
Did Neil Armstrong really say “that's one small step for a man”? - ternaryoperator
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-neil-armstrong-one-small-step-for-a-man-20150605-story.html
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colechristensen
This was not a productive use of anyone's time. Now while I'm usually all for
wasting one's time on interesting pointless efforts _and_ being quite a fan of
manned spaceflight, I do not at all see the motivation in this article outside
of maybe a 5 minute conversation on one's third beer.

~~~
HBSisBS
While i agree this is not productive, the primary stated goal for HN has
nothing to do with productivity, but has to do with fulfilling one's curiosity
and what hackers and makers find interesting.

~~~
vacri
Sadly the business side of HN has completely evaporated in recent months. It
used to be 40/40/20 business/hacking/other stuff, now it seems it's 0/50/50\.
There's too much miscellaneous other stuff these days, which is making HN into
a generic jumpsite. I think that the guidelines need updating.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
God, I wish that were true. HN has always had a heavily disproportionate stock
of articles about/relevant to startups, a tiny subset of hackerdom, because
Y-Combinator. Less businessgab would be awesome. The "miscellaneous other
stuff" can stay as long as it's either interesting tech, political news
relevant to the interests of the internet and the people who maintain it, or
general smart-people stuff.

~~~
vacri
Well, I went and had a look at the numbers for the current front page, and
they're 17:10:1:2 hacker:misc:business:showHN. I put Show HN separately
because they fit all three categories. So without the Show HN, that's 1
business article out of 28.

It doesn't seem out of the ordinary for content these days - the sad thing is
that there are tons of tech jumpsites out there, but very few sites that meld
business to tech stuff. Despite the name, 'hacker' news was focused on the
startup world (it's essentially an advertising mechanism for a startup
incubator).

===

hacker: apollo 11 source code, call for hackers, machine learning, julia
language, origami robot wheels, neural network framework, self-rubber-ducking,
swift, A*, SHA3 announcement, Stanford dataset, nature of code, awesome-fonts,
equational reasoning, new math for science, nexusUI, dnswatch

misc: beach lego, armstong moon words, people over pleasure, beware of
phishing at airbnb, phones on air force one, guide to logic, engineered
century/armstrong. lobster economics (content isn't really business, despite
the name), rocket-colling icebag, fun with turbulence

business: problem with founders

show HN: gamedevs, coredemia

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justinpombrio
Regardless of what he _did_ say, Neil Armstrong _meant_ to say, "that's one
small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind".

~~~
kordless
He's quoted as saying he said the A. Anything else is just us making up some
rationalization to fit what we think it is.

And the whole time, there's this guy who was the FIRST GUY ON THE FUCKING MOON
and we're not going to believe HIM? I mean, who can you believe if you can't
believe him?

~~~
Crito
> _" I mean, who can you believe if you can't believe him?"_

Well since we have a recording, I think that believing our own ears is a
reasonable option.

I think that most of us have misspoken in the past without realizing it. It's
similar to botching a sentence on paper, but reading it back to yourself
correctly while proofreading it. It happens. As such, I think it is more than
possible that Armstrong _meant_ to say "a", _thought_ he said "a", but did not
say "a".

~~~
dfxm12
Or maybe he said the "a" and the recording equipment didn't pick it up.

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empressplay
I always thought he meant "One small step for man" as in modern man, "one
giant leap for mankind" as in man as a species overall.

~~~
bshimmin
Either interpretation seems to be loaded with subtle "isms" [0], if you ask
me. Shocking.

[0] qv.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7999486](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7999486)

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martin1b
We're really wasting our time on this? Seriously? Too much time on our hands.

