alt.hn

1/31/2026 at 8:02:36 PM

The Saddest Moment (2013) [pdf]

 https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login-logout_1305_mickens.pdf

by tosh

2/1/2026 at 1:02:13 AM

Bitcoin did two things to this paper, first it demonstrates that Byzantine fault tolerance has practical applications, and second it demonstrates that anytime you have to deal with Byzantine fault tolerance the question is not "How do I verify this message?" but "Why am I trying to deal with those assholes?"

by yk

2/1/2026 at 2:40:38 AM

Bitcoin manages to consume more power than all the AI systems were wringing our hands over: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

And provides approximately none of the scant benefits of asking Claude to fix my spelling.

by noosphr

2/1/2026 at 5:49:21 AM

*we’re

Sorry, had to do it for the irony

by dchuk

2/1/2026 at 7:56:56 AM

just proves the point, that line was autocorrected by bitcoin, the next line without grammatical errors was autocorrected by Claude.

on edit: changed ChatGPT to Claude, this post was written by me. This is the saddest moment.

by bryanrasmussen

2/1/2026 at 7:18:06 AM

Still better than bitcoin.

by noosphr

1/31/2026 at 8:58:40 PM

I don't actually care about byzantine fault tolerance. But, James Mickens wrote it? I'm reading.

by AnimalMuppet

1/31/2026 at 9:43:04 PM

The Night Watch... https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf is one of my all time favorite pieces of internet writing

by Avicebron

2/1/2026 at 12:19:01 AM

Can you believe there are people out there who haven't read this yet? I can, because one of them was me. This was incredible.

> A systems programmer will know what to do when society breaks down, because the systems programmer already lives in a world without law.

by rubenflamshep

2/1/2026 at 12:43:10 AM

Me also, I found Mickens through his Harvard Tenure post, but somehow just found Night's Watch today.

by nemosaltat

2/1/2026 at 3:27:39 AM

"I have no tools because I've destroyed my tools with my tools" is a phrase I think to myself at least weekly.

by bloaf

1/31/2026 at 9:04:49 PM

Mickens is a rare combination of bright, engaging, and absolutely hysterical.

I hope I get to meet him someday.

by cushychicken

2/1/2026 at 2:40:18 AM

Same. No idea how that could ever happen but it would make my year. Mickens is a treasure.

by bigstrat2003

1/31/2026 at 10:22:23 PM

This is why I no longer work on trustless systems.

In actually useful business problems, there is trust to be "exploited" to make the system simpler than Byzantine algorithms can manage. And what if the trust is exploited for theft? Then the parties take a loss, learn who can't be trusted, and get on with business.

Humans trust. Their systems should too.

by jeffrallen

2/1/2026 at 12:32:11 AM

"Listen, regardless of which Byzantine fault tolerance protocol you pick, Twitter will still have fewer than two nines of availability. As it turns out, Ted the Poorly Paid Datacenter Operator will not send 15 cryptographically signed messages before he accidentally spills coffee on the air conditioning unit."

by HeliumHydride

2/2/2026 at 6:50:40 AM

You can tell times have changed because nobody has tape backups these days, just a hope and a prayer that the copy of their data to a different cloud provider will still be good when The Great Oops takes out everything. Unfortunately, everything has a dependency on us-east-1, except that us-east-1 has a critical dependency on the dns servers of a small regional ISP probably somewhere in the southeast US.

by bigbuppo

1/31/2026 at 9:02:40 PM

This is one of my favorite quotes from technical comedic writing

> “How can you make a reliable computer service?” the presenter will ask in an innocent voice before continuing, “It may be difficult if you can’t trust anything and the entire concept of happiness is a lie designed by unseen overlords of endless deceptive power.”

If you didn't know Mickens[0] and you enjoyed this piece, you may want to peruse more of the same[1]. They're not all this good, but they are good.

[0] which I discovered through HN years ago, thanks folks [1] https://danielcompton.net/james-mickens-collection

by riffraff

2/1/2026 at 2:02:38 AM

Hey man, leave Keanu out of this

by Festivity1299

2/1/2026 at 12:45:07 AM

Mickens is the best!

by brunooliv

2/1/2026 at 12:17:46 AM

Things would be profoundly simpler if Judge Dredd would take care of computer crackers.

by nilslindemann