fbonetti

I’ve never worked at a place that took breaks between sprints.

What neighborhood do you live in? I live in Uptown with my wife. We don’t have any kids yet but I don’t think I would want my kids to go to school around here. Uptown is sketchy and people seem to get murdered here on a regular basis. I would feel differently if we lived in Lake View, Lincoln Park, or Wicker Park, but those neighborhoods are too expensive for us.

Is your tech team located entirely in NYC?

There are plenty of legitimate scams in the cryptocurrency world, but the games we're referring to (PonziCoin, PoWH3D, CryptoCelebrities, CryptoKitties, etc.) are very transparent about the fact that they are zero-sum games where you have the chance to lose a lot of money.

These games should really be considered simulated bubbles instead of Ponzis. A Ponzi scheme collapses when the operator walks away with everyone's money. PoWH3D doesn't have an operator since it's totally decentralized. It will collapse when everyone decides to sell. Likewise, CryptoCelebrities will never crash but inevitably somebody will get stuck with a collectible that nobody else wants to buy. It's akin to buying a beanie baby or a tulip for an exorbitant price, only to find that there's nobody to resell it to.

It's just a different form of PvP gambling, like poker.

You really can't imagine any scenario in which this information could be used for blackmail?

I know this is a joke, but there are numerous real life Ponzi and pyramid schemes based on Ethereum smart contracts. PonziCoin, PoWH3D, and EthPhoenix transparently advertise themselves as Ponzi/pyramid schemes. There's also a whole genre of "hot potato" collectible games that operate like pyramid schemes. CryptoCelebrities and CryptoKitties are a couple well known games in this genre.

Personally, I don't think there's anything unethical about transparent pyramid schemes. They're essentially gambling games where players bet on the greed of other players. The greediest players end up "holding the bag" while every one else makes money. These games can be pretty profitable if you play conservatively.

Bitcoin is still deflationary, which makes it unusable as money. Inflationary currencies like USD incentivize people to spend and invest. Deflationary currencies incentivize people to hoard.

Most people don't have even a basic understanding of economics or the incentives that drive markets. They equate development with gentrification and displacement. They don't realize that by opposing development they're actually restricting supply, and thus increasing prices.

2017 was the year of the shill.

How is that not two-way binding? The Vue documentation even calls it two-way binding:

“You can use the v-model directive to create two-way data bindings on form input and textarea elements.”

https://vuejs.org/v2/guide/forms.html

The virtual DOM automatically updates the real DOM for you, in a way that only touches the parts that have actually changed. Think of it like a diff.

This allows developers to focus on the business logic and presentation of their apps without worrying about how to update the DOM efficiently to match the current app state.

v-model is a two-way binding. In other words, you don’t have to write a setter function for every piece of state - you can hook up a state field directly to a text input, for example.

React doesn’t allow two-way binding, or at least heavily discourages it. The downside of two-way bindings is that they can make it hard to track and understand state changes. The upside is that they drastically cut down on boilerplate for things like forms.

I also made a couple DAPPs recently, the first using Vue (which I have very little experience in) and the second in Elm (which I have years of experience with and have used in production).

I never thought I’d say this, but I was a lot more productive with Vue and it was more fun. Static types and immutability are great for long term stability and refactoring, but it felt great to just bang out an app in a few hours and not worry about the overhead and boilerplate that comes from using a strict language/framework like Elm. I’m definitely going to use Vue on my next DAPP.

Yes.

They don’t want to go public because they have insane valuations yet aren’t profitable. Going public would mean losing a significant amount of paper wealth. The stock market doesn’t value “world changing technology” (flimsy startups) as highly as investors in Silicon Valley.

The ability to have nearly anything I want shipped to me with 2 days for a flat annual rate is absolutely devastating. I don’t know how I don’t know how I manage to function when a BIG, EVIL corporation is manipulating me into buying stuff I want. /s

I don’t get it either. I’ve been a developer in Chicago for 6+ years and have always worked from 9 - 5, aside from the times I did some contracting and was paid to work overtime. Most developers I’ve worked with came in to the office around 9:30 or 10 and left at 4:30 or 5.

I’m American but I scored 83% British with a crappy Cockney accent ;)

It's a quote from Socrates.

I've heard that taking that approach comes with a lot of a rules on how you can use your money. For example, if you make a profit from rent, you can't take it out in cash (it has to be reinvested into the business). Also, if you want to make an improvement to your property, you are required to hire someone to do the work instead of doing it yourself.

I could be totally wrong about this because I haven't done a lot of research. My plan is to use regular cash for down payments on traditional mortgages. I haven't decided what to do with my 401k yet, but I definitely want to use it even if that means paying the fee to pull it out in cash.

Thank you for sharing this. While it's good to be appreciative of our relative privilege in this market compared to other labor markets, it's nice to hear people admit that being a software engineer does nothing for your social or emotional growth. Sitting in front of screen day after day with little social interaction or meaningful collaboration takes a toll on you, no matter how much you're getting paid.

My exit plan is to become a landlord. I love fixing houses and there's something very satisfying about being able to physically experience the product of your work (unlike software, which is mostly abstract). I will probably need to work for another 5 years in order to build up enough rental income in order to justify quitting this industry, but it will be worth it. I would be absolutely miserable if I had to write software for the rest of my life.

The difference between Facebook and an ISP is that ISPs are, for all intents and purposes, a natural monopoly. There is an enormous cost associated with laying cable and negotiating the rights-of-way with the thousands of affected parcels to make even a tiny local network. It makes sense to enforce net neutrality because it's impossible to switch to a different ISP in many markets, just as it's impossible to switch to a different water provider or sewage system provider.

Facebook is a social media website. It doesn't provide a basic, necessary service. It doesn't operate under the physical constraints that utilities do, and it's not impossible to compete with Facebook, as evidenced by the numerous social media services out there like Snapchat, Tumblr, Youtube, Reddit, LinkedIn, Google+, Qzone (China), and Sina Weibo (China).

I'm certainly not against regulation as a general concept. The free market does not produce the best, ethical incentives in all cases. That being said, I fail to see why regulating Facebook is even necessary, and what that would look like in practice.

People on HN seem to take as a given that Facebook having loads of personal data is somehow a bad or dangerous thing. Why? Facebook has 2 billion users. That's 25% of the human population. 2 billion people voluntarily created profiles, provided details about themselves like their age and relationship status, and uploaded photos of themselves, their friends, and their families. For those 2 billion people, the "cost" of "losing privacy" was worth it to them. Face it, nobody outside of the tiny HN bubble cares about the security of their vacation photos or cat pics, nor should they.

Honest question: why is it a problem that Facebook has personal data and uses it in their advertising platform?

No one is forced to give their data to Facebook. It's not a public utility. It's an entertainment site, first and foremost.

Honest question: why? Why would you roll your own buttons, headers, footers, modals, panels, grid system, and alerts, which all respond responsively, when you could just take a framework off the shelf and start being productive immediately?

1% is incredibly low. Where do you live, when did you take out the loan, and what are the terms? According to this[1] chart, the lowest 30 year mortgage rate in the past 40 years was about 3.5%. I'm curious how you got a loan with such a low rate.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=NUh

> They don't achieve this by optimizing what's there, they do it by building an enormously complex system for no reason :)

This aspect of the industry drives me absolutely insane. I've seen this at every single company I've worked at. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Am I the only developer that sees tech as merely a tool? I don't want to build a massively complex system that scales to infinity and does everything for everyone. I don't want to build everything from scratch. I want to build dead simple, boring software that accomplishes a goal and is easy to maintain, so that I can go home and not worry about it.

Misguided cost savings is the worst when it comes from engineers. Software developers love to optimize, so if they can save $500 - $1,000 a month buy rolling their own service instead of paying for an existing one, they'll do it, completely ignoring the fact that their time costs money.

> Elm's type system will not catch this bug at compile time

This is completely false. Elm's type system will force you to handle the decoding failure at compile time. The `decodeString` function has the following type:

    decodeString : Decoder a -> String -> Result String a

Which means that when you call `decodeString`, it will return a Result containing either the decoded value or a String describing the error.

This is not a "runtime failure". This is the compiler forcing you to explicitly spell out what you want to happen the case of a decoding problem. The difference between Typescript and Elm is that Typescript's compiler will happily let your program crash when this type of issue occurs, whereas Elm's compiler won't.

Cons of using Typescript:

* Lack of purity. You can unintentionally trigger side effects from a function that's a supposed to simply return a value.

    function add(x: number, y: number): number {
      fireTheMissiles()
      return x + y
    }

* It's impossible to validate that external JSON data is the correct type at runtime. If a JSON API returns something weird, you're going to get a runtime error.