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by jared314 4110 days ago
> The moon landing really was nothing compared to this.

I used to believe that, but I have slowly moved to the other side.

Things are complicated. There is no doubt about that. But, landing on the moon was a fight against nature (gravity, air, distance, etc). Current programming is a fight against stuff someone else dreamed up and no one ever fixed, because "LOL, that's old school" or "You're just doin' it wrong".

Most of the points about parts not being specified correctly, not working as expected, or disappearing happens all the time in other industries. (That's one reason hardware kickstarters fail so often.)
1 comments
XorNot 4110 days ago
Except it's an applies-to-oranges comparison to start with. The mathematics of space-travel is very simple - it's just calculus. You need to be accurate, but it's easy to quantify and well controlled.

Which is why you can go to the moon with a decent graphics calculator, but you definitely can't have a self-driving car with much less then a modern supercomputer.

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jared314 4110 days ago
> The mathematics of space-travel is very simple - it's just calculus. You need to be accurate, but it's easy to quantify and well controlled.

We're not talking about calculating our way to the moon. We're talking about going to the moon.

The space program had much more than a graphing calculator. They had buildings full of people, systems, and realtime communication with the craft.

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