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Comment by idlewords | Hacker News Reader

You gotta bore for that sweet latency win. A chord tunnel between San Francisco and Hong Kong would save 1300 miles (20% improvement right there), and if you drill it straight enough, you won't even need a cable.

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Please don't give the HFT's ideas, they'll probably do it and cause a half dozen tsunamis in the process.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/high-frequency-traders-push-clo...

...and create a supervolcano.

We already have one of those on land in the US.

We have two. I suspect that you are thinking of Yellowstone, but there is also the Long Valley Caldera in Eastern California. The Mammoth Mountain area.

If you don't like HFTs, this is an idea you'd probably like to give them. Nobody has ever drilled through the Mohorovicic. It is unclear whether or not it is possible to do so.

The most-likely outcome is a few happy geologists/geophysicists and a number of very-sad HFT underwriters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohorovi%C4%8Di%C4%87_disconti...

It says it's 10 to 20 km below the ocean floor. Are we as humans been digging in the ocean floor that deep, or even at all? That sounds like sci-fi to me, I'd love to learn more if that's actually feasible.

USSR, land, 12,262 metres: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole

US, sea, 183 m below the sea floor in 3,600 m of water: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mohole

Apparently the deepest oil well at sea was 10km deep, in the Mexico Gulf, drilled by the Deepwater Horizon rig

Anyone interested in the topic, this is a great movie — fiction but very close to reality:

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

You know, if HFT's will be the agents of future MegaInfrastructure spend, so be it.

I long for the days when the US loved building infrastructure.

Heh baby steps maybe? The existing cables aren’t even short paths along great circles. The Oregon-Japan cable google owns is 12000 km along a 7500-km path.

Need to have lava shields for that.

The photons go through fast enough that they won't get very hot.

Remember: You want your photons crispy around the edges, not charred.

I take my photons medium-rare.

Not to make light of these puns, but they aren't very coherent...

On reflection I think we could all use a bit of light relief at the moment!

Medium-rare with a light salad

I only use recycled photons, so my light is green.

Who cares? Would be totally worth it because of unlimited geothermal energy!

How deep would this bore tunnel be at the centre most point if it was perfectly straight? Would it go into the mantle?

d=r(1/cos(s/(2r))-1)=3958(1/cos(6906/7916)-1)~=2198 mi; Yes, into the lower mantle with only 692 mi to go to the outer core. What I would love the internetz to explain is how to justify the h8 for HFT, yet the luv for Musk since he is the one in the driver's seat at the moment for this stuff with StarLink and the Boring company.

And tell me how one would service any problems that arise either by tectonic movements or breaching an alien/breakaway civilization hollow earth chamber?

Repair it like any other tunnel that requires maintenance?

Because HFT helps the rich AF get richer but Starlink benefits normal people?

Satellite internet already exists; StarLink's defining feature is lower latency both by being in a lower orbit and inter-satellite links. It does benefit consumers by introducing another satellite internet competitor, but how many "normal" people want to rely on satellite internet or, if they do, care about a few extra 100s of ms of latency? (Inter)-National wireless companies have a tendency to consolidate and lobby out smaller companies and municipalities who have less incentive to build out fiber and landline companies, if any, have further justification to cut cords. StarLink is the now the leading solution for global low latency connections for HFT by being in a near vacuum in low orbit. The case for HFT benefiting non-professional trader Mrs. Mainstreet is that she no longer has to eat the larger spread offered by the big bank market maker every pay cycle when the 401K contribution hits with HFTraders providing liquidity. The opportunity for smaller traders to make the market is no longer there, but the odds that they would had a chance to begin with have been stacked against them for a long time with the cost of the fastest connection being marginal to now near insignificant.

" care about a few extra 100s of ms of latency?"

Well, as someone who grew up in the modem era(90's) and was trying to play online fps games. I cared quite a bit about latency. Normal people also like things to be quick you know :)

Based on that experience in the 90s to this day i want my internet connectivity to be as fast as possible and i'm willing to pay.

Low latency enables video/audio chat amongst other things and just a better experience.

A quick google search gives 600 ms latency for satellites(not Starlink) thats quite a alot. Also bandwidth is a issue with existing providers i think.

We used to manage a remote branch over geo stationary satellite, it was an excersise in pain. We used to check the local weather forecast to see if it was raining before doing any work on the servers. Geo internet is awful, I think you are underestimating how much usability difference there would be between LEO and GEO latencies and bandwidth (because geo bandwidth was awful too)

The ping on satellite internet is usually around 640 ms as it’s a ~45,000 mile round trip, worse the bandwidth is terrible. That kind of latency breaks a lot of assumptions in the modern web. Dropping to ~20ms and dramatically upping the bandwidth is a huge win for rural internet users.

PS: I am on the waiting list for starlink.

Current satellite internet is really bad. ~600ms of latency is very noticeable even just loading webpages, and the throughput isn't great either.

Also multiplayer gaming is rather popular, and that's just not possible with that much latency.

VOIP is a pretty terrible experience with that much latency too.

One of the important components of online hate is that it requires zero justification or logical consistency.

It just needs to feel gratifying.

> if you drill it straight enough, you won't even need a cable.

Well, yes and no. I recall they wanted to pursue hollow cables in the early days of optical cabling, but it turned out solid fiber was the answer.

(sorry, can't find a good reference)

So FTTC (Fiber Through The Core) is what you want.

couldn't you start experiments using the Alameda-Weekhauken tunnel?

Alameda enterprises excited by rumours of new chord tunnel Thursday, low latency burrito delivery futures up 5%.

We have the technology!

And they are heated along the way!

Currently posting from Alameda. If you cause a local surge in demand that means I have to outbid a Manhattanite for a good burrito, I will cut someone.

BagelRail was dual use before the fiasco

More feasible would be transmitting neutrinos or some other signal that would not be blocked by the Earth.

> More feasible

If they don't interact with the thousands of miles of earth between the source and the destination, they probably also won't interact with the receiver! :p Imagine the retransmission rates!

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

And you'd also have to ignore all the insane amounts of noise coming from regular neutrinos wizzing about in the universe.

If you've built a reliable detector, you've already built something that can intercept them. You just need to make a shroud around your detector and a tube facing your transmitter out of the same material.

There are ~65,000,000,000 neutrinos from the sun passing through each square centimeter of your hands every second as you read this. There are no materials on Earth that can reliably stop any given neutrino. For that, one needs densities greater than those generally found in stellar cores.

Neutrino detectors work by maximizing dumb luck through being both very large and very, very clean (low radioactivity). The transmitter-detector systems work by sending oodles of very energetic neutrinos at a well-defined time and looking for a rare coincident flash in the detector.

Any detector useful for communication is also an interceptor. The way we detect neutrinos now is not useful for communication.

If you're sending neutrinos at a known energy from a known location and in a narrow time-coincidence window, you can hammer most backgrounds way down.

The low detection rate isn't so terrible either -- one only needs the bits that are detected to be tradably-correct almost-all the time.

The hard part is arranging to make enough money to fund the accelerator and detector.

There has been a lot of progress in the past 20 years on antineutrino detection. Antineutrinos are produced by fission and so there's been a fair bit of interest in detecting them to detect covert nuclear tests as well as potentially a new modality of detecting nuclear submarines.

I think it could become possible before too long to use this to transmit data. It would probably be a ~billion dollar project, but the HFT arbitrage market is essentially winner-take-all, and may be large enough to support this size investment.

The MINERvA experiment at Fermilab already demonstrated communication with neutrinos, admittedly over short distance: "The link achieved a decoded data rate of 0.1 bits/sec with a bit error rate of 1% over a distance of 1.035 km, including 240 m of earth."

https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.2847

Anyone from an HFT firm who wants to look into a partnership researching a neutrino link to the CME data center feel free to reach out :)

Dear god the packet loss.

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