Stephen Hawking's Ph.D. Thesis Crashes Cambridge Site After It's Posted Online

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/10/23/559582380/stephen-hawkings-ph-d-thesis-crashes-cambridge-site-after-it-s-posted-online

by endswapper • 9 years ago

157 55 9 years ago

npr.org

endswapper• 9 years ago

Direct link to thesis: http://schema.lib.cam.ac.uk/PR-PHD-05437_CUDL2017-reduced.pd...

DrScump• 9 years ago

It would have been more helpful to post mirror site addresses rather than exacerbate the problem.

Anybody know of mirror sites? A basic web search doesn't show any, and archive.org doesn't show it.

matthewbadeau• 9 years ago

Mirror: http://web.archive.org/web/20171024005153/http://schema.lib....

its4tom• 9 years ago

Link to thesis on Scribd in case helpful: https://www.scribd.com/document/362484322/Stephen-Hawking-Ph...

PhilWright• 9 years ago

The PDF is just a scan of actual book printed pages. No wonder it is a monstrous size.

ccvannorman• 9 years ago

So a man who uses a machine for synthesis into text for speech, wrote a book which was then printed, scanned, and uploaded.

I wonder if they faxed it at some point too?

lallysingh• 9 years ago

What's this got to do with his speech problems? Did you want him to ready it to you?

ktta4• 9 years ago

In 1966?

HN's guidelines say that one shouldn't ask if one has read the posted link, but I'm tempted to all the time.

retox• 9 years ago

What percent of downloads will actually be read I wonder.

I'm guilt of downloading and hoarding things that seems interesting and never getting round to even opening them. "When I'm retired", I tell myself.

callinyouin• 9 years ago

Guilty as charged, as well. I download just about any programming manual/book that's free in PDF or similar form and I've probably read maybe 10% of them.

colinbartlett• 9 years ago

Seems like a perfect use for a torrent. Is there a tracker link?

logicallee• 9 years ago

"I've watched everything"

"What do you mean everything?"

"TV shows. Movies. Even the japanese ones."

"How about older stuff"

"I've gone through early Chaplin work. I've seen Metropolis 17 times."

"I'm sure there's something"

(grabs his friend)

"You don't understand, Paul. I've been reading Shannon. A Mathematical Theory of Communication. I've run out. I've taken to begging strangers for a fix."

"That bad?"

(Guilty), "I just... " (resigned) "I just asked someone to put up a torrent of Stephen Hawking's Ph.D. thesis..."

B1FF_PSUVM• 9 years ago

Movies. Even the japanese ones.

Even the Eastern European ones. And all of Ingmar Bergman.

(shudders)

ktta4• 9 years ago

Info hash: e5878b9cdd55286310135419a69371a31195a32a

Magnet link:

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:e5878b9cdd55286310135419a69371a31195a32a&dn=PR-PHD-05437_CUDL2017-reduced.pdf&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fexplodie.org%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.empire-js.us%3A1337&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.leechers-paradise.org%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.opentrackr.org

If you don't have a torrent client: https://instant.io/#e5878b9cdd55286310135419a69371a31195a32a

accurrent• 9 years ago

Article has a typo in the quote should be Olber not Older who described what's now known as Olbers paradox.

tbrock• 9 years ago

99% chance someone used apache’s default configuration.

Bromskloss• 9 years ago

What is the limitation in that default configuration?

jerf• 9 years ago

KeepAlive, probably: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/19/running-apache-on-a-memo...

eighthnate• 9 years ago

I just have to ask why this is news? Is this really something newsworthy?

Cambridge's network probably isn't as hardened to spikes in traffic since they don't get much traffic. But still, it isn't 1995. They should have some form of load balancing or distributed/clustered web/data/file systems to handle temporary spikes in traffic and data requests. Serving simple static data isn't something that should "crash the site".

Insanity• 9 years ago

The technology behind the repository itself is not great. (DSpace[1]), add to that the factor that it is not actually build to handle this many requests and scaling quickly is out of the question too because of the server set up.

Even without issues, it often felt a bit sluggish when serving locally. The pages are quite large, and the whole pipeline from content -> webpage is rather tedious.(Java, XSLT -> html)

It shouldn't have happened - but I assumed it would.

disclaimer: I am a former contributor to the project [1]: https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace

maxpert3• 9 years ago

Ok I am confused, 60k hits in a day? What broght down the website? 72MB of size, network congestion, or 60k hits? Even with authentication for download what can bring the system down? I have handled more traffic on a RPi with 100MBps connection. I really don’t get it.

lstyls2• 9 years ago

If you're hitting a single box, this seems perfectly possible - especially if the server or the network is poorly configured. This is what CDNs are for.

dsfyu404ed• 9 years ago

This isn't Joe's blog running from a desktop found in a dumpster. It's a university with actual infrastructure. They should be able to handle this. Registration is probably more load.

A 72MB file being served 500,000 times over a 24hr period is 3-4Gb/sec.

The department probably has one or more web servers serving content off a network drive. Your average "rack of network storage" won't even blink at that.

There was probably a gigabit switch somewhere or that was being a bottleneck or the web server was simply misconfigured for this task.

maxpert3• 9 years ago

Here I made a quick copy and a quick domain, almost 10 LoC and it will be more reliable than what Cambridge had http://hawking.sibte.ml/

chauhankiran• 9 years ago

Wow! Thanks. But, I do not understand the <script> tag in homepage contains lots of ![]+[].

fnwx17• 9 years ago

Love the irony on that! Which makes me wonder how much valuable content and research in locked away on technologically ancient servers in Cambridge and Oxford.

mayank• 9 years ago

Probably a burst of traffic hitting a single box web server, rather than 60k hits spread out evenly over a day.

posterboy• 9 years ago

With a half time of 3 days of interest and a 100 MBps connection the average download time would be 3 hours. That would indeed seem unusual for today. but 30k page hits spaced out over 60 hours is not too much of a burden on top of that.

yreg• 9 years ago

It hit top of reddit yesterday, I don't think it was a mere 60k hits.

Vinnl• 9 years ago

More than 400k, actually: https://mobile.twitter.com/dannykay68/status/922745216481808...

mortehu• 9 years ago

(60000 connections * 72 MB) / (24 hours * 40 Mbps) ~= 10 concurrent connections.

If your server is configured for a low number of concurrent connections, it can easily seem swamped if a small number of people are concurrently downloading a large file slowly. All that's happening is that it's not accept()ing new connections until existing ones finish.

gilleain• 9 years ago

Heh, I don't know what the current hardware is for the CUDL DSpace repository, but having helped upgrade it a few years ago, I can't say the software is the fastest.

It's a java application with XLST in the page rendering pipeline, so not exactly optimised for speed.

masonic• 9 years ago

  What brought down the website?

The Greys.

netsharc• 9 years ago

I'm glad NPR used this headline, another news site said it "broke the internet". Journalism!(tm)

ianopolous• 9 years ago

Here is an ipfs link to it: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmNwcSE8BYQmHSS99dtg2VdAez4uswVkvCssj4R...

F00Fbug• 9 years ago

Was just thinking, "This sounds like a job for IPFS!" I spent most of Sunday reading about and playing with IPFS. Great idea - I hope it gets some traction.

imrehg• 9 years ago

Thanks a lot, and pinning it to help to seed :) `ipfs pin add /ipfs/QmNwcSE8BYQmHSS99dtg2VdAez4uswVkvCssj4Rgce4rLp`

dredmorbius• 9 years ago

This points to challenges of digital information.

Stephen Hawking and his dissertation are high-profile as these things go. The NPR mentions other popular items generating 100s of requests per month. I've run across items with lifetime request counts in the double or triple digits frequently (and suspect I doubled the count on one particular item).

More often, though, the truth is that this material simply isn't available online. There are several thesis repositories (either Michigan State or University of Michigan are one, as I recall), and I can frequently turn up a shelf reference via WorldCat ... somewhere.

But there's work from surprisingly prominent names in numerous fields that simply isn't available in electronic format. The worst case is for materials from rougly 1924 - 1980: to late to be out of copyright, and too early to have been composed, or converted to, digital formats (and 1980 is an early cut-off date for that, though it's when material seems to start appearing in bulk).

This includes PhD dissertations, Masters theses, and numerous academic or other writings, often including government documents not under copyright. Thankfully with Sci-Hub, actual published academic journal articles can be found, freely, with a very high success rate. Particularly painful for me are popular magazine and newspaper items, for which even the indices are very frequently locked behind site-restricted or affiliate-only access.

The time-and-effort differential of being able to look something up online, vs. travelling many miles to a facility for access, is tremendous. And it absolutely stops a great many incidential queries dead.

See Rick Falkvinge's excellent rant about how the KRACK vulnerability was blocked behind corporate-only paywalls for over a decade:

https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2017/10/the-recen...

Note that the issues here are twofold. One element is the task of scanning and making available documents, and organising the results in a manner useful for search.

But much the harm is the direct consequence of the present regime of copyright and paid access to information, AS WELL AS the perverse incentives of advertising-backed media and media manipulation have created a media regime that is actively harmful to society.

I'd really like to see the elements of this addressed.

zamber• 9 years ago

Suggestions on getting this in audio form? I guess it requires transcribing the handwritten parts. The Chrome OCR fails there. Is there a better one?

Sample:

This implies that the universe is spatially homogeneous and isotropic since there is no direction defined in the 3- space orthogonal to Ua. In this universe we consider small perturbations of the motion of tl1e fluid and of the '.ifeyl tensore 1 Ne neglect products of small quantities and perform derivatives with respect to the undisturbed metric. Since all the quantities we are interested in with the exception of the scalars, µ, ~' e have unperturbed value zero, we avoid perturbations that merely represent coordinate transformation and have no physical significance. To the first order the equations (1) - (4) and (7) - (9) are

Stephen Hawking's Ph.D. Thesis Crashes Cambridge Site After It's Posted Online

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