* Whenever a person or group do something bad, the response is always, "Look how much humanity sucks."

* Whenever a person or group does something good, the response is always, "Look how good those particular people are."

Now, there is a positive explanation for this: It's good to give credit. When someone does something particularly good, it diminishes their act to say that it's just another example of humanity.

But at the same time, the aggregate effect of this bias is that always appears that humanity sucks with the rare exception of a few blessed individuals. But the opposite is much more likely to be true.

But solving unbounded problems that involve moving emotions and attitudes around - like building a planetary culture that isn't violent, irrational, and collectively suicidal - is hard.

Martin Seligman teaches in the book Learned Optimism that:

Optimists think any good thing that happens is permanent, pervasive and personal.

Optimists think any bad thing that happens is impermanent, specific and impersonal.

Pessimists flip flop these explanatory styles. The people you’re commenting on seem to be pessimistic about humanity.

And they're probably fine if they're supervised by NASA employees working for the government.

There is a cogent response to that, as a series of questions.

1 - Which requirements changed?

2 - Which hard science & engineering problems had to be solved, and how trivial, or monumental were they?

3 - Which components failed, or passed testing, requiring rework, or re-engineering?

> Selling a program to taxpayers as a 500 million dollar endeavor and then extracting ten billion dollars from them is the kind of thing that should put people in prison for life.

Initial estimated costs were higher than 500 million. The 500 million number was an NGST estimate, right? I don't think lifecycle costs were ever estimated at 500M, it seems crazy to be that low. Are you sure you are correct on the type of costs you are providing?

What should have been done is to have many more missions where these technologies can iteratively been proven so that once you head into a larger project you have some idea of whats gone happen.

And you don't end up launching a telescope that already has 20 year old tech in it.

And the companies that did it made fine profit of course. Promise the moon, don't deliver, make profit. Not a good model.

And how much do those projects cost? And what value do we derive from lots of small iterative solutions?

> And you don't end up launching a telescope that already has 20 year old tech in it.

If you're launching iteratively, then either you're proving out the tech until it's decades old, or you're never making progress on your iterative approach because you're constantly replacing the thing you iterated on with the new hotness.

But what other reasons that people might care about X failing as a project when it succeeds as a product?

And you are posting this on a forum dominated by software engineers?

Sometimes it's good to overspend if it's an excuse to fund research that would otherwise struggle to find money to stay alive.

Plus I think the budget didn't jump from 500 million to ten billion dollars in on day, project grew and budget grew with it, and someone had to approve it, we are talking about multinational project, so I think everything is well documented and well approved from people who knows the project well better than us.

I do agree with you that if that was military budget, I would think that something is really wrong.

On another article today, again the top response to the top comment was so negative that dang stepped in, and yet again, it's the first thing you see.

It's frustrating, because HN is doing a great job keeping things pretty constructive, but this still seems to reward negativity by thrusting it into view. Shouldn't it at least be below less-downvoted responses?

Life in prison for being over budget...

Would you say the same about LIGO, for example? Originally thought to be easy, it turned out to be a 40 years long endeavor.