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It's worth looking at the discussion of the ship just three days ago on Hacker News[1]. A lot of what people thought was true (that it would be stuck there for

• jeremymcanally 6y ago
  Also, if we’re being honest, a pack of software nerds on a website don’t have the deep expertise on every topic like they think they do (speaking as a software nerd on a website myself :)). The stuff that gets posted here sometimes is...fascinating.
  • craftinator 6y ago
    To be fair, there were a number of people chiming in who were claiming to be experienced in that area (ex Navy captains, people who did dredging ops, etc). One of the big things that changed the timeline was that the highest tide of the month occurred yesterday; if not, I imagine that ship would be stuck for another month!
    • gameswithgo 6y ago
      Being expert in adjacent domains is sometimes worse than being clueless. The ratio of actual to assumed expertise seems to get worse. Navy captains vs shipping boats, geologists vs climate scientists, programmers vs cpu design, etc etc. You can very easily not understand subtleties, comment on a thing, and then people listen to you.
      • xxs 6y ago
        >programmers vs cpu design You went a bit too far. I'd presume a lot of programmers do know CPU architecture well. While not common some of them to work on boring web platforms, some still do. Also most CPU architects would be decent programmers to begin with. Programming has not changed all that much and it was not so long time ago that programmers routinely knew assembly and how many cycles (and bytes) each opcode took... Nowadays it might be regarded as an arcane art by most, of course.
        • gameswithgo 6y ago
          In all of those examples, its possible the person DOES have a good understanding of the adjacent domain. And in all examples, it is possible they will miss some subtleties, but people will give their opinions a lot of weight. Just as an example I see a lot: branch prediction. Some programmers don't know about it at all. Many do know about it, but think that it still works in some form like "assume the branch will go the same way it did last time". Which is how it worked in the 1990s. Then it evolved, and then it evolved two more times. Today there is something like a neural network that learns how the branches will go. (And careful, im a programmer so I may be communicating some subtleties wrong there!)
          • xxs 6y ago
            >Today there is something like a neural network that learns how the branches will go. More like history, where the call comes from. Oddly enough the price of branch misdirection has become lower as not the entire pipeline needs to be thrown away but also due to hyper threading taking the slack. Flip note: with 'recent' developments of Spectre, one'd think branch prediction got into the lime light. Truth be told, though, not many would be able to write constant time 'fizz buzz' (can try it on your own, bonus points to having constant time int->string conversion)
        • lstamour 6y ago
          > Programming has not changed all that much and it was not so long time ago that programmers routinely knew assembly and how many cycles (and bytes) each opcode took... That statement partly highlights the problem. It assumes linear execution, when in reality, for most performance-critical products, out-of-order execution is the reality. For example: https://smist08.wordpress.com/2019/11/15/out-of-order-instructions/ https://smist08.wordpress.com/2019/11/15/out-of-order-instru... Most programmers on Apple platforms don't actually think about execution order -- because they don't have to -- but also because Apple is actively using Clang to discourage assembly and writing for specific CPU architectures. It makes Apple's job of releasing new silicon that much easier if they don't have to worry about breaking existing software custom written for a previous architecture. And this still assumes a one-to-one relationship between the code you're writing and the computer it's running on or designed for. When you get to the cloud, or cloud functions, that breaks down even further. If using Heroku, for example, you don't even have to consider how to deploy your code and you can make it pretty far running a production service. It's possible for closely related fields to still have very large differences. Consider drivers and cars: The more automation is introduced, the less we might need to know about what the automation is doing for us under the hood. Anti-Lock Breaking (ABS) in cars might be a simple example where folks know about it because there's a light on the dash and instructions in driver's ed. But if we didn't have those indicators, how often would anyone know about it and other such features? Some technologies remain undocumented until discovered later by experimentation, the VW diesels come to mind. Specific chip designers likely know more than your average programmer, just as specific car manufacturers likely know more about their products than drivers would.
      • HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
        And the aging of their experience matters. I mentioned upthread that I was trained as a merchant marine officer. However that was three decades ago and while a lot of my training will still apply, industry practices move on and a lot of the stuff I learned is long since outdated. A lot of times I start to type a reply to something relevant and have to smack myself into remembering that things are probably done differently in 2021 :-)
    • maxerickson 6y ago
      It took them a few days to dredge away meters of sand. Why would it take more than a few additional days to dredge away another couple meters of sand? Of course each meter of depth is a little harder, but not that much harder.
      • EricE 6y ago
        >Of course each meter of depth is a little harder, but not that much harder. lol - cut and fill on a slope is not trivial. It’s more of an exponential function than a linear one for the amount of material removed the deeper you have to go down. They dodged a HUGE bullet with the highest tides happening this weekend. If they had gone beyond a Tuesday with the drop in tides each day as the moon got further away it would have been sketchy if they could have gotten ahead of the tide or not. The timing of this couldn’t have been tighter. Thankfully they came out on the good side :)
        • maxerickson 6y ago
          The seasonal variation in the tides is like 20 centimeters. The draft of the ship is more than 10 meters at the bow.
          • EricE 6y ago
            Good thing we are talking normal monthly tidal variations (not seasonal) which vary by meters, not centimeters.
            • maxerickson 6y ago
              Not in Suez though. Yes, the high tide is a better opportunity to do it, the tides over the next couple of weeks are still within 20-30 cm. The worst day in the next 30 days is 60 cm below the highest. But maybe the dredge only made a few centimeters of difference running for 5 days, who knows.
          • garaetjjte 6y ago
            Yeah, but on ship this size 400x60x0.2=4800 tons of difference! I'm somewhat exaggerating because ship hull isn't cuboid, but it is still likely equivalent to removing around hundred containers.
    • EricE 6y ago
      Yes - Mother Nature deserves the lions share of credit for extraditing the ship!
  • devoutsalsa 6y ago
    As someone who watches a few too many YouTube videos on all things space, I consider myself to be a leading cosmologist, astrophysicist, and rocket scientist. I can speak w/ great confidence to anyone who knows nothing about these subjects.
    • patcon 6y ago
      > I can speak w/ great confidence to anyone who knows nothing about these subjects. heh sorry, can't tell how serious you're being. but it tickles my brain that there's someone who would also vibe with that byline: con artists :)
      • devoutsalsa 6y ago
        I'm being serious if you know nothing about space :) Did you know my experimental observations of quantum gravity & string theory are as good, if not better, than the world's top scientists? If you print this comment on paper, I will have been published & peer reviewed, too!
        • lstamour 6y ago
          I see your tongue is still firmly in cheek here, as a brief Google Scholar search would reveal there are very few experiments available to observe quantum gravity and as far as I can tell, few studies of mathematics ever bother considering the experimental observations that other scientists or engineers would require. In fact, another researcher wrote the following article in 2017 in plain language: https://nautil.us/issue/45/power/what-quantum-gravity-needs-is-more-experiments https://nautil.us/issue/45/power/what-quantum-gravity-needs-... therefore what you're saying is roughly true if not exactly true? ;-) From that 2017 article: > You already know we haven’t found anything yet—otherwise you’d have heard of it. But even null results are valuable guides for theory development. They teach us that some ideas—for example, that spacetime might be a regular lattice—are simply incompatible with observations. I would suggest that publishing and peer review requires an audience, therefore ... err, by publishing this I am actually peer-reviewing your work?! Drat! That makes me 0/2 then! To conclude my peer-review, I would like to see more details for reproduction, merely stating that you've performed experiments without providing the necessary observational data and steps to reproduce highlights the lack of originality in the paper you're proposing and therefore I would decline to publish. ;-)
  • debaserab2 6y ago
    Ever since I discovered n-gate.com HN comments read a little different than they used to...
    • DenisM 6y ago
      Do tell?
    • hartator 6y ago
      This is some kind of weekly digest? I don't fully get it.
      • acqq 6y ago
        Never mind! Here https://www.patreon.com/ngate https://www.patreon.com/ngate There's an offer of: Limited Series A (5 remaining) just €43.50 (+VAT) per month Limited Series B (7 remaining) just €431.50 (+VAT) per month or Limited Series C (1 remaining) just €862.50 (+VAT) per month Brilliant! (I must note that the circuit shown there is... somehow... inducing some negativity in me.... which probably isn't unintentional.) And the main site has an about page too, in all its glory: http://n-gate.com/about/ http://n-gate.com/about/
      • ohgodplsno 6y ago
        It's a weekly digest that makes fun of how absolutely full of shit (and themselves) HN posters are.
    • thisistheend123 6y ago
      Yes, been following n-gate along with HN for years now .. n-gate gives a whole new perspective on HN comments and casts a light on dangers of taking an echo chamber too seriously ..
    • lanstin 6y ago
      Wow thanks for the link. That is too funny, a little.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • tomc1985 6y ago
    The Dunning-Kruger effect is real
• polote 6y ago
  Well the biggest luck event in this case, is that there was a dredger pretty close to the ship. If you dont have a dredger and you need to ship one there we would have wait much more time
  • patentatt 6y ago
    Knowing nothing about it, would it be safe to assume that the Suez Canal would always have a dredger around? Or is that not how that works?
    • BurningFrog 6y ago
      I assume it's the same kind of luck that places gas stations near motorways.
    • kparaju 6y ago
      Yeah, they have dredgers around for maintenance of the canal. This clip was from at least 6 months ago. https://youtu.be/P6st0k7KJmk https://youtu.be/P6st0k7KJmk From the YouTube clip, it def seems like it's normal to see them when passing through the canal.
• mrfusion 6y ago
  The media seems to exaggerate problems...
  • malwarebytess 6y ago
    Why do you say that? What was true is that if they couldn't get it out during the period surrounding king tide (which is now, peaking next high tide) then it would be a few weeks before conditions were as good. That's a factual take on things.
• sandworm101 6y ago
  Note that the egyptians were also planning for the "maybe weeks" scenerio. They were assembling the team for a litering operation (cranes etc) should the ship need to be partially unloaded. And a great many ships began to divert around africa, some of which may now be turning around. Certainly the shipping industry as a whole was headging against the "maybe weeks" option. Not everyone on HN is a software nerd. More than a few here have worked in the shipping and logistics industries.
  • freeflight 6y ago
    > Note that the egyptians were also planning for the "maybe weeks" scenerio. Which is the sensible thing to do in their position: Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.
  • rini17 6y ago
    The canal has a limited capacity, so the backlog may go on for few weeks anyway.
    • Clewza313 6y ago
      They've said they expect to clear it in 3-4 days.
• dentemple 6y ago
  The HN crowd tends to be heavily bearish on pretty much everything here, and there's an ironic lack of respect for experts in fields beyond those few HN favorite topics (e.g., low-level programming languages). So, the difference in the expected outcome here doesn't surprise me.
  • ethbr0 6y ago
    Tesla and SpaceX?
    • Robotbeat 6y ago
      HN tends to be pretty bearish on Tesla, although overall bullish on SpaceX.
• faefox 6y ago
  Yeah, but sitting around and reserving judgement wouldn't make for a very interesting comment section. :)
• keenreed 6y ago
  We got lucky. But several weeks was real scenario. If this boat would leak, ruptured, broke in half...
• BurningFrog 6y ago
  I think most people were reserving judgement. But judgement reservers aren't prone to jump on message boards and shout "guess we'll have to wait and see" to the world.
• pqb 6y ago
  > A lot of what people thought was true (that it would be stuck there for weeks, being dismissive of using tugboats to pull it out) didn't pan out as expected. That was what many investors thought - see crude oil market in last days. There were two tribes - one saying week and second month(s) to solve the problem with ship. One selling, because of optimistic perspective and obviously other buying for opposite reason. In the result the price was standing still on the "same" level.
• olalonde 6y ago
  This happens a lot on HN. Another recent example which turned out to be dead wrong about Coinbase[0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25459556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25459556
• prophesi 6y ago
  Those comments were really helpful to me. HM did a great job at showing just how insanely large this ship is and why it will be difficult to get it unstuck. To a layman such as myself, a boat remaining stuck for almost an entire week sounds pretty absurd without that context.
  • luxuryballs 6y ago
    To the tinfoil layman it’s funny, if I am not mistaken, that as soon as the President of Egypt ordered it to be unloaded they suddenly got it unstuck within the next 24 hours.
• tomthe 6y ago
  To be fair: Maersk, biggest shipping company in the world also came to the conclusion that it will take longer and sent their ships the way around africa. It's always a gamble and every outcome has it's probabilities.
  • rantwasp 6y ago
    that may still be the right choice given that now there is a huge backlog
    • EricE 6y ago
      Yes - just because they moved it that doesn’t mean the delays instantly clear.
• puddingnomeat 6y ago
  I think this is wrong. Someone says "it COULD be stuck for weeks" It gets unstuck earlier, fine. Doesn't invalidate the possibility. The criticism is moot. If anyone had made bets, then I'd take both more seriously.
  • ceejayoz 6y ago
    We see this all the time with political polling. "Oh, Nate Silver said Trump only had a 30% chance of winning the election, but he did, so Nate Silver is an idiot!"
    • EricE 6y ago
      Nate Silver wasn’t just a little off - he was massively off outside of accepted norms for polling. Multiple times no less.
      • ceejayoz 6y ago
        No, he really wasn't. In 2016 he was one of the most optimistic of the major poll aggregators on Trump's chances; he had Trump at 30% when others had him at much lower odds. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-fivethirtyeight-gave-trump-a-better-chance-than-almost-anyone-else/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-fivethirtyeight-gav... > Our final forecast, issued early Tuesday evening, had Trump with a 29 percent chance of winning the Electoral College.1 By comparison, other models tracked by The New York Times put Trump’s odds at: 15 percent, 8 percent, 2 percent and less than 1 percent. As for 2020: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-werent-great-but-thats-pretty-normal/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-werent-great-... > This year was definitely a little weird, given that the vote share margins were often fairly far off from the polls (including in some high-profile examples such as Wisconsin and Florida). But at the same time, a high percentage of states (likely 48 out of 50) were “called” correctly, as was the overall Electoral College and popular vote winner (Biden). And that’s usually how polls are judged: Did they identify the right winner? (He also doesn't do the polling. He's an analyst, not a pollster.)
• Agentlien 6y ago
  When this first got posted on HN I felt confident that I had absolutely no clue about the difficulties involved or how best to resolve the situation. I still stand by that assessment.
• adrianmonk 6y ago
  I think a lot of that is because of this one quote and how the news (and the public) handled it (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/24/ever-given-a-massive-cargo-ship-is-still-stuck-in-the-suez-canal.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/24/ever-given-a-massive-cargo-s...): > "We can't exclude it might take weeks, depending on the situation," said Peter Berdowski, CEO of Dutch company Boskalis. Of course that message got oversimplified as it spread. "Can't exclude" is a pretty important qualifier that suggests that it's an unlikely worst case. But that nuance already was lost in the title of that same article: "Cargo ship blocking Suez Canal could take weeks to move". If you were to read only that title, you might think it is likely to take weeks. TLDR: People thought it would take weeks because that's what they were hearing from other people.
• politician 6y ago
  On the other hand, they hired the best salvage company in the world to remove the ship, that company ran massive calculations on the loads in the ship, and then they determined the application of forces needed to dislodge the boat. I think the pendulum is swinging too far the other direction. "Look how easy it is. They just shook it loose" is the wrong lesson to take here, IMO.