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that's been going on for decades, rinse and repeat


The PS3 failed?


The article didn't say that.

> The PS3 failed developers because it was an excessively heterogenous computer

Most here are probably too young to realize the PS3 was supposed to be a flagship consumer device to show off the Cell processor and Sony was pushing hard for the Cell arch to be everywhere, media devices, general purpose computers, next gen supercomputers

It died hard when people realized how difficult it was to program for, and I dont think anything else other than the PS3 ever bothered seriously trying again with that arch.


>The article didn't say that.

Yes it did, fairly near the top.

>>It is important to understand why the PS3 failed.

This article is a bunch of nonsense.


Read. More. Than. One. Sentence. Read the article as a whole, not cut into pieces. Context will let you learn what he meant by "failed", since "failed" can mean multiple things. "At what did the PS3 fail?" is how it should be read and comprehended.


Dunno why you are getting downvoted. You're completely correct. It is literally the third line on the page, including the title! That sentence is, to quote TFA,

> It is important to understand why the PS3 failed.


You mean the URL not the title. The title is actually the the conclusion of the article. A URL is more like a filename.


I see the disconnect.

Full disclosure: I have been doing The Internet for well over 30 years. :)

"including the title" was intended to attach to the line count. Some may include the page title (h1 heading in HTML) in the lines at the start of the page. Some may not, because the title isn't necessarily part of the article itself. I was trying to disambiguate.

I was not trying to say that the "PS3 failed" was in the title.

You're right that it's in the URL but I didn't see that until you pointed it out.


But hopefully also you see the connection.

Being pedantic is not an interesting position.


To save time I'm going to just link the other comment thread because its boring arguing against bad reading comprehension

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43656279#43656640


that's what I'm saying


Yeah, looks like they shipped ~87 million of them, a bit more than the Xbox 360.


You probably see it enough already in your ads, but this has been the most effective app blocker for me: https://getbrick.app


I've ignored it because it's advertised :) What's your experience with it?


Ha, I do the same for most advertised things. It is as advertised. I've easily gained back more of my time than the $59 that it costs. Game changer if you make a habit to "brick" your phone every morning.


For humans to have any reasonable presence somewhere else in our solar system (moon, mars, etc.) we need the ability to launch tons (literally tons) of stuff to orbit and to the destination. and we need to launch it often to do anything in a reasonable amount of time. the only way to do that is to make reusable launch systems. SpaceX's Falcon 9 has aced that for satellites (see Starlink and everything else they've launched). The Starship launch system is capable of launching a significantly larger payload, ~20 times more. What they demonstrated yesterday is that a launch system that is capable of getting us anywhere in the solar system can be reusable. Huge accomplishment.


Anyone else click just to slide some animations?


This guy gets it!


Brandon Sanderson ftw!


Went to comments here exactly for this. I was delighted to see one of my favorite authors front-and-center as an incidental detail of an otherwise unrelated tech. demo.


How does the scroll wheel work? Is it mechanical or it has some connection/interface with the software?


The how it works section says the following when you expand it:

> Through carefully mechanized components inside, tinyPod's wheel makes direct rotation contact with your Apple Watch crown, letting it naturally scroll anything across the OS.


It has to be mechanical, there are no input ports on the (current) Apple Watches.


Wonder if the diag port would allow for it.

> It's basically Lightning minus the PWR and ID1 pins, because those are for satellite accessories.


There's no diag port any more on anything Watch 7 or later. They switched to a 50 GHz non-contact protocol for diagnostics on the Apple Watch.


*60.5


I'm sort of expecting a rubber band around the crown going down to a gear tied to the wheel.


I feel it must be mechanical since it interfaces with crown?


> "What goes around, comes around! Rediscover the delight of tactile scrolling with tinyPod’s physical scroll wheel. And yes, it actually scrolls. How? Through carefully mechanized components inside, tinyPod's wheel makes direct rotation contact with your Apple Watch crown, letting it naturally scroll anything across the OS."


tried to find that as well. the "How it works" section is completely useless.


We've done it. Now let's re-engineer our apps to use error codes for 200 responses and get free S3 usage.


I worked on a team with similar cost optimisation gurus... They abused HTTP code conventions and somehow managed to wedge in two REST frameworks into the Django app that at one point had 1m+ users...


Another fan of parasitic computing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitic_computing


I don't know if this counts, but I had something that I would call parasitic happen to me once.

I administered a VBulletin forum, and naturally, we installed all sorts of gewgaws onto it, including an "arcade" where people could play games, share high scores, etc.

This arcade, somehow, came with its own built-in comment system, one where users could somehow register without registering for a proper VBulletin user account on our instance, and thus without admins being notified.

One day, we discovered this whole underbelly community that had apparently been thriving under our metaphorical floorboards, and promptly evicted them. In hindsight, I probably should have found some way to let them stick around, but recently several things had happened that hardened our stance to any sort of un-wanted users.


Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1305/


If I understand TFA, you'd need to find a way to get S3 (which offers no server-side script execution, only basic file delivery) to emit an error code (403 specifically) alongside a response of useful data. Good luck...


Simple. Just encode all of your app's data and logic as a massive lookup table, each bit of which is represented by an object that either doesn't exist (a zero) or is unauthorized to access (a one).

When you read a sequential series of keys (404 403 403 404 = 0110) it will either tell you the data you were looking for or the next key name to begin reading from.


You can also perfectly parallellize those requests, making the operation highly efficient!


It said "never incur request or bandwidth charges". I assume this means you don't pay to compute the response or for the bandwidth to deliver it.

Seems you could compute the response, store it somewhere (memcached or something), and then return an error. Then have the caller make another call to retrieve the response. (To associate the two requests, have the caller generate a UUID and pass it on both calls.)

That doesn't make it entirely free, but it reduces the compute cost of every request to just reading from a cache.

(This does sound like a good way to get banned or something else nasty, so it's definitely not a recommendation.)


Well, you can probably send out one bit a time by updating your ACLs on a clock (with which your clients are also roughly synchronized) and distinguishing between 403 and 404.

take an awful lot of time to get that data out, though.


It seems to me you could just use static ACLs and create (or not) object names to cause this 403 vs 404 distinction? The drawback is that you'll be paying for the minimum retention of minimum-sized objects, not to mention all the other bucket management traffic you are using.

So you're going to have a lot of consumers of the same bit stream before you've somehow made the covert, "free" egress a net positive value versus a regular object. I imagine AWS can trivially put in place some throttling of error responses to make this impractical.

Ignoring these economic issues, imagine a content-addressing scheme like /stream-identifier/bitnumber which you can then poll to fetch one bit per request. Populate an object (which will return 403) for 1 bits and omit an object (which will return 404) for 0 bits.

You also need to know some stream length or "end of stream" limit. Otherwise you can't tell if you've read past the end or are really fetching 0 bits of a longer stream.

One strategy might be to use an 8b/10b encoding so you can detect when you're not getting a valid symbol anymore. You could treat that as end of stream if it is supposed to be static, or go into some polling mode to wait for more symbols to be posted.

Hybrid strategies might use regular objects or recursive use of these streams to publish metadata streams that tell you about the available stream names, lengths, and encoding schemes.


> take an awful lot of time to get that data out, though.

That’s what glacier is for!


Now explain it to me like I'm in a cow level.


I wish this were talked about more. Quantum computing is the biggest long-term threat to crypto imo. What's the plan once elliptic curve cryptography can be broken?

There will be a point in time where there are just a few quantum computers that can break everything before the general public has access to quantum computing. Can crypto work in that scenario? Normal computers wouldn't be able to work with the beastly algorithms a quantum computer could handle.


The first entities that are likely to achieve practical quantum computers will either be governments or big tech companies like Google. And it will be a big deal, so there would likely be several years of warning before it could be at the point where it would make sense to use it to steal someone's bitcoins (I guess the original Satoshi coin address would be the biggest bounty). And in the time period between when the big development is first announced and before it's practical, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency projects can do a fork to a new digital signature scheme that is quantum proof (such as LegRoast) so that anyone who is concerned can move their coins to a new secure address. So while it would certainly be disruptive, it wouldn't necessarily spell the doom of Bitcoin.


Depends on the incentives. If the only interest in quantum computing is to break classically hard encryption then I think the time between poc and widespread availability could be relatively short.


> What's the plan once elliptic curve cryptography can be broken?

A likely drop-in replacement for elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) currently used by Bitcoin could be

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersingular_isogeny_key_exch...

I am not a Mathematician, but what I understood, it's basically an extension of ECC using multiple elliptic curves, allows to re-use the Diffie–Hellman key exchange protocol (private keys kept secret, public keys exchanged) and memory requirements are small. So it would be a perfect replacement in wallets and validation nodes. But I can not explain why it is safe against an attack using quantum computers.


Just don't re-use addresses. Bitcoin does not expose your public key until you spend from it.


If the QC can crack your private key within a few minutes, it would still have a decent chance to steal your money.


> Bitcoin does not expose your public key until you spend from it.

Are you sure, what about when someone sends to it?


They're correct. The blockchain just records that the funds were sent to your address. To spend the funds you have to show the public key which hashes to that address, in another transaction signed by the private key.

If the sender wanted to send you a private message, they would need your public key, but that's not what transactions do.


Fair enough, thank you.


Sending to an address means sending it to a "hash" of a public key (or a more complex script) on all modern formats. Then such script and data is revealed on spend.


While not implemented I think there are "lattice based" forms of cryptography that are believed to QC resistant that blockchains could migrate over to if QCs begin to show signs of increased fault tolerance and size.


We already have a solution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamport_signature) but there’s no reason to deploy it yet since it reduces scalability.


The problem with "yet", in security, is that by the time you realize that "yet" is here, it's already too late.


> I wish this were talked about more.

This is talked about all the time in Bitcoin dev circles.


There's a lot of research and practical work on quantum-proof cryptography which is already in use in some cryptocurrencies - 'just' need to hardfork and update it when it's ready for Bitcoin


No need for a hard fork. A soft fork like Taproot is doing this year would be sufficient.


What cryptocurrencies are currently using post-quantum cryptography?


Only one I'm aware of is QRL ("quantum-resistant ledger").

https://www.theqrl.org/


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