How was it, when Gregory House put it... "...and no, I don't have a pain-management problem. I have a pain problem. But who knows, maybe I'm too high to tell..."
I literally have not had Python just break on me, and after decades of software development at various places using Python/Java/Javascript I would say it is rare these days to see it happen to other people in the team either.
It usually happens when someone decides to experiment with a different way of handing application versioning that they saw on HN, but they aren't actually experienced enough to test it in a sandboxed environment. Essentially breaking their computer in a new way that no one else on the team can help, and that Google won't give you any help with.
I would say that the person you are replying to is probably inexperienced and doesn't want to learn their tools.
His comment was more that the juniors that he mentors break their environments.
The junior breaking their environment is usually self inflicted.
Besides to fix this, you still don't need to run everything remotely.
[Edit]
In my experience, the biggest slowdown to being productive is corporate lockdown of laptops, but then no support from corporate for getting a development environment set up. So the first 2 weeks on the job is waiting for local admin permissions so that you can install brew and make your Mac environment as close to Linux as possible.
more like because the language is a non obvious clusterfuck that requires self-inflicted pain to be productive in. sounds like a good use case for a remote container
not to mention, pair programming/ merge review will be easier, making guiding juniors more efficient. of course i'm not saying it'll be all positive but there are legitimate reasons gitlab is doing this
If we were allowed to use a real OS, you could just run local containers. Or hell, this was solved with Vagrant how many years ago?
Why does it have to be remote?
The whole point is that I don't always have internet access, sometimes there are outages and sometimes it's just plain slow for some reason. It's shit enough all the video calls I have to be involved in these days, not as bad as all the face the face meetings in crampt rooms with everyone falling asleep because of the lack of air circulation. Why do you want to make the development environment crappier?
It also isn't clear how it would make code reviews better, or even paired programming? Shared workspaces are already a thing.
Exactly. That problem doesn't exist anymore in the JVM ecosystem. You can literally just install intellij and open some random project. It will download the jdk, the build system, all your dependencies, everything. It works on every OS, every time. It doesn't break across OS upgrades.
This is a language/tooling issue, not a local Vs remote issue even though it may seem that way to people using languages that are only barely working on non-Linux systems.
This is a friend of mine and I'm always skeptical of his ideas being overly technical, but sometimes we all tend to forget that programming can be a form of art and expression too, even in benign things.
Sometimes yes, because in the end everyone here is trying to justify some kind of purpose, but in reality they forget that it's all music and dance and it doesn't have to arrive at a certain point. Upvoted.
Whether or not you're aligned with Bitcoin political values and goals, please don't be duped by Ethereum. It may appear as something useful, without the stigma of Bitcoin being black market money. However, you ONLY need black market money. Everything else that's ok with being regulated, does not need a blockchain. The hard problem that Bitcoin solved was "How do we create money that wouldn't collapse and lose value once outlawed". The proof-of-work solution cannot be replicated (for reasons I won't go into here, homework for you). And that's a good thing.
Ethereum is a scam and has always been a scam from its inception. Multiple reasons for that:
1) Overly complex, obfuscating its lack of problem to solve by having lots of features and code
2) Constantly coming up with new terms and features and "new hot thing" to try and pump the price and keep the interest going.
3) No real world use case. Only promises and cryptokittes.
4) Literally controlled by one guy (see the now famous "Can you guys stop trading" quote).
5) Only produced scam ICOs with 99.99% of ICO projects practically stealing money from investors with no repercussions whatsoever.
There are many more, but the thing to remember is - Bitcoin solves a real problem: it allows people to escape and bypass existing financial system and continue doing business, save and not be subject to policies outside of their control. It is black market money which governments hate and will try to outlaw in some way. That is the real pain Bitcoin solves for people: not agreeing to unjust laws peacefully and quietly exiting the system.
Ethereum is a blockchain for general purpose computing. It’s not a scam, it delivered what it promised. MakerDAO, mentioned in the post, is a cool and useful project running on Ethereum.
I agree with you about the core use case for Bitcoin currently being an escape from the government-forced financial system. It pierced the monopoly successfully. But the Ethereum screed is just lies at this point, Ethereum is one of the good ones.
"a blockchain for general purpose computing" is precisely the problem. Nobody wanted or needed that. Bitcoin was created as digital money. A bunch of people mistakenly thought that the best "feature" of Bitcoin was its programmability, and doubled down on that by allowing arbitrary computations in transactions, which just opened up the Pandora's Box of attack vectors.
And you can't really say "Ethereum is one of the good ones" if it literally enabled the wholesale defrauding of billions of dollars from ill-informed speculators by providing the platform for those fraudulent ICOs.
I'm sure everybody just wanted a faster horse, but I certainly do have some good uses for distributed computing (with a larger bandwidth than Ethereum can provide, though). And any new tech can be seen as the "Pandora's Box of attack vectors" and a fraud platform, including the internet itself.
What has it delivered exactly? Where is it being used that's not itself a scam? MakerDAO - which seems to be some sort of token issuance thing - has no real world mechanism for enforcement. That is, if an autonomous decentralized organization issues a token, who's to make it pay you dividends or enforce your rights for whatever this token represents? This is the thing that ETH fanboys are completely delusional about. Securities only work because state regulators enforce the laws guaranteeing their value.
> That is, if an autonomous decentralized organization issues a token, who's to make it pay you dividends or enforce your rights for whatever this token represents? This is the thing that ETH fanboys are completely delusional about. Securities only work because state regulators enforce the laws guaranteeing their value.
I thought the point of this would be that the contract code, that defines organization would automatically pay you back in whatever. No need in regulators with laws, that random judge can overturn any day. And that is the whole point of it...
How about being able to raise money for a project, and whitelist investors, without people having to trust you to send them the securities after they send you the money, and them seeing exactly what is being done with dilution or whatever instead of having to trust?
Or having a fair pricing model as investors buy in using a bonding curve, eliminating priced rounds and other crap, pg said that’s the “future” - Ethereum makes it possible.
All this is only possible because enough gateways trade ETH that it can now be considered money. And it can be used as an input to tons of cool smart contract things. You couldn’t do this stuff 10 years ago, at best you’d have some sorta hookup to Stripe API and banks.
Explain the mechanism by which people who invest can exercise their rights as stakeholders, receive dividends etc? Who's to enforce they actually own anything? What's stopping this project from taking all the money and producing nothing (which is exactly what happened with pretty much every ICO out there)?
As far as I understand it, all that matters is the logic of the smart contract code, and possession of private keys. Humans are removed completely from the process. If you own the private key involved in a transaction, then that is the guarantee you’re looking for. All that’s left is to examine the smart contract code in order to figure out what sort of contract to which you’re now a cryptographically-guaranteed party.
No person enforces anything. Only the math does. And I think that’s entirely the point.
Do you have an example of an organization that works this way, 100% automated? It's hard to think of a system that can be 100% foolproof, there is always someone somewhere that has to trigger something manually, and that 's the weak spot.
Nope, I don’t. And I’m not a particular proponent of this approach. This is just how I understand it.
I think the ultimate goal is to have smart contracts which don’t require any of the human intervention you’re mentioning. How that’ll be possible remains to be seen...
What’s stopping a YC startup from going bankrupt after having disclosed tons of risks in a PPM? At least here we know exactly how much was invested.
Why does everything have to be about voting and receiving dividends?
Amazon’s shareholders don’t do either one but value the shares greatly.
And dividends can be programmed into the smart contracts too. Want them in DAI, USDT, ETH? You can! One way would be for the company to put them into a new smart contract that refers to the other smart contract which stores who owns what share, at that particular time. You could also program tons of fancy rules like a UBI from the company or whatever. They would also be distributed fairly.
Explain the mechanism. How do I know this organization made this much money and that the amount I'm being paid is fair in regards to their profits? How can this code track all the money the company is making? It's not like they're being paid with their tokens.
And for minority of projects where indeed they're expected to be paid using their own token, how do I know the company owners don't run away with all the money they raised? Because this is exactly what happened with 99.99% of ICOs created on Ethereum. Now, of course scams happen in the traditional financial system too, but not to the same extent, because there's an enforcement mechanism in place. So, following your example, what stops a YC company from declaring bankruptcy and spending all the money on things founders want for themselves? Well, an investigation may be launched: founders are known, they can be found, prosecuted and sentenced. With tokens issued online, where you may not even have a company registered or have a company registered in some obscure jurisdiction, there is very little incentive NOT to steal the money. And, once again, that's exactly what happened during the ICO craze, which Ethereum is directly responsible for. A lot of people lost a lot of money funding scammers - and nobody blinks an eye!
I don't argue that everything has to exist within the traditional financial system. On the contrary. But in order to provide real value and allow investors to have some level of certainty that at least their money won't be outright stolen, the solution MUST include an enforcement or incentive mechanism strong enough to deter scammers.
>That is, if an autonomous decentralized organization issues a token, who's to make it pay you dividends or enforce your rights for whatever this token represents?
...the smart contract? Maker pays interest (via buy and burn). It's really not that different than a corporate board agreeing to pay dividends. We don't need a state regulator to pay ourselves, do we?
Afraid of a little competition? This is the paradox of the bitcoin maximalist: The 'free market' is good but don't try to compete with my 'one true asset'!
I heard about Bitcoin in 2010 a few days before MagicalTux announced Mt. Gox on the Bitcoin forums. Once graphic card mining became a thing I quickly started a small farm while in school.
When I first understood PoW I immediately knew PoW must die for cryptocurrency to become sustainable. It is the single largest flaw with contemporary cryptocurrency. Bitcoin has become stale and unwilling to progress, instead choosing to retreat in maximalist dogma. This prevents bitcoin from solving some of these obvious technical issues. The block size debates is far more than enough to turn me away.
For me the ethereum community has been a breath of fresh air and is far more progressive than those left in the bitcoin world. After seeing the ethereum community gracefully handle the 2016 DOA hack with a hard fork, I was sold. Ethereum's community understood technology serves us, not the other way around while acknowledging and actively working toward solving problems bitcoiners often simply ignore.
I believe in the human spirit of solving problems through technology. Ethereum is not a panacea, but the ethereum project tries to remember that progressive spirit.
Disclaimer: I hold positions in both, more in Ethereum.
1. Both are very complex. How did you compare?
2. "Constantly coming up with new terms and features and "new hot thing"" - this is a fact. "to try and pump the price" - this is a speculation. Even if it is not - I don't know why is it necessarily bad. That is one of the major goals of every company applying to YC, or doing any kind of innovation in business.
3. Technically, all the use cases for Bitcoin are the same as the use cases for Ethereum, AFAIK.
4. It has the same proof of work system with miners, so in the end Buterin has the same 0 direct control over it, as Nakamoto would over Bitcoin. True, a lot of influence.
Ethereum has the first ever decentralized banking system based on on-chain smart contracts. I'm earning high interest on usd stablecoins for several months now. The interest rate was double digit until very recently, but even 5% is still very good for a completely anonymous system.
DAI itself is a decentralized usd stablecoin, meaning it can't be confiscated by the issuer. It's overcollateralized by locked eth. Anyone can generate new dai after locking eth. Those two together make the previously impossible possible - an Iranian or Venezuelan citizen earning interest on a USD-denominated savings. This is all called DeFi. Once mortgages and other external assets are tokenized, it's going to allow fully decentralized mortgages.
>Bitcoin solves a real problem: it allows people to escape and bypass existing financial system and continue doing business, save and not be subject to policies outside of their control. It is black market money which governments hate and will try to outlaw in some way.
Bitcoin completely failed, as majority of its hashpower is located in China. The Chinese government can tell miners to censor transactions tomorrow and to orphan blocks from non-compliant miners and it would happen. There's no defense against this. Changing PoW via a hard fork would result in a gpu-secured network that's even more vulnerable than an asic-based one, as it's easier to a large entity to rent or buy enough gpus.
PoS is the only defense against such centralization. Most hashpower is going to be an impossible to hide industrial facilities, while PoS only needs an internet connection, much harder to catch. More importantly, even if a determined attacker acquires a very big fraction of the tokens and attacks the network, a hard fork can just delete the hostile accounts. One a gpu based PoW network is attacked there's no solution, as it's not possible to make the attacker's mining hardware ineffective via a hard fork.
Let’s be clear about the problem with ETH. It has a 60% pre-mine, and the next 35% of the mining was done by just a small subset of the same people. Only 5% of the supply was ever “up for grabs”. A currency requires highly-decentralized float. ETH will always be speculative.
Other than that (fatal problem), its a great technical project.
Vitalik and ETH are the definitions of scam and scammer. He's very good at obfuscating it by appearing very smart: read his articles and tweets, they always sound complex, but can be rewritten in much simpler terms. And ETH is the same: it obfuscates its uselessness and nonsense by being overly complex, every year employing new terms and coming up with tons of code that only increases the attack surface and complicates things even more.
Please don't cross into personal attack. It degrades discussion. Maybe you don't owe every person better, but you owe the community better if you're posting here.
> tons of code that only increases the attack surface
Ethereum itself was the original sin in this respect. In Bitcoin, for the most part, the economic value at stake in a block is (1) the block reward, (2) the transaction fees, and (3) the amount transacted. (1) + (2) + (3) is therefore the maximum amount that can theoretically be "moved" if a block is invalidated through an adversarial fork, since someone else can claim the miner rewards and every transaction could possibly be double-spent. Anyone who wants to be assured of transaction immutability can, at the very least, calculate the total value that is at stake and wait until at least this much PoW has been layered on top of the transaction.
Not so with smart contracts. A paper I read yesterday showed how smart contracts can be used to execute trustless, crowd-sourced DoS attacks on rival blockchains (https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/775.pdf). It's ridiculous. Once you open the Pandora's Box of smart contracts, you can throw your consensus guarantees out the window.
> smart contracts can be used to execute trustless, crowd-sourced DoS attacks on rival blockchains
And that's a good thing. We needed an established way to attack rival blockchains that use the same PoW mechanism. They are insecure by design of PoW, and until they are all torn down by attacks, unsuspecting people can loose a lot of money.
>He's very good at obfuscating it by appearing very smart: read his articles and tweets, they always sound complex, but can be rewritten in much simpler terms.
What? Nothing could be more unfair. His articles on zk-snarks and starks are probably the most approachable explanations available.
I don't agree, but anyway, how does that even make him a scammer? Vitalik rarely talks about the price of ETH, and he's very open about the risks and shortcomings.
During the 2016-2017 bubble he was even tweeting that the crypto space had done very little to even deserve the runup. However you had several other prominent people tweeting things that only amplified the bubble, so it did little to tame things, but at least he wasn't participating in it.
If he's a scammer, as you put it, he's doing a very poor job of that.
How this works? They send btc and people use them. You're thinking in the old frame of reference: you don't need banks, legal entities or identities even to produce code. Who cares if it's recognized or not.
Knowing the founder, find it hard to believe. The guy who fled Russia to avoid persecution has little tolerance for any government trying to mess with people's privacy. Culturally, Russia itself has a lot more in common with the west. China is completely separated, from, I would say, the rest of the world, in terms of mentality. It's even different from most Asian countries and Hong Kong. Find it hard to imagine why would anyone cooperate with China on doing things the western world considers immoral and unacceptable.
