easuter

If the browser becomes popular, expect an explosion of "sorry for your loss" incidents.

Honestly I don't know why people keep throwing money (fiat, lol) at bitcoin projects.

Yeah, unfortunately a lot of these blog posts are very US-centric. There are still plenty of people in Europe living in poverty and their white privilege somehow didn't save them.

It's interesting how these racist ideas get tossed about proudly here and in the US media.

The brutality seems to have been mostly by Erdogan supporters; though this is probably not what the article was trying to convey...

Yep this is what I'm referring to. And an 8 MB block size still won't resolve the problem.

It's really tiring to see bitcoin promoted as some sort of second-coming-of-Christ when all evidence points to it being nothing more than an interesting experiment.

And they're all vaporware as far as I'm concerned until they're actually widely adopted and actually work as advertised.

Haha! I'll take bitcoin seriously once it can actually process a useful number of transactions without choking.

> How do you think the Chinese manage to get access to every natural resource?

> Just bribe a leader and you're home free

Heh, far from it. See this documentary about Chinese operations in the Congo, for example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0C4_88ub_M

Getting anything done in Africa is a pain in the ass, and it goes far beyond just bribing the right people.

> I don't think that there is anyone on Hacker News who can say they succeeded getting their start in the industry outside of a 'software' tech hub.

Haha! Counterexample: practically every programmer in my country.

None of our cities are "software tech hubs" like you'll find in the USA, UK or Germany.

Love this framework, it has been a lifesaver when I need to implement an HTTP API in an existing Windows service, with no need to rely on IIS.

> No the difference is one has to be written in a shitty language (SQL), whereas the other can be written in an actual programming language.

Your other comments already make you sound like a petulant child and a moron (or at the very least, someone with no actual real-world experience), but this just the cherry on the cake.

SQL is extremely powerful, and using it effectively doesn't take much more effort than learning another new mainstream programming language.

Anyway, enjoy your tortured use of shitty ORMs + Mongo for your toy projects; move aside and let the real programmers go on with their work.

On this topic I'd like to plug a book that really drove this home for me: "SQL Antipatterns" by Bill Karwin.

What points in the article do you disagree with, or care to offer counterarguments?

I hear you'll have a lower life expectancy in Chicago...but that's just what I gather from the news :(

> Card payments take far longer to process than bitcoin payments

I can't remember the last time I stood in line at the supermarket for an hour because VISA was clogged with "dust" transactions. Hmm.

I'll take all these improvements with a pinch of salt until they are actually in the wild.

Take the lighting network for example. The idea has been floating around for quite some time but in practice its still vaporware.

Yet, ask any bitcoin enthusiast what's being done to solve the scalability problem and the LN is trotted out as if it were already widely adopted. It's ridiculous.

Of course it's a good thing. Cyber criminals can purchase TF2 without having to use Paypal or a credit card now!

For me, I have "bitcoin fatigue" regarding all the usual topics pro-bitcoin evangelist start spewing whenever the topic comes up. The usual "bitcoin is the second-coming of christ" crap.

There is a complete lack of acknowledgement of bitcoin's ineptitude as a replacement for current payment methods, what with its 2TX/s limit (on a good day) and the ridiculous size of the block-chain which effectively negates all the advantages of it being a distributed system since you have to rely on third-parties to use it on you phone or embedded devices for example. Not to mention the monopoly that chinese miners have on the network...it's a joke.

IMHO bitcoin is an interesting experiment, but that's all it is. It will be replaced by something better some day, another fact that evangelists refuse to concede.

> The year is 2016.

It is $CURRENT_YEAR, yes.

> Software engineers are still obsessed with squeezing every last drop of performance from a single core, adding multicore or distributed load support as an afterthought.

Normally I'd agree, but if you had bothered reading the abstract the performance losses were not negligible and the kernel scheduler was responsible for the losses. This has nothing to do with application programmers not understanding "distributed programming" as you put it.

From the article:

> As a central part of resource management, the OS thread scheduler must maintain the following, simple, invariant: make sure that ready threads are scheduled on available cores.

> As simple as it may seem, we found that this invariant is often broken in Linux. Cores may stay idle for seconds while ready threads are waiting in runqueues.

> In our experiments, these performance bugs caused many-fold performance degradation for synchronization-heavy scientific applications, 13% higher latency for kernel make, and a 14-23% decrease in TPC-H throughput for a widely used commercial database.

> Walmart employees are not compelled to work for Walmart; the employment contract is agreed upon voluntarily by both parties. The employees know how much they will be paid and agree to accept the terms.

While technically true, you're ignoring a ton of other factors such as the lack of any other alternative employment or the lack of financial capability to move to an area where more employment exists.

When the only jobs available are McJobs, then that is what you are compelled to do, to support yourself and your family - regardless of your intelligence or qualifications because someone else is ready to take your place if you don't accept the job. You have no power to negotiate a higher salary regardless of whether or not you deserve it.

It is a very hard rut to pull yourself out of and stay free from. Companies like Walmart exploit this as much as they can, and have no reason to change their behaviour unless forced to do so.

From Wes' updated post:

> I never contacted Facebook or Alex using my work email account. It was only after Alex contacted my employer via email that I sent a reply from my work account. Alex indirectly contacted me at work, not the other way around.

The researcher has already updated his post regarding the use of his company email. Apparently your original point still stands:

> I never contacted Facebook or Alex using my work email account. It was only after Alex contacted my employer via email that I sent a reply from my work account. Alex indirectly contacted me at work, not the other way around.

Also, why would he be doing this work at the behest of his employer when (IIRC) Facebook's bounty program only pays out to individuals? It would automatically make him ineligible to claim the bounty.

To me it seems like Alex Stamos tried to use some good old threaten-your-livelihood intimidation tactics and failed miserably.

> Reading these notes make me feel embarrassed for the author.

If that post made you feel this way, then her follow-up article will have you cringing and wincing:

http://sarah.thesharps.us/2015/10/06/what-makes-a-good-commu...

Aparently she knows for a fact that all those points definitely make a good community, despite never having run one the size and scale of the Linux kernel project.

Pure arrogance and entitlement.

I find it strange that Sarah Sharp makes accusations of sexist and homophobic jokes but provides no examples. The mailing list is public after all - should we just take her word for it?

Yep, this is what he had to say about Git:

> Quoting Linus: "I'm an egotistical bastard, and I name all my projects after myself. First 'Linux', now 'Git'".

>('git' is British slang for "pig headed, think they are always correct, argumentative").

https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Git_FAQ#Why_the_.27Git...

> US interests are international stability and freedom of commerce

Haha! You can't really be serious!

Yeah, copy the good stuff. And then leave it in the dust :)

What do you mean by "normal exercise"?

For example, yesterday I burned ~750kcal on the treadmill. Are you trying to tell me this makes no dent in the calories I consumed throughout the day?

If my objective was to lose weight, are you implying that doing such a workout couldn't lead to a calorie deficit and therefore expenditure of stored fat?

Indeed, not to mention the fact the there are lots of folks who need to use the OS on modest hardware (embedded devices for example) and having additional runtimes for a language like Go or Javascript (god save us) is kind of out of the question.

Rust seems to be a saner alternative, but isn't production ready.

> I've taken to a rash practice of just tearing out tightly coupled, untestable, duplicated and poorly designed code by the roots.

Hello me, from a parallel universe!

You've basically described the project I'm currently assigned to and the situation I'm in as well, and I share your enthusiasm for "weeding" out obvious turds and warts from the codebase.

Unfortunately I've reached a new kind of roadblock when it comes to improving and refactoring the project: I've picked all the low-hanging fruit, and now if I tug at any of the remaining lose ends the whole thing will unravel.

Basically the remaining pain points are architectural ones (that will hurt us at scale) and that require attention but at the same time are large enough that management won't approve the necessary resources to work on them.

Honestly I almost feel as if I've fucked myself over by making those improvements: the project is now mediocre as a whole, but just good enough so that nobody really cares about improvements any more. Had I just let the ship sink, maybe something better would have come out of this whole mess in the end.

Not sure what the lesson here really is! :|