HN user

Feeble

256 karma
Posts5
Comments61
View on HN

I am very much in the same position right now. My dev team has introduced mandatory code reviews for every change and I can see their output plummeting. It also seems that most code reviews done are mostly syntax and code format related - noone actually seems to run the code or look at the actual logic if it makes sense.

I think its easy to add processes under the good intention of "making the code more robust and clean", but I never heard anyone discuss what is the cost of this process to the team's efficiency.

That's quite interesting, I wonder how they were fraudulent as bitcoin transactions dont have chargebacks etc. In the article they also mention that the price for the game would fluctuate which seems to indicate they actually priced the games in Bitcoin. Normally price would be Euro, USD etc and price conversion to Bitcoin would be done at check out. I guess these were the early days though =)

"Remote workers were not only more productive they were more satisfied with remote work than they had been with working in a traditional office"

I think some citation is needed here, there are multiple studies and they have very varied outcome. This one for instance find that productivity drops 18% when working from home: https://www.nber.org/papers/w31515

At best he is cherry picking his studies and ignoring the contrarian studies, at worst he is blindy pushing his own interest and views.

Amplitude is a great product. We tested alot of similar products and Amplitude was by far the best. The only negative I have found is their pricing which is free up to quite a generous level to be honest but then it suddenly becomes really expensive.

The energy is not used to handle the transactions, the energy is used to secure the network.

Instead of being used for something useful

Bitcoin uses less energy than YouTube. Wether you think having a decentralized, global monetary system that gives everyone an opportunity to own sound money that the government cannot take away is more or less useful than YouTube is of course something everyone is entitled to have an opinion on.

It might be that you are correct, it is too early to tell, but you are no the final judge of what is useful in the world or not, so this quote is just your personal opinion and nothing more.

But then we've lost standardization which is the whole point of the error codes to begin with.

Returning 200 and then using response body to denote missing resource is no different. So you have to choose, either 404 can be invalid path and missing employee; or 200 can be valid data or missing employee. Personally I would prefer the former as 200/OK then indicates success.

I think we need the government to decide exactly what technical parts should be produced with the production of semiconductors. Maybe they can make a 5 year plan for exactly what parts to produce and who gets them. Then we don't have to worry about any newtech coming in and disruping our current lives! /s

Miners don't operate at loss. This is nothing but free market economics.

Electricity is sold on a free market. Miners buy electricity to secure the Bitcoin monetary network because other people value a decentralized monetary network, i.e. Bitcoin, to such a price that it's worth it. Should the market value the network less then less miners will buy electricity for mining.

Do you suggest we get rid of the free market for energy?

It's wrong to see it as power consumption per transaction. The power used is to secure the monetary network. So for VISA you would have to factor in all their offices, running systems, employees, security etc. used to secure their financial network.

My company operates in a highly international business area. The whole industry is moving towards using crypto for B2B payments. Every provider and partner offers payment by crypto - because international bank payments are slow, expensive and complicated (gets stuck, countries blocked, unclear KYC etc, opaque AML blockers etc).

The question was how much does the financial system in your country use. So I picked a country to show an example. You then changed the question

Not really. I am saying consider that energy usage for traditional banking is also high. If you compare numbers then I believe it needs to be global or pro rata.

It supports fewer transactions per second

I don't think this is a relevant comparison to be honest. The high energy usage of Bitcoin is not to handle transaction volume, but to secure the network and funds.

Payment cards is a secondary payment layer on top of the banking settlements. Bitcoin is more equivalent to bank settlements.

Second layer solutions for Bitcoin such as Bitcoin Lightning and crypto payment cards (Crypto.com, Coinbase etc) are more comparative to bank settled payment cards and can (and does) provide much higher transaction volumes for Bitcoin. Which also means that payment card energy usage should not be included in any comparison if done (imho).

Just as a side-note, Christmas lights in US used more energy than Bitcoin miners (at least a couple of years ago) and for sure more than a lot of countries. Bitcoin provides sound money for unbanked people all over the world. What would you rather have?

Sure, but BTC is global so you need to divide BTC's energy usage with the population of New Zealand to make a fair comparison.

New Zealand's population is 0.06% of the world population. Best guess of Bitcoin energy usage put it at around 100 TWh so New Zealands part would be 0.06 TWh.

So I think we should really compare pro rate BTC usage of 0.06 TWh against NZ's 40 TWh. I have no idea how much of NZ's usage is spent on financial system though.

As a currency? I have that already. And its stable, accepted almost everywhere, doesn't waste tons of energy and cannot be lost by forgetting a password.

So you were born (or at least live) in a country that has a stable currency which is accepted almost everywhere, and you can trust your politicians to not undermine this currency by bad economic policies and/or creating very high inflation. Congratulations! However, a large part of earth's population do not enjoy this stability. For them crypto offers a way to store wealth that cannot be debased nor easily seized by authorities in bad faith.

Some estimates are that 2 billion adults do not even have banking.

You say your currency does not waste tons of energy. How much energy would you say the financial system in your country use in order to keep a sound ledger and enforce the monetary rules & policies?

Bitcoin uses less energy than the gold industry. And gold mines wreck the environment (https://earthworks.org/campaigns/no-dirty-gold/impacts/). But you don't hear much about that even though most gold is used as a store of wealth, much like Bitcoin is.

Energy usage should also not be equated to bad energy production, though of course miners can use bad energy source instead of sustainable energy.

[dead] 5 years ago

That twitter account is just angrily ranting at new technology he most likely do not understand. Why would you post this here?

Replace crypto with Internet and you got a perfect article from 1997 about this new weird technology called Internet.

Where the author declares all good ideas and startups around this Internet has already been "mined to perfection".

Yes, that would be the logical conclusion of all these types of products.

However, but if more people use this then the prediction will become more likely to be true. E.g. predict price goes up -> users starts buying -> price does go up.

Would require a lot of users to affect price this way though I suppose...

They say that it is not mining, but rather doing transactions on something called Incognito network? Or maybe I am misunderstanding it.

It does seem really sketchy though, they are all over the place. They say they use Proof of Stake, but BTC is not PoS. And not sure how that ties into this little gem: "Node earns Incognito’s native coin, Privacy (PRV)" =)

On SQS 7 years ago

Were you running RabbitMQ clustered with persistent queues?

I don't think SQS is primarily for low-latency messaging, but rather a provided high available MQ with very little hassle.

With about two years of learning you are probably just reaching the stage where you start to understand what you don't know (stage 2 below). Keep at it and you will grow.

Stage 1: Unconscious Incompetence. Stage 2: Conscious Incompetence. Stage 3: Conscious Competence. Stage 4: Unconscious Competence