Top all-time · #2691
Chris Ball
Personal blog · blog.printf.net/articlesprogrammingsystems
Chris Ball's personal blog at blog.printf.net covers programming and systems. Since 2010, 28 different Hacker News readers have linked it 53 times, most often “GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub (2015)”. The last post was in 2015, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (23) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Chris Ball's blog is mainly linked for its GitTorrent announcement, a decentralized GitHub built on BitTorrent and a DHT. Other posts cover WebRTC signalling and Go and chess AI.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 23 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub (2015)10 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2018-06-05
- GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub9 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2015-05-29
- WebRTC without a signaling server5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2013-05-17
- /articles/2012/02/23/computers-are-very-good-at-the-game-of-go/2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2014-03-26
- A Robot for Timo – cheap telepresence for remote teams2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-03-19
- Technical talks should be recorded2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-05-22
What Hacker News says?
I know of two such projects from HN: GitTorrent and Radicle. The former seems abandoned but the latter is still being developed. Radicle: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19367916 Gittorrent: https://blog.printf.net/articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gitto...
Comment linking /articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gittorrent-a-decentralized-github/
on “YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA”Submitted GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub as a story · 1038 points
HN discussionIt's possible and a proof of concept does exist but it's no more than that currently: http://blog.printf.net/articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gittor...
Comment linking /articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gittorrent-a-decentralized-github/
on “Ad blocking is under attack”Submitted GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub (2015) as a story · 402 points
HN discussionGitTorrent: http://blog.printf.net/articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gittor... Imagine a world where GitTorrent is fully developed, includes support for issue tracking, and has a nice GUI client that makes the experience on-par with browsing github.com. I mention this not as an "Everybody bail out of GitHub and run to GitTorrent!!!" sort of statement, because I believe GitHub's response here was excellent and confidenc…
Comment linking /articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gittorrent-a-decentralized-github/
on “CocoaPods downloads max out five GitHub server CPUs”Submitted GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub (2015) as a story · 314 points
HN discussionNeat! I used to be a kernel maintainer, and had a similar setup going inside emacs with gnus, and dvc-git commands bound to keys to apply patches. Here's an old blog post about some of it: https://blog.printf.net/articles/2010/10/04/git-patches-in-g... Gnus was too slow, but worse, emacs is single-threaded, so e.g. polling for new mail in the background blocked the rest of the editor while it happened. I never under…
Comment linking /articles/2010/10/04/git-patches-in-gnus/
on “Aerc – An email client that runs in the terminal”Submitted GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub (2015) as a story · 75 points
HN discussionYeah! I mentioned the same sentiment in this 2012 post when it was becoming clear that computers were reaching human strength at Go via brute force: http://blog.printf.net/articles/2012/02/23/computers-are-ver...
Comment linking /articles/2012/02/23/computers-are-very-good-at-the-game-of-go/
on “DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment”Submitted A Robot for Timo – cheap telepresence for remote teams as a story · 20 points
HN discussionI assume you're suggesting something like including such a timestamp in the commit message? If that's the case, that makes a lot of sense to me. It would be cool to have a tool to automate this. Or something like GitTorrent[0] might do the trick if it had wider adoption. [0] http://blog.printf.net/articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gittor...
Comment linking /articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gittorrent-a-decentralized-github/
on “Our Team Won Startup Weekend and All We Got Was a Shitty New Boss”Submitted Computers are very good at the game of Go as a story · 12 points
HN discussionA decentralized key-value store that is tolerant to an active adversary is not a "very simple problem". A block-chain is actually a reasonable solution for this, see [1]. Not to say it's perfect, for sure. [1]: http://blog.printf.net/articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gittor...
Comment linking /articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gittorrent-a-decentralized-github/
on “GNU Ring 1.0 released”Submitted Computers that aren't computers as a story · 11 points
HN discussionRelavant: GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub ( http://blog.printf.net/articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gittor... ) The repo is at ... https://github.com/cjb/GitTorrent , so just clone that and ... oh ...
Comment linking /articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gittorrent-a-decentralized-github/
on “GitHub Outage”Submitted WebRTC without a signaling server as a story · 10 points
HN discussionI don't think you're missing anything, except maybe just that closed-source is the default on macOS and Windows so the marginal loss of safety from one more closed-source privileged app isn't so high there. For the moment maybe the best we can do is trying to use apps with screen sharing support included, e.g. Visual Studio Code's sharing. Your mention of VNC reminded me of some work I did in 2008 :) https://blog.pr…
Comment linking /articles/2009/01/26/multi-pointer-remote-desktop/
on “Show HN: Screen – screen sharing for remote work, by the cofounder of Screenhero”Submitted GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub (2015) as a story · 5 points
HN discussion> You will need [...] and drumroll - a server. Actually, you can make poor human to do signalling servers work: http://blog.printf.net/articles/2013/05/17/webrtc-without-a-...
Comment linking /articles/2013/05/17/webrtc-without-a-signaling-server/
on “A real world guide to WebRTC”Submitted Technical talks should be recorded as a story · 2 points
HN discussionyou may be interested in Gittorrent. I'll link to the recent HN discussion, since the original article was from 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17234498 original article: https://blog.printf.net/articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gitto...
Comment linking /articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gittorrent-a-decentralized-github/
on “Phabricator – GitHub Alternative written in PHP used by the Wikimedia Foundation”Submitted Technical talks should be recorded as a story · 1 points
HN discussionFlightCar - Lead Front-end Developer - Boston/Cambridge, MA FlightCar is the world's first p2p car sharing company to operate at the airport. We're a YC company that's raised $6m+ in funding. We give travelers free airport parking by renting out their cars to others. Everything's insured up to $1m. We're funded by General Catalyst, Softbank Capital, Brian Chesky, Ryan Seacrest, and others. We're looking for a Lead F…
Comment linking /articles/2014/03/18/a-robot-for-timo/
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2014)”Submitted The Future of JavaScript as a story · 1 points
HN discussionFlightCar - Lead Front-end Developer - Boston/Cambridge, MA FlightCar is the world's first p2p car sharing company to operate at the airport. We're a YC company that's raised $6m+ in funding. We give travelers free airport parking by renting out their cars to others. Everything's insured up to $1m. We're funded by General Catalyst, Softbank Capital, Brian Chesky, Ryan Seacrest, and others. We're looking for a Lead F…
Comment linking /articles/2014/03/18/a-robot-for-timo/
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2014)”Yes, gittorrent: https://blog.printf.net/articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gitto... HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9625840
Comment linking /articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gittorrent-a-decentralized-github/
on “YouTube-dl source code encoded in two images”> WebRTC still uses central servers to establish connections WebRTC without a signalling server: http://blog.printf.net/articles/2013/05/17/webrtc-without-a-...
Comment linking /articles/2013/05/17/webrtc-without-a-signaling-server/
on “Skype's Principal Architect explains why peer-to-peer was eliminated”The best thing you can do is probably to donate a significant percentage of your income to an effective international aid organization, like VillageReach or Oxfam. The money you're earning performing your standard job is simply able to produce more good than having you fly around the world attempting to do things to help (usually in an inferior way to locals) would. I've been doing this for a few years: http://blog.…
Comment linking /articles/2010/11/26/giving-thanks
on “Ask HN: How can I do something meaningful?”> Are there any example projects using this? The only project I know is gittorrent ( https://blog.printf.net/articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gitto... ), but it hasn't gone anywhere.
Comment linking /articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gittorrent-a-decentralized-github/
on “Dragonfly: Alibaba P2P file distribution system”There was GitTorrent in 2015: https://blog.printf.net/articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gitto... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31534936 There are also multiple git-remote-ipfs projects on GitHub.
Comment linking /articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gittorrent-a-decentralized-github/
on “Gitlab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash”
