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CS Alert (1890)
- gnulinux 7y agoMeta HN question (I'm sorry if this is inappropriate). Normally, in HN "{Title} ({Year})" signals that the article is written in "Year". So when I read the title, I thought the article will be from 1890, but then realized the article is named "CS Alert (1890)". In this case looks like "(1890)" is added to the title to disambiguate it from other "CS Alert"s i.e.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CS_Alert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CS_Alert I initially thought it would make more sense to name this article as "CS Alert" since it wouldn't matter as much as Wikipedia if the title is ambiguous. But then I disagreed with myself since other "CS Alert"s are all named of the form "CS Alert ({Year})" so it could still be ambiguous even in HN context. Maybe the title could editorialized to "CS Alert 1890" or "CS Alert, 1890" or something, but I understand that HN rules are against editorializing titles. It's an interesting problem.
- rmbryan 7y agoMaybe wikipedia should be exempt from the dating rule, since, what's the publication date on a wikipedia entry?
- 0xffff2 7y agoI think the problem here is that the literal string "(1890)" is part of the original title.
- Stratoscope 7y agoThis article is a great example of where the submitter should improve the title. As it is, I thought "Was there a Computer Science Alert in 1890?" There's nothing wrong with an informative title here. If it were me, I would write: The cable-laying and cable-cutting ship CS Alert That does what a good headline should do: give a taste of the story without venturing into clickbait territory.
- mikeash 7y agoInteresting that they cut the lines instead of tapping them. Maybe the technology wasn’t there yet, or they were in too much of a hurry.
- gwbas1c 7y agoIt would probably be obvious if there was always a ship over the cables.
- rmbryan 7y agoI wonder if there are cases where it's better to cut an enemy cable, as opposed to tapping it. I can't think of any, but this isn't my field.
- henryfjordan 7y agoTapping the cable still allows the enemy to talk. Sometimes, if the enemy is trying to be sneaky, it's better to overhear them and thwart their efforts. Other times the enemy might be trying to coordinate a massive attack for which timing is key. It wouldn't matter if you overhear because you need to disrupt the attack before it starts. In that case it's better to not let the enemy communicate at all.
- ryacko 7y agoStill doesn’t explain why layer 1 encryption isn’t used for oceanic cables. Edit: I mean this from a timeless perspective, and slightly from the present day.
- krastanov 7y agoIn 1915!? Because mathematically sound encryption and the computational machinery to employ it did not exist back then.
- 7y ago