GoogleTalksArchive
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 9 months, 2012–2025
1:21:16 · 26K views · Aug 22, 2012
Van Jacobson's 2006 Google Tech Talk on rethinking networking around named content instead of host-to-host conversations. He recounts packet-networking history and lays out the content-centric networking idea that later became NDN.
HN commenters point to it as an inspiring talk behind content-addressed designs like IPFS, Urbit and immutable URLs.
11 comments from Hacker News
I was surprised to command-F for Van Jacobson and not find this lecture, "A New Way to Look at Networking". this video Van Jacobson was the major architect of TCP/IP; here is how the Internet would work if he were in charge. If this is ever implemented it will change everything.
Yes! Ted Nelson talks about this in this amazing and inspiring Google Talk video from 2006. He talks about the rise of packet-based networking, and how the future will be content-centric. this video
The thing that got me interested in Urbit when it was first announced back in 2010 was reading Van Jacobson's "Networking Named Content" paper [1] and related work from PARC, referenced in this blog post [2]. As someone who has spent 15 years now working on web development, browser development, and web standards, I feel the Internet really needs some form of "named data" networking as its next big step. I don't know if Urbit is the way it's going to happen, but it'll happen somehow. Maybe we'll evolve browsers and HTTP into a named data network instead. (On the one hand, it would be orders of magnitude easier than building an entire new model of computing from scratch... on the other hand, you don't get to throw out the whole ball of mud if you just keep building on top of it.) Anyway, I encourage everyone to read the Van Jacobson paper or watch the tech talk. It points out some assumptions that are so baked into our network architectures that I had never really thought about them. And it gives some context for these slides' claim that "the internet has failed," by pointing to a working alternate system that's a better fit for some common cases. The link from the Urbit blog to the Van Jacobson talk is broken since Google Video was shut down, but you can now find it on YouTube [3]. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] this video
You may be interested in this Google Tech Talk from 2006 - this video . I found it interesting at the time it came out.
It's interesting that you mention TCP/IP, because that's the most famous example of a technology that "works in practice, but not in theory". Take a look at Van Jacobsen's presentation on the history of ARPANET: this video Packet switching was "utter heresy" (20m in) when it was invented. It "wasn't a network, it was an inefficient way to use an existing network". And it almost collapsed 25 years after it was invented; the presenter is famous for inventing the modern TCP/IP congestion control that saved the Internet [1]. The TCP/IP flow congestion algorithm has been redesigned several times since [2]. It works not because it was designed well, but because it wasn't designed and instead evolved over many years with many contributions from people devoted to keeping it working. Alan Kay is usually who I think of for great ideas that "work in theory, but not in practice". He's done some crucially important work in OOP, programming languages, and GUIs. But note that we don't actually use SmallTalk; instead we got C++ and Java. Nor do we use Dynabooks and Altos; instead, we got Microsoft Windows. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK]