Did Neil Armstrong really say “that's one small step for a man”? | Hacker News Reader

Did Neil Armstrong really say “that's one small step for a man”?

latimes.com

This was not a productive use of anyone's time. Now while I'm usually all for wasting one's time on interesting pointless efforts _and_ being quite a fan of manned spaceflight, I do not at all see the motivation in this article outside of maybe a 5 minute conversation on one's third beer.

Hacker news, the bastion of things that are a productive use of our time.

That's not entirely fair. I mean it can be a massive time-suck of pedantry at times, but I've learned a great deal of very useful things about work and life here from articles and comments.

Humans are weird creatures; we achieve productivity in very unexpected and often unintended ways.

Yes, but neither is it fair that because you serendipitously gain productivity from this website, to assume the function of it is to be productive or expect submissions to meet some standard of productivity. I think completely trivial submissions have a place here too.

While i agree this is not productive, the primary stated goal for HN has nothing to do with productivity, but has to do with fulfilling one's curiosity and what hackers and makers find interesting.

Sadly the business side of HN has completely evaporated in recent months. It used to be 40/40/20 business/hacking/other stuff, now it seems it's 0/50/50. There's too much miscellaneous other stuff these days, which is making HN into a generic jumpsite. I think that the guidelines need updating.

I only wish it were 50% hacking! I miss the lively discussions of programming topics that are more than Go's and Rust's latest features. (Not that I mind those discussions at all.)

God, I wish that were true. HN has always had a heavily disproportionate stock of articles about/relevant to startups, a tiny subset of hackerdom, because Y-Combinator. Less businessgab would be awesome. The "miscellaneous other stuff" can stay as long as it's either interesting tech, political news relevant to the interests of the internet and the people who maintain it, or general smart-people stuff.

Well, I went and had a look at the numbers for the current front page, and they're 17:10:1:2 hacker:misc:business:showHN. I put Show HN separately because they fit all three categories. So without the Show HN, that's 1 business article out of 28.

It doesn't seem out of the ordinary for content these days - the sad thing is that there are tons of tech jumpsites out there, but very few sites that meld business to tech stuff. Despite the name, 'hacker' news was focused on the startup world (it's essentially an advertising mechanism for a startup incubator).

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hacker: apollo 11 source code, call for hackers, machine learning, julia language, origami robot wheels, neural network framework, self-rubber-ducking, swift, A*, SHA3 announcement, Stanford dataset, nature of code, awesome-fonts, equational reasoning, new math for science, nexusUI, dnswatch

misc: beach lego, armstong moon words, people over pleasure, beware of phishing at airbnb, phones on air force one, guide to logic, engineered century/armstrong. lobster economics (content isn't really business, despite the name), rocket-colling icebag, fun with turbulence

business: problem with founders

show HN: gamedevs, coredemia

You're right. Some of these submissions are just sad, linkbaity nonsense. I'm going to head over to /newest and see what little I can do to improve things.

EDIT: There was some interesting stuff on /newest. I just wish I could do a bit more than push them from 1 to 2.

I'd much rather read more things like http://theaviationist.com/2014/07/21/su-27s-escorted-mh17/ or http://keccak.noekeon.org/

Given that the article headline maps correctly to the content, you were not deceived into clicking on it.

Regardless of what he did say, Neil Armstrong meant to say, "that's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind".

He's quoted as saying he said the A. Anything else is just us making up some rationalization to fit what we think it is.

And the whole time, there's this guy who was the FIRST GUY ON THE FUCKING MOON and we're not going to believe HIM? I mean, who can you believe if you can't believe him?

The billions who have heard the tapes and didn't hear the A?

People misspeak all the time.

> "I mean, who can you believe if you can't believe him?"

Well since we have a recording, I think that believing our own ears is a reasonable option.

I think that most of us have misspoken in the past without realizing it. It's similar to botching a sentence on paper, but reading it back to yourself correctly while proofreading it. It happens. As such, I think it is more than possible that Armstrong meant to say "a", thought he said "a", but did not say "a".

Or maybe he said the "a" and the recording equipment didn't pick it up.

He was meant to say to be precise. He did not come up with the phrase, there was a whole "marketing" team around it. Which makes sense given the budget and the aim - winning the world image war.

The marketing behind this phrase has been quite successful. Even 45 yrs later, a paraphrase of Armstrong's quote is splashed in about a million locations on the most lucrative advertising real estate all across China: “向前一小步，文明一大步。”

I always thought he meant "One small step for man" as in modern man, "one giant leap for mankind" as in man as a species overall.

Either interpretation seems to be loaded with subtle "isms" [0], if you ask me. Shocking.

[0] qv. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7999486

We're really wasting our time on this? Seriously? Too much time on our hands.

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