Hacker News Reader

Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

I sometimes wonder about the value of these news stories on forums and social media.

It's all pretty much wild speculation with several potential causes already mentioned on this forum.

News important yes, every rando with a few shreds of factoids speculating, not so much.

Anything about civilian air safety is like catnip for nerds. It is the ultimate armchair nerd sport -- speculating about reasons for a civilian air crash. I guess this discussion will be more than 1,000 comments before its heat-death.

Here we get air traffic controller recordings, and people who are ammeter pilots. It is more informed speculation than my "normal" friends or co-workers.

I suspect moderately informed, but not completely informed, is the worst kind of speculation. It has a sense of authority and knowledge that is hard to pinpoint its accuracy.

Almost all the amateur theories in here, just by the variety, are going to be dead wrong.

It just sounds more informed. Just like all the "amateur" physicists who speculate on theoretical physics posts on HN.

I’ve been saying something similar to friends recently. We have access to a bit Too much news for our own good.

Here, I get ATC transcripts and learn about the helicopter flight paths. Traditional news describes an airliner with 60 people on board as a “small plane.”

In this case there is no or negative value. Wait for the facts, avoid the noise and wild speculation.

But my dopamine…

Well, last night when there were only 10 comments here, the essentials of what had happened were available from those comments. Meanwhile the mainstream news TV I was watching at the same time was presenting either zero information, or false information (e.g. that 4 survivors had been rescued).

Don't you know? If a person can program in Rust and Kotlin, that makes him an expert in every other field, too.

I've seen at least one "why don't you just <misunderstanding of how aviation works>" upthread already. Can't believe this flavor of tech hubris is running the country now. No wonder the goddamn planes are falling out of the sky...

Arguably we have that with the current US executive branch.

We had a hubub about the right way to power an aircraft carrier catapult for a while the first go around with these fools ...

Yes, tons of speculation, and very little clear basic facts.

When I clicked, I expected to find the comments interesting (since I worked in a small corner of flight safety), but, skimming through, I kept feeling aversion to threads.

Most modern news organizations aren't much better.

Let's go back to AI non-stop 24/7, hallucinations are saner.

I come to hn for the speculations.

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