alt Hacker NewsIn case of this "invisible electrostatic wall", there were likely significant amount of people in that company who were at least somewhat into Star Trek[0], so I'd expect more than mere "meh, this happens" from people who had just seem to have accidentally invented a force field. It's not merely a weird emergent behavior, it's a behavior closely resembling a sci-fi technology, and therefore likely to have similar applications - so quite obviously a potential money and fame printer.
-- [0] - Which was well-known around the time of that event, and at its peak of popularity when the report in the article was filed!
When you work in production and have quotas to meet, you often ignore interesting side-effects. When I worked at google I worked at global cluster scale and frequently saw any number of events that in themselves would have been graduate-student-for-two-years projects that I had to force myself to ignore so I could get my main work (large scale protein design using 1-3 million cores in prod) to finish.
As a side note, always test any global-scale torrent system for package distribution carefully, as sometimes the code can have "accidentally n**2" network usage that only shows up when you have a worldwide grid of clusters.