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Comment by advael | Hacker News Reader

What a profoundly stupid take by a profoundly irresponsible company. This is a great example of why you should consider anything a company says about itself to be marketing, and treat it with commensurate skepticism.

"We're so innovative we don't have time for safety regulations" - An idiot, destined to harm someone unless pure dumb luck causes their company to fail first

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> We're so innovative

what I'm wondering is: what's the incentive to be "innovative" in the first place? Unless "innovation" is an end in itself.

Is there some great unmet need to send people to extreme depths, especially when unmanned probes can do most necessar work nowadays?

> Is there some great unmet need to send people to extreme depths, especially when unmanned probes can do most necessar work nowadays?

Two reasons: 1) they had plenty of paying customers, so there was a demand

2) the CEO wanted to be remembered as an innovator, views this as being an explorer, and wanted to inspire people (he said so in interviews)

> “I’d like to be remembered as an innovator,” Rush said in the 2-year-old YouTube interview. “I think it was Gen. MacArthur said, ‘You’re remembered for the rules you break.’ And, you know, I’ve broken some rules to make this. I think I’ve broken them with logic and good engineering behind me, the carbon fiber and titanium — there’s a rule you don’t do that. Well, I did.”

And see what happens?

The only "unmet needs" such an endeavor need care about is convincing a deep-pocketed investor

Exactly. One could make the same claim about space tourism, but that one has some rational justification at least. I don't see a great benefit in having cheaper deep-water subs.

What’s the rational justification for space tourism?

I'm hoping someone will come up with one. Maybe lowering the cost & raising the safety standards for people who have useful work to do up there?

You can argue, but it won't be with me on the other side. I don't have a dog in that fight.

Rather: for every customer who slightly informs himself, it should be insanely obvious that signing up might be quite dangerous (with a risk that is likely very hard to actually measure - this is a huge red flag for any risk-averse person).

So if you neverthess sign up, you are very aware that things might go insanely wrong (and there is actually a very realistic probability of dying). So you really know what you are up to.

The linked article is very clearly an attempt to persuade its reader that the lack of classing (IE verification of safety by an external auditor) is less of an issue than they might otherwise think. Your advice to a reader of this article is rational here, but I think it's worth also pointing out that the article is meant to persuade said reader to not think that way

Perhaps this might be a cultural issue (I am not a US-American citizen), but to me your quote

> "We're so innovative we don't have time for safety regulations"

reads like "to offer an innovative service which would otherwise not possible, we exchanged known risks (what safety regulations are for to capture and mitigate) for much more unknown risks".

As I wrote: "risks that are likely very hard to actually measure are a huge red flag for any risk-averse person" (and most people are risk-averse), so every customer should be perfectly aware for what he signs up.

This is like a financial adviser who offers a highly innovative finance product with a risk profile that is hard to measure because of its novelty, which the advisor clearly tells. There do exist customers for which such a product is a good choice (say risk-affine, novelty-seeking ones), but such customers are perfectly aware what they are up to.

The linked article is a clear case of the messaging from the company trying to downplay the risk, as I wrote before. The example of financial advisers selling risky products is an apt one, because very famously, the entire finance industry has crashed giant segments of the US economy multiple times via selling products carrying insane risk profiles to customers who were not in actual fact risk-affine and novelty-seeking, and did not in fact understand the risks. They did this because they were incentivized not to be responsible, but to push as much product as possible, and because their risk in this equation was substantially mitigated by deep-pocketed financial backers, including but not limited to bailouts from the government itself, in a way that the risk of their "customers" (Past a certain threshold of deceptiveness, I would consider the term "victims" more appropriate) was not

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