
Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award - melqdusy
https://news.mit.edu/2017/tim-berners-lee-wins-turing-award-0404
======
jacquesm
Key quote (for me) from the interview:

"A social network is disempowering because you put a lot of energy into it,
all your personal data out there, and tell it who your friends are. You can
only use that information inside the silo of that particular social network."

source: [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604052/webs-inventor-
tim-...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604052/webs-inventor-tim-berners-
lee-wins-the-nobel-prize-of-computing/)

~~~
Kenji
Yeah. I wish we had something more decentralised, like e-mail, but for social
networks. Like, a standardized social network protocol that most people use
(popularity is important here). There is nothing special about what social
networks like Facebook do, the biggest challenge is probably serving so many
requests and storing lots of data with high availability.

~~~
danielpatrick
As a matter of fact, this is what Sir Berners Lee is working on right now at
MIT.

[https://solid.mit.edu/](https://solid.mit.edu/)

The issue is not storing the data, just like "email" doesn't store data. It's
just a protocol and a data format. This makes it interoperable across
whichever industry player wants to spring up and compete for your service.

Ex:

Don't like gmail? Go to ProtonMail. And you don't lose the ability to interact
with people who do use Gmail.

Don't like Facebook? Go to Ello. But now you've lost your entire network.

The decentralized web will be built on data formats and protocols that allow
you to take your data with you and force companies to compete with the quality
of their service, not the size of their network.

~~~
freehunter
But half the point of a social network isn't the ability to communicate, but
rather the history you've built there. Likewise, half the value of email isn't
the ability to send a message to anyone, but the history of emails you have.
Sure email isn't a data storage method, but in reality? Yeah, email is a data
storage method. That's why Gmail gives me 25GB for free. Not because that's
the size of my inbox, but because that's the size of every email I've ever
gotten.

If I move from Gmail to Outlook, I can still email my friends but I can't go
back and search our old conversations unless I export everything from Gmail to
Outlook. If I switch from Facebook to Instagram, I can still message my
friends but I can't see all of the pictures I posted on Facebook unless I
export the pictures from Facebook to Instagram, but even then there are a lot
of features of Facebook that I can't export data from because they just don't
exist on Instagram.

History creates lock-in, and history is really hard to move around.

~~~
XJOKOLAT
History should be decentralized too, then.

Who remembers RSS feeds? I miss those days. We should have some superior spin
on that but for social networks.

Imagine Facebook, but your history/data were your own property. A friend would
find you on Facebook, or Ello, or AnythingAnyWhereBook ... add your feed, and
done. Then it is up to the Social Networks to make a superior product for you
to enjoy your friends data and interaction.

Right now it's about the monopolisation of our data.

Zuckerberg. If you're reading. Your current model is bullshit.

~~~
mike-cardwell
What do you miss about RSS feeds? They're still there... It's very rare that I
come across a blog that doesn't have one, even now...

~~~
XJOKOLAT
You're right, of course. It's possible I'm still pining for my perfectly set-
up Google Reader account which I cannot quite replicate. That still hurts! RSS
felt ubiquitous (to me) back then.

Anyway, to the point, try using RSS with facebook in the above context.

I hate being locked in - hence I gave up on FB. It's trash to me until it
solves this issue.

~~~
flukus
> Anyway, to the point, try using RSS with facebook in the above context.

For me they're different things. RSS is for things that I want available until
I get around to reading them or until I manually mark them as read, this is
precisely what I don't want out of facebook.

~~~
Godel_unicode
I suspect parent was talking about the distributed nature of it. Subscribe to
whoever you want, allow anyone to subscribe to you.

------
madiathomas
This goes to show how hard winning Turing award is. One would have expected
someone who invented the most useful invention of the 20th century to have won
this award long time ago. Maybe I am just overvaluing www because of the
impact it had on people's lives.

EDITED: 20th century, not 19th.

~~~
chubot
I always felt that Tim Berners-Lee was not respected enough in both the
computer science and programming communities. I felt it especially after
working for over a decade at Google, which literally built its entire business
on TBL's architectural concepts.

For example, Google and other search engines would not work without the
principle of least power [1], which a lot of people, including Alan Kay [2],
somehow don't understand. That is, if the web language was a VM rather than
HTML, there would be no Google.

It would also not have been possible for the web to make the jump from
desktops to cell phones as the #1 client now. You know the handler in iOS and
Android that makes <select> boxes usable? That's an example of the principle
of least power.

I recommend reading his book "Weaving the Web" [2] if you want to learn more
about the story behind the web.

I'm very glad that TBL is getting this recognition. He is a genius and also
has a very generous personality.

People in the programming community seem to talk about Torvalds or Stallman a
lot, perhaps because of their loud styles, but I don't see that much about
TBL.

Ditto in the CS community. "HyperText" used to be a big research area but I
guess TBL solved it and people don't talk about it anymore.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_least_power](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_least_power)

[2] [http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-
wit...](http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-with-alan-
kay/240003442)

[3] [https://www.amazon.com/Weaving-Web-Original-Ultimate-
Destiny...](https://www.amazon.com/Weaving-Web-Original-Ultimate-
Destiny/dp/006251587X)

~~~
gambler
_> For example, Google and other search engines would not work without the
principle of least power [1], which a lot of people, including Alan Kay [2],
somehow don't understand. That is, if the web language was a VM rather than
HTML, there would be no Google._

Kay's criticism of the Web is very well justified and (like most of his high-
level criticisms) typically misunderstood. He doesn't criticize it as a
repository of hyperlinked documents. He criticizes it as platform for
application delivery, which it became. Modern web with all its scripts _is_ a
VM -- and badly designed one at that.

~~~
sanderjd
I think people understand the argument, they just don't fully agree with it.
Personally, while I agree that we have ended up with a fairly poor universal
VM, I find it to be a fascinating example of path dependency. Maybe we would
be better off with one repository of hypertext and one well designed universal
VM, but what path would we have taken to get there?

The hypertext repository was so compelling that everyone installed software to
access it. Then that universally available software was so compelling that
people found ways to run increasingly complex applications on it. And that's
how we naturally found ourselves where we are today.

I don't see any reason to think that engineering a more perfect solution all
at once would have worked better than this natural progression.

~~~
chubot
Well said. Kay's misunderstanding is that it could have been any different.

He thinks that you can just design something nice from whole cloth and people
will use it. That's why his designs aren't deployed.

I've been looking at projects like OOVM and going back in history to Self and
SmallTalk, and there's a reason that those things aren't deployed. Don't get
me wrong -- they're certainly influential and valuable.

But he's basically confusing research and engineering, as if engineering
wasn't even a thing, and you can just come up with stuff and have people use
it because it's good. You need a balance of both to "change the world", and
TBL has certainly done that.

Another analogy I use is complaining about the human body. Like "who designed
this thing there there trachea and esophagus are so close together?!? What an
idiot!!!" Or "why are all these people mentally ill and otherwise non-
functional members of society? Who designed this crap?"

The point is that it couldn't have been any different. It wasn't designed; it
was evolved.

~~~
theon144
>Another analogy I use is complaining about the human body. Like "who designed
this thing there there trachea and esophagus are so close together?!? What an
idiot!!!" Or "why are all these people mentally ill and otherwise non-
functional members of society? Who designed this crap?"

Okay, so what's wrong with discussing the limitations of the human body and
the ways to improve it then?

Yes, the web evolved instead of being designed (however much that distinction
makes sense), but arrived at a shi^H^H^H suboptimal result. And it arrived
there through deliberate design decisions of people - who unfortunately were
designing a different system in the first place.

It's like English. I love English, but it's a bloody mess that we're all stuck
with now - except that changing a computer system is comparatively easy to
changing the direction of a language.

~~~
sanderjd
It's great to discuss ways to improve things, but that is different than
suggesting that the whole thing is rotten to the core and needs a re-work from
the ground up. The productive way to do this is to identify specific
deficiencies and propose targeted incremental improvements to address them.
This is what all the people involved in various standards and implementations
on the web have been doing for years. This is working, progress is just slow
and difficult, as it is with most things that are worth doing.

------
peter303
I remember doing internet research before there was the web. For example in
the late 1980s I studied California earthquakes. The USGS had a public ftp
site where they put daily epicenter map images (jpeg?) and text databases of
epicenters. I wrote automated scripts to download new stuff.

I remember there even internet search engines at the time. People wrote
automated scipts to look for public ftp ports and compiledbthe results. The
internet only had a few thousand addresses at the time, so it wasnt an
ardorous process. I think one of these databases was called archie.

~~~
spinlock
I personally think it's important to remember how the Internet worked with TBL
invented the Web. Most importantly, everyone believed and implemented net
neutrality. I think it's a very interesting thought experiment to imagine if
we would even have the web had the University of Minnesota decided to drop all
http packets to promote their competing gopher protocol.

The Web is the best example I can think of for why we still need net
neutrality.

~~~
75dvtwin
I do not share the

> The Web is the best example I can think of for why we still need net
> neutrality.

I think the Web is best example of why we need privacy protection as it is a
form of communication.

I personally pay for a VPN. And I hope my right to use independently
implemented (independent from Google/Facebook/ISPs) privacy preservation
technology and de-anonymization-resistant technology is not lost, and instead
encouraged by the legal system.

In my view, the so called 'net neutrality' is simply a deceiving name for 'a
subjective favoritism' given away (as political/economic favors) to some web-
monetization players vs others.

Eg. ISPs cannot favor/unfavor content providers, but yet Search engine company
can favor/unfavor/rank content providers.

So ISPs are labeled as 'evil' while search and social networking service
providers are the 'good doers'.

------
losvedir
When I was an MIT student I worked one summer at CSAIL. The office I was in
had only a single occupancy bathroom. One afternoon I went to use it and just
as I got there I saw that TBL was exiting. Once I went in and sat down, I
noticed that _the seat was warm_!

Highlight of my life right there, having my butt warmed by the residual heat
of the inventor of the www's butt.

Ahem, in any case, congrats to him! Definitely well deserved.

~~~
dbcurtis
Hmmm... so you have a TBL number of 1, for some definition of TBL number.

------
logicallee
For anyone who doesn't know, the www is a a "hypertext" project where
documents can contain links to each other. By clicking these links, a wide
variety of content is exposed. For example, consider how much easier it is to
use Wikipedia than to have to look up references in the index (page numbers by
word occurrence) of a printed book. You can just click on a link and follow
it. In all, most people spend most of their online time reading pages that
have hyperlinks in it, which they follow.

It's certainly a paradigm shift similar to what Gutenberg accomplished.

~~~
cr0sh
TBL created the web, certainly - but hypertext prior to the web goes far back
as an idea (at least as far back as Alan Kay - also an ACM Turing Award
winner, IIRC)...

~~~
hcs
The word, at least, was coined [1] by Ted Nelson, published 1965. The idea
goes back at least to Vennevar Bush's Memex proposal [2] in 1945.

I haven't heard Kay mentioned as an early proponent of hypertext, I'd be
interested to hear more if you can find it.

[1] [https://elmcip.net/node/7367](https://elmcip.net/node/7367)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex)

~~~
chubot
Yeah I hadn't heard Kay mentioned with hypertext either. I think he is
profoundly mistaken about it too (or at least he was until very recently):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14035411](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14035411)

------
icc97
I think his work on educating people about the web ever since it's creation is
pretty awesome.

His list of questions for kids is great, especially the one on 'what happens
when I click a link' [0]

    
    
      [0]: https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Kids.html#What1

~~~
e12e
Probably want that in-line, as a clickable link:

[https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-
Lee/Kids.html#What1](https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Kids.html#What1)

------
staunch
TBL is a great role model. He saw an important opportunity to make the world
better and he executed on it selflessly.

I do think he probably should have started a browser company or something
though. The nice thing is that his beautiful dream for the web is (slowly)
coming true.

I love looking at that NeXT box he used as the first web server:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN_httpd](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN_httpd)

------
amelius
Question: did TBL invent the WWW as part of a job-related project while at
CERN, or did he invent it as a personal side-project using time/resources of
his employer?

~~~
icebraining
According to Wikipedia and himself, he wrote up a proposal and was encouraged
by his boss to implement it as an "unofficial" project:
[https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-
Lee/FAQ.html#Influences](https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-
Lee/FAQ.html#Influences)

~~~
peterkelly
You can read the original proposal here:
[https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html](https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html)

~~~
doomlaser
That's a great read. I didn't realize Bill Atkinson's HyperCard preceded Tim
Berners-Lee's proposal by a few years, or that Berners-Lee had referenced
HyperCard directly in it.

The applications of hypermedia were clearly in the ether in thay era, but that
document certainly pulls a lot of the threads together.

~~~
TheGrassyKnoll
Wow, I'd never heard of it. Those old Apples had some cool shit I missed out
on.

    
    
      "HyperCard was created by Bill Atkinson following an lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) trip."
    

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard)

~~~
wallace_f
Jobs criticized Gates saying he'd be a better product designer had he spent
more time exploring individual pursuits such as what Jobs did--spirituality
and psychedelics.

------
jameskegel
This story makes me feel good. I feel TBL doesn't get his just recognition
from all the people who take advantage of what he made for us without even
knowing the origin. Good on him.

------
suff
This is perhaps the most proportionately insignificant prize given for any
invention in the history of humanity.

------
bmm6o
Is it a coincidence that the award is announced on 4/04?

~~~
emiliobumachar
What's special about that date that makes you ask that? Edit: Oh, I get it
now. 404 Not Found.

------
etandel
"I’m humbled to receive the namesake award of a computing pioneer who showed
that what a programmer could do with a computer is limited only by the
programmer themselves"

That's like the exact opposite of what Turing proved, with the halting problem
and all.

I'm any case, a well deserved award!

------
mulletboy
If you're interested in the history of the Web and its inception, I highly
recommend you this (non-technical) reading TBL wrote some years ago. Really
inspiring. [https://www.amazon.com/Weaving-Web-Original-Ultimate-
Destiny...](https://www.amazon.com/Weaving-Web-Original-Ultimate-
Destiny/dp/006251587X)

------
netvarun
I was watching the penultimate episode of Halt and Catch Fire Season 3 this
morning while doing my morning run at the gym. Towards the end of the episode,
Donna faxes over a document about this great new invention, she recently
encountered as a VC, called the 'WorldWideWeb' to Joe. Pretty coincidental :)
Thanks, Tim!

------
chauhankiran
It was few years back when some one ask on Quora for - 'Who Still Not Get
Turing Award For Their Work?'. I was the one who name Tim.

Glad man get credit for his work.

------
m3andros
Looks like HN is bombarding it, so:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SwQAer7...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SwQAer7j_6QJ:news.mit.edu/2017/tim-
berners-lee-wins-turing-award-0404+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

------
throwaway2016a
I've met him on a few occasions. I used to be active in Semantic Web and I'd
run into him at the Cambridge Semantic Web Meetup -- Massachusetts, USA not
England).

He seems like a generaly good guy with some real forward thinking and I like
many for the ideas he has. I'm happy for him.

------
josteink
So the ACM is now handing out Turing Awards for people making the FOSS
community build stuff around an exciting, open technology, only to bait and
switch and poison it with DRM?

Impressive.

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

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

------
jyriand
Offtopic. I was wondering what happened to guy who invented email. I kind of
remember reading that he was living in poor conditions. Did a search on
"inventor of email" and found a controversy about some guy who claims to be
inventor of email(Shiva Ayyadurai). That's not the guy I was looking for.
Instead I was thinking of Roy Tomlinson, as I found his name in an article
called: "Ray Tomlinson's 'story' about inventing email is the biggest
propaganda lie of modern tech history: Shiva Ayyadurai"[0]. But seems like Ray
has already passed away.

[0] [http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/ray-
to...](http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/ray-tomlinsons-
story-about-inventing-email-is-the-biggest-propaganda-lie-of-modern-tech-
history-shiva-ayyadurai/articleshow/51337493.cms)

~~~
klez
> I was wondering what happened to guy who invented email

I'm afraid he died last year.

------
seejay
Holly crap! Congratulations woman!!!

~~~
seejay
I don't understand the minus points here. Did I piss a bunch of people off?

I genuinely loved OPs comment here (gave it an upvote). So instead of saying
"woman" here If I just "assumed" he is a man and said congratulations "man" or
"bro" would I get plus points?

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

~~~
seejay
Thank you very much! in that case I'd be ok with the down votes. But the first
reply I got here from someone I assume who is in charge of HN was "OP is a
man" so I can't help but wonder what's really going on in the minds of these
down voters.

~~~
alainv
1) Your comment added nothing, but then this wasn't a high-value thread
anyway.

2) Any pronoun in that case would be superfluous. "Holy crap!
Congratulations!" would be far more intuitive to native english speakers.
Choosing to add a gendered pronoun without knowing the correct gender is
just... odd. That's exactly the type of situation most would avoid where
possible: you omit gendered pronouns unless you know.

~~~
seejay
I agree with both your points, completely. Thank you very much!

------
ionwake
Great news

------
luisivan
For a moment my brain read "Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Complete" LOL

------
adamnemecek
Internet? That's still around?

------
septimus111
I greatly admire the guy but does TBL OM KBE FRS FREng FRSA FBCS really need
another award or title? All that money and publicity could be directed towards
promising junior researchers who need it!

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

~~~
septimus111
I guess I like the Fields medal model better - it's awarded only to people
younger than 40 to encourage future achievements.

------
samstave
Reading the comments here and being a netizen since internets inception is
weird;

Wtf do we want?????

We want privacy, anonymity but also credibility and our ego boosted.

Fuck the government fuck spying, but acknowledge how awesome I am... all at
the same time. So pick fucking one!

So... I propose the following internet user-name platform where only users who
know you IRL can vote on your comments

We removed downs and vote counts from hn and reddit - so let's only allow ppl
to vote on anything you say If they know you irl

Yeah that idea won't go over well, but fuck .gov censorship whilst claiming
all they claim

