Hacker News Reader

Comment by ksajadi | Hacker News Reader

I have an honest question, but am afraid that I get downvoted for reasons that perhaps relate to my question: Why is this on top of HN? Is it a novel invention by Tailscale? Are they the first company who’ve done it? Are they used by so many people (like GitHub) that this will have other implications? Does the article go to technical details of their implementation that relates to the dev crowd?

Please, educate me, those who upvoted it.

View on HN

Mainly because Tailscale is popular with the HN crowd. Many people use it for their personal home networks, and some companies do to (we do at Instacart).

The nice thing about this is it means you can invite anyone into your network without requiring them to have a Google/Apple/Github account. They just need a phone. It also means you can be much more confident inviting these people because they are unlikely to get phished due to a crappy password.

One of the common complaints in HN comments about Tailscale is they don't want to trust Google/Apple/Github/etc for various reasons. This removes that need.

> Many people use it for their personal home networks, and some companies do to

To nitpick, you can't use just tailscale, you need to use tailscale and some authentication provider.

People love Tailscale, and passkeys are relatively new, so a major authentication improvement for a well-loved service that is based on a new authentication mechanism not lots of companies support yet is … interesting. I think it’s as simple as that.

I think it's 99% just the former.

I've seen a blog post describing a very elementary better way of storing IP addresses upvoted and praised.

I've seen people agree and fawn over the idea they were using a flat JSON file everywhere initially.

Then they somehow discovered a 20 year old DB, and some people treat it like the second coming of Christ.

None of this is to insult Tailscale, or their works, or their blogs. People love it and it's obviously a nice product.

The fandom here around them and what gets upvoted and praised just seems cultlike at times.

I dno; people used to say that about Dropbox in the early days. Clearly people like what Tailscale is doing, and find it interesting. The upvotes are about what’s interesting to the community, so seems fine and not cult-like to me.

It's a product a lot of people use and it is nice to be informed about its development. At least this news entry is not the n-th "here's my top life advice" from a 30 years-old.

I don't really know anything about Tailscale. But I really dislike passwords — I think they're very frustrating for users to use, and it feels like we should have found a technological solution to this problem by now. Passkeys seem to be a solution to this problem, but it's up to people to adopt them. I upvoted this post so that others might see a company implementing passkeys, and that this might encourage them to implement passkeys too. Once we have widespread enough support for passkeys, maybe we might finally ditch passwords.

(Or, maybe passkeys are bad, I don't know, but we need to have a conversation in order to find a better solution.)

> maybe we might finally ditch passwords.

I sure hope not.

I am 100% in favor of alternative solutions for those who struggle with passwords, but I also want the option to continue to use passwords.

There is obviously a big marketing effort from Tailscale going on. It doesn't bother me too much, it's not like they are raw astroturfing and drowning HN, a lot of people are happy and engage with the posts. Personally I don't like it and won't use their products, but it's easy to ignore here.

personally, I've been wanting to try passkeys and this is the first provider I'm aware of that will let me, so that is newsworthy to me

Reply on news.ycombinator.com