> The guys field testing took one look and knew it wouldn't work.
You have a hearsay, hindsight story (no offense to the author) that one person thought it wouldn't work.
And now we have a hindsight HN comment that they would have known it all along. I'm guessing the people who worked on it weren't idiots, though people seem to delight in supposing they are smarter than all the dumb people whose plans don't work out perfectly.
No offense taken. The observation of an instrumentation technician and an engineer (me) definitely counted for not much at all in the grand scheme of things. And we could have just as easily been proven wrong.
Since you're the author: can you remember any cases where the person with "common sense" thought "this crap ain't gonna work" but it worked anyway? Surely people only remember those cases when common sense won, and selectively forget those where it didn't?
> can you remember any cases where the person with "common sense" thought "this crap ain't gonna work" but it worked anyway
I have one! Totally different field though. Cruise ships (and roro ferries) look sooo ungainly in water that regular people frequently ask how do they not just roll over. The Icon of the Seas goes 9 meter underwater and 20 stories over the water. It does not feel or look right. Yet it is right, and keeps upright :), because it does not have uniform density. The engines and machinery, and tanks at the bottom of it keeps the center of gravity low enough to make it stable.
The funny twist is that vehicle carrier ships also look unstable the same way and there the intuition is more correct. There have been multiple accidents where such ships capsized. But the intuition there is still not correct about the reasons why they flip over. (It is not that they don’t have enough draft, but due to free surface effects and the cargo destabilising).
You have a hearsay, hindsight story (no offense to the author) that one person thought it wouldn't work.
And now we have a hindsight HN comment that they would have known it all along. I'm guessing the people who worked on it weren't idiots, though people seem to delight in supposing they are smarter than all the dumb people whose plans don't work out perfectly.