When comparing project costs, there is a difference that pops up that is universally glossed over in every handling that I’ve seen. In discussion comparing the cost of a hyperloop route and a high-speed rail route between San Francisco and Los Angeles , there is never a distinction made between hyperloop being privately funded and the high-speed rail being government funded, and there is indeed a very big difference between the two that comes down to accountability for using funds constructively and efficiently.

I have a set of git repos published to IPFS that I talked about before here. Since that post a month ago, the repos have grown in count and size to the point that it is no longer feasible to use the automatic publish as it was. I have made one change and found that I am required to make further changes for it to remain usable.

The change already made is to no longer run the publish from the post-update hook and to instead have that create a file in a spool directory and have a separate process monitor the spool directory and launch the publish script. This has the effect of the git push master to return quickly (it only needs to create a file).

Today I checked in on cjdns to see where the project was. It looked about like it did the last time I checked it several months ago. While reading doc/bugs/policy.md I noticed a link that went to archive.org because the original site was dead due to domain name expiration. Thinking about how IPFS could have kept sites like this alive even when the original owner abandoned the site, I dove down a rabbit hole and ended up with a mirror of the site.

Because I think that the engineering problems facing hyperloop can all be overcome, I’m going to discuss several criticisms I found on the web and ways they can be overcome. I’m only going to look at serious criticisms and not hand-wavy “this couldn’t possibly work!” criticisms that can’t be answered anyways.

After scanning a couple articles on the topic, they all seem to be from 2016 shortly after the white-paper was released and nothing of substance more recent. If you know of such an article, please email me with a link.

I was reading thru the latest posts at No Tech Magazine and saw this article on designing web pages to last a decade. A lot of what is covered very much applies to websites on IPFS. Here is the list from the article (which you should read):

1. Return to vanilla HTML/CSS
2. Don’t minimize that HTML
3. Prefer one page over several
4. End all forms of hot-linking
5. Stick with the 13 web safe fonts +2
6. Obsessively compress your images
7. Eliminate the broken URL risk

Of these, #1, #2, #4, #5 and #6 absolutely apply to IPFS sites. I am not sold on packing everything into a single page (#3) or completely eliminating site generators (#1), as can be seen by this multi-page website generated by hugo. #7 doesn’t quite translate to IPFS sites because the built-in replication can make the site available when the source server is down.

Yesterday, I threw together a proof-of-concept comment system for use with IPFS websites. You can find the demo here. I expect this link to become unreachable once I transition from a proof-of-concept to a production system.

How it Works

The comment system consists of the following parts:

• The web page with comment submission form. This is hosted on IPFS using IPNS for mutability
• comments.js that contains the existing comments.
• pubsub-comment.js contains functions for submitting comments with AJAX and updating the static page to include existing comments
• A pubsub relay server. I’m using NGINX to proxy three API functions from an IPFS node
• Comment server that subscribes to a pubsub channel, collects comments and packages them into comments.js

When you reload the page, the contents of comments.js is used to populate the comments section. It does a probe to determine available relays for comment submission. The script as written prioritizes 127.0.0.1:5001.

I came across another article today blasting the idea of hyperloop and doing so with terrible arguments. It was honestly painful to read. The article, if you can call it that, was written in a way that I can only call screaming at the reader, absolutely certain in itself that it was right. After getting past that, the article essentially came down to because high speed rail exists elsewhere in the world, that America should have only rail and get rid of as many cars as possible, and that Americans are either greedy, lazy, inefficient, or more likely, all three, because they don’t already have high speed rail, and that they should just fix that and be like the more enlightened Europeans and Asians with the electrified rail and dense cities.

Finished the NAS system maintenance that I’ve been putting off. Removed the faulting hard drive and installed the 8TB into its spot, removed and replaced the thermal paste on the CPU, replaced the CPU cooler (the hold downs broke while it was removed), and buttoned everything back up. After cranking up the CPU load on the system with IPFS Follow Cluster and Folding@Home, the CPU is holding at 35-36°C with 90-95% CPU utilization. I’ll be watching it over the next couple of hours to see if that holds before returning it to the server closet.

I recently came across this site that talks about a group in the Netherlands who combined a Nickel-Iron battery with an alkali electrolyser. For the cost of a membrane and a couple of fittings, you get an electrolyser. I think this makes a lot of sense. Nickel-Iron batteries will last a long time before having to be refurbished, and the hydrogen can be used for seasonal energy storage (my preference is methane, others want straight hydrogen or ammonia).

About 26 hours later, and somewhere between 10 and 14 hours of programming in a language I had not used before, I have a libipfs at a Proof of Concept stage. I have a program written in crystal (because I am familiar with it and it lets you right C bindings in crystal) that initializing an IPFS node, connects to the bootstrap nodes, and downloads the CID from the ipfs-as-a-library example. I think this could expand into something useful because most programming languages have a way to call C functions.