She has the right to be annoyed with those that were supposed to deliver and test the collars, not with Martha Lillard or NPR.

From the point of view of M.L., she is maybe one of several that promised to help but could do it (not a fault of Naomi Wu of course, but of those that first contacted her for help and then left things unfinished), so it doesn't surprise me that she was not mentioned.

NPR asserted in their article that help was few and far in between when this wasn't the case. Naomi has certainly gone above and beyond in attempting to help. It should be noted that the difficulty is not in finding help, but in the logistics. It reads very much like a plea to emotion, how NPR worded it.

I mean there's also plenty of other options, like the parts didn't fundamentally work and it's easier to just forget about it and write a new article than risk another media blowup by bringing a Twitter personality into a story that's not really about her?

That makes absolutely no sense, Wu is in china so some back and forth in order to get the collars to fit correctly is to be expected. Following which you're done because the chinese shop can make the collars to order whenever that's needed.

> bringing a Twitter personality into a story that's not really about her?

Wu was already involved in this. Per her comments she'd already sent packages of collars to be tested and altered / fitted.

Hell, mentioning that there was a volunteer / grassroots effort to produce new collars would have been more honest than the article going "collars where?"

It's a light human interest story, not a comprehensive international assessment of iron lungs parts suppliers or formal inventory and provenance check of Martha's stock.

> It's a light human interest story

It's NPR. There's no excuse for poor sensationalist journalism even from them.

A brief retrospective of iron lungs and the technical difficulties faced by people who still prefer them is among the least sensationalist pieces of writing I can imagine. Where you normally get news that's so sedate by this standard?

That makes absolutely zero sense, though. She's also not a twitter personality. She's a full-blown engineer with a very popular Youtube channel and following and has done these sorts of things quite often.

Naomi Wu is not a US citizen (the English name is a pseudonym). The NSPE is a US-only entity.

There's a lot of engineers out there who wouldn't count as engineers by that metric.

i'm an engineer and i'm not even sure what "PE cert" stands for. certification means very litte.

A Professional Engineer certification can mean "We trust you to work on things where human lives may be at stake". Gatekeeping engineers use this to exclude everyone else. If your screw-up doesn't cost human lives then you're not a real engineer.

> If your screw-up doesn't cost human lives then you're not a real engineer.

This is such a ridiculous, asinine, and outright wrong assertion that it warrants no reasoned response.

In that case please follow the site guidelines, which ask you not to reply.

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29023822 also broke the site guidelines. That's not cool, regardless of how bad other comments are or you feel they are.

Would you please review them and take the intended spirit of this place more to heart? We'd appreciate it.

I'm fairly sure the post you're replying you was interpretative-facetious.

I got that, it was directed towards the engineers who act this way. I've met too many of them as well.

Please do not post in the flamewar style to HN, regardless of how bad another comment is or you feel it is. We've had to ask you this multiple times before. That's not cool.

You also broke the site guidelines by crossing into personal attack below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29025655

We're trying to avoid this kind of thing here, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

I also live in Europe. The term Engineer is used in many contexts outside of "what you build could kill people" contexts.

Get off your high horse.

Spaniard here. I doubt it. Maybe in the UK, but in the rest of Europe being an Engineer is not a bragging wannabe title.

Did Martha herself not reach out to Naomi? It would seem to make more sense to me than NPR doing so..