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Comment by sidcool | Hacker News Reader

I remember when in 2012, the then PM of India had declared this project. The entire internet community came together to deride this, saying it's not possible in a couple of years and that India had better feed its hungry etc.

I am a very proud Indian today. This achievement, like other by humanity (LHC in particular), will encourage me to push myself towards greatness.

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> The entire internet community

I wouldn't call some bored internet-addicted teens and college cynics "the entire internet community." Just because some opinion is upvoted on sites like reddit, doesn't mean its some sample of the general population or the general internet population. College identity politics and extreme political correctness rules the internet, because that's the politics of those who spend the most time on the internet posting opinions. Its not a mainstream view, in my experience. I think you'll find a lot of ISRO fandom and well-wishers out here. The idea that the developing world shouldn't be performing "great works" is asinine and anti-progress.

Unfortunately, acting cynical and world-weary is going to be popular with young people because it imitates wisdom, but imo, its probably the worst attitude a young person can have. If you're not enthused and motivated you're just not going to be accomplishing anything. I often need to aggressively park my inner critic and gen-x "who cares" or "that's stupid" attitudes. These attitudes been a huge disservice to me my whole life. When I see others engaging in this type of cynicism, I really do pity them because life has so much to offer if you look at it the right way.

>I am a very proud Indian today.

You guys should be proud. This is an incredible achievement, especially when you consider the cost and difficulty of the mission.

The HN discussion was indeed a disheartening mix of skepticism and criticism:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4385241

I chuckled reading some of the comments from armchair scientists. This gives me immense hope. For a big part of my life my decisions have been based on other peoples' judgement. Oddly, I feel personally vindicated.

I'd say almost a third of HN comments are intentionally misleading or flat-out wrong. I've seen people include fake link citations to try and prove their point.

Sadly, there are a huge number of phonies on HN. I'll bet many of them have enough karma to downvote too.

There's an insane amount of cynicism and bitterness in that thread. I had to close the tab after a handful of comments.

> The entire internet community came together to deride this

why the persecution complex ? Yes there was criticism, but there is always criticism of everything on the internet.

Another proud Indian.

Not a persecution complex. I did not argue then, I don't wish to deride anyone now. It's just that I feel good about this. Developing countries taking to space. Humanity is progressing.

Yes, but the people who do a lot of the criticizing seem to just shrug their shoulders then start criticizing the next thing. As humans, we often don't learn from our mistakes. And in democratic societies, we expend a lot of energy dealing with the noise.

Almost nobody will admit to being wrong. Plus a lot of people take a lot of satisfaction from being negative about things.

On the other hand, people should have listened to critics before the Titanic, the Hindenburg, the last Columbia launch, the last Challenger launch, the Big Dig, the Iraq War, the launch of the Obamacare websites, and a bunch of other large undertakings.

The critics were wrong in this case, but writing them off as noise can lead to other mistakes.

With exception of the Iraq War and Universal Healthcare websites, pretty much everything was an accident.

Sending an orbiter to Mars is advancing science and knowledge. Aside from the fact that this was an unmanned mission, ambitious projects mostly have an extra element of risk by definition. Inactivity due to that would be stopping advancement.

Besides, India spent USD 75 million on it. It's GDP is 1.877 trillion USD approx. Its peanuts[1].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8361505

> With exception of the Iraq War and Universal Healthcare websites, pretty much everything was an accident.

Off the top of my head: Titanic's water bulkheads didn't go all the way to the tops of compartments, Hindenburg didn't use non-flammable helium, and Challenger had known issues with O-rings at low temperatures.

In context, many early stage startups are (or hope to be) valued more than a probe to mars.

Proud: "feeling deep pleasure or satisfaction as a result of one's [b]own[/b] achievements"

By definition neither you or sidcool are proud (unless you actually/literally helped the project), you must be looking for a different word, perhaps pleased

proud:feeling deep pleasure or satisfaction as a result of one's own achievements, qualities, or possessions or those of someone with whom one is closely associated.

you conveniently left the second part "or those of someone with whom one is closely associated."

well then the question is what "closely associated" means, if by being Indian, Chinese, black, white, orange, etc "closely associates" you with them (that group?) then anything does, the fact that we all wear clothes for example, we belong in a group that shares this idea, which then closely associates us, making the word meaningless

It doesn't make the word meaningless at all. There are many orders of granularity in "close association" and the diversity of the usage of the word reflects this. For example a google search for "proud to be human" turns up nearly a million hits. The phrase "proud to be alive" returns yields almost two million. Even "proud to be from the milky way" returns six results.

You should learn to admit when you're wrong.

Don't feed the Troll.

Your comment has significantly less content than his.

Not that I particularly wanted to mention it until reading your comment, but I also don't particularly understand associating yourself with the activities of strangers who happen to live close to you. It's really not that unusual a viewpoint.

Socialising success. "I'll take some of that, thanks." I've been meaning to give it some proper thought for ages. People celebrating when a sports team wins, as if their own accomplishment. That aside, congrats to ISRO, great stuff.

Pedantic much? You know what he meant.

I believe he /literally/ helped the project by paying his taxes on time.

The government plays ads on local TV channels urging citizens to pay their taxes on time and that the money helps government execute projects like this.

I guess it really is a huge(proud-able) accomplishment to pay your taxes on time

Yes it is proud-able accomplishment, and I am serious.

Government plays ads on local TV channels because a lot of people hide their real income and skip paying taxes, but I digress.

Being a part of the "entire internet community" I don't remember doing this.

> “When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.”

― Jiddu Krishnamurti, [Freedom From the Known, Chapter 6][freedom]

[freedom]: http://www.jkrishnamurti.org/krishnamurti-teachings/view-tex...

Please, stop with the philosophical garbage. I'm not Indian, but I'm proud of them and very happy for them. We at Hacker News tend to call ourselves hackers, programmers, techies, entrepreneurs, geeks, etc. Are we also being violent?

You can choose to become a programmer, but you can't choose to be born Indian. I imagine you would take offence if I said I am proud to be white? If people keep saying they are proud because of things they didn't choose, then that breeds social differences.

I agree with segmondy. Instead of classifying this news as Indian achievement, we should look forward to it as world's achievement.Surely those guys had it commendable work in such constrained resource! For me, it's new frontier in science...and boy it's cheap! More the affordability, more the chances of discoveries. Remember when a useful pricey thing becomes affordable without loosing usefulness then it's innovation!

Not very deep.Separation is not always violent,sometimes separation is an act of care and sometimes it's an act of prevention.Separation is neccessary.The 'rest of mankind' is sometimes not the space where you want to spend your life in.

Is this really an achievement when someone else could do it in 1965? Is it an achievement when other countries can land rovers on mars? India should be a leader, not follow others' footsteps.

EDIT: 1971, not 1965

Of course it's an accomplishment, even if others did it long ago. If I successfully run my first marathon (unlikely), it'll still be an accomplishment even though someone else first did it 2500 years ago. Getting a spacecraft into Mars orbit takes skill and careful work. I think it clearly warrants congratulations.

Also, by the way, the first Mars orbiter wasn't in 1965—that was the first successful flyby. The first successful orbiter was Mariner 9 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariner_9) in 1971.

Maybe I should rephrase. Is this mission a scientific achievement? It could be a economics/accounting/marketing/HR/logistics achievement, but what is new scientifically?

do you understand enough "science" to fathom "scientific achievement"? If the people behind the mission explained to you "science" in it and what are the "scientific achievement", would you understand them?

I think he was implying that this was largely a PR stunt.

Er yes I can. I want to know what is new since the 1971 orbiter success, and why India cannot put a rover on Mars.

India isbuilding the infrastructure that will allow them to put rovers, and possibly humans, on Mars.

In the age of NSA sponsored spying, having an independent and largely self-taught space program is indeed a scientific achievement. Especially for a country that's 67 years old.

Let's put aside the science, because they haven't taken the data they wanted yet, so it's impossible to debate, and indeed somewhat beside the point for this 15kg instrument.

The thing about spacecraft is that there is a huge engineering component. The s/c is in a novel environment (vacuum, radiation, cold) and many systems have to work together. You have to figure it all out in advance, using first-principles physics and modeling, and design and build a system that works without further manual intervention. Just getting it there intact is a significant achievement in systems engineering.

Technology demonstration is what this mission was about.

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