eliwjones

Doesn't anyone remember that it's "UNABOMer"?

My working definition of "too clever" is:

If you have to spend time explaining 'what' the code is doing, it is "too clever".

If you have to spend time explaining 'why' the code is doing something.. then "them's the breaks working in a complicated world".

Code should only be as complex as the problem domain.

The Romans called it decimation.

Though, Twitter would need to make the layoffs random, force co-workers to escort the laid off off premises, and take away perks for a few weeks... If that's what they were angling for.

You don't raise a rebel by telling them it's okay to play on the roof.

You raise a rebel by telling them "I don't want to see you on that motherfucking roof!"

Then, when they are ready, they will go to the roof.

You provide the back pressure and their job is to overcome it.

How much back pressure? That's an exercise left to the parent.

For my money, I want the few rebels who survive helicopter parents.

These kids may be milquetoast with no sense of evaluating risk.

Then the marauders will thank you for your pile of guns as well.

A lot of the back-and-forth here reminds me of:

"Note that, with careful optimization, only 14 gajillion messages are necessary. This is still too many messages; however, if the system sends fewer than 14 gajillion messages, it will be vulnerable to accusations that it only handles reasonable failure cases, and not the demented ones that previous researchers spitefully introduced in earlier papers in a desperate attempt to distinguish themselves from even more prior (yet similarly demented) work."

from James Mickens' "The Saddest Moment" - https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login-logout_1305_micken...

I don't engage devil's advocacy.. only pedantry.

1. I see your pedantry and raise you a "Honduras is in Central America"

To me.. the core idea is that (given one chooses, over and over, from a bunch of independent and identically distributed events.):

There are more ways for everything to happen than there are ways for one thing to happen over and over.

His point about the bastardization of "cut and paste" is very important in my opinion. Hell, he ends with this..

Bringing a complex tangle of code to heel becomes tractable if you just print it out, cut it up, and rearrange the parts.

It would be fairly sexy to be able to do this on your computer... granted, you need a lot of screen space to pull it off.

Oh, and I'm ignorant of Ted Nelson.... But it seems fairly obvious these talks are meant to be taken with some humour.

Its a sexy read.

James Mickens is AKA "Galactic Viceroy of Research Excellence"

http://microsoftjobsblog.com/viceroy-james-mickens/

Hmm, thanks for this bit (pun?) of information.

So, I guess the question becomes.. is there a (or what is the) difference between:

1. [0, ∞)

2. (0,1]

when it comes to a currency?

I think that the traditional "boil the frog" approach of monetary inflation is psychologically easier for people to take.

A central authority just sort of wills new currency into existence as it is demanded.. Which, presumably, allows for price stability.

To me, the fact that it is hard to get "1 bitcoin" makes it too unstable. Someone could will 0.001 bitcoin into existence and pay $1 for it.. but, that 0.001 bitcoin may be worth $0.50 tomorrow (but then worth $3 the next week). So.. what's the point (presuming I desire an alternative currency).

One needs a clever way to create an "algorithm" (seems people think this stuff is as magical as the idea of a central bank).. that people trust to sell currency units.

The system would just run and sell 1 bitcoin (or 1 mystery coin or whatnot) for $1 to anyone who wanted it. The goal would be to achieve parity with the dollar (and maybe any other currency).

The thing this magic algorithm would NOT do is.. it would not BUY its mystery coins back. It would just create a verifiable.. non-counterfeit coin for anyone who desired one for a set price.

If a deflationary spiral set in on the dollar.. well, magic algorithm learned from Soros and the Bank of England.. you don't fight that..

Bitcoin is "doomed" to fail (as a currency) by the simple fact that the supply is capped at 21 million.

This relegates it to the status as a "virtual collectible" (as someone so humorously put it).

Maybe Bitcoin 2.0 will be smart and remove a cap (or build in the ability to allow itself to float).. but Bitcoin as it is isn't flexible enough.

According to the quote I provided from the article, failure of the Zookeeper cluster will bring down their entire architecture.

I don't know... sounds like they just shifted the 'single point of failure' to the Zookeeper cluster. Is it somehow sexier to have your SPOF be things running Zookeeper instead of things running loadbalancer or DNS software?:

"The achilles heel of SmartStack is Zookeeper. Currently, the failure of our Zookeeper cluster will take out our entire infrastructure. Also, because of edge cases in the zk library we use, we may not even be handling the failure of a single ZK node properly at the moment."