标签：#ha

When I set out to build a provably-fair random selection system on Solana, the obvious choice for randomness was a VRF (Verifiable Random Function). Instead, I built the system around Solana's SlotHashes sysvar with a commit-reveal scheme. Here's why, and what I gave up to get there. The problem A fair-selection system needs a winner (or set of winners) chosen in a way that's fair, and just as important that participants can check for themselves without taking anyone's word for it. VRF services (Switchboard, ORAO, etc.) solve the fairness part well: they produce randomness that's unpredictable in advance and cryptographically provable after the fact. But they come with a dependency on an oracle, a fee per request, and a proof that most users will never actually verify they'll trust it because the crypto math says they can, not because they did. I wanted something a participant with no crypto background could check in a browser console. The approach: commit-reveal with slot hashes The core idea: commit to the participant list before you know the randomness, then derive the randomness from a slot hash you couldn't have predicted at commit time. rust fn derive_randomness(target_hash: &[u8; 32], participant_root: &[u8; 32]) -> [u8; 32] { let mut combined_seed = [0u8; 64]; combined_seed[..32].copy_from_slice(target_hash); // slot hash at reveal combined_seed[32..].copy_from_slice(participant_root); // Merkle root, locked at commit solana_keccak_hasher::hash(&combined_seed).to_bytes() } The flow: Commit: participant list is finalized and hashed into a Merkle root; this is written on-chain. Wait: a target slot in the future is chosen as the reveal point. Reveal: once that slot passes, its hash is pulled from SlotHashes and combined with the committed root to derive the randomness. Select: the randomness deterministically picks winners from the participant set; winners get their own Merkle root and proofs. Every draw ends up with an audit record like: rust pub struct AuditR

I’ve been a NameCheap customer for 13 years. I’ve also helped out an old college club paying for a .com they use (that is registered to me under my name, address, and phone number). During a recent leadership transition, the incoming club lead wanted to make changes to the DNS and didn’t know to contact me. They figured out the domain name was parked at NameCheap, so they initiated a password reset using the domain name. I got a password reset email and immediately filed a NameCheap support tick

I’ve been building Echo ( https://echo.tracerml.ai/ ), an experiment in making one AI system out of a pool of open-weight models rather than choosing a single model and using it for every task. It started with a simple experiment. I took a group of models, including GLM-5.2, Kimi K2.7 and others, and ran them on the same evaluations. Then I measured what would happen if, for each problem, you somehow knew in advance which models would be useful and how their outputs should be combined. That hypo