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Comment by notacoward | Hacker News Reader

There's a long and mostly bad history of claims around 3D storage. About twenty years ago I followed a company called Constellation 3D, later Terastor. They made many strikingly similar claims, smaller absolute numbers but a similar multiplier vs. what was already in the market. At least they only claimed three dimensions. I can sort of accept orientation as an effective fourth dimension, but size seems like a real stretch. In any case, C3D/Terastor struggled along for a few years, with more claims and more excuses, before they turned into the predictable smoking crater. I've seen several more just like them come and go since then, so I think I'll wait for more concrete proof that this particular technology can work at scale in the real world instead of just once in a lab.

BTW, if you want to go even further back, who else remembers the promises about bubble memory?

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Or what if it's a niche technology that works just fine at scale in the real world but nobody cares enough for super long lifetimes to pay the higher price for the equipment?

No "bad history of claims," just niche technology.

Not everything has to be "fake news" or "phony" just because it doesn't take over the world.

I can't help but think we're cheapening the idea of fraud when we accuse every company or technology of fraud just because they don't wildly succeed.

I think you're overreacting, or perhaps going off on a bit of a tangent from what I actually said. I didn't accuse anyone of fraud. I even offered kudos. I'm just trying to adjust expectations because the history is indeed bad even if nobody did any wrong. Would it have been better if I'd said "sad" or "unfortunate" instead?

A medium that really has these kinds of density and survivability traits is indeed a great thing, but "niche" is a bit of an understatement. Adding it to the payload of a multi-million dollar rocket is definitely a publicity stunt, so I think it's entirely fair to point out that it might be good for little else depending on how further development plays out.

If you don't launch it into space, it will be destroyed when the sun engulfs the earth in only six billion years, if not earlier. There's a dismayingly large chance that the only thing surviving from our entire culture in only a few million years will be a mass extinction in the fossil record, a halo of geosynchronous metal debris, and whatever data is encoded in such stable forms as these glass discs.

In that context, describing it as "a publicity stunt" seems short-sighted to the point of self-parody, like a small child who thinks that the main distinguishing feature of money is that you can buy candy with it. In a very short time, it is likely that the only things humanity has done that are even detectable are the launching of satellites, a mass extinction, and the launching of such archival media.

I know it's fun to call people short-sighted and compare them to children, but grow up yourself. Sending something in this particular medium was a publicity stunt, and it worked. You think we're talking about it here for any other reason than Elon Musk was (tangentially) involved? Sending some sort of beacon or memorial into space is such a great idea we've done it many times before, with better-tested media. If we wanted to try something newer, a Rosetta Project disk would have been a much more obvious choice.

Practicality wasn't the point. Publicity was.

The Rosetta Project disks have a much shorter expected lifespan and weigh more, so they're less practical.

Since I've been talking about the Rosetta Project and related initiatives for about 15 years, long before Elon Musk was involved, you're also mistaken to assert that "we're [not] talking about it here for any other reason." I mean, I'll take your word that it's true of you, but it's not true of me. Maybe you've got a mouse in your pocket?

Publicity stunt by whom? The whole point of the Arch Mission is stuff like this: https://www.archmission.org/

Using this exact media was a full test of the technology, to get it out of the lab and into the environment they intend for it long-term.

But I can see you're committed to this narrative, so please don't let me interrupt it with the actual organization responsible for it.

Are you assuming publicity is bad? I certainly never said so, and would appreciate it if you wouldn't interpret my words as negative based on your own misapprehension. Arch Mission seems like a good cause, and publicity in a good cause is a good thing.

"Practicality wasn't the point. Publicity was."

The real issues involved here are the Laws of Thermodynamics, Entropy and 'Glass' (Crystals) being the the most stable state of matter in the universe. All of these indicate that such longevity is possible (see my main post).

Clearly, the reason that '13.8 Gy' is used here is that it's a well known time interval and it puts the longevity of this technology into perspective in ways that many will understand.

If actually achieved in practical terms then we ought to be hailing this work as a remarkable effort—not quibbling about trivia and silly incidentals.

Glass is the opposite of crystals. Crystals would presumably be longer-lived, but their anisotropy makes them somewhat trickier to work with. Otherwise I agree, and like you, I'm profoundly disappointed by the level of "notacoward"'s comments in this thread so far.

You're right of course. I've assumed the stuff would necessarily be crystalline (and would have to be to have such longevity). The word 'glass' here being used for easier digestion by the public. (See my longer post for more details.)

It wasn't a publicity stunt by the University. Preserving knowledge over extreme periods of time is the whole point of the Arch organization (which is not for profit). It's weird, maybe not practical, but it's the whole point.

Also, such rockets often just use a mass simulator (i.e. block of concrete or metal) on inaugural flights, so there's nothing wrong with giving it a shot.

To me it feels like a similar (or is it reverse?) problem to deep space telescopes and that they used to 'image' that black hole. You need so many fractions of an arc-second in order to 'see' the distance object.

Only in this case you also have to arrange the other objects so they don't occlude the ones behind them.

Imagine trying to lay out a warehouse so you can do inventory without walking through the building. Just a binoculars and a gantry crane, or a bicycle to go around the perimeter.

How densely are you gonna be able to pack things, really?

I mean, there is one option I know of. The guy who discovered NiMH battery chemistry had an optical storage format he was pushing where you use one laser to excite phosphors in a 3d matrix and a second to read the state. The bits are all transparent until excited. But I think you're limited by how fast you can activate the cells, so linear scans would be the slowest.

You don't have to avoid occlusion with nanogratings and other interference phenomena; occlusion only adds a little noise.

According to the paper, their laser pulse rate is 500kHz; if they're writing a single 1 bit per pulse, and half the bits are 1 bits, and there's no coding overhead from something like 8b/10b, that's 125 kilobytes per second, so 10 seconds per 1.2 megabyte 5¼" DSHD floppy. At this rate, filling the 360-terabit capacity of the disc would take 11 years. You would not expect such a slow storage system to be able to compete in the market with 50-megabyte-per-second SD cards, unless data retention of centuries or more was a key selling point, so the fact that such storage systems have failed in the market provides no evidence against the claims made in the paper.

Bubble memory, similarly, does work; it was just too slow to compete with DRAM and not dense enough to compete with spinning rust, except in a few niche applications.

Strawman. I never said there was anything wrong or untrue about the claims in the paper. I'm just trying to put that into perspective. You're not new to HN. You must know that people here mostly see "360TB super-durable media" and immediately jump to thinking about how they'll put their private copy of the npm repository on it tomorrow. Or their transient ML training data. Or their porn stash. Pretending perspective is irrelevant so you can score some internet points is - to borrow your own phrase - childish.

You said, "There's a long and mostly bad history of claims…" which I interpreted — I think reasonably — as asserting that these past claims were false. (In what other sense can a claim be bad?) I was rebutting that reasonable interpretation of what you said, not a strawman. I am pleased to see that you are not claiming that the paper is false.

False conclusions hypothetically jumped to by finance-obsessed man-children and brogrammers, in JWZ's immortal phrase, are not my problem. Mere assertion that their perspectives are relevant does not constitute an argument for their relevance. In fact, nobody in this thread has so far suggested storing their replica of the npm archive, their ML training data, or their porn collection on one of these discs, so your concern seems to be entirely without an empirical foundation.

> Mere assertion that their perspectives are relevant

Is it your reading comprehension that's lacking, or just your integrity? I said perspective is relevant. I didn't say their perspective.

What would it even mean for perspective per se to be relevant or not? We aren't discussing art history! I did indeed read your comment as saying that the perspectives of the hypothetical conclusion-jumpers were relevant, which would at least have been coherent. I can't make heads or tails of your comment about perspective being relevant — you apparently meant to accuse me of some kind of dishonesty, but it isn't even clear what I'm being accused of. In any case, your comments so far provide very little reason to take seriously anything you say.

"Perspective is relevant" means that it's important to have some. This is a cool scientific advance. I said so before you even showed up. But it's not something that's immediately useful to most readers. That's perspective: like this from one POV, like that from another. Is that clear enough for you?

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