Gopherfest 2017 | Upspin with Rob Pike
Why Hacker News recommends it
Cited as the talk that introduced Upspin, and called fascinating and really good by commenters.
What it is
Rob Pike presents Upspin at Gopherfest 2017, an experimental framework for naming and sharing files and data securely and uniformly across a global namespace. It is a project written in Go rather than about Go.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2017 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec hawkinsw · 2017-10 · on “The Upspin manifesto: On the ownership and sharing of data (2014)”
Rob Pike explains this manifesto in several videos available on YouTube: [this video] It's a fascinating talk. I really enjoyed it. I hope you do too!
Recommends iamevn · 2021-03 · on “Interview with CEO of rsync.net: “no firewalls and no routers””
If you want to see more on this theme, the Upspin docs[1] are a really interesting read. This 2017 talk[2] that Rob Pike gave on it is also really good. [1] [LINK] [2] [this video]
Cites bngybmgrglflps · 2021-04 · on “Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work”
"Encrypt, store, share [files] on your own terms" is elegantly handled by (Rob Pike's) Upspin. Practically: upspinfs fusermounts a cloud storage bucket. (TCO: $0.01/GB/mo.) Transparent public-key crypto. Sharing is built into the protocol. Sane defaults. [LINK] [this video] Building notes on top feels almost too straightforward to monetize. (For that matter: 1password, any number of small-scale B2C things, ...)
Cites jd3 · 2024-01 · on “Willow Protocol”
other commenters have mentioned ipfs, dropbox, syncthing, etc. but this most closely resembles [LINK] with the caveat that willow is p2p and upspin uses a centralized key server [this video]
Cites pbohun · 2025-02 · on “Turning Down Upspin Infrastructure”
This saddens me because I think the concept behind Upspin is powerful. Is it really that much of a resource drain to drop the key server? I imagine it could run on a $10/mo VPS. This is the talk that introduced Upspin: [this video]