nemild

So far, we have a long way to go to build higher quality code. There's a few reasons:

1. Blockchain smart contracts are often unchangeable, so you can't fix bugs

2. The language is being built as people write code, with some bad design choices that encourage mistakes (slowly being fixed)

3. Libraries are still being developed

4. Tooling is still limited (even basic linting)

5. People are not taking the time to have a beta process.

6. People prematurely optimize gas, at the cost of readability

(For non-Ethereum devs, here's a short tutorial for how the language works: https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/solidity/ )

My own view is that you have to code expecting that things go wrong, and ensure that your logic survives inevitable mistakes ('resiliency').

There's a lot of great resources on security, for people interested in this space:

Ethereum Safety: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Safety

Decentralized Application Security Project: https://dasp.co/

Consensys Smart Contract Best Practice Guide (I helped coauthor this back in 2016 after the DAO): https://consensys.github.io/smart-contract-best-practices/

Hacking Distributed is a great blog for blockchain security:

http://hackingdistributed.com/

Emin and Phil Daian are great to follow on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/phildaian

https://twitter.com/el33th4xor

Audit Checklist (written by my team): https://github.com/cryptofinlabs/audit-checklist

(Disclosure: Our team does audits for a few projects: http://audit.cryptofin.io/index.html )

Feel free to add other resources to this thread. Imagine it'll be useful for everyone.

I think there's a fair bit of nuance to the story. I wrote a three-part series on it:

https://www.nemil.com/mongo/

Personally, I think that usability shouldn't be the primary decision criteria in a database for most engineers, even if it is a successful strategy.

This is great! Added to my media literacy guide:

https://github.com/nemild/hack-an-engineer/commit/3d8091960e...

But even Dang is just a single person. We really need to design systems (social networks) that encourage this type of thoughtful debate. Right now, all the incentives in social media are around "engagement" (upvotes, likes, retweets, large amounts of comments)

There is not often a monolithic "HN", but instead a group of people who decide to engage or not based on the subject matter.

We need more media literacy around HN and Reddit. You just need a few users to upvote something, and people often respond when they see the opposing view (this is why conservatives and liberals in the US so often take the most extreme statements on the other side, and critique/retweet them; better engagement and an easier way to caricature the opposing side).

It's interesting to think about how different posts attract wholly different tribes, meaning HN is hundreds of sub-groups not a monolith. There might be a post on a Ruby gem, and the entire commenter group are Ruby-ists who hold common views on opposing languages. You might see this as "HN believes X", but instead it's the subset of people attracted by that post that you're really interacting with.

Will add this as an example to my media literacy guide for engs:

https://github.com/nemild/hack-an-engineer

I've lived through a few eras, where open and/or decentralized systems were expected to win (Internet, crypto today). For most users, the critical things are usability and utility, not decentralization.

If we care about decentralization, we have to care about these points even more, to make products competitive with what users are used to. Even though many engs I know value decentralization, most people won't choose systems for this reason alone.

Just like with Github, there was a bunch of anger before when Slack was displacing IRC. I wrote some thoughts about what we/I could learn from that example:

What Open Source Can Learn From Slack

https://www.nemil.com/musings/oss-and-slack.html

If you really want to get more cynical, Tim Wu's book "The Master Switch" is a masterful look at 20th century technologies (radio, telephone, telegraph) going through the idealism of the early days, to the inevitable frustration when it creates new anti-consumer behemoths.

Agreed, but see my edit. The problem is that readers will see heavy coverage as "this is important" and I should be worried about this.

For example, after 9/11, 1k more Americans died in car crashes, because they decided not to fly.

I think another way is to train readers to understand the issues, and over decades, change the incentives faced by media. Or for us to push back on the incentives that social networks set for media outlets.

I wrote a media literacy guide for engineers in this vein:

https://github.com/nemild/hack-an-engineer

Absolutely, but many people use this news coverage to then make decisions. Statistically, this is crazy.

Like Rosling, the point is that we need to understand why the media covers things the way it does.

Hans Rosling's work is famous for pointing out how media incentives, statistical illiteracy, and our preconceptions give us a flawed sense of the world.

In the vein of Hans Rosling, I've done add'l research on media coverage vs actual stats for death. What's covered is what we most want to read about. As a society, we need many more lessons on statistics and the incentives behind news:

The deaths that are most covered are a tiny fraction (<1%) of the way we die

https://www.nemil.com/s/part3-horror-films.html

Today’s biggest threat to democracy isn’t fake news—it’s selective facts

https://qz.com/1130094/todays-biggest-threat-to-democracy-is...

How Media Fuels our Fear of Western Terrorism

https://www.nemil.com/s/part2-terrorism.html

EDIT: As some commenters point, news covers "new" things — and so of course it's at odds with data.

The problem is that most consumers of news don't understand that just because something is heavily covered doesn't mean it's common — or relevant input for personal decisions they make. This speaks to the issue of media literacy, and I'd argue is why Rosling's book is so important.

I really like the succinctness of that. I wrote a lot of words, to say the same.

I think it's a more complex picture. I did my own deep dive after years of reflecting on this:

Inside the Bubble at Facebook

"Management will laud what employees do, show them selective facts that justify their views, and hire/promote those who behave similarly to them. Employees in isolated teams with training in a single function may not realize the broad, unintended effects of their company's work. They'll assume the best of their coworkers that they've developed friendships with from working in the trenches, without inquiring into the larger effects they're having."

https://www.nemil.com/tdf/part1-employees.html

Would love feedback.

I made a list of a good set of commands for a full stack engineer:

https://github.com/nemild/cli_for_full_stack

Like many tech executives, Ev's view is that it's up to users to demand more from social media algorithms and tech products:

> But he is not convinced that the problems with social platforms can ever be fully solved, nor does he believe it's entirely incumbent upon tech companies to solve them. ... [It] will be up to users to choose, and stick to, their own information diets.

This echoes FB's VP of Ads, Rob Goldman, who blamed lack of media literacy and Benedict Evans at a16z, who argued that engagement must be king at FB.* To me, this feels remarkably self serving.

Regardless, I made an engineer media literacy guide to encourage a shift in user behavior, and contributions are welcome:

https://github.com/nemild/hack-an-engineer

-------------------------------------------------

* https://twitter.com/robjective/status/964680128092504065

* https://www.nemil.com/s/benedict-evans.html (my response to Benedict Evan's post)

A tweet from Princeton's Professor Arvind Narayanan on this announcement:

First Microsoft, now Google. Sends a message to researchers choosing between academia and industry that your work will be valued in the industry only if it's buzzword compliant.

https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/993850870067548160

The visual image I like is that we're all puppets influenced by the media sources we consume. Each media source is shaped by its business model — and other goals, which gives us a (statistically) biased view of the world (e.g., social feed algorithms and engagement).

See the puppet images we made in this media literacy guide: https://github.com/nemild/hack-an-engineer

(Contributions welcome)

Ideally, we are individually able to realize this — and cut some of these strings.

I'll respectfully disagree. Financial incentives influence everyone, including the editors at top publications who are constantly looking at what is read, watched, and shared to decide what to invest in and feature.

You might really like "All the News That's Fit to Sell" which is written by a media economist that digs into how market incentives influence coverage (he's the director of the journalism program at Stanford). There's lots of discussion as well about media coverage decisions in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election at even the national networks.

This Cecil the Lion example at the Washington Post has always been illuminating to me: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/17/business/where-clicks-rei...

Even at the top publications, financial incentives influence choices. It's not as malevolent as someone paying off a journalist.

For example, at most top tier newspapers, there is an incentive for "if it bleeds, it leads". This is an economic outcome, as this elicits the most reader interest and also increases profitability. (See my data analysis on this in the NY Times: https://www.nemil.com/s/part3-horror-films.html )

I've been actively working on a media literacy guide for engineers, contributions welcome:

https://github.com/nemild/hack-an-engineer

(Think Reddit influences so much of engineering thought from things like r/learnprogramming to all the cryptocurrency subs)

This is awesome! You might really like All the News That's Fit to Sell which is a deep dive into the media economics behind why things are covered — it gives lots of color for why coverage is the way it is (there's a famous journalism saying: "If it bleeds, it leads" — which speaks to the readership/profits that come from covering vivid deaths)

If useful, I did a similar analysis, but just for the NY Times vs WHO/CDC (I manually tagged an year of articles by cause of death vs. this article's ability to see across many years):

In 2015-6, the deaths that are most covered are a tiny fraction (<1%) of the way we die: https://www.nemil.com/s/part3-horror-films.html

You can also extend the analysis to see how death coverage varies by region (those who are culturally similar to us get more coverage):

How Media Fuels our Fear of Western Terrorism: https://www.nemil.com/s/part2-terrorism.html

But if it's an entitlement to a % of profits, then it is much more like equity.

Feel free to send me your email and Github. I talk to a few Ethereum teams and can ask around.

I hear this argument a lot, and let me just make one point:

Human nature is really shapeable — and we (as a former product manager in this space) designed algorithms and product experiences to maximize certain outcomes that benefit social network bottom lines. Regardless of how good or bad human nature is, the algorithms prize engagement however they can get it — I personally believe it surfaces a certain side of humanity, and pushes people in a certain direction.

If you're a news editor, you actually have a choice to sensationalize all day because it maximizes short-term profits. After bad things happened (see yellow journalism, the newspaper circulation wars) — newspapers did cut back a fair bit. (We can debate whether that was the risk of regulation, or their own respect for the role they had)

This clearly isn't the social networks' fault alone, but their product choices do partially influence on how we all behave. On HN, you hear a lot of anger at journalists for being so click-baity, and the sad part is that every incentive many journalists face encourages this (from user behavior to profit)

There are tons of examples how bad incentives can warp how people behave, far beyond "humanity is good" or "humanity is bad". For example, see Hannah Arendt's Banality of Evil or the Stanford Prison Experiment. More regularly, see architecture, urban planning, or product management in the Valley, as disciplines that think deeply about the outcomes they want to encourage.

A more accurate statement I would say is: humanity has certain predilections, and design choices can influence these dramatically.

(And now I will shill my media literacy for engineers guide — contributions welcome: https://github.com/nemild/hack-an-engineer )

For anyone interested, I'm always open to PRs for the "Media Literacy for Engineers" doc I put together:

https://github.com/nemild/hacking-engineers

Examples like this are what I include, about how third-parties can manipulate media sources for their own ends.

If useful, I wrote a media literacy guide for engineers that touches on a lot of things discussed in this thread:

Hacking Engineers and Engineering Media

https://github.com/nemild/hack-an-engineer

That's a great point, I'll make it clear in the intro that it is for both.

I wrote it initially for engineers, but then kept finding examples in other fields.

For engineers, you can read part 3 in my MongoDB series ("The Marketing Behind MongoDB") to see a common playbook at dev tool companies specifically:

https://www.nemil.com/mongo/3.html

To anyone reading, please do send a pull request (or an email, see my HN profile) with examples. I put this together in my free time, but would love to crowdsource more examples and general points.

I'm confused, what does better early computer science education have to do with cybersecurity?

You're absolutely right, that's often the intent.

I approached my project with the hope of creating antibodies that makes those techniques less valuable. Or at minimal, help a few people better understand the incentives/techniques behind what they're seeing.

If it's useful for anyone, I made a list of all the ways engineering media can be manipulated (including journalists):

https://github.com/nemild/hacking-engineers

I added this example to it since it's a particularly good example of how marketing/PR uses threats of access and cherry picked demo sessions to get their favored view out.

(Contributions welcome)

That's awesome, and an inspiration.

And I really encourage you to find a good team (rather than just focusing on salary), it'll really level you up quickly — and set you up for lots of good opportunities as the years go by.