an automated solution.

And the even realer ones will spend years coming up with a universal solution to figuring out which is more optimal.

Journalists don't choose the clickbait headlines and generally don't care for them; they are business decisions, especially for any site that makes money via ad clicks. They even do A/B testing: initially some visitors are shown headine A, others see headline B. If B gets more clicks, A is dropped.

> Management insists Jira stories be routed to new Epic.

Agile expert called in, who saves the day(night?)...

I find a lot of content on YT is like that. The actual work is skipped hand-waved then it's every other second cut scene and some music on top... Idk. Started unsubscribing from channels lately. Still some good ones.

That's internet for most people. We are in a bubble and the bubble is actually much better than that.

Either mystery or bad puns based on the science.

Extra points if you can throw "Einstein" in the headline.

> trying to manufacture a sense of mystery or surprise

That's a positive spin on clickbait.

I'm not sure how much more mystery one neds than 'Only orbiting telescope in human history has a fault our best engineers haven't diagnosed as yet!' :-)

Interestingly, we humans actually have more than just Hubble floating around up there in the way of telescopes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_telescopes

Missing from the list are the space telescopes that look inwards:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen

Fascinating buried lead:

> A NASA history of the Hubble,[24] in discussing the reasons for switching from a 3-meter main mirror to a 2.4-meter design, states: "In addition, changing to a 2.4-meter mirror would lessen fabrication costs by using manufacturing technologies developed for military spy satellites."

Hubble was derived from these spy satellites.

What's mindboggling to me is the sheer number of spy satellites that were more or less each equivalent to Hubble.

There are estimated to have been something like seventeen of the KH-11 satellites, each one of which cost something like 2/3s of a Nimitz class aircraft carrier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen

And there are an unknown number of its successor, but probably at least 3, where they updated it for stealth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misty_(satellite)

It feels like a parallel universe where what is a technical struggle and tour de force here, is churned out by the dozens.

Hubble was botched initially, they had to send astronauts up to fix it before they could get usable images out of it. I wonder what the success rate for those spy satellites was. Maybe some of them were replacements for others, replaced instead of repaired?

If you go back a little more, they used to launch one or two film-based disposable spy satellites per month.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

> 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.

I thought they were riffing on recent UFO hype.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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