Hacker News Reader

Comment by chaxor | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't it be wonderful if the most popular version control system was is decentralized? This is achievable, and is the correct solution.

This way your git repo could be located on: - GitHub - Your Closet (...) - UCLA's supercomputer - JBOD in Max Planck Institute (...) - GitLab

Doing this with a simple file with "[ipfs, github, gitlab]" on it would be revolutionary, especially for data version control, like nn weights or databases that are too large for git and cost too much on other services, as they would be free on ipf/torrent.

Then no one is phased by the inevitable failure of various companies.

View on HN

Git is already decentralized....

I think what GP was getting at is that the topology is still point-to-point, which tends to lead to a hub-and-spoke system. Hell, it’s even in the name: GitHUB. And fact is, this works out for most people, but it leads to some undesirable failure modes. Maybe we need, say, a “git-discover-remote” command…

So is cryptocurrency, but people still lose their money when exchanges get hacked. :D It's a cry for help. "Make decentralization as convenient as centralization!"

Not sure I understand the 'cry for help's comment. This has absolutely nothing to do with currency here. Associating decentralization with currency is idiotic and completely misses the point.

Well, actually on second thought it does: If ipfs or torrent can be used as a data version control backend, people no longer have to pay $600 to get the very popular and basic dataset of arxiv.org from AWS - under torrent or IPFS it's free. So basically decentralization here means running away from money hungry scams like AWS.

But not GitHub... :-)

Can't tell if this comment is sarcastic, but that's exactly what git is: Every clone of the repo is independent, and acts as a full backup. Likewise, a local repo can be pushed to various remotes, there is no inherent strong server-client coupling (even though it's often used in such a way).

Yes but not having to specify every single user who pulls the git repo from GitHub by IP address as an additional remote is a huge win no?

If "ipfs" can be added as a remote, and it automatically pulls from thousands of different devices without having to specify them, that's a pretty big win for redundancy right?

Not sure what's the big benefit here, backups? Otherwise, the more devs a repo has, the more redundancy exists anyway, if that's your main concern.

It becomes far more useful for making very large files generated from code (e.g. NN weights) easily downloadable without having to pay huge sums to storage providers ($600 to AWS for arxiv.org for example) - with IPFS it's completely FREE, because everyone with the file is using it and hosting it.

Additionally capabilities can be added in a Makefile form to use IPFS as the cache to ensure that a script that takes 3 months on a HPC/supercomputer to make a 3MB file only has to grab the file in a few seconds, even if not yet computed locally (e.g. you just computed it at work and do `git pull && ipfsmake`).

Ah yes, because version control is only about file storage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com