Jon-Kyle jondashkyle

Peer-to-peer computing: Beaker 0.8 and beyond

There's a somewhat old-fashioned term in computing (old-fashioned being a relative concept) and the term is "live."

Back when Xerox PARC was making the first real GUI and building the first Object-Oriented programming language (Smalltalk) they were building a live environment. And "live" meant that the code was right there, available to the user, ready to edit. If you go back and look at the demos of Smalltalk, you see people jumping into that code and modding the environment on-the-fly, and that's what live meant! It meant you could mess with the code.

There's a complementary term, just as old-fashioned but much more relevant, and that's "dead." That's what cloud computing is: dead computing. It's compiled, packaged, shipped, and completely unchangeable -- a total black box to the user.

Live is vibrant. Live is community-owned. Live means that mods and plugins are going to emerge out of the userbase. Some of the most popular and well-known computer games

New APIs in Beaker 0.8

This Gist is a quick writeup for devs using the beta or master build. We'll get a more complete writeup in the Beaker site docs on 0.8's final release. Feel free to open issues for discussion.

DatArchive

We've done some work on the DatArchive API to make it easier to use. Prior to 0.8, Dats had a "staging area" folder which you had to commit() to publish. In 0.8, Beaker will automatically sync that folder. As a result, the staging-area methods (diff() commit() and revert()) were deprecated. There are also some new methods, and a few changes to how events work.

Here's a full reference:

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

The history of hyperHTML followed by lit-html

While many remember the epic hyperHTML: A Virtual DOM Alternative post I've published the 5th of March 2017, the first official implementation of the library was working as hyperHTML.bind(node) function for tagged literals the day before, and it's been in my experiments folder already for a little while.

The hilarious reaction from the skeptical community

At first glance people couldn't believe performance of the DBMonster demo shown in that article,

I've been implementing a dat client in Rust: https://github.com/bnewbold/geniza

It's been fun! The "whitepaper"/spec has been very helpful. Below are a few thoughts/comments on the paper, documentation, and protocols.

Informal Protocol Proposals

With my archival and inter-op hat on, I wish that the hyperdrive metadata register (specifically Node protobuf messages) included standard full-file hashes (eg, SHA1 or BLAKE2b of the entire file, with no length prefix). These could be optional, but could presumably be calculated when adding files to archives with little overhead. This could make auditing, verification, and interoperability between distributed networks easier. Storage and compute overhead would be non-zero.

It seems like the network protocol really should have a version field... in the initial pre-encryption Register message?

Download Audio from YouTube

-i - ignore errors

-c - continue

-t - use video title as file name

--extract-audio - extract audio track

Can we create a smart contract VM on nodejs using Dat?

Ethereum is a trustless network of VMs which run smart contracts submitted by users. It uses proof-of-work to synchronize state across the network, and has every node execute the contracts in order to verify the state's validity. Each transaction is stored in the blockchain for replayability. Read more about it here.

Ethereum's "trustless network" model has some disadvantages:

Transaction processing is slow - it maxes at roughly 25tx/s right now for all contracts combined.
Every transaction costs money to execute.
The entire blockchain state must be shared across the computing network.
No private transactions.

What I Wish I'd Known About Equity Before Joining A Unicorn

Disclaimer: This piece is written anonymously. The names of a few particular companies are mentioned, but as common examples only.

This is a short write-up on things that I wish I'd known and considered before joining a private company (aka startup, aka unicorn in some cases). I'm not trying to make the case that you should never join a private company, but the power imbalance between founder and employee is extreme, and that potential candidates would

Direct copy of pre-encoded file:

$ ffmpeg -i filename.mp4 -codec: copy -start_number 0 -hls_time 10 -hls_list_size 0 -f hls filename.m3u8

	/node_modules/
	module.js