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Comment by bhiggins | Hacker News Reader

hey sorry to burst your bubble but this is pointless.

This post is a great example of being "a hater". You aren't disagreeing about the application of a tool to a problem, you are dismissing all opportunity for anyone to enjoy or get value out of the item in question. Since the creators put effort in to creating this, it at least has value to them. So do the people that have upvoted it. So you're dismissing their opinion without offering any information, which is not very helpful.

fine. here's some information, then: you're promoting cargo cult thinking.

I share the GP's feeling, although not his short-sightedness. I would have made the same comment in a different way, namely:

I have no use for this and can't imagine where I would, so I can't give you any feedback. However, I'm sure that some people will find it useful and dream up new things to do with it, so good job!

EDIT: Actually! I think that this would be a great way to persist data in static, local html documents. You can probably create a full-blown web app with this in just HTML which someone can unzip and run in their browser.

Your EDIT hit the nail on the head — that's exactly what I had in mind when I wrote this. I plan on writing some web apps that can run from anywhere as a pile of static files, using this as their backing store.

Nothing is pointless! Everything is an adventure. :)

Exactly. I was trying to think how to build a chat program on this, and establish keys between two chatees for communicating, but it seems impossible to make a public channel/key for registering interest in chatting in the first place, without using an untrusted readwrite channel/key.

An append only store might solve it, with a key that is globally known. Some sort of broadcast channel. An append only, with limited size appends, and cleared at regular intervals.

Good challenge! Here's a start:

Say you and I want to chat with each other. We both pick a random key to store our messages in. Let's call those key[markchristian] and key[heretoo]. Each of those has a read-only version -- readonly[markchristian] and readonly[heretoo]. I'll post the key readonly[markchristian] to "markchristian-to-heretoo". You post the key readonly[heretoo] to "heretoo-to-markchristian". Our chat clients can just poll those keys, looking for new messages -- whatever hand-wavy format we want to have.

Problems: 1. Requires us to agree to chat ahead of time and know each other's usernames. 2. Nothing to stop a malicious third-party from putting a different readonly key at the "heretoo-to-markchristian" pointer keys.

your enthusiasm is infectious in a bad way.

I'm with you bhiggins

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