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pushes up glasses I would watch the heck out of a Twitch stream of their debugging/brainstorming sessions. I always loved the movie Apollo 13, especially the te
by qzw 5y ago
pushes up glasses I would watch the heck out of a Twitch stream of their debugging/brainstorming sessions. I always loved the movie Apollo 13, especially the technical troubleshooting parts.
- Koshkin 5y agoDebugging on a computer that is down is not a very exciting process.
- only_as_i_fall 5y agoI'll settle for the post-mortem
- pbourke 5y agoSpeak for yourself
- qzw 5y agoIn the movie Hero[0], two kung fu masters fight a battle purely in their minds. And when the mental fight was over, they only execute one physical move to finish the battle. Think of this as the computer equivalent of that scene. [0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0299977/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0299977/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
- avaldes 5y agoLike the battle between Sherlock and Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows?
- the_af 5y agoYes. A lot of Western action movies owe their inspiration to Chinese movies (and I suppose, viceversa). In this case Hero (2002) -- or a similar movie, since I doubt it invented this trope -- is likely an inspiration for A Game of Shadows (2011).
- jasonwatkinspdx 5y agoHK movies clearly inspired the action movies of the 90s.
- the_af 5y agoYes, with some cases like John Woo even explicitly crossing over to Hollywood :) A friend just reminded me the same "battle of the minds" trope is used in Takeshi Kitano's version of "Zatoichi": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlVK7ogwyUI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlVK7ogwyUI
- NetOpWibby 5y agoThis sounds amazing!
- gautamcgoel 5y agoUgh, such a good movie... If you haven't seen it, do yourself a favor and go see it.
- bshep 5y agoIn case anyone wants to watch a clip of the fight: https://youtu.be/AeeoEpmyb2Y https://youtu.be/AeeoEpmyb2Y
- fishtoaster 5y ago_Hero_'s always been one of my favorites. A lot of kung fu movies try to strike a balance between aesthetics and realism - I really enjoy a movie that picks one (in this case the former) and goes all in on it. It's got a fight that takes place entirely on the surface of a lake, and another that takes places in a forest of falling leaves that change color several times throughout the scene. It's an incredibly beautiful movie.
- barbazoo 5y agoBoth: Dance around for 10 minutes trying to out-physics each other Guy 1: Why don't I just poke him with the pointy bit Great scene though, makes me want to watch the whole movie.
- qzw 5y agoYeah, this is strictly artistic kung fu, which is basically high-mortality ballet. There are also many "realistic" martial arts films, if that's your thing. I enjoy both styles, depending on mood.
- the_af 5y agoAgreed. Wuxia to be specific, which is kinda like fantasy kung fu and has a long tradition. It includes powers like becoming weightless, killing with a single movement, flying, etc.
- ISL 5y agoWhat a wonderful visual representation of the notion that, "a battle is won before it begins."
- pbhjpbhj 5y agoWhich is a Tsun-tzu reference presumably, he says don't enter a battle unless you have 'already' won (through preparation, numerical supremacy, etc.).
- smileysteve 5y agoespecially with extremely long response times.
- mkarr 5y agopg down Sigh. pg down Sigh ... Repeat for hours.
- meepmorp 5y agoNo, but "Debugging on a computer that is down... in space," does sound more interesting, right? You have a computer that you can only interact with over a radio link, and need to make it start working again with only what you know about how the system is built and a limited set of remote commands. Sounds like something I'd get obsessed with solving.
- zepearl 5y agoI did something like that when trying to boot my brand new root server in Finland a few weeks ago (tried ~50 times while having UEFI enabled plus mdadm raid1 on GPT partitions, never worked, asked support to disable UEFI, worked). Confirming that not being able to ping/connect to it during the failed attempts was absolutely not exciting :)
- keanebean86 5y agoThis would be cool for earth satellites. On the other hand watching a stream involving something on Mars, let alone voyager, would be pretty boring! Send: ls Ok let's take a 20 minute break.
- abnry 5y agoJob Posting: NASA programmer, needs at least 1 wpm typing speed and experience with compiling large projects.
- gundul 5y agoBest programmer. -1 wpm.
- Koshkin 5y agoOnly needs a keyboard with one key.
- robocat 5y agoA telegraph key: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegraph_key https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegraph_key
- mywittyname 5y agoI'm so fast that I can do -127wpm. Only in certain software though.
- diamondo25 5y agoThe amount of preparation is much, much more than every other "accessible" installation. Typos are the worst to recover from, backspace usually doesnt exist. As I've sent commands to our Linux-running satellites, its usually prepending your commands with ctrl-c characters and a couple newlines at the end, just to make sure it runs and nothing is left in the buffer. There is also a possibility that commands get executed multiple times, and there are usually limits in transmission speed, processing speed, and frame length. Sending a lot of characters over a terminal can cause characters to be eaten, creating typos you can't see, affecting the commanding immensely.
- afterburner 5y agoI think what you're really saying is you'd watch the movie version of this. And considering there are no life or death stakes, it still wouldn't be as exciting as Apollo 13.
- hungryforcodes 5y agoThat might not be true though. This guy took about 30 hours of video of him porting an 80s version of unix to the ESP8266. Warts and all -- live! I've started to watch it and it's fascinating! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDHcGY7EzUM&t=62s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDHcGY7EzUM&t=62s You could have a whole channel with different teams debugging satellite technology and if you're bored, it would probably be quite interesting. The bigger problem is most likely concerns about IP and secret protocols and so on. "And now Bob will log into TeleSat123 via SSH." <We see bob type in root / password123> "Oups, uh..gosh we'll just go to a commercial break!"
- stackbutterflow 5y agoI guess the last thing you want when you're debugging something during your work is for the whole word to watch over your shoulder.
- idreyn 5y agoIn case you haven't seen it: https://apolloinrealtime.org/13/ https://apolloinrealtime.org/13/
- belter 5y agoFantastic site. Thanks for sharing.
- 1911z 5y agoThank you for sharing, this is amazing
- Izkata 5y agoFun weirdness of even limited multilingualness: For some reason my brain first parsed this as "a pollo in real time" - or, from Spanish, "a chicken in real time".
- nevster 5y agoWow - so here I am an hour later... Thanks for that link!
- asavadatti 5y agoWhat a fantastic website. Reminds me of Encarta 97
- bfeist 5y agoHey there. I'm the author of the website. Thanks for the post. Happy to answer any questions.
- trothamel 5y agoIf you want to see debugging a computer in space, check out Apollo 13's sequel, Apollo 14. The moon landing is being held up by shorted-out switch that's causing the LM to abort the landing, and it's up to the programmers back home to figure out how to work around it in time to allow the landing. Apollo 13 was the story of a 'successful failure', while Apollo 14 shows how hard work and creative thinking can turn failure into success.
- NikolaNovak 5y agoIs there actually an Apollo 14 movie? I can find Apollo 18 but not a Apollo 14 feature movie. I saw this but it's a short documentary and may not be what you meant: https://www.amazon.com/Apollo-14-Complete-Downlink-Edition/dp/B00007GUG4 https://www.amazon.com/Apollo-14-Complete-Downlink-Edition/d...
- cratermoon 5y agoThere's the HBO series "From the Earth to the Moon", which covers this with the Apollo 14 mission. Highly recommended.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- NikolaNovak 5y agoAhh, yes; I've seen the series multiple times - agreed that it's great, especially for those who enjoyed Apollo 13. I wasn't sure if there was a different Apollo-14 movie OP/Trothamel was referring to...
- trothamel 5y agoNo, or at least not that I know of. I was having a bit of fun by declaring Apollo 14 (the mission) the sequel to Apollo 13 (the mission).
- bumby 5y agoWas this the scenario where there was a false positive warning light but they had no way to test if it was truly a false alarm? I remember attending a talk by an Apollo engineer who convinced the control room that the switch design had a propensity to a short and it really came down to a probability-based judgement call
- kabdib 5y agoHenry S F Cooper Jr.'s book The Evening Star describes some of the remote debugging and other problem solving that was necessary when the Magellan probe experienced computer problems while orbiting Venus. It's been a few decades since I read it, but it was pretty detailed and rather exciting.
- kevmo 5y agoThis sort of comment is why I still read HN.
- barkingcat 5y agoAnd the people downvoting this comment is why I will stop reading HN.
- NeutronStar 5y agoWhat did that comment actually bring to the conversation?
- kbelder 5y agoConversation.
- pc86 5y agoIt's arguably even worse than just commenting "This." At least that is small enough you can scan over it and barely even register its existence. But this fedora-tipping "Thank you kind sir this is the type of Internet Content I enjoy!" doesn't even afford you that luxury.
- omikun 5y agoHow could it have been reworded to avoid the "fedora-tipping" connotation? I'm being sincere here since I also appreciate book recommendations and I get probably half my book recommendations from HN.
- dehrmann 5y agoI have no idea if it would be more or less exciting than a tech company warroom.
- eschneider 5y agoI dunno. That sort of thing is exactly my job, except the remote devices are still on earth somewheres. What you'd see is me sitting in a library drinking coffee and looking at source code and schematics until I had an answer that matched the evidence. Satisfying, but not exactly must watch tv.
- moocowtruck 5y agoyou just killed any future dramatic space troubleshooting film scenes for me
- Izkata 5y ago> Satisfying, but not exactly must watch tv. What's in your head could be though. That's my pet theory on the movie Hackers, what we're seeing on the computer screens isn't what's actually there, it's the characters' mental constructs visualized.
- macksd 5y agoHonestly that movie is a lot of why I got into math and engineering. Jim Lovell was undeniably a badass but I watched that movie and thought the heroes were the ones reading telemetry off a computer screen and using their slide rule to figure out what to do. I hope Hidden Figures does that for another generation.
- seanc 5y agoLike John Aaron, the steely eyed missile man!
- nonameiguess 5y agoNot was. Is! I noticed on the last season of the Expanse that Luna headquarters was named after him and bothered to look him up. Dude's 93 and still kicking! It's amazing how well the astronaut medical screening worked. Unless they get killed in the line of duty, these guys are all living incredibly long.
- falcrist 5y agoIt's worth noting that the people in that movie were WAY more loud and emotional than the real NASA engineers and operators. You can see how NASA people react to tough situations by watching the videos of mission control during the Challenger and Columbia disasters. No shouting. No arguments. Just cool professionalism and restrained emotions. They have a job to do, and they do it well even under stress. "Steely-eyed missile men/women" indeed.
- bumby 5y ago>the people in that movie were WAY more loud and emotional than the real NASA engineers and operators. There are plenty of NASA engineers and leaders who lose their cool. I’m only saying that so people don’t overly lionize them in a way that prevents them from pursuing a similar job because they feel they are somehow cut from a different cloth.
- erosenbe0 5y agoEverybody knows that when presented with the irrefutable evidence that the Challenger o-rings would fail, they more or less just let the astronauts die. Definitely cut from same cloth as any other org.
- bumby 5y agoThat’s not quite accurate. It wasn’t that there was “irrefutable” evidence that the o-rings would fail, it was there wasn’t data that they would, or wouldn’t, fail. “The O-rings were never tested in extreme cold.”[1] There wasn’t data which led to discussions about uncertainty, but that shouldn’t be conflated with irrefutable evidence of failure. The obviousness of it (like many engineering failures) was only apparent in hindsight. “Evidence, in retrospect, points to a long period of time, especially based on post-flight inspections when the joint design weakness was ‘sending a message’ and the true potential of this message was not perceived and reacted to.”[2] “Not perceived” isn’t compatible with “irrefutable evidence that it would fail”. [1] https://www.space.com/31732-space-shuttle-challenger-disaster-explained-infographic.html https://www.space.com/31732-space-shuttle-challenger-disaste... [2]https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRPT-99hrpt1016/pdf/GPO-CRPT-99hrpt1016.pdf https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRPT-99hrpt1016/pdf/...
- caycep 5y agoSomeone is going to suggest unplugging it and plugging it in again, i'm sure
- geoduck14 5y agoMe, earlier this week: Did that work... no. Well, what about... THIS... still no. 3 hours later... clear the cache?!? Aww crap
- ArcticCelt 5y agoThis youtube series of video, follow a group that restored an Apollo Guidance Computer that a collector basically pulled from the trash. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KSahAoOLdU&list=PL-_93BVApb59FWrLZfdlisi_x7-Ut_-w7 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KSahAoOLdU&list=PL-_93BVApb... My favorite part is when they needed the version of the software that was used for the moon landing but they only had the source code for a previous version (scanned from giant binder) and the hash value of the version of the landing. By a series of educated guesses, by reading memos and by analysis of the source code they modified the old code the exact way so it gave them the correct hash, confirming that they correctly and exactly recreated the original code. It's being a while and I go from memory, I might have some details wrong. See this video for this story. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JTa1RQxU04 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JTa1RQxU04
- loufe 5y agoI am halfway through the second season of For All Mankind, it's a series based on an accelerated (versus the decelerated) series of events around the time of the Apollo missions. I think you may enjoy it!