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Comment by atlgator | Hacker News Reader

During the Iraq War, everyone marveled at the great new technology behind the Predator drone to conduct surveillance and deliver ordnance during strike operations. Then it leaked that the Predator had been developed 15 years earlier and used successfully in Desert Storm. Cut to 2011 when we learned that the SEAL team that killed Osama Bin Laden used a stealth helicopter, something that no one in the world had any public success toward achieving, and we not only achieved it but were running classified missions with it.

Based on those two examples alone, I estimate that the most secretive programs are 15 years more technologically advanced than we are in the public domain.

AI and Quantum Computing come to mind as likely focus areas in addition to those already mentioned.

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There is also a great deal of fetishizing of these black programs and post-hoc creation myths that assume a level of advancement that simply does not exist and did not exist at the time. As a simple example, you are confusing the Pioneer drone (developed in the late 80s, deployed in Desert Storm, basically an RC plane with a video camera) with the Predator. The Predator was not ever used in Desert Storm and in fact the program was only started just prior to that conflict. Given that drones have existed since the 30s and the initial base that was used to develop the Predator started as a cruise missile, which have been widely known since the early 80s, I am not quite sure why you think drone development was a surprise to anyone other than the casual, ill-informed public.

Also, fetishizing instruments of death because of the "cool tech."

The two are mutually exclusive, so the "cool tech" can always be appreciated for what it is.

Yes. The British Army was actively using drones from 1999 [0]. The unarmed Phoenix system was developed to support artillery forward observers, and used in the Balkan wars and Gulf War 1. It was operated by the artillery regiments, not TLA hoods.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAE_Systems_Phoenix

Israel pioneered UAVs as early as 1982 [1] and Firebee's regularly flew over Vietnam [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAI_Scout [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Model_147

This is all true. Plus, the military, like aerospace, is inherently technologically conservative: it doesn't fly unless it's flown before.

On the other hand, governments can throw a lot of money at an interesting topic. See John Clark's Ignition! for rocket fuels.

> AI and Quantum Computing come to mind as likely focus areas in addition to those already mentioned.

Um, yeah, no. Pretty much all experimental QC students capable of doing the work are accounted for. The theorists who don't hustle mostly can't get jobs, with good reason: it's mostly malarkey.

You'd think if there were some blackops AI center of genius out there, at least one of them would have a job at Facebook making $2m a year or at a hedge fund gobbling up the order books. There are none.

Neither the predator nor stealth choppers were particularly surprising. You can watch documentaries on youtube about stealth choppers like the RA-66 Comanche, and drones were in wide, boasted-of use in Vietnam.

FWIIW I did a little consulting work for SBIR places; most of the procurement officers got their ideas from shitty science fiction. I'm pretty sure we'll eventually get all the dumb things from Aliens no matter how impractical and useless in actual combat they are.

> You'd think if there were some blackops AI center of genius out there, at least one of them would have a job at Facebook making $2m a year or at a hedge fund gobbling up the order books. There are none.

Perhaps they were TOO successful, and their AI escaped, eating the researchers on its way out. There's no way for us to know..

Alan Kay has some talks about how research used to be at Xerox PARC during the glory days of Smalltalk, Interlisp-D, Mesa/Cedar.

His takeaway is exactly that, if you aren't budget bound, think of what the future would be 15 years from day and start implementing that.

That's the way I (try to) think, sort of, but honestly the successful projects are the ones with money behind them. Java was just terrible but IIRC Sun put in approx. $0.5 billion into advertising it and it was jumped all over by execs because of advertising and not any technical, or far more importantly business, merit.

Tech is fad driven - look at all the big data projects by companies that don't need them.

> Java was just terrible [...]

Java was released in 1995. Compared to the state of the art back then, I believe it was a significant advancement. There was plain C with all its shortcomings, C++, but in a much worse state than today, and then the dynamic bunch (Python, Tcl/Tk?).

There's no doubt Java had major issues, many of which were only ameliorated with Java 2 and later, and some remain today. But on the other hand it was memory safe, statically typed, with much simpler semantics, machine independence, Unicode support etc. pp. I believe Java overall meant progress.

I'm not sure the advertising budget perspective is that salient. The main competitor for Sun at the time was Microsoft (with C++ and their Windows platform), who had a very well working marketing / developer relations / etc operation going as well.

Java was dire. It could have been much better when released - though granted it was designed for embedded originally, but it was then arguably mis-sold.

Performance was avoidably bad in some parts of the libraries.

I recall a major rewrite of some product being started then killed because performance sucked (surely much better now, but things took far too long to change).

Memory behaviour was not fixed until java 5:

"The original Java memory model, developed in 1995, was widely perceived as broken, preventing many runtime optimizations and not providing strong enough guarantees for code safety"

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_memory_model)

I'd also like to add Brinch Hansen's heartfelt lament

"If programmers no longer see the need for interference control [in java's threading] then I have apparently wasted my most creative years developing rigorous concepts which have now been compromised or abandoned by programmers"

Per Brinch Hansen, Java's Insecure Parallelism - SIGPLAN Notices, April 1999

> statically typed

with type holes for arrays

> with much simpler semantics

yep, too simple. IMO it relied too much on the programmer. Generics took too long to appear also.

> Unicode support

Broken cos they didn't read the spec properly. It has problem with the BOM on UTF8 which has bitten me (can't remember the details, think it was this https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1835430/byte-order-mark-...)

The advertising budget was what drove things, not common sense. Java could have been good but it was designed badly and badly oversold.

> I believe Java overall meant progress.

I'm not so sure, you're comparing it only to C,C++ or Tcl/Tk but what about Ada? Smalltalk? Lisp? Objective-C?

Plus Java's standard library was full of bugs for a looonnng time: they focused on new features instead of fixing it.. I've experienced "Java can't print" myself while Java's hype was going full force..

Objective-C was going nowhere before Apple's acquisition, my thesis was rewriting a particle system from Objective-C/NeXT into C++/Windows as means for the department to keep research in OSes that everyone else could use.

Ada compilers were bloody expensive.

Modula-2, Delphi, VB, Oberon, Modula-3,..., were great, but they were either only available commercially, or OS specific.

Java was given away as free beer, with a batteries included standard library and with less hurdles than trying to write portable C or pre-C++98 across all platforms that existed in the 90's.

That alone made us try it out,

On my university, the computing department changed all the compiler design and distributed computing classes to Java, without Sun paying anything to a tiny Portuguese university.

The java performance complaints are also widely overstated...Mostly when running on windows it took a few seconds when starting a java program if the JVM wasn't yet loaded to memory (as it had to be loaded first).

But a well written java server-side application (so something that doesn't need to be started very often but generally just idles until it's contacted by clients) is as fast or faster than anything you were likely to be using for a couple decades after its introduction.

"are"? Yes, perhaps.

"were"? I don't know.

Ada, until Gnat came out, was similar to C++, minus templates and "real" object orientation but plus generics and threading. It was also hand crafted by military contractors out of pure unobtanium. The true interesting bit, Spark, didn't come until later. (I'm not sure who did the Ada I used in a class in the late '80s.)

Smalltalk was neat, but never caught on, possibly due to the lack of free implementations and the difficulty of integrating with anything else. (The original prototype of the OS/2 3.0/Warp UI was done in Digi-something Smalltalk. (Waves feebly from IBM.))

Lisp, in particular Common Lisp, was very popular in certain areas, but again died out. Possibly another combination of lack of free implementations, integration difficulty, and sheer difference from the alternatives. (Scheme. Sigh. The cleanest language design ever. But no single OO design when that hype train was at full speed. Plus, parentheses, which well Common Lisp had already poisoned.)

Guy Steele said that Java dragged the industry halfway to Lisp, if that means anything.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if Sather had caught on.

(forked from Eiffel in 1990, unlike Eiffel it was free and open-source)

Authors claimed it was as fast as C++.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sather

I think it never had Eiffel's level of tooling, and libraries, focused on UNIX platforms as CLI compiler, hence why it never took off outside its research university.

I learned about it on a Dr. Dobbs article and that was about it.

As for performance, Eiffel was already quite fast, because while it used a VM for development (MELT), AOT compilation was done via system compilers, with support for generics and value types from the beginning.

It was also one of the first OOP languages to support non-nullable references.

EDIT: This was the Sather article I referred to. https://www.drdobbs.com/tools/the-sather-programming-languag...

I subcontracted to a guy who was sold on the eiffel hype. I got an installed it to. I managed to crash the compiler in the first few minutes of use. The other guy ended up entirely distrusting the incremental compilation after losing a day or so to that.

I don't remember any particular tooling, and the language was crap (Meyer was better at hype than language/compiler design).

IIRC sather was eiffel with the subtyping holes fixed. Bertrand Meyer allowed holes in eiffel subtyping (which sather disallowed) which he (meyer) was sure he could deal with, but eventually they proved intractable IIRC.

My boss eventually abandoned eiffel, and let the eiffel company know why. It was not an enjoyable experience for either me nor him.

To implement a prototype of the future, this works well, but to sell something to consumers you have to implement something "cheap", which Xerox PARC didn't manage to do..

And yet their innovations paved the way towards HCI paradigms we take for granted today. So although they weren't practical when they were invented, I think there's still value to these sorts of labs to continue paving the way for the practical creators of of 2034.

The timeline checks out though. The Macintosh came 12 years after the Alto was conceived, or 16 years after Engelbart's NLS.

They’re probably advanced in achieving some strange specific technological goal like making rotor blades sound like goats. But they probably do it with floppy drives.

Focusing on the task at hand, using what they know works with well understood failure modes. It's smart.

Its just interesting how the US military is simultaneously advanced beyond belief. And behind the times.

It's like in those SciFi movies,where people live in ancient Greek kind of environments yet have lasers, teleports and etc..

Multifrequency, spread-spectrum, unjammable, secure communications that sound like an ancient POTS line over a sub-oceanic cable and have the connection resilience of two cans and a piece of string.

A Blackhawk with five blades.... Shhhhh!

Does it also have a moisturizing strip?

15 years ahead is a good rule of thumb for DoD / Aerospace. 3D printing and additive manufacturing used to carry monikers like Rapid Prototyping and Stereolithography but has been in use for decades. Another metric is cost, which is typically many orders of magnitude ahead of the inevitible consumer tech version.

I love reading about space history. And the part of the article that hit home was the floor with 200+ engineers working as a team. That engineering led culture is giving way to financial dominance.

The Long-Forgotten Flight That Sent Boeing Off Course: A company once driven by engineers became driven by finance

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing...

I was struck, though, by this quote: "my Electrical System Engineer Al Gross threw me a curve. He said, 'Bob, we need to connect two new circuits with a couple of diodes. I don't know where you are going to put them, but I don’t want to add them to the Recovery Programmer as this will trigger a requal program,' That would require a lot of work and paperwork to requalify the programmer."

I don't know enough about aerospace to really follow this (or even to know what a "programmer" is in this context), but it certainly sounds strikingly similar to Boeing's use of ad-hoc engineering solutions to avoid expensive retraining of pilots.

Perhaps technical corporate culture has always been a complicated relationship between finance and engineering. Triumphantly successful projects tend to make everyone forget about the tension, while miserable failures lead to more introspection.

Both bombing drones and stealth helicopters seem to be relatively straightforward concepts that were not publicly developed simply because outside of the military there is no motivation to pursue those things.

On the other hand AI and quantum computing are generally useful and require novel breakthroughs, so I would expect a smaller gap or no gap.

For my part, as no one special in particular, I've seen information and intelligence tools available to line unit leadership which were well ahead of their time. As well, I have seen technology at work in the field during missions which I did not recognize at the time (and at least one thing I still cannot explain but which certainly must have been some kind of weapon or recon platform). I also have family that works tangentially with skunkworks engineers who is quick to say exactly this, that the bleeding edge the defense contractors are working on is easily a decade or two ahead of the curve.

Always interested in ufo stories. Care to share any details?

Sure. To sort of preface this here by ruining my credibility, I was once previously witness to an "actual" UFO, before I was in the military (in the company of several others including a police officer, however still unexplained). Anyway, the thing I was talking about was much less "that kind" of UFO than something with components I may be able to explain but which I did not then and still do not today completely recognize. What I and others in my (infantry) unit saw were vehicles with a kind of very low frequency pulsejet propulsion system in the night sky above a certain large Iraqi city, flying in from the south (ish) and making a big U-turn before flying from whence they came (ish). You'll have to trust me when I tell you these were yellowish flashes from some kind of fuel detonations and not flight lights, given the flashes would appear bright, expand quickly, and then fade out over 1-3 seconds while maintaining a static or near-static position in the sky. However unlike any pulsejet system I've ever heard of, these flashes would occur only about once every 5-10 seconds, albeit at very regular intervals. They were also completely silent. There were no other flight lights of any kind, and they only ever flew at night. Through nightvision, we could very briefly see the fuselage streaking forward after each explosion, but otherwise not visible. I suspect they were painted black, as were many other kinds of aircraft we were accustomed to seeing (including of course some otherwise completely normal-looking civilian-ish aircraft whose operators would rather everyone simply forgot existed). The object through thermal optics were almost exactly the same, with the explosions visible (as hot), and what must have been the fuselage briefly visible streaking away from the explosion (also hot, though nowhere near as hot as the explosions). I never saw these things drop or fire munitions. But also neither were they ever seen to have been fired at, which I mention only because that's what we first thought it may have been, however incredibly unlikely, until we noted the interval regularity and these sightings became a not-uncommon occurrence in the night sky. However I did once witness some "normal" jet aircraft (flashing white flight lights) vaguely shadow one of these objects through it's U-turn and continue on at a slower speed after it. Just to be clear: I can't be certain if the flashes were actually propelling the fuselage forward, so I don't mean to imply the "streaking" was any kind of discernible acceleration, but rather just was the only other visible component of this thing at any time.

I have heard first-hand accounts of people who saw the SR-71 in operation during Vietnam. Blew their minds, considering it still looks ‘futuristic.’

when we learned that the SEAL team that killed Osama Bin Laden used a stealth helicopter, something that no one in the world had any public success toward achieving

It’s more interesting that it leaked out that they crashed one of said helicopters because they ignored the mission planning advice they’d been given. How embarrassing!

Could you expand on that? I've never heard about this.

The crash happened during the bin Laden raid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Osama_bin_Laden

> ... because they ignored the mission planning advice they’d been given.

Who is "they"? (The pilots?) Which advice was ignored?

> The crash of the Blackhawk may have been, at least in part, caused by the aerodynamic deficiencies introduced to the airframe by the stealth technology add-ons.[321]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Osama_bin_Laden#Helic...

They were told if you hover low over the compound walls you will lose lift and crash, but they did it anyway because they’re the Navy Seals(tm)

The most interesting thing for me is: how do you keep all those bright minds with enough knowledge and experience from striking out on their own either in academia or in business? At the end of the day creating new tech is hard, replicating 'easy'. Or is it that the "15 yr ahead" simultaneously suggests it's about 15 yrs of work on your own to replicate? Perhaps they work with great compartmentalization? But compartmentalization suggests you don't need great minds, but just very good minds with good structure. That goes against what I think I know about innovation. It's quite fun fantasizing about a world within a world with better technology.

On this subject, there is a very interesting new book about Jim Simmons, the founder of Renaissance Technologies, who used to work as a codebreaker in the US. I think for many of the people in these programs, the attraction is getting to solve problems beyond anyone else's reach, with tools beyond anyone else's reach.

> getting to solve problems beyond anyone else's reach

more this, and less "tools beyond anyone else's reach".

A fair number of people go to work with these groups to "check the box" that they've done it. They know who's at NSA, or CIA, or DARPA. Because they spent 2-5 years with them inside the box. There's a tremendous amount of self-confidence that comes out of a successful turn at one of these places. You know you know.

You are ignoring a very important part of it - some people genuienly want to "help their country" and are willing to sacrifice personal success for this. For example it's not exactly a secret that 3-letter agencies don't pay software engineers anywhere near as well as other IT companies would, but the promise of doing something "for your country" is worth more than money(just like game developers sacrifice money to work on something they really like).

>For example it's not exactly a secret that 3-letter agencies don't pay software engineers anywhere near as well as other IT companies would, but the promise of doing something "for your country" is worth more than money(just like game developers sacrifice money to work on something they really like).

You hit the nail on the head in explaining this dynamic, but I hate the fact it exists in the first place, in game dev or IC. It also exists with US special operations, as another way to sort out anyone who isn't a true believer.

Fair, you might say. I just think it's dumb a Google/Netflix/Facebook engineer working on some boring cog in their company's infrastructure gets paid a top-of-market $250k+, while an engine programmer working on an AAA title makes half that, or a firmware engineer working on offensive cyber payloads makes half that, or a special operations solider makes half that.

Maybe it's just market demand: boring stuff is paid better since everyone wants to do something exciting. But I think it's also a filter, and a lot of these places know that.

Since graduating from college with a EE degree, I've worked for 3 employers, all of which had or have very deep roots in the intel community. At my current firm, we've always had success by a large investment in new technology under IRaD. As one of our founders has said, we provide solutions to problems that our customers don't yet know they have. Payscales for engineers is consistent with commercial companies here in Silicon Valley. In my 40+ year career, I can honestly say that I've never sacrificed personal success for this job and the work that I've done has contributed, in a hugely important way, with our ability to collect and analyze data from the "bad guys". I have absolutely no regrets for my career path.

knowing how to do some highly advanced tech thing and building a successful sustainable business are orthogonal skills. It is very common for somebody in one camp to overlook this.

For the same reason people do research, that also "pays" a pittance compared to what those people could make in the market. And actually, it at least pays better than the academy. Most of the time you will move to some smaller, cheaper town. Sometimes even living inside a base. You can actually buy a house and have a family with defense wages. Try doing the same doing research on the academy.

Definitely with Quantum there seems to be a huge advantage to having it but convincing everyone that you don't. I think we can move towards quantum proof crypto, but it won't happen until we are convinced someone can spy on us if we don't.

I thought it was pretty widely accepted (if not outright known) that military applications, particularly hardware surrounding stealth or the ability to kill people, was about a decade ahead of anything comparable in the private sector. It's not surprising to imagine that gap widening over time as well.

Relevant McDonnel Douglas helicopter ad: (timelink) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0R117k9tdA&feature=youtu.be...

Yes, this is from a video about cattle mutilation, but whatever.

The distinction is really about scale.

Yes generally, there are people in the government using technology well more advanced than anything available to the general public. However it's only a handful of people that are using it. Much of the high cost comes from these systems being at such a small scale.

Also earlier this year when Trump tweeted a classified satellite picture of some Iranian factory and everyone marvelled at the details and quality...

This is not surprising, though, considering that the US are the most technologically and scientifically advanced country and that they have been outspending everyone else by orders of magnitude in military (and related domains) research for about 80 years.

worth noting one of the choppers crashed because (i think?) of the bad aerodynamics

in fact it crashed because it was hovering over the (walled) compound, and those walls were modifying the air flow and causing a vortex ring state. Most helicopters would have suffered the same fate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex_ring_state

All it takes is the will to see so many go without. A price most Western nations won't pay.

If US thinks it is valuable to keep some of it developments secret why would you assume other governments don't do the same?

I see no such assumption.

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