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Supreme Court to hear petition seeking ban on WhatsApp

timesofindia.indiatimes.com

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Re: Supreme Court to hear petition seeking ban on WhatsApp

#81

Post by rwbhn »

dang wrote: post #54
GabrielF00 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW the domain is in a smaller font with lower contrast than the title. I would guess that a lot of people automatically skip over the domain when they read hacker news headlines, because it's less legible than the title and feels distinct.

All true, but we also need to get out of the habit of consuming only the most easily scannable information. As Kahneman explains in "Thinking Fast and Slow", System 2 (the reflective system, the one we want to be working a little on HN) is lazy and prefers to rely on System 1 (the reflexive one that deals in subsecond responses). I think the protests of HN readers when a title isn't trivially digestible or doesn't qu…

Hear, hear! Thank you.

Re: Supreme Court to hear petition seeking ban on WhatsApp

#82

Post by johnbm »

chdjdjdnc wrote: post #66
jacquesm wrote: post #25

Every time you hear about something like this or read an article about something like this you have to slow down for a moment and realize that we brought this on ourselves. The original intent of the internet was peer to peer , not global centralized services that we all connect to. There is no technical reason why something like whatsapp can't be peer-to-peer. Choosing for a centralized service is implicitly choosin…

The issue is that people want to use things backed by a slick marketing campaign. This is why we have Slack instead of IRC, Facebook instead of talking to your friends the old fashioned way, etc.

I don't recall ever seeing a Slack ad. I just noticed more and more things starting to set up Slacks for their own purposes. The same tired "marketing" argument was used to try and explain Apple's success mid 2000s. It was equally wrong there, as evidenced by how everyone copied all of Apple's choices in touch UI and device form factors.

Slack offers: - Multi-device presence - Unread tracking - Email notifications - File upload to cloud storage - Inline previews - Profile pictures

Most of all, all of this just works by installing one app.

I really don't understand why, years down the line, people still insist marketing is more important than stuff that actually works well. Except denial.

Re: Supreme Court to hear petition seeking ban on WhatsApp

#83

Post by colejohnson66 »

dingo_bat wrote: post #41
colejohnson66 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: how would you decentralize something like a messaging app? Don't you need /something/ to facilitate routing? Or do you use some kind of public-private key encryption on a blockchain? But then how do you get someone's public key if they're offline? And why would you want to store a blockchain of everyone's encrypted messages? To get around that, you'd end up with some centralized server storing the w…

>Serious question: how would you decentralize something like a messaging app? Like email. Let everyone host their own chat server. Pass messages around to the correct server and let it forward it to the user's device.

But how do you know who to pass around to? Email works by looking up an IP address from the DNS. Sure DNS is distributed, but it all is "centralized" around the 7 root DNS servers.

As I said in my original post, it sounds similar to how Bittorrent's DHT works; you'd still need a "kickstart" server to send you a list of peers. Sure, you can hardcode a list of peers, but hardcoded stuff isn't decentralized. Someone has to maintain that list.

Re: Supreme Court to hear petition seeking ban on WhatsApp

#84

Post by colejohnson66 »

zeeveener wrote: post #45
colejohnson66 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: how would you decentralize something like a messaging app? Don't you need /something/ to facilitate routing? Or do you use some kind of public-private key encryption on a blockchain? But then how do you get someone's public key if they're offline? And why would you want to store a blockchain of everyone's encrypted messages? To get around that, you'd end up with some centralized server storing the w…

In regards to decentralizing something like a messaging app, there are a couple interesting approaches. 1) Have "tracker" servers set up around the world. The App needs to know at least one of the IPs, preferably all, in order to get a list of Peers it can connect to. This is still considered "decentralized" so long as none of the "trackers" is considered a "master" over the others. 2) Have UserA manually enter the I…

> 1) Have "tracker" servers set up around the world. The App needs to know at least one of the IPs, preferably all, in order to get a list of Peers it can connect to. This is still considered "decentralized" so long as none of the "trackers" is considered a "master" over the others.

How is that not decentralized? I really don't see how. You'd need /someone/ to maintain that list of tracker serves.

Re: Supreme Court to hear petition seeking ban on WhatsApp

#85

Post by dang »

rwbhn wrote: post #81
dang wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All true, but we also need to get out of the habit of consuming only the most easily scannable information. As Kahneman explains in "Thinking Fast and Slow", System 2 (the reflective system, the one we want to be working a little on HN) is lazy and prefers to rely on System 1 (the reflexive one that deals in subsecond responses). I think the protests of HN readers when a title isn't trivially digestible or doesn't qu…

Hear, hear! Thank you.

Btw it was Alan Kay who pointed out the analogy between Kahneman and the reflexive/reflective distinction I've been using to try to understand the dynamics of HN. That was a helpful observation on Alan's part that among other things spurred me to take Kahneman back off the shelf.
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