This is the second time I've seen a story on mining hit HN, it always strikes me as a bit odd as the two worlds are miles apart. But I find them both fascinating (I work in both industries concurrently - by day I'm working for a production drill manufacturer and by night I'm a founder of a startup).
We manufacture underground production drills and have drills at every major underground mine in Canada and many of the other large underground mines around the world. We have equipment at Kidd Creek which is the deepest mine in Canada. When I first began to learn about the conditions underground the first thing that surprised me was the temperature in the mines. It's hot!
In some mines it's so hot that a human can't comfortably work for long, or at all. AngloGold Ashanti's TauTona mine in South Africa is sitting somewhere around 3.9km (Nearly 13,000 feet). The rock face in TauTona at its current depth reaches 60C. This is where it starts to get even more interesting for me. At these depths is hazardous for a human to work but there remains precious metals at greater depths. The technology to reach it and automate the extraction of these minerals is non-trivial and the current tech isn't advanced enough to reach it reliably. There are interesting problems that integrate software and heavy-duty hardware (30,000lb drills).
For me, I think of mine stories like space stories. They both tend to have elements of designing and applying technology to overcome the challenges of nature in extreme conditions. The common ideas of adventure, exploration, and achieving new understanding to see things (and profit) no one else has ever seen before also help.
One of the better software and systems engineers I've worked with grew up working mines in West Virginia and Western Virginia. After retiring after 25 years as a foreman, he went to school and ended up with a PhD in some area of C.S.
Wanting to get his hands dirty, he ended up building several major systems for the U.S. military. He said the parallels of operating machinery, safely, in dangerous environments struck him almost every day.
We manufacture underground production drills and have drills at every major underground mine in Canada and many of the other large underground mines around the world. We have equipment at Kidd Creek which is the deepest mine in Canada. When I first began to learn about the conditions underground the first thing that surprised me was the temperature in the mines. It's hot!
In some mines it's so hot that a human can't comfortably work for long, or at all. AngloGold Ashanti's TauTona mine in South Africa is sitting somewhere around 3.9km (Nearly 13,000 feet). The rock face in TauTona at its current depth reaches 60C. This is where it starts to get even more interesting for me. At these depths is hazardous for a human to work but there remains precious metals at greater depths. The technology to reach it and automate the extraction of these minerals is non-trivial and the current tech isn't advanced enough to reach it reliably. There are interesting problems that integrate software and heavy-duty hardware (30,000lb drills).