Endless pessimism, even in the face of evidence to the contrary is a hallmark of HN. Thank you for continuing the tradition. May you never hold out hope for anything positive in the future.
Blind optimism is just as obnoxious as blind pessimism - both are based on ignorance. Boom still hasn't solved the 2 hardest problems after nearly a decade. Currently regulations prohibit supersonic flight over land. It's a total guess whether or not they'll be able to overcome this, but I remain skeptical both of their noise claims and their ability to overturn legislation. Also they don't have a real plan for an engine...9 fucking years later (because all the big engine manufacturers refuse to work with them).
If anything the pessimists are being proven right.
Disagree that blind optimism is just as obnoxious. Blind pessimists are much less likely to reach beyond what's currently considered possible. We need irrationally optimistic folks.
Irrationally optimistic people will tell you they have a device that defies the laws of physics (I mean hard laws, like conservation of energy or the speed of light), and investors will give them money. I have seen this happen enough times I'd actually have to stop to think of the correct number.
The point is both are disconnected from reality. What we need are people that aren't full of shit. There is a place between "everything is impossible" and "everything is possible" that works better for getting things done.
Well, it's hard to fly a plane without an engine. Just a minor detail though. How hard can the hardest part really be? Also you should always save the hardest part for last if you want to be sure you'll succeed.
It's only been a decade, they're only behind by an order of magnitude on their timeline, and they don't even have a concept of a plan for the critical component. It's fine.
There is no such thing. Humans are giant bags of emotion and pain avoidance.
Pessimists get the warm satisfaction of knowing their choice to not try anything interesting and never take risks in life was correct…most of the time. They cheer on failure from the sidelines so as not to suffer the ego-death of comparison.
Optimists…as the saying goes…they don’t get to be right most of the time. But they do get rich.
"Over land" in this case is just the US. and that was driven more to hamstring the uk/euro Concord. Sell this to rich playboys in the mediterranean or middle east.
Yes, I'm sure for the rest of human history we're never going to break supersonic flight commercially, after having done it already for many decades. Because "regulation." It's not like we'd have the power to change that if we wanted.
Now let us chant the HN pessimists rejoinder in unison.
LLMs are a fad. Bitcoin is a fad. Saas is a fad. Dropbox will never work as it can be trivially replicated on Linux using FTP, curlftpfs, and SVN...
I don't think you fully appreciate the number of obstacles in the way of new entrants building commerically-operable airplanes. Flying a supersonic prototype is amazing. But it is a depressingly-small amount of the overall work necessary to simply start taking passengers, much less make something economical, and even less to make something succeed.
Yes, I'm fully aware the market for building commercial jets is probably one of the most locked-down on the planet.
But hard things have been done before. Throwing rocks at the people trying doesn't do much to help them. They're fully aware of the reasons they might fail.
Would you rather these folks just not try at all, so you don't have to feel jealous if they actually succeed?
I hope they succeed! It’s not throwing rocks at them to point out the obscene numbers of and size of obstacles they need to overcome to others on the sidelines who seem to think that this is anything more than a very, very early step along the way of a still-unlikely future product.
Yes! Where did enthusiasm go in this world? It's easy to be a critic but when blanket pessimism is the default answer its very tiresome reading the comments.
