Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

hearth.eternum.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 106 posts

Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#41

Post by marknadal »

edjroot wrote: post #33
marknadal wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or add realtime updates to IPFS, Beaker, or Blockstack using a P2P/decentralized Firebase: https://github.com/amark/gun IPFS + Firebase = Lovechild ^

I remember having read about Gun a few years ago [1] and there was a lot of (apparently) valid criticism. Do you know how much of that is still valid today? [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9076558

If you intend to use GUN for banking or any globally consistent (CP) system, then yes.

However, for everything else, the criticisms no longer apply.

GUN is an CRDT based AP (highly-available, partition tolerant) strongly eventually consistent system, and therefore should not be used for banking-like systems.

I hate the jargon so sorry to reply with it, but it allow for a quick/concise summary of GUN's tradeoffs. Some more resources below:

- Cartoon explainer of academic stuff: https://gun.eco/distributed/matters.html

- CAP Theorem tradeoffs: https://gun.eco/docs/CAP-Theorem

- How to implement the CRDT and how it solves for Split-Brain failures: https://gun.eco/docs/Conflict-Resolution-with-Guns

There are a bunch of other resources, but I'm more than happy to reply/answer any specific questions if you have them. Cheers!

Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#42

Post by super_trooper »

lucideer wrote: post #14
StavrosK wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's personal preference, some people will prefer Beaker, we personally liked the "drag some files to a folder and that's it" UX. By the way, I'll mention this here because it isn't evident on the Hearth page right now: You can get your own username on Eternum for free, and it will redirect to the latest hash that Hearth publishes (i.e. the latest version of your website) automatically. You can do this even if you do…

> we personally liked the "drag some files to a folder and that's it" UX. Beaker does this... In terms of getting a free username on a HTTP website, https://hashbase.io/ Disclaimer: I haven't used Hearth, so I can't compare, but Beaker doesn't seem like it could be much easier.

Am I missing something? Beaker requires you to use their browser? Not really apples to apples

Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#43

Post by atrus »

52-6F-62 wrote: post #37
bmcusick wrote: post #4

Fantastic. The web falling into the AmaGooBookSoft silos has been convenient, but it hasn't been good for censorship or personal sovereignty. Making it push-button easy to publish to IPFS a great way to return editorial control and ownership to individuals, without the downsides of needing to run and maintain servers. I hope Hearth or someone like them expands beyond websites to self-publishing of store front ends, c…

> but it hasn't been good for censorship or personal sovereignty. On this subject— I'm going to be that guy this time because I haven't yet seen a good solution to the problem, and I ask with sincerity: What happens when somebody decides they're going to start an illicit website/content of some kind? (let's avoid semantics because I'd rather not go down that path) Everybody then has a forced part in hosting it, and t…

I'm not sure why you'd say that everyone has a forced part in hosting it, since IPFS only pulls files you request to your computer.

Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#44

Post by lucideer »

super_trooper wrote: post #42
lucideer wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we personally liked the "drag some files to a folder and that's it" UX. Beaker does this... In terms of getting a free username on a HTTP website, https://hashbase.io/ Disclaimer: I haven't used Hearth, so I can't compare, but Beaker doesn't seem like it could be much easier.

Am I missing something? Beaker requires you to use their browser? Not really apples to apples

Beaker is a browser that supports http:// and dat:// - you can:

- use Beaker to publish/"host" dat:// websites (as you can use Hearth to publish ipfs websites)

- use Beaker or any dat:// client to browse dat:// websites

- use any browser to browse dat:// websites via http through hashbase.io (similar to eternum.io)

Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#45

Post by jondashkyle »

lucideer wrote: post #22
fiatjaf wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but to access a site published on Beaker you must use the Beaker browser, right?

If it's published on Hashbase, you can access it with any HTTP client (though this of course somewhat defies the point of it being p2p). Otherwise, you will need a dat:// client - Beaker is the main web browser with dat:// support, other clients sofar have more specialised uses, e.g. https://github.com/codeforscience/sciencefair

> though this of course somewhat defies the point of it being p2p

Not really. Need ways of bridging the gap.

Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#46

Post by edjroot »

marknadal wrote: post #41
edjroot wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember having read about Gun a few years ago [1] and there was a lot of (apparently) valid criticism. Do you know how much of that is still valid today? [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9076558

If you intend to use GUN for banking or any globally consistent (CP) system, then yes. However, for everything else, the criticisms no longer apply. GUN is an CRDT based AP (highly-available, partition tolerant) strongly eventually consistent system, and therefore should not be used for banking-like systems. I hate the jargon so sorry to reply with it, but it allow for a quick/concise summary of GUN's tradeoffs. Some…

That's exciting, thanks a lot! I was just considering using a graph database for a future side project.

I also read Neo4j was an inspiration. Is there any "human-made" comparison between the two? All I could find was "A vs. B" comparison tables.

Thanks again!

Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#47

Post by IamNotAtWork »

lucideer wrote: post #22
fiatjaf wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but to access a site published on Beaker you must use the Beaker browser, right?

If it's published on Hashbase, you can access it with any HTTP client (though this of course somewhat defies the point of it being p2p). Otherwise, you will need a dat:// client - Beaker is the main web browser with dat:// support, other clients sofar have more specialised uses, e.g. https://github.com/codeforscience/sciencefair

Hashbase seems to function as one of the nodes in the DAT network, so even if none of the peers are online at least Hashbase is still there. That's what I gathered from a quick scan.

The DAT network seems interesting and is new to me, but like you said, needing a central node to cache the data seems like breaking the p2p story.

Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#48

Post by 52-6F-62 »

atrus wrote: post #43
52-6F-62 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it hasn't been good for censorship or personal sovereignty. On this subject— I'm going to be that guy this time because I haven't yet seen a good solution to the problem, and I ask with sincerity: What happens when somebody decides they're going to start an illicit website/content of some kind? (let's avoid semantics because I'd rather not go down that path) Everybody then has a forced part in hosting it, and t…

I'm not sure why you'd say that everyone has a forced part in hosting it, since IPFS only pulls files you request to your computer.

After your comment I did a quick bit of reading and realized I'd made a fundamental mistake regarding how I thought I knew IPFS worked (vs. other decentralized file system formats).

The mistake I'd made was thinking it worked more or less similar to Bitcoin where every node holds the whole chain, where it really works more like torrents in that you download the set of files and then reseed. Thanks for pointing out the difference.

Because of my error I guess the question changes. It sounds like it may be even more damning for those who regularly view illicit content, but at the same time making it harder to shut down caches of the same illicit content. I recognize this is already a problem with torrents, but then my question becomes how do we not repeat the mistake?

Is there a mode of resolution outside chasing down every single bearer of the node to try and remove the content?

Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#49

Post by lucideer »

IamNotAtWork wrote: post #47
lucideer wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's published on Hashbase, you can access it with any HTTP client (though this of course somewhat defies the point of it being p2p). Otherwise, you will need a dat:// client - Beaker is the main web browser with dat:// support, other clients sofar have more specialised uses, e.g. https://github.com/codeforscience/sciencefair

Hashbase seems to function as one of the nodes in the DAT network, so even if none of the peers are online at least Hashbase is still there. That's what I gathered from a quick scan. The DAT network seems interesting and is new to me, but like you said, needing a central node to cache the data seems like breaking the p2p story.

Hashbase is a convenience feature, bridging the gap, so to speak, between p2p and centralised systems. It's not required at all for dat:// to work.

The main benefit is that users of http browsers can visit your dat:// site.

Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#50

Post by lucideer »

jondashkyle wrote: post #45
lucideer wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's published on Hashbase, you can access it with any HTTP client (though this of course somewhat defies the point of it being p2p). Otherwise, you will need a dat:// client - Beaker is the main web browser with dat:// support, other clients sofar have more specialised uses, e.g. https://github.com/codeforscience/sciencefair

> though this of course somewhat defies the point of it being p2p Not really. Need ways of bridging the gap.

I guess what I meant was that using hashbase exclusively over http and not switching to using dat:// clients would be somewhat defying the point, but yeah, it's a good bridge.
Post reply on HN