Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44368813 <comment><USER4> > _Additionally because there are no people, we can take all the oxygen and > most of the water vapour out of the atmosphere which reduces corrosion, > which is a significant problem in data centres_

First time I hear corrosion is a problem in datacentres. I never noticed any corrosion on any machine at home or work. Does it have to do with the cooling of datacentres?

<comment><USER5> I think part of it is that even problems that are small/unnoticeable at the individual level become big when multiplied by a huge N.

For example, I don't think I've ever had a hard drive fail in ~30 years in computing, well without being dropped that is, yet look at the Backblaze reports:

[https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-benchmark- stats-20...](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-benchmark-stats-2016/)

<comment><USER6> That's just unbelievable. To even survive the Deskstar era blows my mind. Not a single drive?

<comment><USER7> Argh trigger alert, I bought four of those in a raid 10.

They even had the audacity to reject my warranty claim.

<comment><USER6> They sent me back refurbs that didn't work, I just gave up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> At what point does this become a problem? They're using the naturally cool sea water to regulate the temperature in the container, but that heat needs to go somewhere... it heats the water. If this becomes a popular alternative to classic server farms, at what point does it start to increase the temperature of the sea? I know, the oceans are big, but so is our data.

<comment><USER9> If my calculation is correct, the total annual electricity production in the world (I used 20 279 PWh) would heat up the oceans (1 347 000 000 km³ of water) by 0,0129°C.

It's rather easy to calculate because one calorie is the energy required to heat up one gramme of water by one degree Celsius, the rest is just unit conversions, but I could have messed up anywhere of course.

Even if I'm off by a few orders of magnitude I'm confident that datacenters won't be noticeably heating up the sea for a long time.

<comment><USER10> According to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_production) , total electricity production is about 24816400 GWh/year (~25 PWh/year, so you were 3 orders of magnitude off).

      $ units -t '24816400 GWh / (1347000000 km^3) / (1 kg/dm^3) / (4200 J/kg/K)'
      1.5908368e-05 K

<comment><USER11> Units is a wonderful program; don't be afraid to use their definitions (/usr/share/units/definitions.units):

      $ units -t '24816400 GWh / (1347000000 km^3) / waterdensity / water_specificheat'
      1.5851925e-05 K

There's even definitions like `oceanarea`, etc ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Prof Ian Bitterlin, a data centre consultant for nearly 30 years, is > sceptical about the environmental impact of going underwater.

> "You just end up with a warmer sea and bigger fish," he says.

> And 90% of Europe's data centres are in big cities such as London and Madrid > because that is where they are needed.

> Microsoft's Ben Cutler insists the warming effect will be minimal - "the > water just metres downstream would get a few thousandths of a degree warmer > at most" \- and the overall environmental impact of the Orkney data centre > will be positive.

Both of these opinions feel like exaggerations but I don't know enough about thermodynamics to know what the true answer is. I have a feeling that the Microsoft opinion is much closer to the truth, can anyone help me understand how I'd walk through the numbers?

<comment><USER13> Not an expert either, but this might be a good way to think about it: on land or at sea, the machines produce the same amount of heat. On land, in general, the environment around the machines will be much warmer than the desired temp. Cooling on land is in general an active affair, which has to do with generating and controlling flow of fluid and/or maybe some kind of thermic reaction. Potentially at sea being plunged in cold water is sufficient to reach the desired temp, and cooling becomes a passive affair. All in all you are trying to displace the same amount of heat but through a more efficient medium. Correct me if I'm wrong.

<comment><USER14> I'm trying to see how the efficiency is gained and I just don't really see it. I guess you don't need to pump water for water cooling so you save the pumping energy, or maybe lower fan speeds or something, but it really seems like it would be a minimal amount. What it does seem like is a cheap way to build a water cooling system that doesn't really need to be maintained. It seems like switching to arm would be a much bigger efficiency gain, but nobody cares because energy is cheap.

<comment><USER15> Switching to ARM _might_ be a bigger efficiency gain, but nobody wants arm. Azure already offers ARM servers. Moreover, these aren't exclusive - one can easily sink an ARM server just as easily as you can sink an Intel one.

But the efficiency gains are such: Air conditioning is actually inefficient, especially with air cooling. Water cooling is more efficient. Water cooling traditionally uses water as an exchange medium, but is eventually water- cooled-by-air anyway, just in bigger batches. Here, they can take in new cold water and throw out old hot water without actually bothering with any air exchange at all. Or at least, that's the plan. Maybe it'll work!

(If "nobody cares because energy is cheap", we wouldn't have tried this in the first place.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't understand why not locating it in a city in a cold climate and using the waste heat to heat the city buildings?

There is precedent. In Seattle there's the old "steam plant" which piped steam to many local buildings to heat them in winter.

<comment><USER17> You're talking about District Heating[1], and that's been around for decades in hundreds of cities. It's the source of the steaming manhole covers that are a fixture of noir imagery.

Denver's got the oldest continually operating system in the world, and within the last decade or so, they added a cooling loop, as well. Instead of a boiler and a cooling tower, you can subscribe to a steam loop and a chiller loop.

The problem is once again of gradient. It makes thermodynamic sense to pipe steam around, because of the large gradient between steam and ambient. But servers don't make steam. At best they make warm water only a couple of dozen degrees over ambient... and warm water doesn't have enough energy to heat buildings very effectively.

That said, and as someone already mentioned, people are doing it anyway. Seattle's internet exchange pipes its water across the street to the Amazon towers[2].

BTW, Seattle's Georgetown steam plant might not be making steam any more, but the one down by the market is still operating as Emwave Seattle[3].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating)

[2] [https://blog.aboutamazon.com/sustainability/the-super- effici...](https://blog.aboutamazon.com/sustainability/the-super-efficient- heat-source-hidden-below-amazons-new-headquarters)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Steam_Company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Steam_Company)

<comment><USER16> > At best they make warm water only a couple of dozen degrees over ambient

Consider that geothermal heating systems are based on the ground having a temperature of 55 degrees. The difference between that and cooler ambient is used to drastically reduce heating bills.

For example, if it is 30 degrees outside, that is heated to 55 by the earth, then the building heater only has to boost the 55 to 70 rather than 30 to 70.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wonder why they are submerging these instead of just making them a floating barge.

I can't imagine submersion is significantly better for cooling, the energy density very likely already requires a circulating water system, and the added issues dealing with the pressure at depth seem risky.

Possibly there is a benefit not related to cooling. Perhaps weather/waves? Things are probably alot calmer 30ft below the surface. The tossing and turning on the surface may place additional streses on things like HDD spidles.

<comment><USER19> HDD spindles????

<comment><USER18> Spinning hard drives have a decent gryoscopic effect. Hold one while it's powered up and try rotating it in a manner that would change the plane of the platters and you will feel the resistance.

Each time you do that, it puts a slight load on the spindle bearings. Do it repeatedly on a varying 5-30 second cycle and you'll simulate what a harddrive on a boat or barge in the open water would experience.

I can imagine that would create additional wear and tear and contribute to an increased failure rate.

<comment><USER19> Right but who is deciding to use spinning hard drives instead of SSDs in an underwater data center?

<comment><USER20> Cooling fan spindles are subject to the same forces; and they had a large array of cooling fans.

<comment><USER21> I doubt they're going to use fans if they are pumping the air out of the thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's some more information from the blog post: [https://news.microsoft.com/features/under-the-sea- microsoft-...](https://news.microsoft.com/features/under-the-sea-microsoft- tests-a-datacenter-thats-quick-to-deploy-could-provide-internet-connectivity- for-years/)

And here's the project site: [http://natick.research.microsoft.com/](http://natick.research.microsoft.com/)

<comment><USER22> Wow. That is super interesting. Thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wish somebody worked on using that unwanted heat, like they do in swimming pool / ice rink combos, rather than finding ways to just disperse it faster in the environment.

<comment><USER24> It's tough in hot climates. There's plenty of heat to go around. And there are lots of people who live in hot climates who, for latency reasons, need servers near them.

Thus there are kind of two cases to solve for. You can stick a data center in Northern Europe, and that heat might be valuable enough that your approach could be to try to reclaim it. If you stick a data center in Singapore, you'd better focus on generating less heat in the first place or finding better ways to get rid of it.

<comment><USER25> Even in Singapore the max sea temperature is 32C, which seems cool enough to cool a data-center.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Some non-environmental reasons for wanting to do this:

[http://www.alexwg.org/publications/PhysRevE_82-056104.pdf](http://www.alexwg.org/publications/PhysRevE_82-056104.pdf)

> Optimal intermediate trading node locations for all pairs of 52 major > securities exchanges, calculated using Eq. 9 as midpoints weighted by > turnover velocity... While some nodes are in regions with dense fiber-optic > networks, many others are in the ocean or other sparsely connected regions.

</comment><comment><USER27> I don't think this is done for the sake of efficiency, but rather latency.

For example, if you had a underwater data center that sat in the middle of the atlantic ocean in between new york and london, you could do some serious trading with that capability.

<comment><USER28> Even in the coast of large cities, like NYC or Boston. The real state cost of having a data center in those regions are high, but it would be much cheaper to just hide your servers underwater, near where your users are.

<comment><USER29> This is a big reason. The cost of leasing out space is definitely more expensive than the cost of cooling these datacenters.

Why spend several million dollars in leasing space when you can drop a datacenter capsule off the coast with free cooling? Who cares about the cost of hardware.

<comment><USER30> The cost of connecting the thing via submarine cable to a suitable land point is likely to be a lot higher than you think.

<comment><USER31> Do you have a source to back this statement?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I wonder what will be algae/flora impact on a heat exchange after year or two. This thing will be warm and stationary so it will became overgrown really fast.

<comment><USER33> We could look at hydrothermal vents to see the effect of heat source underwater.

<comment><USER34> The heat from hydrothermal vents on its own wouldn't support ecosystems in deep water, they also feed out various useful chemicals and nutrients. The base of these foodchains is creatures that can build biological carbon stuff using chemical energy from that instead of using light, called "chemosynthesis".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemosynthesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemosynthesis)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Well everyone is talking about the energy usage, which is the point of the experiment.

But what happens after 5 years (the expected life of the datacenter). Most of the computers in there will be worthless then. Will they bring up the datacenter and reload it with new equipment? Will the cost-benefit be in favor of re-equipment or just sink a new one in? If its going to be cheaper to just drop a new one in, we will have ocean floor littered with dead datacenters.

Haven't heard anything about this.

<comment><USER36> Even if the equipment is outdated and broken, the scrap might be worth something to someone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> If you want maximum energy efficiency, build city centers in cold climates where the excess heat can be used. Yandex has data center in city of Mäntsälä, Finland and they provide 50 percent of the heating needs.

Even more advanced concept, combined district heating and cooling. With combined district heating and cooling and integrate data centers into them. Data center heat can be used in cold regions for heating. Combined heat pump/chiller units can produce both heat and cooling at the same time. Sea water (trough absorption chillers) is used for cooling apartments, offices and data centers. Heat from data centers, purified waste water, etc. is used for heating apartments. During winter more heat is utilized. During summers more water cooling is utilize.

[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jul/20/helsinki...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jul/20/helsinki- data-centre-heat-homes)

Suvilahti Data Centre New Build Case Study: Operationalizing District Heating and Cooling in large Data Centre in Former Electricity Station [http://www.energy-cities.eu/IMG/pdf/WS2_Helsinki.pdf](http://www.energy- cities.eu/IMG/pdf/WS2_Helsinki.pdf)

[https://www.helen.fi/en/company/energy/energy- production/pow...](https://www.helen.fi/en/company/energy/energy- production/power-plants/katri-vala-heating-and-cooling-plant/)

COMBINED DISTRICT HEATING AND COOLING [https://www.euroheat.org/wp- content/uploads/2016/04/Case-stu...](https://www.euroheat.org/wp- content/uploads/2016/04/Case-study-Helsinki-GDECA15.pdf)

District Heating & Cooling in Helsinki [http://www.iea.org/media/workshops/2013/chp/markoriipinen.pd...](http://www.iea.org/media/workshops/2013/chp/markoriipinen.pdf)

<comment><USER38> It's all very clever, but think about the cost and complexity. Installations, management, real estate, physical security etc.

I'm quite confident that even making optimal use of the excess heat you would end up with less money than with their solution. I don't think companies want maximum energy efficiency. They want maximum cost efficiency.

<comment><USER39> Exactly, cooling is expensive but not as much as human resources. With a sinkable data center, you could put it next to any coastal or riverside city.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> So flooding a server starts to mean something completelly different

</comment><comment><USER41> What would be its ecological impact? What if there are more of these data centers?

</comment><comment><USER42> Is there a benefit over just putting it in a boat/coastal building and using water (perhaps pumped from some depth) for cooling?

<comment><USER43> Boats in that part of the world are subject to severe stresses because of the weather. And boats are always moving, even in harbour. Just maintaining a reliable cable connection to a boat is more challenging than connecting to a subsea container. Placing the container on the sea floor avoids almost all of the weather related problems.

<comment><USER44> Microwave links? How about an oil derrick style thing mounted directly to the seabed so it doesn't move?

There's also plenty of coastline away from major cities. Find enough open space and it becomes feasibly multi-tenant. Add wind/solar and run a cable (or 3).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Imagine a future where whenever the energy price drops in a region suddenly companies show up with a bunch of such tubes drop them in the ocean. Do some batch processing and once the energy price rises they pull it out and move on.

In reality of course connectivity would be a major problem and energy price differences are probably not large enough to make it viable.

<comment><USER46> Although it doesn't have anything to do with computational load, hydroelectric storage exploits the change in electricity price to store energy in hydroelectric systems. At low demand they pump water into the reservoir, and at peak demand they release it again through turbines, generate electricity, and sell it at the higher price.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped- storage_hydroelectricit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped- storage_hydroelectricity)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Putting your datacenter in international waters, without laws or regulations, hidden from the world. Such a great way to do things without people knowing, or having people do things about it.

Power it with offshore windmills, and you really only need a network connection.

Great idea though, using water to cool your datacenter and leaving all the oxygen out.

<comment><USER48> Maritime law; there is no such thing as international waters for "stuff" each vessel has to fly under a flag.

The MSFT Datacenter is a vessel under law, if they don't want to fly it under a flag they'll have to essentially abandon it and then salvage laws come into play.

<comment><USER49> In that context, the Internets fascination with pirates makes a whole new level of sense. Servers, classified as marine vessels, admins being literal captains sailing under flags.

In a more fun world, one of those vessels would fly the Jolly Rogers and host a certain infamous Swedish bay.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> > It will not be possible to repair the computers if they fail

This is the part that concerns me the most. Pretty much all DCs have multiple 24/7 staff to deal with hardware failures and equipment swaps... telling a client "you can't access your hardware for 5 years" wouldn't go over too well.

<comment><USER51> Well, you clearly wouldn't lease dedicated hardware with this model. You just redistribute load amongst data pods when there is a failure, and pull the whole pod from service for refurbishment once it passes your total failure threshold.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> > This is a tiny data centre compared with the giant sheds that now store so > much of the world's information, just 12 racks of servers but with enough > room to store five million movies.

How much is that in Library of Congress units? This trend of not giving out data but appearing to do so is strange.

<comment><USER53> "The Phase 2 datacenter can house 27.6 petabytes of data."

Assuming you're using 15TB as one LoC unit, then about 1,800 LoCs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Interesting idea but the maintenance must be painful. Let's say a hard disk fails, what do you do?

<comment><USER53> It's a fail-in-place data center. If a hard disk fails, you don't do anything. They used to replace telephony equipment all the time too, now it's just a locked room in a building. This is pushing data centers to be more hands-off.

<comment><USER55> So they don't do anything? Eventually you're just maintaining stacks of errored and broken computers.

<comment><USER56> Yeah. Fail in place over the service lifetime. When enough stuff is failed that it isn't worth keeping down there, you pull it up and refill it.

<comment><USER55> Based on the picture, "pulling it up" looks like a fairly intensive task, requiring boats, persons, etc.

That kind of thing eats directly into the ROI for a datacenter. I doubt it competes with a static building with a bunch of solar panels on top.

<comment><USER56> Might just fail-in-place, then. Although that looks pretty bad from an environmentalist perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> As an aside in the article:

> There has been growing concern that the rapid expansion of the data centre > industry could mean an explosion in energy use. But Emma Fryer, who > represents the sector at Tech UK, says that fear has been exaggerated.

> "What's happened is we've had the benefit of Moore's Law. The continued > advances in processing power have made doom-laden predictions look foolish"

There may be other reasons that energy efficiency will continue to improve, but Moore's law, (More specifically in relation to performance per watt: Dennard Scaling), has long been at an end. Given her position it's fairly ignorant to sight this as a reason for a continued lower proportion of energy consumption growth by now.

<comment><USER58> > In a normal year, demand for electric power in Chelan County grows by > perhaps 4 megawatts — enough for around 2,250 homes — as new residents > arrive and as businesses start or expand. But since January 2017, as Bitcoin > enthusiasts bid up the price of the currency, eager miners have requested a > staggering 210 megawatts for mines they want to build in Chelan County. > That's nearly as much as the county and its 73,000 residents were already > using.

Source: [http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/business/article212008409...](http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/business/article212008409.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Interesting idea. My hunch tells me that they're underestimating the corrosive nature of salt water. I also wonder about vibrations, which are much more pronounced underwater.

But I guess we won't know until we try!

</comment><comment><USER59> I'd be curious to know the specific benefits of the Orkney Isles to this project; when I hear the renewable research there being referenced (by family there, some of whom are directly involved) they always claim the major benefit is the close proximity of different underwater conditions, with some of the greatest range in tide.

Yet I assume this isn't particularly useful for a datacentre of a well understood shape that doesn't intend to use the conditions to create power through novel designs.

<comment><USER60> That's true specifically, but orkney has generally become a hub for renewables research, so the snowball effect may be in play here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> If clusters of these tanks are eventually deployed, it could have some surprising effects on local marine life and might be a good way to jumpstart a marine preserve. [0] [0][https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/local- news/clusters-of-ma...](https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/local- news/clusters-of-manatees-spotted-at-tecos-big-bend-power-plant-keeping-warm- from-cold-weather)

</comment><comment><USER62> This opens quite an interesting perspective for 'off-shore' hosting, literally. I remember from a previous gig a while ago that renting servers in Saskatchewan or something similar provided companies with a favourable legislation as well as cheaper server cooling. If you plunge a data centre into the middle of the sea somewhere in international waters, does it really fall under any legislation?

<comment><USER63> No legislation cuts both ways. Be prepared to fend off pirates and state actors attempting to claim free loot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> I can see a few robotic hands doing magic under the sea while being operated remotely. Submarine drones deliver the hardware. I can see this helping MS to move into the space and a huge boost for robotics. It will get there eventually, I think the no maintenance is just to test if it is worth it before going all in

</comment><comment><USER65> This can't be a new idea. Or is it that it's only now become possible to do such a thing?

<comment><USER66> I remember reading google was doing the same experiment some 10 years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Microsoft boiling the oceans is a positive move for environmentalism, hybrid owners agree.

</comment><comment><USER68> What happens in a large body of water (ocean etc) when an electric shock accidentally slips out or a live electric cable is cut? Is it similar to an underwater grenade going off, affecting a large area, or is it not a worry?

<comment><USER69> Electricity finds the path of least resistance.

If that power cable would be completely cut, the electricity would spark from one of the pole of the cable to the other, until some breaker shuts the thing off.

Even at great energy, the impact would be minimal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Wondering how long it will be until we have cloud data centers in space... Seems like it could be useful to offer a flexible computing infrastructure to small sats and science missions without requiring ground comms.

<comment><USER71> Actually getting rid of excess energy is a huge problem in space since it's pretty empty: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Cont...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Control_System)

<comment><USER70> Totally. It's the difficulties of putting lots of computing resources in space (heat, power, serviceability, radiation) that actually makes it attractive for selling compute time. Only one company needs to solve those problems and others can leverage that work for a fee. If it was easy, there wouldn't be a business opportunity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> I think we should spend more "energy" on reducing the heat in the datacenter and solve the problem for everyone. Cooling the datacenter in the sea seems like a hacky (though creative) solution.

<comment><USER73> Laser based cooling systems is where we should put our focus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> At first I read it as "Microsoft has sunk GitHub in the sea...".

Sigh my brain is trained to see MS+GitHub wherever I read a news article about MW or GH as a result of all the hype for past two days.

</comment><comment><USER75> What's the average lifetime of a data center? I wonder how the enclosure for this underwater one compares, and whether it's comparable.

</comment><comment><USER76> On a totally non-serious note:

Just reading "Microsoft has sunk a data centre" sounds pretty hilarious given recent events (GDPR, acquiring GitHub)

</comment><comment> cc-d > There has been growing concern that the rapid expansion of the data centre > industry could mean an explosion in energy use. But Emma Fryer, who > represents the sector at Tech UK, says that fear has been exaggerated.

If we're concerned about the technology industry vastly increasing energy consumption, lets look at the entire medium sized country's worth of energy bitcoin is consuming for absolutely useless calculations.

<comment><USER77> Naturally scarce stores of value like Bitcoin, gold, diamonds, etc. have always "wasted" resources, whether they be power, human resource, or polluting the environment. On one hand you could regard them as immoral because of this, on the other hand they enable the freedom to store value without trust.

<comment> cc-d >Bitcoin, gold, diamond

You're being dishonest if you're pretending these things are identically comparable.

<comment><USER78> They're all arbitrary stores of value whos intrinsic value is not justified by the market price?

<comment><USER79> Only Bitcoin requires the continuous consumption of energy to continue being a useful asset though.

<comment><USER80> Physical gold still needs to be mined, smelted, transported, and guarded. When you buy it and move it around energy is spent too. So if you really want an apples-to-apples comparison you'd have to count the energy needed to mine each oz. of gold.

<comment><USER79> The large majority of gold traded for bullion or investment isn't actually moved. It's just the rights to claim X tr. oz. of gold in the vault of XYZ company. Also value of my gold doesn't depend on the transport of all the gold out there so rolling those costs in at the individual level doesn't make much sense. BTC on the otherhand is useless without mining because the existence and transfer of BTC depends on the miners. Even post lightning mining is still critical to opening new channels.

<comment><USER80> The large majority of Bitcoin isn't actually moved every block either. And those systems you describe to reassign rights to gold also use energy. As block rewards fall, profit will come from transaction fees only, and only the most efficient miners (best equipment or energy access) will remain. Sure, Bitcoin uses more energy now than a database sitting on a server, but it's solving a different problem.

<comment><USER79> It is solving a different problem but that doesn't change the fact that the whole network's mining work is required to make it work. There are some energy costs to tracking the rights of stored gold but they're vanishingly small compared to BTC.

We're getting sucked down into the weeds here and losing sight of the original point which is BTC as designed requires the use of massive amount of energy to validate and secure the transaction ledger and that ledger and the things it enables is the whole value of BTC.

<comment><USER81> I think gold _is_ flawed in essentially the same way as BTC. Mining BTC is called mining because it's a neat abstraction of the old fashioned process. The reason fiat currency took over historically is because there's a tremendous benefit to eliminating the dead weight of mining if you can evolve a more subtle way of limiting supply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> I am most concerned about the data cable getting cut by ships. Don't know why nobody else here is concerned about that.

<comment><USER82> Because most of the internet already goes through under-sea cables? We're pretty good at not cutting under-sea cables.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> Would have loved to see FMEA done for this project. From both environment and Data centre point of view.

</comment><comment><USER84> Lots of energy used in storing the data may not always produce effective results.

</comment><comment><USER85> And what would the effect on life in Water or environment affect of the same.

</comment><comment><USER86> I'm sure the environmental impact of this one unit will be negligible, but if the worlds largest tech companies start deploying thousands of these - imaginable, since it's a pretty good idea from an engineering perspective - <USER2> could see that causing some real problems.

<comment><USER87> > I could see that causing some real problems

Can you be more specific? What type of problems and why? Temperature-related, waste related, hazardous substances? And why would this become a problem at- scale?

<comment><USER86>
      Prof Ian Bitterlin, a data centre consultant for nearly 30
      years, is sceptical about the environmental impact of going
      underwater.

      "You just end up with a warmer sea and bigger fish," he says.

The reason I think it could become a problem at-scale is, again, because it's a great idea from an engineering perspective. Cheap land, cheap cooling, space-efficient (no need for human amenities in the building, like walking space and bathrooms and security checkpoints). I could imagine a scenario a decade or two down the road when most of the world's data centers are dumped off the coasts, at which point there would likely be impact. Setting aside the heat, there's the widespread disruption of the sea floor. Also, while some companies might take environmental precautions, I'm sure that others would not. Why would you bother spending the money to salvage a pod in the case of a tank breach or a fire?

It's far from the biggest environmental concern we have, and it could be done with minimal impact if those doing it cared enough, but in my experience large companies won't go to any expense that doesn't make or save them money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> Well now we have a plan for boiling the oceans:

Bitcoin mining + underwater data centers

</comment><comment><USER89> Reminds me of that NOC +10 ARG and the first Bioshock.

</comment><comment><USER41> What would be its ecological impact?

</comment><comment><USER90> <sarcasm>Haha, Microsoft, you sunk a data center and now you think you can run Github.</sarcasm>

</comment><comment><USER91> new snorkelling destination

</comment><comment><USER92> Brilliant.

</comment><comment><USER93> data syncing

</comment><comment><USER94>
      # Full fathom six thy server sits;
      # Of its disks are coral made;
      # Those are pearls that were its bits
      # Nothing of it that doth fade
      # But doth suffer sea-migrations
      # Into substrate for crustaceans.
      # Sea-nymphs monitor system vigour:
      # Hark! HEALTH CHECK: FAILURE -- replacement trigger'd

<comment><USER95> I'm hiding this in my source code somewhere as we speak. Very well written.

</comment></comment><comment><USER96> We have been following this since Microsoft launched project Natick in 2015[1]. Comupting has a large effect on our planet, data centers consume over 6% of the world's electricity (more than India) and generate over 4% of the world's CO2 emmissions (twice that of commercial air-travel)[2]. The approach taken by Microsoft is a nice PR-stunt but we think it's impractical/difficult to carry out maintenance and leads to a very expensive TCO.

FWIW we believe immersion cooling is the most practical approach to reduce energy needs of hungry data centers and still allow them to be situated where they are needed and enable the re-usage of heat. As a shameless plug, I am the co-founder of [https://submer.com](https://submer.com) .

[1] We covered this in our blog ([https://submer.com/microsoft-testing- undersea-immersion-cool...](https://submer.com/microsoft-testing-undersea- immersion-cooling/)) [2] [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/20/much- wor...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/20/much-work-needed- to-make-digital-economy-environmentally-sustainable)

<comment><USER97> Hi Polvs, I believe we met in Berlin. I hadn't seen immersion cooling before then but was absolutely impressed. Unfortunately setup costs are quite restrictive, but for large scale organisations it does make sense.

<comment><USER96> Hi Tom, I think I remember you from the C3 Crypto Conference where we had a booth. I know what you mean, the initial cost of acquiring this technology compared to regular air cooling technologies is more expensive in the very short term, but when you consider the operational costs of electricity, the ROI can be under a year.

It becomes much more interesting when you also factor in that you can pack >4x computing power into the same physical space saving a lot of real estate and don't need the huge CAPEX in expensive prepared server rooms nor plan ahead the "hot-spots".

<comment><USER98> Why hasn't this taken up pace though? I am pretty sure I read about immersive cooling at least 4 -5 years ago. And 3M had some new "liquid" shown 1 - <USER3> years ago. Given the scale of which now Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple operate, surely they should be the first one to adopt?

Edit:

Looks like I asked the question a while ago. From Anandtech and Servethehome:

10 years ago, liquid had a thermal limit. Now it is around 5x that old limit. Problem is cost ($$$/gallon of the liquid) and installation. Has to be marketed on TCO. Also, issues with submerged fiber connections

2U air cooling can reliably handle 8x 200w+ TDP CPUs, 600w of NVMe, plus RAM and add-in cards. 4U designs can handle 6kW of cooling on air. Liquid may be more efficient, and more data centers are being built for it, but air is easy to deploy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER99> 2016 article... but still cool!

*edit, no its not, I have too many tabs open and mixed it up with the blog post listed in the comments. ignore me

<comment><USER100> I think you may be thinking of something else. This was posted today, an hour ago, on the BBC.

<comment><USER101> Im pretty sure I heard about this a couple of years ago too

<comment><USER53> They did a mini-version in the US a few years ago, this one is 4x the size and 100x the compute

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER102> Bit of clickbate there.. Thought this was about them buying Github ;)

</comment><comment><USER103> Great, let's boil the planet

<comment><USER104> That's what they're looking to avoid, by using passive cooling instead of less efficient refrigeration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER105> Seems like a good way to create a new country. The country of Microsoft. Go easy on me down voters, I'm just imagining it from the perspective of China, Russia, North Korea, Syria, Iran, Cuba, Libya or Canada doing the same thing and the controversy that would follow.

</comment><comment><USER106> For years we've used water to cool our CPUs ... what happens if we drop the entire datacenter into water?

<comment><USER107> Why are you just restating the question of the article?</comment></comment>


List of Good Free Programming and Data Resources - <AUTHOR> http://bitboot.camp/resources.html

<comment><USER2> Should add "AWK in 20 minutes" to the AWK section which was posted on HN a few days ago:

[http://ferd.ca/awk-in-20-minutes.html](http://ferd.ca/awk-in-20-minutes.html)

([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8893302](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8893302))

<comment><AUTHOR> sure will do, thank you.

<comment><AUTHOR> done :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Weird to have a list of programming and data resources and not even mention R.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a living document, we will add R resources.</comment></comment>


Tectonic – TeX/LaTeX Engine in Rust - <AUTHOR> https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/ <comment><USER3> I looked into this project when it was first announced. The "in Rust" part seems more aspirational than reality. For those who may not know, Knuth originally wrote TeX in a language called WEB, which is basically Pascal with some preprocessors for making it usable and documentable. Later extensions to TeX, including eTeX, pdfTeX and XeTeX have also been written in WEB. The existing TeX distributions (TeX Live, MikTeX, etc), at their core first translate this WEB/Pascal into (autogenerated and basically unreadable) C, then run it through a C compiler, etc.

What this project has done is take the auto-generated translation into C of xetex.web, and wrapped this (unreadable) C code in Rust — which is an odd choice to say the least. It seems (from Reddit comments by the author) that the reason is that author of this project at the time was unaware of LuaTeX, which (starting with a manual and readable translation into C years ago) is actually written in C.

All these odd choices aside, and barring the somewhat misleading "in Rust" description (misleading for another reason: the TeX/LaTeX ecosystem is mostly TeX macros rather than the core "engine" anyway), there are some good user- experience decisions made by this project. With a regular TeX distribution these would be achieved with something like latexmk/rubber/arara, which too are wrappers around TeX much like this project.

There is still room for someone to do a "real" rewrite of TeX (in Rust or whatever), but as someone on TeX.SE said, it is very easy to start a rewrite of TeX; the challenge is to finish it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Efforts to ditch any C remnants are being made[1].

[1] [https://github.com/crlf0710/tectonic/](https://github.com/crlf0710/tectonic/)

<comment><USER3> Thanks. Is there any code to look at? (Couldn't easily find anything relevant on that repo…) I didn't mention it earlier, but I'm collecting a list of alternative TeX implementations[1] so if there's even (say) a dozen lines of WEB that have been converted to Rust, I'd be very eager to take a look and compare — it would be illuminating.

[1]: [https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/507846](https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/507846)

Edit: To answer my own question. The relevant source (corresponding to the main part of xetex.web) is here: [https://github.com/crlf0710/tectonic/blob/2580c55/engine/src...](https://github.com/crlf0710/tectonic/blob/2580c55/engine/src/xetex_xetex0.rs) I've posted a comparison of some example code first from the official xetex.web listing, and then from the "Rust" code here: [https://gist.github.com/shreevatsa/627399d0150e66d211a264bc0...](https://gist.github.com/shreevatsa/627399d0150e66d211a264bc05b33beb)

You can draw your own conclusions from comparing the code samples, but to point out a few obvious differences:

• What has the symbolic name "fi_or_else" in the WEB code has become the magic number "108" in the Rust code. (This is because the author of this project decided to have their Rust code start from the autogenerated C code which has already lost this symbolic information.)

• What is simply "if tracing_ifs>0" in the WEB code is 29 lines of Rust code, involving a magic offset into eqtb.

• The comments from the original are gone.

• Something like "cur_if:=subtype(p);" becomes "cur_if = (*mem.offset(p as isize)).b16.s0 as small_number;".

I wonder how maintainable such Rust code will be. These problems are not insurmountable and the code can always be cleaned up later I guess… my point is simply that at the moment it is not idiomatic Rust code, for instance.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's the result of automated c2rust[1] conversion. Of course it will be cleaned up. C2rust itself provides handy refactoring tools scriptable in Lua language. A lot of the code will be removed, for example image handling can be done through image-rs crate, etc.

[1] [https://github.com/immunant/c2rust](https://github.com/immunant/c2rust)

<comment><USER3> All that's fine, and good luck to you; I wish you well.

But I guess I wasn't clear. This project is described as a TeX engine "in Rust". Has any code been actually _written in Rust_ —as opposed to either Rust code that wraps C code (as in the main repo), or autogenerated Rust code (as in this one you linked)—for any of the core parts (as opposed to system- dependencies like I/O or whatever) of the TeX engine?

I'm genuinely curious, and if there is any such code I'd like to read it (and compare it to the equivalent WEB code).

I completely understand that this could be done at some future date. The question is about the description of the current state of the project. The impression from a statement like "Efforts to ditch any C remnants are being made" is that the C code is only a few "remnants", when in fact it appears to be the entire TeX engine itself.

(Also, I do not foresee any refactoring tool being able to convert, for instance, "108" into "fi_or_else", recovering information that's already lost. The point here is that it would have been better to start with the original WEB code, not the lossy and autogenerated C code.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> And the price for the most missleading headline this week goes toooo THIS.

This is a TeX-manager/workflow automation/MikTeX+parrot clone. It's not a TeX- Engine, e.g. parsing TeX, and being extensible and faster than the alternatives (classic TeX, XeTEx, LuaTeX). To add insult to injury: writing Rust into the headline for me triggers a "better, faster TeX"-wish - <USER2> there, curious how much of TeX they already supported, came back a little disappointed.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is all good and well. But why XeTeX as a starting point instead of LuaTeX?

Most distributions started the transition from pdfTeX to LuaTeX as the main implementation. And the code from the new translation from the original Pascal to C is pretty nice.

And LuaTeX also has UTF8 support and modern font handling.

<comment><USER6> > And LuaTeX also has UTF8 support and modern font handling.

I always thought this was the whole point of XeTeX?

<comment><USER7> LuaTeX is a kind of successor to XeTeX. Biggest thing is that xelatex / latex / etc all had to use fixed size memory management while luatex supports dynamic allocation (which means no more "TeX capacity exceeded, sorry." dreaded error message)

<comment><USER8> Dynamic memory allocation is not always a desirable feature. If I were running a service like Arxiv, I would much rather have fixed memory management than dynamic.

Similarly, if I was running TeX in web assembly, in a tab in a browser I'd much rather hit "TeX capacity exceeded, sorry." than have it try to scuttle off with all the swap...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Anyone have any experience? I see a date of a year ago on the page.

The latest TeX Users Group meeting, a month or two ago in San Francisco, featured a number of amazing demos of TeX and LaTeX systems compiling large documents basically instantly. Amazing what modern CPU's can do. The TUGboat with the papers should be out soon.

<comment><USER10> > compiling large documents basically instantly

Would be interested to see this. TeXLive has always been able to compile documents instantly even a decade ago, but only documents that were a few pages long.

When you got into dissertation-sized folders of documents with lots of TikZ images, it takes a little longer but still not that long. (my 160 page dissertation compiled in 10-15s back in the early 2010s on a Core 2 Duo with a non-SSD drive)

It was hard to get much faster than that for large documents because LaTeX has (had?) critical paths that defy parallelization.

If it is indeed possible to achieve instantaneous compilation for large documents, that would make live-compilation a reality (live compilation already is a reality but for small documents).

<comment><USER9> One demo compiled the TeXbook, again basically instantly.

<comment><USER11> Do you remember which one? Can't seem to find it here:

[https://tug.org/tug2019/program.html](https://tug.org/tug2019/program.html)

<comment><USER12> I would also really like to know more about this.

Could it possibly be the following entry?

Saturday, August 10 10:00am David Fuchs What six orders of magnitude of space- time buys you

>TeX and MF were designed to run acceptably fast on computers with less than 1/1000th the memory and 1/1000th the processing power of modern devices. Many of the design trade-offs that were made are no longer required or even appropriate.

<comment><USER13> Yes, indeed.

An absolute plain vanilla TeX, exactly as Knuth wrote it, and my tool chain compiles it, composes all 495 pages of The TeXbook in 0.300 seconds on a 2012 MacBook Pro laptop (the first "Retina" model). Single threaded, composing pages in 0.6 msec each, running in well under 1 Megabyte total for code and data. Back on the SAIL mainframe (a Dec PDP10) that Knuth used to develop TeX, it was almost exactly 1000 times slower: the pages would tick by every half- second or so (at night, anyway).

Of course, nowadays we also have lots more memory to throw around. One cool idea is to modify TeX to retain all the internal data structures for the pages it has created, and run a nice screen viewer directly from that; Doug McKenna gave a slick presentation at the recent Palo Alto / Stanford TUG meeting of such a system that he created in order to enable live viewing of his Hilbert Curves textbook, including displaying figures of space-filling fractal curves that can be arbitrarily zoomed, which is simply impossible to do via PDF.

Going further, you can additionally modify TeX so it takes snapshots of its internal state after every page, and is able to pop back to any of these states. Presto, now if the user makes an edit on page 223, TeX can quickly back up to the state of the world just before page 223, and continue on forward with the modified input. Page 223 gets recomposed and immediately redisplayed, essentially in real-time. Of course, the trick here is creating and storing the snapshots efficiently; the TUG demo I gave using The TeXbook runs in a few hundred megabytes, and does the whole "pop back, recompose a page, redisplay it" rigamarole in milliseconds.

The bad news is that my stuff is still in the proof-of-concept stage, as there's no support for the well-established extensions to Knuth's TeX (importing graphics, using system fonts, etc.) that are required by the vast majority of LaTeX users. I don't expect any of these features to slow things down appreciably, but time will tell. I intend to do a "Show HN" by and by, with lots more details, when it's able to handle real-world documents.

My apologies for failing to successfully fly under the radar until things were ready for prime time. My premature TUG demo was intended to wow Prof. Knuth sufficiently that he'd approve of a decades-late Ph.D. for me. (Happily, he did agree, contingent on just one additional feature being added...)

<comment><USER14> > _Presto, now if the user makes an edit on page 223, TeX can quickly back up > to the state of the world just before page 223, and continue on forward with > the modified input. Page 223 gets recomposed and immediately redisplayed, > essentially in real-time._

Isn't it possible, in the worst case, that editing the source line that maps to page 223 could trigger re-rendering arbitrarily far back before page 223? Like if you wrote all 223 pages without any chapters, parts, \newpage, etc. How does your program handle this?

<comment><USER13> Sure. It seems best to redisplay quickly, then update the screen again when everything is quiescent (the user hasn't typed anything for a few tenths of a second, and the whole document has been fully recompiled with no changes detected). Usually it's not even noticeable, though of course there are degenerate cases where a document oscillates, which gets called out in the UI in the unlikely case it happens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am happy somebody is working on this, but I really wish somebody would rewrite TeX and derivatives from scratch in a modern language. The syntax of LaTeX is mostly adequate, and should be kept so people don't have to relearn everything. But the list of other improvements that need to be made is a km long.

* The backend should be in a language that allows for easier editing and package development.

* Need modern bidirectional UTF8 font support.

* Need the compiler to stop producing a bunch of extra files in the same folder, which is a significant adoption barrier.

* Need a way to generate clean html output with nice css.

* Tikz is great, but it would be excellent if it was possible to include the graphical output of any language by writing inline code (org-mode style).

* Same for mathematics - if I can send input to Sage or Mathematica and print the results from within the tex files, life would be so much easier.

* Beamer is interesting, but it is hard to make anything but rather bland scientific presentation in it. A framework for rapid design prototyping in beamer would help so much.

* Etc etc

<comment><USER7> > * The backend should be in a language that allows for easier editing and > package development.

LuaTeX allows writing packages in Lua

> * Need modern bidirectional UTF8 font support.

LuaTeX supports bidir, not sure if you refer to something more specific

> * Need the compiler to stop producing a bunch of extra files in the same > folder, which is a significant adoption barrier.

you can just run your build in a build folder like you would in C, etc ?

<comment><USER15> I know it's possible to have workarounds and I have used them as needed. But the workarounds still have bugs, or are OS specific (your third one for instance), and they don't solve the problem of slow compilation.

There are also fundamental limits to TeX language such as the number of arguments to a function limited to 9 [1], or overloading functions is a pain [2], etc etc.

The advantage of rewriting from scratch in a modern language is that these issues can all be dealt with without workarounds.

[1] [https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/2132/how-to- define-a...](https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/2132/how-to-define-a- command-that-takes-more-than-9-arguments)

[2] [https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/448877/check- number-...](https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/448877/check-number-of- arguments-in-a-command)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> There is some code that is still in C/C++ - remnants of XeTeX, but there is a project[1] to convert all legacy code in Rust.

[1] [https://github.com/crlf0710/tectonic/](https://github.com/crlf0710/tectonic/)

<comment><USER16> Did you even read what you're replying to?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> tectonic is great! I find it works as a "daily driver" now, it's not just another experimental Rust project. it downloads everything as it's used, and automatically decides when to rerun compilation to deal with citations, float numbering, etc.

Rarely do I find I need to fall back on the standard programs.

I strongly recommend giving it a shot if you use LaTeX.

</comment><comment><USER18> I really don't get it. What advantage does this bring over the old Web/Weave Pascal -> C build system?

<comment><USER8> What I really like about tectonic, is that a program can use it like a library, and embed the engine without shelling out to execute programs. There is at this point some system font dependencies that need to be realized before compilation.

But otherwise it pretty much just works without a lot of pre-installation steps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> A big problem for Europeans is that Tectonic currently defaults to US letter paper size:

[https://github.com/tectonic- typesetting/tectonic/issues/126](https://github.com/tectonic- typesetting/tectonic/issues/126)

<comment><USER20> You and I have very different definitions of "big".

<comment><USER21> Yes, I believe that's what the GP is saying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've been a fan of LaTeX for some time, but I've mainly switched to using Chromium instead.

Yes, it seems a bit strange, but browser engines have become mature enough to replace most of what LaTeX can do, and there are even work-arounds for things the browsers can't do natively. For example "Paged.js" is a polyfill for implementing CSS paged media extensions.

Using various Javascript (or webassembly now) libraries, I can directly render Math, SVG, musical charts, all sorts of quirky text directions etc.

There are even knuth-plass implementations in Javascript. I hope that someone smarter than me figures out how to marry that algorithm to the new CSS Houdini API!

<comment><USER23> I'm afraid your desire to meld Knuth-Plass with the CSS Houdini efforts is a bit like saying "I hope someone figures out how to build a wall for a house out of paint." Except probably even less plausible.

<comment><USER22> Why? Houdini offers an API for laying out DOM objects through custom algorithms. Knuth-Plass is an algorithm for laying out Boxes/Text Characters.

Maybe I misunderstand something here, but the paint analogy doesn't help!

<comment><USER23> When I first wrote that comment, I wrote something like "you could _do_ it, but the end result would be absolutely terrible". Then I decided that actually it wasn't possible after all in any meaningful way, and changed it to "except probably even less plausible."

In reality, with what I have in mind, it's kind of a bit of both: what I have in mind is that you'd need to split each piece of the Knuth-Plass layout (box, _& c._) into a DOM element of its own first, so that the layout can determine their sizes and shuffle things around appropriately—since the layout API is only giving you the set of CSS boxes to lay out and their sizes and any engine-decided inline breaks in them, and not the ability to inspect what's in them or to break them up into further fragments.

Once you're doing _that_ , it's probably a bad idea to use the Layout API, because you get no substantial benefit (a ResizeObserver to notify you when you need to redo the layout is just about as good), but are using a _lot_ more DOM nodes (which is bad for performance, and I strongly suspect it'd cancel out the benefit that the Layout API version can run away from the main thread), and are using a new, less-well-supported and probably-buggier API to boot.

Also browsers have some pretty terrible bugs around how hyphenation especially works when you have zero-width characters, and they have shown _no_ interest in fixing them. (Chromium's are the worst, but Firefox has a couple of interesting ones as well.) Therefore you'd probably need all of your line- breaking opportunities (most notably, soft hyphens) to be in boxes of their own. And now you _probably_ won't get your ff ligature if a hyphen _could_ be inserted between them, so I'm probably going to have to disqualify it as not being able to produce the same output.

In the end, I'd be surprised if a variant of [https://github.com/bramstein/typeset](https://github.com/bramstein/typeset) using the Layout API as far as possible while retaining identical output (excepting this soft-hyphens-inside-ligatures case, if my guess is correct) could get down to even 20× slower than it, or using less than about 10× as much memory. In practice, I think figures like 100× slower and 500× memory are more likely. It's _possible_ that it would be less janky for large amounts of text, given that it operates in a worklet which may be run off the main thread by the browser; but I doubt it, due to the increase in other requirements.

This is all assuming that my understanding of what would be needed and possible is correct—I may have stated it too strongly given my lack of particularly detailed knowledge in the area.

<comment><USER22> The ultimate problem I see with breaking words into separate boxes is that they can't be rendered "in flow" anymore. So I guess the actual Text has to be set outside the layout API.

However, consider the case of the CSS Flexbox. It can also wrap boxes, and there some smarter way of looking ahead could be helpful and would be within the scope of the layout API. Not sure.

And indeed, for rendering PDFs it may not be necessary or beneficial to rely on the Houdini APIs at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Github says that this project is 80% C and 6% Rust. What's up with that?

<comment><USER25> _Tectonic is a modernized, complete, self-contained TeX /LaTeX engine, powered by XeTeX and TeXLive._

XeTeX and TeXLive are both written in C.

<comment><USER8> Another thing to consider is it isn't counting all the rust dependencies. You can get away with a lot less code in tree when things get pushed out into crates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> All TeX rewrites seem to keep the batch oriented architecture.

What could improve usability and add the possibility of a modern UI for TeX/LaTeX is to have an incremental TeX engine, that only computes the changes in a document instead of everything from zero each time.

<comment><USER27> Plus an engine that realizes that it has to recompute the document immediately instead of making "pdflatex ..." run 2-3x necessary in order to get what you actually wanted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Wow. This is amazing. I am a user of MikTex and it is such a pain to deal with.

It was about time those Perl scripts are abandoned.

The fact that it now produces final .tex files without needing multiple passes and the fact that it can automatically fetch used packages is amazing.

<comment><USER29> Just a heads-up: what nobody tells you is that MiKTeX is like twice as slow as slow as TeXLive.

I learned this the hard way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Last time I tried it it was missing (and probably it still is) shell-escape support.

This command argument is needed if you're planning to use packages such as pygments (which does code highlighting).

<comment><USER31> I depend on minted which needs shell-escape. So this is a bummer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Is this translating Knuth's WEB/Pascal to Rust, or a from-scratch reimplementation?

<comment><USER8> It's using web2c, and linking against a cleaned up version of the generated C sources for a combined c/rust binary.

There is a further project which runs c2rust over the generated c sources, and is cleaning up the generated c sources, this is linked in comments above.

Going directly from web -> rust, is expected to be difficult, and will probably have a lot to learn from the manual conversions above.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Cool, I've just started messing around with LaTeX, mostly for pgfgantt because Microsoft Project is so damned expensive. In fact so many working project apps (Like OmniPlan) seem to be way too high.

</comment><comment><USER34> First discussed here in 2017:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14450448](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14450448)</comment>


A brief look at some Twitter Spam. - <AUTHOR> http://techblog.avira.com/2009/10/14/a-brief-look-at-some-twitter-spam/en/ <comment><USER2> Does any of the "bad website" things have an API (I mean the blacklisting that modern browsers seem to include - not sure if FF includes something like that, too).

Seems easy to detect Twitter spammers by following the links they post and check them for spamminess.

Of course eventually they will take to building a following with innocent content before they post the spam :-/

<comment><USER3> > Of course eventually they will take to building a following with innocent > content before they post the spam :-/

You mean like all those otherwise sane people retweeting obnoxious Google Wave scams all last week?</comment></comment>


Seth Godin on How To Stop Being a Freelancer and Start Being an Entrepreneur - <AUTHOR>

When you are both a freelancer and an entrepreneur, you end up hiring the cheapest person possible to do the work.
Who is the cheapest person to hire? You Are!
If you want to build a company that is larger than yourself and become an entrepreneur...
Never Hire Yourself To Do Something Someone Else Can Do.
Every Single Thing That Someone Else Can Do, YOU MUST HIRE SOMEONE ELSE TO DO IT.
At first you may be frustrated knowing you could do a better job, but you will quickly realize you can raise your prices, than you can start hiring better talent. Eventually it snowballs into a big organization.
I know I struggle with this and have the mentality that I should do everything that I can do and only outsource the work I can't do.
Seems like that is why I am stuck as more of a freelancer and less of an entrepreneur.<p>Do you agree with Seth Godin? (he said this today at Authority Intensive, Copybloggers first content marketing conference. <comment><USER2> I don't think so. Because I might be good at doing the task, but not as good as hiring and managing someone else doing the task and if the quality of the job done by a third party is questionable, you won't be able to raise your price or even selling to the same customer anymore. I don't think it is a black and white decision. Instead I decide to hire someone to do the tasks I can't do, either because of lack of skills or lack of time/resources.

<comment><AUTHOR> This just means you are a freelancer, not an entrepreneur.

Nothing wrong with that, but its hard to conceive a scenario where you can try to be both.</comment></comment>


Stackoverflow's WISC (Windows, IIS, SQL Server, C#) Architecture - wh-uws http://www.artificialignorance.net/blog/wisc/stackoverflow-and-the-power-of-wisc/

<comment><AUTHOR> I will also be "that guy"---as another commenter said---mainly due to the author's title and finishing rhetoric, even though he is not even attempting to make any convincing arguments in the body but merely pointing out SO's technology stack which has been known since quite some time.

Yes, StackOverflow is a nice success story for a .NET stack, but I think an important piece here is actually mentioned by Joel:

"We are using about 1/10th of the hardware that they are, unfortunately, and _maybe that's because they are not good programmers_ "

StackOverflow says little about "the power of _WISC_ " and more about Attwood and Spolsky being good, experienced Microsoft-tech developers. We cannot compare the power of WISC vs the power of LAMP (for example) when performance and productivity are metrics. It's hard enough to compare each one on its own, but even harder to mix the two. The purported value is thus a red herring. Compare SQL Server to MySQL or C# to PHP, and then we'll have a discussion.

"Can you beat phenomenal performance, reduced CPU usage and great productivity which now comes at no cost up-front?" I can copy and paste that into any flamewar thread on any side of the argument and it will still make sense and you will still want to agree. The reader here agrees with the question, and never with the thesis---as much of a thesis there can be in this post, which is only implied. An unbiased question to be asked should be, free licenses or not, is WISC worth it? Well, no:

* Windows -- Yuck. The only reason to ever want to develop on Windows is if you are using the AllegroCL IDE[1]. Windows as a server? Is there ever any argument there, or is just acquiescence due to the rest of the stack?

* IIS -- Seriously? Have you ever had to manage a farm of servers all running IIS? There may be tools out there to automate IIS maintenance across servers, but do they beat good ol' text config files?

* SQL Server -- Fine, it may have its merits without needing 10 years of experience, so again, where's the SQL Server vs MySQL practical comparison?

* C# -- Mixed feelings. If you're stuck with the above three, not too terrible of a choice if you know the language well and are in a hurry. Else, learn Boo.

Pardon my sarcasm, but there really is no point in belaboring the merits of WISC in terms of performance or productivity. It has its place, and its values, but this leads to a different discussion.

But here's kind of what I felt[2] when I was developing on the MS stack at my previous job:

"I once saw a nature special in which some insect or other dragged some other dead insect somewhere then turned around and dug a whole for it to bury it but the researchers moved the dead insect a bit while it was digging so it had to drag it back but while it did they filled in the hole and back and forth this insect went indefinitely until a PETA sniper took out the researchers."[3]

[1] The AllegroCL IDE is only "full-fledged" on Windows.

[2] After taking the red pill, of course.

[3] Kenny Tilton on comp.lang.lisp

<comment><USER2> >> where's the SQL Server vs MySQL practical comparison?

Here is one: [http://angryhacker.com/blog/archive/0001/01/01/mysql-eye- for...](http://angryhacker.com/blog/archive/0001/01/01/mysql-eye-for-an- microsoft-sql-server-guy.aspx)

<comment><USER3> This one isn't half bad, but it is lacking. MSSQL has a much better query engine when your queries get complex and it uses indexes in a more sophisticated and efficient way. Also on larger databases where the DB-size exceeds the available memory by a factor of 100, you can really forget about MySQL all together while MSSQL will just keep rolling.

Also point 3 about MSSQL defaults has been moot at least since SQL Server 2000. While it _does_ create a named constraint in the background, it supports a as minimalistic syntax as MySQL for setting defaults.

In fact, this is such a widely used syntax that you almost have to look up the overly declarative one he uses in his example to know that it even exists.

Besides that your link does give at least a light overview of the differences when it comes to programming them, so have an upvote.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> MS is not a horrible stack to develop on. It performs great and for the most part you can avoid a lot of the licensing costs anyway - on dedicated servers the difference is like $10 or $20 if you're leasing, and if you're rolling your own hardware there's BizSpark.

SQL Server starts free and it was actually only halfway through last year that I stopped using the free version at Playtomic. It's also the only significantly expensive part - and very easy to not use in favor of something that is free/open source/cheaper/whatever.

I'm glad I went with .NET for my startup - a few days ago I calculated some current numbers: 29 million unique people logged over 3 billion events during a 10 day period. It's holding up well enough for me and my very lean, mostly Microsoft-flavored startup.

Yesterday I came across this writeup on what Quora is built on too:

<http://www.philwhln.com/quoras-technology-examined>

<comment> brown9-2 _on dedicated servers the difference is like $10 or $20 if you're leasing, and if you're rolling your own hardware there's BizSpark._

How much does BizSpark cost after the initial pricing period lapses?

<comment><USER5> [http://www.microsoft.com/BizSpark/Faqs.aspx#Startup- Question...](http://www.microsoft.com/BizSpark/Faqs.aspx#Startup-Question9)

Startups may take advantage of the BizSpark Graduation offer that allows startups to keep the software they have with the option to purchase subscriptions and maintenance if they want to keep it up to date. This also allows them to continue using their Microsoft software at no cost in perpetuity and allows them to renew subscriptions to this software without paying any initial license fees. Startups can:

•Keep their MSDN Ultimate software and optionally renew their MSDN subscriptions at any level

•Keep all their Windows and SQL Servers they are using in production and optionally purchase the first two years of Software Assurance (updates and ongoing maintenance) at a 50% discount

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I hate to be "that guy" but

"(...)When I compare our performance to similar sites that are running on the open source stack, we are using about 1/10th of the hardware that they are, unfortunately, and maybe that's because they are not good programmers. But just in terms of the types of queries we are doing and stuff, the Microsoft stack is actually, appears to be paying for itself – in terms of reduced hardware"

Doesn't really provide any real justifications. I have indeed anecdotally heard good things about mssql, but apart from that I have a hard time believing you couldn't get more or less identical performance from jvm/linux/etc (and maybe mysql/postgres really can give mssql a run for its money, but I admittedly know little about relative database performance)

On the other hand, it seems like Jeff/Joel had lots of experience with the MS stack before, so its not an illogical choice. You want to spend your time building a product, not wasting it figuring a new stack you aren't very familiar with.

<comment><USER7> I've been through the gambit of making heavily used applications under ASP, ASP.NET, CakePHP, and Django. Part of what comes up in these kinds of discussions has to do with how a .NET website works vs how a "Linux" website works.

The difference in performance per hardware dollar for a .NET setup and a Linux type setup can be quite large. Especially if you compare an ASP.NET site to a PHP site. The .NET stuff is going to be compiled, or at least pre-parsed, and likely jitted. To get comparable performance out of PHP, you'd need to use APC or Zend or something similar. For small sites the difference may not be all that large. But if you're using something like CakePHP, there can be a good amount of stuff for the server to parse on every single request.

Also a dead simple dumb LAMP setup is going to use Apache prefork, and won't have nearly as good scalability for the same amount of memory as an ASP.NET setup would. A naive Linux PHP setup is actually more like what the ancient, pre-.NET world of ASP looked like.

So in short, ASP.NET is going to blow the doors off of a dead simple LAMP setup if you have a huge amount of code and don't use Zend or APC. A more modern setup under Linux would do much better of course, say Python and WSGI use Apache-worker. This setup is going to give much better performance (due to not having to precompilation) and make better use of memory (through threads in apache-worker vs what you get with apache-prefork).

Microsoft's technologies come out of the box building higher performance apps in the default configuration than some of the more naive pure-Linux approaches.

<comment><USER8> Come back with figures please, not conjecture.

<comment><USER7> I've personally observed huge boosts in the number of concurrent connections a machine can handle with Apache-worker vs Apache-prefork. I've personally observed PHP applications going into fairly high CPU use, and then settling down a lot once I installed APC (which prevents the machine from having the parse the PHP on every request). It's not conjecture, it's observation. I also know that due to the nature of how .NET apps work, they never have that kind of problem. Neither do most other modern web frameworks. Sorry I don't have the graphs-- I don't use Microsoft apps any more. Good day!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Although we use MS for our core we do use Linux and open source projects as part of our stack. The routers/firewalls, redis for caching, and haproxy for load balancing are all run on Linux. In addition we use Linux for a lot of the management such as Bacula for backups and Nagios for monitoring. We try to be open about our infrastructure and both George and I blog about the changes we make at <http://blog.serverfault.com>

</comment><comment><USER10> Sorry, but with all the respect I have for Joel and Jeff, almost every-time one tells about "why I prefer using windows for my scalable website rather than open source solutions", it reminds me the quote from the Woodie Allen's movie

       "Doc, uh, my brother's crazy; he thinks he's a chicken."
        And, uh, the doctor says, "Well, why don't you turn him in?"
        The guy says, "I would, but I need the eggs."

It is all about an imaginary benefit, as an outcome of a silly process (eggs from that imaginary chicken, saving $$ by choosing MS).

Even if you tend to believe MS-SQL is the best database out there, there is no way, coding/testing/distributing your layers (and trust me, there are plenty of them at SO) in C#/Windows is better than {Python||Ruby}/Posix.

This is my opinion, based on my experience from smaller scale web apps, if at small scale the gap is huge, when things grows to millions of page-views a day, the gap is far larger.

Just try to imagine friend-feed, reddit, facebook, justin-tv or any other large website, you name it, scaling and pushing versions on top of MS platform.

<comment><USER11> MySpace is WISC and bigger than many of the sites you named.

<comment><USER10> apparently, myspace is powered by pimpled faced geeks (see output below [X-PoweredBy]).

But that was said as a joke, talking seriously, there is no doubt, the web is powered by the open source software.

Most of the major sites, are using the tools which are not made at Redmond. There are however, some large sites which are exceptionally using the WISC stack, but amongst the largest sites, take the top 100, top 1000, you name it, they are the minority.

        root@clonezilla-srv:~# wget -O- --server-response --spider http://www.myspace.com/
        Spider mode enabled. Check if remote file exists.
        --2011-02-02 13:25:18--  http://www.myspace.com/
        Resolving www.myspace.com... 126.96.36.199
        Connecting to www.myspace.com|220.127.116.11|:80... connected.
        HTTP request sent, awaiting response...
          HTTP/1.1 200 OK
          Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, proxy-revalidate
          Pragma: no-cache
          Content-Length: 74124
          Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
          Expires: -1
          Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5
          X-Server: 896c6f7da640823d4508c54f3b48fc12058736fbc4e59bcf
          Set-Cookie: MSCulture=IP=184.108.40.206&IPCulture=he-IL&PreferredCulture=en-US&PreferredCulturePending=&Country=SUw=&ForcedExpiration=634322139193426057&timeZone=0&myStuffDma=&myStuffMarket=&USRLOC=QXJlYUNvZGU9MCZDaXR5PUtmYXIgU2FiYSZDb3VudHJ5Q29kZT1JTCZDb3VudHJ5TmFtZT1Jc3JhZWwmRG1hQ29kZT0wJkxhdGl0dWRlPTMyLjE4MTcmTG9uZ2l0dWRlPTM0LjkzNTgmUG9zdGFsQ29kZT0mUmVnaW9uTmFtZT0wMiZMb2NhdGlvbklkPTA=&UserFirstVisit=1; domain=.myspace.com; expires=Wed, 09-Feb-2011 11:25:19 GMT; path=/
          Set-Cookie: SessionDDF2=8Q/cYHD2nDXwG4IfpqngrVTCZxMtlFsPs8sS2KKXpeayPKeoIq6z3xJLZvQ7dssRE48xuBfthlzlt6O7FCHJxQ==; domain=.myspace.com; expires=Sun, 02-Feb-2031 11:25:19 GMT; path=/
          Set-Cookie: MYUSERINFO=; domain=.myspace.com; expires=Wed, 19-Jan-2005 08:28:17 GMT; path=/
          Set-Cookie: MYUSERINFO=; domain=myspace.com; expires=Wed, 19-Jan-2005 08:28:17 GMT; path=/
          Set-Cookie: USER=; domain=.myspace.com; expires=Wed, 19-Jan-2005 08:28:17 GMT; path=/
          Set-Cookie: USER=; domain=myspace.com; expires=Wed, 19-Jan-2005 08:28:17 GMT; path=/
          Set-Cookie: SECUREUSERAUTH=; domain=.myspace.com; expires=Wed, 19-Jan-2005 08:28:17 GMT; path=/; secure
          Set-Cookie: SECUREUSERAUTH=; domain=myspace.com; expires=Wed, 19-Jan-2005 08:28:17 GMT; path=/; secure
          X-AspNet-Version: 4.0.30319
          X-PoweredBy: Pimple Faced Geeks
          Date: Wed, 02 Feb 2011 11:25:18 GMT
          Connection: keep-alive
          X-Vertical: globalsites
        Length: 74124 (72K) [text/html]
        Remote file exists and could contain further links,
        but recursion is disabled -- not retrieving.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's funny because Microsoft is known for selling their solutions but in my experience their main problem is they don't know how to sell solutions. A lot of the white papers they put out are just laughable.

If what is being said in this post is correct (and my personal anecdotal evidence suggests it is) than Microsoft needs to hire the best Ruby and Python developers they can find. Have a program written in both languages on a Linux stack and then write the same program on a Windows stack. Then open source it all so anyone who knows ruby or python can point to code mistakes that might inhibit performance.

Once that's all done MS should stress test all the solutions and publish the results.

The Razor engine is the most credible thing MS has given the development community in a while so there's no time like the present.

<comment><USER5> _Once that's all done MS should stress test all the solutions and publish the results._

This is lose-lose for MS. If it turns out they do worse or the same then they lose. If they do better, even much better, people just say its MS funded, please ignore.

And for any non-trivial app there are 1000! different ways to build it. Even if they happened to find the optimal non-MS implementation, someone will say it isn't. And unless you implement all 1000! of them you'll simply have people saying, "No one would do it that way".

<comment><USER12> By that logic Microsoft might as well pack it up and close shop. Because any act they would take would be an act funded by Microsoft. So if they can't do anything because people will say it was funded by Microsoft than they can't do anything at all.

But you did get me thinking and I wouldn't see anything wrong with them having someone else do the actual tests. Hand it off to CNet, ZDNet, AOL or whoever. Provide them the funding and let them run the tests. I don't think any big media company would say no.

<comment><USER13> >By that logic Microsoft might as well pack it up and close shop.

Jan 31, 2011 Microsoft Corp.'s net income for the latest quarter fell slightly from a year ago but the software giant still beat Wall Street's expectations despite the weak personal computer market. Net income was $6.63 billion, compared with $6.66 billion in the same period last year.

I don't think MS is losing to much sleep over the never-ending discussion between programmers whether the MS stack is as scalable as open source alternatives.

There are several live sites that prove it can scale. Most sites chose the alternative. At the end of the day its an interesting conversation, but why do people _care_ so much? If I choose to give a couple grand of MY money to MS, why does that bother some people so much?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think the open source stack alternative is getting a bad rap here mostly because of MySQL, which has historically not scaled well on multi-CPU systems.

C# is certainly faster than a Python or Ruby but you pay a price in development speed (or perhaps Joel would argue not - if you're a C# expert but Ruby newb you'll probably go faster with what you know).

But you could use Clojure or Java if that's a concern.

<comment><USER15> Python and Ruby code would likely win more beauty contest (which is actually kind of important to me) but, with the advent of C# 3 and 4, I don't think that there is much difference in expressive power. Not having a REPL still sucks though.

<comment><USER5> You get a poor man's REPL with the Immediate Window in the debugger. You can't create classes (or statements in general). but you can evaluate expressions.

But it does appear C# REPL is coming in C# 5.0.

<comment><USER16> The compiler rewrite that's meant to enable REPL (along with some cool metaprogramming features, I hope) isn't targeted at 5.0, but a still later release. Though you can get a C# REPL in Mono today.

<comment><USER5> Really? That sucks. (The post 5.0 thing sucks, not Mono). With REPL and Async (and the other metaprogramming stuff) I was thinking 5.0 was going to be their biggest release yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Am I the only one who noticed this?

"This entire site is serving 16million pages a month and we're doing it off of 2 servers, which are almost completely unloaded. So we've got a ton of headroom on those 2 servers – one server is a webserver, the other server is running Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and they're both 8 core Xeons."

They have only one web server and one database server? Does Joel not understand the concept of "single point of failure"?

<comment><USER18> To be fair this was from April 2009; I am sure after their expansion and funding since then this has changed.

However Jeff/Joel (from listening to their podcast when they did it) seemed to have a massive black spot when it comes to some areas of web scaling that I would have thought were trivial. e.g. saying it was extremely hard to scale beyond a single webserver as it held session state (they seemed to have not heard of memcache)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> WISC? I have a vewwy gweat fwiend in Wome called WISC.</comment>


Internet population passes one billion - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/23/comscore-internet-population-passes-one-billion-top-15-countries/

<comment><USER2> So that explains all of those "Congratulations! You're our 1,000,000,000th user! CLICK HERE FOR A FREE IPOD!"</comment>


U.S. Govt. Equates Megaupload to Bank Robbers - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-govt-equates-megaupload-to-bank-robbers-120614/ <comment><USER2> No matter which side of the piracy/sharing debate you fall, there really should be no room for us to tolerate the use of government power without integrity.

Government needs to follow the rules all the time and at every level.

We give the Government power to act on our behalf because we suppose that it has the moral and physical authority to do what we can not as private citizens. When the Government loses its moral high ground by breaking the law or otherwise acting without integrity, then its use of power is simply abusive and worse than the criminal behavior from which it purports to protect us.

<comment><USER3> I don't really object to this, but in the spirit of the devil's advocate...

There's an argument that we give the power of force to the government because it's better to live under one predictable bully than in a free-for-all. That argument isn't particularly weakened by bad behavior on the part of gov't.

<comment><USER4> Seems to me that the argument you cite is made out of hopelessness rather than hope. I may be pragmatic, and even wise, but I don't like it. I at least like to think that we can reign in the government and compel it to live by certain moral standards.

<comment><USER5> And I'd like to think that we can reign in career criminals like Kimble and compel them to live by certain moral standards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It sounds like the DoJ is waffling while they try to find charges that will stick and thereby justify their seizure. You can say they're like bank robbers all day, but at the end of that day, if you don't have something concrete to charge them with, it's a pointless waste of time, effort and money.</comment>


Apple lawyer going after gnome projects? - <AUTHOR> http://www.grillbar.org/wordpress/?p=254 First she calls the cheese project (photobooth clone) and gets it taken down, then the Xesam (shared search spec)... there must be some prior art for "IC 009. US 021 023 026 036 038. G & S: computer software used for image editing, image acquisition, and image viewing"<p>[or this is a very bad April fools joke by someone!] <comment><USER2> From the comments: have you also considered that its 1st of April today and that this might be a joke?

Its slightly harder to distinguish Apple related April Fools, partly because Apple was incorporated on Thu 1 Apr 1976.</comment>


Show HN: Post-IPO Nonprofits - <AUTHOR> http://postipononprofits.com/

<comment><USER2> (1) Just let me scroll ...

(2) You tricked me into watching a large ad for Zoho?</comment>


Antigua could hit U.S. with copyright-free downloads - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/01/25/us-usa-antigua-copyright-idUSBRE90O0YR20130125 <comment><USER3> I don't see how this would actually work. If you set up a pirate website in Antigua, congratulations, good luck competing with the million other ones that already exist. How does it hurt the U.S. in any significant way to go from a million to a million and one?

On top of that, it's not like the U.S. is going to sit around and allow it. Expect payment processors to be pressured not to process payments for the service, goods like t-shirts to be seized at the border if you actually try to export them into the U.S. or U.S. friendly nations, etc. They're already ignoring the WTO for the questionable purpose of prohibiting online gambling, you don't think they would do it for this too?

In other words, now you can set up a pirate website in Antigua... under pretty much the same conditions as you can anywhere else.

<comment><USER4> The difference is that it's not a pirate website. It's WTO sanctioned, thus a legal offer. This would make things harder to shut down, since it's hard to argue that it should be shut down because it's a pirate site.

<comment><USER5> WTO sanctioning wouldn't prevent MPAA, or even the US government labeling it as a pirate website. US probably could ban importing IP from Antigua, thus making downloading stuff from there as illegal as conventional pirating.

<comment><USER4> Sure. However, we in Europe care little about what the mpaa says and German judges tend to be independent from the US government as well. I'd love to get legal and timely access to high hd content and would be more than happy to shell out some bucks. Europe has a financial crisis, but there's still a market here.

<comment><USER6> >However, we in Europe care little about what the mpaa says and German judges tend to be independent from the US government as well.

They don't need to win over the German government. If the US Congress passes a law to the effect of "No US bank can do business with a bank that does business in Antigua" even European banks will stay clear.

I'm American and I would love to see a major country stand up to the US when it comes to this crazy patent and copyright stuff. But there are a lot of financial levers, and export-driven countries like Germany, Japan, and China are particularly vulnerable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's interesting to see Antigua's reaction to America ignoring the WTO. I think America is on shaky ground here, as many countries are getting sick of America overstepping their boundaries.

In theory, every country aligned with the WTO should back Antigua on this. In reality, America will threaten trade sanctions against them too, so it will be a question of who has big enough balls to stand up to the world's bully. Let's hope we can get a critical mass going.

<comment><USER8> What boundaries exactly got overstepped? It's a legal collision. US law says no online gambling. Antigua law says "Gambling is great, we welcome US consumers!". US tries to enforce its law via sanctions (I think). WTO law says you can't do that and awards Antigua $21M US in "equivalent sanctions" or somesuch (i.e. it's not a cash award).

Yawn. I mean, I think the US law here is dumb, but it's the law. I think the enforcement was clumsy, and it was rebuked. But this sort of nonsense happens all the time in international law. Must _every_ trade dispute involving the US become some kind of para-nationalist rant against the "world's bully?". Can't it just be a dumb law like the literally thousands of other dumb laws?

<comment><USER9> > I think the US law here is dumb, but it's the law.

It is what it is, huh? 'It's the law' is a dose of propaganda so you don't feel bad about being forced to do something stupid.

A legal collision sounds so polite. To me, this resembles gang behavior. People want to gamble, so fuck the State. Statists are the hypocrites who let you buy lottery tickets at every corner store.

I agree with you that this isn't limited to the US, but the US wields pretty heavy influence and repercussions for disobedience.

<comment><USER10> If people want to gamble, they should vote for representatives that will repeal the gambling ban.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Antigua: come for the beaches, leave with a truecrypt image of every book worth reading, every song worth hearing, and every movie worth watching.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is a really interesting idea. Every file sharing site in the world setting up their servers in Antigua could potentially be a huge boost to their economy.

However, I bet the US will come to some resolution with them at the minute to prevent this from happening. This article is probably more of a bargaining chip than an actual plan.

</comment><comment><USER13> Here's yesterday's discussion of a different article on the same move, fwiw: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5112748>

</comment><comment><USER5> Antigua could also become the next Cuba.

</comment><comment><USER14> They're going to suddenly discover al-Qaeda operating in Antigua.

</comment><comment><USER15> Please please, a tropical paradise that's beyond the reach of even just patent trolls. Sign me up.

</comment><comment><USER16> The article is very sensationalist. WTO penalties are meant to be a proportional penalty, not some sort of carte-blanche.

The sensationalist aspect here is the idea that Antigua might set a far below- market price on intellectual property items. Ah, we'll charge $0.000000000000000000000000000001 per song/movie! Functionally unlimited songs and movies for $1! They'll have to negotiate since we now have a legal way for people go get nearly-free, unlimited American content! Except that the world doesn't work that way.

If the United States did something wrong and Antigua was awarded $21M worth of American IP as retaliation, then they should get in the ballpark of $21M. I'm sure no one in the US government is buying the "we can set any price we want and become a legal pirate haven if you don't give us what we want" argument. No one at the WTO would either. It makes a great story - especially since many of us hate the way that content industries in the US act. But the reality is that the WTO's decision is meant to be a proportional penalty to the wrong that has been done, not some vindictive nonsense.

I mean, sometimes countries would rather pay than change their laws - <USER2> because they're trying to be mean, but because they just have different values or fears. For example, let's say that Germany thinks that beer has to be made with German hops. There's nothing wrong with American hops. They're perfectly safe. Maybe they taste like crap, but snobbery isn't a valid reason to exclude a product. But maybe the Germans would rather pay. It happens. Further, let's say that Koreans are afraid that fans that don't auto-shutoff after 30 minutes will suck the air out of a room and kill people. Science doesn't back that up, it's not a valid health and safety issue, and if they want to exclude these non-auto-shutoff fans, they need to pay. Where this happens in the real world are on the edges where science is often murky. Is Pesticide A ok? Is additive B safe? Similarly, it happens with things like gambling where the US wants to regulate it and doesn't feel it can exert authority over foreign-companies (even if it sets regulations for them).

None of this is meant to give anyone carte-blanche to force issues. It's meant to keep things equal. Well, if you're going to favour your domestic industries and harm ours by $x, we get to favour our domestic industries and harm your's by the same $x plus maybe some reasonable penalty amount (I don't actually know about penalty amounts) - with "x" being determined by the WTO.

Antigua had been arguing to the WTO that the US harmed it in the billions. The WTO awarded them $21M. It sounds more like, "we're going to try to find a loophole because they mostly disagreed with us" than it does legitimate. Really, it sounds like the type of negotiation posturing that no one buys.

EDIT: I think the important thing to think about here is how you would want things settled in other cases - a consistant standard of practice - and not just in terms of nations. A lot of us here disliked Apple's harsh stand against Android. We don't mind proportional responses, many of us don't mind paying for quality products or components at a fair price. Likewise, we tend to dislike the "they made a tiny infraction! burn everything that is their's!" disproportionate response. Here we have "the US blocked Antiguan gambling sites in a discriminatory manner". The response shouldn't be, "destroy the entire American IP industry until they submit!"

And it's important to note that these standards should (ideally) be applied equally. If we don't wish disproportionate responses against Actor A, we shouldn't wish it against Actor B. The world might be less interesting in such a stable system, but I think we all benefit. We benefit when small wrongs are treated as small wrongs. We suffer when random wrongs carry random penalties.

<comment><USER11> _The sensationalist aspect here is the idea that Antigua might set a far below-market price on intellectual property items_

What's the price of something that has no incremental cost? We've been trained to think it's ~ $15, but there's no real basis for that.

<comment><USER17> >What's the price of something that has no incremental cost?

Whatever the market is willing to pay.

<comment><USER13> Absent a government-granted temporary monopoly, the market would be willing to pay very little. So it ends up a bit circular when debating government IP policies.

<comment><USER18> The "people who download the most also purchase the most" stories that pop up every six months or so disagree. Even many of the people with the most awareness of the fact that they could get stuff for free are willing to pay the current market rates for a lot of it. It's been almost 14 years since Napster. A decade since suprnova and widespread availability of torrents for movies and TV shows. And yet the floor still hasn't fallen out of market prices. Things are changing in the creation and distribution world, but I see little indication that some substantial part of the population has decided that we're paying content creators too much, and that a song, show, movie, book, or game is only worth very little.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>