_bpgl

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> The well-known 10,000-hour principle, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, illustrates an important lesson for developers. ...

It’s not often I’ll wholesale dismiss an article on HN because of one sentence, but this is one of those times. The fabulist Gladwell is not credible in general, and his 10,000 hour “rule” can no longer be thought to even remotely approach science, or even fact. The author lost all credibility with this sentence.

> "the poor are trading years in the future for pleasantness now"

> This also describes how a lot of people are poor.

I suppose we should be cheered by your qualification "a lot of," since it seems to indicate that you at least have to acknowledge your growing awareness that some, if not the majority nor vast majority, of the poor are there for structural reasons, rather than shortsightedness.

What of those who are there for reasons other than shortsightedness? What of those for whom shortsightedness is a result of mental health issues? What of those who can see ahead, but see no bright future and are making rational choices in the face of that?

Fortunately, having qualified your remarks in the way you have, you have opened yourself up to a responsibility to think critically about those whom you have dismissed. I wish you the best in that.

The first thing I feel I need to point out is that my horse in this race is not whether or not jobs will go away, but whether or not the original commenter to whom I was replying advanced the discussion at all with their remark. I think that the remark–that people have always been saying that automation will take over but it never has–is facile in that the thing that "people have been saying" is not the same over time. In the late 18th century, it could only really have been a comment about capital concentration and the death of the trades. In the 1950s, it was very probably a naive comment about the power of as-then-understood computer technology's capability to replace manual labor or work. In the 1990s, it was very probably a naive comment about the state of the art of AI at the time.

Now, the remark is about actual inexpensive robotics in the context of what seems to be a genuine AI and computer vision and control renaissance, funded by government and corporations. Those are all just different remarks. To package them all up as one "thing that people have been saying" does a real disservice to the discussion. And it's a pose.

In the current case, I find it difficult to say whether the remark will turn out to be naive. However, any competent discussion of whether or not it is has to rely on an assessment of the current situation of computer vision, AI, control theory, economics, and law.

> People have said that it's only a matter of time...Yet it keeps not having happened just yet.

That's incredibly facile. Were there solid state digital electronics at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution? Was there machine learning? Motion control? Systems engineering? A robotics industry?

Just aping the "power source of the future" line from the fusion joke and pretending it's the trenchant result of long experience is the tactic of a 15-year-old.

I think I tell this story every time there's an article about the STS on here. When I was a precocious space cadet, I followed the development of the Shuttle as closely as a kid could before the Internet. I remember the initial promised launch cost of $50/lb into LEO. Young theothermkn weighed himself and worked out how much that would cost, and even tried to guess how much a capsule would weigh, and how much of a group capsule's weight that he would be responsible to pay for. Tough, but doable.

And then the price went to $100/lb. Okay, tougher, but still within reach. And then $500/lb. Ugh. And then $1,000/lb. Oh, well. Maybe a later version will be cheaper. Economies of scale! And then the newscasters stopped talking about the cost at all, except to note how far we were from the initial cost.

The Space Shuttle set spaceflight back 40 years. Years later, I got an aerospace engineering degree, and promptly left the field when I graduated because I didn't want to work inside soul-crushing aerospace institutions without even the hope of doing anything good.

We may never recover, given that all our eggs are in the SpaceX basket.

I get that the idea that we "went to the moon with a slide rule" and similar ideas are appealing, but I'm not convinced that your statements are resting on a basis of fact.

For one thing, I'm not convinced that your mental models of what a "mission computer" is and what a "mission computer" would be doing, or when, make sense from an engineering perspective. I'm also not convinced that you know what an orbital perturbation is, nor how they would be used to plan and fly a mission.

To take an example from aviation, we didn't have practical simulations of general viscous fluid flow in the 1960s, but it would be meaningless to say that we "used Bernoulli's principle" to fly across the Pacific.

The Apollo vehicles had an on-board IMU. A trajectory could thus be pre-planned and flown to using feedback control. That trajectory would certainly have been calculated ahead of time. Thus, while there would be no need to have "[done] the math involved dynamically," that by no means implies that patched conics were used while in flight, nor does it imply that they were in any meaningful way used for the final design of the missions' flight paths.

Further, on any deviation from the planned flight path, numerical integration methods would yield results that would be good enough for later correction, again, by using feedback control.

If you still need to believe that "KSP math" is how we got to the Moon, go ahead. You've certainly done nothing to convince anyone else, though.

> Yes we sent astronauts to the moon using KSP math.

I'm almost positive that we did not.

While patched conics would have been used very early on for rough mission analysis and design, we had a very good understanding of perturbation theory at the time. Wikipedia tells me that the restricted 3-body problem was also essentially solved in 1917. I've seen very detailed plots of the free return trajectories that the Apollo missions followed, too.

Using patched conics for the earth moon system would have resulted in an error on the scale of lunar escape velocity upon entering the sphere of influence of the Moon.