Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

There’s a simple alternative to the current web

hapgood.us

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 148 posts

Re: There’s a simple alternative to the current web

#21

Post by purplerails »

idlewords wrote: post #14
purplerails wrote: post #12

I've been thinking about this for a while now. Please check out my web app to solve this problem: https://www.purplerails.com/ The main idea is to use a browser extension to automatically save pages that you read to the cloud (including the images, stylesheets etc) in the background. Saved pages are searchable and sharable.

An early design idea I had for Pinboard was as a browser plugin that just saved everything it saw in passing to an upstream server. But the problem that stumped me was that there's much more downstream bandwidth than upstream on a typical residential connection, so it was hard to push things to a server in anything like real time. How did you end up dealing with this issue?

Pages are saved in the background. Nothing too fancy. I dedup when uploading: that helps a lot.

Re: There’s a simple alternative to the current web

#22

Post by michaelchisari »

magila wrote: post #15

The fact that he thinks a federated wiki would be "simple" or "easy" leads me to believe he has not actually thought through the details of how it would work in practice.

It would not be simple or easy, but crypto-currency blockchains make it more possible than ever.

Re: There’s a simple alternative to the current web

#24

Post by hackaflocka »

I will pay good money for a Chrome extension that does the following:

1) I can select (or do select all) Chrome bookmarks that I want to keep offline page backups/archives of (saved to google drive or dropbox or some such).

2) Whenever I want, instead of seeing the current online version of that bookmarked page, I can look up the originally bookmarked archived page.

3) It allows me to choose the level of links to the bookmarked page to also backup/archive (e.g., every single page that is linked to that page, x links deep, is also automatically archived -- think httrack or wget).

As someone on Hacker News once said to me: my bookmarks are my knowledge graph. As important to me as any library.

Re: There’s a simple alternative to the current web

#25

Post by purplerails »

lingben wrote: post #13
purplerails wrote: post #12

I've been thinking about this for a while now. Please check out my web app to solve this problem: https://www.purplerails.com/ The main idea is to use a browser extension to automatically save pages that you read to the cloud (including the images, stylesheets etc) in the background. Saved pages are searchable and sharable.

sounds like evernote, if I'm mistaken, please enlighten me :)

1) saving is automatic

2) privacy-first architecture (e.g., plaintext is never uploaded, plaintext URLs are never uploaded etc)

Re: There’s a simple alternative to the current web

#27

Post by spindritf »

It’s interesting that Andreessen can’t see the solution, but perhaps expected.

What a weird dig. It's neither expected, nor established that he can't see a solution. I'm not as smart as Andreessen and I could come up with half a dozen solutions.

Author's favourite is fine but far, far from obvious. How viable is it to run your own federated wiki anyway? Are there packages for popular systems? Are there plugins for major browsers? Is there any federation actually happening? I skimmed the resources[1] and don't know. Does anyone here run one? That would be a solution, this seems more like an idea.

And it's not like no one's doing anything. There are services like Pocket or Readability to store an article until you want to read it, Evernotes, Google Keeps... Our very own 'idlewords will archive the contents of your bookmarks for a fee[2]. Finally, there's archive.org.

[1] https://github.com/WardCunningham/Smallest-Federated-Wiki#ho...

[2] https://pinboard.in/tour/#archive

Re: There’s a simple alternative to the current web

#28

Post by grmarcil »

I find Bret Victor's comparison between the internet and the LOC a little weird. I've always thought of the internet as a publishing/sharing medium, not an archive.

There are plenty of books that go out of print within ten years, we just happen to have infrastructure beyond publishers (libraries) that preserve published copies.

Post reply on HN