Top all-time · #6895
Kadena
Company blog · kadena.io/blogprogrammingsecurity
Kadena is the company blog at kadena.io, writing about programming and security. Since 2016, 11 different Hacker News readers have linked it 34 times, most often “Pact: A Safe Smart Contract Language”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Linked mostly for Kadena's hiring posts and its Pact smart contract language whitepaper, cited in threads on blockchain, Solidity and Haskell. Its whitepaper is also the subject of one correction.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Kadena
Most-linked posts?
- /3 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2016-11-09
- Pact: A Safe Smart Contract Language2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-11-14
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-03-07
- Show HN: Pact – a safe smart contract language (web editor)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-11-13
- The Pact Smart-Contract Language [pdf]2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-11-05
- The Pact Smart Contract Language2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-07-03
- Kadena open sources new smart contract language, Pact2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-11-13
What Hacker News says?
Why bad timing? This is really just an example that while safe smart contracts are technically possible using Solidity/EVM, it's practically impossible. "One of the best Solidity devs" just failed to write a safe contract to the tune of a $30M exploit. Given that, what chance does anyone else have? At some point, it's time to blame the tool and not the user. Moreover, it's not like people didn't see this coming, mys…
Comment linking /
on “153k Ether Stolen in Parity Multi-Sig Attack”Submitted Show HN: Pact – a safe smart contract language (web editor) as a story · 18 points
HN discussionKadena ( http://kadena.io ) | NYC REMOTE | Full-time Kadena is looking to fill a variety of roles to build next generation blockchain technologies. The software is primarily Haskell, but we are also looking for project managers, frontend developers, designers, etc.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2018)”Submitted The Pact Smart-Contract Language [pdf] as a story · 7 points
HN discussionKadena | Haskell Engineer, Frontend Javascript Engineer | Brooklyn, NY | Full-time, ONSITE Kadena is hiring a Haskell Software Engineer familiar with functional programming languages and interested in learning Haskell to build out our new public-chain protocol, Chainweb, and further our work in formal verification of smart contracts. Kadena is building the leading blockchain platform for businesses and enterprises b…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2018)”Submitted Kadena open sources new smart contract language, Pact as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSure, the two I had in mind in NYC are Kadena ( http://kadena.io ) and Jane St. ( https://www.janestreet.com ). Jane St. is more an OCaml shop but they like Haskell people. Kadena builds everything in Haskell.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Physicists of HN, what are you working on these days?”Submitted The Pact Smart Contract Language as a story · 3 points
HN discussionKadena | Software Engineer | REMOTE, ONSITE (Brooklyn, NY) | Full-Time $80k-$150k + Coin and/or Equity Kadena is seeking Haskell engineers to join our team either in Brooklyn or remote. Kadena ( http://kadena.io ) is a tech-founded, post-revenue smart-contract blockchain startup founded in 2016 by Stuart Popejoy and Will Martino, two lead engineers from JP Morgan’s blockchain group. Kadena is poised to become the le…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2018)”Submitted Trying out Pact in the browser as a story · 3 points
HN discussionOr you can just use graph theory to make PoW efficient & more secure[1][2]. Skip to page 11 of [1] for a quick visual summary. [1] http://kadena.io/docs/chainweb.pdf [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1OFJOrgRWw
Comment linking /docs/chainweb.pdf
on “A blockchain is a specific set of choices suitable for a narrow set of use-cases”Submitted Pact: A Safe Smart Contract Language as a story · 3 points
HN discussionPact[1], the language we've built, has the idea of an `admin keyset` that enables admins with the right number of signatures from the right number of keys to migrate contracts. Our approach is rather different from the EVM's as smart contracts interact with/guard a table in a DB (think stored procedures accessing a table) and the system has modules. This way, if a bug is found, the admin can update the smart contrac…
Comment linking /pact/
on “Goldman Sachs Drops Out of R3 Blockchain Group”Submitted Mining and private blockchains don't mix as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI can't say I'm all that surprised. R3 serves as both an R&D lab and a place to connect vendors and potential clients. Moreover, the focus is on private/permissioned blockchain tech. The tech in this space is still quite immature overall and pretty much everyone has had a hard time building actual blockchain infrastructure vs things that are sorta like a blockchain. If you can't show clients value for their membersh…
Comment linking /
on “Goldman Sachs Drops Out of R3 Blockchain Group”Submitted Chainweb: A Proof-Of-Work Parallel-Chain Architecture for Massive Throughput [pdf] as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> Why do we do this, still? Is it not irresponsible? One reason is security - if cryptography isn't done in constant time then there is the potential for timing attacks. This is why BitCoinJ ditched BouncyCastle for their own JNI wrapper around BitCoin's libsecp256k1. There is a rust client for Ethereum, called Parity - they do FFI calls to libsecp256k1. Similarly rust-crypto vendors most of its crypto in C that it…
Comment linking /
on “Zcoin implementation bug enabled attacker to create over 500K Zcoins”Submitted Pact: A Safe Smart Contract Language as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> The validators are known, so any risk of a 51% attack arising from some miner collusion in China does not apply. That's just wrong. Dangerously so. Maybe I'm just missing something in his protocol spec and he didn't really mean mining... I've discussed this attack vector in more depth here[1]. Even if you made the mining function signing the block with your sk it'd still be wrong. Even if you forced the sk holder…
Comment linking /blog/MiningInPrivate.html
on “How to create a private Ethereum network”Submitted Types (and Type Inference) in the Pact Smart Contract Language as a story · 2 points
HN discussionFirst, the pact paper needs to get updated to reflect the changes we made for the shift to public. For example, modules used to only be guarded by keysets (Pact doesn't have a notion of single-sig only constructs, anything using a sig supports multisig natively) and thus only support centralized upgrade governance mechanisms -- you don't need a decentralized vote in a private context -- so we generalized it to being…
Comment linking /blog/MiningInPrivate.html
on “Show HN: Dharma – Programmable Peer-To-Peer Loans Using Ethereum Smart Contracts”Submitted Confidentiality in Private Blockchains [pdf] as a story · 2 points
HN discussionNo need to forgive. You're not wrong nor naive. I'd pin the difference as one of personal risk tolerances. I have much less than you, that's all. Right now Solidity is the only choice of public smart contracts. All I meant before was that this is an impressive project and to be careful. > But, after all, a dark horse 20 year old college dropout spearheaded the development of Ethereum, and the technology now secures…
Comment linking /
on “Show HN: Dharma – Programmable Peer-To-Peer Loans Using Ethereum Smart Contracts”Submitted Kadena: The first scalable, high performance private blockchain [pdf] as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> It sure makes me wonder if Ethereum would do better with a less forgiving programming language. This will be hard. While Solidity certainly has problems unto itself, some of its insecurity comes from the EVM's design, which is almost laughably low level and thus very hard to reason about. It certainly doesn't seem to be informed by modern VMs like LLVM, JVM or BEAM, which know a great deal more about the semantics…
Comment linking /pact
on “Underhanded Solidity Coding Contest”Submitted Is this a smart contract blockchain language that is easy to learn? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionBtw, small bone to pick with the Pact whitepaper[1]: > EVM and Solidity have no support for atomic execution. Ethereum contracts simply abort on error, leaving developers with the impossible task of undoing previous writes and contract creates after any possible error condition. EVM transactions are atomic; all state changes are reverted on aborts (out-of-gas errors and throws). Ethereum state changes are committed…
Comment linking /docs/Kadena-PactWhitepaper-Oct2016.pdf
on “How Blockchain Will Change Your Life”Submitted Open-Sourcing the Pact Smart Contract Language as a story · 1 points
HN discussionBefore I founded a company[1] in this space I investigated blockchain applications for JPM and I agree with your take on bitcoin-style blockchains being mostly BS for industry. I'd take it a step further to note that mining is incompatible with private blockchains of any form because the new coins+fees incentive structure doesn't exist. Permissioned/Private Blockchains don't need to look like Bitcoin, they just need…
Comment linking /
on “How Blockchain Will Change Your Life”You should check out Kadena's FOSS Pact[1] smart contract language as well. Though it currently only runs on our (disclosure: am co-founder) high-performance private blockchain stack we're prepping it for use on a public blockchain (the first presale opens in Sept). It's a pretty different approach from Ethereum/Tezos in that it doesn't use a VM and instead is a Turing incomplete interpreted language (still metered…
Comment linking /try-pact
on “The Michelson Language”