Generally we downweight follow-ups so as to avoid repetition [1, 2]. But once enough time has gone by for the hivemind caches to clear, what is old becomes new again. If you would be willing to email hn@ycombinator.com in, say, a couple months, we could invite a repost and put it in the SCP [3].
A new book came out on this recently: The Web Beneath the Waves. The Fragile Cables that Connect Our World, by Samanth Subramanian.[0]
It is well worth reading if you like to go deep on this stuff. The author explicitly frames it as a kind of 2025 update of Neal Stephenson’s classic Mother Earth Mother Board article (which is now 30 years old!). Suffice to say that global geopolitics and the corporate tech landscape look a bit different from 1996 and unsurprisingly, that has implications for submarine cable networks.
Mandatory Neal Stephenson article in Wired on subsea cables [0], as previously discussed [1]. Also now available in the original magazine thanks to Archive.org [2].
I recently watched the Jon Bois documentary "Fool Time" which relates the story of the men involved in the development of telegraph lines to the 90s sitcom Home Improvement. It's an excellent watch.
The British empire's resilient subsea telegraph network - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46432999
Generally we downweight follow-ups so as to avoid repetition [1, 2]. But once enough time has gone by for the hivemind caches to clear, what is old becomes new again. If you would be willing to email hn@ycombinator.com in, say, a couple months, we could invite a repost and put it in the SCP [3].
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308
It is well worth reading if you like to go deep on this stuff. The author explicitly frames it as a kind of 2025 update of Neal Stephenson’s classic Mother Earth Mother Board article (which is now 30 years old!). Suffice to say that global geopolitics and the corporate tech landscape look a bit different from 1996 and unsurprisingly, that has implications for submarine cable networks.
[0] https://globalreports.columbia.edu/books/the-web-beneath-the...
[0] https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30342302
[2] https://archive.org/details/wired-magazine-04.12-1996-decemb...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmyBSrQodnI
https://www.georgeglazer.com/wpmain/product-category/science...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Heaviside