Comment by superice | Hacker News Reader

Comment by superice | Hacker News Reader

Story time! When I was a much more junior programmer I once received a call from a client, who asked me if I could double check the code sending the container weights from a container terminal to the ship planning system. She explained a captain of one of the ships had called the planners and remarked he was both deeper in the water and tilted quite a bit more than he anticipated.

So I do my research, and it turns out we were sending weights including the metal of the container itself from the one system, but interpreting them as net weights, so excluding container weight itself. So we were off by about 3000kg per container, which is bad enough if the container is 25000kg total, but even worse when transporting empties, where we were off by 100%.

Thank goodness it is drilled into captains that there are strict limits when it comes to stability, and I have never met a captain who will depart if they are not absolutely positive about the stability of their ship, but man I have spent a good few nights lying awake thinking about what could have happened.

I thought I was just working on some boring logistics software at the time, where the worst that could happen was losing a container for a day or so. It was a rude awakening.

> I have never met a captain who will depart if they are not absolutely positive about the stability of their ship

A lesson learned in 17th century Sweden.

Care to share what happened in 17th century in Sweden?

They built a ship called Vasa which was so loaded with cannons that it sank immediately after leaving the harbor on its maiden voyage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship)

Thankfully now it makes an interesting museum.

IIRC it was really top heavy and would have sunk anyways without the cannons, as the geometry and ballast space ratios were hopelessly f'ed... I remember something about testing it by running sailors from one side of the ship to the other and the captain? Admiral? wanted to nope out of it but the orders to launch stood.

Wow, even with restoration, those pictures make it look like it is in shockingly good shape. I would expect hundreds of years in seawater to leave essentially nothing remaining.

The Baltic Sea is cold and too low in salt for sea worms, so wooden wrecks survive much longer than anywhere else in the world.

Til. Cool

The section about conservation in that article is quite fascinating. Apparently the worms are also missing because of pollution in that part of the Baltic Sea, and said pollution is now destroying the ship anyway.

Not entirely learned. There was a french ocean liner built in the last century that installed far too much marble in the first class areas near the top of the ship.

They had to rip it all out.

Sorry, I forgot the name of that liner.

Search engine returns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Imperator , a German ship.

"In October 1913, Imperator returned to the Vulkan shipyard to facilitate drastic work to improve handling and stability, as it had been discovered that his center of gravity was too high (see metacentric height). To correct the problem, the marble bathroom suites in first class were removed and heavy furniture was replaced with lightweight wicker cane. The ship's funnels were reduced in height by 9.8 ft (3 m). Finally, 2,000 tons of cement was poured into the ship's double bottom as ballast. This work cost £200,000, which had to be borne by the shipyard as part of their five-year warranty to the shipowners."

> I have never met a captain who will depart if they are not absolutely positive about the stability of their ship

Guess you have not dealt with air freight pilots in the third world or bush country?

Or that's why they wanted the check. They felt like it was a noticable problem so they got someone to look

I had interpreted the GP as specifically talking about maritime captains, which I imagine could be a very different boat (pardon the pun).

Can someone please explain why native English speakers always feel the need to indicate and express the pun? Literally every single time I see “pun intended” or “no pun intended” I stop for a while and try to understand why the author felt the need to wrie that.

If they weren't joking they'd say "No fun intended" but they are joking (and meta-joking that they aren't joking).

I assume "fun" should read "pun"—but this new version is funny too :-P

Often times you can increase the humor by calling attention to the joke, even if the joke is already obvious. Puns in particular seem (at least to me) to get funnier the longer you think about them so prompting the reader to think about them longer can have positive effects.

> you can increase the humor by calling attention to the joke

My opinion is that ruins everything. Just like those american comedies where the virtual audience laughs like goats.

Yeah, i think most people agree about laughtracks these days. Well, i hope cause i hate it too. But i think the pun thing is mostly just culturally translated. I think if you asked most people why, some would have a vague idea that it might be more funny but i bet the number of people that could give a plausible reason would be very small. People do it in hacky comedies so that they can place a pause and a laugh track to force the audience to laugh. A lot of humor is socially constructed and our own sense of what is funny is certainly no where near the same across the globe. I think sitcom TV culture has influenced us Americans in many ways, including how we handle puns in speech.

Most people think of it as camaraderie, like I'm nudging you into the joke with me

Sometimes we say puns on purpose, and sometimes we realize what we're saying is a pun as we're saying it, so we often distinguish which is which.

In interpret both as "don't miss the pun".

I doubt air freight pilots would live long if they didn't pay attention to weight distribution and the weight being properly secured.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Airlines_Flight_102 for a rather drastic example.

They don't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Pakistan_Internationa...

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