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Iroh 1.0

iroh.computer

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Re: Iroh 1.0

#421

Post by brudlekukk »

evilturnip wrote: post #318
apitman wrote: post #255

If you're new to Iroh, my mental model is roughly "Tailscale at the application layer instead of the network layer". If your question is, "why not just use Tailscale?", look at it from an app developer's perspective. If you want to release an app and have instances of your app be able to easily connect to each other, you could theoretically embeded Tailscale functionality into your app, but then the users of your app…

Ok, stupid question, but what applications is something like tailscale/iroh used for? I've never worked with this type of tech so curious where it is valuable.

Not a stupid question - I was wondering about the same thing, and this gave me easy access to the answer because someone replied to your comment. Thank you for asking :)

Re: Iroh 1.0

#422

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

bsenftner wrote: post #394
samrus wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its amazing to me how people can make a great a product. And then completely bury the lead because they are so deep into the guts of the system You explained the value proposition so well. The website just didnt get to the "why?" At all

That amazement is due to one of our largest and least realized critical mistakes as a civilization: no where are people taught how to effectively communicate. We have entire Colleges of Communications at every university, and what do they teach? How to execute mass manipulation, not how to convey understanding, not how to manage disagreements. These are not "mistakes" either, this distinct lack of teaching real commu…

I think my college technical writing course covered these things quite well. It's not that they're not taught, it's that communication skills are not rewarded the same way that marketing skills are. Generally speaking there's a lot of blame to be placed on the universities, but in this case it's an HR oversight.

Re: Iroh 1.0

#423

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

colinmarc wrote: post #345
samrus wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its amazing to me how people can make a great a product. And then completely bury the lead because they are so deep into the guts of the system You explained the value proposition so well. The website just didnt get to the "why?" At all

It's primarily an open source library, not a product. I don't understand why HN seems so concerned about nailing down its "value proposition".

Also, this link is to a version announcement. It makes a poor introduction to iroh because it's not one.

The "what is iroh" quesition is answered well in the docs: https://docs.iroh.computer/what-is-iroh

Re: Iroh 1.0

#424

Post by mirrir »

colinmarc wrote: post #357
meowkit wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean this kindly, but this is so “engineer brained” Maybe the game has changed with LLMs, but its been a running joke that engineers will build a startup/product/library/thing only to then realize they can’t get any users and that marketing and sales are hard. Attention and mind share are more valuable than ever. If you can’t answer “Why should I care about X?” then you are fighting an uphill battle.

> Maybe the game has changed with LLMs, but its been a running joke that engineers will build a startup/product/library/thing only to then realize they can’t get any users and that marketing and sales are hard. I agree with your premise, but you're still viewing this technology through the lens of "a successful product" versus "a successful piece of technology". Plenty of open source projects stay open source and are…

replace "successful product" with "useful artifact" and you'll get more of the common ground with less of the pedantics.

Re: Iroh 1.0

#425

Post by guywithahat »

mtndew4brkfst wrote: post #390
guywithahat wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're missing is that they can't charge you for IP's, and someone else already charges you for DNS/domains. They would like to replace your IP's with keys they lookup. It's a cool idea and I would expect that they'll find a market, but I'm not sure this would be a breakthrough product for me

Not affiliated, just a happy dev. Nothing about Iroh usage as operator or end-user entails billable metering of keys, clients, QUIC endpoints, bytes transferred etc and to be honest you could deploy pretty extensive Iroh-based software without ever having a financial relationship with number0.

Correct, they do not meter keys, it's a subscription. There appears to be a free tier followed by paid tiers for increased usage (https://www.iroh.computer/pricing).

I don't use Iroh so I could be wrong, but the goal is definitely a paid service.

Re: Iroh 1.0

#426

Post by CommanderData »

rklaehn wrote: post #362
CommanderData wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is content discovery on the official roadmap? If the original peer say peer A goes offline but B downloaded $X, can see find B and download, validate the content today? Sorry if this has been answered or covered on the web I'm currently travelling. Edit: I managed to read the linked page, thank you for working on such an amazing project!

We don't have the post 1.0 roadmap very fleshed out at this point. The team has been extremely focused on getting 1.0 out of the door for the last year. This took longer than expected, as expected :-) But I can say that some form of global content discovery is in my personal definition of done for the project. I'm the BLAKE3 guy at n0, and I don't consider blobs done without global content discovery. But it is a hard…

Excellent I look forward to it, I like Iroh objective of keeping it's footprint small enough to run on low powered devices. IPFS in my experience is very heavy.

If my understanding is right, content discovery can't happen on the existing mainline DHT which is a shame. Maybe once you have enough traction you can propose a standards change? DHT mainline today is amazing because of its network size.

Re: Iroh 1.0

#428

Post by embedding-shape »

evilturnip wrote: post #318
apitman wrote: post #255

If you're new to Iroh, my mental model is roughly "Tailscale at the application layer instead of the network layer". If your question is, "why not just use Tailscale?", look at it from an app developer's perspective. If you want to release an app and have instances of your app be able to easily connect to each other, you could theoretically embeded Tailscale functionality into your app, but then the users of your app…

Ok, stupid question, but what applications is something like tailscale/iroh used for? I've never worked with this type of tech so curious where it is valuable.

Say you want to build a Peer to Peer application; chat, file sharing, music sync or whatever, then something needs to be built to communicate between this application running in two different places. While you still need to build the actual protocol yourself ("Users can send messages" etc), how the two instances are connected is handled by Iroh mostly.

Re: Iroh 1.0

#429

Post by MithrilTuxedo »

bsenftner wrote: post #394
samrus wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its amazing to me how people can make a great a product. And then completely bury the lead because they are so deep into the guts of the system You explained the value proposition so well. The website just didnt get to the "why?" At all

That amazement is due to one of our largest and least realized critical mistakes as a civilization: no where are people taught how to effectively communicate. We have entire Colleges of Communications at every university, and what do they teach? How to execute mass manipulation, not how to convey understanding, not how to manage disagreements. These are not "mistakes" either, this distinct lack of teaching real commu…

That sounds like the Success Oriented approach, as opposed to the Understanding-Oriented approach.

Check out Jürgen Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action (1981).

Re: Iroh 1.0

#430

Post by klempner »

rapnie wrote: post #406
samrus wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its amazing to me how people can make a great a product. And then completely bury the lead because they are so deep into the guts of the system You explained the value proposition so well. The website just didnt get to the "why?" At all

> You explained the value proposition so well. No, it didn't. It shifted the burden of learning the value proposition to first knowing what Tailscale is exactly. And a response of "Duh, that's obvious", perhaps indicates being too deep in the guts of tailscale systems.

I think you've got this a little backwards.

The target audience of this comment chain is exactly people who are familiar with Tailscale, aren't familiar with Iroh, and read the linked post.

Such a person (like me) reading that post will have an immediate reaction of "this sounds a lot like Tailscale", but the post doesn't provide a clear answer to "what problem does this solve that Tailscale doesn't?"

The people with that reaction are the target audience of this comment chain. The fact it is upvoted to the top of the comment section here is an indication that there are quite a few such people, and if this is your reaction you're presumably not one of them. (and that is perfectly fine!)

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