TheColorYellow

What proof do you have that decentralization technology furthers public interest?

I'm sorry, but the institutions are in place today precisely because it is society that upholds them or tears them down. The gears may turn slowly when it comes to implementing change, but they very much are answerable to the public in democratic societies.

You should check out the Digital Asset Modeling Language, DAML. [0]

They've built a language for distributed ledger platforms based on Haskell with defined state transitions based loosely on traditional contract law. For exactly the reasons you've mentioned, this makes modeling the participants, rights, and obligations of a smart contract use case incredibly efficient.

Whether smart contracts are useful or not remains to be seen. There seems to be a lot of potential in the finance and supply chain worlds.

When thinking about DAML it makes me wonder how impactful something like Cobol was in reality. Definitely found use and even long term value add, but transformational? I don't know.

I'm not even sure what the technology comparison should be for DLT without DAML. There's only so many use cases or niche areas where it's valuable.

Yeah was waiting to see a Jmeter comment. Great tool that, when implemented as part of a larger tool stack, makes performance testing very doable.

And I think it's a pretty stupid simple tool compared to some of the DIY alternatives people are mentioning here.

If you do happen to max out the hosting server you can run Jmeter in a distributed fashion as well.

Agreed wholeheartedly. The level of discourse on here exceeds all other forums and has managed to do so while avoiding the increasing trend of culture wars on social forums.

I definitely think the mods are the key. As well as the trend of simplicity. It really keeps things focused on where they should be - good discussion.

This is true. Especially if you look at what Jed Mcaleb helped to cocreate with Stellar, you can see the original idea of Ripple expressed clearly in what has been done with XLM.

> Investors need to start asking more probing questions about how organizations develop and deploy applications.

Does this even matter though? Shitty technology choices don't always translate to poor business outcomes.

Not denying your experience, as it's probably true that the folks you've seen pursuing serverless may be misguided, but I want to contest your last point where you say "not many people" would benefit from serverless.

I would say that "literally any single person" benefits from serverless if they don't have the skills, knowledge, or time to handle the server/infrastructure responsibilities that come from running software.

If I'm a one man development shop with a sufficient budget, I'll probably find it far more productive when using serverless architecture to host my business logic than not.

> Perspectives like this are pessimistic, but important because the industry has age bias and yet we need to understand where technology might be going full circle. But instead of taking that as a bad thing and stopping there, we need to understand why and how the context is different this time and what that means.

I feel like this is a critically important aspect of software engineering that we are missing. I want to say this is because the field is so young relatively speak. The fundamentals have been changing so rapidly and are truly not completely well understood enough to be captured as reliable axioms. So instead we go down this path of recreation, sometimes with improvements, sometimes without.

In a hundred more years maybe things will be better, but for now this is taking on a bit of a vicious cycle. Literally people in the wrong age group are getting "moved" out of the scene not to mention the thousands of others in the "wrong" industries, tech stacks, and culture.

Software in today's age is a fickle industry when it comes to people...

This is the type of cultural accuracy I've been looking for.

Are all the commenters in this thread just cynical engineers who really can't see past their own narrow world view? I get snake oil is snake oil, but there is such a strong brand of "anything new must be snake oil" that runs through the HN community it boggles my mind.

The world is actually full of complex systems. And only once these systems are in place does the software engineer get to do his work! People on this site act as if they have all the understanding and knowledgeable necessary to decry something like cloud vendors because clearly these same people know better than everyone else and these are actually simple problems if only we had their perspective and knowledge.

The ego and arrogance of people in tech really shines through here.

This is a really interesting point. I work in backend enterprise software (as a consumer more than a provider).

Surely the critical success component at scale is more than just "wining and dining". I truly wonder how Oracle has managed to do it for all these years...

This is a big deal to me. I'm watching keenly to see when the crypto market makes the turn out of niche market space and into the mainstream. Perhaps Eth2 is one of the starting blocks that is needed...

+1 for Camunda.

I've used it for microservices orchestration previously and it works great.

I'm excited for Zeebe too but it's a bit immature atm.

More importantly, the US administration is not trying to solve H1B abuse from the perspective of non-US citizens.

> Let's be clear: What Coinbase is saying is, we the founders, who set the company's mission, and are doing so with a clear political view (rooted in libertarianism and so forth), are allowed to use the company to further our political ends.

One hundred percent this. There is a reason Coinbase is one of the few companies to take a stance like this.

The company's foundational value is literally based on the notion of state-free finance. They have no incentive to do anything to allow their company to be steered into engaging with conventional politics. In fact, they benefit from taking strong stances that maintain the status quo if the status quo furthers their own mission.

So, yeah, Coinbase is indeed very mission oriented.

How'd you climb the ladder to exec?

I'm noticing a situation where stepping away from hard technical skills (i.e. Coding) creates a more ambiguous professional career path. It's completely thrown off what would be my previous reference points for career progression.

DAML has been an incredible tool for selling and building DLT systems in the enterprise.

Unfortunately I believe I'm still in the minority as a DAML user.

Regardless of what others might say, for enterprise software like this, the value and efficacy is still undetermined.

What roles and companies do you typically search for when job hunting?

Suprised to see Camunda isn't mentioned here more.

Open-Source BPMN compliant workflow processing with a history of success. Goldman Sachs supposedly runs their internal org with it.

Slightly different target use case, but Camunda has really shined in microservices orchestration and I find implementing complex workflow and managing task dependencies much easier with it.

I've worked with Camunda extensively, which Zeebe is based on.

I've found Camunda to be incredible. The APIs are implemented well and the work flow processing paradigm is easy to work with. Setting up the Camunda engine as a web server in a Spring project and integrating with external sources is great.

I've found there can be some performance issues when running a single engine, but clustering is easily enabled and you can adjust with a dedicated worker paradigm too.

Great piece of tech honestly. Haven't worked with Zeebe yet but am excited to.

Not the GP, but what would you suggest is a realistic alternative in the current state?

Reforming public institutions to more effectively build public transportation infrastructure seems to be incredibly difficult. Local institutions seem to have maxed out their ability to improve beyond what exists.

So why not let the private market innovate and improve? If the public institutions where smarter they'd be taking advantage of these innovations the same way as has happened in reverse when public institutions have had success with innovation.

What autonomy would Uber need to provide?

I wholeheartedly agree with everything you're saying and think this is excellent analysis.

However, I struggle with this part.

> In the short term, US moves to destroy Chinese tech firms and effectively transfer their assets to US firms are not helpful for global stability.

I can concede that this action by the US doesn't help move the US-China relationship into a more cooperative one. To your point, however, the US is not willing to move into such a position anyways.

So, given the US desire to effect change in their existing US-China relationship, why should the US let things like Huawei and TikTok proceed? It's pretty much par for the course as far as US foreign business relations and policy created by the executive branch.

This is a good read of the market and I agree with most of your points.

If you're saying the government shouldn't be innovating in the digital currency space or if the impact would be negligible due to feasibility or some other issue, I'd strongly disagree.

> What's the benefit of using FedCoin over using something decentralized with good monetary properties?

The government and existing banking systems are the actors with the largest degree of potential impact for any currency solution in the next 30 years. This solution doesn't necessarily need Bitcoin-like decentralization by any means to solve real problems with real innovative solutions.

To me, Bitcoin has proven itself limited to only a speculative store of value solution and has failed to deliver impactful, broadly felt impact. Any product based on Bitcoin will inheritly suffer a limited upside due to this. This is where the difference is for the existing entities, the central banks, domestic banking networks, financial intermediaries - unlimited upside.

Do you think there is a sufficient market for businesses looking to transact in crypto?

I'm a big believer in the tech, but when I look today I still don't see how Visa really plays well with the current crypto market.

There are almost no cryptocurrencies that actually have desirable cash-like qualities that would result in their use in the retail space which basically eliminates all B2C like options. CBDC or other forms of tokenization could be a big deal, but CBDC certainly isn't there yet, and despite some interesting initiatives I haven't yet seen a value add tokenized solution in the retail sector. Including in developing countries, existing solutions using traditional payment networks are still more desirable.

There is the classic Innovators Dilemma where the new hot product will obviously underperform traditional products in the interim but eventually outperform them over the long term. I could see this happening in the developing world, but to my knowledge I have yet to see a product that seems to fit this mold.

They quite literally mention the partnerships, programs, and products that Visa is involved with in this space.

What more do you want from a publication saying what Visa is doing in the crypto space?

I don't think this is true at all. The tech bubble in the West is huge and claiming junior devs in the West are anywhere less afflicted by the rat race syndrome than India is outrageously false.

To a certain extent the MIC as you define it would explain the erosion of the market wouldn't it?

Also I've read your comments a few times now and I'm not sure if I'm completely understanding your view of what is becoming more "trust-based". Are you saying that DARPA is more trusted by the consumer (the federal government) than the market entities (the contractors)? If so, isn't that exactly what government entities of all types are created for? These agencies exist as part of the government working for the government because it's difficult to have an effective private market created for these similar purposes.

I think it makes the question about "what makes DARPA successful" so much more interesting from if we acknowledge the limitations of the sector. Many agencies, entities, or initiatives of various types have failed when given similar mandates and similar market conditions. That's even if you believe DARPA is truly as effective as is claimed at achieving it's mandate of innovation in the Defense and National Security sector...

I was really annoyed when I found out that only some USB C chargers can be used to support docking mode in the Switch.

So stupid.

Ditto. Would love to figure out if there's a good way of mapping out layer 1/2 connectivity from a single computer as well. Would be really, really fascinating.

At a recent start-up like situation we paid licensing for a monitoring and metrics provider that provided out of the box tracing infrastructure for us.

It turned out that the licensing was quite expensive for what we where getting (couldn't even get outlier traces), we didn't have much control of our infrastructure (couldn't control the sampling rate in such a way to keep all the traces we needed), and ultimately the learning curve for making the infrastructure scalable was a challenge as well.

Even after setting up tracing in our entire system successfully, I ultimately found it of minimal value and we ended up relying on ELK and log aggregation for more insight.

Tbh, it was a disappointing experience and just reading how much custom dev was required in this post to make tracing work for you guys makes me disappointed. Given the frame of work I do (consulting), I doubt tracing will ever prove more valuable than spending money on log aggregation and other monitoring efforts and tools.