The smartest ones are maybe not the ones providing suggestions?
Then again, it's fun to speculate, and what are these threads for if not to provoke thought? Maybe it's fine for people to imagine and try to put themselves in the place of the professionals working on the problem. You can interpret the comments here as an indicator of dangerous human hubris if you want, but I think most of the people here understand that they can't do any harm by posting naive speculations on HN.
In my opinion, we should save our outrage for people who make an active attempt to be taken seriously and affect the actions of more qualified people, such as the guy who posted the bizarre (and possibly satirical?) account of his attempt to build a system for guiding doctors' treatment decisions.
I had great fun reading about the number of helicopters and starships needed to lift the ship and probably took something away from it for future endeavours. Really great for thinking about scale.
some of the suggestions seemed borderline condescending
e.g. "why don't they just do X"
as tho' the actual experienced engineers working over there on the problem couldn't come up with better ideas than some guy who happens to spend a lot of their day on the internet.
"Why don't they just do X" has two interpretations:
1. "This is such a simple solution and I think they're dumb for not doing it."
2. "X seems like a great and obvious idea, but they aren't doing it. Therefore, there must be something they know but I don't, and I'm interested in learning it."
I try to take the second interpretation whenever I see someone posing solutions in that manner.
"why don't they just do X" can be a great question. Why not just use Riemann integrals for everything? Why not use timestamps as ids? Not knowing the answer is a good enough reason for asking, and I don't feel like I need to police people's feelings and decide if they were feeling curious or condescending when they asked. They'll learn either way, when the question is answered.
I can imagine some people might have asked questions in a disingenuous or insinuating way ("why trust vaccines if the supposed experts can't get a ship unstuck") but I did not personally see any of that.
Then again, it's fun to speculate, and what are these threads for if not to provoke thought? Maybe it's fine for people to imagine and try to put themselves in the place of the professionals working on the problem. You can interpret the comments here as an indicator of dangerous human hubris if you want, but I think most of the people here understand that they can't do any harm by posting naive speculations on HN.
In my opinion, we should save our outrage for people who make an active attempt to be taken seriously and affect the actions of more qualified people, such as the guy who posted the bizarre (and possibly satirical?) account of his attempt to build a system for guiding doctors' treatment decisions.