[rhdjsjebshjffn]

> You can well imagine how important predicting tides would have been for D-day landing.

Is this intended to communicate positivity or negativity?

Predicting tides was known to the ancients; it would be lovely to explore the hubris of the modern narrative.

Edit: fundamentally, if hacker news has taught me anything, it's that "downvote = makes me feel bad and doesn't want to answer questions". The entire concept of democratic news aggregation was a lie.

[grues-dinner]

I think there are two ways to interpret that sentence: "it would have been important": one which implies tidal prediction was unavailable at D-day but would have been useful, and one that implies it was indeed available (subjunctive conditional or "the Anderson case", apparently, per Wikipedia)

I don't think anyone is claiming tide times were so unpredictable in 1945.

[pfdietz]

They were predictable. Interestingly, Rommel misunderstood how tides affected landings. He thought the landings would be done at high tide, so the invading troops wouldn't have to advance across wide expanses of beach. In reality, the allies wanted to invade on a rising tide, so the landing craft, grounded to let out troops, would refloat and be able to move back out. Also, invading at lower tide meant beach obstacles would be exposed and unable to damage the landing craft.

[arghwhat]

> Edit: fundamentally, if hacker news has taught me anything, it's that "downvote = makes me feel bad and doesn't want to answer questions". The entire concept of democratic news aggregation was a lie.

Guidelines:

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

That it feels bad to not win the popular vote does not make democracy a lie, and there's no surprise in not winning favor when blanket discarding the current topic and describing it as "hubris", while not adding any new or constructive information.

[krisoft]

> Is this intended to communicate positivity or negativity?

It just says it was important to predict the tides. There is no positivity or negativity to it. Your question doesn’t make sense, hence the downvotes.

> Predicting tides was known to the ancients

Good. To which ancients? With what accuracy and how far into the future? What techniques did they use? Tell us more.

> it would be lovely to explore the hubris of the modern narrative.

Explore it then! Would love to read it. It is not like there is some conspiracy holding you back.

[kgwgk]

>> Predicting tides was known to the ancients

> Good. To which ancients?

To the ancients of 1944 for sure.