Q&A: PHP Creator Rasmus Lerdorf (2002) - <AUTHOR> https://www.computerworld.com/article/2586472/app-development/q-a--php-creator-rasmus-lerdorf.html <comment><USER2> Don't judge PHP by a 15-year-old interview with its creator. The internals have been completely rewritten by an incredibly talented team that continues to make improvements.

Also, many of the demons from PHP4 (in use in 2002) have been excised, e.g. [https://wiki.php.net/rfc/remove_php4_constructors](https://wiki.php.net/rfc/remove_php4_constructors)

</comment><comment> open-source-ux One of the key reasons why PHP remains so widespread in use is the ease of deployment. No other language can match it.

PHP is the only language with almost universal support among web hosts. It can run on basic shared hosting plans and on nearly every server. It can be deployed by simply uploading your code to a directory on your web host. Sure, it's a widely criticised language (even within the PHP community), but it still accounts for the vast majority of server side code (80% according to some sources).

What's baffling is why other languages and so many developers are blind to this problem of easy server install. They think it's a non-issue.

Prolific blogger and programmer, Jeff Attwood ranted about how he disliked PHP in one of his blog posts, but recognised that:

 _" If you want to produce free-as-in-whatever code that runs on virtually every server in the world with zero friction or configuration hassles, PHP is damn near your only option."_

To broaden choice, Attwood argues we should:

 _" build compelling alternatives and make sure these alternatives are equally pervasive, as easy to set up and use as possible."_

That was written in 2012. ([https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-php- singularity/](https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-php-singularity/)).

It's 2017 and what's changed? Nothing.

Having a ridiculously easy web app installation process for servers would unlock countless opportunities for developers to reach more users or customers. And it has, for many PHP open source projects and products.

Want your customers to self-install your software? Good luck getting them to do that _easily_ with any language other than PHP.

<comment> aaron-lebo It's a good barrier to entry. If in 2017 you can't figure out how to setup an ec2 instance and run a simple webserver in any language, then you don't need to be setting up software. It's not hard.

<comment><USER3> Not even that, but with services like heroku and app engine, upload-and- refresh style development isn't php or old asp or cgi on a shared host anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> PHP is a delight to work with, but that does not suit the signalling and over engineering crowd. We must recognize there is a social phenomenon evolving where some people seem to like complexity.

That's why these developers are blind to ruby setup and dependency hell or nodejs insanity but magnify any self-perceived flaw in PHP without seeing the dissonance. This is a difficult act to pull off. This is so over the top and one sided it ceases to be useful.

Pandering to these criticisms will not work as they are not sincere and these developers are too caught up in how they are perceived to ever use PHP. Those who care for PHP should be concerned about attempts to pander to perceptions as this will destroy the accessibility and simplicity that makes PHP useful for everyone.

</comment><comment><USER5> Rasmus should win a Turing award for bringing an easy to use web-centric server language to regular people. He does not get nearly the attention he deserves.

<comment><USER6> Anything but a Turing award. Turing was a computer scientist who cared.

"We have things like protected properties. We have abstract methods. We have all this stuff that your computer science teacher told you you should be using. I don't care about this crap at all." -Rasmus Lerdorf

<comment><USER7> I also don't think PHP deserves a Turing award, but the remark about abstract methods and protected properties is completely irrelevant - you can have an amazing language without these and crappy ones with them.

<comment><USER6> The point of the quote is not about abstract methods and properties, it's about not giving a shit, and being proud of it.

If you really didn't already know about Rasmus Lerdorf's anti-intellectual attitude (who admits to being "really, really bad" and a "terrible coder", but still thinks he's "better than you"), then here are some more quotes:

There are people who actually like programming. I don't understand why they like programming.

I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say "Yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that." I'll just restart Apache every 10 requests.

I do care about memory leaks but I still don't find programming enjoyable.

I don't know how to stop it, there was never any intent to write a programming language [...] I have absolutely no idea how to write a programming language, I just kept adding the next logical step on the way.

I was really, really bad at writing parsers. I still am really bad at writing parsers.

I really don't like programming. I built this tool to program less so that I could just reuse code.

I actually hate programming, but I love solving problems.

For all the folks getting excited about my quotes. Here is another - Yes, I am a terrible coder, but I am probably still better than you :)

[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf)

<comment><USER8> I think what's getting me is a really superficial notion of what 'solving problems' means.

It's a leaking ceiling, a bucket under the leak ostensibly 'fixes' your original problem of water spilling out onto the floor, but now you've got the problem that at some point, the bucket will fill up.

It's rare for most problems you face in the workplace for the difficult part to be actually solving the problem. It's solving it in a way that doesn't just create three other messes elsewhere, in a way that somebody else can come along and understand how the problem was solved and in a way that doesn't hamstring you in the future.

Some of these quotes are really baffling. I mean, he must be being facetious or something.

<comment><USER9> I think it's called self-deprecating humour. I don't know too much about this guy, but these quotes endear him to somebody like me who is learning as much JavaScript as I need to do the things I want to do, but didn't necessarily come from a CS background. He seems like he's questioning what is pragmatic by using a bit of hyperbole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> >I got tired of rewriting the same code over and over again, and also _wanted to separate my business logic from my HTML layout_.

> So I wrote a very simple tag parser that would parse through an HTML file > looking for special markup tags and replace those special tags _with the > result of my business logic code written in C_.

(emphasis my own)

I really like PHP, but I find it very interesting that Lerdorf doesn't consider PHP code itself as business logic, but more of a templating language for the web.

A lot of PHP's fundamental strengths and weaknesses make sense in that light.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's interesting to see how much the concept of 'backend' and 'frontend' changed over these years:

> I personally use a combination of PHP and Perl for many of my projects: Perl > mostly for back-end tasks, while I have PHP doing all the front-end work.

<comment><USER6> Just like "client" and "server" swapped during the transition from X-Windows to WWW.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> There's an analogy that describes PHP as a weird sort of toolbox. Everything's there, but they are all a little funky.

The hammer is a double sided claw hammer, the pliers don't have serrated edges. They will do a job, but perhaps not the job that you expected.

Eventually it leads to everyone using this weird little toolbox ends up with a weird sort of house that might collapse at any moment.

Things have moved on quite a bit since then. Certainly in PHP 7, you're able to give it the same treatment as a "proper" programming language and people do.

My view is though, it's a little too late. I don't think new people are coming into PHP because the barrier to entry has become higher than other languages.

It has become almost impossible to write a PHP application to do even the simplest task without getting bogged down in all sorts of over engineering and so called "design patterns".

We all know PHP will be around for a while longer.

Yet in 2017, I wouldn't recommend learning about PHP. Go learn something else.

<comment><USER2> > It has become almost impossible to write a PHP application to do even the > simplest task without getting bogged down in all sorts of over engineering > and so called "design patterns".

That's rubbish. There's nothing that stops you creating a single script to return a value based on stdin or get parameters.

Design pattern nerds exist in every language. PHP has them no better or worse.

<comment><USER11> Sure, but then in your example, you're using PHP just to transpose data. Why?

<comment><USER12> Not parent but I have done this before. There was an old PHP code that utilise TCPDF to generate a very complex report. The main application is being rewritten (in JS), but the report is very complex and utilise many features of TCPDF that I cannot find in PDFKit or other nodejs pdf libraries. In the end, the PHP code that generate reports was wrapped to take JSON input from STDIN and output the resulting pdf to STDOUT.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How can a beginner start contributing to open source? - <AUTHOR> I love programming, particularly solving problems using algorithms and data structures. I don't have a firm gasp over any language, but choose to work with C++, Java and Python. Whenever I try to get into open source, I realize the projects to be immensely big and very complex and end up looking for something simpler. But this goes on and on. So my question is, How can a beginner start his/her journey into the open source? What path would you recommend? <comment><USER2> I just hit publish on a post about this! The common guidance is to get started light and to start with the issues. Even the GSoC student at the repo I'm starting to get involved in started by reading as many issues as possible before diving in.

Here are two links to help you:

[http://words.steveklabnik.com/how-to-be-an-open-source- garde...](http://words.steveklabnik.com/how-to-be-an-open-source-gardener) \- Steve wrote a great post about how he gets started with a new project

[http://peteh.me/an-easy-way-to-get-started-with-open- source-...](http://peteh.me/an-easy-way-to-get-started-with-open-source- in-2017) \- Here's my post about how I'm starting to get involved in open source without being great at coding

</comment><comment><USER3> Have a look at this github repo [https://github.com/FreeCodeCamp/how-to- contribute-to-open-so...](https://github.com/FreeCodeCamp/how-to-contribute- to-open-source)

</comment><comment><USER4> Checkout Your First PR @ [https://yourfirstpr.github.io/](https://yourfirstpr.github.io/)</comment>


Future of Storytelling: a Conversation with Transmedia Creator Andrea Phillips - <AUTHOR> http://latd.com/2011/09/27/future-of-storytelling-expert-series-a-conversation-with-transmedia-creator-andrea-phillips/

<comment><USER2> It seems that transmedia is the one form of media more opaque than social media.

Personally, my life is enjoyable enough that I don't need to immerse myself in pretend worlds predicated on consumption. I'd rather create my own story than consume someone elses.

Perhaps one day I can find a transmedia consultant to study how others consume my brand.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that participatory culture (and finding a balance between media creators and the people who "consume"/participate in media experiences) is actually a very big part of transmedia. If interested, check out the writings of Henry Jenkins: \- [http://www.amazon.com/Convergence-Culture-Where-Media- Collid...](http://www.amazon.com/Convergence-Culture-Where-Media- Collide/dp/0814742815) \- [http://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Challenges- Participatory-C...](http://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Challenges- Participatory-Culture- Foundation/dp/0262513625/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1317836761&sr=1-1)</comment></comment>


Do you think Apple will move to their own a chip for their next computer? - <AUTHOR> With the A12x being faster then most computer, what do you think will happen and why? <comment><USER2> They have already done it, it is called the T* series chips.

The first version, T1, did the secure enclave thing, and controlled Touch ID, thermal and power management and a few other things.

The second version, the T2, added storage management, an image signal processor, an audio controller, and encryption for the SSD.

The next version will probably do even more things.

It seems to me that the most likely scenario is the T* chip being used for more and more things and the amd64 chip to be used for less and less things until the amd64 chip is more a "hardware acceleration" chip, like GPUs, here to handle specific tasks to be offloaded from the (now ARM) CPU.

The shift from amd64 as the _central_ processing unit to the T* chip does not need to be a clear cut (ditching the intel cpu directly and using the T* chip for everything) but can (and is) being done progressively (the T chips becoming more and more capable).

</comment><comment> tony-allan Apple are good at architecture migrations. They have successfully pulled it off several times.

For App Store apps, Apple can easily add fat binary support for apps with ARM and x86 code in the same package. They control Xcode and can force resubmission of apps for a future version of MacOS.

The thing is, they need to be able to efficiently emulate x86 at current performance levels for regular software while those developers migrate to the new architecture. This might require new ARM instructions or changes to the graphics processors to assist with performance issues.

The end result is that they need to give their hardware and software folk time and allow developers enough time to get their applications ready. I'm guessing 12+ months from when the new tools become available.

Unless they have been working on it for a while, this suggests 2020 models might be capable.

I would also like to speculate that if they add a fabric interconnect to A13/A14 chips, they could have several sockets in each product resulting in massive performance for the high-end pro models with a very flexible power and thermal budget.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it wouldn't be a stretch to see at least their non-pro computers using an A-series chip eventually. I'm sure there's at least an internal build of Mac OS for Arm machines right?

Given their affinity for AMD graphics, I wonder if a desktop A-series processor could have a built in Vega GPU like the Intel chips? The i7-8809G has a Vega with 24 compute units which should be decent for light video or photo work. Notebook Check doesn't have much by way of directly comparable info for the Vega M GH and the A12X Bionic's GPU.

[https://www.notebookcheck.net/Vega-M-GH-vs-A12X-Bionic- GPU_8...](https://www.notebookcheck.net/Vega-M-GH-vs-A12X-Bionic- GPU_8474_9351.247598.0.html)

[https://ark.intel.com/products/130409/Intel- Core-i7-8809G-Pr...](https://ark.intel.com/products/130409/Intel- Core-i7-8809G-Processor-with-Radeon-RX-Vega-M-GH-graphics-8M-Cache-up- to-4-20-GHz-)

<comment><USER4> I think on the desktop they'll go with their own GPU and just release a driver for it for desktop OSX

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Absolutely. And I hope it happens ASAP. The most interesting team at Apple is the chip decision. They have done things with their chips I never thought possible. A full power desktop chip of A12X variety with some SIMD and more cache could be a powerhouse and still less power hungry than its x86 cohorts.

</comment><comment><USER5> Quite a few people have been talking about the MacBook being a good target to test out their own chip on before moving the entire line away from Intel.

</comment><comment><USER6> The iPad is poised to be their next "computer". As iPads get more powerful, they will just stop making Macs at some point.

<comment><USER7> Tim Cook is so focused on getting rid of the mac line. There is no way iOS can replace macOS anytime soon. So many features are needed to make iOS even appealing for everyday "computer" use. I am a developer, I need access to a full fledge unix system to do everyday work.

[https://reddit.com/r/apple/comments/9w7hzq/it_seems_like_for...](https://reddit.com/r/apple/comments/9w7hzq/it_seems_like_for_years_people_have_been_saying/)

<comment><USER6> Developers can be given various (unappealing) options for everyday work. e.g. "Xcode on iCloud" or an ARM macOS VM on the iPad Pro that is sandboxed and restricted to the hilt with a 'developer App store' bolted on. The App store might include things like Xcode plugins, Unix tools, Homebrew etc. The VM might even even have mouse support :p</comment></comment></comment>


npm-check: Check for outdated, incorrect, and unused dependencies - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dylang/npm-check <comment><USER2> You should add an option to check for dependencies whose code isn't longer than the text required to load them (require statement + package.json entry + packaging overhead). :)</comment>


Solid – Reshape the web as we know it - <AUTHOR> https://solid.inrupt.com/ <comment><USER2> Context here: [https://www.fastcompany.com/90243936/exclusive-tim- berners-l...](https://www.fastcompany.com/90243936/exclusive-tim-berners-lee- tells-us-his-radical-new-plan-to-upend-the-world-wide-web)

Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18101702](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18101702)

</comment><comment><USER3> After reading what little documentation is available and installing a single- user solid server myself, I wonder if this is how people felt when the World Wide Web was first invented. I find myself asking: Okay, now what? Except I think even the World Wide Web, when it was first invented, at least had a demo that worked.

Solid doesn't even seem to work. Following instructions for "learn[ing] how to install and run your own Solid server," I successfully installed a single-user solid server. Great, now I have a single-user setup that is supposed to give me control over my data. So how do I authenticate as the single user? No clue. This thing is so secure, not even I can get my data!

I would have expected something more useful from the inventor of a technology that so many people can use today without having to think much about it.

EDIT: I deleted and started over. I still don't know what happened, but now at least I can create an account and login. Still not quite sure what I can do, now.

<comment><USER4> AFAICT there are literally no apps to try this on. Why did they decide to announce this and publicize it before a basic, well-polished, example was ready? The pod signup process is using vanilla bootstrap, there wasn't even a visual design pass.

<comment><USER5> Well, I guess we just asked the opposite question: Is there any reason to keep this sub-surface any longer, and we didn't find any such reason... :-)

So, it is just "release early, release often". So, the code and the spec has been out there for a long time. I mean, some of this stuff is _really_ old. Us geeks have been thinking about decentralized social networking since the dawn of ages, and it seems like the rest of the world is starting to wake up to its necessity too. So, I think the timing is pretty OK now.

Like, Linux didn't come with a well-polished example either... It wasn't even intended to out-do Minix. :-)

I guess you could say that we could say even more clearly that this is a prototype, and we have a roadmap where it will stay a prototype for some time. But we are seeing people finding it interesting that we're actually not trying to engineer something from the ground, we are seeing what kind of impact we can have with pretty well tested Web technologies. I suspect we have a lot less development to do to have a great social impact than you'd have to do if went full P2P.

At the same time, there is a large graveyard out there of failed decentralized social networks, so we are under no illusion that this is going to be easy. It is going to be pretty hard.

Still, I don't see any reason why we should be sub-surface any longer.

<comment><USER6> It would be good to have a set of demo applications that do something that can't be done by competitors.

I read the website and I don't really get it. If I give an app read access to my data, they've got a copy. Maybe they don't have the canonical copy, the original, but they've certainly got A copy. How do I have control?

As far as I can tell you've reinvented Facebook with a better API. Why wouldn't someone just embrace and extend to take control? "Oh yes, we made some changes to our PODs so you won't get full functionality with other people's PODs. You can just move your data to our company with a click of a button, CLICK HERE, and everything will work great! Also, we no longer support exports of data, sorry. But we'll take really good care of your data, we promise!"

Maybe I'm dumb and I just don't get it, that's certainly possible. But maybe you're not doing a good job of explaining it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The w3.org site describing solid is much better (even if some links don't work):

[https://www.w3.org/community/rww/wiki/SoLiD](https://www.w3.org/community/rww/wiki/SoLiD)

[https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html](https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html)

inrupt.com site is just marketing hype and crap experience.

<comment><USER8> Was just about to say that after reading for a minute I understood nothing about the material. It was just a random array of buzzwords.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I hat websites like this: after reading for 3 minutes I learned that Solid is revolutionary, game changing and whatnot, but I have aboslutely no idea what it is. Very frustrating experience.

<comment><USER10> This early 2010s sitcom clip [1] comes to mind when reading about this. Many of the same buzzwords were used, in the same way. Notice the lack of substance in the product discussion, and the literal dancing around what it (Jabberwocky) was.

Who needs a product, when you have a presentation.

[1] [https://youtu.be/spyJ5yxTfas](https://youtu.be/spyJ5yxTfas)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> _applications_ :(

Does anyone else feel nostalgia for the pre-"web app" days of the internet? I'm talking about personal sites on Geocities and web rings built on communities of shared interest.

 _The browser_ was an application for navigating hyperlinked information. Other applications include email clients, news readers, FTP clients, and IRC clients. You never had to download a megabyte of minified JavaScript just to read a 500-word article; you never would, since it took about ten minutes to download a megabyte on a blazingly fast 14.4 modem.

<comment><USER12> I don't. For me to get a nostalgia rush I need to go down to the Computer History Museum and see yet older stuff. Nostalgia isn't a function of quality, but of age.

Douglas Adams expressed this well:

"I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1\. Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2\. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3\. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."

For me the stage that came after this is, "Well, change is going to happen, so either I need to get off the merry-go-round or I need to learn to like it." Geocities and FTP clients are as dead as fan-fold, green-and-white line printer paper, and for the same reason: we found better ways to serve the same needs.

Justifying one's nostalgia by pining for the days of 14.4 kbps modems doesn't make a lot of sense. If they were good, then surely my first modem, a 300-baud acoustic coupler was better. Although I feel a tug of nostalgia when I see one, it wasn't better. Optimizing to save a resource we have in abundance makes as much sense as depression-era grandparents saving bits of string for possible reuse. It wastes that most precious of non-renewable resources: your time.

<comment><USER13> Except that a lot of things was instantaneous just 20 years ago. I can't believe how slow even new smartphones are when I'm trying to make a phonecall... Every press of a button feels slow, there have to be animations scrolling screens left and right instead of instantly activating something. Every time I'm using something new and flashy, I feel like I'm stuck in sirup.

<comment><USER14> I don't recall anything on the internet being instantaneous 20 years ago. Surely you're misremembering?

I also don't find that new smartphones have much touch-based interface latency; but even so, that kind of latency doesn't have anything to do with the internet, nor the halcyon days of late 1998. To my recollection browsing the web in the late 90s was far more exciting but also far less useful than today.

The modern internet has a lot of inefficiency, but I don't see how you could seriously claim it's slower than what we had 20 years ago. Sometimes heavy web applications are relatively slow because they're underoptimized, but that's less of a technology failing and more of a developer failing. Most websites load spectacularly faster, and perform better, than all but completely static HTML websites from two decades ago despite having much larger byte footprints.

<comment><USER15> Yep - I remember very carefully planning which mp3s I wanted so that I could dedicate my small window of modem time each day to download them because each one took 10-30 minutes. Sometimes I was able to get through a full game of Age of Empires before disconnecting due to lag or because my dad needed to make a phone call. I find long page loads due to excessive javascript as annoying as the next person, but I'm much happier with the internet in 2018 than 1998.

<comment><USER13> Ok, maybe I was spoiled with 100 Mbps connection at the time but I was mainly talking about Apps. They were not web-based, all written in C, some form of BASIC or Assembler.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The goals are laudable, and sometimes a backwards-looking implementation can get traction faster than a forward-looking one. But the reliance on Pods and URL location-based identifiers roots it firmly in the past.

I think the future is the robust content addressable distributed web. Which could give developers the same flexibility, and users the same friendly experience, but with everything virtualized in a peer to peer mesh. I'd like to see the developer smoothness of Solid married to future-proof content identifiers like this: [https://github.com/ipld/cid/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/ipld/cid/blob/master/README.md)

<comment><USER17> Would the content-addressable distributed web really "give ... users the same friendly experience"?

I'm a bit outside my wheelhouse, and I don't fully understand what Solid means when they say "You own your data", but with content-addressable strategies, often users _don't_ really have ownership once something is published in the sense that you can't delete or change something if anyone else is serving a copy.

<comment><USER18> Very much depends on the concept of ownership, doesn't it? ;)

I mean, you own it, but so does everyone else. I think the traditional(?) concept of ownership you are referring to, that allows people to "delete" information is very unnatural and feels akin to trying to reverse entropy. You can't unring a bell, and you can't delete data from the world.

<comment><USER19> The human concepts of ownership implies a very important right that people tend to overlook: the _right to DESTROY it_ , to undo it, to "take back what you said".

This is important, because for physical artifacts having the right to destroy/demolish means having the right to create new things in its place (if I inherit a historical monument castle and I can't f demolish it to a pile of sand by my liking, than that's a scam, I don't really own it; also I might want to demolish it for aesthetic/informational reasons too, to "wipe" a part of its history from the human collective knowledge base).

And for informational artifacts, the right to "undo" or "take back" is also important, because the fact that what you say/publish is there to haunt you forever will have a chilling effect... lots of interesting things will go unsaid unwritten.

 _You have to burn books /libraries/things from time to time, otherwise everyone becomes afraid to write new books or build new things!_

And on a physical level death has the same liberating effect. You know you're gonna die sometime anyway, so you can enjoy that cigarette, it increasing your risk of an incurable cancer by 1e-3 percent will not have consequences that will haunt you forever... Death and destruction are necessary for true freedom, at least for the kind of freedom _I_ want to have.

Things like _block-chain /graphs_ combined with _content adressability_ bring significant limitations to _FREEDOM._ Endless responsibility and accountability for everything you've done and said would make life of all creative and disruptive people a living hell. Heck, if you're not free from at least some of the consequences of your actions, then why do anything at all, why even carry on living.

And on:

> You can't unring a bell, and you can't delete data from the world.

Yes you can, if you _kill_ someone, a part of the information that is in their head and haven't been shared with anyone yet will be lost forever. That's a good thing imo. If everyone who's heard the bell is dead and hasn't told about it to anyone... has the bell truly rung? The information that it has is irrecoverable now. And you can thank your friend entropy for that impossibility to recover this data and for the liberating effect that this can sometimes have ;)

<comment><USER20> > _than that 's a scam, I don't really own it_

Legally speaking then, you don't own information about yourself like your address or past actions. The government won't let you erase that information. The only way to make your friends and family forget it is to kill them, which is obviously highly illegal.

Even with efforts like Right to Be Forgotten, Europe isn't positing that you actually _own_ information about yourself in the same way that you're doing here. Right to Be Forgotten is a) balanced against public interest, and b) only applies to information access and indexing. Right to Be Forgotten doesn't mean that you can demand a newspaper burn all copies of an article it wrote about you.

The reality is that "ownership" means different things in different contexts. There's not a single definition. When we talk about "owning" data or Intellectual Property, we don't mean it in the same way that you "own" a wrench.

How can you own something that is inside my head?

<comment><USER19> > How can you own something that is inside my head?

 _If I put it there, I own it, and I should be able to destroy all proof that it 's not purely a fabrication of your imagination._ (Sure, you can still know it and use it to guide _your_ decision, but it shouldn't be legally valid any more, and there should be no way for you to convince others it's true.) Yeah, obviously if it's in the heads of other people too, it would be more accounts in favor of that information being authentic, increasing the _probability_ that I am lying about that in a legal situation. But key thing would be that it's a probability. I can destroy the certainty. That could swing depending on context, maybe I'm more trustworthy than the group of people arguing for the authenticity of that piece of information.

Obviously there's great deal of criminal activities that can be protected by going too far with this, so it's a question of "tweaking the dial" until we get the right amount of informational "light" and "darkness". As Jung said, there are some who need light, and some who thrive in the shadows...

<comment><USER21> There's two problems. First, there's a basic argument from the outside that you're fucking with historicity for no good reason other than that you think that you're more important than humanity.

Second, from the inside, this simply isn't how memes work. Memes are _designed_ to propagate and survive on their own. If your ideas are at all good or interesting to society, and they manage to become memetic, then you have zero recourse, just as if you were Patient Zero for some new plague. You shared it, and unsharing is impossible, regardless of how moral you might believe unsharing to be.

Seriously, take some time and think about it: How many of your ideas and concepts are actually original to you? Almost none of them, right? And if you're honest with yourself, pretty much every concept seem inextricably linked to others. Really, what matters is the _structure_ between ideas, and that can't be shared, since it's private to each person's mind.

Anyway, if this doesn't sway you, I'm okay with it; you're purely a fabrication of my imagination.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What's not clear to me is how this will work from a data storage and access standpoint.

In order to have a permissions system, you have to have permissions. For example: read:photos, write:photos, read:running_data, etc

In order to do that, there are a few hurdles:

      - You have to define ACLs for every type of data stored in everyone's POD.
      - More complex is to define what parts of what data certain ACLs give access to. For example: I may want to provide heart rate data from my runs, workouts, and temperature data but not GPS. That's getting very granular
      - Since every app will have different or possibly new types of data, having a central standard for data types and ACLs will be tough.
      - You'll also need a mapping mechanism for where the data is stored and how it's named and the formats that are being used. Even within a single app, you can denotmalize data and store it in multiple places for different purposes.

I like the principle of this but it seems very challenging to adopt. I look forward to seeing someone solve the above challenges.

<comment><USER5> Right, so that's one of the reasons why Solid is built on top of Linked Data and RDF, we need the power of these technologies to support those advanced use cases.

The Web Access Control spec is here: [https://github.com/solid/web-access- control-spec](https://github.com/solid/web-access-control-spec) . In principle, we could support really granular data ACLs based on that spec, the ACL applies to a URL, and you can give any datapoint a URL, so problem solved. In practice, it may become a bit cumbersome, I suppose it remains to be seen how you'd do it in practice, but I think we have a really good start there, there's lots of stuff that can be realized now.

There's a wealth of academic research that applies to these problems, the problem of the Semantic Web community has been that it has been strong on the academic stuff, but not very focused on truly useful stuff that can be done right now (to quote AaronSw). That's one of the things that Inrupt sets out to change. But the good thing is that we're not setting out to solve really hard problems in the dark, since we have that academic research, we know pretty well what's hard and what should be within reach.

<comment><USER22> Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I think this is a good start and the question still remains as to how usable it will be.

We've seen this issue on mobile where users give access to certain capabilities on their phone and then are surprised at how apps use them (camera, mic, location, etc).

The challenge is how to describe these things in the way that the average user can understand and trust.

ACLs, capabilities, etc are generally easy for developers to consume but much harder for the average person to understand.

My main thought is that there will need to be some standardization of data and how it is consumed for this to take off. If a consumer is providing access to their location data in 15 different ways for 15 different apps, how are they even suppposed to keep track and understand that?

Standardization of ACLs/access has become standard on mobile and the permissions are very coarse so they aren't overwhelming but it often leads to unwanted results. I've yet to see someone implement ACLs in a way that is easily consumable by the average user.

As noted, I'd love to see that happen. It's a tough problem to solve but one that would benefit all users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Maybe I am just naive, but this all seems terrible. There are paragraphs of ideology everywhere for every aspect of this and nothing boils down to any understandable description of what engineering mechanisms I can use or how it solves the problems laid out.

I really want to like this, but if I spend 15 minutes clicking the guides, the "build a solid app on your lunch break" link, and going all over the site, and I still don't have the foggiest idea of the actual engineering mechanisms, something is wrong.

It is hard for me to believe some consortium of really knowledgeable web architects and inventors made this. It feels like a PR website with attractive purple colors to make me feel cozy. But I want to know _really_ how it works!

<comment><USER24> > Maybe I am just naive, but this all seems terrible.

I do have most respect for TBH and I would consider everything he thinks and writes about, but this does not sound too good to me either.

The idea of linked data and semantic web has been around for almost two decades now and I have yet to see an application, technique or site that amazes me. On the contrary, most of the things in this space I have seen are bloated, unusable or simply unnecessary - whereas every paper sounds like revolution is around the corner. In that combination, it is the worst of both worlds: academic output, that claims practicality and fails to deliver.

Peter Norvig put it best, when he said: "The semantic web is the future of the web and always will be."

A recent discussion touches upon a few problems: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18023408](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18023408).

<comment><USER25> Maybe I'm missing something, but what does this have to do with the semantic web and why is everyone discussing that? Solid appears to be a decentralized identity platform.

<comment><USER26> The proposal here seems to be that data, as Linked Data (as RDF, specifically) be exposed directly to the web, manipulated by rich front ends written in JS using an RDF parser. The marketing speak is so thick that it's impossible to discern much of the technical detail, but presumably the server side is an LDP server backed by something (triplestore?).

RDF, LDPs, and Linked Data in general are all child projects of the Semantic Web movement, and nigh-on inseparable from it in practice. The venn diagram of their user communities is one circle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> His blog post announcing solid - [https://medium.com/@timberners_lee/one- small-step-for-the-we...](https://medium.com/@timberners_lee/one-small-step- for-the-web-87f92217d085)

<comment><USER27> One would think that after a few years of working on this he'd have built a place to post content using it.

EDIT: at least there's the original outside medium on their project page, but seems like just a static squarespace page: [https://www.inrupt.com/blog/one- small-step-for-the-web](https://www.inrupt.com/blog/one-small-step-for-the- web)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> On a basic level, it seems to be the same old web, but rather than Facebook or some other company storing your data, you store it on a pod, and give the app access to it. Which is fine, until one day you share a bit too much, or you 'create' personal data in connected apps, which the app obviously has access to anyway. Not sure what this solves. Also, I can imagine lots of "pods as a service" popping up, which is kinda scary, because now it's not just your social life that's stored in one place, but ALL your personal data, including medical records and whatnot. Perhaps I've missed something, but they need to elaborate more on the underlying concepts driving this idea, as, like others, I'm not convinced of its validity.

<comment><USER29> That said, I'd be happy if the NHS (National Health Service in the UK) can just point to my POD instead of asking for paper forms to be filled in each and every time you change your GP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> How does this solve problems of data leaks? Let's say some social network uses this Solid framework and you login with your Solid POD. Can't the social network then just save your data into a database? Now when the social network gets hacked millions of personal data is still released into the wild?

What I'd like to see, is every device run a small process which can read the user's data. Html then has a syntax that can be interpreted like

{{ solid://mydata/name }}

{{ solid://mydata/profile.jpg }}

{{ solid://mydata/age }}

etc.

That data is on the user's device encrypted. Apps can never read your data, they can only tell your device to display that data.

That way developers cannot read your data, store them in their own databases, and then accidentally get their own database hacked and we are back to square one.

I'd like the data on your device to be encrypted and have some type of homomorphic encryption such that if an app were to show average age of users, then an app would be able to run some sort of `select average(age) from users` but since the encryption is homomorphic, the app never learns information about any individual user. This would apply for machine learning operations too, so that we could get netflix style recommendations of movies, without a company ever learning what movies we liked, our age, etc.

However, I don't know the first thing about homomorphic encryption so I guess I just have to wait until some great soul builds something like this for us.

</comment><comment><USER31> I like the idea. It's basically an encapsulated portable personal "wiki" for a user (persona) with an open data model that can be accessed by external apps based on permissions.

What it doesn't solve is the problem how this data is going to be used by those who access it. I wish there was some kind of digital contracts that only allow using personal data in a way permitted by the user.

<comment><USER32> Have you heard of the concept of "homomorphic encryption"? It allows someone to perform computations on encrypted pieces of data, without actually ever having access to the raw data itself.

I have no idea how realistic or how "possible" this technology is for in the near future, but this seems to be a great match for technologies like these.

<comment><USER5> Yup, it is. Though, I'm not sure about homomorphic encryption, but there has been some work on encryption in the academic community that has very clear application to Solid. Here's a paper written by some friends of mine: [http://epub.wu.ac.at/5818/1/10.1007_978-3-319-58068-5_37.pdf](http://epub.wu.ac.at/5818/1/10.1007_978-3-319-58068-5_37.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I might suggest taking a look at Blockstack and Urbit, which are efforts to do the exact same thing through two completely different approaches.

</comment><comment><USER34> Two years ago I wrote a little Progressive Web App which stores its data in an offline cache (browser) and syncs to my Nextcloud via WebDAV. IMHO that has pretty much the same advantages that Solid proclaims.

I mean, in spirit I seem to value the same things as Solid (decentralized, own your data, etc.), but what I don't understand is why it has to introduce so many abstract/new names when it wants to be 'simple'?

Building on top of the Semantic Web concepts isn't going to help either as it has enough disadvantages of its own (e.g., complex standards without adding any real value).

<comment><USER35> ActivityPub suffers from this problem as well but has become widely used.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Who's "Inrupt"? The main Solid site is [https://solid.mit.edu/"](https://solid.mit.edu/").

Inrupt is not in Crunchbase. They don't have a business address on their site. They try to get people to sign up without giving terms and conditions first. And they want you to give them access to all your personal information. Right.

<comment><USER37> A company of some respected people it seems: [https://www.inrupt.com/meet-the- inrupters/](https://www.inrupt.com/meet-the-inrupters/)

<comment><USER36> Theranos had an impressive collection of names, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Please correct me if I'm missing something that technically prevents this, but once you grant a 3rd Party access to your data (via a SolidPOD), what's to stop them scraping it and keeping it for themselves in order to build a profile on you?

</comment><comment><USER39> Seems like a better marketed, but less-technically well thought out version of Sandstorm ([https://sandstorm.io](https://sandstorm.io)). Perhaps they should have acquired the IP from Kenton Varda.

<comment><USER40> I had the same thought. The hard parts really are the containerization of apps, and the auth and permissions model. Sandstorm as far as I know is the best thought out attempt at tackling those problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Solid appears to use TLS client certificates for authentication. (Granted, they're working on some kind of OAuth integration too.) WebID-TLS appears to have the same severe drawback that HTTP authentication does: the UI is provided by the browser, and so can't be customized, branded, or tweaked in any meaningful way by authentication providers. The TLS certificate dialog my browser presented just now attempting to use the "hello world" live demo also appeared to be extremely intimidating for non-technical users: for example, it presented long strings of hex numbers.

I don't think Solid is going to get any meaningful adoption until the signup and authentication flows resemble those of major current social platforms, which have enjoyed years of usability optimization.

</comment><comment><USER42> I don't get it...

What is a pod and what's so great about it? Something about controlling your data... Storage space... Secure USB stick for the web? So I can mount it and add/remove files from it? Like dropbox or something?

I clicked "Get a solid pod" and it asked me to register, which I did, after which it dumped me into some kind of "home page". Clicking "get started with solid and data browser" brings up instructions for creating notes and calendars and text files in a very primitive interface. There's no link to get back to the "home page" and the back button doesn't work because it's force- forwarding from an interim url.

So is it like a primitive owncloud? What's it supposed to do that's valuable? What am I even looking at?

<comment><USER43> My reading of it is that it's a database you control that you can allow third- party web applications to use. So instead of the web application storing your data on their servers, they store it on yours.

From the perspective of the end user it's useful because retain control over your data, so there's no barriers to switching to a competitor, for instance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> So, I need to ensure that my POD(s) are up and running just to access other services (which will read data from my POD) ? Isn't that a step backwards ? or am I missing something ? Will the data be cached somewhere, so the services are accessible even if PODs go down ?

If people can't run their own POD servers reliably, then they need to use some other cloud POD providers (Inrupt, as mentioned on the website). Which means your data is now with a third-party.

        Solid changes the current model where users have to hand over personal data to digital giants in exchange for perceived value

Won't Inrupt become one of those digital giants (in context of Solid) with access to numerous PODs of people who cannot reliably host them ?

</comment><comment><USER45> I really would like to support this, but I seem to miss the big picture. Looking at the github repos, Solid appears to be mostly about giving a second life to TBL's and W3c's failed pet projects, notably semantic web, linked data, RDF, SPARQL, JSON-LD.

<comment><USER46> What's wrong with bringing those back to life? Their organizing features have been unmatched by any application we have today, except maybe wikis.

They didn't fail for not being useful, but because their engineering was clunky and their demands on resources were way beyond the hardware of the time. Also those systems were too complex for the classic programming techniques. Now that we have a better understanding of reactive programming and async dependencies, maybe we can finally build the tools ecosystem to take advantage of homoiconic data, and these systems can take off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> [https://solid.inrupt.com/how-it-works](https://solid.inrupt.com/how-it-works)

Ok, I like it. Throw in some homomorphic encryption in the future, and maybe we can reverse all this SaaSS nonsense of today.

I love the data stays owned by the user. It's how it should be. I hope the system has some provisions against applications encrypting the data on on user's POD.

<comment><USER48> That page doesn't explain how it works at all :(

<comment><USER47> Yeah :(. I just finished browsing the page and unfortunately, there's surprisingly little technical details about anything. Oh, you can build a client app with Angular. Cool. I'd much prefer to know _how_ it all works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Previous discussions (before the adoption by Inrupt):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16355311](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16355311)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12280764](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12280764)

</comment><comment><USER50> Something like Solid probably needs a strongly inforced GDPR in place. Otherwise big actors can just access all the private pods and cache them in their own big data stores, and we are back to square one.

</comment><comment><USER51> But what prevents an app that you gave permission to from copying your data and selling it to third parties, just like Facebook does?

</comment><comment><USER52> See [https://solid.mit.edu](https://solid.mit.edu)

</comment><comment><USER53> Well I feel like an idiot, I populated my 'pod' with a couple of personal details, and now have no idea how to undo what I've done* and haven't received a confirmatory email to my address so now have some 'thing' on public space I have no control over, no understanding of and no ability to delete.

Not a great start.

* Ostensibly I've over-written with nonsense details, but a cursory check in another browser, not signed in, shows the same original information.

What a mess.

<comment><USER51> Why do you populate your personal details in the "thing" you don't understand and have no control over in the first place?

<comment><USER53> Yep, an entirely valid point and the reason I called myself an idiot - I used my real name and my email and I stupidly assumed I'd have some immediate control over public visibility, or at worst, the ability to undo what I'd entered or nix the thing entirely.

Given the sign-up asks for both details and I assumed there might be some potential for further use here for a platform created by a trusted party, I unthinkingly stumbled with the minimum.

I usually - which is to say always - don't, but here did.

Not looking for sympathy or sanctimony, just relaying my experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Paging Kenton Varda and the company/product/system he and his team created that does something very similar called Sandstorm: [https://sandstorm.io/](https://sandstorm.io/). (Kenton also led the protocol buffers team at Google which is their main format for data interchange).

I'm curious how this is different.

<comment><USER55> Hello... you paged?

It looks like Solid has progressed since the last time I really looked into it. But, from what I recall, Solid focuses on standardizing data formats and storage... but not compute. That is, all of your personal data is stored in some central location chosen by you, and then web apps can access that data (if you give them permissions). The web apps themselves still run on their own servers, controlled by the respective developers.

I'm skeptical of this model because:

1) If the code still runs on the developers' servers, there is no way to place technical restrictions on what they can do with your data. They can make a complete copy of whatever data you give them access to, they can store additional telemetry on the side, etc.

2) I think developers will resist standardized data formats because it makes it hard to develop new features. If you want to build any feature that requires storing additional data, it needs to be supported by the format. Perhaps the formats are extensible, but if multiple vendors do not agree on the extensions, then your data is no longer portable, defeating the purpose. I find it hard to imagine that any developer will voluntarily restrict themselves in this way without a huge incentive, and I don't see what that incentive is. (Certainly, not enough people care about data sovereignty for that to be an incentive.)

My opinion is that data sovereignty efforts must focus not just on storage, but on compute. The servers on which code actually runs should report to the user, not to the developer. Developers should build apps, which run on the user's servers. This way, developers are still free to create whatever data formats they want, but the user ultimately controls the storage. Other developers can attempt to develop "compatible" software which can read the same data, but this doesn't hold anyone back from adding new features to their own software.

But my own attempt to create such a platform didn't work out. So, you know, you shouldn't necessarily listen to me...

<comment><USER56> Reading this comment, I'm saddened again that Sandstorm failed, and that you had to abandon it to work on something that, while technically interesting, doesn't advance end-user freedom as Sandstorm tried to.

And I'm ashamed that I didn't do more to get behind Sandstorm sooner. I suppose this is too little, too late, but I just signed up for the Oasis power-user plan. I suppose if a few thousand of us did that, then you and a handful of other people could work on Sandstorm full-time again.

<comment><USER55> Thank you for your kind words.

FWIW, while my current day job (Cloudflare Workers) is not immediately aiming to solve the same "political" problem as Sandstorm, it turns out we have to solve many similar technical problems, in that we are building a massively distributed platform for applications. For example, we'd like it if an application built on Cloudflare can store each user's data in the closest Cloudflare location to that user. That means applications need to be designed to treat each user's data as a separate unit that can independently migrate. If we succeed in getting applications to do that, then it becomes a much smaller technical step to say, OK, now let's store the data on the user's own machines.

It may turn out that this is a much better technical basis for what Sandstorm wanted to do, while making the "political" problem far less ocean-boiling. That's my hope, anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Not simple enough to attract anybody but geeks. The landing page of a project with ambitions to replace the existing web should target simple users and let them get in, see and access the value in a matter of a click on a very visible button labeled in a very obvious way rather than requiring them to learn how it works (the majority of people bringing money to the internet have no idea of how it works and little desire or capacity to learn that) and expecting them to get a clue they are supposed to click a button with a mysterious label "get a POD" and making them decide if they want their free pod to be provided by a commercial or a non-commercial entity (I bet they will rather click "apps" but there seems to be nothing there). Geeks like us are probably going to love it but geeks alone can't replace the web and fill it with economic value, we are to attract ordinary users.

</comment><comment><USER58> Interesting idea, but I'm interested in the security implications. Now I have a Pod that has all my data in it, and I can host this pod anywhere I want. Great, but its now the single target for getting all data on me.

I get that its great when its working and secure, and I can control it. But exploits happen, and now all my data is in one place.

<comment><USER59> I believe (from scanning the website quickly) that you _can_ host your own pod, but you can also put your data with third party. Currently, it offers 2 free options from a commercial provider and a community provider.

So in terms of security, you can choose to trust a 3rd party with hosting your data, keeping the apps etc up to day or you can host it yourself. I'm not sure what's better!

<comment><USER58> You are correct, but in this world I'm choosing a SINGLE third party to host ALL of my data. There's no distribution of risk, my data portfolio is undiversified, etc. They get hit, its all over.

In fairness, I guess I could have a bunch of pods like financial, social, pictures... or even a pod for each service: facebook_pod, bank1_pod, etc...and host them all with different third parties to try to minimize risk. But this gets incredibly cumbersome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I don't quite understand "how". It all sounds magical.

<comment><USER61> I could be wrong, because I'm also a little bemused by the lack of specifics on the site, but it sounds like the Pod stores sort of "quanta of shareable information" (photos, essays, one's phone number, etc.), and makes them accessible via authenticated APIs.

So instead of posting a photo on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, one would (ideally) authorize Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to read photos stored on the Pod with a "shared publicly" tag (or similar), and then anything with that tag would show up automatically in one's feed on all three sites, and (if also authorized) push reactions and comments back to the Pod.

If I'm understanding correctly, it sounds like a neat idea. I'll be interested to see how well it does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> How is this different from [https://tent.io](https://tent.io) ?

Exactly the same principle, but it failed to get adoption. Perhaps because users don't care where their data is stored, and most can barely comprehend it?

</comment><comment><USER63> I like the spirit of this, but expecting average internet users to buy fancy hard-drives to store their data for apps that don't exist yet, simply to be free of the cloud, is way optimistic.

Also, having a Solid pod does not prevent the worst kinds of personal data abuse, such as identity tracking and brokering of tracked data. I don't care that Facebook stores my photos, but I do care that they've built a profile around the contents of them.

</comment><comment><USER64> Seems to be a rebranding of Linked Data. Need convincing that Linked Data is key to decentralized applications.

I do think that the Semantic Web is still a cool idea though.

</comment><comment><USER65> One advantage is you can build up your data and different apps can re-use that data. Presumably you have to grant permission to use that data but apps could easily ask for access to much more data than it needs? This seems a little dangerous because people just say "Yes" when they want to use something. Or does it have a strategy for dealing with this?

</comment><comment><USER66> The (initial) killer app for this has to be warez. Messaging and publishing seem like compelling uses, but to get people to bust out the credit card to some pod host each month before there's a sufficient network built up to make those attractive, there's going to have to be a lot of pirated content available somehow.

</comment><comment><USER67> I'm on mobile, so please excuse my innacurracie, but from memory how it works is pretty simple. A solid server is sort of like Dropbox. everything is a file, and you can give apps read-write access to a "folder".

It also recommends the use of some XML thing so that all your "contact" objects are the same format.

<comment><USER68> Sounds about right. Even if we imagine that developers adopt this technology for some reason, what's to stop them from also keeping copies of any data they are granted access to? or just using it for auth and giving you no direct access to your data? It all seems too idealistic, since developers derive little benefit from the added complexity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> The "Centralized to Decentralized Recursion" is a bit like Moore's Law.

It works for all aspects the digital ecosystem. Clients, Data, Bandwidth, Storage, etc.

Centralized -> decentralized -> centralized -> decentralized -> centralized -> decentralized -> centralized -> decentralized -> etc.

</comment><comment><USER70> From the visionaries that gave us RDF and the Semantic Web.

</comment><comment><USER71> This sounds good but in practice is hard to implement. Even for email clients we started to display generic/html pages to handle the authentication because we couldn't agree on a standard api/protocol. I doubt we will move into semantic web anytime soon.

</comment><comment><USER72> Yes, Solid is something to looking forward to.

Many years ago, we face the vendor lock-in problem from the software giants, due to proprietary data formats. Thanks to Berners Lee, W3C, XML and open source community, that is less of a problem today.

But now we face the problem of vendor lock-in, not due to proprietary formats, but due to cloud-service lock-in. With all the software giants, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, ... offering their services primarily as cloud services, this cloud lock-in issue is going to become more severe in years to come.

It's a new war the software industry needs to fight. It cannot be addressed just by one person, one project, one organization. It needs collaboration from the entire community.

</comment><comment><USER73> I gave this talk[0] a few weeks ago at MyData 2018 about ActivityPub. Dmitry was going to come and talk about Solid on the same panel, but couldn't make it last minute. So I spoke a bit about Solid at the end too, and compared and contrasted.

Kim Hamilton Duffy gave an illuminating talk right before me about "Decentralized Identifiers and Self Sovereign Identity Standards"[1]

lmk if any feedback or questions

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikCumzhfV9k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikCumzhfV9k)

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsIM0zq37fU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsIM0zq37fU)

</comment><comment><USER74> I don't understand.

HTML5 is on the way to become this. You have permissions, local storage, indexedDB, and a ton of APIs. Anything else you need you can just submit it to the HTML5 working group (e.g. shared data)

</comment><comment><USER75> Maybe I've been programming too long, and I saw Solid POD and I read "a solid pile of data." Perhaps that was the intended play on words. I never saw the english word "pod".

<comment><USER76> It's like two peas in a pod.

Or a pod of whales.

[https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pod](https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/pod)

<comment><USER75> I didn't say I don't know what "pod" means, I meant I did not see that word, only the acronym POD, when reading about this product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> There's a broader set of problems with the whole 'personal data store' space and a lack of evidence of user research to address big problems users have and incentive for companies / app developers that would drive the necessary adoption for impact. [https://medium.com/@shevski/how-solid-is-tims-plan-to- redece...](https://medium.com/@shevski/how-solid-is-tims-plan-to- redecentralize-the-web-b163ba78e835)

</comment><comment><USER78> So it's Diaspora meets a CMS? I thinking the issue here will be the chicken and egg problem - how do you bootstrap something like this without a killer app to drive adoption? After a certain critical mass adopts a system like that, all web applications start getting pressured toward supporting it too, but how do you ever build that critical mass to begin with? The whole point of the system is to prevent vendor lock-in, so what's the vendor's incentive to help make it popular?

<comment><USER37> I'm thinking the incumbents of each field that has a vendor lock-in problem could gather around this common platform and provide an open ecosystem as an alternative to all the monopolies that don't respect their users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> In order for apps to make use of your POD data you'd have to give them access to it and once they have it you're back to the same experience as pre-Solid, right? What am I missing?

</comment><comment><USER80> I like this and I'm in favor of decentralization. However, it's hard to imagine decentralized beating centralized when centralization has such a huge economic incentive. We need to create an environment where people and developers are incentivized to use/build decentralized systems. Maybe through law? Like a carbon tax would incentivize people to buy EVs. Data tax.

</comment><comment><USER81> Tim Berners-Lee may have invented the web, the wonderful, inclusive, open-to- everyone web. But his new focus is DRM for everyone. DRM is the complete opposite. Horrible, exclusive, open-to-money. It started with supporting EME, now this. I hate that he gets to use his own name to promote this, even more now that there's a "Sir" prefix.

</comment><comment><USER82> Can someone clear this up for me?

"This Solid POD can be in your house or workplace, or with an online Solid POD provider of your choice."

"you never have to sync, because your data stays with you"

If you choose to keep custody of your own "pod", how are you supposed to achieve redundancy without some kind of sync / backup process?

</comment><comment><USER83> I don't want anyone to be custodian of my data since a hard drive costs so little and my data is supposed to be so valuable. There is always an incentive to break in and steal it. or just use it in unscrupulous ways like tge multitrillion dollar grift system we call the tech industry does daily.

</comment><comment><USER84> Content is editable when it's allowed to be edited. We have "guestbooks", "chats", boards, commentaries, forums, even wiki-sites long time ago, so this issue is solved, "Solid" doesn't sound revolutionary in this scope.

</comment><comment><USER85> The hard part is ID, you need either a centralized authority _or_ a standard specification.

<comment><USER86> Solid uses the latter.

WebID-TLS: [https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/WebID/raw-file/tip/spec/tls- respec.ht...](https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/WebID/raw-file/tip/spec/tls-respec.html)

WebID-OIDC: [https://github.com/solid/webid-oidc- spec](https://github.com/solid/webid-oidc-spec)

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> Honestly, for something this long in the works I was expecting a UI less... retro?

I hesitate to call it outright bad, but I have no idea what to do after I create a pod. And I'm someone who knows how to write Solidity.

</comment><comment><USER88> So is the idea that we're going to swing back in the direction of personal websites again? Pretty much like an Angelfire 2.0?

What separates this technology from everyone just making their own websites?

</comment><comment><USER89> Hello World example [https://github.com/melvincarvalho/helloworld](https://github.com/melvincarvalho/helloworld)

</comment><comment><USER90> Is the protocol open and documented? I couldn't see it.

</comment><comment><USER91> So how is a pod different than a self-hosted database?

<comment><USER92> Yeah, and how do people know which format the data has you put inside.

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> I really have to ask the perennial VC question: "Why Now?" . What changed that makes this technology ready for mass adoption?

</comment><comment><USER94> Now remove Berners' name from this PR tide and try to make sense from all of that. Looks like another VC pump and dump project

</comment><comment><USER95> Mh, can someone explain how is different this idea from old Plan9 model, except from the big limitation of "web" tech?

</comment><comment><USER96> One idea on top of this would be to store hashes of your files on a blockchain, to be able to prove original ownership.

</comment><comment><USER97> I have had a similar idea about the future of the Web. Instead of navigating to websites that give you both data and presentation, how about sites that only give you data adhering to a defined convention. Then you can consume this data in a common ui and visualization platform that can merge data from various sources for you and answer questions and visualize info on the fly.

<comment><USER98> Hm sounds reasonable. There can be a standardized markup language, maybe like a simplified SGML or something?

<comment><USER99> Hahaha, right? You're just going to rediscover the same path that lead us here to start with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> This sounds like Blockstack. They've been in production with this for at least a year now.

</comment><comment><USER101> Let me know when they have a new browser that doesn't use HTML and JavaScript.

</comment><comment><USER102> It seems like steemit.com may be a better model. On steemit, all of the data is public on a blockchain. As a result, things you share are public but not locked into any one application. Many apps exist using the same underlying structure but serve completely different purposes (See dtube)

</comment><comment><USER103> How does this compare to Urbit?

</comment><comment><USER18> Disclaimer: This comment contains some self-promotion (as we are working on a related solution)

Solid overall looks very interesting, and I can very much empathize with the "decouple data and applications" magic aspect of it (even though they're not doing a great job describing it). My personal experience has been that with a good linked-data approach, building apps can become a lot easier, as linked (more specifically semantic data) mimics traditional information gathering much better, where you start with a small information point, and then enrich the data by just adding more and more related data points to it. I also found that a linked-data approach lends itself better to adaptive UIs, where one entity might be missing data, that another one has.

All that being said, I feel like Solid made some (non-)decisions that might lead it down the same path as the things that were tried in the last Semantic Web hype:

\- Solid is using the same old linked-data formats, that are largely URL based. The problem with URL based systems is that the content behind those URLs might at any point disappear, or change. That makes it especially hard if you try to achieve some semantic conciseness, where the data you entered keeps at one point in time is guaranteed to keep its semantic meaning forever. \- In a world where most application developers think about data models on the level of database tables, RDF/JSON-LD is too low level and verbose when trying to use it for building something sophisticated. W3C also standardized a higher level format, OWL2 (which can also be expressed in RDF(S)), which provides a nice abstraction level in its native form.

Those are some of the lessons I've learned while working on Rlay[0], where among other things we've built a content-addressable adaptation of OWL2[1] for the decentralized web. We had to cut some small parts out of the specification so that the semantic stability of concepts is guaranteed when adding additional concepts to the worldwide ontology everyone is sharing, but overall the expressiveness is the same.

Content-addressability has many nice side-effects, but the one I like the most when it comes to Semantic Data is that it allows for a much more organic evolvement of the concepts people are using. If you decide to add a new property to a concept, you can just do that, get a new content-addressing-hash and start using that instead of the old one. No need to add it to the de-facto centralized schema repository that is schema.org.

I hope I didn't go off on too many tangents here. I've been meaning to write a blog post about the topics I touched on for a long time, but never really got around to it. Well at least this comment exists now.

[0]: [https://rlay.com](https://rlay.com) [1]: [https://github.com/rlay- project/rlay-ontology](https://github.com/rlay-project/rlay-ontology)

</comment><comment><USER104> Looks like an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) with a sharp landing page to attract attention

</comment><comment><USER105> Again

</comment><comment><USER106> > Step 2: add jQuery

....

</comment><comment><USER107> blockstack?

</comment><comment><USER108> Please change "solid" to "Solid" (note capital) in the title.

</comment><comment><USER109> how is any of this different than "hotlinking" the A or IMG tag in html?

it adds absolutely nothing besides that.</comment>


Cancer cells die in microgravity conditions – study - <AUTHOR> https://www.dw.com/en/zero-gravity-kills-cancer-cells/a-50230741 <comment><USER2> I did my PhD in cell biology a few years ago and I am seriously sceptical about the Kickstarter campaign. There are too many questions and way too few control experiments. What you can see about their preliminary research is the rotation device and the pictures of the cells. From what I have learned during my studies is that it is easy to kill cell cultures and it is difficult to compare different cell lines. For example, most cells need a very controlled environment (temperature, growth medium, pH, a specific amount of cells per area and not too many or too few neighbouring cells etc.) This rotation device appears to be at room temperature and creates a shear flow, which is enough to kill most cell cultures. The picture they show is not helpful at all, as they just show dying cells. As others stated: you need more control experiments. One would be to keekp a bottle of cells in the machine, without rotation. That's really cheap and easy to compare, which they did not. (not addressing the issue that that's not real microgravity) I hope to find time later to find their publications, until then I don't believe this to be real.

Edit: I cannot find anything that's even looking like research. News articles all referring Chou, but nothing to show for it. No paper or data. Now it looks even worse.

<comment><USER3> I thought any of these experiments are carried out on two sets of cells. One normal and the other cancerous. Both exposed to the same test environment and treatment -- shear in this case. And when they claim "70% of cancerous cells died" they mean 70% more of the cancerous cells died than that of the normal cells, where "more" is defined in some acceptable standard.

<comment><USER2> Yes, but it is not what they say or show. And as long as they don't publish anything more you should be far more sceptical than those journalists were.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So human cells first survive 3 gs during launch then zero gs before they come back to good old g again. They live and multiply through all this, as long as they stay inside the human.

Now somebody created a carousel and says extracted human cells die when put on that carousel. Some pertinent questions were not addressed in the article: Would the extracted cells live if not put on the carousel? Do other types of extracted cells not die when put on it?

Instead of answering these simple question, they speculate about sending cell cultures to space. Where it's even harder to control conditions. I expect exactly nothing to come of it.

Edit: They have not tested in "microgravity". There is no single place on earth where you can sustain microgravity. You'd have to move very very fast. At which point you have other problems. What they do to cell cultures is move them up and down while rotating them. This simulates microgravity in the sense that "on average" the cell cultures experience zero-g in any one direction. Actually the cultures are routinely accelerated above one g with added torque!

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm skeptical that this could really work, but imagine the breakthroughs that would be ushered in for both medicine and space travel if it turned out that zero gravity diminished cancer? It would be the best incentive by far humans have ever had to develop space travel. And curing cancer at the same time! Billions of dollars of research funds could be redirected for developing rockets and we'd saving more lives than before! A wonderful narrative to a science fiction eutopia at least :)

<comment><USER6> Yep, 1-way tickets to explosive global warming.

<comment><USER7> Vastly improved rocketry could also make things like a huge mirror to shade the planet feasible.

<comment><USER8> There's no way that doesn't have a trillion higher-order effects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So, just like Contact (the movie), where Hadden lives his last days in space to slow down his cancer.

<comment><USER10> Exactly my thought, one of my favorite movies combining my love for spirituality, wonder, science and technology.

R: Comrade Arroway... ...we have been expecting your call. One moment, please.

E: Mr. Hadden?

S: Doctor!

S: How kind of you to call.

E: Mr. Hadden, where are you?

S: The Russian government was kind enough to give me accommodations on Mir.

E: You're living on a space station?

S: It's quite simple, really. The low oxygen, zero gravity environment... ...is the only thing keeping the cancer from eating me alive. Actually, I quite like it up here. My little room has one hell of a view. I want to show you something.

<comment><USER11> 2 of my favorite lines:

S: Wanna take a ride? and S: The first rule of government spending is build two at twice the price.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Oh boy

"Chou Collective Join our journey to help us find a cure to cancer and other aging diseases by utilising the unique environment of space."

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/choucollective/curing-d...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/choucollective/curing- diseases-in-space?lang=it)

</comment><comment><USER13> It's a shame that it is practically impossible to culture healthy cells the way they probably cultured these cancer cells so there is not really a control experiment.

But we know people (bags of healthy cell in their normal environment) don't die in space and cancer cells (presumably they did the same experiment on earth) keep growing in normal gravity. So what we can say is that the combination of loosing their normal environment and gravity kills these cancer cells (if they used cell lines those cells are hardly comparable to normal cancer cells anymore by the way). It's interesting to find out why, but it's a long way from saying that this finding will help cure cancer.

<comment><USER14> >It's a shame that it is practically impossible to culture healthy cells the way they probably cultured these cancer cells so there is not really a control experiment.

Why not? What is special about the way they culture those cells compared to a non-cancerous cell culture? (genuinely asking)

<comment><USER15> Normal human cells intentionally try to avoid growing too much, especially in weird environments (this is important for keeping things stable and functioning). Cancer cells on the other hand are cancerous for the very reason that those controls are broken. They will try to grow uncontrollably, everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Stem cells are also affected.

Stem Cell Health and Tissue Regeneration in Microgravity [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4235978/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4235978/)

It seems that after few days in days in microgravity, human immune cells were unable to differentiate into mature cells.

> Over the long-term, exposure to microgravity may cause severe deficits in > mammalian stem cell-based tissue regenerative health, including, > osteogenesis, hematopoiesis, and lymphopoeisis

>The lack of gravity in space is a major concern for stem cell and tissue regenerative health during long-term spaceflight.

<comment><USER17> Would be curious to know more about this, maybe there is a sweet spot. One of the big issues with cancer is not in eradicating the regular tumor cells but detecting and killing the 'cancer stem cells'. These are a big cause of recurrence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > "We want to see if it is actually microgravity that's having an affect on > the cell, or could it be other things in space — like solar radiation?" he > said. But such an endeavor is no easy task, Chou points out.

Why would he say that after the on-planet microgravity experiment? There was no solar radiation in his actual experiment where the cells died so why would he entertain that? Someone else should entertain that totally different experiment while he tries to gain support for expanding his experiment.

</comment><comment><USER19> > "But what I really wanted to know was: is there something these cancers have > in common? That's why I put them in the microgravity device."

What is this microgravity device? A quick web search was inconclusive.

Before anyone answers this, I would like to guess. Is it either real levitation by (dia)magnetic levitation (when levitating a live frog was possible years ago, levitating a tiny amount of cells in a desktop device should be possible by now?) or maybe something that makes the effect of gravity average out, e.g. floating clusters of cells in a fluid to reduce the net force and maybe even rotate them (or let them rotate freely), so that there is no longer a preferred direction in the cluster (which is what I guess is what is important here)?

<comment><USER19> Rotation, it is. Thanks to thegabriele who posted a link to a page that contains a short video of the device:

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/choucollective/curing-d...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/choucollective/curing- diseases-in-space)

<comment><USER5> I see the gif! Too bad rotation is not at all the same as microgravity... Why would they think going all the way to space would have any improvement over their tumbling device?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> >We want to see if it is actually microgravity that's having an affect on the cell, or could it be other things in space — like solar radiation?" he said. But such an endeavor is no easy task, Chou points out.

Wow. What a headline.

<comment><USER21> That's what I was thinking as well. It maybe solar radiation or some other stuff we haven't yet identified or hardly created an understanding of how they affect cancer cells. Overall it's exciting stuff :)

<comment><USER20> I would guess its nonsense clickbait hype personally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > Cancer cells die in [whatever] conditions.

So what? There are plenty of [whatever]s that satisfy this statement.

The difficult part is how to create such conditions within the human body _without_ affecting sane cells!

</comment><comment><USER23> What is the control? Do cancer cells normally live if they are taken out of the body?

<comment> saiya-jin Yes, look ie at HeLa cell line, continuously cultured cancer cells from patient taken in 1951. Many labs around the world use them.

<comment><USER24> You still have to immortalize the cell line. NIH3T3 cells were immortalized by culture conditions. Others are immortalized with viral treatment. The end result is the cell line is similar, but not the sams as the source. Take a primary tumor out of a patient and culture it and it will slowly die over a few days or weeks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Nose cancer!!!? There's nose cancer?

</comment><comment><USER7> This just shows again how much we need a permanent lab in microgravity.

<comment><USER26> That would cost a lot of money. It should be an international project. Let's call this International Space Station.

<comment><USER27> Fisher delivery drivers hate it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Cannabinoids would probably be easier for people.</comment>


Show HN: Awesome-Compilers List - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/aalhour/awesome-compilers <comment><USER2> Can you add Go also please? It is open source as well.</comment>


Parents seek US probe into son's Singapore death - <AUTHOR> http://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/parents-seek-us-probe-sons-180817197.html

<comment><USER2> _"The Todds said they would feel comfortable handing over the hard drive only if the FBI takes over as the lead agency investigating the death."_

This makes no sense at all. Someone should tell the Todds it is possible to image an harddrive perfectly (preserving file timestamps, etc) and distribute copies.</comment>