Hacker News: b_fiive

New comment by b_fiive in "Bijou64: A variable-length integer encoding"

b_fiive — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:14:01 +0000

sup steb, this is expede's work!

New comment by b_fiive in "Noq: n0's new QUIC implementation in Rust"

b_fiive — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 03:40:58 +0000

Now, see. that's what I said as well. But the rest of the team was tired of me trying to name the hosted iroh "n0des", which I'm now ready to admit was a stretch. And so now here we are spelling n0q as noq. c'est la vie.

New comment by b_fiive in "Noq: n0's new QUIC implementation in Rust"

b_fiive — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 19:04:00 +0000

It's been a draft for a long while, and was only recently approved

New comment by b_fiive in "Noq: n0's new QUIC implementation in Rust"

b_fiive — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 19:02:55 +0000

disclosure: I work on the team behind noq. Can't emphasize enough that the quinn maintainers are really lovely people, and quinn is an excellent project.

New comment by b_fiive in "Willow – Protocols for an uncertain future [video]"

b_fiive — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 02:34:28 +0000

worm-blossom crew is just a delightful bunch of humans doing really great work

New comment by b_fiive in "Iroh-blobs"

b_fiive — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 01:43:54 +0000

delighted to hear! iroh-blobs is Rüdiger's love letter to BLAKE3, and hot dang has he taken this piece of machinery quite far. Much of this is covered in the post, but some highlights:

* fetch any sub-sequence of bytes, verified on send & receive * fetch sub-sequences of bytes in collections (sets of blobs / directories) * store on disk, inlining small blobs into the database for faster lookups * fan in from disk & the network * "multi-provider" fan in that can re-plan a fetch on the fly * should land support for WASM compilation (browsers) soon! https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh-blobs/pull/187

We're hard at work on making the API more ergonomic, but as a foundational protocol it's truly impressive. Rudi has been working with the BLAKE3 authors on both perf testing & the hazmat API.

disclosure: I work on iroh

New comment by b_fiive in "Dumb Pipe"

b_fiive — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 22:48:56 +0000

Yep! It's totally usable for games, and used in a few! One of my favs is the godot engine plugin: https://github.com/tipragot/godot-iroh

QUIC can do both reliable & unreliable streams, as can iroh

New comment by b_fiive in "Dumb Pipe"

b_fiive — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 20:14:09 +0000

sibling comment with links to docs is the more accurate, but to summarize, it's some of both:

* all connections are always e2ee (even when traffic flows through a relay)

* relays are both for connection negotiation, and as a fallback when a direct connection isn't possible

* initial packet is always sent through the relay to keep a fast time-to-first-byte, while a direct connection is negotiated in parallel. typical connections send a few hundred bytes over the relay & the rest of the connection lifetime is direct

New comment by b_fiive in "Dumb Pipe"

b_fiive — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 20:08:57 +0000

yes, to an extent. It will time out if the connection completely dies for more than the timeout interval, but all connections are designed to survive changes to network changes like IP address or network interface (eg: switching from WiFi to ethernet, or cellular)

New comment by b_fiive in "Dumb Pipe"

b_fiive — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 20:07:35 +0000

same team behind dumbpipe makes sendme, which is much closer to this use case! https://github.com/n0-computer/sendme

New comment by b_fiive in "Dumb Pipe"

b_fiive — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 17:39:00 +0000

it's p2p. dumbpipe is hardcoded to use a public set of relays that we run for free (we being number 0, the team that make iroh & dumbpipe).

we can definitely add a config argument to skip the hardcoded relays & provide custom ones!

New comment by b_fiive in "Dumb Pipe"

b_fiive — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 17:31:10 +0000

Thanks for the heads up! We've fixed: https://github.com/n0-computer/dumbpipe.dev/pull/11

New comment by b_fiive in "Iroh: A library to establish direct connection between peers"

b_fiive — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 00:22:41 +0000

less configuration. more reliable. less pure p2p (iroh uses relays)

New comment by b_fiive in "Iroh: A library to establish direct connection between peers"

b_fiive — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 21:41:50 +0000

ah very sorry, I can see how this isn't all that clear. In the comment you've mentioned when I say "custom protocol" I mean a custom QUIC ALPNs: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7301

When we talk to mainline it's for discovery, which is separate from iroh connections, which always uses QUIC. Specifically: our fork of quinn, an implementation of QUIC in rust. Iroh is tightly coupled to quinn, and isn't swappable. Getting no_std support for us basically boils down to "can we get quinn to support no_std?". For that, see: https://github.com/quinn-rs/quinn/issues/579

New comment by b_fiive in "Iroh: A library to establish direct connection between peers"

b_fiive — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 19:39:46 +0000

yep totally doable. You'd use iroh configured with mainline, Then write a custom protocol for the grpc bit: https://www.iroh.computer/docs/protocols/writing

We use this a bunch for writing rpc protocols on iroh: https://github.com/n0-computer/irpc , but there's no reason you couldn't write one with grpc.

New comment by b_fiive in "Iroh: A library to establish direct connection between peers"

b_fiive — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 19:37:03 +0000

keys are always ED25519, we use raw public key bytes, without prefixes.

Applications are more than welcome to use prefixes, but the use of ED25519 is not configurable

New comment by b_fiive in "Iroh: A library to establish direct connection between peers"

b_fiive — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 19:34:24 +0000

Yeah, no_std is going to be very hard. We need a no_std implementation of QUIC that can be wielded by mere mortals first, which I don't think we'll be able to start on for at least a year.

Right now we can get down to an ESP32, which we think is a decent start.

New comment by b_fiive in "Iroh: A library to establish direct connection between peers"

b_fiive — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 19:19:38 +0000

There's no reason this _can't_ be built. The thing that's missing is simulating a raw UDP socket.

We could adapt the pattern from dumbpipe wrapping a TCP listner: https://github.com/n0-computer/dumbpipe?tab=readme-ov-file#t... which is exactly the "here join this ticket" you're describing

New comment by b_fiive in "Iroh: A library to establish direct connection between peers"

b_fiive — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 19:08:33 +0000

(disclosure: I work on iroh): you're selling yourself short! All of this is accurate, except for maybe the BGP stuff :)

Dumb Pipe & Sendme me are indeed demos, we do provide a set of default, public relays to use for free. The relay code is also open source, and if you want to pay us we can run a network for you.

We try to provide a few different options for discovery, the one we think has the most general utility is a custom DNS server, but both local mDNS and Bittorrent Mainline are also pluggable options.

New comment by b_fiive in "Iroh: A library to establish direct connection between peers"

b_fiive — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 19:03:28 +0000

hey I work on this! AMA!