[chatmasta]

It’s because practical experience with technologies like BGP is difficult to acquire without sufficient capital to run a network. You can of course purchase a /24 and dabble (search HN for blog posts describing exactly that). And you can experiment with large deployments in simulators. But network optimization is inherently more of a practical pursuit than a theoretical one, so most broad and consistent learning opportunities are siloed to large organizations where you can accrue daily experience with the stack.

This is really unfortunate, and I mostly blame Cisco and Juniper. They suffocated an entire academic discipline with obfuscated terminology driven more by their business models than anything resembling the OSI model or open standards. That’s why WireGuard feels like such a breath of fresh air after 20 years of L2TP/IPSec.

I applaud companies like Cloudflare and Fly.io for their openness in sharing techniques and open sourcing so much of their code. It goes a long way toward lowering the barriers to self-teaching and experimenting with the latest networking software. And I’m sure HR is happy about the increasingly large applicant pool of qualified networking engineers – even if some hires do eventually leave by advertising their resume to anyone who sends them an IPv6 trace-route :)

[jhugo]

I think consolidation has also lead to this knowledge/experience, at least among younger engineers, being siloed in larger companies rather than spread out among many smaller companies. I started in the industry when the Internet was still relatively new, and at that time most companies I worked with had their own ASN & address space and were running BGP, whereas nowadays most companies just use the cloud.

[RF_Savage]

44Net and hamnet are also interesting to those with radio amateur licenses. Many folks run their own AS an BGP in that range.

[samstave]

Fun Fact ; I'm not sure if it was RIP or BGP, but a certain Cisco Founder stated that they wouldnt have come up with the routing protocol if it weren't for Hoffman and LSD.

[ChuckNorris89]

I really have no idea what any of those acronyms mean.

[LtdJorge]

The drug

[nyc_data_geek1]

RIP = Routing Information Protocol BGP = Border Gateway Protocol LSD = Lysergic Acid Diethylamide

[riekus]

Would love to read more about this.

[xhrpost]

> search HN for blog posts describing exactly that

Know any offhand? Search is a bit tough for a common number like 24. The concept sounds interesting

[chatmasta]

Oh wow you’re right - and neither “autonomous system” nor “AS” are much better keywords! I think this post from 2017 [0] is the one I’m remembering, but I’m pretty sure I saw another one more recently and now I can’t find it (edit: skitter found it! see sibling comment)

“BGP” is a signal-yielding search [1]. And any post from benjojo’s blog [2] is always a must-read.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15727115

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=benjojo.co.uk

[xhrpost]

Thanks!

[skitter]

A quick search turned up https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30178655

[867-5309]

it's ipv6 so a /120 would do!

[icedchai]

You can easily obtain a /44 and your own ASN as an individual, through various RIPE LIRs, no questions asked. If you're in the US, you'll have to procure an overseas VPS so you have a European presence.

[xiwenc]

Yesterday i was watching LSD documentary (https://www.netflix.com/title/80229847). They briefly stated that LSD usage in California was very likely to have accelerated invention of computers. It helped people with problem solving.

[ShamelessC]

How is that relevant?

[lawrenceyan]

You can contribute to the Solana core tech team, with the incentive alignment of underlying token value as a partial backer!

I think they're doing some really cool stuff on the network optimization level. As an example, Solana recently implemented QUIC in its latest release: https://github.com/solana-labs/solana/projects/74

[jhugo]

Are they still using that hand-wavy "cryptographic proof that a duration of time has passed"?

[spencerchubb]

What we care about is getting all the nodes to agree on what order the transactions occurred (aka "Proof of History"). And Solana's goal is to reach that agreement quickly, that's why they call themselves the most performant blockchain.

So how does Solana introduce a concept of "time" without relying on a central authority?

Solana uses a "hash that runs over itself continuously with the previous output used as the next input". Performing a hash over and over again takes some time. Then, someone can quickly verify that this "time" has occurred. The verification of the hashes can be parallelized on a GPU, which makes the verification extremely quick.

https://medium.com/solana-labs/proof-of-history-a-clock-for-...

[lawrenceyan]

Do you mean Proof of History? The concept is made concrete in Solana, but actually any blockchain that hashes a set of transactions in each of its successive slots/blocks can be used to prove that time has passed.

You can verifiably be assured of a temporal ordering between transactions that were hashed in different slots because the output of a slot/block is hashed and used as an input for the next block/slot.

[jhugo]

Solana claims to prove that a certain duration of time has passed, which is a different and much stronger claim than just temporal ordering. The details of their claims, last I heard (which was some talks in Berlin years ago) were extremely hand-wavy and apparently not well understood even by some people working on the project.