from Hacker News

Abraham Wald and the airplane diagram with red bullet holes

by lwhsiao on 3/19/24, 3:47 PM with 8 comments

• by btilly on 3/22/24, 7:50 PM

  I'm pretty sure that I encountered the survivorship bias story before that picture, but that picture is how everyone visualizes it.

  But from https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ I learned that what really helped the planes most was not better armor, it was radar countermeasures that kept the Luftwaffe from being able to target the bomber stream. If you have an hour, I highly recommend that talk. And the blog series that goes with it is brilliant.

• by mchobbes on 3/22/24, 8:45 PM

  I want to be clear, up front, that I believe credit should go where credit is due but, ignoring the arrogance of the blog post in its entirety, there are two closely-related things that rub me the wrong way about this. First is the fact that the actual famous image (which is both the image the author uses at the top of their blog post as well as the one found on wikipedia — who, ironically, _do_ indeed give them credit) is not the image this person created. Second is the fact that the author did not even create the original image. As mentioned in the blog post, the original was created by Abraham Wald. So, this person is neither the creator of the original image, nor the creator of the famous image. They simply feel like they haven't gotten enough credit for making it famous.

• by admp on 3/22/24, 7:50 PM

  Please change the URL to http://, the cert has expired in 2021.