Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea that distributed apps are "no maintenance" or require less overhead than centralized apps is the big lie that will always make such proposals fall apart. If there is a reluctance or genuine opposition to cloud services maybe you should ask why and consider the fact that they might know more than you do about the reasoning (we don't use it because Dropbox internal security is shit) and that there is no decent…
Would you consider Skype (in the original supernode topology) to be a centralized or decentralized service?
Decentralize All the Things
41–50 of 68 posts
Re: Decentralize All the Things
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea that distributed apps are "no maintenance" or require less overhead than centralized apps is the big lie that will always make such proposals fall apart. If there is a reluctance or genuine opposition to cloud services maybe you should ask why and consider the fact that they might know more than you do about the reasoning (we don't use it because Dropbox internal security is shit) and that there is no decent…
Would you consider Skype (in the original supernode topology) to be a centralized or decentralized service?
Re: Decentralize All the Things
#43I'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?
We don't have anything open source yet but we hope to start opening up code and specs to the community soon.
Our website is unfortunately out of date, it makes Spatch look like too much of an app (what's shown is a prototype we've built to show off some use cases). We will be updating it soon along with a jobs page.
We are well funded and hiring, based in London.
Re: Decentralize All the Things
#44I am starting to think that the killer app for a decentralised web is actually business. Think of the typical large corporation: * 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…
The idea that distributed apps are "no maintenance" or require less overhead than centralized apps is the big lie that will always make such proposals fall apart. If there is a reluctance or genuine opposition to cloud services maybe you should ask why and consider the fact that they might know more than you do about the reasoning (we don't use it because Dropbox internal security is shit) and that there is no decent…
It is a big lie to believe that multi-user applications always need infrastructure, they just need to be well designed. I expect that a very large OneNote system may need professional support at some point. But when it does the value is already proven without ever having to ask permission from an engineer.
You are right to be sceptical of cloud although perhaps for different reasons. Amazon S3 is probably more secure and resilient than the typical corporate SAN. But the random office in some small town will not have enough bandwidth to use it. To the average user the corporate run services are exactly like the cloud; they are slow and not designed for them. With properly design P2P systems normal users could actually choose their own tech again.
Re: Decentralize All the Things
#45Everybody has a project they kick around in the back of their head but will probably never get around to doing. My project is an O/S. It should be built from the ground up to be networkable, self-updating, and handle biometrics and P2P trust. And of course heavy use of encryption. In addition, it should operate along two streams: everything should have an execute and a verify stream running simultaneously. The reason…
> In addition, it should operate along two streams: everything should have an execute and a verify stream running simultaneously. What would a "verify stream" do ... input validation, regression testing, anomaly detection, ..? Would it be verifying code or data or endpoint identity?
I'm sold. I want everything I own, from the metal on up, to consist of competing and cross-checking systems, ideally open source from different groups.
So to answer your question, yes. All of it. It's got to be baked in everywhere.
Sketching this out on the back of a napkin somewhere would be a hoot.
Re: Decentralize All the Things
#46I sometimes think network programming is a little hairy and makes p2p apps pretty difficult to make. I wonder what can make it a little easier, like some networked filesystem or protocol... I guess there isn't anything really relevant. I wonder if something like bittorrent or libtorrent, which seems to be a state machine, could be integrated as a kernel module so it can offer a more diverse set of network programming…
The only things that make p2p programming hard are firewalls.
Re: Decentralize All the Things
#47There was a stretch in the mid 20th Century when most Western economies saw a limited amount of geographic decentralization, as industry left the cities and moved to the country-side. The USA was the leader of this trend. But since the 1980s there have been forces working, throughout the economy, to re-centralize various industries. We see this most dramatically in the tech industry, especially in the USA, where the number of computer programming jobs has plummeted in areas such as Ohio, Illinois, Arkansas, Kansas, etc, while rising in California and New York -- the programming jobs were once distributed across the country but are now increasingly concentrated into 2 mega-urban zones on the coast.
Urban centralization tends to be influenced by political centralization. If the political system concentrates, then the urban system will tend to concentrate. Consider: "Empirical studies of [urban] “primacy” identify two strong factors determining the size of the largest city: urban population as a whole (no surprise) and, more interestingly, political structure: federal or decentralized systems do not have primate cities as large as those with high centralization. Thus Mexico City is still larger than Shanghai, because of China’s decentralization."
http://siteresources.worldbank.org/DEC/Resources/84797-12518...
Political concentration increases the economies of agglomeration: "The term economies of agglomeration is used in urban economics to describe the benefits that firms obtain by locating near each other ('agglomerating'). This concept relates to the idea of economies of scale and network effects. Simply put, as more firms in related fields of business cluster together, their costs of production may decline significantly (firms have competing multiple suppliers, greater specialization and division of labor result). Even when competing firms in the same sector cluster, there may be advantages because the cluster attracts more suppliers and customers than a single firm could achieve alone. Cities form and grow to exploit economies of agglomeration."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration
Furthermore, there has been a decline in the number of startups (which therefore concentrates more power in the hands of older firms):
https://www.fedinprint.org/items/fednsr/707.html
More so, the law encourages corporate leaders (of firms listed on stock exchanges) to focus on hitting quarterly targets. Any significant deviation from earnings expectations is now sufficient basis for a lawsuit: the CEO has mislead investors, this is a breech of fiduciary duty, what about shareholder rights, etc, etc, on and on, I'm sure you know the rhetoric. This tends to mean that firms can only grow to a certain size before they get bought by an older firm, as going through with a public listing is more demanding than it used to be, and exposes the firm to more legal risks than it used to.
We should not expect that the Internet to escape the wider forces at work. If economics, and the political system, encourage centralization, then we will see centralization of the Internet.
You either advocate for decentralization of the whole economy, or you don't advocate for decentralization at all. The Internet is not free of the economy.
All that said, it is worth remembering that there has been dramatic decentralization of industry over the last 70 years. In 1945 the USA accounted for 50% of all global industrial production. Nowadays, it accounts for less than 20%. Asia has seen a dramatic rise in its share of industrial production.
Re: Decentralize All the Things
#48Re: Decentralize All the Things
#49Uhhh, 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…
I think you misunderstand how Bitmessage works. It doesn't use a blockchain. It's like alt.anonymous.messages, but with a Bitcoin-like broadcast protocol http://www.quora.com/What-is-Bitmessage-and-how-does-it-work
I know how bitmessage works, sorry if that wasn't clear from my post.
Re: Decentralize All the Things
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea that distributed apps are "no maintenance" or require less overhead than centralized apps is the big lie that will always make such proposals fall apart. If there is a reluctance or genuine opposition to cloud services maybe you should ask why and consider the fact that they might know more than you do about the reasoning (we don't use it because Dropbox internal security is shit) and that there is no decent…
I think OneNote is an example of a good decentralised system. You get a multiuser wiki that only needs a shared folder to save. It is installed alongside MS Office and can be setup without any involvement from IT staff. It is several orders of magnitude easier than installing MediaWiki and needs no big internet connection. It is a big lie to believe that multi-user applications always need infrastructure, they just n…