Comment by fagnerbrack | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fagnerbrack | Hacker News Reader

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Sad day for the Internet, Rest in Peace David L. Mills , and that time keeps going on forever to you and your energy to be felt across time and space.

I'm sure the artifacts of your work will never be forgotten.

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On a sidenote

Last year I had a chat with one of the members of the early Web and we understood there's a serious issue of knowledge transfer to future web devs generations.

Few people reads books, and even if they do, the books written by technical people are not pedagogical enough as to allow the reader to capture the Tacit Knowledge and experience from the author as to be able to reproduce new ideas.

We are LOSING fundamental knowledge of the internet for every mind who dies. If you think that mailing lists, web archives, books and blog posts are enough then you're being naive.

At some point nobody will understand how the Web works. The curve where the Web is going is not pretty.

This is extremely troubling to me and I'm trying on the sidelines to have some sort of way to run Tacit Knowledge extraction from those ppl. Known techniques are ACTA and CTA (Advanced Cognitive Task Analysis and Cognitive Task Analysis).

If you have any other idea, please let me know.

> At some point nobody will understand how the Web works

Sorry to be blunt; but that is absolute weapons grade nonsense on multiple levels.

First, we aren't losing any knowledge on how the internet works; at least, as far as I'm aware. Can you please explain what you mean? What knowledge have we lost? Are we unable to write networking stacks because some greybeards aged out?

Secondly, If you think the guys who wrote the first C compilers and implemented NTP have much of an idea how the 'modern internet' works even today (outside of what you can learn reading beej's guide), you're wrong. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, again, but I struggle to see how folks like these would be useful on the team who implements, for example, the distributed caching algorithms used by Akamai..

I get your sentiment, it's definitely sad and a 'passing of the guard' sort of feeling when the first engineers pass on, and for sure, they know a lot about their domains. But lamenting that 'nobody will understand how the web works' because no one cares about ISC bind's implementation anymore is kind of bonkers.

I don't think we're losing knowledge of how the Internet works, but we're almost certainly losing knowledge of why it was done that way. I remember Bob Braden saying (and I paraphrase):

"When we designed the early Internet, we had a huge blank space to work in, and we agonized over what the best way to do things would be. Ever since, people have been filling in all the other parts of that space."

This was 20 years ago, but he's probably even more correct today. Of course they didn't get everything right by a longshot, but we're definitely losing the rationale for why things were done the way they were. As a result, it's quite common to stumble into old problems that had been engineered around before.

I don't think we're losing the macro "why" at all. We may be losing the wisdom of the path they walked to get to their design, which is certainly very valuable from a pedagogical and historical perspective.

I think that's the point, isn't it? That we're in danger of losing a lot of important history & context that underpinned the "macro"

Yes, that's the whole point I was trying to make. Without history of the why we tend to make the same mistakes all over again. Extracting the why is much more difficult than simply writing a book, there are psychological prompts to do that

I read it more as "losing knowledge of why things are the way they are today" i.e. the earlier technical context & nuance that caused things to evolve in the way they have.

Nice example from a link in this thread is a Dr. Mill's talk at udel: https://youtu.be/08jBmCvxkv4?feature=shared It's packed with interesting context and history stretching back to 1968

You are correct, that's what I meant. Understanding the why allows us to evolve ina. direction ina. way that's educated instead of making bad decisions and committing mistakes that shouldn't have been made

I see you've never met my coworkers: Akamai does employ a number of people with very long experience in the IETF world.

There is quite a bit of bad ideas the people pop up to propose time and time again, because they don't get why the net looks the way it does or the constraints on evolution. The old timers also understand when things have changed enough to justify new things.

W3C and IETF both have a paucity of early or middle career participants. So where are all these people who understand how it works? Not making more standards to solve some real problems.

I didn't speak with them, so I can't verify if "There is quite a bit of bad ideas the people pop up to propose time and time again". I need to verify why they are bad and why they're proposing. Before concluding they're bad you need to understand why. Many ideas are bad, but what I'm saying is that there's a few people like Roy Fielding, Tim Berners Lee, Mike Amundsen, & other that I don't remember their names, that actually have GREAT ideas, only that newbiew engineers with title of "senior" don't understand. Not saying it's your case, just saying there's no way to verify so I can't "explain" to you the effect you're observing.

The Powersharing Series is a great first-person resource for the 1980s PC era: https://www.thepowersharingseries.com/

What can we do to stop this erosion of knowledge?

Reach out to folks who are in the last chapter of their life and collect the knowledge, Story Corps [1] meets ArchiveTeam. Interview them, create or add to their Wikipedia page and upload other artifacts to the Internet Archive.

[1] https://storycorps.org/

That and CTA/ACTA. Extract Their Tacot Knowledge using those techniques and convert them into simulations that can be use to mentor/teach new engineers with the WHY they did what they did by putting them in their actual shows.

Nobody has done that as far as I know

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