from Hacker News

The Canary

by ebcode on 9/8/24, 7:22 AM with 54 comments

• by myrmidon on 9/10/24, 10:56 AM

  Excellent article.

  It is only mentioned in passing, but being 60 years ahead of schedule and 30 billion dollars under projected costs is such a boss move.

  Having stories like these better represented in media would help a lot in preventing general apathy and disillusion toward politics/government-- it might even help channel slight patriotism in a very positive way (toward improving infrastructure/society).

  In western nations, we have reduced nationalism (and national pride in general) by a LOT for the last generations (especially on the left side of the political spectrum), and I do believe that there is a significant hidden price to pay for this (as society and country).

• by Terr_ on 9/10/24, 7:35 AM

  > Basically no one came forward on their own: Civil servants appeared to lack the ability to be recognized. [...] Even their nominations feel modest. Never I did this, but we did this. Never look at me, but look at this work!

  Now I wonder if I should've looked at a career in government. Something to keep in mind the next time I find that I've somehow become the surviving "maintenance" developer on a project.

  Lots of material here, but the two main points I see about stopping mine collapses boil down to:

  1. Make mining companies actually install a safe amount of roof-bolts, rather using the new technique in a half-assed way that saves them some money while staying just as deadly as the old way.

  2. Stop mining companies from substituting their own unsafe models to justify mining-away columns that are are important for keeping everything up.

  _____

  > In 2016 — the first year in recorded history that zero underground coal miners were killed by falling roofs — Chris landed in a public spat. He’d seen an article by an economic historian about the history of roof bolts in the journal of Technology and Culture.

  > The historian wanted to argue that roof bolts had taken 20 years to reduce fatality rates because it had taken 20 years for the coal mining industry to learn to use them. All by itself, the market had solved this worker safety problem! The government’s role, in his telling, was as a kind of gentle helpmate of industry. “It was kind of amazing,” said Chris. “What actually happened was the regulators were finally empowered to regulate. Regulators needed to be able to enforce. He elevated the role of technology. He minimized the role of regulators.”

• by thushan on 9/10/24, 5:04 PM

  This piece is beautiful.

  I hope it gives you the tingles, and color on the people doing the hard work. Michael Lewis knows how to spot colorful characters and frame a thesis of a bigger idea around them. But there's lots of people like this in government, finding ways to nudges to be a "more perfect" version of our country — often exhaustingly facing headwinds to do so.

  I'm an acquired YC founder (S11 → Launchpad Toys → Google → Led early LLM efforts there), now serving in federal government at the U.S. Digital Service. It's the White House's technology arm where we bring people from technology and industry for 2 year "tours of duty" and help to modernize our systems and make our digital experiences better (Fixing Healthcare.gov, and recently shipping IRS Direct File are some of success stories).

  Your country could use you.

  We need experienced technologists across eng/product/design/business – people like YC founders and HN readers here.

  Consider taking a look: USDS.gov

• by motohagiography on 9/10/24, 1:55 PM

  these public service awards should be bigger than the oscars. I take a lot of shots at govt because I've seen it from the inside and seen some of the low things the people in it do, but sometimes the other ones solve incredible coordination problems like the ones described.

  the way for it to succeed is for projects and people involved to have shorter exits, as professionalizing public service accumulates a lot of dead wood that becomes indifferent to any given mission and success becomes the exception. the current military is a bad example of a bureaucracy, but the idea of a short duration national service would create talent pipelines and mission focus, along with national cohesion.

• by macrael on 9/10/24, 6:12 PM

  Very cool story. The technical bit at the heart of it, that Mark applied stats to determine the safe amount of column supports for ceilings rather than relying on various engineering calculations based on physics that all disagreed, is great. And it's wild that he had the data to collect those stats because of regulators requiring reporting on it, but that that data had sat around un-used for decades waiting for someone to actually turn it into safety.

• by ZeroGravitas on 9/10/24, 8:50 AM

  It's an interesting story, but I did wonder how much the transition to mountain top removal of coal and away from deep mines contributed.

  As the text makes clear the industry was mostly motivated by the cost of roof falls, not the deaths and injuries they caused.

  Random AI quote from Google Search: > Surface mining is more cost-effective than underground mining, and accounts for over 60% of coal production in the US.

• by nxobject on 9/10/24, 4:37 PM

  I had brief stints in state and county government doing policy work, and I remember a piece of advice for how you want to do work like Marks': you want to be high enough in goverment that you can make an impact, work with interesting problems in the real world – but not high enough that you get affected by regular changes in elected leadership, with eventually reverberate down the hierarchy. But in public service the compensation for doing good work is really just the ability to do more of that work, without being bothered too much about having to accumulate a fat CV (either in academia or industry).

  I'm glad he found his niche, and managed to survive so many administrative rehousings.

• by Stratoscope on 9/10/24, 9:15 AM

  This is quite an amazing and touching story. A must-read.

  I think the original title is better than the submitted one:

  The Canary

• by jdboyd on 9/5/24, 11:51 AM

  The title doesn't do this justice. This is about how in 2016, there were no roof fall deaths in US coal mines for the first time ever and the career and life of a federal employee who played a large part in that accomplishment.

• by seanc on 9/10/24, 9:33 PM

  Michael Lewis' book "The Fifth Risk" has other stories of exceptional public servants, and a very insightful commentary on public service in general.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifth_Risk

• by zavec on 9/10/24, 4:48 PM

  Among all the other great things, I found the bit about how cathedrals were built by trial and error really interesting. It had never occurred to me that operating on that timescale you could make changes from one bay to the next based on how the first one was reacting.

• by kjkjadksj on 9/9/24, 4:34 PM

  Too bad the workers are still covered in black dust inside and out

• by mud_dauber on 9/10/24, 8:02 PM

  I lost an uncle to black lung in a WV underground mine. One grandfather lost an eye (explosion), the other broke his back.

  I’m happy for Chris’s dedication - but this industry needs to die.

• by K0balt on 9/10/24, 10:15 AM

  Interesting article. Had to read it, trying to figure out why coal miners were in danger of falling off of roofs lol.

• by throwpoaster on 9/10/24, 1:19 PM

  “And what I took away from that was that I should be able to make my own decisions about right and wrong, and whatever anyone else thinks doesn’t matter.”

  A disturbing statement from a civil servant. Glad it all worked out in the end.