HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

tbv

152 karma · joined October 28, 2016

Co-founder of the Beaker browser

beakerbrowser.com

twitter.com/taravancil github.com/taravancil taravancil.com

submissionscomments
tbv··on A collaborative shopping list built on Dat
Super cool! Here’s my local key!

bcfaf7738215b4878b05ea51d9f31788838bbe4c8079a885d328b448d22881cd

tbv··on $1M to build decentralized social networks
To add to that, here's a whole list of websites and apps built with Dat

https://github.com/beakerbrowser/explore

tbv··on Time to rebuild the web?
Beaker dev here. Dat is a protocol that can anyone can implement, and Beaker is a tool that implements Dat in the browser. We built Beaker as a demonstration of what becomes possible when you put a peer-to-peer protocol in the browser, with the hope that other browsers will someday follow along in our footsteps.
tbv··on Time to rebuild the web?
Beaker dev here, quick question: did you try our beta release? We've done a ton of work in the past few months to make it less opaque and to freshen up our UIs. Would love to hear your thoughts on the beta if you have the time!

https://github.com/beakerbrowser/beaker/releases

tbv··on Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher
> this of course somewhat defies the point of it being p2p

Beaker/Hashbase dev here. Not quite, imo. The key difference is that a service like Hashbase has no special authorship priveleges (unlike Google Docs or Dropbox), and is instead an agnostic peer. We think that's an important distinction.

tbv··on ActivityPub: decentralized social networking protocol
We're discussing that situation here:

https://github.com/beakerbrowser/beaker/issues/820

We have two different p2p social feed apps that are compatible, but as we plan for future development we're considering ActivityPub/ActivityStreams

tbv··on Leap: An Online Community for Women
Can you support alternate forms of identity verification? I'd like to join, but I don't have a Facebook account.
tbv··on Max Ogden steps down as Dat project lead over sex abuse allegations
Hey everyone. I’m part of the Beaker browser team (we use the Dat protocol). As Max’s colleague, it’s been extremely disappointing to learn about his behavior, but I’m proud of how the Dat team/community has stepped up in the last week.

Here’s my statement on the situation and how the Dat community is moving forward:

https://taravancil.com/blog/dat-leadership-changes/

tbv··on How Merkle Trees Enable the Decentralized Web
Not quite ELI5, but Blahah explained how Dat handles changes below:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15541392

tbv··on How Merkle Trees Enable the Decentralized Web
It was only a 10 minute talk, so I had to cut something out ;)

Blahah’s comment above may interest you:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15541392

tbv··on Peer-to-peer social networking with Rotonde and Beaker
Hey! I’m one of the creators of Beaker. Beaker is built with Electron, a wrapper around Chromium, and it doesn’t include any UI elements like tabs or the URL bar. We made those ourselves, and have taken inspiration from a number of browsers.

What you see here is actually the “old” version of Beaker - a lot has changed in the upcoming release. Here are a few tweets with screenshots if you want to see a preview:

https://twitter.com/taravancil/status/906583737789542400

https://twitter.com/pfrazee/status/910988429881675782

https://twitter.com/taravancil/status/918232881641779201

tbv··on Evolving the Dropbox Brand
This makes me sad. I can barely read that new typeface. If I were on the market for a files backup solution, I'd want the product to communicate robustness and reliability. This combination of whimsy and the site simply not working sends a bad signal.
tbv··on HTTP is obsolete. It's time for the Distributed Web (2015)
A bit of that, a bit of new people realizing the potential and giving it their best shot. I've spoken to a lot of people who say that Freenet was fun, but just too damn slow to be usable.
tbv··on Dat: non-profit, secure, and distributed package manager for data
That’s something we think about a lot, and decentralization isn’t a silver bullet solution to data loss, but I do think it’s more resilient than what we typically do now.

To counter that, you can take measures to mirror important datasets with a dedicated peer. It requires effort, but it at least makes it much, much harder for example, for a government agency to take down public data without warning.

tbv··on Dat: non-profit, secure, and distributed package manager for data
To draw a quick contrast between Dat and BitTorrent, BitTorrent magnet links are static, meaning if you change the content, you get an entirely new magnet link. Dat archives (a networked directory, essentially) are mutable, so you can publish modifications at a consistent address.

I’m not familiar with DebTorrent, but if you’re interested to learn more about the innards of Dat, this post by pfraze is a good place to start:

https://beakerbrowser.com/2017/06/19/cryptographically-secur...

tbv··on Dat: non-profit, secure, and distributed package manager for data
That’s correct. But the protocol author mafintosh is currently working on a major new release which introduces multi-writer capabilities.
tbv··on Dat: non-profit, secure, and distributed package manager for data
A blockchain is an over-engineered solution to the problems we’re trying to solve. Blockchains provide shared global state. We don’t need that.

https://beakerbrowser.com/docs/inside-beaker/other-technolog...

tbv··on Dat: non-profit, secure, and distributed package manager for data
I'm one of the creators of the Beaker browser[1] and the reason we use Dat is that as a p2p protocol, it offers a lot of neat properties, including making datasets more resilient. As long as one peer on the network is hosting a dataset, it will be reachable, even if the original author has stopped hosting it.

I won't speak authoritatively on behalf of the Dat team, but I believe one of their goals is to make it difficult for public scientific datasets to be lost, and data living on a centralized server is particularly vulnerable to that.

1. https://github.com/beakerbrowser/beaker

tbv··on Things cryptocurrency enthusiasts probably won't tell you
I suspect that the regulatory counter to sleek “get in now” marketing pages has to look something like requiring accreditation for investors.

Do you think it’s possible to square the desires to make startup investing accessible to retail investors and to prevent fraud? If so, how?

tbv··on Why Cutting Carbs Is So Tough
Ribeye steaks, pork, chicken, and other fatty meats are also delicious! One does not need to be an ascetic in order to give up carbs :)
tbv··on Show HN: Deploy dathttpd on now.sh
If you're interested, there are a actually a few other sites being hosted with Dat!

You can view them over https or if you download Beaker [1], you can view the peer-to-peer version of the site with the dat:// protocol.

- taravancil.com - creationix.com - pfrazee.hashbase.io

1. https://beakerbrowser.com/docs/install

tbv··on Mice fed a time-restricted, high-fat diet show reduced metabolic disease (2012)
> At the end of the day losing weight is about changing the amount of calories a person consumes vs. what they use.

Over an extended period, yes, this bears out because the law of thermodynamics. But the question is - can people adhere to a calorie-restricted diet long enough to see meaningful results? More importantly, will they simultaneously be able to build muscle and maintain normal bodily functions (thyroids tend to stop functioning normally during extended calorie restriction, especially when fat intake is low)?

You will have a much easier time achieving a healthy body composition and feeling satisfied while eating a high fat low carb diet, than you would eating the same amount of calories on a low fat high carb diet.

I say that the "calories in, calories out" approach to dieting is problematic because it's simply not as effective as switching to a HFLC diet. It makes building muscle tissue difficult, it encourages miserable dieting tactics, and taken to the extreme (which many people do) is a threat to a person's health.

tbv··on Mice fed a time-restricted, high-fat diet show reduced metabolic disease (2012)
The "a calorie is a calorie" approach to diet and health has been thoroughly debunked.

Our bodies metabolize carbs, protein, and fat, very differently. If a calorie is a calorie is a calorie, then we need to be able to explain why two people eating the same amount of calories per day, but one eating a high fat, low carb diet, and the other a low fat high carb diet see starkly different outcomes. All things equal except the composition of their diet, the person on the HF diet will stay lean and feel consistently satiated, while the LF person will put on more fat and feel hungry far more frequently than the HF.

IMO, the claim that all calories are created equally is the most damaging "science" that's been put forth as common knowledge about dieting.

tbv··on Lyft adds a new app for drivers
I can't speak for jngreenlee, but a lot of people are uncomfortable with Uber's business tactics and ethics. Their HR team allegedly sidestepped one employee's very serious sexual harassment complaints, they've allegedly been complicit in using stolen LiDAR IP, along with a whole host of other shady things they've done in competition with Lyft.
tbv··on Dat – Distributed Dataset Synchronization and Versioning
Yeah, IPFS + IPNS is effectively on par with Dat archive mutability, but mutability being built-in to Dat + its verifiable history log is particularly well-suited to building peer-to-peer websites
tbv··on Dat – Distributed Dataset Synchronization and Versioning
What do you think it sacrifices? IPFS is more focused on static blob addressing while Dat focuses on data sources, and in that sense, there’s a single authority over a dataset. But I see that as a positive, since mutability is pretty valuable.

TBH, I'm not sure how a site can work without mutability.

tbv··on The Uber Bombshell About to Drop
I believe you when you say you've had a good experience with Ride Austin, but I think you've been lucky. I've never been able to successfully book a ride with either Ride Austin or Fasten :\
tbv··on Researchers have found more evidence that butter is heart-healthy
There is quite a bit of evidence to support that a diet rich in animal fats, and poor in vegetable oils has many advantages, including higher HDL cholesterol, lower LDL cholesterol, and improved thyroid function.
tbv··on Ask HN: What is your experience switching away from QWERTY keyboard?
It took me one day to adjust and to be as fast as I was at typing on a qwerty layout. In that one day though, I was very strict with myself. In addition to doing a couple of hours of typing drills, I used Dvorak for everything, writing code, emails, using twitter, and did not let myself take a break, even though I wanted to switch back to qwerty so badly.
tbv··on The Problem with AMP
Cloudflare just launched an accelerated mobile links project which addresses most of your criticisms.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/accelerated-mobile/