Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

spectrum.ieee.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 238 posts

Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

#171

Post by sbardle »

dang wrote: post #12

Before posting something dismissive about this, please remember how easy it would have been to dismiss the internet and the web themselves as things that couldn't ever happen, nice visions but impossible in the real world, etc. etc. and so on. When the people who actually made these things talk about what needs making next, we should hear them with an open mind, not rush to think of objections.

Tim Benners Lee refers to social "levelling". It's interesting to compare the inventors of the internet with the English Levellers of the seventeenth century. They showed great creativity early on, but gradually got worn down by the failure of the rest of mankind to get behind and realise their vision of a reborn society. I think this is the major problem with the "reinvention of the internet" - the majority of people aren't particularly bothered about changing it in the first place.

Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

#172

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

huuu wrote: post #146
ZenoArrow wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Kahle gave a good talk at the end of day 1, where he pointed out that nobody quite knows what the end-user's interest is here. Are we talking about "open-source websites?"" To me the answer is obvious. Look at how the web is used now. Like it or not a high proportion of web activity is social. However, users of sites with a social focus recognise that there are drawbacks to the current arrangements, in that your u…

Aren't the main reasons everything went centralized: bandwidth and reliability? Maybe this can be solved with good caching. But what you don't want is your site / post going viral which will bring down your internet connection.

Which is why you want content-addressable decentralized storage, so the content gets distributed either peer to peer or through public caching infrastructure that's operated by ISPs, just as IP router are nowadays.

Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

#173

Post by Kubuxu »

huuu wrote: post #146
ZenoArrow wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Kahle gave a good talk at the end of day 1, where he pointed out that nobody quite knows what the end-user's interest is here. Are we talking about "open-source websites?"" To me the answer is obvious. Look at how the web is used now. Like it or not a high proportion of web activity is social. However, users of sites with a social focus recognise that there are drawbacks to the current arrangements, in that your u…

Aren't the main reasons everything went centralized: bandwidth and reliability? Maybe this can be solved with good caching. But what you don't want is your site / post going viral which will bring down your internet connection.

This can be solved with for example IPFS. When you download a file you also make it accessible to others.

This means that reverse scaling effect kicks in. The more popular the file is the less people access it from original source.

Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

#174

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

ori_b wrote: post #159
mike_hearn wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, speaking only for myself, I've thought about leaving medium several times but never bothered because: • I don't want an article that goes viral to give me huge bills or crush a tiny server. I want automatic scaling. • I don't want to run or upgrade a web stack. I have a few Linux VPS' and frankly they're painful to maintain. I don't have the time or energy to do this unpaid anymore. If Linux was a better OS may…

> I don't want an article that goes viral to give me huge bills or crush a tiny server. I want automatic scaling. I'm not sure that an article that goes viral can do this any more, if you're running a simple static site. Even a million hits a day on my website would only be something like 150 gigabytes of traffic a month, if it were sustained. (I'd expect a much smaller spike). At Amazon's current pricing, that's abo…

Which is to say, at amazon's crazy expensive pricing. Hetzner, for example, sell a tera(!)byte for 1,39 EUR.

Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

#175

Post by _Understated_ »

Pxtl wrote: post #91
losteric wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> home servers and decentralised identity. Home servers would need to be as close to zero configuration as possible, whilst still remaining secure. People aren't going to buy more black-box hardware they don't directly interact with. Consumers already struggle with routers. I agree with the core concept, but I think we'll need mobile servers instead of home servers... a simple "Internet" app that installs on anyone's…

People struggle with routers because they're terrible. Buggy, inconsistent, and their UI is full of detailed technical questions they don't know the answer to. I imagine the box of the future is a home cloud box with a small touchscreen on it for the easiest bootstrapping ever. Enter a name and that's the new dynip subdomain and said. Enter a password and that's the password for wifi and for accessing the group share…

I think we are looking at this the wrong way. We are looking at it like techs. These kind of problems need to be looked at from the customers point of view (ok, I know that Facebook users are the product, not the customer but the analogy works)

Ask yourself one question: What problem am I solving with this?

Can you honestly see the Facebook-masses buying a blackbox device, however simple, just to connect to others in a decentralized way? Would your mum use it? That's your target audience.

I firmly believe the future must have a better way of doing things but we need to look at the pain points, the current problems that the current tools are attempting to solve and then coming up with something better and easier (let's keep network effects out of the equation for now).

I don't know what that is but it must be as simple as clicking something that says "Log in to "... not another device, however cool or simple it is.

Perhaps a router that gives you a simple question during setup, e.g. Would you like to enable SocialCloud? A major problem I could see with something like that is that I imagine most people get their routers from their ISP and I have no idea how big the router market is... I got mine from Sky and have no intention of replacing it.

Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

#176

Post by tonyedgecombe »

cageface wrote: post #154
ryanmarsh wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sometimes I feel like I am by my self on privacy and freedom issues. Very few of my non-tech friends & family get why I think government and corporate encroachment on privacy and freedom is an issue Privacy and Freedom are values. The web (along with Facebook et.al.) is a product. I once read that Steve Jobs told Drew Houston that file sync was "a feature not a product". Obvi SJ was wrong but it's an interesting di…

I once read that Steve Jobs told Drew Houston that file sync was "a feature not a product". Obvi SJ was wrong but it's an interesting distinction to make. He might have actually been correct if Apple could make iCloud work properly. As it is you'd be crazy to trust your data to it and Dropbox is a no-brainer product.

Jobs was always dismissive of other peoples products, I don't think you could read too much into that.

Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

#177

Post by girzel »

zanny wrote: post #87
losteric wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> home servers and decentralised identity. Home servers would need to be as close to zero configuration as possible, whilst still remaining secure. People aren't going to buy more black-box hardware they don't directly interact with. Consumers already struggle with routers. I agree with the core concept, but I think we'll need mobile servers instead of home servers... a simple "Internet" app that installs on anyone's…

IPFS already does this and exists. It is decentralized, it lets you put your own content in it whenever you want, and anyone can use it. IE, you can simply drop an html page into your own IPFS directory, and other users of IPFS can browse to it (assuming you put global read permissions on it). It is no more complicated than a daemon and a virtual file system.

That's sort of amazing. Thanks for posting this!

Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

#179

Post by sangnoir »

Mon_7i wrote: post #149
brokenmachine wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sometimes I feel like I am by my self on privacy and freedom issues. In real life, I also often feel like I am alone in caring about privacy and freedom issues. Sometimes I feel like a crackpot when trying to explain to people who don't care why privacy is important. However I am hopeful that us techies who are actually the ones creating the future of the web are aware of and give weight to those issues. It seems f…

I think privacy/freedom issues are symptoms not root causes. The Internet today allows/has allowed for the rapid extraction of information/wealth from the masses into the hands of a few. I am totally opposed to the propping up of Mark Zuckerburgs and Larry Pages. Who then get to decide who and how the worlds information shall be accessed. This should not be the point of the internet. There are too many unintended con…

> We could have handled nuclear tech in the same way we handled the internet "to spur innovation"

We did in fact, handle nuclear tech in the same way - briefly. You might not have heard of the "Atoms for Peace"[1] program launched by president Dwight Eisenhower back in 1953. It really did spur innovation (research and development of peaceful applications of nuclear physics - e.g. medical equipment).

The "Atoms for Peace" program was also directly responsible for the first nuclear reactors in Israel, Iran and Pakistan.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atoms_for_Peace

Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

#180

Post by zero_iq »

zkhalique wrote: post #123
zero_iq wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's funny, they're really not. According to your own documentation, you have a traditional centralised client-server architecture. (Albeit one with some bells and whistles.)

Your mistake is thinking that the relevant centralization is in the client-server architecture. The real reason that people have centralized social is because it's hard to let people authenticate and find their friends across domains. And even further, there are no good tools comparable to Facebook when it comes to subscriptions, notifications, updates, realtime collaboration, and all those other multi-user things th…

The discussion point of the article is how we can build such technologies for the kinds of things you just listed as needing a centralized domain.

You claimed that they were describing your platform.

But in the 'macro' sense, your platform is nothing like that -- it's a different flavour of Web app server, and fits in with the existing paradigm. Yes it may be part of a decentralised system (the Web), but any large Web application developed using it would be exactly the kind of centralised information silo that the people in the article want to avoid. The article is about how the existing paradigm is insufficiently decentralised.

Your platform could be a great Web app platform, but it does nothing to address any of the points raised in the article.

Post reply on HN