felipeccastro

“Mental overhead is greatly reduced when you can assume that your data structures are immutable”. I’ve been reading lots of articles claiming that but I still haven’t understand how that’s so. If you have fifty functions all acting on the same piece of state, why would returning new objects instead of mutating would greatly reduce mental overhead? Isn’t there still mental overhead in tracking which of the fifty functions made some transformation? Maybe this is something I would understand better with more practice in functional programming (which I don’t have yet), but if anyone could provide an example of this in practice I’d really appreciate.

What you describe looks like the "install PWA" (Progressive Web Apps) feature coming to Chrome. It is available already in Chrome 72 if you enable a flag (#enable-desktop-pwas) - then, when visiting a PWA site (try https://mobile.twitter.com) you have a menu option to install it like an app.

This looks somewhat familiar with the centralization vs decentralization debate in tech. It seems the network effects benefits don't apply only for tech products, but for cities as well.

While there are many efforts in overcoming those effects through decentralization in various aspects (from remote work to blockchain projects), it seems none of these really achieved as much success as we were expecting, probably because the benefits of decentralization don't outweigh (yet) the advantages of strong networks.

Perhaps once we solve this equation in tech, and make decentralized options more appealing than their centralized counterparts, we may be able to transfer that knowledge to city planning somehow.

That was very informative, thanks! I was having the same impression about Ethereum, that the ecosystem was becoming wider and ever more complex, but still not very practical to actually use. How does Stellar compare to EOS? AFAIK EOS uses the same approach of federation / trusted nodes, and is also a platform for smart contracts, so it would be interesting to see a comparison.

I find the idea intriguing, but it's not clear to me from reading the site what is it for. What cool things one can do with this Node-OS that wouldn't be possible/easy with another Linux?

Also, what's the story for GUI applications? npm is mostly used for libraries, not full apps, so I'm not sure why that was a good pick for an OS. I guess it would be nice if there was a web view as the default GUI mechanism, so one could use web apps as if they were native without having to resort to things like Electron.

I agree, honestly the error handling alone has always been the main reason I never used Go. Yes, I knew there were good reasons for that design, but I prefer to have options in how to handle errors and keep a clean, elegant code.

That's what the Brave browser is doing: "Set up automatic micro-donations. Brave will automatically divide a monthly donation among the top sites you visit." (brave.com)

The downside is the high entry bar of installing a new browser and setting up a cryptocurrency wallet (payments are made with Basic Attention Tokens).

Exactly, the example I had in mind. I tried their app and at this point I think the friction to setup an account, wallet etc. is too high for the average user, but this business model is awesome: great incentive for attracting early users, and if the platform ever becomes a hit, the financial rewards will be distributed among users, not just to the owner.

Decentralized doesn't mean every user needs to run their own node. Getting people to run a node is solved once there's a (financial) incentive for that, which is what made cryptocurrencies possible.

I agree no service is going to get adoption if its main feature is decentralization, but that doesn't need to be its value proposition. "Post your cat photos here and get paid in cat-tokens that are worth real money" would be the incentive.

I agree, and honestly, I think trying to solve this via deep learning is not the optimal approach. Too many details to handle besides a static layout, which are the hardest part.

I believe it would be a lot more effective if designers used tools that generated clean code directly, instead of Photoshop. If it's a SPA, then something with the actual, integrated React/Vue components for consistency and reuse.

While I'm not familiar with any such tool that's actually good enough for professional use (most WYSIWYG designers for the web I tried were terrible), I wonder why we haven't seen much success in this area yet, as we have with desktop app design since VB6.

You needing to trust the website will exist for the coins to hold any value, while true, is not the same as having to trust the currency will work as a currency - i.e. that what is yours is yours, and the steemit owners can't simply wipe out the database or change their numbers arbitrarily.

I'm not saying this model is foolproof, and perhaps you're right and steemit (or app specific coins) will never be a big hit because of that. My point was just to show an example of a different kind of business model / monetization strategy made possible because of the blockchain, and there will certainly be others.

a) what about the economic incentives for early users? That is a pretty huge deal too, even if ICO funding wasn't possible.

b) it's not literally useless outside, you just have to exchange it for other coins to use it outside. Isn't that how cash in most countries work too? Besides, remember there's far less friction in exchanging app-specific tokens by another coin than there is in exchanging cash today.

Even if app-specific tokens do not become standard in the future, it's an interesting idea worth exploring. But the whole point is how different kinds of business models can be created due to the decentralized nature of blockchain, this is just one of them.

That’s like saying bitcoin could be a Money table on my personal database. It’s not the same at all. These coins are unique, wont be tampered, work on exchanges, and don’t depend on you trusting the startup that created it.

a) they could use ETH, but if you launch your own token you get two advantages:

- funding (ICO) - an economic incentive for attracting early users (give tokens for using your app in the promise that they will be worth more in the future)

b) if a user earns tokens that value over time, that's a huge win: imagine if all the time you spend on apps today, generating valuable data to a few companies, would generate in turn some of these tokens back to you?

Besides, what do you mean by "closed" exactly? The data being on the public blockchain should actually encourage integration by default. For example, several new dapps are being built on top of IPFS for data, using uPort for identity, Aragon for governance, etc.

You don't pay, you gain money. Unless, of course, you're a company that wants to buy advertising space.

As a user (writer/curator), you earn tokens for doing what you already do for free in reddit or facebook. The tokens you earn are like altcoins, you can trade them for whatever you like.

The tokens here are essentially altcoins, like ether or bitcoin. How would that be done with a simple, private database?

For example, steemit.com: a social network where you get paid (in tokens) for producing/curating content. As the network grows, the token gets more valuable, so there's a strong incentive for early users to join it.

I'm not sure yet steemit will end up being a winner in this field, but I find this a very smart approach for challenging the network effect of big competitors.

I agree with your view, but I suspect it hasn’t happened yet for a couple of reasons:

- every time it was attempted, the generated html/css was terrible (think old ASP Net for example), and maintenance hard. Abstractions only work when they are not leaky

- designers, devs and users in general expect to have custom design for everything, rather than standard controls. Something to do with “have a unique brand and not look like everyone’s else app”.

It's trying to settle itself as the silver of bitcoin's gold. Since it has solved the scalability issues bitcoin is now facing since its inception, the expectation is in the future people will use bitcoin only for big transactions and storing value, and litecoin for paying coffee.

I don't know enough about Urbit's implementation or team to vouch for it, but I do find the basic idea promising: that we should have control over our own data, and should be able to do whatever we want with it.

I'm not sure why you though an ICO is a bad first impression. Yes, there were several scams but the blockchain space is full of very exciting opportunities. Some other commenter mentioned that a "new web" would have to provide sufficient value to the end user that the current version does not/can not. These experiments in decentralization are worth watching and probably where the "sufficient value" will come from to justify the use of new tech.

First of all, great article, regardless of outcomes I've never considered an alternative web would be a possibility.

At first I was skeptic like most here, but it doesn't sound impossible at all. If you fix the most pressing issues regarding security, improve productivity by orders of magnitude (with great UX by default, even at the expense of some customizability), and can make it run on an iPhone, it might be a path worth exploring, yes.

Have you heard about Urbit? It seem to be also a "new internet" kind of project, but more focused on decentralization, which is very important too. I'd be interested to know your thoughts about it, as well as any progress about the "NewWeb" in case it becomes an actual project.

steem.io - I believe it's not on top of Ethereum, but it's the same idea.

I wonder if any of these Agile haters ever had the pleasure of working with RUP (Rational Unified Process) and endless UML diagrams.

Agile was a response to that trend, cutting the BS and recommending teams would focus more on software quality and collaboration and less on worthless processes. It was a cultural shift more than anything else, and a very welcome one.

Sure, lots of people tried to "sell Agile" by pushing sticky notes everywhere and replacing "Project Manager" with "Scrum Master", as if these changes alone would solve all their problems. This does not mean that Agile itself was a bad idea, it only means that anything that goes mainstream is bound to be misunderstood and misused by a lot of people.

I don't think we'll reach this point of all jobs being automated, where UBI becomes an absolute necessity, mostly because human desires are unlimited, but that's beyond the point I'm making here.

I'm curious about why you think UBI as incentive would be dangerous, especially in the scenario I described. Doesn't this already work in Alaska? What kind of rug pulling you expect it might happen?

If Facebook paid people in exchange for the content they produce, it's not UBI, it's normal income. UBI happens when you get paid for nothing. Looking the example from Alaska, though, it makes sense - it encourages people to move to a place they might not consider otherwise. Perhaps UBI would be a good idea if offered by cities that are facing issues with declining population, as an incentive for attracting more people.

Blockchain, decentralized apps - perhaps based on Ethereum, perhaps not. They have the potential to enhance capitalism in equivalent ways as the current wave of "sharing economy" startups (Uber, Airbnb) has done, or even surpass that.

- it's much easier for more people to become investors, since buying coins/tokens will become increasingly easier and common.

- you won't need to be located at a specific startup hub to launch successful business, because it's so much easier to get investment from around the world.

- it has a great approach for solving the "network effect", where no one can challenge the major players with strong networks, by providing strong incentives for early adopters to join and grow their networks (either by buying very cheap tokens, or producing content that will render them "free money").

- it enables the creation of new business models that might disrupt (ugh, sorry) several existing industries, due to how they solve the trust issue between parties that have no reason to trust each other without a central controller entity. Some are calling this next wave of startups the "Web 3.0".

Sure, it looks like the wild west now, and there are all sorts of problems from scams to scalability issues, but maturity might be only a matter of time.

It would be nice if, instead of closing a question as off-topic and asking it again on another site, there was an option for easily transferring the question from one site to another.

Great article! And oh, the irony of having a very engaging title... It seems it all boils down to incentives: if the only available way of making money is ads, news agencies will optimize for that. I wonder if new techs like blockchain/ethereum may provide alternative ways of making money with different kinds of incentives (i.e. not optimized for more clicks, but for something else).

Don't know why this was downvoted, it is relevant. That's the main reason why hacks like PJAX/turbolinks were invented in the first place, not having to reparse the same JS and CSS for every page change has a noticeable impact in perceived performance.

Interesting. I've always thought event store was an interesting pattern, but not something as a default architecture for typical business apps, probably because of the added complexity in maintenance.

If you're building your relational db based on the event store, I'd imagine even something simpler like Mongo would do it, but I agree that having a single db to maintain is an important advantage.