Challenge HN: Keep lame April Fools' gags off the front page - <AUTHOR> (I'm going to rewrite this, because people have made some good points in the thread.)
Most April Fools' gags in tech are lame. Only the very best ones, such as those that show hackery ingenuity, deserve much attention on HN. I propose that we, or rather you, flag the others off the front page.
After plodding through them much of March 31 (where I am), I realized I was dreading the next 24 hours of having to read so many lame stories and decide which are real. Then I thought it might turn into a positive if I appealed to you all instead. This is a plea! You don't have to do it, but in my view it will help.
A word about humorlessness, since it's bound to come up. People who complain about HN's humorlessness have a point, but not because we're against humor. We like laughing as much as anyone. It's because empirically, a culture of humor means a flood of lame humor, and HN's goal is to optimize for signal/noise ratio. As with any optimization, there are inevitably tradeoffs. <comment><USER3> PS: for those deciding to flag this submission, please note that dang is HN's moderator (as announced by pg here[1]). The HN team could physically prevent such posts, but instead is asking the community.

[1] [http://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over- hack...](http://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over-hacker-news)

<comment><USER4> I think this is what bothers me. No disrespect meant to dang, but because of their position, it is difficult to figure out whether this is a plea or a mandate, which makes it problematic as people clearly aren't sure whether this is up for debate, or overrides the existing method we have of keeping bad things off of the front page in favour of moderator discretion (which I'm aware existed anyway, but more for posts that were clearly garbage/spam/trolls).

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a plea. But I wasn't asking for moderator discretion. Thousands of regular users flag things. Like this post!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My threshold for tech April Fools jokes: if it's clever AND required writing non-trivial amounts of code, it may be worthy of my attention.

I will absolutely flag anything close to "We're being acquired by [competitor]!!1!" or "Announcing [thing totally antithetical to everything we do]!" etc.

</comment><comment><USER4> I disagree in one way, but agree in another. It's one day in 365, it provides a little bit of relief.

But, of course, there are a lot of lame jokes. Just like there are a lot of lame news articles that could potentially be posted on the site but are not upvoted.

So why don't we optimise the SNR, and only upvote _good_ April Fools pranks?

I think that's a good compromise.

<comment><USER6> You've just described how HN works.

<comment><USER4> I know, right? :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sorry, I had to flag this. Today's front page was clean enough that you don't need this post (aside from Google's Pokemon master prank). We are _already_ optimizing for signal/noise ratio, and your post is just a noise in that regard.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Today" was hardly the bulk of April Fools' Day, and the front page was "clean enough" because people worked hard to keep it that way.

I've been keeping a close eye on this. What swayed me was how many more April Fools' posts were appearing on March 31 (where I am) than I previously remember.

I do appreciate that not everyone agrees, but I want to send a message about signal/noise ratio. That's HN's mantra. We can't have that and everything else as well; there are tradeoffs.

The objection that this and other meta posts I've been making are also noise is a good one, except that this is a special case while we go through a transitional period. I won't be making them forever.

I sure wish it were true that the community is already optimizing for signal/noise ratio, but it's not. We have a serious problem with that and we're going to try a lot of things to fix it.

<comment><USER4> Yes, but we have up and down voting of posts, which is inherently democratic - if we like stuff, we'll upvote it, and if it's a lame joke, we'll downvote it. And thus SNR is maintained. Why is there a problem here? Surely what you're kind of verging on, is telling us what we should and shouldn't enjoy?

<comment><USER8> Weighing in here as a random user ...

You have a valid question, and I've thought about this a lot. When you have a very large audience it's depressingly easy to have lots and lots of quick upvotes for something that's genuinely content-free. There are plenty of places on the interwebs where you can find amusing material, but it feels to me that there is a real danger of the intellectually challenging and enriching material being swamped as we "amuse ourselves to death."

I don't think this is a case of telling people what to enjoy, it's more a case of trying to keep the original flavor and culture. HN is certainly an unusual corner of the 'net, and I value it.

 _Added in edit: And you can 't actually downvote posts, you can only flag them. Unless I'm missing something, or possibly haven't hit the karma threshold yet. Which seems unlikely._

<comment><AUTHOR> That's exactly right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One thing to consider is that some of the April Fools' "jokes" are pretty awesome hacks in disguise, such as this year's "Headdit" with actually working head gesture recognition, etc.

So, I'd propose flagging lame pranks, but up-voting fun and inspiring hacks, seeing as how this is Hacker News after all.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have an old Russian poster that says: "I have my own opinion, but I disagree with it." I agree with your opinion more than mine and am going to rewrite the post accordingly.

The truth is that I just didn't think of this way of looking at it, and it's clearly better.

Other users (like tlrobinson) have made the same point in this thread. This comment is for them too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Respectfully disagree. The only ones that will be upvoted a lot will presumably be the funny ones, not the lame ones.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a thoughtful comment and a model of how to disagree on Hacker News. Thank you.

I wish you were right, but I'm afraid you have an overly rosy view of upvotes. For example, [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7506762](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7506762) shot to #1 in just a few minutes.

<comment><USER11> Speaking of moderation ideas, now that there is some new blood, here's another random one. I'm not sure it's any good, and it's kind of vague, but... how about if an article gets flagged enough, the upvoters are "named and shamed" in some (not _highly_ visible) way. It might provide a small incentive to not vote for lame stuff.

<comment><AUTHOR> It feels wrong to out people's votes, which are normally private. The objections I've been making to inappropriate comments are public only because the comments themselves are.

<comment><USER11> Fair enough. I wouldn't want my comment votes public, but I can't think of any stories where I would mind terribly. I could see reasonable people thinking otherwise, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Let the system optimise for signal/noise ratio, not just a blanket 'voluntary' ban of April Fools gags. Don't encourage people to follow your personal opinion of 'dreading' this day, it's an abuse of your position to try to persuade people that way. You're a moderator, please remain as objective as possible.

The tech world is having a day of fun, people interested in tech have to make the personal decision of whether or not they like each individual gag. If the masses approve then it has a place on a tech news feed. If you don't like it, feel free to make your opinion heard, just don't ask others to follow your opinion thoughtlessly.

<comment><AUTHOR> _Let the system optimise for signal /noise ratio_

I know the system pretty well. The trouble is that, left to its own devices, it doesn't optimize for signal/noise ratio. That's why we're appealing to the community to do so more consciously. The current post was an experiment in that. We're going to do a lot of such experiments until we see results.

HN isn't the whole of the tech world, nor has it ever been simply a vote aggregator. There are other factors, the most important of which is culture. HN's culture has been diluting, and we're going to address that.

It's true that that's opinionated. The only thing you'll get without an opinionated moderator is drift. If HN drifts, it won't be to an interesting place but a mediocre one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I agree completely with you. I am from a country that does not "celebrate" April Fool's day. Today it is a really bad day for my usual internet news pages because they are infested with lame joke attempts.

</comment><comment><USER14> >April Fools' gags in tech have grown stale

Or you have gotten older.

<comment><USER15> What's the average age here? I feel like I'm in a no fun allowed zone.

<comment><USER11> I've had jokes upvoted here. The ingredients, as far as I can tell, were that they were original, topical, and required a bit of thought about the subject. In other words, the opposite of memes, or generic jokes that are probably retellings from somewhere else. Here's one from yesterday:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7500889](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7500889)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just don't upvote lame ones. There's a lot of lame news everyday too. You don't have to flag all news.

<comment><AUTHOR> Based on experience I am sure that's not enough, or I wouldn't have made the appeal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think it has less to do with not having humour/fun, but more to do with wasting our time sifting through what is real and what is not.

HN is the place where you discuss things like "Whatsapp bought for $19 BILLION". So by nature, some of the headlines we get on here are a little hard to believe in the first place... throw in April Fools jokes, then we have people questioning if they are reading a real PR piece, or a "joke".

<comment><USER4> I actually think that makes things interesting - when it's difficult to discern between reality and parody, it makes you think about the world we live in.

<comment><USER17> Well, why restrict it to one day a year? We should be thinking about the world we live in more often than that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Let's just collect them in one thread.

</comment><comment><USER19> How about setting the bar for posting/upvoting at "Actually fooled me".

The explicit guideline would be:

\- Post/upvote online if you think it's legit after reading the content. It's OK to upvote even if you realize it's fake later (e.g. from comments) - <USER2> is considered timeshifted voting not a violation of the guideline.

\- Don't flag/downvote on the sole basis believing it's a joke. Of course flag/downvote as normal for any other reason, e.g. it sucks.

\- No addition restrictions on commenting, in particular mocking the OP is perfectly OK [edit: so long you abide by the normal community guidelines of civility etc]

</comment><comment><USER20> Quite useless post in my opinion. Since when are we told what to upvote and what to flag? Do we get a "please flag Microsoft posts" when there's the next big Microsoft event (example)?

If you can't handle a few bad jokes and lame stories, then stay of the news for a day and come back the next one, instead of getting emotional about it...

And there's no need to justify "guys" as "gender-inclusive". It's already known as such.

Can we now get back to the Hacker News without rules on what we have or don't have to do?

<comment><AUTHOR> This site has a culture. That culture is to focus on intellectual curiosity. It doesn't mean other things aren't also good; I personally love frivolous humor. But HN can't be all things. It needs a focus, and optimizing for one thing means trading away others, as in any engineering or design problem. The real agenda behind my post is that we want to get the community participating more in maintaining this culture. It's an experiment and it may not work, but I hope it does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I disagree, because I think the 1st of April has turned into a challenge towards our own perception of news. While it is most often easy to detect an April's fool, it is hard to rule out false positives. So many news stories are so strange, so meaningless or so predictable that they might qualify as a nonsense joke.

One day a year, we are asking ourselves for each and every article we read: Is this story too odd to be true?

I think that's a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER22> _(That 's a gender-inclusive "you guys".)_

Or you could just use gender-neutral language in the first place, if you're concerned about being inclusive. "you folks", "my colleagues", even just "you". There's a host of alternatives. It scans weirdly that you highlight that the phrase might be taken the wrong way, but then choose to explain it rather than alter it.

<comment><USER23> I sent the following mail to Dan, too, but for others who might be confused at why people take offense to an attempt at inclusiveness:

\---

I'm kind of surprised to see you explicitly call attention to your usage of "you guys" in your post. I'd originally thought that I at least preferred it to leaving "you guys" there unannounced ... but given a little more thinking, I suspect it's actually _worse_. The subtext that you've provided there, to people who do not identify as "guys", is 'I know you're there, and I know that these words make some of you uneasy, but don't worry, I didn't mean to offend you, I just really really wanted to use these words anyway; I think they're worth the risk of offending you'.

I know what you were trying to get at -- you want to make Hacker News a better place for /everyone/. (And thanks for that!) I'm sure you didn't intend that meaning to non-guys, and I totally understand how that came about. But, given that, I think that you might want to edit those words. Can I recommend the usage of "you all", or if you want to be more colloquial, "you folks"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Point taken. I rewrote the phrase to "you all" before I saw this, so hopefully I'm getting the hang of it.

<comment><USER23> Thanks! Much appreciated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm very glad for this. The only problem I can foresee is knowing what is/isn't an April Fools' joke. If I remember correctly, Gmail looked like it might be an April Fools' joke when it was first announced on April 1. The amount of storage on offer was so much higher than other webmail services that it seemed almost too good to be true.

(Gmail is turning 10 today!)

</comment><comment><USER25> I personally am tired of the April Fools stuff too but I have enough faith in the HN community/mechanism to trust that only those things deemed worth it will make the front page. I'm not against humour either, so can't/won't object if good/funny/clever April Fools links get posted.

tl;dr: special measures not required, IMHO.

<comment><AUTHOR> The front page has never solely been the product of the community. It has always been curated, if largely unobtrusively. Part of my aim here is to appeal to the community to participate more in that. It's not just a question of individual preference (upvote) but of the culture of the site and the intellectual curiosity we're trying to optimize for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Dude, April first is 'national do something besides read news' day. That's why they post all those false stories. It's there for a reason. Go, get some work done. Or go outside. Get laid. go for a walk.

April first is a day to sit back and contemplate something besides your echo- chamber. Step outside of your filter bubble!

<comment><USER27> "Contemplate something besides your echo-chamber. Step outside of your filter bubble!" he said, screaming into a vortex.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm actually really glad about this. For one, the Hiring Thread goes up today, and if you want to see all the madness, you've got Twitter, TechCrunch, and Reddit to supply you.

About the only thing I'll miss, is for the more impressive ones, technical explanations. But beyond that, it's nice to have a place to breathe.

<comment><USER22> I don't hang out on Twitter, TechCrunch, or Reddit. There is one day a year for such light-hearted japes... but apparently that's too many.

I see HN as a community, not a trove of tech and business documentation/explanations. The proper place for communal documentation is a wiki, not a forum. I mean, it's _one day_ that the entire Anglo culture knows about, not just techies. You can gird your loins for one day, and have weeks in preparation for it.

Personally, I can do without the obituaries when someone famous dies. The single-to-noise ratio is so incredibly low - there's a small amount of discussion of what the person did (repeated so many times), and a whole lot of 'oh, sad to see they died'. But hey, if I wait, the whole thing will blow over in a day or two, no need to complain, nor pre-emptively get defensive about being the 'obituary police'. I mean, after all, when someone famous in tech dies, you've got Twitter, TechCrunch, and Reddit to supply you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> We're not all weathered by many decades of lame April Fools! Think of the younger geeks who may be drawn into the community and discussion by particularly good tech gags :)

I have faith in the voting system that all but the good'uns will be filtered out anyway. I respectfully suggest that this post is noise itself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Respectful suggestion respectfully received :)

Your faith in the voting system is misplaced, I'm afraid. Upvotes alone don't keep HN HN.

But I've posted what feels like ten zillion comments in this thread, not to mention plastering the whole site with them lately. I'm going to stop here.

</comment></comment><comment> slipstream- Unfortunately, I've already seen at least one on the front page.

So... challenge failed before it even started <3

</comment><comment><USER30> Down with fun!

</comment><comment><USER31> Thanks, I opened 'zite' up on my tablet and it was mainly really uninspired/mundane/transparent/poorly executed attempts at humor and I was quite put off by it. Be glad for that crap not to surface here.

</comment><comment><USER32> This is a target rich environment, like the kind of Warsaw Pact through Fulda Gap scenario which convinced NATO putting TOW missile launchers on absolutely every vehicle they had, and atomic landmines, would be a good idea.

Good hunting!

</comment><comment><USER33> I disagree at needing moderation around this. The community can moderate this one. I know we can't downvote stories, only comments, but I think the better content will win out if there is actually anything.

</comment><comment><USER6> Why the hate? It's become the new cool to despise April's fool?

I admire companies that make up pranks. I really wish the megacorp I work for would have the guts to break the monotony once a year too.

</comment><comment><USER34> Thank you for making this day less insufferable for me.

</comment><comment><USER35> You're supposed to add "This is not Reddit." That is the canonical response when anything less than serious is posted.

</comment><comment><USER36> You correctly picked up how "you guys" could be read as non-gender inclusive (and I speak an English dialect where it is gender inclusive), but you then used "lame" which is a mild insult against people who are physically disabled. Maybe choose a better word? I find insults based around poo to be better :)

<comment><USER37> With respect, if you go looking for inadvertent use of wide-meaning colloquialisms that cause minor offence to the sensitive, then you will find them.

<comment><USER36> To take this story more off topic, I think it's important to look at history. There are phrases now that used to be "wide-meaning colloquialisms" but now viewed as unprofessional, and used to be dismissed as "inadvertant(ly)" causing "offence" to a 'tiny sensitive minority'. (e.g. calling women "baby"). That doesn't mean we shouldn't look at our words today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> i, for one, love the humorlessness. it's a haven from the lamers at Reddit.</comment>


Intel Shuts Down Lustre File System Business - <AUTHOR> https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/04/20/intel-shuts-lustre-file-system-business/ <comment><USER2> Lustre is a pure-bread racehorse. It is not something the general masses should ever take a ride on; or even get up close and personal with. It will bite you; kick you; piss on you; crap on you; stomp on you; and generally try to kill you. It is cranky. It is not user friendly. It doesn't play nice with others.

But if you do know how to ride it; you have track to ride it on; and it decides to let you ride; you are in for a real treat. It is a rush that can't be beat. Even though after that ride your body will ache from the beating it's been given.

In the right workloads Lustre can't be beat. I've seen it completely transform large HPC clusters from dogs to kentucky derby winners. But as mentioned by many it is a complex beast that needs the right people; right hardware; and right workloads to make it run.

We used it for many years for large geospatial big data workloads. Huge images to many 1000's of HPC nodes. Worked great. But it was highly sensitive to the technical staff running it; and ultimately it became too "cranky" to use in production mode without Gandalf and his wizard army to keep it from eating itself.

So we now run on NFS over IB and happily give up some performance for 24*365 uptime.

<comment><USER3> > pure-bread

OT: I think you meant pure-bred. :) Reminds me of this section from Orwell's «Politics and the English Language»:

> Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning > without those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe > the line is sometimes written as tow the line. Another example is the hammer > and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the > worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, > never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying > would avoid perverting the original phrase.

<comment><USER4> It's not uncommon to see anvils with their horns broken off from too much hammering.

<comment><USER5> Is it possible multiple hammers were involved?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> ironic to see comments here criticizing Lustre, from people who don't seem to understand it at all.

Lustre is for large HPC clusters. It's not for your desktop; it's not for your video editing suite. It is the only way to provide a filesystem that scales to support, for instance, a compute job of 100k ranks, all writing checkpoints and snapshots periodically. No, Hadoop doesn't do it. Ceph is for performance- and-scaling-insensitive cloud installs.

Lustre is for when you expect to saturage 100 100Gb IB links to storage. it works remarkably well for its use case (though even on HPC clusters, MDS performance can be a problem).

<comment><USER7> Actually Lustre isn't the only game in town for this. BeeGFS ([http://beegfs.com](http://beegfs.com)) does a very good job at this as well, has better small to large scaling, understandable by mere-mortal error messages, doesn't require a specific (ancient) kernel or distro for the server ...

So does GPFS ... er ... Spectrum Scale by IBM.

There are a few others that fit in this, but Lustre is not alone here.

<comment><USER8> To my knowledge GPFS is IBM only.

<comment><USER9> It's an IBM commercial product, if that's what you mean by "IBM only". You can install it on any hardware though, we run it on a combination of SuperMicro, Dell, and DDN currently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This entire space is littered with hard to use and/or flawed products. It's extremely difficult to get right. And even things like HDFS, which redefine the problem into something much much more manageable and with better semantics for distributed computing, have had their own issues.

Take, for example, my favorite storage system Ceph. As I understand it was originally going to be CephFS, with multiple metadata servers and lots of distributed POSIX goodness. However, in the 10+ years its been in development, the parts that have gotten tons of traction and have widespread use are seemingly one-off side projects from the underlying storage system: object storage and the RBD block device interfaces. Only in the past 12 months is CephFS becoming production ready. But only with a single metadata server, and the multiple metadata servers are still being debugged.

With Ceph, some of these timing issues are that the market for object store and network-based block devices are dwarf the market for distributed POSIX. But I bring it up to point out that distributed POSIX is also just a really really hard problem, with limited use cases. It's super convenient for getting an existing Unix executable to run on lots of machines at once. But that convenience may not be worth the challenges it imposes on the infrastructure.

<comment><USER11> "This entire space is littered with hard to use and/or flawed products."

None of the internet facing services actually need a strongly consistent POSIX filesystem that scales across multiple datacenters and a huge chunk of them won't put up with corresponding latencies of something like that for mere convinience. So the products are not really flawed, they just don't need to do those things.

<comment><USER12> this is right. posix for posix sake shouldn't really be relevant anymore. look at the success of write-once s3. posix semantics were designed to address issues of concurrent access to the same bytes.

also, the only standard distributed protocol for posix, nfs, has always had a lot of design and implementation issues. v4 is complex and tries to address some of the consistency issues, but I don't know how successful it is in practice given the limited usage.

treating blobs as immutable addressable objects and using other systems for coordination avoids a lot of the pain with caching, consistency, metadata performance, etc. you can layer those things...its a good cut for large scale distributed systems

<comment><USER13> Well, NFS isn't really cache coherent, and hence not POSIX compliant. Lustre is, but pays for it with an amazingly complicated architecture.

I have (somewhat esoteric corner cases, but still) benchmarks that will cause failures within seconds when run against NFS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Intel seems to be cleaning its house from a number of long ongoing efforts. The most high profile one was the IDF, then OpenStack and this one here fits the pattern as well. Looks like at the beginning of the year they did some hard thinking where the company should be heading and decided to change direction. And it looks like they mean it.

The real question however is not where Intel does not see its business today but where it sees its future business.

<comment><USER15> They've also spanoff Intel Security back into McAffee as a separate company which Intel only has a stake in.

Intel seems to be going back to being a hardware only company.

<comment><USER16> As a counter-example, they bought back Itseez which had spun off to develop OpenCV.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A lot of commenters here are treating this announcement like it is the end of Lustre. It is not. Lustre has a LONG history and a lot of deployments. A partial history:

1999: Lustre is started as a research project at Carnegie Mellon University 2001: Cluster File Systems, Inc. founded to commercialize Lustre 2007: Sun acquires Cluster File Systems 2010: Oracle buys Sun Microsystems, acquires Lustre assets 2010: Eric Barton leaves Oracle and founds Whamcloud, continues Lustre dev there 2012: Intel buys Whamcloud for its Lustre assets 2013: Oracle sells Lustre-related assets to Xyratex 2013: Intel tries to extend Lustre to Hadoop use-cases 2014: Seagate buys Xyratex 2017: Intel discontinues its Lustre Filesystem business

I seem to remember IBM and HP being involved at some stage, but I'm having trouble finding it online now.

The only serious open-source competitors to Lustre are Ceph and glusterfs. But Ceph is too unstable, and glusterfs 3.0 is based off of distributed hash tables and so is not strongly consistent.

<comment><USER9> Whatever happened to parallel NFS/pNFS? I know Panasas basically uses this + some of their own special sauce, but hasn't been clear to me if there is an open source implementation of pNFS that could approximate performance of Panasas on the right non-proprietary hardware.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> IBM operates an internal company-wide storage system called GSA or Global Storage Architecture, which is GPFS on the servers, with various and sundry methods of access through automounted NFS, Samba, and a basic web interface. I wonder if such a system could be constructed with Lustre, one that wouldn't require a Lustre wizard with a Unix beard to keep it happy.

</comment><comment><USER19> We used Lustre, pNFS and GPFS at Stanford on HPC gear (DDN, Panasas and some enterprise COTS). Luster has a lot of moving parts and config. Most folks tend to use Puppet/Chef and/or Rocks distro to deploy clusters in a somewhat sane manner. (Sometimes AFS too but not much.)

These days, Ceph/Gluster might work, but Lustre's proven.

</comment><comment><USER20> It's been amusing to see all the apologia and simple ass-covering following this.

Lustre is a monstrosity - badly designed, poorly implemented, very hard to configure and keep running or even get adequate performance under other than a single limited use case.

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

<comment><AUTHOR> > or even get adequate performance under other than a single limited use case.

Hmm?

From the article: " In the core HPC market, Lustre has 75 of the Top 100 systems on the Top 500 rankings, and is used on nine of the top ten systems."

That is a strong argument for it being performant. That 'single limited use case' you mention is... high performance computing.

<comment><USER20> That's an artifact of the limited choices available. Plus the core HPC market is both notoriously inbred and tolerant of low system reliability and high delicacy that the enterprise wouldn't let in the door.

And no, "single limited use case" I mean, is a relatively small number of very large files that need to be sequentially streamed out/in as fast as possible. That's a small subset of HPC.

GPFS is the gold standard but it's expensive.

Lustre is more a byproduct of the HPC vendors trying to get more margin by using open source. They've drunk from the poisoned chalice in that the amount of time, money and effort required to get Lustre to acceptability (limited as that may be) has been far more than GPFS license/support cost. Even from the brain-eating zombie that is today's IBM.

<comment><USER21> > GPFS is the gold standard but it's expensive.

Confirming! And going on a small tangent (ha!).

Our previous configuration was Lustre and XFS/NFS; the former was the scratch file system for HPC applications and the latter for home directories and what not.

Lustre was definitely a beast (in a good sense), but we'd occasionally get bit by a work load high in metadata operations - which would bring Lustre to its knees due to latency.

XFS/NFS was great for its purpose (no HPC workloads), but we'd also get bit by a user or users reading seemingly tiny, innocuous files (inadvertently in parallel) which would cause load averages to spike; surprisingly the latency wasn't as bad as the Lustre workload mentioned above.

Not too drink the GPFS kool aid here, but it's definitely solved both problems above. It has its issues, but definitely handles the common I/O patterns seen on our cluster.

<comment><USER20> If I walked you through the Lustre metadata state machine you wouldn't be surprised by Lustre latency any longer. It's a veritable Rube Goldberg machine without the amusement.

<comment><USER21> I believe it.

At least the Lustre developers (pre-Intel) had the foresight to enable extremely good debugging - you could simply enable a few procfs settings and easily find the offenders.

It's still amusing to me however, that the biggest offenders of Lustre slow- downs were single core processes. I'd check the RPC counts per node, find the violator, and then check per PID statistics; it was always (95%+) a single core application performing thousands of calls.

We never did experiment with the 2.x branch of the software. I recall one of our co-workers stating that even the developers did not believe the dual MDS set-up was production ready at that time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> openvstorage and sheepdog probably don't come close to the scale of ceph or lustre?

</comment><comment><USER23> So now they lack lustre?

I'll get my coat.</comment>


Inside Apple's new Xcode 4 development tool - <AUTHOR> http://www.appleinsider.com/print/10/06/19/inside_apples_new_xcode_4_development_tool.html

<comment><USER2> New debugger to be open sourced. That's good news for IDE/debugger integration. One presumes it will present a nice API for IDEs to use.[1]

 _Also within Xcode 4 is an entirely new debugger system Apple designed for performance and efficiency, resulting in faster finding and fixing of bugs. The new debugger is modeled after LLVM's modular architecture, and is therefore named LLDB. Apple is also said to be releasing its internal LLDB project as open source, and will make it available to third parties alongside the open source LLVM compiler._

[1] The FSF camp coders have historically omitted APIs to prevent closed source people from integrating their GPL'd projects or implementing closed source extensions. That serves their goals, but is a PITA if you really want to programmatically control something or extend it without maintaining patches through version changes. gcc's adherence to this has brought us the more liberally licensed LLVM, and now gdb has brought us LLDB, I will hope it is as good as LLVM.

</comment><comment><USER3> Apple's IDE user interface design continues to take inspiration from the best -- Microsoft Visual Studio. And it's all good.

<comment><USER4> I guess that's good. Tried Xcode 3. Seriously, horrid mess. Confusing. Documentation that was wrong. Not just somewhat wrong, but wrong, can't compile, can't even do what the documentation say. Confusing madness. A dozen windows open from multiple programs.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I haven't gotten a chance to try my stuff under 4 yet (blol Apple changing how the original window is generated and breaking apps), but an IDE where I can not have 47 windows open at the end of a dev session? finally!

XCode is finally catching up to eclipse... hopefully soon I'll be able to program in it without feeling like I'm only a quarter as productive as I need to be...

<comment><USER6> Xcode already has a single-window mode, if you don't want to work with multiple windows. You'll also want to learn about the Close All Windows command (Command+Option+W), which closes all windows of the same kind. You can use it to close all source windows, all debugger windows, etc. The same command works in most OS X apps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The looks pretty good, especially that Interface Builder is now included in Xcode, and that it also supports Git for version control.

Hopefully it will reach a stable state soon.

<comment><USER4> I can't help but wonder why they split the UI builder. Seems like it would make more sense to keep work area and toolkit in the same general area.

<comment><USER8> In the old days (starting pre-Apple), you could build a pretty good UI and test it without opening up Project Builder (older version of Xcode). It was actually quite nice to have it as a separate program.

<comment><USER9> Yeah. IB first shipped in, what, 1988? A time when interface builders were sufficiently rare that it didn't seem generic to name the product Interface Builder.

<comment><USER6> Originally, IB _was_ the IDE, but you edited your code using TextEdit (which had a programmer's mode) or Emacs or VI. Later (1995?) they added Project Builder as a more traditional IDE (class and method browsing, code completion, integrated debugger, etc.)

Project Builder had 3 windows: a single window for managing the project and editing source code, one window for the debugger, and one window for compilation. This is the "Default" layout in XCode. XCode also has "Condensed" layout, in which the project and source code windows are separate, and "All- In-One" layout, in which project, source, debug, and build modes are contained within a single window.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you have a developer account, you can watch the WWDC videos introducing Xcode 4 for yourself. Honestly, these videos consistently impressed me far more than the iPhone 4 keynote.

</comment><comment><USER11> I really wish it retains the multi-windows paradigm. I like to use vim instead of the built-in editor and the current arrangement is good for that. If they start to bundle tools like IB alongside the editor in a single window, I wonder if using an external editor is still as easy.

<comment><USER12> Support for external editors is removed in Xcode 4.

<comment><USER13> I don't understand this. Apple has thousands of programmers--aren't _some_ of them addicted to Vim keybindings or something?

<comment><USER14> I'm sure the xcodebuild command line tool is still around. I'll bet that all of the vi-using developers who _work_ on Xcode are still just using that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Sounds like some positive steps forward.

I'm not a fan of the whole GUI IDE approach though, compared to the vi/CLI/REPL/scripts approach/ecosystem. I prefer minimalism, simplicity, having as little cognitive structure/clutter on screen at once as possible, or in config files, with high automatability and minimum configuration complexity and boilerplate.

For me, XCode failed in those areas. If you do iPhone development with XCode, for example, and IIRC, I once counted that there are approximately 8 different names or identities that are tracked for any given iPhone app. There were complex, counter-intuitive and under-documented ways in which they related to each other and were used. And if any were used wrong or collided somewhere, blammo. Then you had the multi-dimensional/multi-overidable/varying-opacity configuration system, and the iPhone app submission process/non-process, and it was a recipe for pain and grief.

I will still use XCode and do iPhone development for money. But only for money. Not for any personal projects where I have acceptable alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER16> Developers were given a preview of Xcode 4 at WWDC. Based on feedback from people who broke NDA, at this moment it is apparently quite buggy and unstable.

Obviously that will improve before Xcode 4 is released.

<comment><USER17> Well, the buggy / unstable is visible in the WWDC videos, which are available for free (to developers). It's no great surprise that someone "leaked" something so widely available.

It's a preview release, I still have high hopes, it looks like they've improved a number of things pretty significantly. And here's hoping for an extension API of some sort!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is this available to iPhone Dev Program members yet? I'd love to try it, but it seems as though it's only available to WWDC attendees from what I can see.

</comment><comment><USER19> Looks to me like a Visual Studio 2002 clone :D

<comment><USER15> And VS started as a "me too" clone of the Borland IDE, etc. :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This single-window design might be hard to run it on 13 inch Macbooks given their limited screen.

<comment><USER21> In Xcode 3 using a single window workflow you can hide the sidebar and the top area with a shortcut. Also you can navigate from debug to editing with a shortcut. Those two things make hacking on a smallish laptop screen bearable.

I set the shortcut to be

edit mode : cmd + 1

Debugmode : cmd + 2</comment></comment>


50 Million Myspace Profiles Now Belong to an Ad Targeting Firm - <AUTHOR> http://www.betabeat.com/2011/06/29/myspace-sold-ad-targeting-specific-media/

<comment><USER2> This is a complete non-story. Every Facebook profile is owned by an ad firm. Every Gmail account is owned by an ad firm. Every + account is owned by an ad firm. Every Yahoo Mail account is owned by a bit of an ad firm - ditto for Live. Generally, every free service is selling you and your time. This really shouldn't be surprising.

<comment><USER3> That is completely wrong.

People who buy ads against Facebook and Google profiles don't get to see specific info about the users they are targeting.

In this case the firm doing the targeting is also the firm that can see all the profile data.

<comment><USER4> > That is completely wrong.

I agree with you but my first reading of the OP lead me to believe that she/he meant that Google and Facebook are advertising firms.

<comment><USER5> Google is an advertising firm.

Admittedly, not as annoying as all the rest, but still, their business is advertising.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Now they'll know what we were into 5 years ago!

</comment><comment><USER7> The headline seems a bit alarmist to me. Is Facebook itself not essentially also an ad targeting firm with millions of profiles?

<comment><USER3> Facebook sells ads against anonymous user demographics. Specific Media now owns the actual profiles, with everything from sexual orientation to medical history they may contain.

<comment><USER8> Who puts their medical history on Myspace?

<comment><USER3> I'm sure lots of people shared details of illness, pregnancy, drug abuse and other personal info that would fall under the rubric of medical data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Out of 50 million profiles...how many are active? How many haven't logged in in the last 12 months? How many are bots? I was under the impression that Myspace is used about as much as Geocities these days.

</comment><comment><USER10> Did anyone really expect them NOT to sell this data for ad purposes?

Services like Google, Myspace and facebook are free. Don't kid yourself, they are doing this for money. If you pay - demand privacy. If it's free - come on, you did put all the personal data voluntarily, didn't you?

All they use is statistical data. Be fair - no one really cares about your individual private data, unless you're rich and/or famous. But then you will be much more cautious about sharing personal data on the web. You will, won't you?

<comment><USER11> If you're not paying for it, you're the product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I must say this is an extremely good news headline which by itself completely refocusses my understanding of this acquisition.

<comment><USER13> for less than a buck per profile. Sounds like a hella good deal.

<comment><USER14> It's so good it's hilarious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> That is really interesting thinking! Take a look at how everybody thinks about facebook selling some user data or google following you everywhere you are and everything you do. This post opens up a totally new argument for why this companys should not have so much power over your privacy. Maybe they are really good companies, really never doing anything evil.

But maybe someday they get sold and actually nobody knows what happens then. There is probably no variable for moral and ethics in the function of selling your company and the data you acquired over your users. It's like opening a completely new dimension to think about the problem of privacy, at least to me. Thanks for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER16> So, Google and Facebook are basically ad targeting firms.

</comment><comment><USER17> It's a very interesting/strategic acquisition, but I doubt that anything good can come out of it for the user. I find it unlikely that this media company will try to improve the MySpace experience, instead they will likely focus on monetizing and ad-targeting.</comment>


Ask HN: HN-style community sites for advertising/marketing and biz dev? - <AUTHOR>

I've found the Hacker News community really helpful in a lot of ways and am often asking aloud "I wonder if there is a site like this for x community to congregate in".
At the moment I am specifically looking for something in the advertising industry but I have also been looking for something for up and coming film/tv writers and producers.
Any help much appreciated! <comment><USER2> <http://www.undrln.com/> Don't frequent it but just new it existed

<comment><USER2> Should note it is very new too I believe</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Will Hacker News Get An Official "Show HN" Section? - <AUTHOR> I've just recently joined Hacker News and I think it is a great community, however there is one flaw. While browsing through the "Ask HN" section, I find nearing half of the entries to be "Show HN". I think there are so many people who are now "showing" things to HN, it deserves its own section up top. Does anyone else share this opinion? <comment><USER2> Yep, it definitely will! This has been on our list for a long time and I'm hopeful we'll get to it soon.

I'm going to bury this thread now. Questions like this are better sent to firstname.lastname@example.com.

</comment><comment><USER3> According to _dang_ , the short answer is _Yes_. This is dang's response to a similar question, approximately 23 days ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7739559](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7739559)

In the same thread, I wrote up some "in the mean-time" search examples that can help surface "Show HN" submissions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7738243](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7738243)

</comment><comment><USER4> The root of the problem is that with the current setup, theres a huge 'luck factor' into whether or not your Show HN post most makes it off of 'New' and onto the first page. Its often 1 or 2 votes that can mean the difference between a post reaching the front page where it can then go on to recieve double/triple digit upvotes, versus remaining on 'New' and only getting 2-3 votes (in which case someone searching 'Show HN' thinks to themself 'well that post must not be very good, since it has so few votes'.

Of course the same could be said about news articles, however people dont spend hundreds of hours writing a news article (in fact it's rarely even the poster's work at all). While it would certainly be unwise to rely on a Show HN post as the sole means to launch your project, it certainly one of the top 5 traffic generators when you are just getting off the ground, and it sucks when your thread falls into obscurity because you didnt get that one extra vote to move you off of 'New' onto the first page.

<comment><USER5> That's why the "smart" thing for someone to do is to game the system, either through ring voting, asking friends to upvote on twitter. I can't blame them, thigh it's technically a bit borderline. I guess it's more legit for show hn than blogspam though.

<comment><USER6> That is why HN has a voting ring detector. :p

<comment><USER5> I really think that if you have a group of friends who are regular participants of HN, the ringvoting detector doesnt come into play. (not that I've tried)

But maybe it's "okay" if the people are actually regulars? Hard to say since I'm not a mod here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would love that. I've been working on my startup for over two years, and my "Show HN" post last week didn't get a single upvote. I was really disappointed. I think the Show HN section would provide more visibility.

<comment><USER8> Don't take this the wrong way but I think I understand why :).

Don't get me wrong I am sure you spend a lot of work on your startup but the question I would ask myself is. Did you do a good job with how you market it. In other words did you actually create a product for me to buy?

Your claim:

 _" Easy predictive modeling in minutes Answer the questions that matter most to your business:"_

is kind of vague and your examples

 _" What will sell best?"

"How much will it pay?"_

Etc. simply sounds too good to be true.

Furthermore your visual style works against your claim. Using old b&w pictures confuses however visits the site.

You then follow up with an excel like sheet which means nothing.

So in other words people have no idea what you are actually doing. I don't get a sense of what this product is. Only vague generic claims.

So I would probably spend some more time on making the site more about how your product is solving predictive analysis (whats your claim to fame compared to others using those terms) and re-design the visual side of things (I rarely say this but in your situation it really do need to look quite different)

<comment><USER7> Thanks for taking the time to give me some feedback. I'll redo the landing page to make my value proposition much clearer. And I'll get rid of my retro pictures, even though I do kind of like them.

In regards to the OP, that's just the kind of feedback I was hoping to get from my Show HN post. I think I only had 3-4 arrivals from that page before it dropped of the "New" page into oblivion. Maybe I was just unlucky.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This thread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363)

is for _feature requests_. There is a link to it at the bottom of most pages on HN.

</comment><comment><USER10> I personally like the non-forced feel of how it works now, though I agree luck is a factor. If it were "official," gaming will start instantly and the value of the meme drops (as with most things). People start fights like "I'm tired of seeing ____ in the Show HN section"; it takes the natural flexibility out of the whole thing. Once you introduce incentives for gaming (the 1.0 probability that many people, including people with money, will see your link) and create a sectioned-off social space, it becomes a whole different social dynamic.

Maybe just have a link at the top bar/somewhere else to one of the websites other commentors have mentioned that feature all ShowHN projects.

</comment><comment><USER11> For the duration and focus of my average HN interaction, more compartmentalization of the content here will mean I read less. Or maybe I'll only read default compartments. Be careful what you ask for.

</comment><comment><USER12> FWIW, I think there should be. Always seemed a bit odd seeing Ask and Show posts merged together like that.

In case anyone's interested, I've put together a project [1] that generates a "Show HN" RSS feed here: [http://hnrss.org/feeds/showhn.xml](http://hnrss.org/feeds/showhn.xml)

[1] [https://github.com/edavis/hnrss](https://github.com/edavis/hnrss)

</comment><comment><USER13> there are a couple of community run webpages that filter Show HN posts. Ie. [http://showinghn.com/](http://showinghn.com/) Or on twitter: [https://twitter.com/ShowHNDaily](https://twitter.com/ShowHNDaily)

<comment><USER14> This very thread turned up on ShowHNDaily because of the "Show HN" in the title.

...thinks like that hold back unofficial filters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think that a Show HN section is a good idea.

However, I'd strongly suggest it is more like a subreddit than just a filter to only show 'Show HN' posts if possible. It would encourage people to use it but keeping it separate might keep it from overwhelming the more relevant content.

<comment><USER15> I remember when there was at least one Show HN post a day, sometimes 3 or 4 on the front page... Those were the days when products and projects were the relevant content. I don't know what anyone in this community works on anymore. I miss seeing people do things.

<comment><USER6> And you'd have entire page of Show HN posts one click away. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> You're not alone!

In fact, it's so tricky to sort through the Show/Ask HN archives that I don't often use HN when I want to browse new projects, I use producthunt.com

</comment><comment><USER17> And, will it get a never time out and eat my long form essay i painstakingly wrote on the bus... section?

</comment><comment><USER18> The "ask HN" section is usually very informative and useful, ie. dealing with problems, finding work, recommending products etc.

I'm not sure a "show HN" section would have the same overall value for the community.

<comment><USER19> > I'm not sure a "show HN" section would have the same overall value for the > community.

Last I heard HN was a community of people who build things. A separate "Show HN" section would allow you know... people to show what they are building. Extend this further, the homepage should be defaulted to "Show HN" and all the rest put onto "other" pages!

<comment><USER20> I think a third party can aggregate these and that would be enough. Personally, I like that HN is a single page to visit (more or less) with occasional ShowHN items appearing, I like seeing them, but would be less likely to visit a separate section......if they appeared in both I guess that would be ok.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> +1 on this. It would be like Product Hunt for the HN community.</comment>


"I worked at Boeing for about 1.5 years in the 2008-9 time period" - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/bdfqm4/the_real_reason_boeings_new_plane_crashed_twice/ekyyd9g/ <comment><USER2> Btw, the new "fix" for the MCAS has just been announced and discussed by a 40-year experienced pilot [1]. Turns out that while we shouldn't be doing armchair analysis and assuming the worst of the engineering, management and executive team; the software fix released appears to be rather elementary and MCAS should have been designed with these safety checks in the first place. Why it wasn't is a huge concern and we wonder what other systems are at risk.

In summary, the software fix does the following:

1\. Use inputs from both AOA sensors, if they disagree by 5.5 degrees, disable MCAS. Original MCAS system used only 1 AOA sensor and switched back and forth between the two after every flight.

2\. Triple redundant filters, A) Average value reasonability filter B) Catastrophic failure low-to-high transition filter C) Left vs. Right AOA deviation filter

3\. Limiting MCAS stab trim so that the elevator always can provide 1.2g of nose-up pitch authority for recovery. Furthermore, electric trim with the yoke switch will override MCAS.

Turns out that armchair analysis was sort of on point and goes along with the incompetency at Boeing affirmed in this reddit post - sometimes, I wonder how we, humans, collectively build extraordinary monuments while we individually rest on stilts.

[1] [https://youtu.be/zGM0V7zEKEQ?t=370](https://youtu.be/zGM0V7zEKEQ?t=370)

<comment><USER3> _> I wonder how we, humans, collectively build extraordinary monuments while we individually rest on stilts_

My take is that we used to have brilliant engineers in the time where computational ressources were scarce (60s, 70 , 80s...), and they thought out their design thoroughly starting with a fucking paper and pencil. Aerospace indutries still rely on the designs from these times.

But now engineering seems to be : let's ask my computing power what is the good design, with little further questioning.

<comment><USER4> Brilliant engineers are still there. We haven't gotten stupider as a species in 30 years. It's the economics that changed.

As people say "They don't build stuff like they used too anymore".

First we started going cheap on the materials. Now we are going cheap on the engineers too.

Why pay a senior "brilliant" engineer $$$$ when a fresh out of college "average" engineer can write the "same piece of code" for $$

<comment><USER5> I think it may be that brilliant engineers still exist _somewhere,_ but I suspect they're less likely to go into aerospace than in the 50s, 60s or 70s. Heck or even the 40s.

Immediately after the war aerospace was red hot - there were countless countries and companies putting out new jet designs - both commercial and military. The competition and pace was intense and there was quite some cachet and public interest in aviation.

Since roughly, I guess, the 90s aerospace is rather settled and a very mature market. There's only a few major players left, and very very few new products; many of those are variations on the previous. Not nearly as much place or appeal for the brightest stars.

<comment><USER6> No, there's more to it than that.

Firstly, from 1903-1968 aerospace was in a period of exponentially improving performance (range, speed, altitude) comparable to Moore's Law. But from the mid-60s onwards the rapid improvements stopped, as developments hit hard limits imposed by material science and thermodynamics: it's hard to get a material much stronger than carbon fibre or titanium alloy, it's ridiculously hard to go faster in air (drag increases faster than the square of speed: if you throw more energy at the problem via your engines it comes out in the form of friction-induced heating).

Secondly, there _have_ been huge incremental improvements since 1968. Consider the 737 series. The 737-100 had a maximum range of 1540 nautical miles on 17.86 metric tonnes of fuel; today's 737MAX-10 can do 3850nm on 25.94 tonnes of fuel: it's 72% more fuel-efficient. It's also gone from 118 to 204 seats, so about the same upgrade is passenger capacity. The cargo capacity has almost doubled, too.

This being HN, the point of comparison should be an Intel-cpu laptop circa 2009 with an equivalent laptop today. The headline clock speed is probably similar (stuck around 2.4GHz), as is the number of hardware cores. The modern laptop probably has more RAM and more storage, but only by a factor of 2x or 4x. But it has double or triple the battery life, 4x or 8x the pixels on screen, a screamingly fast SSD instead of a rotating-platter drive, and a GPU that the OS can offload a chunk of work onto other than simply accelerated graphics. It _looks_ disappointingly similar, but if you could give your 2009-self your 2019 laptop they wouldn't be in a hurry to give it back again.

There have also been huge improvements in overall safety, the 737MAX MCAS problem aside; compare accident rates today with accident rates in the 1980s, let alone the 1950s if you want an eye-opener. (Of 1010 Boeing 707s delivered, there have been _173 hull losses in accidents_.)

<comment><USER5> Hmm, aren't we agreeing here? :)

As a brilliant star with a newly minted engineering degree I might go into aerospace pre-1968 to play with blank sheet developments, X planes and XB-70, Concorde, Harrier, SR-71, 707 etc etc. Much the same with at engine makers - Merlin to Olympus and Pegasus. An absurdly long list, often with remarkably small teams. I might not want to take my 2019 vintage degree into a world of incremental improvements at one of the few global giants. Even if those improvements are of enormous significance over the years. It doesn't feel earth shaking any more, Farnborough isn't showing astounding free PR every year, just steady incremental progress (mostly). No more flying bedsteads.

Same goes with the laptop analogy actually - the fun was probably in the earlier years than now with new model every year with an extra few percent on the numbers, or slimmer. Green fields are usually more fun, and when they succeed, more satisfying; even with the odd Osbourne effect or total failure.

Were I that newly minted genius, I'm not sure where I would park myself today. Space X for some, perhaps. Probably not Boeing or BAe. I'm sure there's plenty of good (enough) engineers at all of them still. Working as one of thousands. That's not so alluring.

> 1010 Boeing 707s delivered, there have been 173 hull losses in accidents

Never knew that. That is frankly amazing.

<comment><USER6> I forgot the point I was trying to make while giving the background!

It's not that the engineers of yesteryear were brilliant while today's engineers are second-rate: it's that what they were doing back then was in some respects _easier_. (And we remember the _good_ planes: as often as not they invented utter turkeys: look at the history of the Supermarine Scimitar for example — [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermarine_Scimitar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermarine_Scimitar) — TLDR: yes, it's military, but to lose 51% of your aircraft in 9 years of peacetime service takes _some_ doing. And then compare with the F-35, two crashes out of 308 airframes in service over a 5 year period, even though it's a vastly more complicated and higher performance aircraft.)

<comment><USER7> Yeah. People tend to forget that as each problem is solved, the next problem is typically more complex.

<comment><USER8> I like to say we never solve problems, we try to replace bigger ones with smaller ones.

<comment><USER9> And more equally distributed ones: there are not many easy solutions anymore that are pareto improvements, ie do not have downsides elsewhere.

For example, the door to the cockpit is locked now to keep terrorists out - which allows a suicidal co-pilot to fly the machine into a mountain undisturbed. (Having said that, a suicidal pilot can take down the machine one way or the other, so maybe locking the doors was a pareto improvement.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I worked at Boeing on a large satellite program back in this same time frame (2008-2011). I worked on the software simulator for the satellite that was used to test flight code and the ground system (i.e., give the ground control software simulated satellites to talk to, and to ring out procedures).

Anyway, as the final configuration for this satellite was still being tweaked, I needed to get updated mass properties (in order to simulate the physics properly) from the team working on the real satellite as the configuration changed (e.g., they added more batteries, solar panels, decreased RCS tank size, etc.). Ordinarily, these would be emailed to me in an excel spreadsheet every so often. I would make the updates, life would go on.

Now, internally, the simulator software worked with metric units, and the spreadsheet I received would also use metric units. Apparently, one day an engineering manager on the vehicle team found out that one of their engineers had been "helping" the simulator team by plugging the mass properties into an excel spreadsheet, translating the units from imperial to metric, and sending them to me (I did not know any of this, of course... I just knew the vehicle team would send me updated mass properties from time to time).

This was an outrageous affront to said manager, who ordered his folks to not expend any time helping "some other team." So, the next time I needed updated mass properties, what did I get? A faxed copy of something that looked like it had been generated on an old line printer. I called and asked "Where is the spreadsheet?" and got "Sorry, that's all I can do anymore."

Some of the numbers were questionably legible, but I tried to use it anyway. As I was making my updates, I noticed the numbers were way off. Units weren't labeled on the fuzzy faxed copy, so it took me a few minutes to realize that the vehicle engineering team apparently worked with imperial units internally.

Angry phone calls back and forth ensued, but I don't recall the (political) issue ever being fixed. I didn't stay much longer, so I don't know if it was ever resolved.

<comment><USER11> I'm surprised there wasn't a push to standardize units after this incident: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter)

<comment><USER12> I'm all for Freedom Units... But honestly if you're doing aerospace you just use metric and that's all there is to it! Period.

This is true for almost all engineering. I use metric but it is annoying in PCB design because mils is the standard there and those are just Tiny Freedom Units.

I'd be in favor of switching to metric for USA, but I see no indication of that happening. But a company has a choice esp one the size of Boeing!

<comment><USER13> The aerospace industry is stuck on imperial fasteners. That trickles down to other design elements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I contracted with a branch of Lockheed. While I couldn't/shouldn't talk about any of the technology involved, I can attest to the culture I witnessed. I always assumed it was horrible because of the government affiliation. But I think that mostly affected their focus, in that most of the branch was dedicated to wasting money so they could ask for more money. However, the culture itself was stagnate by design. Most of the employees actively fought anything that would require them to learn or change. EVERYONE was counting the clock to retirement. Anyone who wasn't in the same boat left as soon as they got the big picture. It made me extremely pessimistic about taxes.

<comment><USER15> I worked at a similar large aerospace contractor just in the past couple years. I can attest 100% to what you've said.

They estimated they would need to replace 40% of their workforce within the next 10 years just to stay afloat. Recently at my old site they hired 1000 people. Within a year, 800 had quit. These are software engineers, mechanical engineers, etc. I watched people just play on their phones, keep their feet up, basically do nothing at all.

One guy showed up to work on the first day and was told by his manager : "I don't have an office, so you'll have to sit here for now". The manager then flew back to another state, and the guy did not see him ever again. For a year this guy played Candy Crush on an iPad and did nothing because no one else knew who he was or who he worked for. Eventually he got a new manager and his job was then unboxing computers...for a year...When I started working with him, he would go into a large empty lab and just lay down behind some boxes and nap for 2hrs a day.

He was hired to be some sort of cost accountant.

This was not uncommon, it was rampant. I still cannot believe workplaces like that exist.

<comment><USER16> This is kind of why SpaceX is so efficient. That kind of dead wood doesn't really exist there, plus their actual aerospace/mechanical engineers are cream of the crop from the best universities.

<comment><USER17> I think it's that as well as the fact that they are a private company and don't do as much "contracting" in a sense. They aren't handed a gigantic set of legaleze requirements from the customer (the government).

Unless they do- I don't work there but it seems like they build their product, make sure it can lift X mass to orbit well, and if anyone needs shit lifted into orbit they just goto SpaceX. Far less bloat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > To this day, I refuse to fly on a 787. I'm sure that the Dreamliners that > came off the assembly line after about a year or so were fine but there's > that first year of production that, as far as I'm concerned, are ticking > time bombs. I talked to many engineers who had worked on that program to > know just how badly they rushed that initial production.

Ouch. Anybody know where to get a list of who's operating the planes from that first year of deliveries?

Do airlines publish the serial numbers for upcoming flights? ie is it possible to check the delivery order of the plane you're potentially flying on?

<comment><USER19> Sometimes, online flight trackers estimate the registration prior to the flight and they usually have the serial number as well (otherwise you can look it up on airfleets, plane spotters etc). For some flights it's easy to estimate the registration yourself (if the only plane available is a current inbound flight).

But generally, you won't get that info more than a day in advance. Airlines won't even know it more than a week in advance, they only know that it'll be one of a pool of planes of the same type.

<comment><USER20> But typically the same types of planes fly the same routes, I would imagine.

<comment><USER21> Aircraft model is set in advance (has to be, the airline needs to know how many seats available to sell) but late model substitutions sometimes do happen.

And if you want delivery year of the aircraft with an airline operating multiple aircraft of that type, you're probably going to have to know serial/tail number which might not be possible to determine until very late on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> In his other comments, he walks back on his remarks:

> Also, in all fairness to my hated former employer, air travel is still by > far the safest form of travel. Even with the shitshow at Boeing, Boeing > planes manage to be incredibly safe. I'm really not sure how, but they are.

> And it might be because I grew up around Boeing, but I'd still fly Boeing > over Airbus, to be perfectly honest. Airbus makes good planes, but that > reliance on computers over pilots just makes me nervous.

> Even the 787, despite all the horrible issues with the initial run, is > probably going to be an exceptionally safe plane due to the carbon fiber > construction.

So it sounds like much of his commentary is of the "how the sausage is made" nature that is common to the gestation of many (all?) complex products. You probably have nothing to worry about with air travel.

<comment><USER22> > You probably have nothing to worry about with air travel.

Well, the conclusion is already made in the statistics, and air travel is the safest, yes, but it's worrying that it's safe despite the enormous fallacies, despite the insane pressure of market forces.

A very eye-opening thing is to watch what the pilots should have done: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xixM_cwSLcQ&t=16m55s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xixM_cwSLcQ&t=16m55s)

Runaway stabilizer scenario has associated memory items (meaning the pilot must have the checklist committed to memory). There are big wheels that turn, with noise and a big visibility marking.

This was Boeing's initial defense too, that the pilots fucked up, because disabling any electronics works the same way. (There's a cutoff switch.) So if something is doing something, shut off the power, rotate the wheels manually.

And in this regard Boeing is right. Pilots decisionmaking was suboptimal. However, it is Boeing's fault that they opted for a no-training-required strategy.

A similar WTF is that pilots don't keep up with the aviation industry news. How - the fuck - can you pilot a plane that you know nothing about (except that your license is valid for it)!?

<comment><USER16> Commercial pilots these days are glorified bus drivers. Pay is similar too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> My view of aircraft engineering has certainly changed since the 737 stuff came out. You always get told software engineers are a bunch of cowboys compared to aircraft people, because they have to put everything through a bunch of rigourous tests.

I asked a friend who trains commercial pilots about it, and to my surprise he told me the processes to get things certified are political and hand-wavy.

<comment><USER24> I know software is bad.

But using the same airframe from the 60's and just strapping bigger engines to it until you have to move the nacelle and alter flight characteristics seems like a cowboy move also.

<comment><USER25> "Cowboy" is one person taking shortcuts to get things done but in a risky way.

This was Boeing optimizing very hard at "how do we get better fuel economy while keeping the same type rating". In general, I'm totally in favor of them doing this sort of optimization, since pilot training is legitimately a big expense.

(In this case it clearly went wrong, both in that MCAS was an unsafe design and that the FAA should not have allowed it to keep the same type rating.)

<comment><USER26> There's a point where shortcuts are appropriate, and there's a point where the shortcuts actually cost you time.

You can spend ten weeks messing around with "quick fixes" when it'd take two weeks to redesign the unstable or broken part.

Too much of engineering is obsessed with "get the thing out there and we'll fix it in version two".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I lived in Seattle for 7 years and got to know some Boeing project managers. The stories they told are very similar to this one. Apparently the life of a Boeing PM or Engineer is endless meetings, I asked one of my friends why this was the case. His response? A good chunk of the managers at Boeing won't use email.

<comment><USER26> I wouldn't be surprised if this was a liability thing.

You can't subpoena a conversation unless it was recorded...

<comment><USER28> It's standard practice for big corp to auto-erase emails after N months for this reason (well officially they dress it as cost saving measure).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Not every big company is bad at this.

I used to work for a large company in the aerospace sector (not an aircraft maker) where software was a big part of what they did. I was in the safety assurance part of the company, and on a couple of occasions I had to tell management that the software wasn't up to scratch. One of them was The Big Project On Which Everything Depends.

Management didn't even blink. They went straight back to the supplier and spent the next several weeks in tough negotiations about timescale and how the additional costs were going to be split. The project was delayed, and I got zero blowback. They didn't even argue with me. The nearest I got to argument was some careful review of my report, which was perfectly reasonable given the amount of money at stake.

I'm posting anonymously here and not naming names because I stand by my duty of confidentiality. But I am proud to have worked there.

</comment><comment><USER30> "I worked at Boeing for about 1.5 years in the 2008-9 time period and I can absolutely guarantee this happened."

was in response to this comment:

"I would be very surprised if in a few years from today a bunch of engineers don't testify that ample of warning was given to management about this. "

Reddit doesn't make it easy to find what they replied to.

<comment><USER31> > _" I would be very surprised if in a few years from today a bunch of > engineers don't testify that ample of warning was given to management about > this. "_

I love this mentality that "managers" are the only people responsible, and that the people actually putting the thing together are not. It's the same with the bank scandals, or the VW scandal, or the Facebook scams; it's all the executive team! We were just peons following orders! We aren't responsible!

If you see a major safety issue or other concern, and report it to your superior, who does nothing, you're pretty weak if you shrug your shoulders and say, "I did _my_ job!"

<comment><USER32> I mean... that's literally their job. Hence why they get higher pay and more responsibility. The dictionary definition of manager includes "a person RESPONSIBLE for controlling or administering all or part of a company or similar organization". My job description, on the other hand, is simply to aid in implementing and developing the technologies I'm told to by my manager. If they tell me to implement something that is a concern, and I bring it to my manager, and they still tell me to do it then I have done my job and the responsibility of that issue is now on my manager

<comment><USER31> > _My job description, on the other hand, is simply to aid in implementing and > developing the technologies I 'm told to by my manager._

Boy, good thing that's what your job description says, it completely absolves you of any accountability in the real world!

"Not my job" is such a great attitude, and is precisely the reason why these huge scandals are able to persist. Whatever helps you sleep at night.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm currently working at Boeing, and had a very similar experience to him getting onboarded as a contractor on a major project. Just as an example, I'm going to outline the steps it took to get me a proper badge

1\. Filled out badge request form and gave it to my manager who gave it to the person who would be my manager at boeing

2\. 4 months later have to refill out form because they lost it

3\. 1.5 months later I receive badge, but it doesn't have the chip I require

4\. Get told by manager to go back to badge office and get chip, but apparently the form was submitted by someone who actually isn't my manager but is listed as my manager and they selected "no chip" so they can't reissue until they get a new form

5\. My manager submits new form requesting chip, go back to badge office and get told I can't get a chipped card because he isn't technically my manager so they need to change my assigned manager first

6\. Actual manager attempts to contact the person boeing says is my manager multiple times, after about 3 weeks they hear back from them

7\. Manager finally changed so he sends email to badge office saying that he is now my manager and I need the badge

8\. Go back to badge office and they can't give me chipped badge because he submitted the form before he was my manager and the email isn't sufficient.

9\. He submits new form, go to badge office and they finally give me chipped badge

And mind you, everyone is so lazy that it takes multiple days minimum for every communication with anyone. So essentially Boeing payed me for an extended amount of time where I couldn't really do anything because no one cared to get me what I needed to do my job. Also, that was only the first piece. I am still working on getting everything else I need, and it doesn't look like it's going to happen anytime soon.

Another thing I hate is everything costs a ton of money and is garbage. No free coffee, no free tea, no free snack, no free cups, no free stirring sticks, and the cafeteria food and options they do have are way over priced and worse than dog food. The majority of the staff are old, sad white men that don't seem to want to do anything.

Oh, and on top of everything the project is 100% in the cloud but the out of touch manager requires everyone to be onsite

By far the worst company I have ever had the displeasure of being contracted at. Can't wait to be done

edit: thought of another wonderful example, I once heard a member of the "security" team say that their job is to just say no to everything that comes their way

<comment><USER33> Dude we had totally different experiences. When I got my grey badge, I walked in, gave them my forms I was told via email they would need, was then told to wait 3 hours and left to go hang out at the lake. Sunbathed for 2 hours. Came back. Got my badge. No issues.

My team was very underutilized... We got legitimately excited when we came in and there was real work for us to do instead of sitting around and being 'available'.

<comment><USER32> I did get a badge the first time, but it didn't have the chip I needed to access certain things required for my job so I could get in the building and lab but not really do much. Apparently it also has to do with the location, because another person that was getting onboarded for the same project at another location also didn't get a chip but they immediately issued a new card when he walked back in without the hassle I went through. Seems to be pretty hit or miss, but I haven't had any luck

<comment><USER33> Right, and I neglected to mention that I did get the chip with no issue. My point was just that the system can work well, sometimes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Well a decades-long oligopoly of two companies is similar to central planning in many aspects and his story indeed rings a lot of bells.

<comment><USER35> In the last 50 years, fatalities per miles travelled have been reduced by a factor of 100.

If that's an oligopoly at work, I want to try a monopoly and see if it's even better.

<comment><USER36> Is there any evidence to attribute that process to the effects of oligopoly?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Its interesting how an unknown source making unverifiable claims on a site which is basically a rumor mill gets so much attention.

<comment><USER38> It's not, if you think about it. People believe what they want to hear. Unverified post agreeing with the popular narrative gets immediately accepted as fact, and posts disagreeing with the narrative gets accused of being shills or damage control.

I'm not saying this guy is a fraud, but if there's no supporting evidence, there's no evidence to believe him.

<comment><USER14> There's probably some truth to it, but there is probably some confirmation bias to his story. I have no love for big companies with horrible corporate culture. But this is like a Yelp review from an unsatisfied customer, might be true, but should be taken with a grain of salt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Interesting. I was hanging out at a wedding with someone right around that time frame who was one of the lead engineers on the 787 rollout. He too had similar comments about safety. He told us that the 787 was failing it's FAA tests, but since the head of Boeing's relationship with the FAA was a former FAA tester, he "helped" the FAA rewrite the tests so that the 787 would pass.

I told him he may want to consider being a whistleblower, but his response was "well the AirBus didn't pass their FAA test either until they rewrote the tests".

I still look at the overall safety numbers and realize that flying is still safer than driving, but it sounds like it could be safer still.

</comment><comment> village-idiot Everything I learn about Boeing smells of the traditional failings of "national hero" type industries, where national pride and government incentives effectively isolate a company from any sense of responsibility; economic, moral, or otherwise.

Can't help but wonder if Airbus is any different, and if so, why?

</comment><comment><USER40> This was interesting

> When I showed up at my first day of work, the first words out of my > supervisor's mouth were, "I don't know why you are here, we have no need for > programmers." (The Boeing interview process is done so that at no point, do > you ever have contact or communication with the team you will be working > with.)

My first job out of college in 1984 was with Grumman Aerospace in Bethpage Long Island. I was hired by a college recruiter and didn't speak to anyone on the team I would be on 'til my first day of work.

They had no work for us to do. I left after exactly one year. I wrote some utility programs to format compiler errors just for fun.

They had these "cost plus" contracts with the Navy and they could make a few extra dollars by making a small profit charging for some junior workers on a project. The F-14D project was canceled a few years after I left.

</comment><comment><USER41> Neither safety critical software nor critical aircraft engineering relies on the personal quality of people involved. The safety is build into the process and the organizational structure. Usually involving multiple organizations that check each other's work.

What can happen is collapse of the process and regulatory capture.

Boeing is able to cut corners because FAA is cutting corners. FAA whistleblowers have demonstrated that FAA has culture that resulted in "malfeasance, bordering on corruption" [https://www.latimes.com/travel/la-trw- airlines4apr04-story.h...](https://www.latimes.com/travel/la-trw- airlines4apr04-story.html)

There is no sign that things are getting better. 737 MAX gained FAA certification on March 8, 2017. Meanwhile FAA has been running without administrator for two years. Trump tried to nominate his personal pilot, but when it failed he didn't nominate anyone. Dan Elwell is the acting administrator.

</comment><comment><USER42> It would be presumptuous to think "this is the real Boeing" based on anecdotes from people who worked there. Even in big companies, where a lot of folks are twiddling thumbs, there are undoubtedly teams where real quality work gets done. These teams are somewhat insulated from the bureaucratic environment around them and attract true performers.

<comment><USER43> Do you think that the teams are insular or the people who know what they are doing are insular?

Because in my experience the people that do the heavy lifting are just randomly distributed and are bright spots in a otherwise gray landscape.

<comment><USER42> You do find good talent embedded in poorly performing teams, but that doesn't last very long (few years at most). People like to be around others with similar standards. Good talent will gravitate to teams with high quality talent and conversely good teams tend to pick good quality people. It's a form of sorting that over time results in people with similar standards working with one another.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> "To this day, I refuse to fly on a 787. I'm sure that the Dreamliners that came off the assembly line after about a year or so were fine but there's that first year of production that, as far as I'm concerned, are ticking time bombs."

He doesn't like the Dreamliner too! Eeek! That was the best value for crossing the Atlantic. Damn, this is gonna haunt me now, I liked flying those :(

</comment><comment><USER45> "When I showed up at my first day of work, the first words out of my supervisor's mouth were, "I don't know why you are here, we have no need for programmers.""

Wow. If that's not a huge red flag that you shouldn't work there, I don't know what one is. The only appropriate response to that, I think, is to say "OK, then, it was nice to meet you. I quit."

<comment><USER46> Another appropriate response:

"That's odd, you build major products that sell for hundreds of millions of dollars, that tens of thousands of peoples' lives literally depend on, and that are completely controlled by software, fly-by-wire, etc. And yet you have no need for programmers?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I've had similar experiences with Airbus when we conducted technical feasibility on one of their maintenance mobility products. Couldn't get any technical documentation for the life of us, and once the product was presented, the design assumptions were so clearly flawed it was laughable. Authentication was implemented using iPad name. Yes, that name anyone can edit to be anything. No password. The assumption was just that everyone on the corporate network could be trusted.

</comment><comment><USER48> I also worked there in that time frame and do not find most of the things in this post familiar. Boeing is a large company and things are not as homogeneous as this person implies.

</comment><comment><USER49> Wow, good to know. I won't be going anywhere near a 787.

<comment><USER50> Good thing the poster of the story is totally verified legit and not at all making things up for fun or profit.

<comment><USER51> All that sweet karma profit!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> >This was inevitable.

Inflammable means flammable? What a country!

<comment><USER53> 'Evitable' means 'avoidable'. 'Inevitable' means 'not avoidable'. They mean the opposite, which is what you'd expect.

It's nothing like 'inflammable' and 'flammable', which mean the same thing. Those two have different roots which is why there is confusion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Unpopular opinion, but had this happened at a company that hired H1-Bs, people would've jumped on the incompetent immigrants band-wagon immediately.

This here is a fine example of the classic American work ethic devolving into sheer laziness. FWIW, I saw this happen at another Military contractor (Northrop Grumman) too!

<comment><USER55> Sometimes I wonder what'll happen if the United States ever has to fight a war against an opponent whose industrial base is _not_ 150 years behind it.

Then again, I've heard Russian military equipment is in just as sorry a state. No idea what the Chinese military is like, but I'd imagine the real money is in selling to Americans rather than killing them.

We're in this interesting place where it's entirely possible that the best military equipment is actually in the hands of private, ostensibly civilian companies. SpaceX has ballistic missiles with a CEP significantly smaller than a drone ship, for example, a feat that was unheard of during the Cold War. For that matter, the very concept of a drone ship would've been awfully helpful during the Battle of the Atlantic.

<comment><USER56> "SpaceX has ballistic missiles with a CEP significantly smaller than a drone ship"

It goes quite slowly compared to a real ICBM and relies on GPS that will be jammed in a real war.

<comment><USER57> Don't you think they could easily replace the GPS with some other navigation module?

<comment><USER58> I don't. The most accurate navigation system that doesn't require an off- platform signal is inertial (INS). INS units drift badly (relatively speaking), with errors measured in tens or hundreds of meters after only an hour. I have personally seen data from a unit that was off by kilometers after a couple days without GPS correction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> None of that explains why MCAS would point the nose down when the nose is already down and the plane is flying into the ground at 500 knots.</comment>


Red Herring: Why Web 2.0 Isn't Dead Yet - <AUTHOR> http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=21342&hed=Why+Web+2.0+Isn't+Dead+Yet&sector=Industries&subsector=VentureCapital <comment><USER2> The Web2.0 designation will probably die soon, but the next-generation of the web is here to stay.

This is not a bubble of web products cropping up to ride the acquisition-hype- train (though many are). With the "Web1.0", companies were being formed without solid goals and ways of monetization. The web has expanded so much since then that there is a market for all these novel ideas. If the web community deems a product or service worthless, than those ideas alone would sink and allow the best to stay afloat.

There's no bubble to burst this time, folks. New approach, new media, new web. I'm excited.

</comment><comment><USER3> That was an interesting interview. You sat down with the guy and only asked THREE questions? I can overhear a better conversation than that on the train.</comment>