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Comment by theamk | Hacker News Reader

There are two kinds of "nobody knows": "Nobody knows how to make room temperature semiconductors" and "Nobody knows why my washing machine failed"

In the former case, it's a genuine mystery that can be only solved by very smart people and modern science. In the latter, it's the lack of interest - sure, for $$$ a knowledgeable engineer will take the washing machine apart and figure out the exact defect, but no one is going to pay this, they'll just throw the washing machine away and get a new one.

The historical software knowledge is definitely the latter. It is eminently possible to dig into any part of software and eventually get a full understanding of this part. But most of the time, it's way cheaper and more practical to shrug and ignore the problem, or maybe add yet another layer to compensate.

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Unless, for example, you invested billions into trains that run on Windows 3.11 and retrofitting all of them with a modern control system is prohibitively expensive. Which means the second type of knowledge becomes as irreplaceable as the first one.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240127140416/https://www.gulp....

I guess you mean "room-temperature superconductors"; if you don't, I submit you and your laptop can come out of the walk-in freezer now. It'll still work. ;)

There's also the classic, "Nobody knows how to make a pencil."

That kind of "nobody knows" is about the complexity of many large interconnected systems, and the deep wells of knowledge, theory, and history in each of the various domains.

I argue it's different from your washing machine type because the domains of computing are vast. Sure, you can dive in and figure some things out when necessary, but you can do that with pencil production too.

You can figure out _a_ way to make a pencil, but it may not be as efficient or clever as they did it the first time. Or it might be a lot more practical with modern abilities that were impossible at the time of the first pencil.

If you started today, you might not use graphite, or wood. That's ok for pencils. But it might mean we've forgotten a technique they used for making pencils that's also useful for tiny gear shafts. But we don't use it for gear shafts anymore because somebody invented the Swiss lithoscropy process.

I thought the whole point was that nobody knows how to make the pencil we think of as a regular pencil.

There's the graphite core, the wood handle, the yellow paint, the eraser and the little metal ring holding the eraser.

No one person knows how to find, extract and refine the raw materials, then turn them into those components and put it all together.

Agreed, there's a difference between "nobody has the time or money to care" and "no human mind has the capacity to hold the whole model at one time."

I was fortunate to get a computer and electrical engineering education that ran the gamut from making basic organic semiconductor structures in the lab and up the pyramid through logic gates, adders, a custom processor on an FPGA, writing a custom RTOS, patching the Linux kernel, and writing a userspace application.

There are no black boxes anywhere on that stack - someone somewhere knows or knew how it worked - but the last time that some systems engineer could claim comprehensive understanding of the stack was probably no later than the early 80s.

Individually, one can build broad competence, comprehension, and a career at some height in the pyramid, and can have limited comprehension of things directly above and below your zone, but the whole pyramid is superhuman.

How would you approach this problem https://github.com/pyasn1/pyasn1/issues/55?

There is a library called `pyasn1`, the author passed away and there are some challenges, such as intimidatingly long error messages that are not easy to interpret, or counter-intuitive behaviour of some of the functions in its API.

Do you have any tips for approaching this with the few resources that are available?

"Nobody knows how to operate this 40 year old kubernetes cluster anymore". Some of you will go billing thousands per hour rewriting legacy Helm manifests for antiquated banking infrastructure.

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