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Comment by dharma1 | Hacker News Reader

really looking forward to the next generation of distributed internet. I think those IPFS addresses need to be a bit more human readable though :)

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They have a related name service for friendly names, IPNS, however it's difficult to find more information about this service.

WOW, very difficult. Anyone have a link?

They talked a little about it in this video [1], but that's all I could find.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUVmypx9HGI

There isnt a doc available yet, but there are two key properties. The first is, you can create mutable IPFS archives by generating a keypair; the pubkey becomes the identifier, and new versions are signed by the private key.

The second property is, you can use DNS TXT records to provide shortnames that map to the pubkey (or, I believe, to a static hash-id also). Run 'dig txt ipfs.io' to see an example.

EDIT: this is also helpful https://github.com/ipfs/examples/tree/master/examples/ipns

And it works really great! I've been serving my personal web page for months now at /ipns/pablo.rauzy.name :).

The only catch is that you need to republish regularly (I do it using cron two times a day) otherwise the IPNS do not work after some time, but I'm not sure it still is the case.

You put the human readable part underneath the hash, like `/ipfs/QmPJnEf5933cXteZmaMJkphCW1CtpcMMVx7N6rUr8cZAok/jquery/3.0.0/jquery.js`. In this case, the hash represents a directory of everything from CDNJS and the `jquery/3.0.0/jquery.js` part is a file in that directory. For added readability, there's a thin layer of mutability called IPNS that can map a domain name to a hash, so you could point `cdnjs.com` to `QmPJnEf5933cXteZmaMJkphCW1CtpcMMVx7N6rUr8cZAok` and not have to remember that long ugly hash.

Same here; this decentralized and distributed internet stuff is exciting. I agree the ipfs addresses are a bit long and kinda illegible...I once thought that maybe there could be future self-hosted (quick-n-easy-to-roll-out) url shorteners, but then figured these would be ephemeral at best, which might sort of undo the content-address-ability of the ipfs content...and then my brain began to hurt, so finished my beer, and went back to chilling. ;-)

You use something like namecoin to provide a content name registry. (Once it's supported)

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