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Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

news.mit.edu

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Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#171

Post by NoGravitas »

krona wrote: post #13
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.

That was essentially the promise of RDF, OWL, The Semantic Web, Web2.0 and so on. After swimming in that stuff for 3 years in the early 00's, I could tell back then that it was mostly a boondoggle, and even though those technologies have found their niche, the project failed for the same reason that the original WWW was successful. It was like 'AI' in the 80's, but with XML.

The feeling I got was that most of those were just too general to be suited for any specific purpose. You could, in principle, build a piece of social networking software out of them, but there was never a product that you could just deploy to your web server and use.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#172

Post by [deleted] »

freehunter wrote: post #117
danielpatrick wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But half the point of a social network isn't the ability to communicate, but rather the history you've built there. Likewise, half the value of email isn't the ability to send a message to anyone, but the history of emails you have. Sure email isn't a data storage method, but in reality? Yeah, email is a data storage method. That's why Gmail gives me 25GB for free. Not because that's the size of my inbox, but because…

[deleted]

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#173

Post by mike-cardwell »

XJOKOLAT wrote: post #159
freehunter wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But half the point of a social network isn't the ability to communicate, but rather the history you've built there. Likewise, half the value of email isn't the ability to send a message to anyone, but the history of emails you have. Sure email isn't a data storage method, but in reality? Yeah, email is a data storage method. That's why Gmail gives me 25GB for free. Not because that's the size of my inbox, but because…

History should be decentralized too, then. Who remembers RSS feeds? I miss those days. We should have some superior spin on that but for social networks. Imagine Facebook, but your history/data were your own property. A friend would find you on Facebook, or Ello, or AnythingAnyWhereBook ... add your feed, and done. Then it is up to the Social Networks to make a superior product for you to enjoy your friends data and…

What do you miss about RSS feeds? They're still there... It's very rare that I come across a blog that doesn't have one, even now...

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#174

Post by ComodoHacker »

chriswarbo wrote: post #65
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.

> 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. The difficulty with decentralising is that these are the biggest challenge to centralised systems like Facebook; they're problems which are very nice to have ("oh no, we have a billion users!"). The biggest challenge for decentralised syste…

>These days the Internet, and hence the number of people who need to agree on the protocols, is huge.

These days however it's not the people who decide, it's organizations.

>Think about, for example, HTTP2; how many organisations and individuals were involved in its definition and publication?

Many may be involved, but very few can decide whether to use it or kill it. Namely, Google and Facebook would be enough. Descending down to individuals, it's about 3-5 from Google and one from Facebook.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#175

Post by Ar-Curunir »

27182818284 wrote: post #139
justin66 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Claude Shannon never won it.

That's an interesting point. I interpret the prize's criteria "for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community" to be less in Claude's space and more in the applied space. Scrolling down through the list of past winners, I've implemented several of the work of winners and am using the WWW right now to communicate this. On the other hand, I think I use Claude's work in the same sense that I use…

Stephen Cook, Micali, Goldwasser, Rabin, Scott, Karp, Hartmanis, Stearns, Manuel Blum, Yao and Valiant. These are all pure theoreticians; I didn't include data structures people and applied-ish cryptographers like RSA and DH.

More than a significant fraction of Turing awards have been won by theoreticians.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#176

Post by KeatonDunsford »

Kenji wrote: post #4
jacquesm wrote: post #3

Key quote (for me) from the interview: "A social network is disempowering because you put a lot of energy into it, all your personal data out there, and tell it who your friends are. You can only use that information inside the silo of that particular social network." source: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604052/webs-inventor-tim-...

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.

Help build Urbit.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#178

Post by madiathomas »

justin66 wrote: post #134
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.

> 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. Claude Shannon never won it.

Let's hope he will be awarded one day, posthumously.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#179

Post by madiathomas »

hodgesrm wrote: post #126
madiathomas wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Odds of becoming a US dollar billionaire are higher than odds of winning it in your lifetime.

In this case scarcity correlates to value. Given a choice I think I would take the Turing Award. :)

Same here. I will rather win that prestigous award.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#180

Post by madiathomas »

hardtke wrote: post #143
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.

It's hard to top antibiotics in terms of useful inventions.

Yes they are very useful. I was only counting computer related contributions since Turin award only recognise people who contributed to computing community.
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