Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award • Hacker News Board

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#51

Post by qplex » Tue, Apr 04, 2017, 1:13 PM UTC

danielpatrick wrote: post #42

Kenji wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. I wish we had something more decentralised, like e-mail, but for social networks. Like, a standardized social network protocol that most people use (popularity is important here). There is nothing special about what social networks like Facebook do, the biggest challenge is probably serving so many requests and storing lots of data with high availability.

As a matter of fact, this is what Sir Berners Lee is working on right now at MIT. https://solid.mit.edu/ The issue is not storing the data, just like "email" doesn't store data. It's just a protocol and a data format. This makes it interoperable across whichever industry player wants to spring up and compete for your service. Ex: Don't like gmail? Go to ProtonMail. And you don't lose the ability to interact with peop…

So does one export their existing network information to these open formats? I don't think the companies who currently hold that information will part with it willingly.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#52

Post by sbmassey » Tue, Apr 04, 2017, 1:13 PM UTC

castis wrote: post #38

madiathomas wrote: post #14

This goes to show how hard winning Turing award is. One would have expected someone who invented the most useful invention of the 20th century to have won this award long time ago. Maybe I am just overvaluing www because of the impact it had on people's lives. EDITED: 20th century, not 19th.

I believe the most useful invention of the 19th century was possibly the cotton gin :)

Pish-posh, the cotton gin was invented at the end of the 18th century.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#53

Post by jacquesm » Tue, Apr 04, 2017, 1:15 PM UTC

peterkelly wrote: post #36

jlebrech wrote: post #18

good for him, but whoever thought it was a good idea to make webpages other than a markup language for documents needs to be shot.

Do you realise that your comment, and HN itself, would not exist if no forms of interactivity were ever implemented on the web?

HN could be done without anything other than what the OP suggested.

It would work a little bit different (there would be a few more refreshes, for instance, on voting) but for the most part you would hardly know the difference.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#54

Post by e12e » Tue, Apr 04, 2017, 1:16 PM UTC

simias wrote: post #23

jacquesm wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even email is no longer really decentralized. Google and a few other email silos now make up the bulk.

At least it's still mainly interoperable with 3rd party solutions through open standards. I host my own email and as long as you adhere to the guidelines (use DKIM, make sure your IP range isn't part of some blacklist, triple check your postfix config etc...) you don't feel like a 2nd class netitizen.

Not quite. You still (in my experience) need to go through obscure web-forms to avoid having gmail/hotmail black list your domain. And even then gmail is way too aggressive with its spam labeling. I've seen replies to an email thread be marked as spam by gmail when the sender is in the recipient's address book.

Gmail considers anything beyond big corporate email providers as second class participants - and so does the other big providers.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#55

Post by lucideer » Tue, Apr 04, 2017, 1:18 PM UTC

seejay wrote: post #43

jacquesm wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP is a man.

I see, how am I supposed to know that? is it listed anywhere in HN?

Reasonable assumption to make for someone named Gabe?

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#56

Post by minipci1321 » Tue, Apr 04, 2017, 1:19 PM UTC

losvedir wrote: post #21

When I was an MIT student I worked one summer at CSAIL. The office I was in had only a single occupancy bathroom. One afternoon I went to use it and just as I got there I saw that TBL was exiting. Once I went in and sat down, I noticed that the seat was warm ! Highlight of my life right there, having my butt warmed by the residual heat of the inventor of the www's butt. Ahem, in any case, congrats to him! Definitely…

A side channel of an extremely low bandwidth... 5-10 bits / hour?

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#57

Post by e12e » Tue, Apr 04, 2017, 1:19 PM UTC

icc97 wrote: post #8

I think his work on educating people about the web ever since it's creation is pretty awesome. His list of questions for kids is great, especially the one on 'what happens when I click a link' [0] [0]: https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Kids.html#What1

Probably want that in-line, as a clickable link:

https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Kids.html#What1

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#58

Post by simias » Tue, Apr 04, 2017, 1:21 PM UTC

e12e wrote: post #54

simias wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least it's still mainly interoperable with 3rd party solutions through open standards. I host my own email and as long as you adhere to the guidelines (use DKIM, make sure your IP range isn't part of some blacklist, triple check your postfix config etc...) you don't feel like a 2nd class netitizen.

Not quite. You still (in my experience) need to go through obscure web-forms to avoid having gmail/hotmail black list your domain. And even then gmail is way too aggressive with its spam labeling. I've seen replies to an email thread be marked as spam by gmail when the sender is in the recipient's address book. Gmail considers anything beyond big corporate email providers as second class participants - and so does th…

Maybe I've been lucky but implementing DKIM, DMARC and SSL SMTP support seems to have been enough to make gmail happy (I even get the small "lock" icon in gmail inboxes as a bonus).

I've used one of the many blacklist check websites to test my domain and only ended up with two false positives which I've rectified through their web forms.

It was mostly smooth sailing from there.

Note that this is using a dedicated server as a host, a while ago I tried the same thing from my home ADSL (with a static IP) and that was a pain since those "home" addresses are generally blacklisted by default since people tend to assume that emails from those addresses are sent by compromised computers.

Nowadays I know many ISPs even block port 25 by default so that's not even an option anymore.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#59

Post by seejay » Tue, Apr 04, 2017, 1:22 PM UTC

seejay wrote: post #22

Holly crap! Congratulations woman!!!

I don't understand the minus points here. Did I piss a bunch of people off?

I genuinely loved OPs comment here (gave it an upvote). So instead of saying "woman" here If I just "assumed" he is a man and said congratulations "man" or "bro" would I get plus points?

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#60

Post by jyriand » Tue, Apr 04, 2017, 1:24 PM UTC

Offtopic. I was wondering what happened to guy who invented email. I kind of remember reading that he was living in poor conditions. Did a search on "inventor of email" and found a controversy about some guy who claims to be inventor of email(Shiva Ayyadurai). That's not the guy I was looking for. Instead I was thinking of Roy Tomlinson, as I found his name in an article called: "Ray Tomlinson's 'story' about inventing email is the biggest propaganda lie of modern tech history: Shiva Ayyadurai"[0]. But seems like Ray has already passed away.

[0] http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/ray-to...