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Comment by bayindirh | Hacker News Reader

You should read "The Machine Stops" by E. M. Forster. Also, "Pump Six" from "Pump Six and Other Stories" will also do fantastic job of diving into this "forgetting how to maintain them" reality.

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Pump Six really nails that feeling of "this thing we don't really understand keeps filling the log with warnings we don't know what to do about, let's ignore them and pray it just keeps working."

Any similarities with the real world are surely coincidental.

Many apps have warning/errors that are undecipherable from the very beginning, let alone 20 years later.

Or only make sense when looking into source code that is long gone

The worst is when the log line is constructed in a way that makes it really hard to find the source. Source code file name and line number is ideal but a tag like on Android auffices.

And to say that people are paid to find traces of attacks in logs, while after 5 years, everyone ignores everything that’s in the logs.

The most incredible thing about The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster is how casually prescient it is - first published in 1909!

Instant messaging, video calls, the internet…

> "forgetting how to maintain them" reality

I serve the Omnissiah.

Awesome, thank you! Just as I was again running out of things to read.

Ringworld

Fire upon the deep, where space ships runs on a future version of unix and only one guy knows what the unix epoch means.

I don't recall that in that book. Maybe you're thinking of A Deepness in the Sky? I haven't read that one yet.

I think the reference is in Fire: It’s an offhand line about an ancient timekeeping system which the modern engineers mistakenly believe is calibrated to humanity’s first steps onto another celestial body.

As A Fire Upon the Deep is one of my favorite books (it's been a while since I've read it- my copy is currently on tour), I'd like to chime in and say I remember this reference, but I believe it's in A Deepness In the Sky, which goes more into Pham's backstory. It's definitely one of these two books though.

> Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely. . .the starting instant was actually some hundred million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems.

- Chapter 17, A Deepness in the Sky

At a conference I met Vernor Vinge and told him my entire career was basically because I read his books in high school. He was very happy.

I loved that aspect of it - it's becoming more and more true as we build more and more frameworks/abstractions. Once we got to Kubernetes and some of the modern web frameworks, the notion of "Programmer-at-Arms", the one-in-thousands master developer who'd actually dig into the depths of these abstractions, made perfect sense!

Yes, that bit is in "Deepness".

I really love that series. It's been a little bit since I last re-read them but there are certain concepts/ideas in them that I still think of from time to time.

I think the first half of the first book is the best. Much less interested in Tine's world

Loved this series when I first read it and it will always hold a special place in my heart but I did reread a few months ago and the way Teela Brown (and some other women) is talked about/to left me feeling very uneasy.

Keep in mind if you start the Ringworld series there's also a tie in series that starts 200 years before Ringworld (Fleet of Worlds) and both end with the same last book. Niven and M. Learner wrote so many books...

I think the Man-Kzin Wars are also somehow related, but I'm not sure if it's technically in the same continuity or not.

Same universe, not sure if same characters. There are like 20 books, and I think some of them are community written.

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