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Comment by potato3732842 | Hacker News Reader

People are supposed to die in war, and automobiles are operated at the whim of the one person driving them whereas commercial airplanes are operated in strict accordance with a protocol that's supposed to prevent killing people and trashing the multimillion dollar commercial equipment. Nobody gives a crap when two guys in a float plane crash in the middle of nowhere, because the circumstances said aircraft is operated under are pretty close to that of a car.

I'm not gonna call your question silly because it was in earnest, but it does seem to indicate problems with your world view that you consider deaths under these differing circumstances fungible at a 1 for 1 rate or thereabouts.

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Why are they not fungible for you? What difference is there when a drunk t-bones you two thousand times versus an iceberg t-boning fifteen hundred people one time? Also what the hell do you mean "supposed to die in a war", who decides that?

But I see the line about "multimillion dollar commercial equipment". The shareholder value must be protected after all. Conversely, a wrecked car is a potential new sale.

I can tell you haven't been a software developer or engineer long if the woes of the Titanic aren't resonating with you at some level. They built out this lux tricked out master facade to make the most high-end ocean liner in the world but built it with rivets that were high in slag (cheap). They took shortcuts that got exposed on the product launch which sent over a thousand people to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. As a dev I look at this as the worst, most historically atrocious user experience in the history of human civilization and it continues to live on in the memories of everyone in 2025. And RIP to those that gave up their seats on those shifty lifeboats so that other peoples kids could survive this debacle.

> "As a dev I look at this as the worst, most historically atrocious user experience in the history of human civilization"

Another contender: during the fire and sinking of the steamship General Slocum carrying people on a family picnic in New York, 1904, people reached for the fire hoses which were cheap and rotten and useless. The lifeboats were inaccessible. The life jackets unmaintained for a decade and had rotted to cork dust and the inspection records had been falsified. Imagine with no fire extinguishing, no lifeboats, you grab a remaining life preserver and put it on your kid and throw them overboard only to watch them sink to their death because the life preserver manufacturing company had put iron bars in them instead of cork floats because that was cheaper.

957 people died in the whole disaster. The headlines are here:

https://www.nytimes.com/1904/10/02/archives/put-iron-bars-in...

https://www.nytimes.com/1905/05/25/archives/for-life-preserv...

and the story here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38NfsPVC6m8

The rivets and plates were made of material that was strong enough at room temperature but brittle at freezing temperatures. This phenomenon was not known to metallurgists at the time. It was an industry-wide problem.

> who decides that

The people that sent them to war and the people trying to kill them. It's a collaboration.

Deaths are not fungible.

My grandma died in her 90s. That was a pity.

My friend committed suicide in his 40s. That was gut-wrenching.

Another friend died unexpectedly of heart issue in his 40s. That was sad.

Some deaths insert periods into sentences; others, ellipses or question marks.

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