liamzebedee

Chrome extension is marvellous for anyone who hasn't used it. Particularly useful for looking up docs of calls to external packages in Python repos.

To further explain, I know it can sound confusing just saying we've done away with all trust, when in fact we're just replacing it with something different.

Blockchains allow parties to achieve consensus without trusting any other member. The innovation being that any social system that relies on trust brings with it the problems and implications of the trusted. Common examples include being more costly (overhead/greed), socially exclusionary / corrupt in some circumstances (eg banning protesters). It also facilitates new innovations such as cryptocurrency.

In public blockchains, trust is instead put into the security of the network in terms of its proof-of-work, its developers who maintain the software, the community at large (especially in the case of forks) and so on...

Not mentioned often however is why corporations also are loving the idea of private blockchains (IBM Hyperledger, R3, etc). Private blockchains involve trusting only a couple participants to join the network. A set of banks can define a mutual settlement protocol in a standard smart contract for example - in using a blockchain, they mitigate the risk of other banks affecting their system.

A better example of where a private blockchain would do wonders is in BGP routing. You hear almost every year of a news story where an Indian ISP accidentally broadcasts they forward for Google's IP subnet, and subsequently disrupts all of India's Google access until they manually fix it. A private blockchain among BGP hosts would vastly improve these situations if everyone could agree on which routes they were routing, and globally optimise in the case of failure.

I think the key to achieving anything with the blockchain approach is to not try replace something with a blockchain (ie Facebook) for the sake of removing trust, but pinpointing specific pains that derive from having to trust other parties and then focussing there.

Are secrets within the secure enclave vulnerable? e.g. Bitcoin wallet keys

[related] Has anyone considered the possibility of a Spectre-style attack in Ethereum's Turing-complete EVM? Not that the state would be unique for all contracts, but there's a possibility of communicating to an external contract with the output.

> Unconfirmed transactions are at an ATH of 260k... has been at over 100k for weeks.

Statistics like these should be more prominent in the argumentation. Regardless of any technical discussion of the merits of SegWit vs. big blocks, there isn't any doubt in the usability of the system as is compared to as before.

The difficulty is necessary for moderating consensus given more 'voters' (with their flops) joining the network.

I'm interested by your idea, but you would need to work by a different consensus model. Proof-of-stake would be interesting to investigate, since mining doesn't scale with computation power, rather holding of the currency.

As a full stack dev who has never written iOS apps, I have tried to understand the conceptual basics and how they compare.

> Cocoa Touch is (I suspect) deliberately very simple: there’s Target-Action pattern, Dependency Injection, Delegate and MVC

Can anyone enrich this explanation?

Depends on the context. If you're writing a CRUD web app with simple business logic, is the mental priming of data structures like arrays relevant helping you develop?

I love this idea of Huffman coding the syntax- I've been thinking recently it wouldn't be difficult to crawl all the packages of NPM for example, encode them into their AST's, and use algorithms to analyse them. e.g. trying to apply PageRank to visualise the most important classes/methods in a codebase.

Oh this piques my curiosity, big time!

There is a large gap in software for non-linear thinking/sketching. It's not obvious for tasks that require linear thinking, like programming, but when you are trying to explore solutions in an fuzzy problem space, something along the lines of TreeSheets is certainly useful.

Yeah I get you. Because Ethereum has such an enterprise-facing governance (eg. Ethereum Enterprise Alliance) most of the education that goes into it is to business and big corps right now.

Do you mind if I get your email and send you something? Looking at writing about this and would love some feedback.

What are the top (say, three) things you'd like to learn from such a book?

I agree, insides on the Ethereum tech (like how their proof of work relates to smart contract state, where the DAG fits in) are very brief / difficult to digest at some points.

Ethereum is elegant in many ways - for example, strengthening security by rewarding the linking of orphan blocks in the network. I think there's a need for some better education between the marketing material and War and Peace white/yellow paper ;)

I was assuming OP was referring to custom-built projects. I too have a CGM (thanks to the recent Australian Federal subsidy) - a massive shame the technology isn't more open.

I don't know about you, but 'blockchain of blockchains' [1] is an incredible idea. ;)

[1] https://github.com/the-laughing-monkey/cicada-platform/blob/...

An incredible book if I may add. Zamyatin was one of few dystopian writers to actually be involved in the going-ons in the Russian revolution at the time.

Sounds intriguing, could you offer up a more detailed insight or a link? :-)

> 30 minutes per day

I don't know about you guys, but my friends spend probably upwards of an hour a day at least.

Could you provide an example of a project you'd develop? :-)

There's a whole subgenre of programming called algorave (algorithmic rave) which is oriented around building music using functional/declarative paradigms.

It's a super cool creative branch of prog research, much of it involving live programming, funky editors/IDEs (Ixi Lang is the macOS rich text editor, where on certain key combos its content is piped and the colours of the editor changed live -- bit of a hack and super cool).

Check some out -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAq4BAbvRS4

Fully-agree. From the start, Netflix was talking about React being useful because you can drop it in to various pages without affecting other UI views.

I use it at work on a page-by-page basis-- it drastically reduces the mental overhead of class naming, JQuery spaghetti, maintaining the DOM etc. Sometimes I even surprise myself when something "just works" because of React's well-controlled model.

Exactly! Not to mention the reusability benefits of components - rather than passing around JQuery selectors and objects.

The cognitive load of using plain React is unparalleled for me. The effort to setup the tooling is a bit of a hassle though..

Probably worth mentioning in the title that this is part of the IPFS project, not just another library.

Would love to see the source for that, if you still had it.

The video linked is much better IMO.

I've setup Minecraft/web servers which required no server for holepunching. Just plain old IPv4 with port forwarding.

WebRTC requires the use of a centralised signalling server for the initial connection between two peers. I feel many miss this point when reading about WebRTC-enabled projects. Even if you do have Universal Plug and Play which port forwards automatically (and thus you can communicate directly between two peers), you still need this centralised signalling server.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this poses a problem if you ever want to take WebRTC further (i.e. in a self-hosted mesh network).

One minor error, but the implementation of difficulty in proof-of-work is not based on the number of leading zeroes, rather whether an integer is below or above a target.

JavaScripts on a Plane?

Don't downplay the social innovation of Uber though- it's created a worldwide transportation service run completely by a group of ordinary drivers, who need simply a car and a smartphone.

Ooooo this topic has been intellectually tingling me for two weeks now - ontologies, knowledge, how we construct the line between abstract (mathematical objects) and reality (all the way down to elementary particles), and at its core the nature of information. If you're further interested in this area, some very interesting lines of inquiry to go down is the the mathematical universe hypothesis [1], bit-string physics [2] (the theory of everything that explains the universe as a binary string), digital physics [3] and of course the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy article on information [4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothes...

[2] http://www.osti.gov/scitech/servlets/purl/28404/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_physics

[4] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/information/