7 ms·

Hi HN. I am the co-founder of the project. If you are interested in how the protocol works under the hood, start here: https://docs.radicle.xyz/ https://docs.ra

Hi HN. I am the co-founder of the project. If you are interested in how the protocol works under the hood, start here: https://docs.radicle.xyz/ https://docs.radicle.xyz/ Docs are still WIP though.

throwaway220033 3y ago
How much budget was spent on Radicle, how many people did work on it, how long you've been building it and who is using it ?
- cloudhead 3y ago
  I won't reveal anything about our finances, but the current code base is a little under 2 years old. We've worked on the general problem for over 4 years in total though. The team is around 12 people, split between protocol, cli, tui, web and content. The product is set to launch this month, so we're just starting to onboard users, but many people in the community are already using it, and we've been using it internally for about a year.
  - throwaway220033 3y ago
    My question wasn't about your "current codebase". It was about Radicle. It was launched 6 years ago, and for some reason it's always about to onboard the first users when crypto is on hype :) An idea doesn't take off -- totally normal, but how on earth can you fund Radicle for such a long time with no users? You can even throw it away and rewrite it! What's the source of funding for Radicle ? Asking because you seem to be best at getting the idea funded, not really actualizing it.
    - maninak 3y ago
      [dead]
    - marcus0x62 3y ago
      I might take your comment more seriously if you a) put your name behind it and b) dropped the “just asking questions bro” shtick when you obviously have some sort of axe to grind with this project.
      - throwaway220033 3y ago
        Good luck with your reasoning skillset
        marcusb 3y ago
        Good luck with your trolling.
        throwaway220033 3y ago
        Asking source of funding is definitely trolling for sketchy crypto projects ;)
  - gremlinunderway 3y ago
    Sorry, this is sketchy. If you're not clear about your revenue generation and finances, how do I know your project isn't just about harvesting as much user data as possible? Open-source projects obviously need to pay the bills, but if you're not clear on how you are achieving this or hoping to achieve this then there's really zero trust in using this.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
      > there's really zero trust in using this It's peer to peer, anyone using the protocol is entitled to share and collect as much data as the protocol permits, and the founders have no more power than any other user. It's way less sketchy than anybody operating a server and asking you to trust that they're doing so responsibly--which is pretty much everybody. I don't think that everything can or should be made zero-trust. But if this can, then that's a win.
      - lkjdsklf 3y ago
        The alternative isn’t just some random person hosting a random server. It’s dealing with a company where you agree to a policy that describes how they can use your data. That means you have legal recourse if they violate that agreement. It also means you know who actually has your data which isn’t the case with these federated networks. Every entity that has your data on their server is another entity can use it in a way you don’t agree with On top of that, the alternative solutions are pretty clear how they make money.
        __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
        If you're powerful enough to have a lawyer for such things, then I guess that's a significant difference. But for most of us, your description of the alternative is indeed tantamount to "some random person hosting a random server". And you're right that federated designs are susceptible to bad behavior on the part of the server admin. I assume that's why the radicle protocol guide (https://docs.radicle.xyz/guides/protocol https://docs.radicle.xyz/guides/protocol) has a section differentiating P2P from federated. I don't know these people, maybe they are indeed up to something nefarious, but their design is inherently more trustworthy than federated or hosted solutions. If I must chose between transparency into finances and a nonhierarchical design which presents no high value targets for corruption to focus on, I'll take the better design over the financial transparency every time. If they turn out to be actually shady I can just configure my node not to talk to them or their friends and keep on using it, which is a lot more than can be said for most of the alternatives. Besides, it's a publishing platform. What is this "your data" you're talking about? The whole point is to spread it far and wide and to collect contributions from far and wide.
wokwokwok 3y ago
I read the documentation and this stands out to me: > Radicle repositories, which can be either public or private, can accommodate diverse content including source code, documentation, and arbitrary data sets. If this is, basically, a peer-to-peer file sharing application, what part of the protocol handles dealing with abuse? Otherwise, how is this different from the previous generation of file sharing applications (BitTorrent, winny, etc) where people just share arbitrary copyrighted content like movies, songs, software, etc? I feel like a few bad actors will ruin this? Can you partition your “personal” network somehow, so you can use it with absolute confidence your not participating in anything illegal?
- zlatan_todoric 3y ago
  you can choose which nodes you follow and which nodes you block - you can even decide that you will seed particular repos and not the entire node. (P.S. I am working at Radicle)
  - wokwokwok 3y ago
    How would you know which nodes to block?
    - gsaslis 3y ago
      Any node with "problematic" behaviour can be blocked. But please note that you can also choose a "block everyone, follow just the good ones" (i.e. a selective) seeding policy [1]). [1] - https://docs.radicle.xyz/guides/seeder#a-selective-seeding-policy https://docs.radicle.xyz/guides/seeder#a-selective-seeding-p...
  - 1oooqooq 3y ago
    so it's the same as cloning a repo locally, auto updating it, and exposing a mirror to the world? how will this not devolve into freeNet fiasco when popular repos start to go wild on content? edit: i see from the finance thread you will likely take on maven/npm/etc with crowd hosting+funding so I'm now more curious how cheap it will be for bad actors to push intentional malicious content, since now it's mostly about cost of having consensus over the mirrors
djha-skin 3y ago
I'm interested in this, but I noticed a base58 hash on the page. I'm not really interested in crypto. How much could I use this product without adopting crypto? Is this attached to some digital currency like ipfs or is it independent?
- bordumb 3y ago
  It’s independent. No need for crypto/digital currency whatsoever.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
badoongi 3y ago
Fascinating project! I'm curious what's the business model? it's listed on Crunchbase that you raised 12M$ so I'm assuming you do have plans to make money?
- rapnie 3y ago
  Curious as well. Searching around I found this documentation on their ecosystem [0], which may shed some light on the organization structure. It may be they are organized as a DAO? From the intro: > Radworks is a community dedicated to cultivating internet freedom. They do not shy away from cryptocurrency technology, though AFAICS that is not directly applied to the Radicle project. Another project of Radworks is Drips [1], to help fund open source. [0] https://docs.radworks.org/community/ecosystem https://docs.radworks.org/community/ecosystem [1] https://www.drips.network/ https://www.drips.network/
crabbone 3y ago
Hi. While not actively looking for replacement to proprietary services s.a. Github or GitLab, from time to time I'm asked about an alternative. I'm all for a distributed self-hosting solution, so Radicle is definitely hitting the mark here, however: > Linux or Unix based operating system. For the kind of project I have to assist with, this would be a deal-breaker. Since the code seems to be in Rust: do you intend to make it available to MS Windows? (I took it for granted that Mac OS is included in the Unix family, right?) If not straight-up support for MS Windows, then maybe an MSYS2 port? ---- To give some background: I'm not in charge of decisions like service vendor selection, and we are talking about a quasi-government organization with substantial open-source code base that is currently hosted on Github. I.e. sometimes I might have a chance to pitch a particular idea, but it's not up to me if the idea is accepted. They are quite motivated to make their work as resilient to private vendor policies as possible as well as try to "do good" in other ways (i.e. sustainability, breadth of the outreach etc. -- a typical European gov. org :) So, Github is... obviously in conflict with such policies. While there are other gov. agencies tasked with archiving or networking support, they seem to be woefully incompetent and / or outdated, as well as often falling for the vendor-laid traps (eg. the archiving service went all-in after DataBricks not even realizing it's a commercial closed-source product). So, I wouldn't have high hopes for the org. to be able to leverage a self-hosted solution. That's why a distributed solution looks great. However, they wouldn't be able to use a tool that doesn't work on major popular PC systems.
- cloudhead 3y ago
  Hey there. Yes, Windows support is something we'd like to have, but focusing on less OSes is helping us ship faster. In principle, there shouldn't be any issue in porting to Windows, but since no one on the team runs Windows it would have been hard to ensure things are working smoothly. If there is demand though, we will certainly start allocating time towards it. Radicle does work on macOS as well.
  - miohtama 3y ago
    Windows Subsystem for Linux should alleviate these pains a lot.
k8svet 3y ago
Does this v3 iteration mean that if I pull Radicle from nixpkgs right now that I might be a major version behind?
- cloudhead 3y ago
  I am a nix noob, but we are now using flake[0], I don't know if that helps! [0]: https://app.radicle.xyz/nodes/seed.radicle.xyz/rad:z3gqcJUoA1n9HaHKufZs5FCSGazv5/tree/flake.nix https://app.radicle.xyz/nodes/seed.radicle.xyz/rad:z3gqcJUoA...
  - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    It would be neat to define the radicle repo as an input to the flake for a project which used radicle, that way you could add it to the devshell and you'd have pinned the version of radicle to your project such that running "nix flake update" updates that project's version of radicle along with updating its other dependencies (this, among other things, is what having a flake.nix at your repo root makes possible). A workflow of this sort doesn't need nixpkgs at all, but it does require that the nix flake input handler knows how to fetch from radicle repos. I'll try it a bit later today, but I'm guessing that this will require a change to nix before it works.
    - k8svet 3y ago
      Interesting. "fetchFromRadicle" would be insanely cool.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
        It seems like you can define radicle repos as flake inputs like so: https://gist.github.com/MatrixManAtYrService/b527300542b6fddc60cbd4fd96efd17c https://gist.github.com/MatrixManAtYrService/b527300542b6fdd... Although maybe this approach is cheating because it's relying on https and not some kind of hash-linked P2P magic (which would definitely require modifying nix to make work). I guess there's something similar to the IPFS gateway going on: somebody is hosting a bridge into radicle space. It would be interesting to get this working without dependency on that bridge. Anyhow, modify your project's flake accordingly and your version of `rad` will track with that radicle repo. No curl-to-bash required.
andrew_ 3y ago
My eyes! The goggles do nothing! [1] Please bring on some design and UX folks. The contrast literally strains the eyes. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWFF7ecArBk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWFF7ecArBk
johnhenry 3y ago
I'm curious if you (or anyone) had a chance to use Mango (https://github.com/axic/mango https://github.com/axic/mango) before it was abandoned?
- cloudhead 3y ago
  I do remember Mango! I didn't actually try it out, but we had experimented with Ethereum and IPFS in the past, and it wasn't a great fit for a code collab platform due to performance and cost.
gwd 3y ago
Looks really interesting! Some of us are allergic to "curl | bash" though; would you consider creating a homebrew package?
- cloudhead 3y ago
  Understandably! We are working on packages for Linux and macOS.
doctorpangloss 3y ago
There are lots of potential intellectually stimulating research projects. Why code repositories instead of like, a video game? Why not harness the same manic energy into something that already existed? Like the kind of person who can be sincerely passionate about source code repositories, why can't that kind of person then be passionate about literally anything?
- alchemist1e9 3y ago
  I’m confused. What does this comment mean?
  - doctorpangloss 3y ago
    Let's say you had $12m, with the requirement that it be spent on an "interesting problem." What would you spend it on? These guys picked "distributed source code repositories, with a client idiosyncratically written in Rust and idiosyncratically built with a cryptocurrency idea." Why? I agree it's intellectually stimulating. But besides that, is there a reason they are particularly passionate about distributed source code repositories? Thing is, building UIs to clone GitHub is a huge grind. It's not anything anyone asked for, and there aren't any innovations there. Then building all this infrastructure and documentation is also a grind. Then this is a grind, and that is a grind, and you add up all this stuff that is kind of a grind. So you have this original... radical of an interesting idea, that is intellectually stimulating, but then you have to do all this work that is a grind, and it's like, why? So in my experience there's someone back there who has a certain manic energy, an ability to focus on doing this grind. There's no audience, so there are no bug reports, so it can sort of be all work channeled into product development just for the psychic satisfaction of pumping out GitHub UI clones, documentation, install scripts, infrastructure, documenting and evangelizing a "protocol" etc. I mean that's 90% of the work right? So why not harness that manic energy elsewhere? I'm not making a judgement, but I'm trying to figure out where the sincere excitement lies. Like if you are willing to put up with this grind, you can also contribute 1 feature to Git, which already exists, and that could get 1,000,000x the adoption and be 1,000,000x more impactful. I don't know. So it's not about that. It's not about growth growth growth, or whatever. If you have the manic energy to do any mundane task, like if the authors don't really care about which grind it is or how much it is, why not channel it into something else that maybe they are more passionate about? Like who is sincerely passionate about distributed source control, but hasn't already found their proverbial tribe in the many, many places where you can be excited about something like that? I bring up "video games" because it's stereotypically the thing the quiet kid who suddenly becomes very wealthy doing something meaningless (sorry, that's true about distributed source control) and then now, he has the money to do whatever he wants, so he funds a Diablo clone or whatever. It's only a half joke. But it's like, why? Why this? Of course one answer is that, for many people, they see $12m as Finally My Payday. They'll say or do anything to make that happen. If it happens to be that their lane is Authoring Idiosyncratic Computer Science Research Projects, that's what will be related to getting the payday. If that happens to be their lane because they look like a guy who plays Diablo and drinks energy drinks and is good at math and has manic energy to program cryptocurrencies... okay. That could be true. This is just a colorful comment. But I think there's something more sincere there, and that's what I'm asking for, and unfortunately there is a way to tell in writing if someone is or is not sincere, versus just trying to keep their payday, and that's the risk with exposing yourself to the community, and that's fine.
taminka 3y ago
i really like the website and application design, bc so many oss projects often completely falter w/ visual design, and while this is a superficial thing, beautiful design makes me want to interact w/ a project more :) also, i'm curious, what kind of adoption were you anticipating (some time ago and now) and did the result align with it?
pabs3 3y ago
Are you planning on adding native support for this to git?
- cloudhead 3y ago
  No plans to do so - firstly we’d have to rewrite it in C, and second it would be a big amount of code for the Git project to merge.
paul_h 3y ago
Your gossip protocol isn't the gossip protocol of Hashgraph/Hedera https://hedera.com/learning/hedera-hashgraph/what-is-gossip-about-gossip https://hedera.com/learning/hedera-hashgraph/what-is-gossip-..., is it?

Hi HN. I am the co-founder of the project. If you are interested in how the protocol works under the hood, start here: https://docs.radicle.xyz/ https://docs.radicle.xyz/ Docs are still WIP though.

throwaway220033 3y ago

How much budget was spent on Radicle, how many people did work on it, how long you've been building it and who is using it ?

cloudhead 3y ago
I won't reveal anything about our finances, but the current code base is a little under 2 years old. We've worked on the general problem for over 4 years in total though. The team is around 12 people, split between protocol, cli, tui, web and content. The product is set to launch this month, so we're just starting to onboard users, but many people in the community are already using it, and we've been using it internally for about a year.
- throwaway220033 3y ago
  My question wasn't about your "current codebase". It was about Radicle. It was launched 6 years ago, and for some reason it's always about to onboard the first users when crypto is on hype :) An idea doesn't take off -- totally normal, but how on earth can you fund Radicle for such a long time with no users? You can even throw it away and rewrite it! What's the source of funding for Radicle ? Asking because you seem to be best at getting the idea funded, not really actualizing it.
  - maninak 3y ago
    [dead]
  - marcus0x62 3y ago
    I might take your comment more seriously if you a) put your name behind it and b) dropped the “just asking questions bro” shtick when you obviously have some sort of axe to grind with this project.
    - throwaway220033 3y ago
      Good luck with your reasoning skillset
      - marcusb 3y ago
        Good luck with your trolling.
        throwaway220033 3y ago
        Asking source of funding is definitely trolling for sketchy crypto projects ;)
- gremlinunderway 3y ago
  Sorry, this is sketchy. If you're not clear about your revenue generation and finances, how do I know your project isn't just about harvesting as much user data as possible? Open-source projects obviously need to pay the bills, but if you're not clear on how you are achieving this or hoping to achieve this then there's really zero trust in using this.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    > there's really zero trust in using this It's peer to peer, anyone using the protocol is entitled to share and collect as much data as the protocol permits, and the founders have no more power than any other user. It's way less sketchy than anybody operating a server and asking you to trust that they're doing so responsibly--which is pretty much everybody. I don't think that everything can or should be made zero-trust. But if this can, then that's a win.
    - lkjdsklf 3y ago
      The alternative isn’t just some random person hosting a random server. It’s dealing with a company where you agree to a policy that describes how they can use your data. That means you have legal recourse if they violate that agreement. It also means you know who actually has your data which isn’t the case with these federated networks. Every entity that has your data on their server is another entity can use it in a way you don’t agree with On top of that, the alternative solutions are pretty clear how they make money.
      - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
        If you're powerful enough to have a lawyer for such things, then I guess that's a significant difference. But for most of us, your description of the alternative is indeed tantamount to "some random person hosting a random server". And you're right that federated designs are susceptible to bad behavior on the part of the server admin. I assume that's why the radicle protocol guide (https://docs.radicle.xyz/guides/protocol https://docs.radicle.xyz/guides/protocol) has a section differentiating P2P from federated. I don't know these people, maybe they are indeed up to something nefarious, but their design is inherently more trustworthy than federated or hosted solutions. If I must chose between transparency into finances and a nonhierarchical design which presents no high value targets for corruption to focus on, I'll take the better design over the financial transparency every time. If they turn out to be actually shady I can just configure my node not to talk to them or their friends and keep on using it, which is a lot more than can be said for most of the alternatives. Besides, it's a publishing platform. What is this "your data" you're talking about? The whole point is to spread it far and wide and to collect contributions from far and wide.

wokwokwok 3y ago

I read the documentation and this stands out to me: > Radicle repositories, which can be either public or private, can accommodate diverse content including source code, documentation, and arbitrary data sets. If this is, basically, a peer-to-peer file sharing application, what part of the protocol handles dealing with abuse? Otherwise, how is this different from the previous generation of file sharing applications (BitTorrent, winny, etc) where people just share arbitrary copyrighted content like movies, songs, software, etc? I feel like a few bad actors will ruin this? Can you partition your “personal” network somehow, so you can use it with absolute confidence your not participating in anything illegal?

zlatan_todoric 3y ago
you can choose which nodes you follow and which nodes you block - you can even decide that you will seed particular repos and not the entire node. (P.S. I am working at Radicle)
- wokwokwok 3y ago
  How would you know which nodes to block?
  - gsaslis 3y ago
    Any node with "problematic" behaviour can be blocked. But please note that you can also choose a "block everyone, follow just the good ones" (i.e. a selective) seeding policy [1]). [1] - https://docs.radicle.xyz/guides/seeder#a-selective-seeding-policy https://docs.radicle.xyz/guides/seeder#a-selective-seeding-p...
- 1oooqooq 3y ago
  so it's the same as cloning a repo locally, auto updating it, and exposing a mirror to the world? how will this not devolve into freeNet fiasco when popular repos start to go wild on content? edit: i see from the finance thread you will likely take on maven/npm/etc with crowd hosting+funding so I'm now more curious how cheap it will be for bad actors to push intentional malicious content, since now it's mostly about cost of having consensus over the mirrors

djha-skin 3y ago

I'm interested in this, but I noticed a base58 hash on the page. I'm not really interested in crypto. How much could I use this product without adopting crypto? Is this attached to some digital currency like ipfs or is it independent?

bordumb 3y ago
It’s independent. No need for crypto/digital currency whatsoever.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

badoongi 3y ago

Fascinating project! I'm curious what's the business model? it's listed on Crunchbase that you raised 12M$ so I'm assuming you do have plans to make money?

rapnie 3y ago
Curious as well. Searching around I found this documentation on their ecosystem [0], which may shed some light on the organization structure. It may be they are organized as a DAO? From the intro: > Radworks is a community dedicated to cultivating internet freedom. They do not shy away from cryptocurrency technology, though AFAICS that is not directly applied to the Radicle project. Another project of Radworks is Drips [1], to help fund open source. [0] https://docs.radworks.org/community/ecosystem https://docs.radworks.org/community/ecosystem [1] https://www.drips.network/ https://www.drips.network/

crabbone 3y ago

Hi. While not actively looking for replacement to proprietary services s.a. Github or GitLab, from time to time I'm asked about an alternative. I'm all for a distributed self-hosting solution, so Radicle is definitely hitting the mark here, however: > Linux or Unix based operating system. For the kind of project I have to assist with, this would be a deal-breaker. Since the code seems to be in Rust: do you intend to make it available to MS Windows? (I took it for granted that Mac OS is included in the Unix family, right?) If not straight-up support for MS Windows, then maybe an MSYS2 port? ---- To give some background: I'm not in charge of decisions like service vendor selection, and we are talking about a quasi-government organization with substantial open-source code base that is currently hosted on Github. I.e. sometimes I might have a chance to pitch a particular idea, but it's not up to me if the idea is accepted. They are quite motivated to make their work as resilient to private vendor policies as possible as well as try to "do good" in other ways (i.e. sustainability, breadth of the outreach etc. -- a typical European gov. org :) So, Github is... obviously in conflict with such policies. While there are other gov. agencies tasked with archiving or networking support, they seem to be woefully incompetent and / or outdated, as well as often falling for the vendor-laid traps (eg. the archiving service went all-in after DataBricks not even realizing it's a commercial closed-source product). So, I wouldn't have high hopes for the org. to be able to leverage a self-hosted solution. That's why a distributed solution looks great. However, they wouldn't be able to use a tool that doesn't work on major popular PC systems.

cloudhead 3y ago
Hey there. Yes, Windows support is something we'd like to have, but focusing on less OSes is helping us ship faster. In principle, there shouldn't be any issue in porting to Windows, but since no one on the team runs Windows it would have been hard to ensure things are working smoothly. If there is demand though, we will certainly start allocating time towards it. Radicle does work on macOS as well.
- miohtama 3y ago
  Windows Subsystem for Linux should alleviate these pains a lot.

k8svet 3y ago

Does this v3 iteration mean that if I pull Radicle from nixpkgs right now that I might be a major version behind?

cloudhead 3y ago
I am a nix noob, but we are now using flake[0], I don't know if that helps! [0]: https://app.radicle.xyz/nodes/seed.radicle.xyz/rad:z3gqcJUoA1n9HaHKufZs5FCSGazv5/tree/flake.nix https://app.radicle.xyz/nodes/seed.radicle.xyz/rad:z3gqcJUoA...
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  It would be neat to define the radicle repo as an input to the flake for a project which used radicle, that way you could add it to the devshell and you'd have pinned the version of radicle to your project such that running "nix flake update" updates that project's version of radicle along with updating its other dependencies (this, among other things, is what having a flake.nix at your repo root makes possible). A workflow of this sort doesn't need nixpkgs at all, but it does require that the nix flake input handler knows how to fetch from radicle repos. I'll try it a bit later today, but I'm guessing that this will require a change to nix before it works.
  - k8svet 3y ago
    Interesting. "fetchFromRadicle" would be insanely cool.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
      It seems like you can define radicle repos as flake inputs like so: https://gist.github.com/MatrixManAtYrService/b527300542b6fddc60cbd4fd96efd17c https://gist.github.com/MatrixManAtYrService/b527300542b6fdd... Although maybe this approach is cheating because it's relying on https and not some kind of hash-linked P2P magic (which would definitely require modifying nix to make work). I guess there's something similar to the IPFS gateway going on: somebody is hosting a bridge into radicle space. It would be interesting to get this working without dependency on that bridge. Anyhow, modify your project's flake accordingly and your version of `rad` will track with that radicle repo. No curl-to-bash required.

andrew_ 3y ago

My eyes! The goggles do nothing! [1] Please bring on some design and UX folks. The contrast literally strains the eyes. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWFF7ecArBk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWFF7ecArBk

johnhenry 3y ago

I'm curious if you (or anyone) had a chance to use Mango (https://github.com/axic/mango https://github.com/axic/mango) before it was abandoned?

cloudhead 3y ago
I do remember Mango! I didn't actually try it out, but we had experimented with Ethereum and IPFS in the past, and it wasn't a great fit for a code collab platform due to performance and cost.

gwd 3y ago

Looks really interesting! Some of us are allergic to "curl | bash" though; would you consider creating a homebrew package?

cloudhead 3y ago
Understandably! We are working on packages for Linux and macOS.

doctorpangloss 3y ago

There are lots of potential intellectually stimulating research projects. Why code repositories instead of like, a video game? Why not harness the same manic energy into something that already existed? Like the kind of person who can be sincerely passionate about source code repositories, why can't that kind of person then be passionate about literally anything?

alchemist1e9 3y ago
I’m confused. What does this comment mean?
- doctorpangloss 3y ago
  Let's say you had $12m, with the requirement that it be spent on an "interesting problem." What would you spend it on? These guys picked "distributed source code repositories, with a client idiosyncratically written in Rust and idiosyncratically built with a cryptocurrency idea." Why? I agree it's intellectually stimulating. But besides that, is there a reason they are particularly passionate about distributed source code repositories? Thing is, building UIs to clone GitHub is a huge grind. It's not anything anyone asked for, and there aren't any innovations there. Then building all this infrastructure and documentation is also a grind. Then this is a grind, and that is a grind, and you add up all this stuff that is kind of a grind. So you have this original... radical of an interesting idea, that is intellectually stimulating, but then you have to do all this work that is a grind, and it's like, why? So in my experience there's someone back there who has a certain manic energy, an ability to focus on doing this grind. There's no audience, so there are no bug reports, so it can sort of be all work channeled into product development just for the psychic satisfaction of pumping out GitHub UI clones, documentation, install scripts, infrastructure, documenting and evangelizing a "protocol" etc. I mean that's 90% of the work right? So why not harness that manic energy elsewhere? I'm not making a judgement, but I'm trying to figure out where the sincere excitement lies. Like if you are willing to put up with this grind, you can also contribute 1 feature to Git, which already exists, and that could get 1,000,000x the adoption and be 1,000,000x more impactful. I don't know. So it's not about that. It's not about growth growth growth, or whatever. If you have the manic energy to do any mundane task, like if the authors don't really care about which grind it is or how much it is, why not channel it into something else that maybe they are more passionate about? Like who is sincerely passionate about distributed source control, but hasn't already found their proverbial tribe in the many, many places where you can be excited about something like that? I bring up "video games" because it's stereotypically the thing the quiet kid who suddenly becomes very wealthy doing something meaningless (sorry, that's true about distributed source control) and then now, he has the money to do whatever he wants, so he funds a Diablo clone or whatever. It's only a half joke. But it's like, why? Why this? Of course one answer is that, for many people, they see $12m as Finally My Payday. They'll say or do anything to make that happen. If it happens to be that their lane is Authoring Idiosyncratic Computer Science Research Projects, that's what will be related to getting the payday. If that happens to be their lane because they look like a guy who plays Diablo and drinks energy drinks and is good at math and has manic energy to program cryptocurrencies... okay. That could be true. This is just a colorful comment. But I think there's something more sincere there, and that's what I'm asking for, and unfortunately there is a way to tell in writing if someone is or is not sincere, versus just trying to keep their payday, and that's the risk with exposing yourself to the community, and that's fine.

taminka 3y ago

i really like the website and application design, bc so many oss projects often completely falter w/ visual design, and while this is a superficial thing, beautiful design makes me want to interact w/ a project more :) also, i'm curious, what kind of adoption were you anticipating (some time ago and now) and did the result align with it?

pabs3 3y ago

Are you planning on adding native support for this to git?

cloudhead 3y ago
No plans to do so - firstly we’d have to rewrite it in C, and second it would be a big amount of code for the Git project to merge.

paul_h 3y ago

Your gossip protocol isn't the gossip protocol of Hashgraph/Hedera https://hedera.com/learning/hedera-hashgraph/what-is-gossip-about-gossip https://hedera.com/learning/hedera-hashgraph/what-is-gossip-..., is it?