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Comment by mlyle | Hacker News Reader

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"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you know more than others, that's great, but then please either (1) share some of what you know, so the rest of us can learn; or (2) don't post. Supercilious putdowns only make things worse.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

The problem is, this “simulator” leads to very misleading conclusions because of the inability to control altitudes. It potentially fuels a false narrative that balloons drift at random and are not useful for surveillance, while Loon flew something like 40 balloons in a row to dwell over South America for sustained periods.

I’m sorry that the dismissal was short, but I did name the key problem.

If you had posted this in the first place it would have been better. Better yet would be to drop provocations like "false narrative", which implies something sinister, and just focus on contributing correct, interesting information about balloons (or whatever the topic is that you know about).

It's too easy to underestimate the impact of putdowns in internet comments by 10x, if not more—impact on the readers, on other commenters, on the site as a whole, and (if they see it) on the author or creator. When you* post putdowns it usually feels innocuous, as if you're just adding a little extra emphasis, but to the reader it often comes across as much larger than the rest of the comment put together—especially when there isn't much other information.

* I don't mean you personally of course—I mean all of us.

But it's not a shallow dismissal. It gives a feedback of a particular shortcoming that makes the whole idea very misleading -- imagine a journalist making a conclusion that there's no way a baloon could fly over US territory based on such or similar simulation.

It's possible to fix that shortcoming and make the idea useful.

It was shallow in the sense that it didn't explain why. When people post comments that simply dismiss what someone else has done without being explaining why or teaching the reader, that's what we mean by shallow dismissal.

Both your comment and the GP's follow-up do contain a little more explanation—that's good—but even better would be to give more: walk us through what the issue is here, why it matters, and what an improvement would look like.

If you just focus on what you don't like about something, how useless or dumb it is, that puts a nasty torque on conversation which is hard to get out of.

> It was shallow in the sense that it didn't explain why

I was a passenger in a car en route to a funeral. I felt like the post was a little troublesome and I provided what context I could in the limited time I had to reply.

I do wish I had said "deeply misleading" instead of "useless", though. Which-- deeply misleading is even worse than useless, unfortunately.

> walk us through what the issue is here, why it matters, and what an improvement would look like.

In this case, there's a state actor (China) deliberately conflating weather balloons and surveillance craft. Typical weather balloons drift freely and cannot maneuver; capable balloons that can control their altitude can maneuver far more freely than most people expect. "Narrative" may sound sinister, but we have a deliberate counterfactual being used in the furtherance of surveillance and geopolitical conflict.

In turn, we have this "Spy Balloon Simulator - With real atmospheric data" that makes it pretty much impossible to control a balloon. It may be an accidental misstep, but it's at the very least a somewhat dangerous one.

Way to leave positive feedback, sheesh, people seem to forget there’s actual people behind this doing it for fun and for free.

See my response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34898328

Additionally, wind data for altitudes at or above 60,000 feet isn't commonly available. The spy balloon was in the 60,000 to 120,000 range.

The variability of wind direction at different altitudes can be seen at https://www.aviationweather.gov/windtemp and https://www.aviationweather.gov/windtemp/data?region=slc

A more useful observation would be that without the ability to control altitude, it misleads the unknowledgeable to make erroneous conclusions about the capability of high altitude balloons to follow predetermined flight paths.

Or you could just call it what it is: A toy using a misleading description ("With real atmospheric data") that doesn't tell people its a toy. Perhaps its to be expected considering the fact that its a simple website, but still.

EDIT: I just realized the author made an account to clarify in this thread that its a toy application.

Would adding the ability to control altitude make it useful?

It would provide a better representation of the ability to steer the balloon.

As it is now, it suggests "you launch it and it goes somewhere randomly." But if you were able to demonstrate that it is able to steer by changing its altitude it becomes more clear that overflying an area can be a deliberate act.

Additionally, the data of "here is the current vector map for the winds at some altitude" doesn't handle the forecast of what they will be at a different location in 6 hours.

Having this as a game with "overfly these cities and score points" combined with using one month's worth of wind data and forecast information for 6h and 12h from now (rather than a point in time) would be more accurate for what it can do.

Definitely. Programs such as Google's Project Loon used altitude to access different wind profiles so that they could plan & control the balloons' paths. You see this a lot with hot air balloons: The wind at one altitude can be going the opposite direction than the wind a few hundred feet below.

https://x.company/projects/loon/

Maybe.

On one hand, yes controlling altitude will provide better results. One quirk of balloons is that winds can move at dramatically different directions/speeds at different altitudes.

On the other hand, this seems to be a solo developer working on something for the pure challenge of it. Adding different altitudes would have dramatically increased both the work and money required to build/display this.

In other words, adding features might make it more useful if you’re purely interested in accurately forecasting balloon flight. But prematurely adding features might mean that we wouldn’t have gotten to play with it now. Would that really be an improvement? Who knows?

If you want to accurately forecast balloon flight, there are already built resources for you. But this is hacker news, let’s leave those concerns for another time and celebrate hacking.

OP, I dig balloons. This simulation isn’t perfect but you have done some really good work. Keep at it!!

yes. winds change at altitudes, so you might find it faster/slower depending on your altitude. or even going in the opposite direction

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