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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

"The team is speculating that the greater reliability may be connected to the fact that there were no humans on board, and that nitrogen rather than oxygen was pumped into the capsule."

That does sound plausible. But I do wonder how much might have been due to extra care. If I were the sysadmin on the project, I probably would have spent extra time on component selection, cable seating, burn-in testing, etc. Lots of pressure for it to do well.

Edit: Unrelated, but this picture is funny to me. I don't think there's enough room to slide that server out, so I'm not sure what he's doing. https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/800/cpsprodpb/48D6/production/...

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This:

"there were no humans on board"

Made me think of this:

"The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment."

Haha I hadn’t heard that one before, that’s great.

Is there more to that quote that makes it make sense? Otherwise both the human and the dog are redundant as a pair as their purposes are circular and don't benefit the factory.

I've heard it before as "The dog is there to make sure no one touches the equipment, and the man is there to feed the dog", may make a bit more sense.

That's what makes it a joke.

beep boop does not compute what is "humor"?

I heard it originally in reference to planes getting automated. The idea is that nobody would be comfortable riding a pilotless plane, so the pilot is hired on to assuage people's fears, but assigned a dog to keep him from messing with the automation.

I assume the same dynamic is at play, but I find the entire thing to be riddled with hubris, and projective of industry for industry sake.

Remind me that i never play D&D with you ;)

You must be great at parties

Every day, a user on HN strays further into social oblivion

A friend of mine wrote a paper on the effects of cosmic rays on memory errors in data centers a few years ago[1]. He also posited they had effects on hard drive reliability.

The first thing I thought of when reading this article is whether the increased shielding from the water reduced the impact of cosmic rays on the hardware.

[1]: https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/ASPLOS2012.pdf

Sun Microsystems had some Sparc servers where the on die cache didn't have ECC. And, cosmic rays created issues: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19095-01/sf4810.srvr/816-5053-10...

In a more dramatic example, Virginia Tech strung together over a thousand PowerMac G5s in a cluster they called the “Big Mac”, and it was one of the fastest (and cheapest) supercomputers of the world at the time. Unfortunately its lack of ECC RAM made its failure rate so high it would have trouble even booting. They dismantled it and sold the machines away one at a time and replaced the entire thing with an Xserve array instead, which had ECC.

I've always wondered whether the orientation of the memory chips in your computer made a difference for cosmic ray errors. That is to say, if their face is to the sky vs. their edge, will it affect the error rate?

You can try the experiment at home. The equipment is ~$100 : https://hackaday.com/2017/11/27/make-a-cheap-muon-detector-u...

It's also a really good random number generator, for those Hackers/crypto people that would like a true source of randomness.

Cosmic rays can come from any angle, and even pass through the entire earth without impacting anything. (millions of them are zipping through you and your RAM, right now! electrons barely dodging out of the way in time.)

I think (but have no reference) that the amount of cosmic rays the planet blocks by being in the way is dwarfed by the effects of the magnetosphere and solar rays.

Slight nit-pick: Neutrinos are the ones that are zipping through you and the Earth. They interact with things very rarely and have no real charge anyway. The rays you'd worry about with computer hardware are photons (gamma rays) with high energy enough to create new charged particles. Also other charged particles like muons and their decay cascades.

Watching an alcohool fog chamber is such a cool experience.

Not sure how you would do the math there. Edge up would maybe be a smaller target, but hits would pass through more silicon.

I think there is something to this I used to have a radio that would pickup this type of interference and days when it was heavy I would have more than usual amount hardware failures even powersupplies.

> there were no humans on board

Back when I worked at a supercomputing center, we had "operators" on duty, who were supposed to visit the machine room every 2-3h or so and check several things.

It turned out that they were the major cause of hangs and reboots of our SunSITE server (a large FTP archive) — walking on the lifted datacenter floor caused vibrations which were enough to disturb the (terrible) external SCSI connectors to multiple drive arrays.

So, I can certainly believe that statement.

They should have probably prepared two tubes like that, and flipped a coin to randomly dunk one in water, and leave the other one up?

The outcome you're looking for is pumping one full of oxygen and one full of nitrogen - at least to verify care vs nitrogen.

Yes. Ideally you'd have lots of tubes with varying all kinds of conditions.

Nobody's mentioning tin whiskers as a failure mode. Maybe the anaerobic atmosphere slows their growth?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisker_%28metallurgy%29

even treat wiki mentions conformal coatings can stop it. it's it long solved at manufacture?

> so I'm not sure what he's doing.

Maybe securing the vertical bars after the entire thing slides horizontally into the tube?

I'm assuming the tube has some rails they use to slide the racks in but then they have to be properly secured in place.

Our computer room had emergency breathing masks on the wall , asked why it was there I was informed about the halon gas fire suppression system.

Needless to say whenever I was there I kept having flashbacks to the first Resident Evil movie.

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