11–20 of 68 posts
I have been playing with an idea to decentralize search (or, more generally, information processing). I would consist of - a publicly available hierarchical type system (similar to how classes look like in an OOP language with multiple inheritance). For example, URL is a type, or set of search terms is a type. - any number of nodes on the net. Each of them would provide a mapping from a set of input data to a set of…
Uhhh, either I don't get what they are trying to say or the article doesn't really say anything at all? They state the example that a bitcoin like blockchain isn't the right solution for distributed email? Well no shit? A few paragraphs before that they even say "blockchain is a distributed database", well you don't want a distributed database to deliver messages to individuals. And yes, torrent doesn't need a databa…
No, they didn't do a good job of explaining it. 'We' basically failed at building easy-to-use decentralized 'services' and those who don't think it's a big deal to do so built a bunch of centralized services that were easy-to-use and also made their investors rich. Users don't understand all the ramifications of using a centralized service, so they ended up using what was easier, instead of what was better.
Further, the reasons to move away from a centralized service are difficult for most people to comprehend, so there's not a way for clear intent to emerge, other than a bunch of us rattling the cage now and again trying to get others to pay attention.
1. https://github.com/ssbc/secure-scuttlebutt 2. http://www.kappa-architecture.com/
I'd be interested to hear what decentralized technology projects HN readers are working on and/or most interested in -- and hopefully that a community could help with. Care to share your favorites below?
I have been playing with an idea to decentralize search (or, more generally, information processing). I would consist of - a publicly available hierarchical type system (similar to how classes look like in an OOP language with multiple inheritance). For example, URL is a type, or set of search terms is a type. - any number of nodes on the net. Each of them would provide a mapping from a set of input data to a set of…
I like the notion of trustworthy, general-purpose, publicly distributed computing: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-dawn-of-trustwo...
* Massive reluctance to use cloud services and active blocking of services like Dropbox.
* Centralised "intranet" style software is usually slow and badly designed.
* Internet connections are slow, but local network connections are usually fast.
* Desktop computers spend most of their time completely idle and will often have lots of spare disk space.
* Centralised services are very expensive to maintain and difficult to develop.
Simple P2P apps that would run on corporate networks and require no maintenance could be very powerful.
My feeling is that if we could reclaim all those good old protocols (ftp, and all the other above-mentioned ones) and if we could run them locally easily and added a couple more generic services such as bittorrent and gnutella (for search), we'd have a nice decentralized stack to build new applications on.