Hacker News Reader

Comment by mukyu | Hacker News Reader

Could someone translate what this is actually trying to talk about into something clear? This blog post reminds me of someone on weed trying to relate to you this profound idea to you and rambles on stream of consciousness style. He wants there to be no 'centralization' (that is, servers) and have things run on a cloud of people's web browsers, yet at the same time it still talks to mysql somewhere? We won't need any one site to hold data and things just magically work by sending things out into the ether?

View on HN

What I understood is that the author wants the browser to run on the server and then stream the video, VNC-style. That's a profoundly silly idea, since you'd have to basically get one server per user for any semi-CPU-intensive rendering, and to what benefit? I don't know.

What I’m proposing is that we replace PHP with a web browser so that the code we run on the server could be the same code we run on the client. To make it so developers only have to learn one language, one set of technologies.

That will eventually lead to decentralised applications, but in the mean time will simply lay the groundwork for it whilst people continue with the centralised model.

There will always be a need for centralised systems, the world is just not going to simply change their entire toolset and paradigm overnight. We must make centralised apps use pretty much the same technologies as decentralised ones first, then coax developers over.

With desktop applications you can use the same language/code on both the client and the server side. That did not lead to decentralization. Well, that isn't cross platform you might say. However, Java mostly covers that and still it did not happen. There are also numerous tools that allow you to write in one language (Java with GWT, some lisp one I cannot name) that runs on the server side that automatically generates equivalent javascript for the client.

There is no reason (and you provide no argument) that using the same code on the client/server results in decentralization. Furthermore, we have the fact that it already exists and still did not lead to decentralization.

Presumably he/she envisions a Facebook/BitTorrent hybrid with content replicated across the social graph.

You'd get drafted into storing images for some subset of the intersection of your social graph and several others, and the rest of your images would be served by someone(s) with whom your social graph intersects.

Presumably invitations would be via e-mail, or, if you wanted to be even more decentralized, QR code.

... Which assumes people keep their machines running 24/7 on unlimited data connections. It's a nice idea from a tech point of view, but for the life of me I cannot see how it's superior to what we already have.

Well, except some degree of redundancy would be built in to the storage scheme á la BitTorrent.

As far as data volume, I've got to imagine the data usage per user would be significantly less than BitTorrent.

The desirable aspect of this system is obvious - the only people who see your data are people who've seen a QR code from someone in your social graph - your FaceTorrent profile will never, ever be indexed by Google.

> The desirable aspect of this system is obvious - the only people who see your data are people who've seen a QR code from someone in your social graph - your FaceTorrent profile will never, ever be indexed by Google.

What if Google started offering, say, free Google Coupons (assuming they roll their own groupon) in exchange for befriending them on FaceTorrent? Not all of my friends and relatives value privacy as much as I do.

The best I have been able to make of it is that he wants to make a protocol where anyone can make an application/service and distribute arbitrary data via the browser. Basically, the internet at large except all of the 'computers' are actually web browsers running on actual computers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com