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

Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

news.mit.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 305 posts

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#71

Post by mtgx »

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-...

Tim Berners-Lee seems to be much more idealistic about how the web should be in that regard, because he knows it's the right thing to do.

And yet he decided to be "pragmatic" on web DRM, instead of taking the same idealistic approach because it was the right thing to do.

http://gruik.io/view/1238

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#72

Post by madiathomas »

Cyph0n wrote: post #49
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.

Diffie and Hellman won it only last year, 40 years after their seminal paper was published! It is indeed a very tough award to get.

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

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#73

Post by sametmax »

jacquesm wrote: post #33
seejay wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this mean it's ok to sell food with poison in them because people have the option to just simply not eat them? A figure like TBL openly supporting something like DRM sends a message, and it's not a good one.

Another pointless analogy. Food with poison in it is illegal to sell. Supporting DRM sends a message that you do no agree with (and that I do not agree with), we can agree that it's not a good message but we are not without power in this: you and I can simply decide never to use that feature and not to support companies that use that feature. Copyright law is here to stay, rights holders will try to use technology to…

> Food with poison in it is illegal to sell

Is is not. Only poisoned food that kills you quickly. You have plenty of legal food that harms your body or gives you diseases that are legal. We just call them junk food, alcohol, and other names because they are morally accepted.

You accept DRM as fact of life. We don't. Because it isn't. It's just the next move pulled out by the majors to try to lock in the consumer. It brings zero benefits to society. No culture sharing restriction ever did, and all the stats in the world show that what they claim to protect against is a scam: majors are making more money that ever.

> The fact that consumers as a group don't care enough is the main problem

It can be said about any problem in society. Health, education, whatever. Regulations are not the solution, having people caring is.

Still, we do have regulations.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#75

Post by bnegreve »

peterkelly wrote: post #36
jlebrech wrote: post #18

good for him, but whoever thought it was a good idea to make webpages other than a markup language for documents needs to be shot.

Do you realise that your comment, and HN itself, would not exist if no forms of interactivity were ever implemented on the web?

Usenet[1] has been around for years and is (or was?) a very sophisticated form of forums.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#76

Post by bahjoite »

seejay wrote: post #59
seejay wrote: post #22

Holly crap! Congratulations woman!!!

I don't understand the minus points here. Did I piss a bunch of people off? I genuinely loved OPs comment here (gave it an upvote). So instead of saying "woman" here If I just "assumed" he is a man and said congratulations "man" or "bro" would I get plus points?

You might have omitted "woman".

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#77

Post by Jaruzel »

seejay wrote: post #59
seejay wrote: post #22

Holly crap! Congratulations woman!!!

I don't understand the minus points here. Did I piss a bunch of people off? I genuinely loved OPs comment here (gave it an upvote). So instead of saying "woman" here If I just "assumed" he is a man and said congratulations "man" or "bro" would I get plus points?

Your comment, although well-meaning, also didn't add anything to the conversation. People tend to vote those down.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#78

Post by circadian »

I'm very happy he's not only won the award, but also that he's used it as a springboard to highlight ongoing privacy, security and information freedom issues.

Personally I think that's a mark of a great pioneer who is still using his capabilities for the best interests of us all.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#79

Post by sopooneo »

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.

I expect getting that many requests would be a bigger challenge than serving them.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#80

Post by kbart »

septimus111 wrote: post #62

I greatly admire the guy but does TBL OM KBE FRS FREng FRSA FBCS really need another award or title? All that money and publicity could be directed towards promising junior researchers who need it!

Turing Award is the highest IT award (hence "the Nobel Prize of computing") given for a lifetime's work. If some junior scientists would do something as groundbreaking, I'm sure they will receive this award too (after some time maybe; web wasn't invented yesterday either).
Post reply on HN