HN user
That's not a problem with feature flags per se, it's a problem with lazy implementations of feature flags. Flags should be associated with an expiry date, and company comms tooling should be consistently yelling in some public channel when expired flags still exist in the codebase.
Talk to anyone who works in the industry and they're trying to solve a problem.
Sure. But are those problems worth solving? How many VCs does the world need to pump cash into NFT-enabled video games before we ask the question, "why?"
https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/22/nba-top-shot-creator-dappe...
I am interested in learning about how "shard chains" work.
I'm concerned after reading https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/shard-chains/ that sharding is aimed at letting individual dApps roll up transactions -- i.e. the individual app would be the effective shard key -- and thus that would introduce some notion of centralization into the system.
Sorry, thought my last paragraph covered that. Can any blockchain-backed tech handle the number of transactions per second that current major credit card/payment networks do?
One benchmark is 1,700 tps for VISA. https://phemex.com/blogs/what-is-transactions-per-second-tps
If not, why not? Especially after 10+ years of development and intense VC funding (as is the parent article's point).
Great pointer, thanks.
This is a protocol that rolls up ETH transactions and executes them in batch, in an attempt to alleviate scalability concerns. I can't really speak to the side/unintended effects of transaction rollups on a blockchain, but I'm interested in learning.
This excerpt from the FAQ
It is worth noting that anyone can become a relayer so long as they have staked the required bond in the smart contract. This incentivises the relayer not to tamper with or withhold a rollup.
kind of bothers me. It does not seem like such a small step to go from 'decentralized' to 'cartel of relayers' to 'central bank and subordinate branches'. And the fact that this protocol is unavailable to US persons is interesting, though perhaps standard for the space right now.
OK perfect. "Inefficient" in every sense of the word. Let's say I'm wrong and skipped over that line. What else could the various senses of "inefficient" mean in the context of this article?
Probably the fact that, despite having been under development for > 10 years, we haven't seen any ground broken by any blockchain technologies for any reasons other than speculation or triviality. Which is what the other 95% of the article focuses on. The inefficiency of the development process, not necessarily the technology, although yes, the latter is a factor.
So this is Yet Another Liquidity Pool? $14B is not the kind of scale I mean. That is frankly trivial especially when transactions are large (or initial funding is high).
What I mean is, if blockchain is going to be a revolutionary technology backing all finance, where is the evidence it can handle the kind of transaction volume that, say, major credit card networks generate?
But I don't understand why people get so invested in it being a scam or failure.
Can't speak for everyone. But from my perspective, it's because certain "applications" are being marketed very heavily to non-technical people who aren't able to reasonably assess the viability of the technology. I'm thinking of NFTs in particular. The only other popularized non-NFT applications are cryptocurrencies, which are pure speculation (i.e., gambling).
In short, that's a moral issue. People were outraged by the Madoff scandal (and others), and this doesn't look a lot different to people who understand the underlying technology. Nobody wants their mom going broke because they bought some hyped-up blockchain thing on the advice of some super-hustler internet marketing influencer out looking to make a buck.
Didn't pg write Viacom (shopping cart software) in 1995, and sell it to Yahoo in 1997?
I'm not aware of any serious financial application running at scale and relying on blockchain under the hood.
Are you? What is it? Specifically.
The parent article doesn't say anything about performance. Therefore this comment seems like a red herring. A case of not reading the article?
The parent article's point is that most currently popular technologies found an application rather quickly, whereas blockchain technologies have been around for a long time (in tech terms) and still have not made ground.
You act like people that struggle with reading aren't capable of making a decision between usually only two candidates
A functioning political system shouldn't only have ever have 2 viable candidates. Much less have the only viable candidates belong to one of two viable political parties, both of which have cartoonishly stable views over time.
Maybe the broken, overly simplistic US political system is a _symptom_ of shockingly terrible education outcomes. Not vice-versa. Like many of the other social ills currently ravaging American society.
how a good lead or manager should go about identifying these problems.
Notice when things aren't getting done by the time they were estimated to be done, and notice if the person seems to be continually pushing back completion dates. After a day or two of "thought I could get it cone but couldn't", it's negligent to _not_ dig in to _why_ the person is struggling. Really not meaning to be snarky, but if a manager isn't doing this, I'm not sure what exactly they are doing.
IME most solid engineers prefer autonomy and trust over schedule and process, and would strongly resent having to spend their time in a meeting because their manager was unable to do people management.
Ideally you wouldn't waste everyone on the team's time every day just to suss out individuals who potentially can't ask for help. A competent lead or manager should be able to identify those kinds of team members without a standup, and address the issue 1:1. If the lead or manager can't do that, why have a lead or manager at all?
Re: your last example.
Where is the incentive for a company to actually bother reaching into the ledger to determine who holds royalty rights? The underlying media pointed to by the NFT is not restricted, it's infinitely reproducible and thus valueless. Why not just right-click save-as and display the media, bypassing the metadata encoded in the NFT?
It seems like there'd have to be some person or collection of persons who are responsible for enforcing that the company treat the terms of the NFT as a binding agreement. Using force, if necessary, either legal or physical. Something almost like... a legal system associated with a state. Which would be centralized. Which would beg the question, what's the value of the decentralized ledger in that case?
So an NFT is a digital signature that is worthless unless it "makes a market for" itself. It is a pointer to an infinitely and freely reproducible resource, meaning the owner of the signature doesn't actually have control over the underlying resource, they just have "proof" that they "own" it. And the owner needs to convince other people that their "owning" the signature has value, so that other people will pay larger sums of money for transferring "ownership", or other people will be recruited into the market to buy more stuff.
Let's substitute "digital signature"/"NFT" for "tulip", or "star", or "moon crater", or "beanie baby", or "MLM beauty product". How is the market for NFTs any different from these essentially ponzi-scheme markets?
"NFTs allow digital artists to profit from their work!"
I mean, sure, but again, they are selling digital signatures with no inherent value that they need to "make a market for". The money they are making isn't because of their art, it is because their sales skills allow them to convince greater fools that inherently worthless digital signatures are actually worth something.
Would we say "selling stars enables amateur astronomers to profit from their work"? Or would we rather say selling stars enables scammers to scam people who don't know any better? Or charitably that selling stars enables charitable people to donate money to whoever is selling the "star", both parties to the transaction recognizing that there is nothing of value being exchanged.
The latter would be forgivable but it also seems highly unlikely there would be a large market of altruistic donators wanting to provide patronage specifically via NFTs. We have a large and robust financial system that is perfectly capable of facilitating low/no-cost donations. It seems more likely that illegitimate or shady capital needs ways to achieve liquidity and legitimacy. And the whole "supporting artists"/"allowing artists to prosper" narrative is a fantastic (and sufficiently complex) cloak that would achieve that while avoiding scrutiny.
tl;dr When a market for an inherently valueless, infinitely reproducible resource pops up out of nowhere and begins to rapidly inflate, it seems likely there's some sketchy stuff going on under the hood.
Ah, that is true. Full court doc for anyone interested in reading https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21165768-us_vs_rei_i...
It sounds like the bank accounts were owned by the guy's employer and he was perceived to be authorized to transact on the employer's behalf.
While true, vehicle dependency is a serious societal problem in North America that needs to be fixed. This is partially the reason. Nobody should need a personal vehicle in order to be able to live a baseline satisfactory life.
Pretty much every first-world country other than the USA has at least partially solved it. Social safety nets, regulation of utilities/public goods (education for example), and a guaranteed standard of living.
I think that's more of an assumption based on social norms than something we can strongly conclude is true. Here is a study that suggests alcohol is one of just four 'high risk' drugs in terms of harm per user, and of those 4 alcohol is the highest-risk. Also alcohol is the highest risk drug at population scale, which we know:
for individual exposure the four substances alcohol, nicotine, cocaine and heroin fall into the “high risk” category with MOE [margin of exposure] < 10, the rest of the compounds except THC fall into the “risk” category with MOE < 100. On a population scale, only alcohol would fall into the “high risk” category, and cigarette smoking would fall into the “risk” category
If you don't get a huge financial windfall, there was never a point in sacrificing yourself.
This doesn't explain why they wouldn't accept the offer of work from /u/lopkeny12ko
It sounds like OP is moving a bunch of the startup's systems onto bigcorp's infrastructure. Usually you can't "just do" stuff like that in a public company since there are laws and regulations surrounding access control, change management, data security, etc. For example PCI, SOC2, SOX, GDPR, ...
It's usually not the case that the bigcorp people just want to prevent the fast-moving Startup Superstar! from moving quickly. Bigcorp operates in an entirely different context from startup, and needs to protect itself from employees with incomplete information making reckless decisions.
I agree that OP should find a job that's better suited to their preferred style of working.
Wasn't your argument that increased exposure leads to less harm via developing social regulation mechanisms, though? Using alcohol as an example?
Yet alcohol is by far the most destructive substance in terms of both $ and human life costs. Which seems to weaken the argument significantly...
So maybe prohibition is not the answer. But whatever we've done with alcohol clearly isn't, either.
I mean sure, but if you're already working around the framework's ORM...
ActiveRecord (Rails ORM) provides an interface for raw SQL queries if that's really what you want to do (`connection.execute`). You can use it whenever you want. You can also swap out ActiveRecord for something else like DataMapper (or whatever) if you really want.
But, the whole point of using a framework like Rails is to let the framework make certain decisions for you, so you can develop quickly according to convention, and not think of lower-level technical decisions. Bypassing the ORM certainly works against that.
That's a problem with a limited imagination
Only if you examine the problem so superficially you can't think of any other cost of personal vehicles than burning gas.
Cars burning gasoline isn't the only or even the smallest problem with everyone needing to own a car. Think of the supply chain required to produce, deliver, and dispose of personal vehicles for everyone. Think of the civil infrastructure required to enable everyone to have a personal car. Think of the human cost that humans being terrible, irresponsible drivers takes on society. For starters.
There are things called towns that exist in suburbia and can be reached easily by bike or walking.
There is a thing called weather in much of the US and world that makes this unrealistic. Further it's disingenuous to claim it's feasible to walk to a town to do your groceries from a suburb. You're going to need to walk at least 2-3 miles (best case) to a grocery store and you're not going to be able to carry more than a couple days' worth of stuff, less for a full family.
The suburban way of life is going to crash and burn, spectacularly. It is running on credit it can never pay back. At least 2 generations have covered their eyes and ears and yelled "naaa naaa we don't believe it". It's time to acknowledge that we can't carry on that "tradition'. Either we voluntarily adapt, or our surroundings will force the change.
If their argument is it should be abolished because not everybody has the choice to go there
Why don't you read the article (or my comment to you, fully) to understand what the argument actually is?
Kids like suburbs just fine before they understand there's a big world out there outside the family unit. Often things fall apart after that phase.
I can't imagine that they would enjoy living in 2 bedroom apartment
OK but that's a problem with a limited imagination, not how your kids would actually feel. Do you know that 90% of families in the world live in close quarters, in places like 2 bedroom apartments (or -- gasp! -- smaller)? Do you think all these kids really hate their lives because of the size of their apartments? Do you think young kids even realize that they "should" prefer a 3000sqft house to an apartment?
this country is big and there's enough space for all of us!
Sure there's space, but space isn't really the issue. The negative social and environmental impact of a suburban lifestyle is unsustainable. Future generations are going to look back on our settlement patterns and think we were truly insane, hundreds of millions of people each with multiple personal cars spread out from each other such that cars are necessary to do even the most minor tasks. It's taken some incredibly opaque collective blinders for us to have ended up thinking suburbs are a responsible way of living.
"Not too bright" is very relative. Even W Jr. is a genius compared to the average American. Even with legacy considerations Ivys aren't accepting truly incapable people.