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Comment by kqr | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the other commenter that the specific shape of the cross section of the wing is overemphasised in almost all material including this one. Any shape longer than it's thick will, at a reasonable angle of attack, provide lift.

This article did provide a barn door model also, but it was quite far down.

The shape is mainly about efficiency and increasing the range of reasonable angles of attack, and then further nuances.

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It's amazing how the article did such an incredible job building a deep understanding of how the airfoil works, yet you managed to completely miss that and find something to so small to critique.

I think many of these kinds of comments are driven by a form of insecurity. They subconsciously wish they had written the article and are envious of the attention the author is receiving… so they find whatever small nitpick they can in order to tear it down.

Sorry for my low-value comment, but I think it is appropriate here. Doing a psychoanalysis of OP does not really add to the discussion meaningfully. Same applies to parent comment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names

To be clear, the article was amazing. That has already been said multiple times by others so if I left a comment saing just that I would contribute nothing. Besides, the size of the criticism (in this case small, as you point out) is an even better measure of quality than number of fawning comments.

I also publish articles (though nowhere near as good or ambitious as this one) online and the comments I look forward to most are the constructively critical ones. They are the reason I publish in the first place.

My only goal of giving and receiving constructive criticism is to improve our collective understanding of the world. There's nothing sinister or ill-natured about it as another commenter suggested.

(This extends to comments as well. I really appreciate you prompting me to check my tone.)

bro just stop

This made me think of how I hate Youtube comments. All the high-fiving positive ones end up on the top and not the ones that provide an opportunity to learn or think critically.

I thought they made it very clear and talked at length that the shape isn't the key important factor. They do also then go on to talk about the benefits of different shapes and why they are chosen.

You gotta wonder why the Wrights spent so much time optimizing an airfoil. You could have been there to tell them to use a barn door wing and flat plate prop to save them a lot of time.

I have noticed this "it works or it doesn't work. Everything else is nuances." binary thinking among SWEs. It's odd.

effect is amplified on hn

An odd thing to say for a SWE. There's huge differences in the quality of apps, both from a user perspective and an internal/dev perspective.

Don't get me wrong -- for practical flight it is really important to expand the reasonable range of angles of attack because angle of attack is one of very few ways one has of controlling the aircraft.

But for explaining how lift appears, it is an irrelevant detail.

The purpose of modeling is not to mimick reality at high fidelity but to focus attention on the o parameters that matter for a specific situation. When you change the situation (going from explaining how lift happens to trying to fly) it is not surprising to have to switch to a different model.

This article shows how a flat plane can create lift. It doesn't start with that, it starts with a familiar airfoil, deconstructs it until it reaches the flat plane making lift, and then builds back to showing why airfoil shapes are used when simpler flat planes still make lift.

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