6 ms·

While we all (HN audience) know roughly what kind of things are going on, seeing it in all the delicate details is fascinating. Just thinking that all these by

While we all (HN audience) know roughly what kind of things are going on, seeing it in all the delicate details is fascinating. Just thinking that all these bytes and everything that's happening have 6 more layers below all the way to physical electrical/electromagnetic flow, all routed potentially through many different ISP backbones and possibly international routes, all happening in roughly less than 1/10 of a second is even more fascinating.

connordoner 3y ago
Incredible, really, isn't it?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nomel 3y ago
The craziest thing is, if you’re using Ethernet, there’s a very high chance you have an actual physical data connection with the other computer on the other side of the world. A giant physical web blanketing the Earth.
- vikingerik 3y ago
  Well, that's not new with computers or the internet. We had that ever since the analog telephone system. Even telegraphs before that for a smaller set of points and routes.
  - nomel 3y ago
    I imagine we're somewhere near peak density though, or maybe even past it. Wireless will slowly remove your fingers from laying on that physical web.
    - LK5ZJwMwgBbHuVI 3y ago
      Why isn't wireless physical? Perhaps it's not massive :)
    - foobiekr 3y ago
      Really no. The RF world has nothing on fiber and copper for density. There is almost unlimited desire for bandwidth in the access layer and over subscription ratios are still very very high. The transition to 800G ports and then post-800G is not even warmed up yet. You can run the entire country of Australia on a backbone of two dozen routers today because of the lack of endpoint access bandwidth. We are at a place where bandwidth is once again plentiful in the core … not so much on the edge. Sort of like 2003 when oc768 created that situation.
- can16358p 3y ago
  Never though of it this way. Right!
  - anamexis 3y ago
    Similarly, every time you step onto a road, you're stepping on a contiguous strip of pavement that spans the entire continent
    - lelandfe 3y ago
      My lifetime of road trips is just a really inefficient flood fill
    - kzrdude 3y ago
      I often daydream about this one and wonder if there is continuous asphalt from me (Sweden) down to South East Asia or if there are any breaks. When I search for answers right now, AH1 looks like a candidate, but no confirmation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AH1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AH1
    - Gare 3y ago
      Even more remarkable with rail.
- bigdict 3y ago
  In what sense? What's a physical data connection? There's a shit ton of routers and switches in between, it's not like there's an electrical connection.
  - nomel 3y ago
    You could run your finger across from my keyboard to yours, without a single break in the continuous physical connection between them. Connector clips included, of course. ;)
    - bigdict 3y ago
      I don't know, I alternate between thinking that's remarkable and not so much. I could run that connection via the power grid too, or the water supply (if we were in the same city). Edit: I concede it's actually pretty remarkable. It is like the nervous system of the planet. Sure there's not a purely electrical continuity, but neuron synapses don't have an electrical nature either.
      - silviot 3y ago
        Are you sure? As far as I'm aware a single city might have its electricity network split in a few macro areas, and not really connected to each other. The Internet, on the other hand, needs all nodes to be connected somehow (and I bet the vast majority of connections are physical).
        bigdict 3y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continental_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmission_grid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmiss...
        ElevenLathe 3y ago
        This is true but on a much larger scale than the city. For example, the United States has only three electrical grids (East, West, and Texas). Within those areas, not only are all electricity users in some sense connected, they are all /synchronous/, meaning that the 60hz coming out of your wall peaks and troughs at the same exact time as the 60hz at your cousin's house two states away. The grids also have interconnections with one another, but they happen via DC to avoid needing to synchronize the whole continent. In a literal sense, modernity is about using energy to coordinate human activity across vast distances at minute time scales. We normally think about this in terms of transportation, telegraphy, telephony, print, broadcasting, and the internet but it's also true of the motors in our washing machines and factories.
bheadmaster 3y ago
Assuming artificial superintelligence is possible, imagine how would its "experience" be in contrast to ours - it would be orders of magnitude faster in both thinking and execution. We would be like some weird plants to them, that take a year just to move from one location to another. Truly fascinating.
xenadu02 3y ago
It reminds me of being a teenager in the late 90s and the early days of the internet. I discovered entirely on my own that I could telnet to port 80, type "GET / HTTP/1.1\n\n" and the server would send me the headers + page content. Shortly after I discovered the same worked for SMTP. I was very far from the first person to have this revelation but it was definitely an eye-opening "there is no magic, it's all just software" moment for me. It fundamentally changed the way I think about computers at every level and inspired me to look "under the hood" at everything... how CPUs implement superscalar OOO execution. How atomic operations work at the CPU level. What a syscall actually is. How subroutines are called (and calling conventions). How dynamic linkers work. You don't have to be an expert at all these things but it is like a superpower to understand the basics of every layer.
- swyx 3y ago
  > What a syscall actually is ive only regarded it as a literal system call, the lowest possible level, “language agnostic” api that does a thing in the OS. do you have some deeper insight?
  - fihfkvfh 3y ago
    "Syscalls" is a topic in systems programming. You can Google "syscall faq" for example. https://blog.packagecloud.io/the-definitive-guide-to-linux-system-calls/ https://blog.packagecloud.io/the-definitive-guide-to-linux-s... Understanding how syscalls are invoked from user space typically involves knowing what calling conventions are, knowing what an ABI is, etc. https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/syscall.2.html https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/syscall.2.html
  - tremon 3y ago
    The difference between a syscall and a library function call is that a syscall crosses protection boundaries. Implementations differ, but where a library (even the lowest-level OS library like libc) runs in the context of the application and can be invoked with a regular "store pointer and jump" method call, a syscall usually involves transfering control to the kernel through a software interrupt.
  - 3y ago

connordoner 3y ago

Incredible, really, isn't it?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

nomel 3y ago

The craziest thing is, if you’re using Ethernet, there’s a very high chance you have an actual physical data connection with the other computer on the other side of the world. A giant physical web blanketing the Earth.

vikingerik 3y ago
Well, that's not new with computers or the internet. We had that ever since the analog telephone system. Even telegraphs before that for a smaller set of points and routes.
- nomel 3y ago
  I imagine we're somewhere near peak density though, or maybe even past it. Wireless will slowly remove your fingers from laying on that physical web.
  - LK5ZJwMwgBbHuVI 3y ago
    Why isn't wireless physical? Perhaps it's not massive :)
  - foobiekr 3y ago
    Really no. The RF world has nothing on fiber and copper for density. There is almost unlimited desire for bandwidth in the access layer and over subscription ratios are still very very high. The transition to 800G ports and then post-800G is not even warmed up yet. You can run the entire country of Australia on a backbone of two dozen routers today because of the lack of endpoint access bandwidth. We are at a place where bandwidth is once again plentiful in the core … not so much on the edge. Sort of like 2003 when oc768 created that situation.
can16358p 3y ago
Never though of it this way. Right!
- anamexis 3y ago
  Similarly, every time you step onto a road, you're stepping on a contiguous strip of pavement that spans the entire continent
  - lelandfe 3y ago
    My lifetime of road trips is just a really inefficient flood fill
  - kzrdude 3y ago
    I often daydream about this one and wonder if there is continuous asphalt from me (Sweden) down to South East Asia or if there are any breaks. When I search for answers right now, AH1 looks like a candidate, but no confirmation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AH1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AH1
  - Gare 3y ago
    Even more remarkable with rail.
bigdict 3y ago
In what sense? What's a physical data connection? There's a shit ton of routers and switches in between, it's not like there's an electrical connection.
- nomel 3y ago
  You could run your finger across from my keyboard to yours, without a single break in the continuous physical connection between them. Connector clips included, of course. ;)
  - bigdict 3y ago
    I don't know, I alternate between thinking that's remarkable and not so much. I could run that connection via the power grid too, or the water supply (if we were in the same city). Edit: I concede it's actually pretty remarkable. It is like the nervous system of the planet. Sure there's not a purely electrical continuity, but neuron synapses don't have an electrical nature either.
    - silviot 3y ago
      Are you sure? As far as I'm aware a single city might have its electricity network split in a few macro areas, and not really connected to each other. The Internet, on the other hand, needs all nodes to be connected somehow (and I bet the vast majority of connections are physical).
      - bigdict 3y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continental_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmission_grid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmiss...
      - ElevenLathe 3y ago
        This is true but on a much larger scale than the city. For example, the United States has only three electrical grids (East, West, and Texas). Within those areas, not only are all electricity users in some sense connected, they are all /synchronous/, meaning that the 60hz coming out of your wall peaks and troughs at the same exact time as the 60hz at your cousin's house two states away. The grids also have interconnections with one another, but they happen via DC to avoid needing to synchronize the whole continent. In a literal sense, modernity is about using energy to coordinate human activity across vast distances at minute time scales. We normally think about this in terms of transportation, telegraphy, telephony, print, broadcasting, and the internet but it's also true of the motors in our washing machines and factories.

bheadmaster 3y ago

Assuming artificial superintelligence is possible, imagine how would its "experience" be in contrast to ours - it would be orders of magnitude faster in both thinking and execution. We would be like some weird plants to them, that take a year just to move from one location to another. Truly fascinating.

xenadu02 3y ago

It reminds me of being a teenager in the late 90s and the early days of the internet. I discovered entirely on my own that I could telnet to port 80, type "GET / HTTP/1.1\n\n" and the server would send me the headers + page content. Shortly after I discovered the same worked for SMTP. I was very far from the first person to have this revelation but it was definitely an eye-opening "there is no magic, it's all just software" moment for me. It fundamentally changed the way I think about computers at every level and inspired me to look "under the hood" at everything... how CPUs implement superscalar OOO execution. How atomic operations work at the CPU level. What a syscall actually is. How subroutines are called (and calling conventions). How dynamic linkers work. You don't have to be an expert at all these things but it is like a superpower to understand the basics of every layer.

swyx 3y ago
> What a syscall actually is ive only regarded it as a literal system call, the lowest possible level, “language agnostic” api that does a thing in the OS. do you have some deeper insight?
- fihfkvfh 3y ago
  "Syscalls" is a topic in systems programming. You can Google "syscall faq" for example. https://blog.packagecloud.io/the-definitive-guide-to-linux-system-calls/ https://blog.packagecloud.io/the-definitive-guide-to-linux-s... Understanding how syscalls are invoked from user space typically involves knowing what calling conventions are, knowing what an ABI is, etc. https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/syscall.2.html https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/syscall.2.html
- tremon 3y ago
  The difference between a syscall and a library function call is that a syscall crosses protection boundaries. Implementations differ, but where a library (even the lowest-level OS library like libc) runs in the context of the application and can be invoked with a regular "store pointer and jump" method call, a syscall usually involves transfering control to the kernel through a software interrupt.
- 3y ago