Henri Bergson's debate with Albert Einstein swayed the 1921 Nobel committee - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/35/boundaries/this-philosopher-helped-ensure-there-was-no-nobel-for-relativity <comment><USER3> In a way it's a bit more surprising Einstein didn't get the Nobel prize earlier for his Brownian motion paper from the same year as his special relativity and photoelectric effect papers. It's the most beautiful of his three great papers of 1905. [pdf: [http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gold/pdfs/teaching/einstein_...](http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gold/pdfs/teaching/einstein_brownian05.pdf) ]

General Relativity was under active development in 1920-1921, and it is so fundamentally different from Special Relativity that it is unfortunate that each theory shares half a name with the other.

(Even more unfortunate is that it took a few decades to arrive at a mathematical and conceptual understanding SR in a GR context as simply one of an infinite number of possible hyperbolizations of a first order quasilinear system of PDEs along the lines of the Einstein Field Equations, or alternatively as a low energy effective field theory in the sense of Kenneth G Wilson (which is what GR itself might be in turn) -- that all became possible only because of mathematical and calculational discoveries made well after Einstein's death).

Special Relativity was surely worthy of a Nobel prize once its relationship with Minkowski space and the Lorentz and Poincaré isometry groups became fully understood (all by the mid-1910s), but General Relativity had also just become Nobel worthy thanks to the 1919 expedition.

So a Nobel prize for a special-case theory which may have seemed like it was about to be overthrown by a generalization by its originator? Or push the award off into the future after General Relativity had developed further? Or possibly two Nobel prizes, one for each theory? In 1920-1921, nobody could have known that it would take four decades for GR to become useful for working scientists, nor that SR and Newtonian mechanics would remain in use as (or in) effective theories even in 2016.

I wonder how much that line of thought might have weighed on the prize committee's mind, rather than objections raised by a non-physicist philosopher.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a kind of thing that have always fascinated me: People from past epochs (Bergson in this case) trying to convey a though and we being unable to parse it.

My favourite example is one of Robert Musil's essays. There are multiple versions of it, showing that he desperately tried to convey a thought and make it as precise as possible, but the meaning escapes me.

The reason for fascination is that even in the past there must have been clever people, Einsteins born 1259, that had valuable thoughts but were able to express them only within the contemporary context, using contemporary means.

It may even be that those thought could possible lead to whole new areas of knowledge but were never followed simply because the world have moved in a different direction in the years that followed.

A sad thing is that these alternative thoughts can be spotted only if they occurred not that long ago (for me, personally, the limit is maybe 1850). When you go further into the past, the things get simply weird and undecipherable (angels dancing on the tip of the needle, anyone?) Thus, the possibility to explore alternative branchings of the river of thought disappear forever as we move forward.

<comment><USER5> The debate about angels dancing on pins was about whether you could fit a finite number or an infinite number.

We can decipher a lot of great thought, even from before 1850.

Reach eg Archimedes' "The Sand Reckoner" ([http://euclid.trentu.ca/math/sb/3810H/Fall-2009/The-Sand- Rec...](http://euclid.trentu.ca/math/sb/3810H/Fall-2009/The-Sand- Reckoner.pdf)).

Some meta-information about it at Wikipedia: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sand_Reckoner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sand_Reckoner)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been unable to find the dialogue alone

without all of the editorialising

The article is fascinating, and I was unaware of this debate but I find it difficult to reason along with this article's diction

I'd love to read the original debate, if anyone had a link

Preferably an English translation, but the French would be fine too

EDIT : lstamour found it [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11646664](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11646664)

<comment><USER7> Did you try to follow up ref. 1 from the article?

<comment><USER6> i did, multiple search permutations all came up dry, circling back by linking to this same nautil.us article

<comment><USER8> I might have found it in PDF (with an annoying download timer) at [http://docslide.fr/documents/la-theorie-de-la-relativite- dei...](http://docslide.fr/documents/la-theorie-de-la-relativite-deinstein-a- la-societe-francaise-de-philosophie.html) or [http://bit.ly/23vLiif](http://bit.ly/23vLiif) (Google Books preview), found via exerpts at [http://dialog.ac- reims.fr/wphilo/philoreims/articlesb6fe.htm...](http://dialog.ac- reims.fr/wphilo/philoreims/articlesb6fe.html?lng=fr&pg=257) which cites Bergson-Einstein, Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie, T. XVII, 1922, Paris, A. Colin, p. 25 as the original source. This PDF might still be in copyright, so there might still be better sources out there.

<comment><USER6> found it, in french:

[https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b3075319;view=1up...](https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b3075319;view=1up;seq=361)

which matches your bitly link: [http://bit.ly/23vLiif](http://bit.ly/23vLiif) ; and the bitly link has a clearer typeface

also, it seems the pdf is the same document.. well done on the results!

one of your other links led me here:

[http://www.2iceshs.cyfronet.pl/2ICESHS_Proceedings/Chapter_2...](http://www.2iceshs.cyfronet.pl/2ICESHS_Proceedings/Chapter_25/R-17_Canales.pdf)

from there i got the citation:

The meeting was recounted in the Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie, vol. 22, no. 3, July 1922, pp. 102–113. It was reprinted in Bergson, Ecrits et Paroles, vol. 3, pp. 497, and in Henri Bergson, ―Discussion avec Einstein,‖ in Mélanges (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972).

of which i took the Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie, vol. 22, no. 3, July 1922,

which led me here:

[https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000505792](https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000505792)

and you can see v17-22(1917-1922) which leads to the above facsimile

you can easily confirm this by searching the text for the quote: Il n'y a donc pas un temps des philosophes ; which will be found on page 107

<comment><USER7> This is useful - thanks for tracking it down.

<comment><USER6> credit goes to lstamour

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Einstein has been described as a philosopher, and in a way he was - one of a new kind, both able and unafraid to follow reason through a veil of paradox into a disorienting world of postmodern uncertainty. It was an inflection point for philosophy, which could either follow Einstein or sink into self- referential introspection. Bergson had no clue as to what was happening.

Einstein himself stumbled over quantum mechanics, but there were others to lead the way.

<comment><USER10> I think Einstein did pretty well with quantum mechanics, as judged against his contemporaries. At least he knew something was wrong with the statistical/Copenhagen view. I think if he were told the Many-Worlds interpretation, he would find it beautiful and in line with what the character of natural law is supposed to look like.

<comment><USER11> The opposition didn't feel rational. For example, the EPR paradox was presented as a failure of quantum mechanics, when quite the opposite was true - and indeed quantum entanglement has been proposed for commercial applications. Simply put, in his later years people were already using QM to solve real world problems, while he was telling them their theories were wrong.

<comment><USER10> Well, the theories _were_ wrong. History has been kind to his viewpoints.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Consonant with the theme of deposing humanity from the center/top e.g. geocentric to heliocentric.

Bergson's perspective, which I interpret as 'things don't matter until they matter to someone', strikes me as more like engineering or economics: use not truth.

OTOH there's that quantum mechanics idea (that I don't understand) that a waveform only collapses into particles when observed by a conscious "observer"... seems very anthropocentric. Surely it can't be right.

<comment><USER10> Of course it's not right. The Many Worlds interpretation is a much more elegant explanation that does not privilege humans or consciousness.

<comment><USER13> And why would that be "more elegant"?

If, after merely a few centuries of industrial revolution, we are nearing to be able to make a good enough physics simulation, and thus it's conceivable that in th future (100-1000 years) we could create a very fine simulation of a world (with simulated humans in it too, a la Sims).

Then the same (that they themselves will be eventually able to create a simulation) can be said for the inhabitants of the simulated world we've created.

This means that in the end, there might be thousands or millions of such simulations inside a prior simulation.

This begs the question: why would then our world not be a simulation itself? Certainly if there are 1000's of simulations, it's more probable that we're somewhere in the middle than on the top of the stack.

Now consider the simulation above us: they create our universe as a simulation.

It would then make sense that:

1) the simulation would be in final analysis discreet. 2) it would only spare computation cycles when it was worth it.

So, (1) would involve something like Planks length (and related constants).

And (2) would make it so that "reality" (active simulation) exists only when one of us (humans/consciousness) look at it.

<comment><USER10> MWI is just the unitary, deterministic, local, continuous, linear evolution of a partial differential equation. There's no extra semantics that need to be added to tell you how to interpret it.

It's the only interpretation of quantum mechanics that has all of these properties. Others fail most of those qualifications. I'm particularly bothered by the thought that we don't live in a deterministic universe. This is what I mean by "more elegant".

As for whether our universe is a simulation, I'm familiar with Bostrom's argument, which you outlined. It's certainly an interesting idea and might be correct, but orthogonal to the original question of interpretations of quantum mechanics.

<comment><USER13> Well, (1) and (2) don't seem so orthogonal to quantum mechanics. Rather they'd explain them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Bergson quotes:

[http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/h/henri_bergson.ht...](http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/h/henri_bergson.html)

I'm not sure what's more amazing - the fact that Bergson was feted as a philosophical genius in the first place, or the way that Einstein dissected his pretensions so economically.

<comment><USER15> Sure, some Internet guy summarily dismissing a philosopher whose oeuvre spans decades and who is widely recognized and admired. That must be all there is to it.

I know next to nothing about philosophy, bur I've just looked up what Will Durant has to say at the very end of the subchapter "Criticism" about Bergson:

"Yet, of all contemporary contributions to philosophy, Bergson's is the most precious. We needed his emphasis on the elusive contingency of things, and the remoulding activity of mind. We were near to thinking of the world as a finished and pre-determined show, in which our initiative was self-delusion, and our efforts a devilish humor of the gods; after Bergson we come to see the world as a stage and the material of our own originative powers. Before him we were cogs and wheels in a vast and dead machine; now, if we wish it, we can help to write our own parts in the drama of creation."

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Seems like the last gasp for philosophy as a publicly influential field of work. I'd never heard of Bergson before, but I've certainly heard of Einstein.

When was the last time a philosophical argument or book was front-page news? I can't remember it happening. Stories of scientific discovery make the news pretty frequently.

<comment><USER17> Perhaps that is the fault of a deficient classical education, rather than the merit (or lack thereof) of Bergson's ideas? To extrapolate from your example argument, there are thousands of historical figures you have never heard of. And yet, their decisions and actions have had a profound effect upon trajectory of history, and the way the world appears to you today. Are they unimportant just because you have yet to personally learn about them?

Or perhaps it is a lack of imagination: Bergson was certainly a large part of the intellectual milieu in which Einstein was working. His thoughts pushed Einstein in certain directions Einstein might not have gone otherwise. Even if Bergson is unremarkable for his own work, surely he is important for no other reason than his impact on the thought of the remarkable and memorable theories of Einstein?

Taking 'I haven't hear of them' as your starting point of historical importance seems like an intellectually lazy argument to me. Each to their own, however, and you are certainly entitled to your opinion.

<comment><USER16> > Perhaps that is the fault of a deficient classical education, rather than > the merit (or lack thereof) of Bergson's ideas?

My point was not about merit, it was about cultural impact.

But having had some time to think about it, I'm probably wrong. Kuhn's concept of the "paradigm shift" is more recent than Bergson. While not directly challenging a specific theory the way Bergson did, it has certainly captured the imagination of the public and of scientists.

That said, it seems that Bergon's star has faded over time. I looked up a few lists of the most influential modern philosophers and he is not usually highly ranked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So, I worked with Bergson's texts quite a bit in grad school, as he is heavily in vogue at the moment in certain disciplines. To break down his argument to its essentials, the whole concept he is railing against is the spatialization of time. That is, for Bergson, time cannot be subdivided into the "mechanistic time" of the ticking clock, and the idea of a timeline is an abomination.

Hence Bergson's framing of time as duration: for Bergson the essence of experiential time is that our consciousness is always experiencing the latest moment sliding smoothly into the next. Time, he says, cannot be spatialization and counted as can space. Bergson railed against the idea of time being extrapolated to just another metric dimension like the 3 dimensions of space. The spatial dimensions, to him, were static, fixed, dead. It is only duration that gives our existential experience of the lived experience that we know. Spatialization, to Bergson, was a dirty word; it was the spatialization of our lived experiences that rendered industrial life dead, static, mechanistic and uninteresting. Bergson was railing against the idea of a physics that could predict everything, a popular thought in the early 20th century.

After WWII, Bergson was largely forgotten until Deleuze & Guatarri ressurected him. Deleuze in particular was an enormous fan of Bergson and promoted his ideas heavily.

But what was revolutionary about Deleuze's handling of Bergson was his incorporation of post-war complexity/chaos theory and quantum mechanics to recover space as a dynamic and mutable. Influenced by such concepts as Reimman mana olds and fractal theory, Deleuze recognized that space wasn't a static and mechanistic concept at all, but instead, like Bergson's duration, can give rise to all types of unpredictable behaviors, experiences, and mathematics.

Rather than focus on one concept of "space" \- the abstracted Euclidean grid - they classified space in two broad classes, the smooth and striated. Smooth spaces are spaces that are analogous to Bergson's duration: the experienced space of the journey, nomadic spaces, spaces that unfold rather than increment, that are uncountable and unexpected. Striated spaces are the class of spaces Bergson focused on exclusively: coordinate spaces, the countable spaces of the Euclidean grid and the map, or that of the timeline.

Essentially, D&G 'recovered' mathematical space as an exciting and unpredictable philosophical concept. All spaces arise from continuously recapitualtion of smoothing and striation, and counting spaces always give rise to the uncountable and to emergent behavior.

A good example is Conway's Game of Life: a simple set of rules played out on a metric space in countable time (striation) gives rise to emergent organizational patterns and a higher level of emergent behavior that simply cannot be predicted or quantified using the original simple set of rules alone (smoothing). Or, to take another case, the Mandlebrot set: a simple pattern gives rise to a recursive, self-similar-yet-never-identical structure that persists to infinity. For D&G it the uncountable always arises out of the act of counting.

This comment is somewhat outside the normal domain of HN, I know, so I hope you will excuse it. I rarely get to show off the hundreds of hours I dumped into D&G and Bergson in gradschool in my day job. :-D

<comment><USER3> Interesting. The vocabulary disconnect with General Relativity (which is the more relevant theory of relativity here, I think) is pretty frustrating, although one thing that struck me is that at the time Bergson was making these arguments, there was a lot of GR jargon yet to be invented. Also, crucially, a formal process for foliating a "block universe" spacetime was decades off (the 3+1 Arnowitt-Deser-Misner formalism arose in the late 1950s), so a late 1910s criticism of GR as treating the timelike axis as "dead" like the spacelike ones was almost reasonable.

Other important and relevant tools were either extremely fresh (e.g. Noether's first theorem) or had yet to be formalized (e.g. gauge theory), and these put practical limits on conceptual attacks on dynamical spacetimes (that's one reason why externally static vacuum metrics, like Schwarzchild's, were popular at the time). Numerical relativity wasn't even a dream in the 1920s.

However, in spite of not-yet-existing tools, it was pretty clear that General Relativity's coordinate freedom combined with diffeomorphism-invariant models of matter would accomodate standard approaches to time-series evolutions of field content (e.g., initial values surfaces and physical laws). Additionally, "ticking clocks" that appeared in Einstein's and others' GR papers were meant as shorthand for much more general objects -- basically anything that has some state that isn't time-translation-invariant. Ideal gases and other thermodynamic composite "objects" count, as do fundamental particles, as does an entire expanding or contracting universe. "Ticking" is simply the application of some arbitrary coordinates (not necessarily linear or even uniform ones; in GR they only have to admit a diffeomorphism) on those "clocks".

One of the interesting things that was pretty fresh prior to Einstein's Nobel was the resolution of the hole argument, which essentially abandoned manifold substantialism. Spacetime without a clock is simply an irrelevance; it's only the presence of at least one (or more) "ticking clocks" that gives meaning to any system of coordinates one puts down on the manifold -- and in particular it's the "ticking clock" or clocks that generate the metric; it is not something that is a property of wholly empty space, and that in turn led to a deeper understanding of the G_{\mu\nu} + \Lambda g_{\mu\nu} side of the Einstein Field Equations (i.e. the curvature of spacetime determined by the metric).

There was undoubtedly some "philosophy" going on in the early days of General Relativity, but frankly most of the work was on modelling gravitational collapse in general, which was both fairly difficult technically and also a deep well of unexpected consequences that were even more strikingly different from Newtonian gravitation than the Kepler problem in GR.

I'm fairly confident that the ideas raised related to this Bergson-Einstein debate were uninteresting (and possibly even mostly unknown) to most of the scientists exploring the golden age of General Relativity (1960s & 1970s mainly). GR, especially post-Einstein, racked up some extremely precise quantitative predictions of the behaviour of large bodies (and small things near large bodies) that matched later observations with high precision.

By the 1980s, the space for thinking about the philosophy of General Relativity was already mainly at inaccessible energy-densities or at almost pointlessly timelike-separations from us (e.g. the earliest we could see the consequences of black hole evaporation is about a hundred billion years in the future), so what's more interesting (I think) is the study of the mechanisms that generate the metric and the exploration of non-exact solutions, rather than picking at the scabs of GR's unremovable background.

<comment><USER17> This... was an amazing reply. Thank you for offering it, and taking the time to lay out such a long and thoughtful response. I think you are pretty much dead on, and your reply helped me connect some dots in my own mind about the meta-history of relativity.

Regarding the lack of interest in Bergson during 70s and 80s, I think you are precisely right, and the untestable nature of the time-like ramifications of relativity weren't something I had previously considered. Of course, by that time Einstein was so obviously right, and Bergson so obviously wrong, I think those physicists can be forgiven for not knowing, or for not giving a shit if they did know.

One of Bergson's chief objections to the Twin's Paradox was the idea of time slowing down for the twin sent on the relativistic journey. Such a thing made no sense to him, giving how he framed time: as an unrolling now that could not be subdivided into metric units.

Bergson's objections to time-like relativity are certainly understandable, I think, given the historical context. As you pointed out, the notion of a physics without a background of absolute space - the concept of the ether or an absolute background metric against which space time is measured - were the 'standard' model of the time. I would go even further, and say that many physicists at the time either had severe difficult in coming to terms with physics based on frames of reference, or they rejected it outright. So I don't think Bergson's objections to a relative experience of time are unreasonable, nor do I think you can fault him for his objections, given the difficulties physicists themselves had coming to terms with the implications of relativity. Something I hadn't really considered, however, is that we didn't have the laboratory apparati to test the hypothesis that time passes differently under acceleration until decades after Bergson himself was dead.

Regarding clocks, I certainly understand that a 'clock' in physics is a shorthand for a physical system undergoing periodicity: whether it is an actual clock, a cesium atom, or a gas, etc. For Bergson, however, it was the act of reducing the dimension of time to a countable metric itself that was problematic. For him, the idea that time can be subdivided like space was simply a trick of memory, not actual experience. If we focus only on the unfolding 'now' \- something difficult enough to do Bergson wrote whole books on it - we only see one moment elide seamlessly and smoothly into the next.

Bergson had no problem with pointing out that metric time worked quite well in modeling physical systems; his objections were to using this approach to model human experience (particularly with regards to free will and the implications of determinism inherent in relativity). Bergson was a proto-postmodernist, and was trying to get at the idea that the 'map is not the territory.' Hence Bergson's focus on the Twins Paradox. Relativity allows for a space-like time that can be 'run in reverse,' but actual time isn't space-like, in the sense that it can be traversed in one direction only. So despite what Einstein's equations predicted, Bergson objected that the notion of the Twins experiencing time differently was non-sensical.

What I hadn't realized prior to reading your comment is the similarity of Bergson's objections to the objections/difficulties physicists themselves had in abandoning the idea of a fixed, background metric space. He is essentially arguing for a fixed background of indivisible non-metric time that everyone experiences universally and that unrolls at a fixed rate for all observers.

On a side note, I've always thought Bergson (and pretty much the entire history of the philosophy prior to Einstein) had it precisely backward. Thousands of works have focused on and prioritized time as a cornerstone philosophical concept. Bergson was not alone is his obsessive focus on it. And yet, time is the most ephemeral and intangible concept of them all. You can't see it, you can't hold it, there is nothing there. 'Time' as we know it is merely the periodic spatial change repetition of some physical phenomenon: the vibration of an atom; the periodic steps of a watch hand; the filling of a fixed volume of space with water (as in a water clock).

Perhaps it's only the fact that I take living in a post-Einsteinian space-time for granted, but I always found it strange that people -including Bergson - <USER2> obsessively abstract 'time' as something distinct from itself, when what they are really seeing is space itself unfolding into... well, more space I suppose.

Thanks again for the thoughts, it was a great read with my morning coffee!

<comment><USER3> [continuation of too long comment]

"He is essentially arguing for a fixed background of indivisible non-metric time that everyone experiences universally and that unrolls at a fixed rate for all observers."

Right, that pre-Einsteinian picture has proven to be wrong. Accurate clocks at different altitudes and moving at different groundspeeds bear this out, even if people living on mountaintops or flying in jets don't notice the parts per billion difference in their day from the people living at sea level. The GPS tools they have with them do, though.

And, sadly, he did not live long enough to see 1971 ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafele%E2%80%93Keating_experim...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafele%E2%80%93Keating_experiment) ).

Penultimately, there are some theoretical physicists who think time is "real" in the sense that it is fundamental rather than just emergent. I think you are taking an emergentist position (which I agree with) when treating it as arising from observed periodicity. (Remember that your observation of something's period -- like the bouncing light pulse between the parallel mirrors -- is not necessarily the same as another person's observation of the same something.)

Finally, just to bend your brain a bit, in General Relativity in any universe which is even close to being like ours, you cannot have a system where a pair of mirrors with a light pulse bouncing between them can be forever parallel. The parallel mirrors and light pulse are a system of mass-energy that source very slight (but nonzero) curvature. That curvature means that the parallel mirrors, if close to one another, are on a converging path even in empty space far from all other matter. If far from one another, the metric expansion of space means that the parallel mirrors are on diverging path. In a completely empty universe with a finely tuned dark energy, one can set up a _classical_ system in which the system is extremely finely balanced so that the mirrors will stay the same distance apart (measured locally by a notional mass-energy- less observer moving with the mirrors), but real mirrors and light, made out of parts of the Standard Model, will break that fine balance, and the mirrors will move onto either a converging or a diverging path eventually (maybe bet on diverging because of the relative strength of the electromagnetic interactions with the light pulse compared to the gravitational potential energy, and because real mirrors are imperfect reflectors so some photons will "leak away").

On top of that, a really long (approximately "straight-line") Twin Paradox journey in an expanding universe can put a cosmological horizon between the Twins, so they'll never be able to compare their wristwatches in person. Each will see the other slow down and grow dimmer, but only the one moving at near the speed of light (still locally constant everywhere) will live to see her twin disappear completely across the horizon.

(Of course a similar journey confined to the neighbourhood of the Milky Way, e.g., by zipping to and fro many times, will not involve a cosmological horizon.)

"post-Einsteinian space-time"

Well, we call it post-Newtonian. General Relativity's fundamental theory (and in particular the Einstein Field Equations) is very much Einsteinian still. We just understand it better than he did, mainly because we have newer calculational tools (and newer mathematical innovations), and because we have the advantage of access to many thousands of relativists' work over the sixty years or so since his death.

> Thanks again for the thoughts, it was a great read with my morning coffee!

Likewise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Simultaneity plays an important role in the brain too, and there it is difficult to say who may be right.

<comment><USER9> The issues of simultaneity in consciousness are different from the issues that relativity address. I get the impression that Bergson thought his intuitions about time, arrived at (at least in part) by introspection, could somehow invalidate Einstein's evidence-based reasoning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Could it be that our brain simply overclocks/underclocks in certain situations, leading to different perceptions of time? Such a construct would probably never occur to either Bergson or Einstein.

<comment><USER20> They made experiments and apparently we don't overclock [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_motion_perception](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_motion_perception)</comment></comment>


Spectre.css – a lightweight, responsive and modern CSS framework - <AUTHOR> https://picturepan2.github.io/spectre/ <comment><USER2> Is it me, or is every CSS framework nowadays advertised as being either 'light,' 'responsive,' or 'modern?'

[http://danmalarkey.github.io/schema/](http://danmalarkey.github.io/schema/) [http://responsivebp.com/](http://responsivebp.com/) [http://getbase.org/](http://getbase.org/) [http://getskeleton.com/](http://getskeleton.com/) [https://www.myresponsee.com/](https://www.myresponsee.com/) [http://html5-ninja.com/icecream/](http://html5-ninja.com/icecream/) [http://www.fitgrd.com/](http://www.fitgrd.com/) [http://lightuikit.in/](http://lightuikit.in/) [http://bulma.io/](http://bulma.io/)

<comment><USER3> Just like every new shiny tool that pops up - everything is 'robust', 'scalable', easy 'to reason about'. What a time to be alive.

<comment><USER4> We are still in Wild West of shiny open-source frameworks, libraries and tools. As time goes by, a niche markets and more sophisticated marketing strategies evolve. "Clojure library for 18-35 whites living in suburbs" would become a common then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5>
      .form-checkbox,
      .form-radio,
      .form-switch {
        input {
          display: none;
        }
      }

All check boxes and radio buttons will be completely inaccessible to screen reader users if you use this framework.

</comment><comment><USER6> Tested on iPhone 6s:

\- No horizontal scrolling as reported elsewhere here, so all OK for me.

\- Code blocks OK, scrolling horizontally within the box as they should.

\- Tables OK and compressing sensibly. More room is for example automatically given to Name than Duration.

\- Navbar NOT adapting ok. Buttons overlap and distort branding label and navbar height.

\- Pagination NOT adapting ok. "Next" label follows on a new line rather than reducing the number of shown pages from "1 ... 6 7 8 ... 12" to e.g. "1 ... 6 ... 12".

\- Modals use vertically scrolling content (if reaching a max size?), rather than making the modal box fit the content. I like the that if used on an otherwise empty page, which is probably the idea.

\- Otherwise working seemingly OK with no special notes.

I hope the minor issues are fixed, because otherwise I liked the exhaustive set of features while maintaining clean HTML and think it may be a decent "light Bootstrap" alternative if you're fine with discarding the ecosystem that has evolved around Bootstrap.

<comment><USER7> Am on iPhone 6s and I see horizontal scrolling outside code blocks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think this is cool, but as an aside, what is up with the influx of css libraries on HN? Nothing against them, but there has been 1 or 2 in the top spot for the last few days.

edit: Including this ~3-4 in the last 5 days. Not staggering, just seems like a disproportionate to the usual amount as they are all just variations on pretty similar themes. Not to disparage creators, and I thought the CSS purge resources were awesome. Just an observation.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=.css&sort=byPopularity&prefix&...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=.css&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=pastWeek&type=story)

<comment><USER9> I feel like there's 20 CSS frameworks being made a day, so only the few lucky filter through to HN...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks fantastic! Thanks for posting it. I think it's great that the first install method suggested is simple: download the css and add a style link to it.

</comment><comment><USER11>

Come on.

This is my italic text.

<comment><USER12> From a WCAG point of view you might want the top one instead, some screen readers read content in  in a different tone, which may not be intended.

<comment><USER13> Even then the equivalent of an em or i is a span, not a div.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hey there! I am the maker of Wing.css ([http://usewing.ml](http://usewing.ml)), and I love this! The website is nice and minimal also. Keep it up :)

</comment><comment><USER15> This is the first flexbox-layout (I've seen) where the framework actually adds something. Bootstrap et al seem to have missed the momemt where their layout functionality became just a useless wrapper on flex.

<comment><USER16> I'm not a Flexbox expert, but I'm curious to learn what Spectre has over Bootstrap in this domain. Is it the .hide- classes? Is it the Responsive Resizer testing tool?

It seems that the .col-[size]-[num] classes function exactly the same way in both.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is a dropdown functionality planned? I mean, like bootstrap's dropdown. If I wish to add dropdown functionality, what would be the recommended way? I could code it, but I'm interested in knowing if there's a recommended js library for that.

<comment><USER18> select2 is a commonly used library for combo/dropdown.

<comment><USER19> Glad they have proper accessibility support, have always stayed away from these libraries due to this reason.

Although jQuery dependency is a bummer

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Nice. It's a small thing but I really like that you can add loading indicators on the buttons with just a class.

</comment><comment><USER21> Is framework a new word for template or is there a real difference between a CSS template and a CSS framework?

</comment><comment><USER22> Although I've been using mincss ([http://mincss.com](http://mincss.com)) framework alot more lately, for what this spectre framework provides, I think the 27KB file size is actually not bad. Kudos picturepan2!

</comment><comment><USER23> Is this Bootstrap-compatible? Classnames look mostly the same. (is this Bootstrap 4 rip-off?)

</comment><comment><USER24> Just loaded the site on mobile. Always first test I do for these things. It's a pile of content, presumably using their framework, but loaded and scrolled FAST. I like that much. :)

<comment><USER25> I tested on mobile as you suggested, and noticed an unwanted horizontal scrolling of about 20 pixels. I assume this is probably a bug to be fixed later.

<comment><USER24> Here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11764257](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11764257)

I tried to replicate your and other commenters experience. I found issues on Android's default browser that didn't exist on my first, Chrome test. Did you use default browser or what browser you on?

<comment><USER25> My apologies, I didn't see your message on time. I used the default Chrome browser on my OnePlus One running CyanogenOS 13 (Android 6.0). I should have posted this in my first comment itself.

Interestingly, I did not see any horizontal scrolling when I tried in Chrome browser (Mac OSX 10.11.4) in regular user mode. But on toggling device mode (in dev tools), and selecting one of the mobiles - Galaxy S5 or Nexus 6P, the horizontal scrolling started to appear, and it is a lot worse than on my actual android phone.

I haven't yet been able to identify the element that overflows, but the  and  seems to take default 100% width and are expected to be contained within the browser frame. There is some other rogue element, somewhere nested inside, which is causing this unwanted horizontal scrolling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I like how simply checkboxes and radio buttons are styled.

</comment><comment><USER27> > optimized for asian fonts

Except the font size is far too small.

And for east-asian font readers (Hanzi), the English/Roman font size is far too small.

Translation is assisted by bigger font sizes.

</comment><comment><USER28> I wish CSS framework would stop giving a grid unless they are better than the standalone grids like Lost or Susy

</comment><comment><USER29> How is this different or better than the many CSS frameworks already out there? And why don't any of these frameworks use fieldset instead of extra DIVs with classes?

<comment><USER20> Because fieldsets are often used as accessibility features and may not be semantic in all the places you would want the look of a fieldset

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Grid broken on mobile? For me all the col-xs-* cells take whole screen width instead of e.g. one quarter for col-xs-3

Xiaomi note 3 / chrome

</comment><comment><USER31> The text of the inline "soon" button is not centered inside button on my phone

</comment><comment><USER32> That Chinese example though..

<comment><USER33> Google translate had this to say:

Revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, not so refined, so leisurely, "gentle", as "温良恭俭让." Revolution is an insurrection, a class overthrows another act of violence.

Is that text profound beyond the literal meaning or am I missing something?

<comment><USER34> It's from Chairman Mao's _Red Book_ of quotations. [https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/red- boo...](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/red- book/ch02.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> at first glance, it looks like a copy of Bootstrap...

</comment><comment><USER36> Looks nice

</comment><comment><USER8> I think this is cool, but as an aside, what is up with the influx of css libraries on HN? Nothing against them, but there has been 1 or 2 in the top spot for the last few days.</comment>


So Apple is 'flailing,' eh? (re: TechCrunch story) - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/08/19/arrington

<comment><USER2> I know I'm going to get downmodded for this but I have to agree with Captain-M.

The attitude that "we're doing better than our competitors so we don't need to improve" is toxic, and usually fatal for a company in the long run (... the others aren't going to be content with sitting in second place forever).

My earlier-gen MBP, iPhone, iPods etc are all rock solid (I'm delighted with them all), but I could easily see a situation where quality could go south on new products in the rush to cut costs and get to market faster.

I hope that's not the case. It would be little comfort to me as a new buyer if my machine bricked for no reason, and some smug fanboy pointed out that other people who bought Macs in the past had no problems (making me the problem?)

<comment><USER3> > _The attitude that "we're doing better than our competitors so we don't need > to improve" is toxic_

Who exactly has this attitude?

<comment><USER4> Pretty much anyone or anything somewhere at the top of the food chain for an extended period of time.

<comment><USER5> So you know for a fact that Tony Fadell, Scott Forstall, Sina Tamaddon, Bob Mansfield, and Ron Johnson have this problem?

<comment><USER6> He said "most" not "all". It's the perfect out when a specific is pushed!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What is with Hacker News' obsession with Apple minutiae?

<comment><USER8> Don't know if PG has released browser stats for HN - but my guess is that Safari and Firefox on OS X would be fairly well represented.

Everyone likes news about their tools - ever seen a mechanics shop when the snap-on van pulls in?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've found this to be quite common of bloggers. They tend to generalize their own personal experiences to the entire population without really doing much research into it.

<comment><USER10> I see what you did there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I love my MBP, but in my experience AppleCare support is horrible compared to the competition. If something goes wrong with your Dell laptop, they will send a technician out to you the next day and repair it on-site. If something goes wrong with your Mac, you have to make an appointment to take it to an Apple store, and you may have to leave it there for up to a week while it gets repaired.

<comment><USER12> > If something goes wrong with your Dell laptop, they will send a technician > out to you the next day and repair it on-site.

Only if you paid _extra_ for that service option. The default phone-support and ship-it-back-for-service warranties that you get with most Dell machines by default is likely no better than Apple.

However, I must say that if you get the upgraded support from Dell, especially the type that comes with their XPS line, they certainly have the best support service in the consumer PC industry. And turnaround time is fantastic; they paid to ship my XPS laptop to the service center and back, and I literally had it fixed and back in my hands in less than a week.

<comment><USER11> Sorry if I was unclear. I was comparing Dell support with AppleCare, which you also pay quite a bit for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I dunno...I've seen both sides of this issue.

I had an iBook 13" I got in 2002. Stayed with me for three years before the logic board start to go out on me; freeze ups, bad video, etc. It seems like it was either asleep or on, and always with me so I kind of expected it.

Another person I was acquainted with seemed to have this same problem but every few months or so. He got a few free Ti and iBooks out of them. Better to ask forgiveness, I guess.

</comment><comment> captain-m In this case doing better than the competition doesn't mean doing well. It doesn't even mean acceptable. I don't use any apple products and I don't really care either way, but saying that they're better than the competition doesn't mean anything.

<comment><USER14> "...saying that they're better than the competition doesn't mean anything."

How does that statement even have a basis? How else can you benchmark anything? You need _SOMETHING_ to base your placement on.

Past performance even, which was considered in that article. How can we award gold medals if there is no competition to base that award upon?

<comment><USER10> Let's say company A sells laptops such that 1 out of 1,000 of them blow up due to a defective battery. Company B sells laptops such that 1 out of 100 blow up.

You can say that company A's product is 10x better. But, it doesn't mean that company A's product is good. It just isn't the worst.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why the hell is this linked?

</comment><comment><USER16> >> But is Apple doing a far better job than any of its competitors? Yes. <<

No.

<comment><USER17> You might be right, but it's a little hard to agree with a one word statement.

<comment><USER16> This is exactly the point I wanted to communicate to the blog author.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> TC is always full of animosity against Google, Yahoo and Apple.

Are they sponsored by microsoft?

<comment><USER19> And Daring Fireball is always full of animosity against anyone against Apple. Are they sponsored by Apple? Alas, fan boys need no corporate sponsorship to throw dirt from the trenches.

<comment><USER20> I'm not sure about in general, but I think they presented good supporting evidence in this case.

<comment><USER21> Not really, Arrington presented anecdotal evidence, and Gruber smacked him down with a survey contradicting the anecdotal evidence. Unless some new evidence comes to light, Gruber's point of view holds more weight.

<comment><USER20> When I said 'they' I was referring to Daring Fireball.

<comment><USER21> My bad :-) Being a Daring Fireball regular, I just think of it as being Gruber - hence a use of 'they' indicates someone else for me. That'll teach me to pay a bit more attention when reading!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: About your CS teaching experience - <AUTHOR> A little bit of context: I have former teaching experience by teaching CS basics to teenagers (K-12). But after some time working in the industry, I'm currently teaching BSc and MSc CS topics to adult students in a local technical university.
However, I am currently not quite satisfied with the current "universal" method of lecturing theoretical concepts with the ocasional laboratory assignment. I feel that I lose too much time preparing theoretical lecture slides which the students won't fully understand since they lack the field experience I have.
My problem is mostly with the MSc students as I'm teaching more advanced concepts to them (Distributed systems). For instance, explaining things such as how transactions may succeed or have to roll-back if they fail, is just a detail that they will forget eventually after the exam.
So I'm starting this thread in the hope that I can read your experiences teaching adults on CS or other subjects, and hoping to get some literature, books or articles about things that you think that it may work! <comment><USER2> I've not taught CS, however I used to teach math to adolescents. Some basics: scaffold concepts, spiral back to previous concepts, and allow exploration and self discovery. All quizzes and exams should have earlier content in them. I believe I heard that six repetitions over time were needed for most students. For distributed systems, don't just present the two generals problem. State the scenario, and give them 8 minutes to think through a solution in small groups. Maybe go as far as to have them illustrate the problem on poster paper with markers. Have a one or two summarize what they discussed to the class. Ask probing questions. Then give the reveal (a brief lecture on why it unsolvable) and show the results of the giants upon whose shoulders they should stand. Employ other active learning strategies. Google "active learning strategies." Yeah, lots of facts will be forgotten after the exam. However, the more they understand principles, the more they can recall and recreate long term.

Hopefully the above advice helps with the lecture portion. As for labs, my experience says that practical exercises are great and my experience says that lab exercises are too contrived to be even slightly useful. To explain: I took an online distributed systems course to balance out my self learning and work experience. Their code work / labs were terrible. All the scaffolding was in place and it boiled down to "translate these algorithms to scala." I gave me no insight or feeling or deeper understanding of best effort broadcast or anything else. Mostly, I wrestled with trying to grok scala. However, previously implementing toy (read mostly broken) versions of Paxos and Raft (which I had done prior to taking the class) gave me a solid understanding and appreciation for the nature of the problems they attempt to solve. Reading the papers and attempting to code up what was presented worked better for me.

Cheers and good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your comment, I am already searching for relevant information on active learning strategies.

About your experience with the online course, I can understand the difficulty on trying to make a lab assignment for people without the necessary knowledge to complete the assignment. My current strategy is to provide some base code and then asking for the students to keep changing the code (giving enough hints) so that in the end they have a working solution.

Edit: Found some interesting papers, for instance [0] and [1].

[0] [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.59....](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.59.7176&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

[1] [http://www.cs.duke.edu/forbes/papers/fie2002.pdf](http://www.cs.duke.edu/forbes/papers/fie2002.pdf)

<comment><USER3> I've done some guest lecturing in more beginner-focused environments, but those papers seem to match with my experiences there. I'd reiterate a key point from them for emphasis - students shouldn't "change the code" until it works without understanding WHY the changes they make have an effect.</comment></comment></comment>


Interactive Canvas in Jupyter Notebook - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/martinRenou/ipycanvas <comment><USER2> Would be nicer if the examples were commited after the code had been executed.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure I understand your comment, would you mind explain more?

Which examples are you talking about?

<comment><USER2> The example notebooks in the repository are commited before the code has run so github renders them empty</comment></comment></comment>


How the NSA taps fiber at the bottom of the oceans - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/VzqpaF8y <comment><USER3> This is a (poor) translation of an article that ran last weekend in the Sunday edition of a German newspaper[1].

It does not appear to contain any new information that was not already publicly available: see, for example, the Wikipedia entry for the USS Jimmy Carter: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter_(SSN-23)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter_\(SSN-23\))

1\. Behind a paywall at [http://bit.ly/12cXRi9](http://bit.ly/12cXRi9) ; full original text at [http://pastebin.com/KFhVj2X1](http://pastebin.com/KFhVj2X1)

</comment><comment><USER4> An interesting article from 2001 which discusses this at length. [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB990563785151302644.html](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB990563785151302644.html)

Alternative link (WSJ one acts wierd) : [http://www.zdnet.com/news/spy-agency- taps-into-undersea-cabl...](http://www.zdnet.com/news/spy-agency-taps-into- undersea-cable/115877)

Also for anyone looking for better reading, the wikipedia page sources (4][5][6][7]) all discuss this topic. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter_(SSN-23)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter_\(SSN-23\))

A video on how Fiber Optic splicing is done by boat is super interesting : [http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xvlowj_tyco-resolute- mighty...](http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xvlowj_tyco-resolute-mighty-ships- discovery_tech#.UdPEzfndNAs) (45minutes Tycho Resolute).

You would think this is a much easier way than building a billion dollar submarine, then again some cables are in delicate waters.

<comment><AUTHOR> After reading the WSJ article from 2001, it's become clear that the FAZ/FAS article is largely based on it.

Interesting quote from the WSJ article, in light of the fact that it was written 3 months before 9/11:

 _The NSA long boasted some of the most powerful computers on earth. But the agency 's technological edge dulled as the equipment aged and money grew tight. The NSA's budget is classified, but individuals familiar with it say it is about two-thirds what it was a decade ago, even before accounting for inflation._

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is a book called Blind Man's Bluff that documents how this started during the cold war by NSA tapping soviet undersea communication cables.

According to the book one of the captured tapping devices is on display in Moscow and on the side it says "Property of the United States Government". No point in hiding it...

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_Man%27s_Bluff:_The_Untold...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_Man%27s_Bluff:_The_Untold_Story_of_American_Submarine_Espionage)

<comment><USER6> I read it a few years back and from memory it was quite an interesting read

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm a little skeptical about this process given the other, much easier methods available to the NSA.

The one thing that isn't discussed here is data retention. Quite simply, how do you get the information to shore, where it can be processed, in a timely fashion? We're talking about thousands of TB or PB (or greater). You can't just simply send that up on a radio link, and a recorder device would have to be enormous. Processing and analysis cannot be realistically done on the submarine, and frequent trips back to the site would tie up a tremendous naval asset. I cannot in any sense see the Navy agreeing to the NSA's continued use of its submarines for tapping civilian traffic when its primary focus lies elsewhere (such as performing special operations in the Pacific.)

It's an open secret that the Jimmy Carter was built specifically to tap cables and perform other special missions, but the technical facets of tapping a major transatlantic cable for bulk data collection sounds too unrealistic when better alternatives exist; specifically, the major routing and landing points on US soil where equipment can be installed via cohersion of the owner.

<comment><USER8> This is my skepticism about these highly technical, complex theories as well. I don't know enough to discount them based on technical merit, and they all certainly sound feasible, however unlikely. It's _possible_ that the NSA can be tapping fibers, running its own fibers back to Utah, storing the data in a massive storage network, running millions of CPUs to decrypt it all, reverse- engineering the ever-changing application protocols, running very deep analysis against the results, and then coming up with the targets' communications patterns. It just seems much easier, cheaper, and faster for them to drop a secret, legal order on the involved companies and let the data come to them. It's the ultimate hack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Anyone recall the inet cuts to (Egypt?) about two years ago? (Damn, sorry - <USER2> just recall how the undersea cables were "cut" and there was a lot of speculation as to who/why... I think we have a culprit. [posting from my phone, ill try to search for a reference when I get to a machine]

<comment><USER10> I highly doubt it. The NSA has been tapping undersea cables for decades, there's no reason they'd have suddenly become so sloppy as to cut two cables in the same region. Especially as a cable will be inspected if cut and any surveillance equipment will be discovered.

I think it's more likely that those outages really were caused by ship anchors.

<comment><USER11> it could be a less sophisticated nation's tapping attempt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Unfortunately, this article includes pretty much everything _but_ how the NSA taps fiber at the bottom of the ocean. I'm actually a bit curious about this myself...

If you want to tap a classical signal traveling down a fiber, you want to turn that fiber into a beam splitter. A beam splitter probabilistically reroutes photons from the data stream down a different fiber. Since a single bit traveling down a fiber optic cable is represented by millions of photons in an identical optical state and fiber-optic lines are lossy, a few won't be missed. A 99/1 splitter (i.e. 99% one way, 1% the other) would be pretty hard to detect in a fiber optic line that is subject to fluctuating loss caused by bending, temperature change, etc..

The trick, according to this article, is to avoid cutting the fiber and splicing in a beam splitter. This is because, immediately after the fiber goes dark, the company running it will want to know where the fault is and hook up an OTDR to the line. In the simplest terms possible, this is a device that sends light down the fiber and looks at what gets reflected back. Any break in the fiber will reflect light back the way it came. Time how long the round- trip takes and you can pinpoint where the break is and send out a repair crew. If the operators are fast this can take mere seconds to do. Naturally, the NSA doesn't want repair crews finding their tap-in points!

So how do you turn a piece of fiber into a beam-splitter without cutting and splicing? Well, that's surprisingly easy. One way to create a fiber beam splitter is to take two fibers and fusion-combine them. Basically, you put them right next to each other and heat them up so that they melt together just a little bit. If you did this to a line in service it would never have to be cut. This is dead easy to do... to one fiber... in a lab. Doing it to a bundle of fibers in the deep sea is challenging! However, it's certainly feasible. Given that the NSA's budget dwarfs the entire scientific research budget of many nations, it's reasonable to expect they could get pretty good at it given a couple of decades.

They probably aren't doing this. I've done a little in free-space optics, but fiber really isn't in my bailiwick. There are probably other, much easier ways. However, based on a few minutes of thought I'm convinced the claims of the article are beyond merely feasible. I'd be shocked if the NSA, and _every_ other nation out there with subs, doesn't have the same capability.

The real trick, of course, is getting the data back home (and processing it). The article suggests that the Jimmy Carter has the ability to lay fiber lines, presumably to take their purloined bits back to the nearest NSA processing center. The amplifiers spoken of are unlikely to be used to boost the signal that continues on the original fiber back to the people being spied upon, simply because a good method of tapping in should be indistinguishable from fiber loss, plus components like amplifiers spliced into the line are detectable! No, those amplifiers are likely there to boost the signal going down the NSA's pirate lines. What I don't understand is how the NSA keeps their lines from being detected. Wouldn't, for example, Russia patrol it's fiber back-bones (while tapping other nations fiber) and cut the NSA's lines? There may very well be an underwater struggle going on day-to-day that we're entirely unaware of!

<comment><USER11> No, they are probably using evanescent wave technology. Fiber optics works by reflecting the light down a channel - when light hits an interface between media with two different speed of lights, there is a reflective component and a refractive component. If you solve snell's law for a very shallow beam hitting a less dense media, you get an imaginary value for the angle of the refractive component. One way to interpret this is that zero of the light energy is reflected. But if you solve a wave function cos(x) with an complex value x, that is equivalent to a function with a complex exponential, potentially with nonzero, real preexponential.

That is what an evanescent wave is. There is light that decays exponentially "bleeding" off the reflective surface[1]. The snell's law solution is sort of a hack, what is really going on has to do with the quantum wavefunction of the photon ensembles, but the result is the same.

Biologists use evanescent waves to do microscopy - you can illuminate an area of low density underneath your coverslip, and effectively a very very thin layer of flourescence is illuminated right above the coverslip.

It would seem reasonable that the NSA would use exactly this technology to tap fiber optic cables without splicing them, and it should be nearly undetectable. There will be a nonzero loss of photons if you tap it, but it should be relatively negligible.

[1]note - the photonic energy is just 'there' as in the wavefunction has nonzero amplitude in that spatial region. It's 'bleeding' into the space outside of the fiber optic channel, but it's not actually bleeding energy, there is no energy loss from this 'spatial bleeding', unless there is something in that zone that is capable of absorbing that photonic energy.

<comment><USER13> If I understand both you and the parent correctly, you are describing the same process. When you melt two fibers together, the cores aren't really becoming one. Really, they melt together such that light from one core partially evanescently couples into the core of the adjacent fiber.

[http://www.goochandhousego.com/products/passive-fiber- optic-...](http://www.goochandhousego.com/products/passive-fiber-optic- components/fiber-laser-components/PEC%200178i1.pdf)

<comment><USER11> I wouldn't have assumed you need to do any sort of melting to capture evanescent photons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> [http://cryptome.org/eyeball/mmp/jimmy- carter.htm](http://cryptome.org/eyeball/mmp/jimmy-carter.htm)

<comment><USER15> [http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/20/politics/20submarine.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/20/politics/20submarine.html)

        "The capacity of fiber optics is so much greater than other communications media
        or technologies, and it's also immune to the stick-up-an-antenna type of
        eavesdropping," said Jeffrey Richelson, an expert on intelligence technologies.

        To listen to fiber-optic transmissions, intelligence operatives must physically
        place a tap somewhere along the route. If the stations that receive and transmit
        the communications along the lines are on foreign soil or otherwise inaccessible,
        tapping the line is the only way to eavesdrop on it.

        The intelligence experts admit there is much that is open to speculation, such
        as how the information
        recorded at a fiber-optic tap would get to analysts at the National Security
        Agency for review.

<comment><AUTHOR> _The intelligence experts admit there is much that is open to speculation, such as how the information recorded at a fiber-optic tap would get to analysts at the National Security Agency for review._

How about another fiber in the same bundle?

Also, during the telco bust, there was a lot of 'dark' (i.e. unlit) fiber, probably prophylactically tapped by NSA.

<comment><USER16> Or the "dark" fiber was the return line for the tapped data.

<comment><USER15> You'd still need to terminate at the surface point, in which case what are you gaining by sending a modified sub to the bottom of the ocean?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is there anyway for the signal to be bulk encrypted in realtime and have the cryptographic key between two end points automatically cycled and exchanged via means other than that cable?

I would imagine that making a cryptographically secure wired connection impervious to eavesdropped would be a thing by now.

<comment><USER16> > Is there anyway for the signal to be bulk encrypted in realtime and have the > cryptographic key between two end points automatically cycled and exchanged > via means other than that cable?

They could use one time pads (two identical lists of pregenerated random numbers) at the ends. Then XOR the traffic with those. It's unbreakable. They "key" could be terabytes long.

<comment><USER18> A terabyte of shared secret would run out in seconds on these links. (and if you reuse it, it's extremely insecure). It's totally possible (but possibly prohibitively expensive) to encrypt the traffic going through a link like this but a OTP is _not_ how you would do it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think everyone is overestimating the complexity here. There a stations underwater that contain optical amplifiers that necessarily boost the signal. A lot of optical amplifiers include monitor ports (splitters) built into the equipment.

</comment><comment><USER20> [http://randomdrake.com/2008/02/13/google-maps-version-of- the...](http://randomdrake.com/2008/02/13/google-maps-version-of- the-2008-submarine-cable-cuts/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Where is this from? Google did not turn anything up when I searched for Thomas Gutschker and submarine.

</comment><comment><USER16> The cable operators need to encrypt all traffic going through the fibers - problem solved. In fact what goes through the backbone should be encrypted many times over - by the backbone operator, by the company leasing the backbone bandwidth and by the end user.

<comment><USER22> Technologically I was in the impression that the end-points where barely able to route the traffic that's going trough these cables. Encrypting the traffic in real-time might not be possible.

<comment><USER23> Not possible in software, but you can do it in hardware.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> So how does the submarine know where the target traffic is going to be routed ? Unless it's greenland there are many ways your traffic could go: [http://submarinecablemap.com/](http://submarinecablemap.com/)

</comment><comment><USER24> OP, what is the source? The only source on google is this paste.

<comment><AUTHOR> This was published in the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung" this weekend. It's behind a paywall. They make it really hard to find, this is the only link I could come up with: [http://fazarchiv.faz.net/?q=menschenrechte+daten&dosearch=ne...](http://fazarchiv.faz.net/?q=menschenrechte+daten&dosearch=new#hitlist)

Original is in german, sorry for the crappy Google translation.

Little info on Wikipedia: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter)

EDIT: original article in german: [http://pastebin.com/Sy8q4gmT](http://pastebin.com/Sy8q4gmT)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Whenever this is actually figured out, wall street will beat the NSA to doing it - I am sure of that!

</comment><comment><USER26> do they need to tap fiber? snowden has said that they can hack backbone routers.

[https://www.google.cl/search?q=snowden+backbone+routers](https://www.google.cl/search?q=snowden+backbone+routers)

<comment><USER27> Maybe they tapped fiber before hacking backbone servers (or vice versa), and they can do both now. Why stop now?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is very poorly written and lacks credibility. Interesting though.

<comment><USER29> It also doesn't say much except that the submarine can launch a little vehicle that goes down and taps the cables; tapping an already-installed 192 strand fibre cable without breaking any of the strands or disrupting communications would be impressive even even on land and there's no hint as to how the NSA is able to do this once they reach the cable.

<comment><USER30> Trying to install a tap on an active fiber cable sounds like a very much impossible feat for any kind of modern technology.

If I was the poor EE they laid this problem on, I would have the submarine install the tap while the cable is still being laid, before it's connected to any data streams.

Without knowing how long it takes to install the tap, it would also be possible to sabotage cables, install the tap while the cable is down, and make the sabotage out to be the doings of any number of semi-rogue countries in your targeted part of the world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> How do they transmit and store the intercepted data?</comment>


Firefox Reality Now Available - TD-Linux https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/09/18/firefox-reality-now-available/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hm, I don't get it.

There is maybe a use case for VR to add immersion for games (like space sims or racing games), but why would I want to have a device on my head to look at a 2D canvas?

I mean it's a nice tech demo, but it seems like the 2000ish hype around these 3D-cube window managers that ... looked cool, but otherwise don't add anything to your workflow. Do people really want to _work_ (e.g. develop) with a VR in a 3D environment?

<comment><USER2> One of the biggest things we've found that people like to do in VR is private viewing. They'll collect links of videos all day and then come home to watch them on a "big screen" but don't have a laptop or TV that supports miracast, so use a VR headset. Or they like to watch twitch streamers or their favorite movie providers or just bounce around searching content.

As the hardware becomes more mature, we'll support more use cases, but we wanted to enable some compelling early use cases (especially voice search) and learn from users as soon as we could.

<comment><USER3> A $15 chromecast can easily enable this? I'm surprised this is an actual use case.

<comment><USER4> A $15 chromecast + a TV or monitor that someone may not have/want for whatever reason. A chromecast wouldn't be private either if you have other people in your household.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another thing to check out in this area is JanusVR. The thing about Janus is that it makes the internet navicable from an immersive perspective. Granted this requires adding FireBoxRoom code to your site in order to make everything 3D, but it does seem to fit the VR "paradigms" a bit better than what I'm seeing here from Firefox.

</comment><comment><USER6> The main problem with web browsing in VR is it's way too low resolution to read text and you can't see your hands so you have to type everything in with that remote character by bloody freaking character.

But I guess, if you want to browse the web in VR you might as well do it in Firefox.

<comment><USER7> Sorry to be dense, but why would one want do to web browsing in VR at all? It's all built on a metaphor of flat sheets of paper, so it's paradigmatically 2D.

<comment><USER8> I want to be _working_ in VR. Once the resolution gets decent enough I can just get 20 screens wherever I look. Plus I can sit, stand, whatever. Sounds fantastic. Coffee might get a bit cumbersome though.

A straw, maybe?

<comment><AUTHOR> > Once the resolution gets decent enough I can just get 20 screens wherever I > look.

Isn't that stressful on your neck? In the current environment you can also have 20 screens and switch via key-combinations or using the mouse.

<comment><USER9> I think this problem is solved already, see this video about TrackIR from 1:00 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AO0F5sLdVM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AO0F5sLdVM) (it is called motion scaling). Of course people may still get injuries from this if they do it for 40 hours a week...

<comment><USER10> In VR that would likely make you violently ill

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Are they not bringing it to SteamVR? Most Vive owners don't use viveport (outside of China), due to the spooky services it puts on your machine.

<comment><USER12> We have a VR-only browser on launched on SteamVR (Vive) / Oculus Store (Rift). Relevant to HN, we went through a recent YC batch. Still early but focused on 6DOF headsets, and ignoring 2D for now.

[http://store.steampowered.com/app/803010/Supermedium/](http://store.steampowered.com/app/803010/Supermedium/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> FYI, a similar feature has been available for months in Chrome on Android under a flag. I don't remember which ones. Maybe

chrome://flags/#vr-browsing-native-android-ui

and

chrome://flags/#vr-browsing-tab-view

basically once enabled Chrome will show up as an app in the Daydream app launcher in VR

I've only used it on Daydream but it's nice to be able to search in VR, use a virtual keyboard, and also run WebVR pages all without leaving VR.

</comment><comment><USER14> That's nice and all, but now that the hardware has caught up, where are the collaborative multi-user 3d hyperspaces à la Croquet Project/Open Cobalt?

<comment><USER15> Check out this project, also from Mozilla's emerging technology team: [https://hubs.mozilla.com/](https://hubs.mozilla.com/)

(Disclosure: I work for Mozilla)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Out of curiosity, is this the project the Servo team got folded into?

I seem to remember reading somewhere that they were being put onto a VR project.

<comment><USER17> Yes, but this release doesn't include any of that work that is not already in upstream Firefox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This reminds me of animating paperback book pages as a transition to directly linking web pages. The paradigm is leaking over to the new one where the new one doesn't have a good way to do it yet. Instead, I would have a hall with portals you could zoom up to as you wave your hand out in front of you, kind of like the iWatch but not sure the puke factor.

</comment><comment><USER19> Would be really cool if you could just, you know, download the program and run it, not have to go through Viveport at all.

<comment><USER2> While we are on Viveport Mobile and all other relevant stores, a developer can always either build from sources or sideload the browser - [https://github.com/MozillaReality/FirefoxReality/wiki/Sidelo...](https://github.com/MozillaReality/FirefoxReality/wiki/Sideload)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Doesn't look that great in the screenshots to be honest - would be nice if it's not just a gimmick because "we can" but some new paradigm of more effectively and immersive Ly consume the web... I mean - the kind of distraction free "reader mode" that you do in Safari, imagine if you had that in VR and then a 3D way to navigate between web docs/pages based on the links on the current page and smart topics - a bit like Ted Nelson's Xanadu[1] project from the 60s or whenever - the real vision behind hypertext!

EDIT: [1]: Bit is history on Xanadu [https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/](https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/) \- and there's a video of it somewhere and you can/could even download a real demo of it on floppy disk I seem to recall

<comment><USER21> > would be nice if it's not just a gimmick

I mean, this is the future, right?

<comment><USER22> Don't you mean _was_ the future?

I have no idea what the current future is, all I know is that is doesn't include 3D TV sets and tablet computers replacing PCs (apparently, the PC can decline all on its own)

<comment><USER21> If I were to guess, I imagine room-sized VR is the next step.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is this just another Firefox OS? It strikes me as another side project they'll abandon later.

I can understand Firefox OS, I wish they'd persevered, but I don't really get this.

On its own I don't think this makes sense. Maybe in the context of an in game browser.

But then who am I to comment.

<comment><USER24> I'll admit to not being particularly well-acquainted with VR, but a few observations:

1) This is being used as a target for Servo. Even if it ends up being useless (I won't pretend to be able to predict the future), the investigation into getting consistent 90+ FPS performance out of web rendering engines, regardless of content, is going to be excellent for the web. VR is a challenging environment for the Servo team to prove its technological prowess, and for many engineers, a challenging environment is exactly the kind of motivation necessary to push at boundaries.

2) Mozilla missed the "social" hype train and their mobile OS project was widely considered too little, too late (not to mention the terrible performance of mobile web engines at the time). Both of these areas are dominated by large, (effectively) proprietary vendors. Facebook's purchase of Oculus signaled to many that "social" was going to move to yet another platform. Mozilla's goal here is to get out in front of a potential VR hype train, keeping the open web as a major player in order to keep their mission relevant.

3) Mozilla believes the web is the ultimate platform for connecting people. It is one of the few markets with a political landmap that encourages collaboration between the multiple players. Therefore, for Mozilla, the capabilities of the web must always be expanded to prevent balkanization of the Internet into product-specific networks, such as Apple's iMessage. I am actually encouraged by their willingness to jump in front of VR, despite my own belief that VR won't be as relevant as many prognosticators think.

This is my analysis, take it with multiple grains of salt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> _At a time when people are questioning the impact of technology on their lives and looking for leadership from independent organizations like Mozilla_

<comment><USER26> Someone was paid to write that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> VRML, anyone? :-)

<comment><USER28> I spent a good year of my free time in high school creating navigable 3D worlds with VRML. Now it seems like noone has heard of it, and they're next to impossible to render.

What's the latest scoop on VRML? I'm curious.

<comment><USER29> VRML became X3D, which is still around though not very popular. X3D is pretty much an XML translation of VRML.

There's project called X3DOM that uses JS and WebGL to view X3D models in the browser without a plugin. [[https://www.x3dom.org](https://www.x3dom.org)]

I don't think it can view VRML files directly, but there are tools around to convert VRML to X3D.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Low content post, but i can't shake off the feeling we've been there already

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqZpvOPI_aI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqZpvOPI_aI)

</comment><comment><USER31> Vuplex VR Browser (f.k.a. Viewport) for iOS and Android is also worth checking out: [https://vuplex.com](https://vuplex.com)

It lets you create multiple windows and position / resize them.

<comment><USER32> FYI it looks like in the iOS store its still called Viewport. Can't speak for the Android side though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I think it would be fascinating to study how old the people are who are into this.

<comment><USER34> I'm 47

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Hmm, if only PSVR on PC is properly supported...

Still, this is a nice project!

But I remember some kind of virtual reality webpage a year back or so, or was it just custom made by some 4chan users back then?

</comment><comment><USER36> I wonder what an obnoxious advertisement looks like in VR ...

</comment><comment><USER37> We're not that far off from a Gibson-esque cyberspace. Just a matter of someone taking the time and effort.

</comment><comment><USER38> Browsing this on Nightly on Windows says: 'Warning: Potential Security Risk Ahead'.

</comment><comment><USER39> Does anyone know if there's integration with WebGL?

<comment> TD-Linux Yeah there is, if you go to some of the sites on the home page there's an "enter VR" button, where the site does the equivalent of fullscreen for VR (it enters VR mode and it's much like a VR app).

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Cool, another good-looking experiment that Mozilla will phase out a few months after I start depending on it.

If I had a Euro for every time I started using a Mozilla project that got cancelled...

<comment><USER41> Hear hear.

That might be a big drawback of the very experimental release and fail method of development. You eventually start loosing trust in an organization that keeps giving you things, you make the effort to get used to them and then it takes them away. I'm sure the learning they get from it is very valuable, but you just spend a bunch time and energy and got nothing in the end.

<comment><USER40> I completely lost trust, yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Not seeing it in the Viveport store myself...

<comment><USER2> Sorry - Firefox Reality is only currently available Viveport Mobile for all in one / standalone devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Is this another Firefox OS moment?

</comment><comment><USER44> Also will this be usable on Meta AR?

</comment><comment><USER45> Maybe get 2D right before dabbling with VR?

Firefox still does not support hardware encoding of videos on Linux. So when I watch Youtube videos my CPU usage goes through the roof and I cannot watch HD.

xkcd even made a comic about it: [https://xkcd.com/619/](https://xkcd.com/619/)

<comment><USER46> I don't think the same teams are working on video decoding and VR browsing.

<comment> shady-lady No but they're pulling funds from the same pot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Just in time for the death of VR.

In any case, why does the browser need to be VR aware? This is a job that should be left to the host OS or WM, not every client application.

<comment><USER48> VR is a new kind of media you will be able to embed in a web page. Like video or sound. Browsers have to be able to render it.

<comment><USER49> LOL, sitting here with a VRML .wrl file I made in the late 90s. Maybe I can finally open it again, without a browser plug-in this time :)

<comment><USER29> You can. see my comment above: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18024485](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18024485)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Awesome! I have all the parts in the bins, and now I have a reason to build a VR rig!

But uh... I don't see linux on the compatibility lists, and I'm not using my work mac for this, and my gaming windows computers are too old (XP), and with lineageos on my phone without gapps... I'm not buying a bunch of proprietary hardware to play with a new open technology so geez I guess I can't play with it at all. Bummer.

<comment><USER48> Browser vendors don't control drivers or hardware support on the different OSs. VR is pretty much a Windows game today with limited and experimental Vive support on OSX and Linux. I'm sure that Mozilla in particular is eager to support linux.

<comment><USER51> > I'm sure that Mozilla in particular is eager to support linux.

Why would you think that? Firefox treats its Linux version as a second-class citizen (e.g. no hardware acceleration).</comment></comment></comment>


A Story of GameLayers, Inc - <AUTHOR> http://links.net/vita/gamelayers/

<comment><USER2> PMOG was such a wonderful game, and the community was everything. I'm the founder and lead developer of the game Nova-Initia he mentions in the article.</comment>


I'm looking for open source java web app. I want to contribute. - <AUTHOR>

I'm new to java web app development, to improve on my skill, i need any open source java web app to contribute to. Any link? <comment><USER2> Spark seems to be a good one to start. [http://www.sparkjava.com/index.html](http://www.sparkjava.com/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> If you have PHP skills iwould you consider helping develop a startup that will change the world ? www.thestudybox.com</comment>


Learning to Build Distributed Systems - <AUTHOR> http://brooker.co.za/blog/2019/04/03/learning.html <comment><USER2> Being on-call/carrying the pager for a complex and unstable distributed system is a great way to understand how to build a good one. Building a distributed system isn't hard per-se. It's almost always the non-determinism and the associated difficulty in debugging errors that's a problem.

<comment><USER3> This has been my experience. The pieces are simple, but being to able to understand what is going on in the whole system is not. Detailed, quality structured logging is very important, sent to a central location that can be queried (e.g Elastic Search / Kibana). I have come across several experienced developers who really don't like he idea of verbose logging but in my experience it has been critically important for dealing with a mesh of micro services.

<comment><USER4> "How does this even get invoked" and "Where would I go to find these logs" are the two questions that, if the answers are not obvious/obviously documented, there is a big problem with that particular system.

My current company for whatever reason does not value logging at all, to the point where for lots of our systems there just aren't logs/nobody has ever bothered to look for them. It's pretty astonishing to me, a person who has valued logging as one of the highest-value mechanisms to increase tracibility.

<comment><USER3> Prior to moving to software development, I worked 5 years in Support and consequently I have a murderous hatred of anyone writing software that is hard to debug and logging is a huge part of that.

I was actually greatly inspired by a product I used to support which had such detailed logs that you could troubleshoot almost any issue from the (rather huge) log dump. I try to do the same now.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h I really wish all developers had to do support at the beginning of their careers and so they understand how to build things that the ops team can work with. Devops/SREs are one approach to this, but I'd really like to see it be more widespread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I found "Designing Data-Intensive Application" book to be really helpful introduction to learning more interesting details about distributed systems. The book provides a gentle introduction to build intuition around these systems and contains a plethora of links to go further down the rabbit hole.

[https://dataintensive.net/](https://dataintensive.net/)

<comment><USER6> It's about 1000x better than "Designing Distributed Systems" which is basically just a book about Kubernetes. (Should have known, since its written by Brendan Burns).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Aside from theoretic advice, one of the key things I've found euros best is _not_ to set out to build a big complex system.

Solve small problems that deliver value in distributed way and then iterate and expand. Doing this focuses engineering on the real problems that need to be solved at the scale you are working at. This delivers real understanding of what is going on, both theoretically and specially within your domain.

The retort to this is often you'll never get to scale, or that your architecture will be incoherent. Basically you need to see the whole picture and build towards it.

The caveat is that solving small problems doesn't mean 'do something quickly or hacky'. If you do, sure you'll end up with an incoherent mess.

If you maintain good engineering practices, and focus them on real problems, my experience is you will scale your platform. These practices will keep focused on solving real problems properly, and doing so will give you an understanding of what the next problem is going to be.

<comment><USER8> The entry cost of introducing the first set of distributed applications is so high you need backing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was being bootstrapped into the new project (pretty big distributed system) for 6 months since I went on call. But then my debugging skills skyrocketed, and I know it's a little inconvenient to wake up at 5 am because of pager duty sad trombone sound, but I know it's an investment on my part to become a better distributed systems engineer.

</comment><comment><USER10> Disclaimer: ex-AWS. Not for reproduction.

> There are a lot of distributed systems books I love, but I haven't found an > accessible introduction I particularly like yet.

I'd highly recommend Martin Kleppmann's Desgining Data Intensive Applications [0] as an introductory book on distributed systems.

> Here's Jaso Sorenson describing the design of DynamoDB

For the uninitiated, Jaso played a key role in S3's evolution and was one of S3's founding engineers along with the then CTO and now Distinguished Eng, Alan Vermeulen (who's probably Jeff Dean of Amazon), who btw is an expert speaker. Such a shame folks outside of Amazon don't get to see his numerous talks. Absolute legends.

> Colm MacCarthaigh talking about some principles for building control planes.

Jaso also built "one of the most complex distributed systems ever built at AWS", what then later formed inspiration for AWS HyperPlane and the NetworkLoadBalancer by a team led by Colm, who inturn, was a founding eng with Route53 (first-ever 100% uptime public service at AWS?), VPC, and CloudFront among other very fancy security things.

> I've (Marc Brooker) been doing this stuff for 15 years in one way or > another, and still feel like I'm scratching the surface.

Well, he's being humble here. Marc's internal wiki pages on various designs he's come up with over the years for AWS are absolute gold mines, in that they explain his thought process, his experimentation, and his research with existing publications. Along with Colm (and a few others), he's is a prolific speaker internally at AWS with some of his talks ranked in the top 10 consistently. His recent contributions with EC2/EBS and Lambda mean he's worked with the largest and most complicated distributed systems there ever has been at AWS (imo, of course).

There are others like Eric Brandwine (Security), James Hamilton (Data Centers), Peter Vosshall (Silk, EC2, and Architecture), Becky Weiss (VPC and Lambda), David Yancek (IoT, NoSQL), Andrew Certain (DB), Tim Rath (DB), Stefano Stefani (DB, Warehouse, AI), Brad M (S3), Nafea B (Hardware), MSW (EC2/OS), A Ligouri (EC2/OS), Hall Cary (Builder Tools), Marvin T (Kinesis) et al who don't get a mention in the blog post but have been every bit gigantic in their contributions at AWS since forever. The recent recruits at the top rungs of eng at AWS have considerable pedigree coming in, as well. Exciting times, for sure.

I wish they'd release those internal videos (and CoEs) on a case-to-case basis to public. That'd go a long way in contributing to the distributed systems literature... apart from resuming to write blogs and papers abt their systems [1] like the NetEng/Route53 team once did.

[0] [https://dataintensive.net](https://dataintensive.net)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19290069](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19290069)

(Opinions my own. Facts presented may not be accurate. Zero intention to cause hurt and anguish.)

<comment><USER11> What do you think about Maarten van Steen's book?

[https://www.distributed- systems.net/index.php/books/distribu...](https://www.distributed- systems.net/index.php/books/distributed-systems-3rd-edition-2017/)

<comment><USER10> I'm sorry I haven't read that book, so can't comment. You chould give M Kleppmann's book a try if you're looking for an introduction to distributed systems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've been building distributed systems, big ones, across banking and gaming for many years now.

The only thing that makes it successful is correct data modeling and application boundaries. Domain driven design is a great way to start and cqrs a good next step.

Trying to make a poorly built application distributed is like trying to make a poorly built class testable. You can kind of do it, but it's a lot of extra messing around and it never really works properly.

</comment><comment><USER13> "If you can, carry a pager"

Why a pager? I wasn't even sure that they still made them.

<comment><USER14> They do, but it's just the industry metaphor for being on call. Usually through smartphone apps like PagerDuty.

<comment><USER10> At AWS, it isn't uncommon to get _paged_ via email, SMS, phone-call, and a smartphone app in addition to having an actual paging device (usually a dumb phone) separate from one's personal phone or laptop to avoid cases where the personal phone and email are both down (I believe this has happened, and not just once) and that someone important is out of reach in a time of dire need.

Source: ex-AWS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Keep Conway's Law in mind. You usually can't solve organizational problems with technology alone. If your staffing structure is not also "distributed", then making systems that are could hurt you.

</comment><comment><USER16> Does anyone have a good recommendation for a mooc on distributed systems?

<comment><USER17> Reliable Distributed Algorithms Part 1,2 on edX by KTH; Cloud computing specialization from UIUC on Coursera.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Marc brooker is a legend

</comment><comment><USER19> Another article about how hard it is doesn't mention the hardest part of all.

Getting to a place where you will ever get a chance to work on this stuff.

I tried joining a team working on it. Figured I wouldn't get to do a lot, but it was a foot in the door sort of situation.

By the time I quit I had managed 7 months without doing a thing, and 3 more where I wasn't even trying anymore.

Meanwhile the guys who built the thing all got pulled to work on the next big thing. Maybe they were just amazing engineers.

Maybe getting hired out of college and putting right onto a massive distributed systems project is the only fucking way to ever get your foot in the door.

I'm not gonna let this article ruin my day. It's pointless. I can think about how colossally fucked my career is on monday.

<comment><USER20> OT but relevant to your comment. AWS is hiring for various service teams[1]. I highly recommend it as the place to be if you want to work on massive distributed systems. DM me on Twitter if any of those jobs appeals to you.

[1] [http://bit.ly/2L8cPHL](http://bit.ly/2L8cPHL)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> "List of articles to read to learn about distributed systems" \- there I fixed the title for you

<comment><USER22> There's a lot more to it than that.

<comment><USER23> Agreed, but if someone wants to tackle such a list, here's a meta-list of distributed systems resources.

[https://gist.github.com/macintux/6227368](https://gist.github.com/macintux/6227368)</comment></comment></comment>