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Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

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Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#171

Post by mjevans »

ggm wrote: post #155

The other 3.5b who aren't online yet. They're the 20 at the end of the 80:20 solution we deployed for all the metro/urban and economically exploitable agri locations. They're the ones with zero persisting power and infra unrelated to telecoms, who share one honda generator with a village, who have to walk 20km to get antibiotics, who pay middlemen a cut of every transaction, who live in debt bondage. The ITU made a h…

There's also a huge difference between fiber to the whatever, and the 10-20 year old infra in the US suburbs being slowly upgraded to gigabit DOWN only. The suburbs are often regulatory captured by anti-competitive agreements with little enforcement oversight or forethought by the small cities. Maybe (I personally suspect) kickbacks in various forms too.

I agree that the 50% of the population with even less need things too, but it's myopic to think that we're even as good as the rosy outlook. Help to raise the local industrial and civil capacity in other nations, in my mind and opinion, would also make them nicer places to live and thus more likely to have happy citizens with a stable and responsible government who can help make the world a better place overall. (Surely there's been no study on this, but I also theorize this would be the most net cost effective way of battling terrorism; since if there's something positive to live for you're less likely to be angry and hateful towards others.)

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#172

Post by imiric »

closeparen wrote: post #144
imiric wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's my data. I should decide who can access it, when and on what terms. Relying on someone else to do it for me is an unnecessary middle man that exists for the only reason web developers haven't made a good technical solution that would be simple, secure and reliable enough for everyone to use. For goodness sake, we've had to come up with laws for how companies can use our data instead of solid technical so…

* Most home connections are asymmetric and lack upload bandwidth. * Most personal devices are battery powered and intermittently operated. * Many are mobile in terms of physical location and logical network (home WiFi, work/school WiFi, cellular). Having a third, highly available, high upload capacity location to stage data between production and consumption wins because it is a genuinely effective solution to proble…

> asymmetric

There's no technical reason for this to be the case. ISPs adapted to the needs of the web, not the other way around.

> lack upload bandwidth

This is relative to each user. The vast majority wouldn't require much upload bandwidth, and there could be technical solutions to address this (caching nodes, data expiration, P2P, etc.).

The biggest technical challenges of large web services are because of the scale needed to support the large amount of users. If we had built services and tools around the inherent distributed nature of the web, centralization and all the problems caused by scale wouldn't be an issue.

> battery powered and intermittently operated

> mobile

Why should user data be highly available? If I'm physically unreachable or just want to be offline, shouldn't my data be unreachable as well? Besides, all of these can have technical solutions as well.

> Having a third, highly available, high upload capacity location to stage data between production and consumption wins

I'm not disagreeing, but a) this wouldn't be required by most users, and b) why couldn't this be under control of users as well? The fact no such (simple) solution exists today doesn't mean that it couldn't have gained traction back when browsers were getting adopted, and today we would've had a completely different web. Unfortunately incentives are turned on its head, users aren't educated about the harms of giving their data away because they've learned that it's the way the web works, we have to pass laws to protect user data, and a vocal minority of web developers have been swimming upstream and trying to undo the harms of centralization for decades with lackluster results.

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#173

Post by adventured »

dijit wrote: post #137
imiric wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forget open source—there never was a simple way for users to self-host web ~servers~ applications that gained any traction whatsoever. Opera gave it a go more than a decade ago with Opera Unite, but that went nowhere. Like a sibling comment mentioned, Sandstorm was a push in the right direction, but it also eventually failed. Docker and current container solutions are still way too complicated for the average user. T…

This is a weird take on history and divorced from the reality we live in even now. The first ever web browser written by Tim Berners Lee at CERN on a NeXt computer was a web editor as well. He envisioned that every web user would be a web creator. He is quoted many times as saying this. Today: you can still stand up a web server at your house and forward the ports on your router. Unless you’re behind a carrier grade…

> Today: you can still stand up a web server at your house and forward the ports on your router

And you just lost 97%+ of the Internet userbase. They have no idea what you just said.

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#174

Post by dehrmann »

jokoon wrote: post #145
dehrmann wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Low carbon footprint datacenters My gut tells me it's fairly low per person served, and it'll only improve over time as more renewable electric sources come online.

you should not listen to your gut all the time

> Data centres contribute around 0.3% to overall carbon emissions

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06610-y

Compare that to https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#175

Post by adventured »

withinboredom wrote: post #163
bick_nyers wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don't quite understand is how these rural areas got electricity. If it's so expensive to run something to a rural area, who ate the cost of providing grid access? Or is cable/fiber just significantly more expensive per mile compared to electricity?

Many areas in the US still don’t. I remember living on a farm as a child, circa 1998, and our neighbors had no power or running water. It wasn’t lack of wanting it, “the money just ran out.” This was the mountains of Virginia, near Roanoke.

> Many areas in the US still don’t.

In the scale of the US, that's a blatantly false statement.

It's The figure is so high the WorldBank lists the US at 100% access to electricity with all the other affluent nations. Brazil is at 99.8% for reference, Vietnam is 99.4%, India is 97.8%.

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#176

Post by adventured »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #67
bryan_w wrote: post #61

How can we get the layperson to run a "homeserver" to host all their data locally and have a strong pki infra. 30 years ago, people would've said the same things about routers, so I think it's possible with the right ui/incentives

>I think it's possible with the right ui/incentives I want that, but for the masses of tech-illiterate Average Joes out there, it's tough to compete against the sheer convenience of "tap next to trust big tech with all your private data and sync it all in the cloud" that you get when you unbox your iPhone/Android. And for most people their phone is their primary computing device now so their lives are tied to those e…

EU-style regulations will decrease, dramatically, the likelihood of Average Joe doing it themselves: those regulations will improve privacy, data control, et al. requirements for big tech. Average Joe will feel even safer in using big tech.

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#177

Post by hsn915 »

notreallyserio wrote: post #153
hsn915 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do any of these things help? "docker repositories, terraform, aws service catalog (or cloudformation)" These are all part of the problem, and can never be the solution.

What is the problem they are a part of, and what makes them part of that problem? They don't seem problematic to me.

You can't solve problems of complexity by piling on more and more layers.

Layers need to be collapsed

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#178

Post by hsn915 »

adventured wrote: post #173
dijit wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a weird take on history and divorced from the reality we live in even now. The first ever web browser written by Tim Berners Lee at CERN on a NeXt computer was a web editor as well. He envisioned that every web user would be a web creator. He is quoted many times as saying this. Today: you can still stand up a web server at your house and forward the ports on your router. Unless you’re behind a carrier grade…

> Today: you can still stand up a web server at your house and forward the ports on your router And you just lost 97%+ of the Internet userbase. They have no idea what you just said.

Yea. Talk about being "divorced from reality".

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#179

Post by carlosdp »

yuliyp wrote: post #128
carlosdp wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's actually a lot of open source apps that have this property in a particular category: web3 apps. Users (or other intermediaries, not necessarily the app dev) pay the cost of transactions, and thereby pay the cost of the data storage / computation layer. HN doesn't seem to like web3 very much yet, but one of the most positive innovations it brings is giving open-source apps a direct business model (instead of t…

web3 apps do have high transaction costs, but that's not really reducing the costs that the web3 app would have otherwise paid to have a local database. So it costs money, but the developer doesn't really earn anything because of it.

> but that's not really reducing the costs that the web3 app would have otherwise paid to have a local database

I'm not sure what you mean? It literally makes the cost to the developer 0 per user.

And the original developer can absolutely earn money this way. In fact, in web3 it's possible for frontend devs to earn money by creating better frontends to existing protocols utilizing referral fees that can be specified in calls to the protocol!

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#180

Post by _carbyau_ »

Separate out the "central" bit of centralisation.

I think we need DNS for all.

A "secrets service" where people can put a short encrypted message - big enough for an IPv6 address + future extendability - for all to see.

Then users can swap keys, agree on a "secrets service" (or many of them) to store their secret/IP address, and skip any other centralisation altogether.

Apps (open source or otherwise) can then leverage this service to let users simply talk directly to each other.

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