Hi HN, my name is Jacob, I'm the guy that made wtfnasa. Here's my tl;dr reaction to the virality that this project has seen:
wtfnasa was not made to go viral, it was made to be a simple intro to CodeIgniter & a reaction to people upset with NASA, I put ~zero thought into having 'fuck' in the title, it was built in about 10 hours (design, build, data entry, & launch) last Wednesday & Thursday, it had 9 unique visitors as of Friday at noon & right now it has just under 40k.
I'm considering removing the 'f word' based on the loads of kickback I've gotten from it, I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Thanks!
Great job! I absolutely love this, and you deserve a huge pat on the back.
A few questions: How many items are in the database, and is there a chance we could get an itemized dump of them? School starts back for me on Wednesday and I would love to print off a dozen or two to post around campus. I'll gladly include a link to your site--it's fantastic.
Right now there are 51 items in the database, I'll be increasing that number throughout the week with the goal of doubling it.
Creating an itemized dumb is also on my to-do list for this week, I'll post something in here and link to it on the wtfnasa page once it's done.
For some reason, using the entire word "fuck" was shocking in a odd way for me. It's sending mixed signals- it's sounding harsh not funny. I personally think it could be stronger with a nice headline not using it- this idea is really awesome.
There is something off in the relationship between the whole written word and the "ideals" of NASA. I love this, but I think it's a little over-the-top with the whole word being written out.
I can't send this to a niece or nephew with a clean conscience!
Don't be so fucking american. Swearwords are not not to be used. They serve its function, and here it is part of a well crafted site which is trying to make a point.
edit: Though I agree with harrywincup that the wtf-approach at first seems like nasa did nothing good.
This site doesn't make a point via swearing. In fact all it does is further dilute the word which is useful when needed. The site's format has been done before and basically is an improved take on a Did You Know? concept. The facts, the ratings make it interesting. The fucks make it childish. Children misuse words and curse just to hear themselves curse. Adults communicate the right thing for the right reasons at the right time.
If everything is fucked then nothing is fucked. If everything is WTF then nothing is WTF.
A) Why did you think he is American? You can find cusswords distasteful and be from another country.
B) Why do you think he doesn't like the F-word? It's possible to respect a word for its emotional power while thinking it gratuitous or counter-productive in some cases.
> A) Why did you think he is American? You can find cusswords distasteful and be from another country.
A squeamishness around swear words ('cussword' is not a word I've ever heard a non-american use) is I'm afriad one of the perceived traits of America by other english-speaking nations, so from a purely Bayesian point of view it's an assumption he could make with some confidence. Just like we (Englishman here) don't understand why one arab would get unspeakably offended by another arab hitting him with a shoe unless someone told us that it was the highest insult, culturally (it is not apparent that this is the most insulting thing you can do in and of itself, it's a conditioned, learned response). There is a quote, attributed to lots of people, but seemingly either George Bernard Shaw or Oscar Wilde, that Britain and America are 'two nations divided by a common language'. There is real incomprehension and bafflement in the UK, for example, that a swear word or nipple on US tv seems to cause comparable levels of outrage to a shooting spree.
So, I wouldn't jump down the GP's throat too much, even if his assertion was put forward rather abrasively.
> or example, that a swear word or nipple on US tv
> seems to cause comparable levels of outrage to a
> shooting spree.
Welcome to America, where people will flock in droves to show their support of anti-gay marriage attitudes[1], while none of those people will lift a finger to volunteer at a soup kitchen to help out people that actually need the support.
The purpose of the swearword "fuck" is to signal that you are passionate and emotionally unrestrained about something, with a slight underlying threat of violence. Can someone explain why that is appropriate on this well crafted site?
Sure it is. It's "incredible versatile" if you want to express how angry you are about something, because you can basically use it as either a drop in replacement or an intensifier for any word you want, but the common meaning is to express your emotional state. Look at the examples on wiktionary, for example.
As for "what the fuck" being a well established idiom - I guess that depends on your demographic, but I don't see it showing up much in the respectable media, or in academic papers.
Anger is not the only use case for the word "fuck", nor is expressing an emotional state. Really, there's a fuckload of other fucking examples; enough to make one tired as fuck just fucking thinking about them, so I won't enumerate them here (those readers who give a fuck can now exclaim "thank fuck!").
"Respectable" media are beholden to their advertisers, who in turn are concerned that specific demographics might be scandalised by certain words and affect their bottom line. I don't think HN or much of the internet fits into this category.
Academic papers are an interesting case. I suspect their avoidance of the word fuck is a combination of their inherited sense of propriety and the fact that such an ambiguous word as "fuck" rarely has a place in scientific writing.
OK, don't fucking list all the fucking examples, fucking give one fucking single fucking example where fucking is used to fucking express something other than fucking anger, you fucking fuck.
(Other than belaboring the point, an example of which I have just given)
The first question that emanates would be on the order of "What's ESA?" No one in the world knows what it does.
Cheap shot making with pejorative intentions doesn't move forward the debate that we ,as a race,ought to do more in advancing our collective knowledge. Petty bickering doesn't help.
I just put up an alternate to wtfnasa called wtnasa (what the NASA) - http://wtnasa.com/
I hope this is something you would send to your niece with a clean conscience :)
It seems to me that the realisation/delight of discovering all of these incredible benefits to society that come out of NASA carries more than enough weight without requiring the whole "wtf" twist to make this interesting. If anything, it comes across as sounding like NASA hasn't actually done awesome things ("what did they ever do for us?!"), instead of the intended emphasis on the many, many unknown awesome things that affect the world daily.
I get that, and I do usually enjoy the heavily sarcastic approach sites like this take to make their point ... it just seems to me that "wtf [organisation]" is something more akin to how i'd emphasise how unbelievably ridiculous, say, oil companies are for yet another spill/cover-up/buyout etc
In this situation, the intention is really to celebrate the fact that NASA makes awesome stuff and the whole WTF comedy angle seems a bit awkward to me :)
[EDIT] I just realised out exactly why it seems awkward to me ... http://whatthefuckhasobamadonesofar.com/ works because it's sarcastically about what he's done, whereas "wtf NASA" is aimed directly at NASA and comes across as angry. The URL needs to be something like "wtfhasnasaeverdonefortheworld.com" (like the page heading) for the joke to really work I think
Some of NASA's innovations are the result of its focus on solving the kind of problems no-one has tried to solve before; others are simply the result of so many talented scientists and engineers spending their time there.
The question shouldn't just be "Was NASA worth it", but "what kind of new problems should mankind be working on". Deep sea research in another interesting domain. I'm sure there's plenty of others. Space isn't the only frontier.
The question shouldn't just be "Was NASA worth it", but "what kind of new problems should mankind be working on".
I agree with the sentiment, but "is/was NASA worth it" is the question in practice. It's a question with a simple answer: yes. But it helps to be able to explain why, especially with examples. Hence this website.
But apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, viniculture, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
This assumes that we wouldn't have these things without NASA. What evidence is there that private industry would not have provided them more efficiently?
Well they provided hope and dreams for the children, I'm not an American citizen so I don't feel the pain on how they waste their money, but they definitely don't deserve this kind of criticism. Programmers like to reinvent things as well, sometimes in a stupid way just for the sake of research or trying out new things.
According to the Office of Management and Budget and the Air Force Almanac,
when measured in real terms (adjusted for inflation), the figure is $790.0 billion, or
an average of $15.818 billion dollars per year over its fifty year history.
this is a good page. Please revise to remove the language so it can be shared with all age groups. Normally I love tossing an f-bomb around but this site's idea rises above that.
Someone pointed out the other day that an estimated $71 billion per year is lost in US tax revenue because of religious tax exemptions.
If religious organizations paid taxes like everyone else, NASA could send 28 rovers to Mars per year...EVERY YEAR. FOREVER.
(Total Cost of current Curiosity mission : $2.5 billion, including $1.8 billlion for spacecraft development and science investigations and additional amounts for launch and operations. )
Perhaps we should be asking questions that have to do with why we place such little importance on advancing our knowledge and more on preserving arbitrary religious orders.
While I'm not a religious person, and you won't be seeing me give money to any church, it's not that simple. Firstly, the idea that you can calculate the loss in taxes by just applying the tax on paper is fundamentally incorrect, since the tax itself creates an incentive not to spend money that way.
Secondly, churches spend part of the money on social assistance, and so a reduction in their income may increase the funding needs for governmental assistance programs.
I'm not fundamentally opposed to cutting tax breaks for churches, but living in a country where recent tax increases have lead to a massive tax revenue reduction, I felt the need to point out that you probably couldn't fund 28 rovers with it.
"churches spend part of the money on social assistance"
As a vehicle for proselytizing. Organizations that are dedicated to social assistance have reporting requirements that churches don't. It's not transparent at all what churches spend their money on. It's a murky government-sponsored wealth redistribution scheme. Not unlike the financial industry in that regard.
wtfnasa was not made to go viral, it was made to be a simple intro to CodeIgniter & a reaction to people upset with NASA, I put ~zero thought into having 'fuck' in the title, it was built in about 10 hours (design, build, data entry, & launch) last Wednesday & Thursday, it had 9 unique visitors as of Friday at noon & right now it has just under 40k. I'm considering removing the 'f word' based on the loads of kickback I've gotten from it, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Thanks!