

Greybeard Stories: The Jamming Gyro - RiderOfGiraffes
http://www.penzba.co.uk/GreybeardStories/TheJammingGyro.html

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RiderOfGiraffes
This will be the last of these stories for a while. The previous two stories
pretty much sank without trace, so I thought I'd finish and submit this one,
then stop writing them up and re-think the effort.

In case you're interested:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=996250>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=994358>

~~~
shaunxcode
For what its worth I just read all three and really dug them! It might help to
use a more regular blog format so people can post comments?

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RiderOfGiraffes
When I get back from my meeting I'll put links on them back to here - thanks
for the idea. I should've thought of that.

~~~
ynniv
I think that you can quickly add a commenting system to static sites with
disqus.com. I would also consider adding Google Analytics or piwik.org to
better understand the hits you are getting.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
I'll look at those over the weekend - thanks.

~~~
gridspy
Consider some sort of email or twitter list where you can notify us of new
posts and politely ask us to upvote you.

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brandnewlow
You need to round up a voting posse to help push your stories up onto the
front page. Doesn't take much, just 1-2 HN users who like your stuff and will
toss you a few votes when something goes up.

Edit: Of course they need to be people who really like your stuff. Not
suggesting he game HN, just that he let fans know when there's a post they can
check out.

~~~
jacquesm
It would be a very sad thing if that's what it took to get stories to the
front page. Unfortunately it seems that quite a few people have adopted your
'tactic', I always find it a little suspicious when links have been posted
literally minutes ago and already have 3-5 upvotes without any comments,
especially if they then scroll off the new page without receiving further
upvotes.

My guess is that those are simply sockpuppets used for the initial votes. The
sad thing is that plenty of times the strategy seems to work.

~~~
brandnewlow
Sock puppets are bad. I'm not advocating that at all.

What I'm saying is that the OP should take note of some of the people who dig
what he's doing here and let them know next time he has a post on HN.

I like voting for good stuff and helping to promote interesting links on HN.
When people who's stuff I like post new stories, they let me know, and I'm
glad for it.

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jrd
Seems implausible to me. Rather than a self-destruct, it would be more
plausible to just disable the explosive trigger altogether. If a torpedo fails
to hit target for whatever reason (including, but not limited to the original
problem) you don't necessarily want it to explode in some random place. Nor is
it clear how, if this failure did occur with loss of all hands, we would ever
have known about it.

Despite this, I take the point of the story to be that self-corrective failure
detection mechanisms should not be capable of causing greater harm than the
maximum plausible damage of the problem they were intended to correct.

~~~
woadwarrior01
Possibly because you don't want your adversary to get one of your unexploded
torpedos and copy / reverse-engineer / exploit a design flaw. Tactically
that'd be far more devastating than losing a ship or two.

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thechangelog
Interesting (and depressing) story. On one of your posts you say:

"Sometimes because of the nature of my work I get to hear stories from a
greybeard with a past that is, well, "interesting." And again, because of the
nature of my work, or more accurately, because of the nature of their work,
the stories can't be verified."

What's the nature of your work?

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
I'm in the commercial world producing kit (hardware and software) to assist
with the analysis of real-time data used in quasi-governmental organisations.
That means I work regularly with military and ex-military personnel, and they
talk to me off the record.

You can probably track me down if you like, but I generally try not to make
the connection between my on-line persona and real-life work obvious. Feel
free to email me if you'd like to know more.

~~~
thechangelog
I think that separation is a healthy policy; it was more just a mild
curiosity.

I really enjoyed your three grey beard stories and I'd love to read more if
you have them.

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exoself
Long time lurker. Signed up to say keep the greybeard stories coming!

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balding_n_tired
If the sub sank with loss of all hands--not unlikely if a torpedo went off in
the tube--how did anyone know about this? A hell of a lot of submarines never
came back to base in WW II, and in most cases a) there were no survivors, b)
very little debris seen.

I also wonder about the basis of the story. The USS Tang was sunk by its own
torpedo in October 1944. That leaves about 8 months for the changed torpedoes
to operate.

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cmkrnl
This should have been tested by The Black Team :)

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kylemathews
This is really just the black swan problem. You can't predict unpredictable
problems. The only real solution is to stay agile.

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RiderOfGiraffes
Agile really, really doesn't work with systems like torpedos. Or with hardware
in general. Or with many types of security systems.

~~~
kylemathews
Sorry -- agile was the wrong weird to use. I didn't mean agile as in loose
engineering standards -- I meant agile as in "ability to react quickly and
decisively to unexpected events". You can't possibly plan for every
contingency, as the story proved, so it's crucial that your organization can
quickly and easily fix problems as they come up. This has implications for
both engineering and people systems. OODA loop is a better description of what
I was thinking of (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop>).

So having modular, cleanly separated subsystems would matter as much for
hardware as for software.

~~~
pronoiac
Ah. "Adaptable."

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mvaerle
They should've written unit tests obviously ;-)

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ajross
I know it's a joke, but the truth is that this is exactly the kind of bug that
unit tests won't find. The unit tests would have simulated a bunch of gyro
settings, with and without a single gyro failure (but not two gyro failures,
as that was an accepted design limitation).

Running the gyros with the torpedo still on the boat, however, would not have
been tested because the designers didn't think of it. If they had thought of
it, the failure wouldn't have happened in the first place.

Testing can verify that your software works within the space of behavior that
you _already_ know about. It can't make up for your failure to understand the
problem fully.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
Same problem here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=994358>

It's the unknown and unanticipated failure modes that cause the worst
problems. Predicted failure modes at least have code to deal with them, even
if it's buggy. Unit tests reduce the bugs, but non-existant code for
unanticipated failures, while it doesn't have bugs, doesn't solve the problem.

~~~
caf
This is why it's a really good idea to have the unit tests written by someone
who didn't write the code being tested.

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joshu
This is great. I love war stories.

