fivea

> (...) beyond BTC as a highly unstable store of value and claims of some great future state.

Bitcoin is not a store of value, and never was. A highly volatile asset, specially one whose market price halves overnight without much surprise, does not serve the purpose of a store of value.

I mean, this week alone Bitcoin dropped around 10%, and around 25% during the past month. This is not value being stored. If an asset manager lost 25% of it's wallet in a month they'd be out of a job.

> I’m in it for the money if the prices goes up, I’m in it for the art if the price drops

From the looks of it, if the price drops at best we're in it for that sweet sweet URL pointing to Google Drive/imgur.

> This is all discussed in the original article

I read both posts, and I still have this question.

Is it possible to provide a clear and simple explanation? Is there any answer at all which is not the expected "you're right, centralized crypto is pointless at best and a scam at worse"?

Otherwise this sort of reply feels like a blatant attempt to dismiss a concern through hand-waving for which there is no good answer without addressing any of it's points.

> (...) is that centralization is a feature, not a bug.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't centralization in blockchain-related applications a critical problem which defeats the whole purpose of said tech?

I mean, if a Blockchain is controlled by a single entity, doesn't that entity have all it needs to rewrite it however they wish?

And also, is there any difference between storing a record in a centrally-managed Blockchain or a record in plain old relational database managed by a third party?

It should be noted that some database providers already provide a UUID data type which is a 128bit integer.

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/14/datatype-uuid.html

> I'd scoff at C++ and the way in which the language has grown where orgs build up their own utility libraries rather than depend on a standard library.

This comment makes no sense at all. I mean, would it make any sense to also criticize JavaScript/NodeJS for their relatively spartan standard modules and extensive use of vended modules from the likes of npm?

And have we learned nothing from the mistake of going with the "everything and the kitchen sink" that is java which failed to actually satisfy basic needs and resulted in projects like guava and apache commons and vavr stepping in to provide alternatives? And how about C's infamous standard library with it's security vulnerability-inducing standard functions which remain in the standard?

Perhaps we should learn lessons and avoid basic mistakes such as setting libraries in stone. C++ learned that lesson, and so did C#/.NET, and up to a point Rust. Why unlearn them?

> One word: support.

That hypothesis is not credible. They can simply declare a feature is unsupported, and even that using it voids some guarantee. I mean, look at how overclocking is handled.

> QWERTY has a steep learning curve as well, it’s just that it’s so ubiquitous that most people don’t question or remember the work that was put into.

This assertion ignores crucial differences in the basic mechanics of typing in a standard QWERTY keyboard (i.e., look at the keyboard, press one key, get the desired character) and using a stenograph/chorded keyboard. A standard keyboard's discoverability makes it incomparably easier to ramp up than guessing which key combos get you a specific character combo/word.

> Do you assume Putin and western corporations are antagonistic?

Please don't try to change the subject. Putin sent Russia's paratroopers to Kazakhstan to use them against Kazakhstan's civilian population to quelsh unrest. It's not the US, Switzerland, Finland, the EU, nothing. This is Russia intervening in Kazakhstan to preserve Russia's interests, and no amount of whataboutism changes this.

> It’s as “foreign” as any NATO country’s army to another.

I don't believe your comparison is even remotely adequate.

Could you point out an example of a NATO member requesting a military intervention from another NATO member in their own country to respond to protests?

Because what we're seeing here is a blatant attempt by Russia to preserve Kazakhstan's regime by having foreign armed forces intervene against the nation's civilian population.

> I went to school with a young kazak person (...) Their parents had direct contact to the state and they were unaccountably rich went to an insanely expensive private school and owned various apartments all across Europe.

I don't understand what point you tried to make. Do you believe someone needs deep state contacts and government approval to purchase private property in a European country?

> But why is such a dysfunctional dictatorship so stable? (...) I believe the answer is: it is backed by the West because a stable dictator in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan guarantees the oil flow.

And yet, it's Russia and it's strong-arm tactics that are desperately trying to keep Kazakhstan's regime in power.

Think about it: Russia is even sending it's paratroopers to Kazakhstan to stomp out unrest. Not the US. Not the EU. Not Switzerland. No, Russia.

How do you fit that into your mental model?

> If you're counting blocked attempts in logs, you're counting attempts that were never going to succeed.

By your own logic, if the problematic traffic shares the same geographic origin and you only happen to spot failed attempts, blocking all traffic from the same geographic origin would also block potentially successful attempts.

And I agree with the OP: there's an awful lot of malicious traffic sharing a common geographical origin. If you ever felt curious, just launch a cheap VM and setup a web server to listen to traffic and log any connection attempt. You don't even need to host a site. In no time you'll start to see your VM being hit by all sorts of web scrapers and security vulnerability scanners.

> (...) helping Cloudflare get it's meathooks in the internet offsets all the really big companies (...)

What? No. Cloudflare reported a revenue of half a billion dollars, and already controls about half the CDN market.

Let's put things in perspective: in comparison with Cloudflare's business, AWS is a minor player and an underdog with less than half of Cloudflare's market share.

Cloudflare is by no means a small company or an upstart or a David among Goliaths. Cloudflare is in fact and by far the Goliath of the CDN world.

> What point? Nobody said anything about "cloud flare to reach its meat hooks" in the article or the above thread except you?

The OP mention "cloud flare to reach its meat hooks" in the thread attacking those who haven't jumped into Cloud flare's bandwagon by putting up a strawman on how that's only due to ignorance.

OP clarified that misrepresentation by pointing out the risk of allowing a single company to control the CDN market specifically and serving web content in general.

> Personally I'm waiting for engineering salaries in the non-US to catch up to the US because it'll make it easier for me to leave the US if I choose to do so but it doesn't look like it's happened yet.

Let me chime in to say that salary isn't everything in life, or the key to live a good, fulfilling life. I'd even argue that socialized healthcare and worker's rights, ensured in numerous European countries, do far more to achieve good life than, say, an absurdly high salary.

My question is whether Oregon was a hotbed of racism and discrimination within the US, not if the are racist people living in Oregon.

The point being, if the company was honestly concerned about racial discrimination, wouldn't it run this sort of experiment in problematic, high-impact regions?

I mean, would it make any sense to fight discrimination against Eskimos in Florida?

> A feature branch is still expected to have meaningful commits, and is usually used for collaboration between several coders.

No, not really. In fact, some issue tracking software equate feature branches with tickets, worked on by a single person.

> What OP describes is a temporary work branch that belongs to a single person, and has a bunch of meaningless commits.

Aka a feature branch.

> (...) but the neural net still managed to pick up the sexist hiring process by learning what kinds of activities were typical "girl" or "boy" activities.

I'm not sure that's a valid take.

It's my understanding that Amazon calibrated their machine learning model to answer the question of "help me find more people like the one we already have", and they just so happened to have within their ranks way more people with a specific academic and professional background, which was happened to refer to be men who did activities dominated by men.

> Does Airbnb offer other alternative methods of identifying riffraff?

The newspiece mentions a problem of racial discrimination based on checking profile pictures and how a name sounds. Do you feel it's appropriate to equate someone's ratial background with "riffraff"?

> I think you are overlooking the word "experiment."

Is the so-called "experiment" focused exclusively on a jurisdiction that enforces those rules?

A/B testing tends to be randomized per session or per user or per marketplace, not per jurisdiction and specially only on those where AirBNB already lost lawsuits and thus has to face a precedent.

Also, is Oregon the hotbed of racism and discrimination in the US rental market?

> Along similar lines, I've adopted a hyper-frequent commit pattern in git. I do a bunch of meaningless micro-commits as I'm making progress, and then rewrite them all into one or two meanginful commits once I've reached a working state of whatever I was trying to do.

Aren't you describing a feature branch? That frankly sounds like git 101.

> There is a (high) probability users will close the tab after waiting for over a minute for MBs of JS to download and parse.

I'm not sure what leads you to believe that a SPA requires "MBs of JS" to work. I've worked on a popular SPA deployed to multiple regions and with tons of localization data, and the total payload stayed well below 1MB. Plenty of dynamic HTML content, specially images, require far more than that.

In fact, this very discussion on HN, a very spartan dynamic HTML page, currently requires over 250kB as it dumps all the threads regardless of whether you read them or not. As a contrast, Reddit's frontpage takes 750kB.

> (...) are definitely different to a container image that gets spun up (...)

I'm not sure you're making a informed observation. "Spinning up a container image" is just fancy jargon/handwaving to refer to launching a process, which is something nginx already does under the hood in a myriad usecases without warranting complains from users.

> and queried for each request, don't you think?

I'm not sure if either you framed your sentence poorly or you don't have a clear idea about what you're talking about. In AWS lambda, you don't "spin up containers" at each request. You launch your lambda once it's deployed or when it scales up, and it stays up as long as you see traffic.

> And as a bonus, your site works perfectly in degraded environments (poor network conditions, no JS runtime).

What? No. Not at all. If you're behind a subpar network, your dynamic HTML web app does not load/refresh/update at all, and your users start to get frustrated because your crappy webpage is broken and fails to even do the most basic things.

This is not the case with SPAs, and some of the most pressing problems they solve: perceived performance, resilience to faulty network connections, and overall improved UX.

Let's put it this way: with SPAs you can design your app to work even without a working network connection. That's how resilient SPAs are to networking issues. How do you pull that off with dynamic HTML?

> but for 99% of websites server-side rendering only has advantages.

No, not really. Unless you cherry-pick what goes into the 99%, even basic CRUD, form-driven pages the dynamic HTML way suffers from a multitude of drawbacks that are no longer issues in SPAs, both technical and organizational.

> They invented Another Cloud Thing, namely Lambda@Edge, to solve this.

Yes, designed for usecases like those handled by Cloudflare Workers, which boil down to updating data cached in edge servers without requiring global redeployments or pinging a central server. We're talking about stuff like adding timestamps to images or adding headers to HTTP responses or pre-rendering some HTML or emit CDN-aware metrics.

> Now you can run a JS function for every single request that hits your CloudFront Distribution

Not exactly. Lambda@Edge are event handlers from CDN events. You use them when they suit your needs.

> so that you can run logic in there to strip the prefix before it gets passed to your origin.

Your strawman example doesn't even feature among the dozen examples provided by AWS regarding how to use Lambda@Edge.

Everyone is free to come up with silly ideas and absurd examples, but if you design systems around braindead ideas then that says a lot about you and nothing about the tools you chose to abuse

> You read that right! Execute code every time a request hits your proxy!

Yes, that's what web servers do. What exactly is your point?

> But wait, doesn't executing code for every single request sound insane

It doesn't. That's what a web server does. Moreso, Lambda@Edge (and Cloudflare Workers too) only do it if you explicitly decide to make them do it, to match precisely what you tell them to do.

What point are you trying to make, exactly?

> AND doesn't it also add latency which this was trying to remove?

It does. It adds tens of milliseconds when the alternatives can add hundreds of milliseconds. You're also expected to do basic engineering work and do basic performance work when seeking performance improvements, such as measuring things instead of mindlessly jumping on bandwagons without caring for the outcome.

> Isn't cloud just lovely?

I feel your comment manifests too much cinicism to cover too much ignorance on a topic you are not familiar nor understand the basic premise.

> It only gets the label if it's greener than existing solutions. They're not letting perfect be the enemy of good.

That sounds very idiotic to me. One of the biggest environmental threats is global warming, which is caused by reintroducing carbon into the atmosphere through the use of fossil fuels. It makes no sense at all to label fossil fuel usage as green just because they manage to come up with an arbitrary line in the sand for unrelated pollutants and in the process ignore carbon emissions.

> Aren't they aiming to do that for plants that will be using synthetic methane as alternative to battery storage?

I saw no reference to origin or source or type of gas.

All I saw were references to low emissions.

It seems they decided to redefine "green" as "not coal".

> Here we are, two years later. Never could have imagined.

I have to agree, that was very disheartening. Nevertheless, the writing was on the wall right on the first week of the very first lockdown, when so many people made it their point to not only reject complying with lockdowns and any form of basic personal higiene and health precautions but also be very militant and contrarian about violating public health guidelines.

It's hard to contain an epidemic when a sizeable part of the population is outright militant in contributing to it's spread.

> * Accelerating inflation perhaps leading high single digits low double digits in the next several years.

Didn't the US inflation rate went up to around 6% during 2021? Even though that's quite the hike, I wouldn't classify 6% or even 7% as "high single digits/low double digits", unless the definition of "high single digits" is now "greater than 5%"

> * Stocks continue to rise as a function of inflation.

The S&P500 continued to grow constantly as it has been doing for the past decade.

> * Full self drivering cars are no closer.

Is this really a prediction?

> * Reddit continues to decline in quality but no clear alternative emerges.

Is reddit really in decline, though? Doesn't seem like it. In fact, arguably things improved a lot in the past year.

> * Large chance of abnormal oil price volatility.

Does this actually mean anything? Also, there was a price drop at the start of the year due to a drop in demand (lockdowns and all) and since then price returned to the same point it was last year. Doesn't sound like it's either abnormal or volatile.