9 ms·

Engineering Pornography (2002)

235 points by wallflower 14y ago

pavel_lishin 14y ago
> The thumper sends mondo-amp pulses into one end of the cable. The electromotive force tends to cause physical displacement of the conductors which you can hear from the street level. That sounds amazing and terrifying, sort of like the engineering equivalent of the old soviet dentists' belief that they have to poke cavities and judge their location and severity by how badly the patient reacts.
- langseth 14y ago
  We had a power short at $work this summer, with MUCH smaller wiring. They brought in an Astro van filled will equipment to do the same fault finding. Standing above the fault, as the Xcel lineman told me to, I could feel the ground move. It was an interesting experience.
ajb 14y ago
"They learned the hard way that you simply don't reverse the pumps lest you get the Golden Bear [mineral oil] equivalent of water hammer". Ouch. It must have been 'fun' finding that out. Another example of extreme water hammer: http://www.davros.org/misc/ambridge.html http://www.davros.org/misc/ambridge.html
AYBABTME 14y ago
I think the title doesn't describe properly this great article. I'm afraid it might be turning away readers who would otherwise really enjoy the coolness of this read! The title can be read as "How to engineer pornography", at least that's how I read it at first. OP might want to edit it to remove any ambiguity.
- chimeracoder 14y ago
  > The title can be read as "How to engineer pornography", at least that's how I read it at first. OP might want to edit it to remove any ambiguity. I read an AMA on Reddit at one point from a guy who worked as a server engineer on some large porn website/network. The questions were mostly about engineering, but the answers were fascinating - when you think about it, porn networks have to face the same scaling issues as many startups, and they have some unique challenges (and also advantages) that other markets don't. I was secretly hoping this post would be something along those lines. Interesting nevertheless, but not what I was expecting!
  - AYBABTME 14y ago
    Same here, I thought it would be about load handling, or maybe something about tricks they might have used on scene. Nevertheless, I also think this article is great! But if I were at work, maybe I would think twice before opening a link that might be NSFW. Or I can picture some people might not be interested in anything porn related, for many reasons.
    - EliRivers 14y ago
      "I thought it would be about load handling" Hur hur hur.
- mhb 14y ago
  When it was originally submitted (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=193112 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=193112), it had the title How to repair a 230KV, 10 mile long coaxial power cable. But I suppose that that informative title would now be pedantically edited to the one you see here. As well, without the link-bait version it might only have blinked through the front page in 30 seconds.
  - AYBABTME 14y ago
    The last few hours have proven me wrong, the possibly-misleading title has kept the article on the front page so far. Interesting.
- specialist 14y ago
  True. Worried the OP might be NSFW, I scanned the HN comments first.
- MBCook 14y ago
  Actually that's exactly what I thought it was, and I avoided it all day. I figured it was something about getting the lighting and camera setups right, or figuring out what sells best. It wasn't until I saw it on the EngineeringPorn subreddit that I realized what it really was and read it. Now I'm glad I did. Something like "Engineering Porn: Fixing 230kV Underground Cables" would have done it.
e40 14y ago
I know I'll get downvoted for this, but I find jwz's site ridiculously hard to read because of the color scheme. It really hurts my eyes.
- Dylan16807 14y ago
  You don't need a voting disclaimer to talk about a color scheme, that just wastes words. What exactly hurts your eyes? Are you fine with light gray on black? I can sort of understand disliking the amount of green, but if it's just because of the black background then you probably having lighting issues in your setup.
  - benesch 14y ago
    Seconded. Neon green on black is very, very jarring to read. White on black causes strain for large amounts of text. (There's a reason no news sites use white on black.) Lowering the contrast is bad enough, but the green clashes with the black and is downright painful.
  - Firehed 14y ago
    It's insanely high-contrast with a relatively light (thin) typeface and light-on-dark. While I fear the idea of having that neon green as the background instead as I may start glowing, having a slightly heavier font or a not-so-extreme green would have been a lot easier to read. Even when I had a green-on-black terminal it wasn't a problem, I believe because the font weight was a bit heavier and physically deciphering the characters was less taxing.
  - hsmyers 14y ago
    Showing my age, but I worked for years in a dark room with a green screen terminal. I've long since made a habit of setting my terminals (regardless of OS) to exactly the same bright green on black. I do prefer the font bolded though. When I first started (rather shortly after--few years) CRT replacements became available for my favorite terminals. So if I wanted I could use either bright blue on black or bright red. Both surprisingly useful in darkened rooms!
- 14y ago
chubot 14y ago
Programmers occasionally have envy that civil engineering is "real engineering", e.g. civil engineers know how to build a bridge and deliver it on time. Whereas software engineers will come up with 1000 ways to build the bridge, 10 of which work, and take 10x longer to build it. This article seems like a good counterexample. Like most failures, this is a systems failure. Someone engineered the hell out of that cable. But they neglected to realize that it would be drawn through a steel pipe. "So, what went wrong? Varying load conditions in the three legs of the 3-phase circuit caused tremendously strong and dynamic magnetic field changes. The electromagnetic forces between the three conductors and the steel pipe (gack!) cause the conduit to wiggle around inside the pipe." The other lesson is that you shouldn't hyper-optimize locally, and instead design for maintainability. I'm not sure what they were thinking when laying a cable that requires experts to be flown in from the east coast to repair. The simplest mechanisms are the ones that are the most easily repaired. The entire article goes on in great length about how awe-inspiring the engineering of this cable is, whereas I just see a bunch of complexity that probably didn't need to be there. The 118 layers of paper tape, and the oil pumps, and so forth. Surely there was a simpler solution. I'm sure after this failure and the ones on the east coast, they are not still laying cables like this.
- mikeash 14y ago
  I don't know about this automatic rejection of complexity. It could very well be that, even accounting for the tough learning curve and the cost of repairs, it's still the cheapest way to transmit that much power in that context. Sometimes massive infrastructure requires massive repairs, but that doesn't automatically make it not cost-effective.
- pixl97 14y ago
  At the time the cable was installed (72ish?) 230kV was a very high voltage cable. The type of cable that now commonly carries that voltage underground is HV XLPE http://www.fujikura.com.sg/hv_xlpe.htm http://www.fujikura.com.sg/hv_xlpe.htm At the the maximum voltage over XLPE was 110kV. Sticking 2 of these cables side by side would have other interesting effects. http://www.emfs.info/Sources+of+EMFs/Underground/multiple.htm http://www.emfs.info/Sources+of+EMFs/Underground/multiple.ht... It appears oil and paper systems are still used, but I don't think they use the high pressure oil system like the one in the paper. http://www.hitachi-cable.com/about/publish/review/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2005/11/28/1_review02.pdf http://www.hitachi-cable.com/about/publish/review/__icsFiles...
ColinWright 14y ago
Fascinating to look back at the reactions from when I posted this 500 days ago. One person said: while this is a classic, my snark is thrashing against its bonds. I could have sworn it said 'news' up there. And another: SENSATIONAL HEADLINE ALERT!!! And that was it. No further comments to be had. Both those comments were downvoted, but even so, interesting that no one else commented, and very few voted for the submission. For reference, the headline I used was: Engineering pornography - underground power cables gone wrong ... which I felt was more informative. So on this submission, now even older, we have 16 comments (and counting) and 60 points (and counting). Has HN changed? I'm off to check some records ... (pause) A bit of hunting shows that this got at least one vote while still on the "newest" page, but it looks like it never hit the front page, which will part explain why it never got many comments or votes. Still, the tenor of the comments is interesting. I continue to learn.
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  So you are complaining that you didn't get the karma 500 days ago that wallflower got? Or are you just pondering the mysteries of stories getting picked up? I see it isn't the latter since in this comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4097127 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4097127 you indicate you've done research on that topic. So what are you saying?
  - ColinWright 14y ago
    So you are complaining that you didn't get the karma 500 days ago that wallflower got? Not at all. Karma is a proxy measure for something else, and since this submission proved "successful" by the karma measure, I'm happy to see that the submitter got the karma for it. Or are you just pondering the mysteries of stories getting picked up? In part, yes, exactly this, I see it isn't the latter since in this comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4097127 you indicate you've done research on that topic. I have, and continue to do so because I have, as yet, come to no definitive conclusions. The investigations continue, even if only in a sporadic fashion,as and when I have the time. So what are you saying? I'm saying that sometimes submissions fail to attract any attention, even if subsequent submissions achieve significant success. This is evidence that the current system is, by some measures, sub-optimal. I continue to investigate the dynamics (as best I can), and continue to work on something that I think will improve the situation. The dissonance between the comments there (even though downvoted) and the positive reaction here is also of interest. I thought I'd share that, hence my comment.
bashzor 14y ago
IT'S GREEN :| http://www.readability.com/articles/dcsyvhkh http://www.readability.com/articles/dcsyvhkh
- dbbolton 14y ago
  Anything other than #00ff00 on #000000 is apparently just not 1337 enough. It's more important than people actually being able to read the content on your site.
kiallmacinnes 14y ago
I have to reset my difficulty meter for engineering problems now. I know how that commenter feels!
scheff 14y ago
Am I the only person who was disappointed that this article was not about "Taking an engineering approach to pornography"? Wouldn't it be interesting to hear someone's lessons learned from using Lean Startup and A/B testing when entering the porn industry to discover best practices, instead of just using "Tried and True" methods? Is porn an industry ripe for disruption? I wonder if anyone has applied to YC with a pornography startup.
rootbear 14y ago
Wow, I remember reading that back when it happened. Great story of some amazing engineering.
angersock 14y ago
In case anybody is confused about the "paper tape", transformer paper is likely what they're referring to ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_insulation_paper http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_insulation_paper ). Having played with some back in school, it's this gnarly paper that is super stiff, near invulnerable (to hand attempts at tearing and cutting), and really really good at giving paper cuts. It's also somewhat fire retardant, if I remember correctly. So, it's not like the cable was wrapped in Christmas paper or something.
gvb 14y ago
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIkNY5xjy5k http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIkNY5xjy5k Youtube video of a 500KV substation breaker popping - one of the three legs did not quench properly. Impressive!
jason_adleberg 14y ago
spoiler: there is no actual pornography in this link. just sayin
shmerl 14y ago
> That's where the LN-2 comes in. An elegant solution if you ask me. It's quite a classic solution for subway construction and restoration in the deep areas. In certain conditions, when tunnels get flooded with quicksand, liquid nitrogen can be used to isolate them.
bitdiddle 14y ago
Love the symbolics.com address

235 points by wallflower 14y ago

> The thumper sends mondo-amp pulses into one end of the cable. The electromotive force tends to cause physical displacement of the conductors which you can hear from the street level. That sounds amazing and terrifying, sort of like the engineering equivalent of the old soviet dentists' belief that they have to poke cavities and judge their location and severity by how badly the patient reacts.

langseth 14y ago
We had a power short at $work this summer, with MUCH smaller wiring. They brought in an Astro van filled will equipment to do the same fault finding. Standing above the fault, as the Xcel lineman told me to, I could feel the ground move. It was an interesting experience.

ajb 14y ago

"They learned the hard way that you simply don't reverse the pumps lest you get the Golden Bear [mineral oil] equivalent of water hammer". Ouch. It must have been 'fun' finding that out. Another example of extreme water hammer: http://www.davros.org/misc/ambridge.html http://www.davros.org/misc/ambridge.html

AYBABTME 14y ago

I think the title doesn't describe properly this great article. I'm afraid it might be turning away readers who would otherwise really enjoy the coolness of this read! The title can be read as "How to engineer pornography", at least that's how I read it at first. OP might want to edit it to remove any ambiguity.

chimeracoder 14y ago
> The title can be read as "How to engineer pornography", at least that's how I read it at first. OP might want to edit it to remove any ambiguity. I read an AMA on Reddit at one point from a guy who worked as a server engineer on some large porn website/network. The questions were mostly about engineering, but the answers were fascinating - when you think about it, porn networks have to face the same scaling issues as many startups, and they have some unique challenges (and also advantages) that other markets don't. I was secretly hoping this post would be something along those lines. Interesting nevertheless, but not what I was expecting!
- AYBABTME 14y ago
  Same here, I thought it would be about load handling, or maybe something about tricks they might have used on scene. Nevertheless, I also think this article is great! But if I were at work, maybe I would think twice before opening a link that might be NSFW. Or I can picture some people might not be interested in anything porn related, for many reasons.
  - EliRivers 14y ago
    "I thought it would be about load handling" Hur hur hur.
mhb 14y ago
When it was originally submitted (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=193112 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=193112), it had the title How to repair a 230KV, 10 mile long coaxial power cable. But I suppose that that informative title would now be pedantically edited to the one you see here. As well, without the link-bait version it might only have blinked through the front page in 30 seconds.
- AYBABTME 14y ago
  The last few hours have proven me wrong, the possibly-misleading title has kept the article on the front page so far. Interesting.
specialist 14y ago
True. Worried the OP might be NSFW, I scanned the HN comments first.
MBCook 14y ago
Actually that's exactly what I thought it was, and I avoided it all day. I figured it was something about getting the lighting and camera setups right, or figuring out what sells best. It wasn't until I saw it on the EngineeringPorn subreddit that I realized what it really was and read it. Now I'm glad I did. Something like "Engineering Porn: Fixing 230kV Underground Cables" would have done it.

e40 14y ago

I know I'll get downvoted for this, but I find jwz's site ridiculously hard to read because of the color scheme. It really hurts my eyes.

Dylan16807 14y ago
You don't need a voting disclaimer to talk about a color scheme, that just wastes words. What exactly hurts your eyes? Are you fine with light gray on black? I can sort of understand disliking the amount of green, but if it's just because of the black background then you probably having lighting issues in your setup.
- benesch 14y ago
  Seconded. Neon green on black is very, very jarring to read. White on black causes strain for large amounts of text. (There's a reason no news sites use white on black.) Lowering the contrast is bad enough, but the green clashes with the black and is downright painful.
- Firehed 14y ago
  It's insanely high-contrast with a relatively light (thin) typeface and light-on-dark. While I fear the idea of having that neon green as the background instead as I may start glowing, having a slightly heavier font or a not-so-extreme green would have been a lot easier to read. Even when I had a green-on-black terminal it wasn't a problem, I believe because the font weight was a bit heavier and physically deciphering the characters was less taxing.
- hsmyers 14y ago
  Showing my age, but I worked for years in a dark room with a green screen terminal. I've long since made a habit of setting my terminals (regardless of OS) to exactly the same bright green on black. I do prefer the font bolded though. When I first started (rather shortly after--few years) CRT replacements became available for my favorite terminals. So if I wanted I could use either bright blue on black or bright red. Both surprisingly useful in darkened rooms!
14y ago

chubot 14y ago

Programmers occasionally have envy that civil engineering is "real engineering", e.g. civil engineers know how to build a bridge and deliver it on time. Whereas software engineers will come up with 1000 ways to build the bridge, 10 of which work, and take 10x longer to build it. This article seems like a good counterexample. Like most failures, this is a systems failure. Someone engineered the hell out of that cable. But they neglected to realize that it would be drawn through a steel pipe. "So, what went wrong? Varying load conditions in the three legs of the 3-phase circuit caused tremendously strong and dynamic magnetic field changes. The electromagnetic forces between the three conductors and the steel pipe (gack!) cause the conduit to wiggle around inside the pipe." The other lesson is that you shouldn't hyper-optimize locally, and instead design for maintainability. I'm not sure what they were thinking when laying a cable that requires experts to be flown in from the east coast to repair. The simplest mechanisms are the ones that are the most easily repaired. The entire article goes on in great length about how awe-inspiring the engineering of this cable is, whereas I just see a bunch of complexity that probably didn't need to be there. The 118 layers of paper tape, and the oil pumps, and so forth. Surely there was a simpler solution. I'm sure after this failure and the ones on the east coast, they are not still laying cables like this.

mikeash 14y ago
I don't know about this automatic rejection of complexity. It could very well be that, even accounting for the tough learning curve and the cost of repairs, it's still the cheapest way to transmit that much power in that context. Sometimes massive infrastructure requires massive repairs, but that doesn't automatically make it not cost-effective.
pixl97 14y ago
At the time the cable was installed (72ish?) 230kV was a very high voltage cable. The type of cable that now commonly carries that voltage underground is HV XLPE http://www.fujikura.com.sg/hv_xlpe.htm http://www.fujikura.com.sg/hv_xlpe.htm At the the maximum voltage over XLPE was 110kV. Sticking 2 of these cables side by side would have other interesting effects. http://www.emfs.info/Sources+of+EMFs/Underground/multiple.htm http://www.emfs.info/Sources+of+EMFs/Underground/multiple.ht... It appears oil and paper systems are still used, but I don't think they use the high pressure oil system like the one in the paper. http://www.hitachi-cable.com/about/publish/review/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2005/11/28/1_review02.pdf http://www.hitachi-cable.com/about/publish/review/__icsFiles...

ColinWright 14y ago

Fascinating to look back at the reactions from when I posted this 500 days ago. One person said: while this is a classic, my snark is thrashing against its bonds. I could have sworn it said 'news' up there. And another: SENSATIONAL HEADLINE ALERT!!! And that was it. No further comments to be had. Both those comments were downvoted, but even so, interesting that no one else commented, and very few voted for the submission. For reference, the headline I used was: Engineering pornography - underground power cables gone wrong ... which I felt was more informative. So on this submission, now even older, we have 16 comments (and counting) and 60 points (and counting). Has HN changed? I'm off to check some records ... (pause) A bit of hunting shows that this got at least one vote while still on the "newest" page, but it looks like it never hit the front page, which will part explain why it never got many comments or votes. Still, the tenor of the comments is interesting. I continue to learn.

ChuckMcM 14y ago
So you are complaining that you didn't get the karma 500 days ago that wallflower got? Or are you just pondering the mysteries of stories getting picked up? I see it isn't the latter since in this comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4097127 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4097127 you indicate you've done research on that topic. So what are you saying?
- ColinWright 14y ago
  So you are complaining that you didn't get the karma 500 days ago that wallflower got? Not at all. Karma is a proxy measure for something else, and since this submission proved "successful" by the karma measure, I'm happy to see that the submitter got the karma for it. Or are you just pondering the mysteries of stories getting picked up? In part, yes, exactly this, I see it isn't the latter since in this comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4097127 you indicate you've done research on that topic. I have, and continue to do so because I have, as yet, come to no definitive conclusions. The investigations continue, even if only in a sporadic fashion,as and when I have the time. So what are you saying? I'm saying that sometimes submissions fail to attract any attention, even if subsequent submissions achieve significant success. This is evidence that the current system is, by some measures, sub-optimal. I continue to investigate the dynamics (as best I can), and continue to work on something that I think will improve the situation. The dissonance between the comments there (even though downvoted) and the positive reaction here is also of interest. I thought I'd share that, hence my comment.

bashzor 14y ago

IT'S GREEN :| http://www.readability.com/articles/dcsyvhkh http://www.readability.com/articles/dcsyvhkh

dbbolton 14y ago
Anything other than #00ff00 on #000000 is apparently just not 1337 enough. It's more important than people actually being able to read the content on your site.

kiallmacinnes 14y ago

I have to reset my difficulty meter for engineering problems now. I know how that commenter feels!

scheff 14y ago

Am I the only person who was disappointed that this article was not about "Taking an engineering approach to pornography"? Wouldn't it be interesting to hear someone's lessons learned from using Lean Startup and A/B testing when entering the porn industry to discover best practices, instead of just using "Tried and True" methods? Is porn an industry ripe for disruption? I wonder if anyone has applied to YC with a pornography startup.

rootbear 14y ago

Wow, I remember reading that back when it happened. Great story of some amazing engineering.

angersock 14y ago

In case anybody is confused about the "paper tape", transformer paper is likely what they're referring to ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_insulation_paper http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_insulation_paper ). Having played with some back in school, it's this gnarly paper that is super stiff, near invulnerable (to hand attempts at tearing and cutting), and really really good at giving paper cuts. It's also somewhat fire retardant, if I remember correctly. So, it's not like the cable was wrapped in Christmas paper or something.

gvb 14y ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIkNY5xjy5k http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIkNY5xjy5k Youtube video of a 500KV substation breaker popping - one of the three legs did not quench properly. Impressive!

jason_adleberg 14y ago

spoiler: there is no actual pornography in this link. just sayin

shmerl 14y ago

> That's where the LN-2 comes in. An elegant solution if you ask me. It's quite a classic solution for subway construction and restoration in the deep areas. In certain conditions, when tunnels get flooded with quicksand, liquid nitrogen can be used to isolate them.

bitdiddle 14y ago

Love the symbolics.com address