Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today

ns.nl

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 365 posts

Re: Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today

#221

Post by mpol »

jtwaleson wrote: post #180
mikebos wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has nothing to do with safety it's pure a who is where system.

Curious why “who is where” is unrelated to safety? You mean it doesn’t affect the signaling?

Signaling is on a separate system. There is ATB-EG/ATB-NG for max speed and there is ATB-Vv for stopping for red lights.

Part of train history in the Netherlands is the train disaster at Harmelen in 1962 where 93 people died. It spurred the installation of these systems. Every time there is even a minor accident with a train, the national governement is asking questions, up to the highest level. For contrast, every time a child dies in traffic, only the local government (gemeente) asks questions. It is considered completely unacceptable for a train accident to involve more than 2 deaths, it seems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmelen_train_disaster

Re: Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today

#222

Post by Symbiote »

tazjin wrote: post #186
Freak_NL wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is Europe. Credit card imprinters are rare if they were ever used at all. I've never seen one. The most resilient back up (especially in the face of national crises) is cash of course, but a growing group of people have stopped carrying any cash at all, and a lot of people in power are doing their best to make sure a cashless future is nearer each day. I don't mind paying with a debit card; I just want to have a…

Most credit or debit cards support offline transactions, so a shop can keep a battery powered terminal that reconciles when it comes online. Imprinters don't exist in Europe to my knowledge - the first time I saw one was on a visit to NYC a few years ago and I thought they were pranking me.

My employer has (or had) one. They used it a couple of years ago when they sold some stuff to staff (old furniture etc).

The usual fraud risks don't really apply in this case. Other than that, it must be over 20 years since I saw my parents pay using one, and that was unusual enough that I remember it.

Re: Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today

#223

Post by bmitc »

sofixa wrote: post #198
bmitc wrote: post #115

More and more we are seeing "the computer says no" in our lives. We've replaced human activity and decision making with computerized versions, which are nothing more than the automation of stored human knowledge and routines.

A much more efficient automation. For instance, running high speed rail without computer signalling would be a huge risk there's no sense in taking ( due to the speeds involved, by the time you see anything of issue like a train or damage in the tracks in front, it's too late to stop).

I think that's a bit of a leap from what I was saying. I didn't imply that all software and computation is bad. Obviously, a human cannot live handle any control system that needs even remotely fast operation. The point is that due to scaling issues, we're removing humans from systems where humans excel or could serve as backups in the event of failure (and actually vice versa).

Scale creates problems that are partially solved via software systems, which only handle a subset of the existing variety and new variety introduced by scaling. This makes the systems leaky with regards to unhandled variety and incredibly rigid (i.e., not robust) against exceptions, exceptions that could often be readily be handled by humans. By software being a snapshot of some small group of humans' knowledge of a system, it is completely unable to respond to live operational exceptions. Stafford Beer's work is interesting background on this type of thing.

> A much more efficient automation.

There are many, many examples where that is both not true and true. For the not true cases, just see literally any customer service interaction with a large company in the past half decade. I suppose this could be arguable though if one asks the question "efficient for who?".

Re: Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today

#224

Post by jaclaz »

Tabular-Iceberg wrote: post #165
Scoundreller wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There we had something of an impromptu party until there was no more power for the cash register and they stopped sales. Funny how the entire system has ground to a halt and the bartender is still worried that their cash register receipts and inventory won’t reconcile and shuts that part down too.

I’m puzzled by the lack of resilience in retail sales. I thought “always be closing” was supposed to apply to all types of sales. A receipt pad and a credit card imprinter under the counter would be a very cheap backup. It would be slow, but at least they would be closing. It can even be considered a national security issue in the case of food, medicines and other vital services.

I have some experience related to cash/registers/POS.

Card imprinters did exist in Europe (Italy) just fine, but they are not used since (at least) thirty years.

Most cards that are presented to the cash now have no embossed numbers (most people have the national payment circuit called Bancomat/Pagobancomat, sometimes coupled - on the same not-embossed card - with a Visa or Mastercard debit).

So in 99% of cases there is no way to "extract" money from cards without using the card reader and if electricity or landline/internet connection are down, it is a problem, though there are a number of battery powered and GSM/cellular connected POS/terminals that may give a few hours of autonomy.

Since several years sales to the public MUST be recorded on an electronic cash register[1], there is something like a "special emergency exception" where you can annotate manually on a paper registry sales, but as often happens the exact procedure is not largely known and I believe most people would not risk a (hefty) fine should they do any mistake in these cases and prefer to close the shop.

[1] which is BTW connected via internet to the Agenzia delle Entrate, the governement agency that deals with taxes, and data from the cash register is transmitted daily to them automatically, though there is a few days time tolerance in case of connection issues

Re: Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today

#226

Post by Aeolun »

CyanBird wrote: post #105
Aeolun wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did it before the whole thing was automated. Surely they can do it again.

Sure, * but not on a single day without any warning what's ever*

I’m sure nobody raised this issue before. They just didn’t care “Don’t worry, the system will always work”.

But here we are.

Re: Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today

#227

Post by Thlom »

klausjensen wrote: post #206
Freak_NL wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is Europe. Credit card imprinters are rare if they were ever used at all. I've never seen one. The most resilient back up (especially in the face of national crises) is cash of course, but a growing group of people have stopped carrying any cash at all, and a lot of people in power are doing their best to make sure a cashless future is nearer each day. I don't mind paying with a debit card; I just want to have a…

I am in Europe as well, but I am probably older than you, so I actually have seen the imprinters in Denmark. However, that was probably 20+ years ago. :)

Same in Norway. I used to go out for beers to this one bar that had an imprinter when my bank account were empty in the early 2000s. good times.

Re: Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today

#228

Post by Symbiote »

gridspy wrote: post #67
323 wrote: post #42

In 2019 there was a power blackout in London. When power was restored, a number of new trains refused to start without a technician physically coming over with a diagnostics laptop to them because power fluctuated outside allowed bounds or something before the blackout.

It's likely the same power fault could occur in a single train in other circumstances. When an electric train cannot access the grid reliably it would become far more dangerous - no more regenerating brakes, no reliable acceleration ... Better to force the operators to fix the boom arm / whatever other cause of power glitches with fault codes like this. Even if they false-trip when there are grid level outages.

No, it was considered a design fault with these particular trains, and fixed soon afterwards.

Being unable to accelerate or unable to use regenerative braking is not in any way a safety problem. Either situation can happen at any time. (Electric trains have banks of resistors used to dump the unwanted kinetic energy when it's not possible to return it to the power supply, and this was the normal method for decades before regenerative braking became common.)

Re: Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today

#229

Post by thibautg »

sofixa wrote: post #190
quartz wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the notice: > It affected the system that generates up-to-date schedules for trains and staff. ...boy oh boy did trying to look into what NS uses for crew scheduling ever send me down a rabbit hole. I don't know if the systems have changed but while poking around online I found this[1] doc about the Netherlands' timetable revamp around 2006 and it talks about the complexity of TURNI-- their on-the-fly crew sched…

> 36hr week, 5 weeks vacation, pension 1 hour more than the standard French contract, and there are also far more holidays here.. > free unlimited 2nd class + low cost 1st class train travel. .. okay that's actually a great perk. IIRC the French national railway company, SNCF, provide only a limited number of tickets per employee (like 10 per year? someone please correct me if I'm wrong). Their UX is also atrocious t…

I work for the Belgian railways and I have a free unlimited first class pass for Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg) + lots of international free tickets, also in 1st class. But no company car, obviously.

There is no UX: it's just a small sheet of paper.

Re: Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today

#230

Post by eatingcrowe »

ArnoVW wrote: post #173
MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> everything else in their IT land outside this system runs off SAP (likely including the actual distribution of the output of crew scheduling) so if I had to gamble I'd say the failure happened somewhere in the integration between them. I have a reflex repulsion for off-the-shelf "enterprise" software. You pay millions of dollars to subscribe to a suite of (seemingly) bad, bloated software that takes more work to cu…

Have done consulting for 15 years, understand your feelings. But I'd like to offer some alternative viewpoints. Buying an off the shelve package also buys you an industry-standard business process. The idea is that part of value comes from the process that you have to shoe-horn into. Some integration is expected (and provided for) but if you have to modify heavily, You're Not Using It Correctly. Also, using an OTS pa…

> I've seen people implement SAP in a couple of months. It's possible. It's still expensive and clunky though :-)

Never worked with SAP, but still coming off my burn-out hangover from $OLD_JOB - worked to migrate the nexus of the firm's accounting systems from COBOL to MS Dynamics. Unto itself, I don't really have a problem with Dynamics - I do have a problem with MS and their piss-poor available materials on the topic. While I understand their business sells training and certifications, this does ass all for folks pulled in as a pinch hitter during a death march. Can scarcely fly out to Las Vegas for a week long vacation while I'm working 16 hour days to beat the clock on our last true COBOL coder's retirement date.

The greater issue I have in enterprise systems - often the consultant / contractor firms[0] involved in the process. The classic fly-out of classy sales-engineers replaced with low-rent off-shore coders for the actual work. Slick-as-shit documentation that does not match reality in even the simplest of cases. Counter-Party contacts that neither care nor hide their lack of caring for the outcome of the project. Pressing for aggressive timelines that do not meet reality

I would assume there is some correlation, however, between buying $ENTERPRISE_TOOL and an unwillingness to hold consultants feet to the fire on their own failings, structuring a contract that keeps them honest.

[0] - Not to state `ArnoVW is one, only stating a pattern I've run into all too often.

Post reply on HN