171–180 of 593 posts
What a surprise it didn’t need nuclear ordinance or building giant elaborate dams or millions of helicopters.
Edit: I think I saw an earlier article, other reports are now saying it's fully floating and moving.
It's worth looking at the discussion of the ship just three days ago on Hacker News[1]. A lot of what people thought was true (that it would be stuck there for weeks, being dismissive of using tugboats to pull it out) didn't pan out as expected. Just a reminder that we should always take what we read with a grain of salt, and that it's fine to reserve judgement and see what will actually happen after the initial medi…
> "We can't exclude it might take weeks, depending on the situation," said Peter Berdowski, CEO of Dutch company Boskalis.
Of course that message got oversimplified as it spread. "Can't exclude" is a pretty important qualifier that suggests that it's an unlikely worst case.
But that nuance already was lost in the title of that same article: "Cargo ship blocking Suez Canal could take weeks to move". If you were to read only that title, you might think it is likely to take weeks.
TLDR: People thought it would take weeks because that's what they were hearing from other people.
It's worth looking at the discussion of the ship just three days ago on Hacker News[1]. A lot of what people thought was true (that it would be stuck there for weeks, being dismissive of using tugboats to pull it out) didn't pan out as expected. Just a reminder that we should always take what we read with a grain of salt, and that it's fine to reserve judgement and see what will actually happen after the initial medi…
I think this is wrong. Someone says "it COULD be stuck for weeks" It gets unstuck earlier, fine. Doesn't invalidate the possibility. The criticism is moot. If anyone had made bets, then I'd take both more seriously.
"Oh, Nate Silver said Trump only had a 30% chance of winning the election, but he did, so Nate Silver is an idiot!"
Good thing hacker news doesn't run large civil engineering projects.
You know, I used to think that HN was a collection of some of the smartest people on the Internet. Don’t get me wrong, there are some incredible people here. But I guess what I have learned over the past 10 years is that HN has as many blind spots as any other online forum. If you want SV advice, this is the place to be. If you want to dislodge a stuck mega ship, look elsewhere.
Then again, it's fun to speculate, and what are these threads for if not to provoke thought? Maybe it's fine for people to imagine and try to put themselves in the place of the professionals working on the problem. You can interpret the comments here as an indicator of dangerous human hubris if you want, but I think most of the people here understand that they can't do any harm by posting naive speculations on HN.
In my opinion, we should save our outrage for people who make an active attempt to be taken seriously and affect the actions of more qualified people, such as the guy who posted the bizarre (and possibly satirical?) account of his attempt to build a system for guiding doctors' treatment decisions.
I honestly love that it was freed using the "boring" solution. No need for any of the crazy solutions people proposed on the internet. Just careful and measured execution of proven techniques.
What a surprise it didn’t need nuclear ordinance or building giant elaborate dams or millions of helicopters.
Just to be clear: The ship is still there and still stuck. They were just able to straighten it enough (parallel to the shore) to be out of the way and no longer blocking boat traffic. Edit: I think I saw an earlier article, other reports are now saying it's fully floating and moving.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know, I used to think that HN was a collection of some of the smartest people on the Internet. Don’t get me wrong, there are some incredible people here. But I guess what I have learned over the past 10 years is that HN has as many blind spots as any other online forum. If you want SV advice, this is the place to be. If you want to dislodge a stuck mega ship, look elsewhere.
It's the classic "expertise is universal" fallacy. When we see someone who is an expert in their field, we assume that expertise carries over to totally unrelated fields, when this is emphatically not the case. Being a genius does not prevent someone from being ignorant; the finite nature of time means every genius is almost completely uninformed on almost every topic, and without information what you get is GIGO.
Lots of articles quote a $XXX billion dollars per day figure, but those numbers are normally for "worth of goods delayed" which, while interesting, doesn't tell the story to me. Are there any estimates as to the actual cost of this "mishap", due to e.g. spoilage, financial/contractual repercussions of late deliveries, personnel/fuel costs?
Is it just me, but hasn't the mainstream financial news over the years taken on the feel of reality television? The talking heads are usually pushing some sort of narrative. Occasionally, reality overwhelms their ability to spin things, and they have to readjust and do damage control, as sometimes happens to the producers in a reality TV show. The aim of their manipulation and spin seems to be mainly to keep up the level of drama, just as in a reality TV show.
Lots of articles quote a $XXX billion dollars per day figure, but those numbers are normally for "worth of goods delayed" which, while interesting, doesn't tell the story to me. Are there any estimates as to the actual cost of this "mishap", due to e.g. spoilage, financial/contractual repercussions of late deliveries, personnel/fuel costs?
Probably the actual cost will require an army of accountants and lawyers at a dozen major logistics corporations arguing with each other for months to even try to compute. I doubt us regular uninvolved people will ever get a "real" number. How do you even try to calculate and reveal the cost associated with say a manufacturer in the middle of a supply chain deciding to source their parts from a different vendor for t…
1) The scale and depth of the disruption makes it impractical to figure in any kind of accurate way and
2) The disruption will have introduced hypotheticals that nay spiral out themselves (butterfly effect style) e.g. some retailer may have lost a customer who went elsewhere, some supplier may have lost a retailer who went elsewhere, etc
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I can speak w/ great confidence to anyone who knows nothing about these subjects. heh sorry, can't tell how serious you're being. but it tickles my brain that there's someone who would also vibe with that byline: con artists :)
I'm being serious if you know nothing about space :) Did you know my experimental observations of quantum gravity & string theory are as good, if not better, than the world's top scientists? If you print this comment on paper, I will have been published & peer reviewed, too!
From that 2017 article:
> You already know we haven’t found anything yet—otherwise you’d have heard of it. But even null results are valuable guides for theory development. They teach us that some ideas—for example, that spacetime might be a regular lattice—are simply incompatible with observations.
I would suggest that publishing and peer review requires an audience, therefore ... err, by publishing this I am actually peer-reviewing your work?! Drat! That makes me 0/2 then!
To conclude my peer-review, I would like to see more details for reproduction, merely stating that you've performed experiments without providing the necessary observational data and steps to reproduce highlights the lack of originality in the paper you're proposing and therefore I would decline to publish. ;-)