6 ms·

Good thing hacker news doesn't run large civil engineering projects.

abhiminator 6y ago
That thread was a good chuckle though -- a bunch of mostly software devs brainstorming on freeing one of the biggest containers ships from their comfy armchairs. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26585282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26585282
- rovr138 6y ago
  I learned how not to get rid of a whale at least. In case I’m ever asked about that...
  - croutonwagon 6y ago
    "The remaining chunks were of such a size, no respectable seagull would attempt to tackle anyway." This guy assume gull's are respectable. Man I hope this guy had an amazing career, because that was an awesome report.
- foxes 6y ago
  Yes some of the options would have been fairly spectacular at least.
IgorPartola 6y ago
You know, I used to think that HN was a collection of some of the smartest people on the Internet. Don’t get me wrong, there are some incredible people here. But I guess what I have learned over the past 10 years is that HN has as many blind spots as any other online forum. If you want SV advice, this is the place to be. If you want to dislodge a stuck mega ship, look elsewhere.
- Grakel 6y ago
  HN is a lot of amazing experts in a particular subject mostly talking about something else. It's fascinating in this way.
- throwaway09223 6y ago
  I just re-read that old thread and to be honest, on the whole the advice there is sound. I saw comments discounting the fanciful speculation outnumbering the speculation by at least a multiple of two. There are silly ideas in every forum. I've been on plenty groups comprised entirely of tech experts and I can confidently say that foolish ideas will be proposed even in the most elite of circles, even in their areas of specialty. It happens, and as long as there are other reasonable voices it's fine.
- kibwen 6y ago
  It's the classic "expertise is universal" fallacy. When we see someone who is an expert in their field, we assume that expertise carries over to totally unrelated fields, when this is emphatically not the case. Being a genius does not prevent someone from being ignorant; the finite nature of time means every genius is almost completely uninformed on almost every topic, and without information what you get is GIGO.
  - hanche 6y ago
    I suspect that many (but not all) of the “crazy” suggestions were a bit tongue-in-cheek.
    - justinator 6y ago
      Which I think is fine? Isn't it fun to imagine how you would unstick a huge boat, even if your idea is totally off the mark due to a bad application of lateral thinking? Be it helium balloons or falcon heavy lifting rockets.
      - hanche 6y ago
        Oh yes, great fun to be had by all. You'll hear no complaints from me.
      - arethuza 6y ago
        Or repeatedly exploding nukes behind it to convert it into the first space going Orion container vessel....
      - SubiculumCode 6y ago
        Or ramming another containership into it.
    - jsight 6y ago
      Yeah, the part that is missing are the experts who can take those "crazy" suggestions and explain, in accurate detail, all of the reasons why there are better ideas. Along with detailed explanations of the better ideas. As it was, we kind of just got stuck on the jokes and random thoughts.
- jethro_tell 6y ago
  There's a whole industry around ship recovery and they know how to do things like patch things back together with some light underwater welding and then pump the water back out the hole in the bottom with compressed air. Lots of times, this is done while the ship is busy worrying itself to death on a reef. Ship salvage is a combination of batshit crazy and real-time engineering marvel with a healthy dose of understanding tides waves and currents. There's also a strange maritime law business going on where the captain and or insurance company have to sign a contract. IF the ship is a 'wreck' the salvage company gets what ever they can save or whatever it's agreed on in the contract. If it just needs some help, the contract will be lighter. But many ships have sunk completely while the insurance company and salvage company have argued over whether it was a total loss or just suck in a low tide. I always find the salvage stories to be super interesting. Seeing people do hard ball business while the ship is breaking up under them is really something else.
  - BelmundoRegal 6y ago
    Reminded me of the Kathryn Spirit ; "After years of immobility, the federal government awarded an $11-million contract last year to a conglomeration of businesses to dismantle the ship. Ironically, one of the companies picked was the same one that abandoned the wreck in 2011." Where: "years"=8 "Built in 1967, the Kathryn Spirit has not had an owner since 2015, at which point the federal government took control. The ship, which had been used as a cargo ship in the past, had been towed to Beauharnois in 2011 by the Groupe St-Pierre, which wanted to dismantle it in the St. Lawrence River to then sell the scrap metal." https://www.westislandblog.com/abandoned-vessel-kathryn-spirit-set-to-be-removed-from-the-shores-of-beauharnois/ https://www.westislandblog.com/abandoned-vessel-kathryn-spir...
- dkarl 6y ago
  The smartest ones are maybe not the ones providing suggestions? Then again, it's fun to speculate, and what are these threads for if not to provoke thought? Maybe it's fine for people to imagine and try to put themselves in the place of the professionals working on the problem. You can interpret the comments here as an indicator of dangerous human hubris if you want, but I think most of the people here understand that they can't do any harm by posting naive speculations on HN. In my opinion, we should save our outrage for people who make an active attempt to be taken seriously and affect the actions of more qualified people, such as the guy who posted the bizarre (and possibly satirical?) account of his attempt to build a system for guiding doctors' treatment decisions.
  - test1235 6y ago
    some of the suggestions seemed borderline condescending e.g. "why don't they just do X" as tho' the actual experienced engineers working over there on the problem couldn't come up with better ideas than some guy who happens to spend a lot of their day on the internet.
    - BelmundoRegal 6y ago
      It actually happens quite often and you can get handsomely rewarded for being that some guy ; https://www.innocentive.com/ https://www.innocentive.com/ Have fun ! :D
    - dkarl 6y ago
      "why don't they just do X" can be a great question. Why not just use Riemann integrals for everything? Why not use timestamps as ids? Not knowing the answer is a good enough reason for asking, and I don't feel like I need to police people's feelings and decide if they were feeling curious or condescending when they asked. They'll learn either way, when the question is answered. I can imagine some people might have asked questions in a disingenuous or insinuating way ("why trust vaccines if the supposed experts can't get a ship unstuck") but I did not personally see any of that.
    - Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
      "Why don't they just do X" has two interpretations: 1. "This is such a simple solution and I think they're dumb for not doing it." 2. "X seems like a great and obvious idea, but they aren't doing it. Therefore, there must be something they know but I don't, and I'm interested in learning it." I try to take the second interpretation whenever I see someone posing solutions in that manner.
- steve_adams_86 6y ago
  The way I look at it is, if I’m here, then there’s a strong statistical probability that a bunch of other clueless superficially intelligent people like me found their way here too. I just hope anyone I encounter is smarter than I am.
- ravi-delia 6y ago
  As correct as that is, I don't think anyone was actually thinking those were good ideas. There's something really innocently funny about this episode of history, and honestly it's fun to just think about what-ifs. Could you build surge walls all the way along and use some kind of dam? Combine all the power of every helicopter to lift the whole thing? Big ships are fun, unwieldy objects getting stuck are fun, sometimes it's just fun to mess around.
- Thrymr 6y ago
  I wonder if there is a forum of marine engineers somewhere speculating on how Google (or whoever) should fix a service outage...
- vermontdevil 6y ago
  I enjoy reading all the various ideas people come up to solve a complex issue. I know it's mostly not realistic but always good to see how imagination come forth.
divbzero 6y ago
With more robots and drones, only a matter of time before we have Twitch controlling atoms instead of bits? [1] [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10477721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10477721 "Show HN: Twitch Installs Arch Linux"
leereeves 6y ago
I remember people in that discussion saying the high tide might help and suggesting pumping water around the boat to remove the sand. The HN discussion included the right answer, among a lot of more entertaining ideas.
tim333 6y ago
I think a lot of the HN suggestions were for entertainment value really. Dredge and use tugs wasn't very exciting.
dang 6y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26622120 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26622120.

That thread was a good chuckle though -- a bunch of mostly software devs brainstorming on freeing one of the biggest containers ships from their comfy armchairs. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26585282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26585282

rovr138 6y ago
I learned how not to get rid of a whale at least. In case I’m ever asked about that...
- croutonwagon 6y ago
  "The remaining chunks were of such a size, no respectable seagull would attempt to tackle anyway." This guy assume gull's are respectable. Man I hope this guy had an amazing career, because that was an awesome report.
foxes 6y ago
Yes some of the options would have been fairly spectacular at least.

IgorPartola 6y ago

You know, I used to think that HN was a collection of some of the smartest people on the Internet. Don’t get me wrong, there are some incredible people here. But I guess what I have learned over the past 10 years is that HN has as many blind spots as any other online forum. If you want SV advice, this is the place to be. If you want to dislodge a stuck mega ship, look elsewhere.

Grakel 6y ago
HN is a lot of amazing experts in a particular subject mostly talking about something else. It's fascinating in this way.
throwaway09223 6y ago
I just re-read that old thread and to be honest, on the whole the advice there is sound. I saw comments discounting the fanciful speculation outnumbering the speculation by at least a multiple of two. There are silly ideas in every forum. I've been on plenty groups comprised entirely of tech experts and I can confidently say that foolish ideas will be proposed even in the most elite of circles, even in their areas of specialty. It happens, and as long as there are other reasonable voices it's fine.
kibwen 6y ago
It's the classic "expertise is universal" fallacy. When we see someone who is an expert in their field, we assume that expertise carries over to totally unrelated fields, when this is emphatically not the case. Being a genius does not prevent someone from being ignorant; the finite nature of time means every genius is almost completely uninformed on almost every topic, and without information what you get is GIGO.
- hanche 6y ago
  I suspect that many (but not all) of the “crazy” suggestions were a bit tongue-in-cheek.
  - justinator 6y ago
    Which I think is fine? Isn't it fun to imagine how you would unstick a huge boat, even if your idea is totally off the mark due to a bad application of lateral thinking? Be it helium balloons or falcon heavy lifting rockets.
    - hanche 6y ago
      Oh yes, great fun to be had by all. You'll hear no complaints from me.
    - arethuza 6y ago
      Or repeatedly exploding nukes behind it to convert it into the first space going Orion container vessel....
    - SubiculumCode 6y ago
      Or ramming another containership into it.
  - jsight 6y ago
    Yeah, the part that is missing are the experts who can take those "crazy" suggestions and explain, in accurate detail, all of the reasons why there are better ideas. Along with detailed explanations of the better ideas. As it was, we kind of just got stuck on the jokes and random thoughts.
jethro_tell 6y ago
There's a whole industry around ship recovery and they know how to do things like patch things back together with some light underwater welding and then pump the water back out the hole in the bottom with compressed air. Lots of times, this is done while the ship is busy worrying itself to death on a reef. Ship salvage is a combination of batshit crazy and real-time engineering marvel with a healthy dose of understanding tides waves and currents. There's also a strange maritime law business going on where the captain and or insurance company have to sign a contract. IF the ship is a 'wreck' the salvage company gets what ever they can save or whatever it's agreed on in the contract. If it just needs some help, the contract will be lighter. But many ships have sunk completely while the insurance company and salvage company have argued over whether it was a total loss or just suck in a low tide. I always find the salvage stories to be super interesting. Seeing people do hard ball business while the ship is breaking up under them is really something else.
- BelmundoRegal 6y ago
  Reminded me of the Kathryn Spirit ; "After years of immobility, the federal government awarded an $11-million contract last year to a conglomeration of businesses to dismantle the ship. Ironically, one of the companies picked was the same one that abandoned the wreck in 2011." Where: "years"=8 "Built in 1967, the Kathryn Spirit has not had an owner since 2015, at which point the federal government took control. The ship, which had been used as a cargo ship in the past, had been towed to Beauharnois in 2011 by the Groupe St-Pierre, which wanted to dismantle it in the St. Lawrence River to then sell the scrap metal." https://www.westislandblog.com/abandoned-vessel-kathryn-spirit-set-to-be-removed-from-the-shores-of-beauharnois/ https://www.westislandblog.com/abandoned-vessel-kathryn-spir...
dkarl 6y ago
The smartest ones are maybe not the ones providing suggestions? Then again, it's fun to speculate, and what are these threads for if not to provoke thought? Maybe it's fine for people to imagine and try to put themselves in the place of the professionals working on the problem. You can interpret the comments here as an indicator of dangerous human hubris if you want, but I think most of the people here understand that they can't do any harm by posting naive speculations on HN. In my opinion, we should save our outrage for people who make an active attempt to be taken seriously and affect the actions of more qualified people, such as the guy who posted the bizarre (and possibly satirical?) account of his attempt to build a system for guiding doctors' treatment decisions.
- test1235 6y ago
  some of the suggestions seemed borderline condescending e.g. "why don't they just do X" as tho' the actual experienced engineers working over there on the problem couldn't come up with better ideas than some guy who happens to spend a lot of their day on the internet.
  - BelmundoRegal 6y ago
    It actually happens quite often and you can get handsomely rewarded for being that some guy ; https://www.innocentive.com/ https://www.innocentive.com/ Have fun ! :D
  - dkarl 6y ago
    "why don't they just do X" can be a great question. Why not just use Riemann integrals for everything? Why not use timestamps as ids? Not knowing the answer is a good enough reason for asking, and I don't feel like I need to police people's feelings and decide if they were feeling curious or condescending when they asked. They'll learn either way, when the question is answered. I can imagine some people might have asked questions in a disingenuous or insinuating way ("why trust vaccines if the supposed experts can't get a ship unstuck") but I did not personally see any of that.
  - Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
    "Why don't they just do X" has two interpretations: 1. "This is such a simple solution and I think they're dumb for not doing it." 2. "X seems like a great and obvious idea, but they aren't doing it. Therefore, there must be something they know but I don't, and I'm interested in learning it." I try to take the second interpretation whenever I see someone posing solutions in that manner.
steve_adams_86 6y ago
The way I look at it is, if I’m here, then there’s a strong statistical probability that a bunch of other clueless superficially intelligent people like me found their way here too. I just hope anyone I encounter is smarter than I am.
ravi-delia 6y ago
As correct as that is, I don't think anyone was actually thinking those were good ideas. There's something really innocently funny about this episode of history, and honestly it's fun to just think about what-ifs. Could you build surge walls all the way along and use some kind of dam? Combine all the power of every helicopter to lift the whole thing? Big ships are fun, unwieldy objects getting stuck are fun, sometimes it's just fun to mess around.
Thrymr 6y ago
I wonder if there is a forum of marine engineers somewhere speculating on how Google (or whoever) should fix a service outage...
vermontdevil 6y ago
I enjoy reading all the various ideas people come up to solve a complex issue. I know it's mostly not realistic but always good to see how imagination come forth.

divbzero 6y ago

With more robots and drones, only a matter of time before we have Twitch controlling atoms instead of bits? [1] [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10477721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10477721 "Show HN: Twitch Installs Arch Linux"

leereeves 6y ago

I remember people in that discussion saying the high tide might help and suggesting pumping water around the boat to remove the sand. The HN discussion included the right answer, among a lot of more entertaining ideas.

tim333 6y ago

I think a lot of the HN suggestions were for entertainment value really. Dredge and use tugs wasn't very exciting.

dang 6y ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26622120 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26622120.