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0 pointsh34t17y ago0 comments

Why do you think starting a company is less demanding than being a member of the Manhattan Project or Apollo teams?

"Scale" is exactly the right word -- Apollo didn't happen because one person worked more insanely hard than anyone else had worked in the history of the universe. It was a large project with a lot of people (and a lot of science). Yes, a lot of them worked hard. But please, measure effort on a human scale. It doesn't matter whether you're starting a company or developing a new technology for space travel -- if you're pouring your whole life into it, the same psychological conditions can apply.

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krschultz17y ago· 3 in thread

Except, in Apollo people died/can die. They didn't work 18 hours a day because you make mistakes at that point. If your "web application" fails, no one really bats an eye. But if you start killing people - it is a bit different. Please don't compare these toy companies that get created, which barely have a business model much less a purpose, to one of the greatest achievements of all time just because you sit in front of your computer for long hours.

mechanical_fish17y ago

Except, in Apollo people died/can die.

That is a rather silly criterion. All engineers build things that can kill people if they go wrong. That's what engineers do.

You think that social software can't be used to kill people? Do you know the number of people (mostly women) who are murdered each year by stalkers, most of whom are former lovers or spouses? Do you want to bet that none of those stalkers have used, say, Google to help locate their victims?

Do you think that having your identity stolen and your bank account drained can't lead directly to your death? What, do you live in a country where health insurance is guaranteed to all citizens? (Oh, wait -- perhaps you do. Never mind.)

"Toy companies"? Interesting choice of phrase. Here's what one minute's Googling found for me: A court case, Estate of Matthew C. Metzgar v. Playskool, Inc:

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=3rd&#...

the plaintiffs' expert, E. Patrick McGuire, reported for the record that in one year studied, 1988, there were eleven deaths due to aspiration of small toys or toy parts by children... the plaintiffs submitted a CPSC estimate reported in the House Congressional Record that in each year from 1980-88, an average of 3,200 small children were treated in hospital emergency rooms for toy related ingestion and aspiration injuries. The CPSC also reported that between 1980 and 1991, 186 children choked on small toys, toy parts, and other children's products.

Frankly, from the viewpoint of danger and death, the space program's engineers are wimps: They do very dangerous things, but they only endanger a handful of people at a time. A toy engineer who specifies the wrong paint can kill hundreds of babies at once. Social software is pretty safe, but if the odds that a Facebook user will be killed because of a Facebook design error are as small as one per 100 million user-years [1], the company stands to lose 1 user per year, because they have 90 million active users.

[1] I have no data, but I doubt the odds are that small. I'd be astonished if Facebook hadn't already been a factor in thousands of suicides, for example. One of the reasons why humans are so incredibly talented at socializing is that it's fraught with peril.

krschultz17y ago

Apollo engineers make a design mistake, it kills people. If you don't like that because it doesn't effect enough people (Sorry I didn't realize that since Facebook serves 100 million people it is more of a feat than going to the moon) lets talk about Boeing. Boeing makes a design mistake, hundreds of people die. That has happened and will continue to happen.

Now you compare that to Facebook - if Facebook or Google goes down, who dies?

And this whole stalker point - wtf does that have to do with anything. Do you think there where no stalkers before the internet? The fact that people misuse something doesn't make it the engineers fault. If I designed kitchen knives and it is used to kill someone is it my fault? Hell no. But if I design a hatch door that doesn't open because of a design flaw, and people die, that is my fault.

That responsibility is the difference.

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h34tOP17y ago

Missing the point. This is not about how important your project is to "society" or how much risk there is of other people dying. This is about what goes on inside your head.

When your brain decides how fast to make your heart pump, or how fast to breathe, or how tense to make your muscles -- it can't tell the difference between flying to the moon and building an ajax alarm clock. All it knows are what your emotional hot-spots are, the parts of you that matter to you... you are entirely capable of inflating the significance of whatever project you're working on just as large as the significance of Apollo to one of its engineers.

Likewise, it's just as easy for the Apollo engineer to say "I was just doing my job" as it is for me to say "Holy shit I'm responsible for my baby nephew's livelihood because his dad is a partner in this startup"...

Other people may not bat an eye when your web app fails, but you sure will.

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