I agree that centralization is bad, and one of the worst parts of HTTPS (the other being that things like ed22519 systems, chacha20, poly1305, sntrup are generally viewed as better modern alternatives to AES, so postquantum system like rosenpass https://github.com/rosenpass/rosenpass are more preferable).

However, I think there is no reason at all that a system that is decentralized is not far _far_ simpler to instantiate for a user (not to mention far more secure and private). Crypto gets a lot of hate on HN, but it seems that it is mostly due to people's dislike of anything dealing with 'currency' systems or financial that touch it. This is a despised opinion here, but I am still actually excited for crypto systems that solve real world problems like TLS certs, DNS, et al.

Iroh seems like a _fantastic_, phenomenal system to showcase this idea. It allows for a very fast decentralized web experience on modern cryptography such as Blake3, QUIC, and so on but doesn't really touch any financial stuff at all. Its simply a good system.

I hope we can slowly move to a system that uses the decntralized consensus algorithms created in the crypto space to remove the trust in (typically big, corporate, and likely backdoored) centralized entities that our system today _requires_ without any alternative.

The comparison is to pandas, so single node performance is understood in the scope. This is for people running small tasks that may only take a couple days on a single node with a 32 core CPU or something, not tasks that take 3 months using thousands of cores. My understanding for the latter is that pyspark is a decent option, while ballista is the better option for which to look forward. Perhaps using bastion-rs as a backend can be useful for an upcoming system as well. Databricks et al are cloud trash IMO, as is anything that isn't meant to be run on a local single node system and a local HPC cluster with zero code change and a single line of config change.

While for most of my jobs I ended up being able to evade the use of HPC by simply being smarter and discovering better algorithms to process information, I recall like pyspark decently, but preferring the simplicity of ballista over pyspark due to the simpler installation of Rust over managing Java and JVM junk. The constant problems caused by anything using JVM backend and the environment config with it was terrible to add to a new system every time I ran a new program.

In this regard, ballista is a enormous improvement. Anything that is a one-line install via pip on any new system, runs local-first without any cloud or telemetry, and requires no change in code to run on a laptop vs HPC is the only option worth even beginning to look into and use.

Aw man, are they selling only 4GB ones now?

More seriously, even 16GB was essentially the 'norm' in consumer PCs about 15 years ago.

As indicated by the explanation, better for people who believe in FOSS rather than closed corporate software.

Most developers work with a Unix mindset (do one thing well, with focus on simple and easily managed code), which tyically means telemetry is _wildly_ out of line (offers no real benefit for the basics while adding huge complexity), so privacy and security are naturally far better. Lynx like TUI browsers are a nice idea, but unfortunately sometimes an image is desired to be manually viewed, or javascript is required. It would be wonderful if javascript were simply dropped from most websites, but we don't live in that world, so we're stuck with the next best thing (disabling all js until explicitly allowed by the user).

These are the types of things people in software devs typically care about, which there are many in HN.

https://github.com/servo/servo

Servo is upcoming, but so far it is fantastic in comparison to any other browser out there.

I tend to focus on any software that does not require 12 teams of people 6 weeks to determine how to build a single binary because of the use of 20 different programming languages and mixing and matching of paradigms and solutions to subconponents. I very much appreciate simplicity and look for highly secure and private programs that highly discourage JavaScript from ever being run.

Servo is finally a breath of fresh air in that regard.