RubenSomsen

Silent Payments

Receive private payments from anyone on a single static address without requiring any interaction or extra on-chain overhead.

Update: This now has a BIP and WIP implementation

Overview

The recipient generates a so-called silent payment address and makes it publicly known. The sender then takes a public key from one of their chosen inputs for the payment, and uses it to derive a shared secret that is then used to tweak the silent payment address. The recipient detects the payment by scanning every transaction in the blockchain.

belisarius222

Ford Fusion

Overview and Rationale

Ford Fusion was an overhaul of Urbit's over-the-air upgrade process and a rewrite of its build system. The new update system corrects a few long-standing bugs with the previous one, and the new build system is simpler, smaller (by around 5,000 lines), and easier to manage.

Since deployment of Ford Fusion to the livenet in late June, over-the-air updates (OTAs) have been much smoother. Before Ford Fusion, it was common for an OTA to take several hours, use too much memory, and leave ships in inconsistent states. After Ford Fusion, multiple OTAs have been pushed out, including kernelspace changes, and most users didn't even notice.

Urbit has always been able to update itself OTA, but this process has often been rocky. Updating an operating system kernel on-the-fly is a difficult problem in general, like performing heart replacement surgery on yourself while running a marathon. Code that allows Linux to update its kernel in this way became a startup called Ksplice, won

Rich-Harris

I've been deceiving you all. I had you believe that Svelte was a UI framework — unlike React and Vue etc, because it shifts work out of the client and into the compiler, but a framework nonetheless.

But that's not exactly accurate. In my defense, I didn't realise it myself until very recently. But with Svelte 3 around the corner, it's time to come clean about what Svelte really is.

Svelte is a language.

Specifically, Svelte is an attempt to answer a question that many people have asked, and a few have answered: what would it look like if we had a language for describing reactive user interfaces?

A few projects that have answered this question:

tmcw

So, as I mentioned last time, I have two fundamental goals with dat that are not addressed by simply running dat share.

• Uptime: making sure that the site is seeded even if my local laptop is closed, eaten by a bear, or disconnected from the internet
• Resilience: ensuring that there's a way to restart my website if the original seeding computer is lost. I try to make everything on my primary work/personal computer work in such a way that I can recover it all, easily, onto a new machine if I need to

To break these down a bit more, uptime is a combination of two things:

• Ensuring that there are seeders
• Ensuring that those seeders are seeding, and they're up-to-date

Rich-Harris

Edit — February 2019

This gist had a far larger impact than I imagined it would, and apparently people are still finding it, so a quick update:

• TC39 is currently moving forward with a slightly different version of TLA, referred to as 'variant B', in which a module with TLA doesn't block sibling execution. This vastly reduces the danger of parallelizable work happening in serial and thereby delaying startup, which was the concern that motivated me to write this gist
• In the wild, we're seeing (async main(){...}()) as a substitute for TLA. This completely eliminates the blocking problem (yay!) but it's less powerful, and harder to statically analyse (boo). In other words the lack of TLA is causing real problems
• Therefore, a version of TLA that solves the original issue is a valuable addition to the language, and I'm in full support of the current proposal, which you can read here.

I'll leave the rest of this document unedited, for archaeological

jasongilman

Atom Clojure Setup

This describes how I setup Atom for an ideal Clojure development workflow. This fixes indentation on newlines, handles parentheses, etc. The keybinding settings for enter (in keymap.cson) are important to get proper newlines with indentation at the right level. There are other helpers in init.coffee and keymap.cson that are useful for cutting, copying, pasting, deleting, and indenting Lisp expressions.

Install Atom

Download Atom

The Atom documentation is excellent. It's highly worth reading the flight manual.

max-mapper

Synchronization for Merkle graphs

abstract

intro

• Problem we’re solving: Efficient p2p Merkle DAG replication
• Proposed solution in a nutshell: Simplistic and symmetric protocol with reference implementation in Node.js

OlegIlyenko

In this gist I would like to describe an idea for GraphQL subscriptions. It was inspired by conversations about subscriptions in the GraphQL slack channel and different GH issues, like #89 and #411.

Conceptual Model

At the moment GraphQL allows 2 types of queries:

• query
• mutation

Reference implementation also adds the third type: subscription. It does not have any semantics yet, so here I would like to propose one possible semantics interpretation and the reasoning behind it.

rbf

# You can inspect the release by `tag` before to get the URL of the first asset.
# API_DOC: https://developer.github.com/v3/repos/releases/#get-a-release-by-tag-name
# The you can download the release asset file (not the API object) by including the header 'Accept: application/octet-stream'
# NOTE: When downloading the binary file, don't forget to specify the name of the downloaded file (with -o <filename>).
#       Otherwise the binary will be streamed into the terminal, doing weird unexpected things.
# API_DOC: https://developer.github.com/v3/repos/releases/#get-a-single-release-asset
#
# Everything put together gives that script:
GITHUB_OWNER=twbs
GITHUB_REPO=bootstrap

mfikes

Since an embedded JavaScriptCore can be made to launch quickly, I've been pondering whether it is justified in converting Planck to be a portable (OS X, Linux, Windows) C-based wrapper around JavaScriptCore (so that it is more broadly useful). Right now Planck is not portable owing to the use of Cocoa/Foundation and Objective-C.

I think this partially boils down to wether the launch latency is faster than an equivalent based on Node.js (which is already portable and has a much richer ecosystem). That latency has to be significantly different, and I also think you'd need to be convinced that it is going to remain that way (perhaps V8 will be further optimized, but perhaps the outright launch speed of Node.js isn't a priority).