Hacker News Reader

Comment by madsbuch | Hacker News Reader

Something's rotten with article. It resembles an advertisement more than a news article.

If they had a cell phone and was lost in a forest why didn't they just boot up maps (they had bandwidth enough to download an app) and walk out of there?

View on HN

It's not an advertisement, the BBC are explicitly not allowed to provide that kind of content. Also, you've got to understand the mentality of someone when they are stressed and scared. They wouldn't be thinking straight and the fairly simple task of following a line on Google Maps becomes much harder. Additionally, when dealing with navigating in rural locations, it's not as simple as just 'go in straight line to place X'. There is terrain to navigate around, which is not obvious in the dark, especially when you're not familiar with the location.

They had obviously got to the point of calling the emergency services, so let's make it easier for them to be located, rather than complaining that they should have just got their compass out and sucked it up.

Just because the BBC didn't know it was an advertisement doesn't mean it isn't an advertisement. I have sent an email to their news team encouraging them to re-read the article and letting them know that they may be accidentally promoting a product. I suspect their editors may have mistaken the "scientific" skin of the article as being of academic interest rather than of business interest.

There's a lot of bits that don't make very much sense. Hypotheticals involving people don't have a phone signal and can't be sent the app by emergency services but they can still convey a what3words message to them (using what? semaphore?) People don't already have a GPS enabled app on their phone?

Relevant PG article that always gets brought up here when an article which is obviously a PR effort gets posted here http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com