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Comment by misterprime | Hacker News Reader

I love this sort of reporting. It's enlightening to learn about the infrastructure that makes our way of life possible. I love learning how these projects are funded and who's funding them, who is implementing the projects, how they are implemented, what some of the concerns are, and the related political drama surrounding these projects.

I feel similarly about oil, energy, and food production and delivery.

So much goes on without most people even giving it a second thought.

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Next time you eat a fast food item, think about how many people were involved or one step away from making that burger or sub.

Meat, bun, spices, ketchup, mustard, pickles, lettuce, cheese, bacon...

Every one of those has hundreds ro thousands of people involved. Researched, seeds, planted, grown, harvested, collected, processed, quality controlled, containerized, packaged, distributed, opened, preparedz put on your bun, served.

All those steps have at least one person involved, plus management, plus sales, plus quality, plus food scientist research, plus people's tastes research. Plus the manufacturing of the tractors, packaging systems, quality control equipment, processing equipment... hundreds more people.

We eat like kings of old with hundreds of people working to feed us one meal, and we don't think anything of it.

This is a book excerpt that I originally found from an HN post ages ago. It's a fun read

https://www.howtoflyahorse.com/what-coke-contains/

Basically covers (not too deeply) how a 12-pack of Coke cans in your local grocer involved work on every continent except Antarctica. The book itself was pretty good too, but this was probably the best chapter.

Your comment reminds me of Leonard Read's classic essay, "I, pencil" [1] about the many thousands of hands that make a simple pencil, all guided by local decisions and price signals, without a single mastermind.

[1] https://fee.org/resources/i-pencil/

That’s exactly what I was thinking, except I thought Milton Friedman was the source. Did not realize it pre-existed him.

Thanks for linking this! I read the introduction and skimmed the text. The details of manufacturing such a simple object are fascinating, of course. I certainly agree that they demonstrate one of the reasons why centralized planning doesn't work.

Going from "central planning doesn't work" to "therefore we have proven that unregulated capitalism leads to utopia" is...odd.

The irony is that central planning would be more possible now than ever.

Previously, there was a data collection, storage, and processing limitation. Manual collection, entry, and early computers simply couldn't process quickly enough to continually model the economy at the requisite fidelity.

But now, we still have the human data reporting problem, where the storage, network, and computational resources are possible, but the first mile "getting true numbers, reliably" still prevents the implementation of an effective centralized system.

Reminds me of this commercial about not wasting food: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5c2Z7EqQLQ

Follows the life of a strawberry that goes moldy in the refrigerator.. and how many steps it took to get it there for it to just go bad in the end.

That's the economy right? We can take it a step further. If you are getting a burger from McDonalds, and you are using their self-service kiosk, there is a whole world/economy behind that. Software, Hardware, Touch Screens, CPUs, Connection, etc... If you are using an international card to process your order, there is a whole set of banks (throughout the world) involved in that particular and single transaction.

This kind of makes you think: All that efficiency comes at a cost (fragility). There should be contingencies to that. (ie: Cash acceptance is mandatory, at least one human kiosk, a list of close food suppliers that you can use in case your supply chain breaks, etc...)

That is what I have been stating on HN since the start of HN? Commodities are the basic fabric of our economy, but Silicon Valley ( and by extension on HN, ) treat it as if some simple, unimportant, easy to optimise and automate domain.

You would expect COVID could force them to learn or think about some of these things. But most still dont.

Some of this was covered in the book Connectography by Parag Khanna https://www.paragkhanna.com/book/connectography-mapping-the-...

I found the book maybe a bit overly optimistic/idealistic about how he thought infrastructure dependencies would impact the world, but a lot of the information was fascinating nonetheless.

Nice Maps of different layers of infrastructure on the globe: https://atlas.developmentseed.org

Me too! To add to that, whenever I see good visuals of global energy markets, and traders in a room full of screens, I get excited in a way I use to get excited seeing a terminal being used before I knew anything about coding.

I still randomly will encounter people who asked what I do and then happened to see terminal on the screen and are like oh wow you're a really technical person. One time it was a stewardess and a court reporter who saw me tailing logs on an application I was debugging. And they're like how can you even tell what's going on when all I was doing was looking for the obvious patterns of java stack traces.

Another was a guy sitting at a bar next to me who turned out to be a NFL sports reporter. And same deal I opened up the terminal and he's like oh shit your real smart. As I'm literally just listing a directory and then doing a git status.

There is a scene in Orwells Homage to Catalonia that reminds me about this:

A young italian peasant militia man, stands with open mouth, astonished off his genious officers, who were reading a simple map. So, this is an old trope.

Education is important it seems and while I don't think that everyone needs to get along with a terminal, everyone should at least understand what it is. For most people computers are essentially dark magic. And I think this us not doing good to society that has become so dependant on Computers.

Nah, let them keep thinking typing ‘ls’ is black magic. Keeps our salaries high :P

jokes on you, a new generation of people are coming up having known nothing but smartphones. I work with one as a developer. She only uses her macbook because she has to. Very little insight of how the underlying OS and fundamental computing stacks works and yet she writes good fast code.

The companies are all colluding to lock down computing more and more and who do you think will push back against this? Not them thats for sure. If you never let the greater population understand the freedom they have now, they wont fight back when it comes time to try and take it away. Its probably too late anyway.

Pretty soon you'll be writing code in a locked down appliance with no freedom (or AI takes your job).

I work with developers like that too. When they see me doing rudimentary things in Linux, they view me as a wizard. My job is safe and my skills are rare and valued.

Bet when you started the greybeards of the time were miffed you couldn't just do assembly or read a hex dump like it was a newspaper, and you turned out alright (maybe).

> Very little insight of how the underlying OS and fundamental computing stacks works and yet [...] good fast code.

What domain is this? That's near impossible in most!

Frontend web mostly doesn't care about OS performance. Should care, but nearly anything works nowadays :V

If you have enough abstraction (like with the web) and understand basic performance principles, like instructing the computer to only do, what is neccessary, then one doesn't need to understand the system beneath, to get performant code.

It is mostly enough to know that method A is expensive (e.g. drawing a big image) so if you avoid it, than this what brings you good enough performance.

So sure, no one is talking about high performance low level graphic engine code. For this you clearly need to understand the bare bone metal interface. And of course the baseline is pretty low these days. The ordinary web is full of horrible inefficient ways of doing things, so you are probably already above standard, if you avoid the worst habits..

What's even more fun is when you have actual experts doing things with the very computer you're fixing; using tools and datasets way beyond my comprehension, get amazed by opening a terminal or CMD and fixing something.

One of my proudest moments in masters was they had the masters students demo each week to the undergrads. So I'm in a big auditorium on a pc with a projector behind me. This was in 2000, computer still had a floppy drive. They wiped the computer every week, Windows NT.

I popped in the floppy did D: and typed `ls`... and error, and the whole class laughed at me. Having been switching a lot lately I typed, I believe, `echo dir > C:\Windows\ls.bat` and (or whatever the right pipe command is, it's been a while), and typed `ls` again. Then double birded the whole class. And started launching the demo.

There were audible gasps esp from the professor who was like, hold up, what did you just do. So I spent 3 minutes explaining it to the class, then we did our demo.

I was at the time quite proud of them all being flabberghasted while I also flipped off over 75 students, actually still am.

>I was at the time quite proud of them all being flabberghasted while I also flipped off over 75 students, actually still am.

Me too son, me too.

Ron is that you?

Modern computing has definitely lost the "computer is whatever you have the time / skill to make it" default understanding.

For all its faults, IMHO that's the greatest strength of Unix-alike philosophy: making small hacks easy, if you know how the system is composed.

Wait, they were familiar with terminal commands (dir vs ls) but they didn't know how PATH worked? Or am I misunderstanding something

I seemed like a genius once to it support at big co when I heard him having issues with "ok I fixed the text what do I do now" which I just said esc:wq. Guy was like what the helly you say, I repeated. He was like thanks and wrote it on the bottom of the white board. From them on I skipped the line at that office.

"Why does he get to skip the line. Oh this is his 3rd time in here this week" (8 am on a Monday).

For me, it was sitting in the back of a lecture hall, with a law prof, showing how AOL instant messenger danced across on the school's wifi unencrypted. I miss those days of easy ethereal magic.

Early 2000s WEP key recovery with cantennas.

You may enjoy: https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

That one article justifies the entire exitence of Wired for me, personally. I still remember reading it with pleasure in '96.

I bought "Some Remarks" by Neal Stephenson just to give this story to someone.

You might enjoy the 99% invisible podcast

Wanna see how a bullet is made?

Lord Of War - Life Of A Bullet

https://youtu.be/8LUEiKs2UAo?t=57

Well, not showing how a bullet is made, but an attempt at coarsely portraying the assembly of one rifle round, and then its shipment, firing, and the flight of its constituent bullet.