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Comment by CryptoBanker | Hacker News Reader

The founder/CEO has said that he hasn't been on a single trip where everything went to plan...

This is what happens when you take the move fast and break things culture to anything where people die when things break. Really just sad and so stupid.

It’s sad of course, but the early days of flight were also quite dangerous but they lead to rapid innovation and the stable industry of today.

It’s a tragedy, but high risk activities are by definition going to have a few.

Unfortunately with flights you can usually at least take a good guess at what went wrong. I think we’ll be lucky if they find (and retrieve) wreckage in this case

>It’s sad of course, but the early days of flight were also quite dangerous but they lead to rapid innovation and the stable industry of today.

And if you tried to take paid passengers on a homebuilt uncertified aircraft today you would go to jail. This isn't the early days. The challenger deep was reached over 60 years ago. We've been building submarines longer than airplanes. We know how to do this stuff safely. This was negligence.

Sure but at that time no one knew how to fly. Today we absolutely know how to build and test decent submersibles and there’s really no excuse for building a machine as untested as this one.

There's calculated risk and reckless risk. Sounds like this was the latter unfortunately.

But risk can be mitigated with proper engineering, testing, and manufacturing process control. These are all quite well understood just seemingly not well implemented by this company.

> This is what happens when you take the move fast and break things culture

Or then you take things slow and you end up like NASA who has not launched any new rocket in years. Is that better?

In regards to human life, unambiguously yes.

The nasa is also supposed to actually launch stuff you know

I think there's a happy medium, and civilian tourism probably isn't really the place to be pushing the safety envelope.

Science, discovery, boldly going where no one has gone before? Absolutely safety is going to be somewhat compromised. Taking rich people to the gawk at the Titanic? I, personally, think you're a bit of dick for MacGyvering a vessel together and calling it good enough.

They haven’t killed anyone in years, either.

Zero output guarantees that

... yes?

You cant have space exploration without people dying.

Do you know what happened to Apollo 1?

Wow, everything working should be the goal- not a mere nice to have.

Stop being such a nerd! There’s an old boat in the water that sank because of hubris, let’s go see what we can learn!

(Lesson learned the hard way)

> everything working should be the goal

It's probably the goal, but complex endeavors mean you need to iterate to get there

The iteration has already been done. Safety rules exist because somebody has died and had it written in their blood. Failure to read the literature gets people killed.

This is reckless and it is stupid and excusemaking for it has no moral grounds.

> The iteration has already been done.

Excuse me, there are several companies operating submarines that visit the Titanic with tourists?

This is a response that, if made not in jest, is a signal of mendacity.

Submersibles visited the Challenger Deep in the 1960s. We know how to build them, we know how to build them effectively, and we know many of the ways not to build them. "But we added tourists!" is not a meaningful factor here unless what you meant-but-wouldn't-say is "but we value engineered it!" in which case: yes, exactly, that's what safety rules are designed to put guardrails around.

I think the founder/CEO should be on a trip to prison for the negligence and mind bogglingly poor decision making surrounding this debacle.

He was on the sub.

He's one of the people on the lost submarine

My mistake, I thought there was a separate party from the company piloting and the owner was not aboard.

He is in the submarine...

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