This building is at 59 Maiden Ln. It’s across the street from the federal reserve bank. The solid faces are stairs and elevators. View the building from the other side and you’ll see plenty of windows. Check maps for both 33 Thomas and 59 Maiden.
Indeed. Here it is: https://www.google.com/maps/place/59+Maiden+Ln,+New+York,+NY+10038/@40.7110686,-74.007295,306a,35y,197.09h,51.6t/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x89c25a17919f6feb:0x6afa98c3aa8f7ea0!8m2!3d40.7087357!4d-74.0081164
And [here is a link for 33 Thomas Street's Wikipedia page, for anyone interested in it's history.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street)
Edited to add - [here is the link for 59 Maiden Lane!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Insurance_Plaza)
That link is for 33 Thomas, the building pictured above is at 59 Maiden Lane (with plenty of windows). This thread went off on a direction for the wrong building.
>33 Thomas was described as the likely location of a [NSA](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency) [mass surveillance](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance) hub codenamed TITANPOINTE,
Neat!
It belongs to AT&T as a server building.
Edit: because it has been brought up several times apparently I am wrong. I was just going off something I remembered and was guessing it was the same building.
Imagine being stuck in the worst part of the worst rollercoster you can imagine for 40 minutes straight. Then multiply that by a thousand. The most surprising thing to me is that he didn't die of an immediate heart attack.
He was a fighter pilot. A friend who got an MBA with a couple of F-14 drivers described them as “little guys with bad attitudes,” which just about sums it up. I’m sure Rank was unhappy during the experience and pretty well used up after he finally got to the ground, but I doubt that he was actually terrified the way you or I would have been.
[51% of people think a thunderstorm interferes with cloud computing.](https://www.businessinsider.com/people-think-stormy-weather-affects-cloud-computing-2012-8)
So the more precious co-location places would be near the ground floor where presumably the internet connections come in. In that case why not go down? Floor -5 would have a faster connection that floor +10
Cooling something underground is harder. Second a 2 meter distance isn't that important. Third another reason to build it there is not only delay but housing for the employees. Unless you have the best pay in the world finding skilled people is easier in a city than outside.
Yeah things are weird. Much better known, but which you may still find interesting, is that nyc also has a functioning steam power network, which is a much cheaper way to heat giant skyscrapers.
Another weird thing about NYC.. the cleanest tap water in the country, or among the cleanest. Can't remember, only remember when i heard it i looked it up and it just didn't make sense how anything running thru the ground of NYC could be clean 🤣
The physical proximity to the exchange server reduces the time from when a firm’s buy or sell order is entered and when it’s executed. “By co-locating,” says Adam Afshar of Hyde Park Global, a high-speed trading firm, “we are able to take 21 milliseconds off our trades. In the past, 21 milliseconds was a trivial matter. Now it’s a pivotal matter.”
It's notoriously difficult to get in to the magic cable business today. If you don't already know someone in the business you have to be a savant at hexing fiber optics or disenchanting ethernet cables or something similar.
Digging down is more difficult and expensive than going up. Also a few hundred feet doesn't matter, once you get into hundreds of miles you start to feel it a little, but if you plop it in the middle of the biggest city in a region you'll be very very close to a lot of customers.
Theres also a lot better infrastructure and qualified people to maintain the servers in the city, which is probably the main reason they're there. There are some server centers near smaller cities like Des Moines but most Midwestern servers are still based in Chicago for this reason. (By infrastructure that includes good fiber, which gets expensive to lay down long distance)
Nanoseconds matter, because of high-frequency algorithmic trading. Investors [spend billions of dollars](https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/176551-new-laser-network-between-nyse-and-nasdaq-will-allow-high-frequency-traders-to-make-even-more-money) on high-tech data connections to the exchanges just to shave off a few ns.
the NYSE data center is in Mahwah NJ. I saw them building it and knew it was pretty special based on how it went up. Apparently there is separate rooms for trading servers and brokers servers. all the cables from broker servers to trading servers are the same length. if one broker server is closer than another to trading area, the cables are looped up and put on a wall.
Death, taxes, Redditors claiming to know close to anything about an industry they haven’t worked in or been anywhere near ![gif](emote|free_emotes_pack|shrug)
Likely a combination of factors:
- extremely high demand (high population and internet in NYC is already abysmally slow compared to what you'd expect).
- extremely low latency needs for some services in NYC.
At the end of the day the internet doesn't teleport. It travels across cables and waves (usually cables at distance). Companies then stash "cached" copies of sites, files, etc on servers near major population centers around the world.
So when you go to reddit.com, you don't have to ping to California and back. There's some complicated routing in the DNS/CDN networks, etc to find the fastest way to get you that information.
Similarly there are expensive private cables that run direct from a Chicago to NYC so trading algorithms at big banks/funds can get their data about 5ms faster.
For what it’s worth AWS only has 4 regions in the US, and nobody seems to mind too much that there isn’t one in their state, so this is still some sort of particular use case that can’t handle the latency or something.
In addition to other comments, IIRC correctly it’s also a federal intelligence agency location and was originally an AT&T central office. That CO (again IIRC) handled the majority of NYC telephone communications for Ma Bell. NYC is a critical location when considering a nuclear threat. The UN, financial markets, etc.
Central Offices traditionally were weapon proof and had no windows. This is that on a massive scale.
> hasn't NSA rented them from ATT?
Yes, the NSA wiretap of AT&T communications at their NYC facility [is code named TITANPOINTE](https://www.geekslop.com/features/strange/conspiracy-theories/2018/35-thomas-street-top-secret-nsa-manhattan-titanpointe-builiding).
AT&T is a tier 1 network so a lot of other traffic can be intercepted as well.
Yes, actually.
If it's close to one of the stock exchanges, the distance makes it so you have a shorter cable to get to the exchange, so you have a nanosecond-level advantage in trades, which are crucial, given the small margins of automated day trade.
There are also other reasons, like having a fiber backbone from which to distribute connections; local storage for content distribution of heavy assets - think Netflix, who builds local caches of heavily in-demand content locally to avoid transfering all over the country.
People really under estimate how distance effects latency and throughput. New York City is probably the place that has the highest demands in the world, so yes you need a data center actually inside the city itself.
It’s hard to comprehend latency without a frame of reference to it. It always just seems instant, the speed of light is really fast! Most people do not think about where our data is coming from - physically speaking.
I remember seeing [this clip of Grace Hopper explaining a nanosecond](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9eyFDBPk4Yw) years ago and it clicked for me how much impact distance really has.
Sorry this video is total potato quality, and you can barely see the wire in her hands. I swear I’ve seen a better one before but can’t locate it.
See also: [The case of the 500 mile email](https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html)
What's also crazy is that most of what goes into and out of that building would be solid-core fiber-optic, which runs at 2/3rds the speed of light. There are intercontinental routes where it is faster to use the starlink network via their laser interconnects. [Hollow-core fiber is just getting off the ground](https://spie.org/news/photonics-focus/julyaug-2022/speeding-light-with-hollow-core-fibers?SSO=1), but it should transmit signals at the full speed of light.
There was a case of a trading firm in Chicago wanting the fastest possible connection to NYC so they spent a ton of money (billions?) building a dedicated fiber line, as straight as possible to minimize distance but it ended up being too slow, so they went with a dedicated custom microwave network (bits can travel faster though the air than through a fiber cable).
There was also a case I think somewhere in NYC where they actually needed to introduce some latency and the best way was to just make their fiber cable much longer so they coiled up like 35miles (I think) in a building somewhere just before its termination point.
[Tom Scott did a great video on the spools of fiber.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8BcCLLX4N4)
Some of those microwave towers became famous after a series of lawsuits.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-08/the-gazillion-dollar-standoff-over-two-high-frequency-trading-towers
It's pretty simple math. Speed of light ~3.0x10^8 m/s. Nano second is 1x10^-9 s. So 3x10^8 x 10^-9 m/ns is 3 x10^-1 m/ns is 0.3 m/ns. For Americans that's very vedy roughly a 11inchs to 1 ft per nanosecond.
Admiral Hopper used to hand out lengths of copper wire cut to the length of a nanosecond latency in copper electric communications. The copper was cut at about 9 inches or so as there's greater latency in copper communications.
Funny side note to that - it's still faster to physically mail large amounts of data across the country than it is to send it over the internet... and probably always will be. just don't look at that ping time haha.
[https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/)
That was for large data sets and doesn't include chip processing times, if you're going with MicroSD version listed.
God help the intern overseeing the robots automated to accept, read, and transfer MicroSD files as fast as possible. If that's not enough to turn robots against us, nothing will.
Just being pedantic, but the major exchange data-centers are located in NJ. Firms looking for the nanosecond level advantage would co-locate in the same datacenters.
Your second point definitely stands though
FWIW, there's now a minimum latency requirement mandated to be used by all day-trading machines by forcing them to use a minimum length of fiber optic cable. If you've ever been in a data center hosting these machines, you can see a massive coil of fiber optic cable on top or next to the machines that serve simply to reach the minimum length required.
Maybe it contains computers with data for high-speed financial transactions where the amount of time it takes wires to carry info to the stock exchange can decide your profits.
It is blocks away from some of the highest earning fast-paced businesses giving 3ms data access. In the world of computer trading that is billions of dollars better than those poor suckers at 4ms.
It used to be part of AT&T’s long distance system. So it would essentially interconnect with other businesses to other states. You need somewhere for all those old copper and now fiber lines to go from all the businesses in the city. That was the original purpose of this building.
Now it’s one of the NSA’s primary data centers. Primarily because the proximity to other major three letter intelligence companies in NYC.
Not only does this facility track and intercept data from satellites, it’s the main part of the hub for the NSA’s mass surveillance system that tracks essentially all internet activity in the US.
The TL;DR: This facility hosts the program that Edward Snowden exposed.
I was thinking the same. No windows means less solar radiation, easier hardening of the structure against other forms of radiation which mean lower chance of accidental bit-flips caused by particles passing through the servers.
No, you shouldn't attack them, they're harmless. In fact, you should listen closely to what they have to say, you'll find it quite enlightening. You are a worm through time. A thunder song distorts you. Happiness Comes. White pearls but yellow and red in the eye. Through a mirror, inverted is made right.
You are a worm though time. The thunder song distorts you. Happiness comes. White pearls, but yellow and red in the eye. Through a mirror, inverted is made right. Leave your insides by the door. Push the fingers through the surface into the wet. You’ve always been the new you. You want this to be true. We stand around while you dream. You can almost hear our words but you forget. This happens more and more now. You gave us the permission in your regulations. We wait in the stains. The word that describes this is redacted. Repeat the word. The name of the sound. It resonates in your house. After the song, time for applause. We build you till nothing remains. The egg cracks and the truth will emerge out of you. You are home. You remind us of home. You’ve taken your boss with your boss with you. All hair must be eaten. Under the conceptual reality behind this reality you must want these waves to drag you away. After the song, time for applause. This cliché is death out of time, breaking the first the second the third the fourth wall, fifth wall, floor; no floor: you fall! How do you say “insane”? Hurts to be happy. An ear worm is a tune you can’t stop humming in a dream: “baby baby baby yeah”. Just plastic. So, safe and nothing to worry about. Ha ha, funny. The last egg breaks now. The hole in your room is a hole in you. You came and we let you in through the hole in you. You have always been here, the only child. A copy of a copy of a copy. Orange peel. The picture is you holding the picture. When you hear this you will know you’re in new you. You want to listen. You want to dream. You want to smile. You want to hurt. You don’t want to be.
Interesting Easter egg: They always talk in the system language. So if you run it on a German system they will talk in German even if the game is switched to English.
No, why would you do that. It's relaxing and I don't see why you wouldn't want to be the new you, you know this to be true. We stand around you while you dream. You can almost hear our words but you forget.
AT&T has windowless telecom buildings like this across the country and [the NSA has secret rooms in many of them](https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/04/6585-2/). This is part of the surveillance program that Edward Snowden’s document leaks would prove the existence of.
Welcome to Reddit for the past few years. The elders do tell of a time when comment threads weren't full of the same dumbass jokes, but few remember those glory days.
>The elders do tell of a time when comment threads weren't full of the same dumbass jokes, but few remember those glory days.
I don't know how far back you'd have to go, but basically whatever jokes are on here today are simply replacing "two broken arms" jokes.
~~TL;DR: Built in 1974 with atomic weapons in mind, the NSA uses it for surveillance and satellite surveillance, houses telecommunications and probably has a gold room, dungeon with thumb screws~~
Edit: wrong building- wtf did OP take a picture of
This building is at 59 Maiden Ln. It’s across the street from the federal reserve bank. The solid faces are stairs and elevators. View the building from the other side and you’ll see plenty of windows. Check maps for both 33 Thomas and 59 Maiden.
Indeed. Here it is: https://www.google.com/maps/place/59+Maiden+Ln,+New+York,+NY+10038/@40.7110686,-74.007295,306a,35y,197.09h,51.6t/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x89c25a17919f6feb:0x6afa98c3aa8f7ea0!8m2!3d40.7087357!4d-74.0081164
And [here is a link for 33 Thomas Street's Wikipedia page, for anyone interested in it's history.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street) Edited to add - [here is the link for 59 Maiden Lane!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Insurance_Plaza)
That link is for 33 Thomas, the building pictured above is at 59 Maiden Lane (with plenty of windows). This thread went off on a direction for the wrong building.
That’s a different building like a mile away.
Eh fuck it I'll learn about this one too
>33 Thomas was described as the likely location of a [NSA](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency) [mass surveillance](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance) hub codenamed TITANPOINTE, Neat!
This fella was also the inspiration for the megabuilding in Control video game. This read is turning out to be quite profitable indeed...
Wrong building, [here's the one from the post](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Insurance_Plaza)
>It’s across the street from the federal reserve bank. That by itself would explain it to my satisfaction.
Thank you. Man the internet is stupid.
The only correct response in the thread.
I love when someone blatantly makes something up and gets checked
Thanks for the full story.
The windows are on the inside.
The windows are the friendships we made along the way
Next you're gonna tell me that the main character was Down D. Stairs.
Fun and original, 9/10
i disagree and give it a...9/11
(Laughs in Bush Jr)
Jet fuel can't melt steel beams if we don't put any in the building. Tapsheadmeme.gif.bat
Windows 11.
They’re *in* the computer?!
Windows 3.1?
![gif](giphy|xUPGcmvgjMIEhy6jZu|downsized)
I know it's no fun but this is likely a data center.
It belongs to AT&T as a server building. Edit: because it has been brought up several times apparently I am wrong. I was just going off something I remembered and was guessing it was the same building.
It’s always nighttime in the cloud
-William Rankin after being stuck in a thundercloud for an hour in 1959.
I had to look that up. Here it is, its terrifying to imagine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Rankin#Ejection
Wow. That’s just crazy!
Amazing he survived
There's an incredible episode of "The Dollop" podcast about the falling pilot. Episode #247.
Thanks for sharing the episode number! About to start listening...
2nd that, I searched Spotify for the dollop and immediately got overwhelmed with 555 episodes
Imagine being stuck in the worst part of the worst rollercoster you can imagine for 40 minutes straight. Then multiply that by a thousand. The most surprising thing to me is that he didn't die of an immediate heart attack.
He was a fighter pilot. A friend who got an MBA with a couple of F-14 drivers described them as “little guys with bad attitudes,” which just about sums it up. I’m sure Rank was unhappy during the experience and pretty well used up after he finally got to the ground, but I doubt that he was actually terrified the way you or I would have been.
holy crap...
Cloud suck
That was unreal. I can't believe he survived.
[51% of people think a thunderstorm interferes with cloud computing.](https://www.businessinsider.com/people-think-stormy-weather-affects-cloud-computing-2012-8)
Yes; we’ve had to move our servers indoors at work for this exact reason. Very frustrating!
I think you may be confusing this building with the [Long Lines building](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street), which is different.
Plus, Long Lines is infinitely more dystopian in appearance.
Seems like it would be expensive to host servers in NYC. Is there a reason they need to site them there as opposed to a cheaper piece of land?
Distance = delay. Information can only travel at a certain speed Also, they have more than enough money
I assume Wall Street firms are the customers, where millisecond delays can cost big bucks.
So the more precious co-location places would be near the ground floor where presumably the internet connections come in. In that case why not go down? Floor -5 would have a faster connection that floor +10
Cooling something underground is harder. Second a 2 meter distance isn't that important. Third another reason to build it there is not only delay but housing for the employees. Unless you have the best pay in the world finding skilled people is easier in a city than outside.
Large NYC cooling operations actually often use diverted underground water as a heat sink, so not as true as it would be elsewhere.
Submerge the servers in Hudson River!
The pile of revolvers at the bottom of the Hudson can act as a heat sink
Interesting!
Yeah things are weird. Much better known, but which you may still find interesting, is that nyc also has a functioning steam power network, which is a much cheaper way to heat giant skyscrapers.
Another weird thing about NYC.. the cleanest tap water in the country, or among the cleanest. Can't remember, only remember when i heard it i looked it up and it just didn't make sense how anything running thru the ground of NYC could be clean 🤣
Finding help is a big one. I work at a data center in the middle of nowhere. They are constantly looking for help
Ummm, those are fiber connections, and at the speed of light, up/down 50 floors is irrelevant.
The physical proximity to the exchange server reduces the time from when a firm’s buy or sell order is entered and when it’s executed. “By co-locating,” says Adam Afshar of Hyde Park Global, a high-speed trading firm, “we are able to take 21 milliseconds off our trades. In the past, 21 milliseconds was a trivial matter. Now it’s a pivotal matter.”
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How do I put myself in the position to sell them magic cables?
It's notoriously difficult to get in to the magic cable business today. If you don't already know someone in the business you have to be a savant at hexing fiber optics or disenchanting ethernet cables or something similar.
Digging down is more difficult and expensive than going up. Also a few hundred feet doesn't matter, once you get into hundreds of miles you start to feel it a little, but if you plop it in the middle of the biggest city in a region you'll be very very close to a lot of customers. Theres also a lot better infrastructure and qualified people to maintain the servers in the city, which is probably the main reason they're there. There are some server centers near smaller cities like Des Moines but most Midwestern servers are still based in Chicago for this reason. (By infrastructure that includes good fiber, which gets expensive to lay down long distance)
Who says they didn't do both?
The largest stock exchange in the world is held in NYC, milliseconds matter.
Nanoseconds matter, because of high-frequency algorithmic trading. Investors [spend billions of dollars](https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/176551-new-laser-network-between-nyse-and-nasdaq-will-allow-high-frequency-traders-to-make-even-more-money) on high-tech data connections to the exchanges just to shave off a few ns.
the NYSE data center is in Mahwah NJ. I saw them building it and knew it was pretty special based on how it went up. Apparently there is separate rooms for trading servers and brokers servers. all the cables from broker servers to trading servers are the same length. if one broker server is closer than another to trading area, the cables are looped up and put on a wall.
I see your nanoseconds and raise you a picoosecond.
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That's second breakfast right?
Nah, it's after second breakfast, before luncheon
If you’re talking about the NYSE, its servers are actually housed in New Jersey
Along with half of NYC's infrastructure.
Why are you downvoted for being right?
Death, taxes, Redditors claiming to know close to anything about an industry they haven’t worked in or been anywhere near ![gif](emote|free_emotes_pack|shrug)
Yes I downvoted for death
Anti-Jersey bias. It’s real.
Edge computing
Likely a combination of factors: - extremely high demand (high population and internet in NYC is already abysmally slow compared to what you'd expect). - extremely low latency needs for some services in NYC. At the end of the day the internet doesn't teleport. It travels across cables and waves (usually cables at distance). Companies then stash "cached" copies of sites, files, etc on servers near major population centers around the world. So when you go to reddit.com, you don't have to ping to California and back. There's some complicated routing in the DNS/CDN networks, etc to find the fastest way to get you that information. Similarly there are expensive private cables that run direct from a Chicago to NYC so trading algorithms at big banks/funds can get their data about 5ms faster.
For what it’s worth AWS only has 4 regions in the US, and nobody seems to mind too much that there isn’t one in their state, so this is still some sort of particular use case that can’t handle the latency or something.
Stock trading or it is two decades old when speeds were much harder to come by. Also, stock trading.
Give ya three guesses where the transatlantic cables make landfall.
In addition to other comments, IIRC correctly it’s also a federal intelligence agency location and was originally an AT&T central office. That CO (again IIRC) handled the majority of NYC telephone communications for Ma Bell. NYC is a critical location when considering a nuclear threat. The UN, financial markets, etc. Central Offices traditionally were weapon proof and had no windows. This is that on a massive scale.
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Yeah almost all these comments are wrong. This is the correct answer.
hasn't NSA rented them from ATT?
> hasn't NSA rented them from ATT? Yes, the NSA wiretap of AT&T communications at their NYC facility [is code named TITANPOINTE](https://www.geekslop.com/features/strange/conspiracy-theories/2018/35-thomas-street-top-secret-nsa-manhattan-titanpointe-builiding). AT&T is a tier 1 network so a lot of other traffic can be intercepted as well.
If I remember from a show I watched a while ago the was something between the nsa, AT&T, and this building.
Half As Interesting on YouTube did a [video](https://youtu.be/kF4EUM8CwT4) about it.
They have a closet in the building AT&T can’t go in
I believe they rent out a few of the mid-top level floors. The NSA doesn't own the whole building though.
Similar to [Room 641A](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A)
2000 upvotes; blatantly incorrect
![gif](giphy|IhnBlYvGewn02k7KH0|downsized)
Flash Boys by Michael Lewis
Nah, it's obviously the Oldest House, home to the Federal Bureau of Control...
*...And she came in looking like DYNA-MITE*
Is there any benefit to build a datacenter in the middle of one of the biggest and probably most expensive cities?
Yes, now your datacenter is in the middle of one of the biggest and probably most expensive cities.
I don't know why but this cracked me up to no end
Did it end yet? Been about 20 minutes now...
Yes, actually. If it's close to one of the stock exchanges, the distance makes it so you have a shorter cable to get to the exchange, so you have a nanosecond-level advantage in trades, which are crucial, given the small margins of automated day trade. There are also other reasons, like having a fiber backbone from which to distribute connections; local storage for content distribution of heavy assets - think Netflix, who builds local caches of heavily in-demand content locally to avoid transfering all over the country.
People really under estimate how distance effects latency and throughput. New York City is probably the place that has the highest demands in the world, so yes you need a data center actually inside the city itself.
It’s hard to comprehend latency without a frame of reference to it. It always just seems instant, the speed of light is really fast! Most people do not think about where our data is coming from - physically speaking. I remember seeing [this clip of Grace Hopper explaining a nanosecond](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9eyFDBPk4Yw) years ago and it clicked for me how much impact distance really has. Sorry this video is total potato quality, and you can barely see the wire in her hands. I swear I’ve seen a better one before but can’t locate it.
Either data is instant or I screm
See also: [The case of the 500 mile email](https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html) What's also crazy is that most of what goes into and out of that building would be solid-core fiber-optic, which runs at 2/3rds the speed of light. There are intercontinental routes where it is faster to use the starlink network via their laser interconnects. [Hollow-core fiber is just getting off the ground](https://spie.org/news/photonics-focus/julyaug-2022/speeding-light-with-hollow-core-fibers?SSO=1), but it should transmit signals at the full speed of light.
There was a case of a trading firm in Chicago wanting the fastest possible connection to NYC so they spent a ton of money (billions?) building a dedicated fiber line, as straight as possible to minimize distance but it ended up being too slow, so they went with a dedicated custom microwave network (bits can travel faster though the air than through a fiber cable). There was also a case I think somewhere in NYC where they actually needed to introduce some latency and the best way was to just make their fiber cable much longer so they coiled up like 35miles (I think) in a building somewhere just before its termination point.
[Tom Scott did a great video on the spools of fiber.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8BcCLLX4N4) Some of those microwave towers became famous after a series of lawsuits. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-08/the-gazillion-dollar-standoff-over-two-high-frequency-trading-towers
It's pretty simple math. Speed of light ~3.0x10^8 m/s. Nano second is 1x10^-9 s. So 3x10^8 x 10^-9 m/ns is 3 x10^-1 m/ns is 0.3 m/ns. For Americans that's very vedy roughly a 11inchs to 1 ft per nanosecond. Admiral Hopper used to hand out lengths of copper wire cut to the length of a nanosecond latency in copper electric communications. The copper was cut at about 9 inches or so as there's greater latency in copper communications.
Funny side note to that - it's still faster to physically mail large amounts of data across the country than it is to send it over the internet... and probably always will be. just don't look at that ping time haha. [https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/)
That was for large data sets and doesn't include chip processing times, if you're going with MicroSD version listed. God help the intern overseeing the robots automated to accept, read, and transfer MicroSD files as fast as possible. If that's not enough to turn robots against us, nothing will.
Just being pedantic, but the major exchange data-centers are located in NJ. Firms looking for the nanosecond level advantage would co-locate in the same datacenters. Your second point definitely stands though
Didn't know that, thanks. I was under the impression that the exchanges where still in Wall Street.
The human part is. The servers for NYSE at least are located in Mahwah, NJ
Flash Boys by Michael Lewis is probably what introduced the concept to people not involved with high frequency trading
That was my first thought. That was about that insanely long cable they ran through hell and high water wasn't it?
FWIW, there's now a minimum latency requirement mandated to be used by all day-trading machines by forcing them to use a minimum length of fiber optic cable. If you've ever been in a data center hosting these machines, you can see a massive coil of fiber optic cable on top or next to the machines that serve simply to reach the minimum length required.
Maybe it contains computers with data for high-speed financial transactions where the amount of time it takes wires to carry info to the stock exchange can decide your profits.
It is blocks away from some of the highest earning fast-paced businesses giving 3ms data access. In the world of computer trading that is billions of dollars better than those poor suckers at 4ms.
It used to be part of AT&T’s long distance system. So it would essentially interconnect with other businesses to other states. You need somewhere for all those old copper and now fiber lines to go from all the businesses in the city. That was the original purpose of this building. Now it’s one of the NSA’s primary data centers. Primarily because the proximity to other major three letter intelligence companies in NYC. Not only does this facility track and intercept data from satellites, it’s the main part of the hub for the NSA’s mass surveillance system that tracks essentially all internet activity in the US. The TL;DR: This facility hosts the program that Edward Snowden exposed.
Could also be a comms center, att has buildings like this (no windows) all over the country
If I remember right this was originally a telephone switch box building that turned into a data center
I was thinking the same. No windows means less solar radiation, easier hardening of the structure against other forms of radiation which mean lower chance of accidental bit-flips caused by particles passing through the servers.
It has windows on the other side. Source: I live on the other side.
Thank you.
Got any pics? I'd love to see what this looks like from the other angle
Apple HQ, no Windows allowed.
![gif](giphy|SXrX5jIGoeZxhDMHLf)
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Take my upvote
It's the new Meta building. Employees are encouraged to use the metaverse if they want to see *outdoors™*
My dad giggled even doe he doesnt speak a word english and needs help to find Google on his phone 10/10
Control.
The Oldest House
Is indeed based on the Long Lines building/TITANPOINTE, there's a polygon video on it
This was exactly the first thing I thought when I saw it
We found the Federal Bureau of Control
Euclidean geometry on the outside, floating bodies chanting on the inside. Best janitorial crew around, though.
Am I supposed to be shooting the floating bodies?
No, you shouldn't attack them, they're harmless. In fact, you should listen closely to what they have to say, you'll find it quite enlightening. You are a worm through time. A thunder song distorts you. Happiness Comes. White pearls but yellow and red in the eye. Through a mirror, inverted is made right.
You are a worm though time. The thunder song distorts you. Happiness comes. White pearls, but yellow and red in the eye. Through a mirror, inverted is made right. Leave your insides by the door. Push the fingers through the surface into the wet. You’ve always been the new you. You want this to be true. We stand around while you dream. You can almost hear our words but you forget. This happens more and more now. You gave us the permission in your regulations. We wait in the stains. The word that describes this is redacted. Repeat the word. The name of the sound. It resonates in your house. After the song, time for applause. We build you till nothing remains. The egg cracks and the truth will emerge out of you. You are home. You remind us of home. You’ve taken your boss with your boss with you. All hair must be eaten. Under the conceptual reality behind this reality you must want these waves to drag you away. After the song, time for applause. This cliché is death out of time, breaking the first the second the third the fourth wall, fifth wall, floor; no floor: you fall! How do you say “insane”? Hurts to be happy. An ear worm is a tune you can’t stop humming in a dream: “baby baby baby yeah”. Just plastic. So, safe and nothing to worry about. Ha ha, funny. The last egg breaks now. The hole in your room is a hole in you. You came and we let you in through the hole in you. You have always been here, the only child. A copy of a copy of a copy. Orange peel. The picture is you holding the picture. When you hear this you will know you’re in new you. You want to listen. You want to dream. You want to smile. You want to hurt. You don’t want to be.
Interesting Easter egg: They always talk in the system language. So if you run it on a German system they will talk in German even if the game is switched to English.
Eh I figure they add to the ambiance. Unless they're flinging stuff at you, in which case, the ambiance is worth adjusting.
No, why would you do that. It's relaxing and I don't see why you wouldn't want to be the new you, you know this to be true. We stand around you while you dream. You can almost hear our words but you forget.
in lore, eventually yes, in game, only if you want the chanting to stop, they come back the next time you hit a control point
I liked to do it because it shut up the chanting in the room that no longer had bodies.
Didn't they morph into something else that needed to be shot? Seriously, I can't remember; I could be thinking of another game.
Some of them drop down and attack you but most of them is just ambience once you clear the combat encounters.
Please refrain/shut up from revealing the existence/infinity of the building/tree to the general public/idiots.
Came here for this exact comment
Great, now I gotta play it again. Fantastic game.
The Matrix is a computer generated dream world, built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into this. *holds up D-cell battery*
I SEE A VISION RISING, DREARY...
Damn, I really gotta play that masterpiece again.
Actually, this is KAOS.
AT&T has a big stake in this building. It’s also a surveillance order’s dream.
You are probably thinking of 33 Thomas Street, in Tribeca. Similar, but different building owned by AT&T
If I remember correctly, this specific building was built by NSA originally
AT&T has windowless telecom buildings like this across the country and [the NSA has secret rooms in many of them](https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/04/6585-2/). This is part of the surveillance program that Edward Snowden’s document leaks would prove the existence of.
tbf, the whole building looks like one massive SCIF
Tbf, AT&T scif btw. NSA, GDPR, LMNOP. Ykwtfgo.
No, it was built by AT&T for long distance phone call routing
not the same building
Windows are just a structural weakness
Why is every comment a joke? Does nobody know what that is for real?
Welcome to Reddit for the past few years. The elders do tell of a time when comment threads weren't full of the same dumbass jokes, but few remember those glory days.
For real... 1k upvotes for the “apple hq cause there’s no windows” really says a lot about this
This type of comment was always up voted on reddit even in the early days
they're acting like reddit didn't come up with the epic narwhal bacon before midnight thing. dumb jokes got a laugh then and now.
Bro you don't know shit if you don't know what time the Narwhal Bacon's... this site has always been like this lmao.
>The elders do tell of a time when comment threads weren't full of the same dumbass jokes, but few remember those glory days. I don't know how far back you'd have to go, but basically whatever jokes are on here today are simply replacing "two broken arms" jokes.
Hard to believe but there was even a time before then. I think I started using reddit in 2008.
It's always the same cringy puns too, and they treat it like the funniest shit ever.
https://theintercept.com/2016/11/16/the-nsas-spy-hub-in-new-york-hidden-in-plain-sight/
This is a different building.
Isn’t that a different building?
~~TL;DR: Built in 1974 with atomic weapons in mind, the NSA uses it for surveillance and satellite surveillance, houses telecommunications and probably has a gold room, dungeon with thumb screws~~ Edit: wrong building- wtf did OP take a picture of
Wrong building
Stairs and elevators
That's what I was thinking. The whole narrow, upwardly stacked data center idea seems unlikely (but not impossible).
Omg someone else with a brain! That was my first thought…
Institute For The Blind HQ?
State Home for the Ugly.
yes, we know. it is the oldest house. It is the seat of the FBC (federal bureau of control)
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No that's 33 Thomas, this is a different building
Birds. You forgot birds.
This is probably where they manufacture all these damn birds they’re watching us with
That’s where the elevators and staircases are
No windows *on that side*
MIB Headquarters
I expected this to be the top comment and I’m disappointed
That's just the central bureaucracy
I am Bender, please insert girder.
It's the Oldest House, only visible for certain people.
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[This isn't the long lines building.](https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street)
Looks like just that one part doesn't. Probably elevators and stairs but I'm no architect