Yeah, that's something I find really odd about most mobile games. They seem designed as a way to basically put the brain into a low energy state or something, rather than actually being interesting.
My personal experience of games like Candy Crush is that people play them on the subway or whatever when there's nothing else to do. If they had a book with them they'd read that, if someone handed them a Nintendo DS with zero effort they'd probably do that (if they could get over the ego thing).
I can't really imagine anyone setting themselves up for a marathon casual gaming session. They seem marketed to be one level above 'watching paint dry' and used in circumstances where that's the only alternative.
I probably have a similar sensibility in regard to games, but Candy Crush is quite the opposite of "watching paint dry" in a lot of respects. It's full of novel/weird animations, cute characters, satisfying sound effects. I compare it to a casino slot machine room - a lot of people just like to be mesmerized by pretty sights/sounds without that much of a challenge. I don't exactly respect it as a gamer, but it speaks to a weird/interesting human need.
It was a tired cliche for describing games even before smartphones existed, but the model for typical mobile game design truly is the Skinner Box. You press a button to get some shiny reward designed to make your brain feel like it accomplished something.
It's a remarkably elaborate ruse to disguise the fact that there really is no "game" underneath all the chrome.
More pointedly, it's a way to monetize the dopamine reward. Most modern mobile games, after all, try to induce "fun pain" to get you to buy more turns/levels/clicks etc. There doesn't have to be a "game" -- just the "fun pain", and then a way to settle back into the dopamine bath via paying RL currency. I know I'm preaching to the choir a bit here, but it's important to note that not only is there no "game", but that they know that there's no "game" and that low-energy-with-periodic-bursts-of-reward state is the _point_.
They are engineered to be a placeholder for ads and environment for micro transactions while feeding the brain novelty. Everything else is secondary or non existing.
But hey the governments love the mindless entertained drones and if someone desires to be one, it has the human right. But let's call it like it is.
If I posted an article about Linux 4.1 or something, I wouldn't expect to see comments saying 'meanwhile, I used Windows yesterday, and played GTA5, and it was good'.
What gives? Are there forums in which people have this sort of reaction to, I dunno, HTML5?
From some of the posts here you would think that it's IED control software.
I'll offer a controversial explanation: bitcoin enthusiasts have exhausted most of the oxygen in the room with regard to rational bitcoin discussion.
The never-ending adulation of bitcoin as the greatest invention since the internet, the hyperbolic claims that bitcoin will do things like revolutionize payments, end global war, eliminate the need for banks, liberate the people from bondage, the litany of bitcoin and blockchain companies making extraordinary claims while consistently under-delivering or outright scamming customers, the warped world-view where communities of impoverished people who can barely meet their daily needs and have markedly poor computer literacy and limited access to computers and internet will be lifted out of poverty by banking with bitcoin, the constant dismissal of bitcoin skeptics as "not understanding" bitcoin, the self-aggrandizing elevation of satoshi and bitcoin programmers as programming prodigies, the condescendingly absurd notion that detractors, the banks and the governments are afraid of bitcoin or afraid of the bitcoin money revolution, the tone-deaf advocacy of bitcoin as a safer method of payment than credit cards, the general refusal to acknowledge bitcoin's practical challenges as real problems (non-technical people being scammed or permanently losing their money due to data-loss, theft, misconfiguration of software, sending bitcoin to the wrong address, downloading a scam wallet), the oversaturation of the underwhelming "x but with bitcoin" formula that pops up every couple weeks... and much more.
As heated, vitriolic and personal as linux discussions can get, its taken for granted that everyone is at least operating in the same objective reality (systemd vs upstart, gnome vs unity, mir vs wayland, even windows vs linux), but a large swath of bitcoin enthusiasts look at bitcoin as something that eclipses every other technical topic in importance to the point where it comes off as quasi-religious.
You get this because the properties of bitcoin attracts two kinds of people.
Goldbugs, because of how bitcoin is "mined" and is inherently deflationary. And gold is the one true currency, m'kay.
Cypherpunks, because it is built around cryptographics. And cryptographics makes anything double plus good.
Never mind that both kinds have a strong anti-establishment streak.
That said, if they could get away form their anti-inflation fanaticism, and find some way to speed up the ledger processing, then the distributed ledger part of bitcoin may have a future.
This because while inflation can be bad when it runs riot (though money printing in itself is rarely if ever the cause) it is better in the long run than deflation, as that allows some entity or other to corner the market.
And in the end, all currencies are tokens of account. Meaning that they exist in the end to make sure nobody double spends. But to be effective in doing so, the token material must the worth less then the face value. If not, people will have an incentive to hoard. And that will drive an economy into the ground.
The pretty strong anti-establishment streak held by goldbugs and cypherpunks is largely shared by HN though. I think much of the sneering comes because there's a third type of person that influences discourse around Bitcoin to some extent: shills.
Obviously a lot of Bitcoin evangelists have large BTC holdings because it's entirely in keeping with their belief that it's a brilliant idea, and many if not most exchanges, altcoins and even blockchain based trading schemes weren't conceived as ways of persuading fools to part with their money. But many Bitcoiners are speculators and some of the schemes dreamed up around Bitcoin were scams or might as well have been, which hasn't really been the case for flavours of Linux. FOSS evangelists might have made similarly grandiose claims about their project and the philosophy behind it, but they weren't trying to pump the price of their commodity holdings at the time or running get rich quick schemes - they usually weren't even expecting to get paid!
Something of a tangent I know. I largely agree with you on the virtues of some inflation in an economy as a whole, but I think it's pretty evident now that Bitcoin is neither replacing currency as a whole nor representing a sufficiently stable store of value to encourage hoarding on any scale. Frankly Steam accepting BTC is no more economically destabilising than Steam deciding to accept inflationary-by-design Linden Dollars.
The incentive to hoard, also often called the "deflationary spiral", is a theory proposed by neo-Keynesian economists, which doesn't appear to be as bad as they say.
People have finite lifespan, and so, they want to use their hoards to better these finite lives, which leads them to spend. This preference, known as the "time preference", strikes a balance with the tendency to hoard. It is impossible to predict where this balance is, though, because it's subjective to each participant.
Why do you buy cell phones or laptops today, knowing that future ones will be better or cheaper? Why buy some food today, when you know your purchasing power will be greater next month? Why pay for housing when prices are falling, knowing your contract will be cheaper in five years?
You just demonstrated the concept to which I'm alluding. There is a balance of time preference versus saving preference for absolutely everything in an economy based on the subjective desires of all participants. For some people, this will be cell phones, or cars, or fancy shoes, or little purse dogs. They won't save forever, living just to get by, for some uncertain future when they can have more stuff. There is no deflationary spiral, there's a balance point where it stops.
This dangerous idea has been used to justify all forms of crazy economic intervention since Keynes formalized it. The notion of a currency having to depreciate is a direct consequence of these policies, all based on a fallacy. No matter how counterproductive these policies are, they're still applied. Look to Japan and Switzerland as recent examples. Japan has massive stimulus, the Yen is dropping, are people spending more, no, they're saving for the future, knowing that their savings will be worth less, so they need more of them to get by - no spending on unnecessary items. Switzerland is paying negative interest rates on savings accounts, so people have to save more to offset that.
There are lots of things to dislike about Bitcoin, but its value increasing over time isn't one.
>* Why do you buy cell phones or laptops today, knowing that future ones will be better or cheaper? Why buy some food today, when you know your purchasing power will be greater next month? Why pay for housing when prices are falling, knowing your contract will be cheaper in five years?*
The deflationary spiral is not about consumption of non-durable goods. Thats why all of your examples don't really work as reasoning against this concept. It rather is about investment and consumption of durable goods: Cars, forklifts, the pick and place machines at foxconn.
So, still just the kind of stuff where you get more for your money over time even despite inflation, thanks to technology developments. Why would the impact of messing with the money supply outweigh that of the technology in any other way that forcing a change in scheduling? And how is inflation beneficial for those who need to save money for a long time for large investments?
Inflation would only really make sense in a model where everybody already have access to all the funds they need to purchase what they want, but where they postpone all purchases to see if the can get more, AND where it is these delays that hurt the market by making it hard for the makers of these goods to survive. And this effect has to be the single most dominant one.
Well, there is a third, rather significant type of bitcoin user: people who don't particularly care about the cool crypto or sticking it to the Fed, but do like the ability to make anonymous payments. And let's not be coy about who many if not most of these are: criminals.
>And in the end, all currencies are tokens of account. Meaning that they exist in the end to make sure nobody double spends. But to be effective in doing so, the token material must the worth less then the face value. If not, people will have an incentive to hoard. And that will drive an economy into the ground.
Lots of goods tend to increase in value over time. Land, gold, stocks, etc. How is bitcoin any different? If people want to hoard, nothing is stopping them. They will just hoard, nothing has ever been stopping them.
And hoarding isn't a bad thing. If you aren't spending your money, then you aren't taking resources out of the economy. That means more resources for everyone else. Spending money, consumption, is what should be discouraged.
Hoarding has a price - the marginal utility of each remaining token of value increases, so it becomes much more expensive to hoard. Some amount always circulates.
Hoarding in a mattress represents a lost opportunity cost. Most hoarders put their money into something that yields interest, that gets it circulating, and it is in fact, how our entire banking system works.
Also, let's call hoarding something else, namely "saving". In a healthy economy, you need saving and spending. Saving is a way of deferring spending to the future. When lots of people save, it means it's a good time to borrow money because it's cheap due to the nature of the banking system and lending and because it means that people have money to spend on whatever you're producing with the credit. You really can't have spending without saving and vice versa, otherwise you risk some kind of credit crunch or collapse of the currency. (The USD is in a scary place, BTW).
If you're trying to argue against Bitcoin as a currency because it's used as a store of value, then you have to be against the USD or Euro too. The ratio of saving to spending is different among these, and in Bitcoin-land the ratio is particularly skewed to saving due to the early adopter advantage, but there's still a healthy amount of churn for a currency that's so young, despite profound technical encumberance to its usability.
I don't see how you get that conclusion. For one thing, it's not even true, people don't actually hoard currency. They put it in a bank, which invests 90% of it back out into the economy. They've done that even since currency was backed by gold.
Second, even if people literally did fill vaults full of cash, it doesn't hurt anyone. It's not like all the currency is going to actually disappear and people will have to go back to bartering. The remaining currency just becomes worth more.
The bitcoin economy doesn't collapse everytime someone loses a wallet. It never will, because the remaining coins can always be divided further, and always increase in value further.
Lastly it's not like people will literally never spend that money again. They of course intend to spend it at some point. At some point the number of people saving vs taking out of savings will stabilize and everything will be normal. And saving for the future isn't a bad thing. In fact it should be encouraged.
No people do not hoard currency, but they do hoard commodities. As such, bitcoin is at present more a commodity (its setup pretty much use math to emulate gold) than a currency. And the situation will only get worse with time.
> And hoarding isn't a bad thing. If you aren't spending your money, then you aren't taking resources out of the economy. That means more resources for everyone else. Spending money, consumption, is what should be discouraged.
I'm usually pretty good at detecting irony, so I apologize if I've been bested here. But are you honestly suggesting that reductions in consumption and spending are favorable to nation's economy?
If you are being ironic, I don't think I understand your message. Would you mind explaining it to me?
>are you honestly suggesting that reductions in consumption and spending are favorable to nation's economy?
Yes absolutely. All the economy does is just allocate resources. If some area of the economy is consuming more, than that is coming at the expense of other areas of the economy. Likewise if spending in one area is cut, that leaves resources available for other things.
That's all supply and demand is. Prices increase or decrease with demand until the supply is stable.
Economics, like physics, scales messily. If the whole world decided to save everything for one year starting today, the economy would free fall. Since nobody is consuming, nobody need produce. Factories grind to a halt and deteriorate, social bonds and casual knowledge fade, and the world returns a year later materially worse off.
Yes and it should. The economy isn't a static thing. It should adapt based on demand. If suddenly demand went down, then prices would fall until they were low enough that the remaining supply can be sold off.
> That said, if they could get away form their anti-inflation fanaticism, and find some way to speed up the ledger processing, then the distributed ledger part of bitcoin may have a future.
Both issues have been resolved in Ethereum, an alternative cryptocurrency with a market cap second only to Bitcoin itself.
So, it can be said that cryptocurrencies indeed solve many problems. What can't be said is which cryptocurrency will be the one that ends being used as cash in the long term.
If you want a large, fast, distributed ledger, go ahead and make one. If you want to anchor it in Bitcoin, go ahead. Why would bitcoin itself change heavily just to suit your proposed need?
It's a misconception that bitcoin the software, or the community as developers, are incapable of switching to larger and faster blocks. The system is working well, as designed.
> the one true currency
The only one here saying that, is you. Bitcoin doesn't have to be the one, or all things to everyone.
> if they could get away form their anti-inflation fanaticism
That's like going to a foreign film society and complaining that they're fanatical about foreign films. It says so on the door and you aren't forced to stay. There are inflationary crypto-currencies...
Interesting... just having a "donate with BitCoin" link visible caused a noticeable drop in donations? Similarly with revenue on a merchant page. That seems bizarre.
Just speculating, but it could be a couple things:
Providing more choices can often result in consumers simply giving up. At a former job we did an A/B test where we showed some visitors two options to buy our product and added a third option for other visitors. In the three option scenario, the bounce rate was about 10% higher.
Or, it could be that there are folks for whom bitcoin is linked with drugs, gambling, piracy, etc. Maybe seeing a bitcoin option makes the site look less reputable.
Well, it may be that using bitcoin right now is... not easy.
"Bitcoin! I've always wanted to try it. [Click.] 'Wallet address', what's that? Okay, I'll just Google Bitcoin. 'Buy viagra and pot online,' oh uhm... Okay, creating a wallet.. Wow, this isn't easy. Okay, now... Time to convert some cash to bitcoins! What the hell?!? Why does it need all of this info? 'For tax purposes bitcoins are not currency,' what the hell?!? Okay, um... What the hell is 'Magic the Gathering'? 'Fraud.' 'Japan.' 'Apologizes.' Hmmm... Ah, forget it."
To me bitcoin is trendy and kind of unprofessional. Steam is obviously a pretty reputable service, but for a long time accepting bitcoin screamed "this is a low quality service and we have no other ways to differentiate ourselves than using a buzzword currency"
I've seen some of the worst biases manifest themselves around bitcoin.
My theory is that in the shadow of the bubble collapse, the desire for bitcoin to succeed has driven wishful thinking to the extreme, where some vocal bitcoin evangelists ignore or spin reality to reconcile it with their desire.
It's more akin to the old XBox vs Playstation flame wars, where a console fan could just admit the cons along with the pros, but then that wouldn't fully validate their decision to invest.
I never considered myself as a bitcoin enthusiast but I am enthusiastic about digital cryptocurrencies in general for most of the reasons you mentioned. Bitcoin (and all other cryptocurrencies) is not there yet but most of those are problems that cryptocurrencies target to solve.
An example: you could never move money over the wire anonymously before crypto came in. Well, except if you had a fake identity, which is illegal. Now you can. Of course, you need to be a security expert in order to do it but ultimately UX will get there. I wasn't around at the early days of internet but I am pretty sure if my mother could access it back then she would have no idea what to do. And here she is calling me on Skype every other night.
Another example: There are millions of people who cannot afford buying a computer as you already said but possess low-cost mobile phones. There are already a bunch of bitcoin startups targeting that market. Apps and tools will eventually evolve up to the point where they will be accessible, easy-to-use, scam-free, safe. We just need to build them.
> you could never move money over the wire anonymously before crypto came in. Well, except if you had a fake identity, which is illegal. Now you can.
As obvious as it may seem that is a positive thing, keep in mind that a lot of people will not think so. Even more people can just don't appreciate it and could be convinced either way. If everyone thought anonymity was so good, fake identities wouldn't be illegal.
Anonymity is good not per se but because it implies privacy. Let's not argue if privacy is a good thing or not. Anonymity also supersedes fake identities.
Sorry, my intention was not to discuss merits of anonymity or privacy. I do agree those are good.
My point was that in discussing things like cryptocurrency (and other technical matters), many of its advocates go to arguments like yours with the silent assumption that certain aspects are obvious benefits. You forget that that's an opinion, and any argument based on it misses it mark with someone who doesn't share that opinion (or hasn't formed one). I think that's part of the reason "the oxygen in the room has been depleted".
Well, while the hyperbole might be grandiose during the stages of bitcoin's infancy - everything claimed is plausible if it can scale. At least to the point of being a global currency and transfer of value alongside govt and central bank fiat.
Sometimes the economic winds favor different assets both liquid and long term stores of value.
Bitcoin adds a legitimate, scarce, immutable form of ownership of something that can be transferred with the least amount of friction of any other asset (including cash).
Hyperbole or not, where it is now compared to 2009-2012 is extremely impressive. It's an exciting space to watch develop over time, love it or hate it.
I think those that don't understand it but are quick to judge or regurgitate the opinions of their peers (it's a ponzi, tulip mania, etc) are just as hyperbolic and ignorant.
I don't see how anyone can argue that bitcoin and it's blockchain is not an impressive, elegant technological solution to a problem that needed solving.
Merkle trees are an impressive and elegant solution to an auditable ledger. Bitcoin however has always seemed wasteful to me. It's incredibly energy hungry for a consensus protocol.
I felt like that long list of complaints about the discourse around bitcoin hit home and did a pretty good job of justifying that claim. Moreover, it was full of examples that contributed meaningfully, so it's weird to say that it contributes nothing. If you'd rather call people names than respond to their points, aren't you doing exactly what s/he condemned?
If bitcoin enthusiasts were capable of rational discussion, then why did you just build up the 'troll' straw man and knock it down?
They're not making a blanket statement or even saying that bitcoin enthusiasts are incapable of rational discussion. They're talking about biases around the bitcoin industry, and as a self-proclaimed enthusiast, you ignored it and went straight to name calling.
Edit: Your massive wall-of-text edit doesn't can't hide the fact that your immediate response was incredibly biased.
>I don't have a credit card, and it feels futuristic to point my phone at the invoice and see it light up as "paid". Without typing in anything, without any risk of cc theft, without anyone in between. I think that is revolutionary, yes.
You've basically just said you use your phone as a heavier, battery-powered credit card. You might as well be arguing that you think horses are a revolutionary new transportation medium because they don't need gas and can obey spoken commands, and cars don't all do that yet.
Horses also have some interesting auto-pilot features, not to mention they are green. Their fuel source generates oxygen during development and some of their byproducts can be used to enhance your garden!
Are your counter-claims not hyperbolic ("liberate people from bondage")?
Regardless of the extreme pros or cons, Bitcoin is revolutionary.
PS - Your middle paragraph is painfully hard to read (is it one, huge sentence?). This makes your post feel like it was purely an emotional, unedited response with little filtering...
Funny how the anti Bitcoin crowd respond with baseless ad hominem attacks.
Bitcoin solved a problem, whether that problem needed solving or will be extremely fruitful is for the future to determine.
The fact that a 4+ billion dollar stateless currency exists is pretty amazing to me.
Personally I think the anti Bitcoin crowd is also the pro government crowd. You know, the people who support torture of innocents, assassinations, genocide, etc etc, but I'm sure I'm just some nut -- yeah I'm the nut, not the people who talk about laws And justice while shrugging off torure.
Actually, I'd suggest you do sometimes see people saying that about Linux, especially when Linux "on the desktop" comes up. And the reason is that neither project is simply a neutral software development project, but are politically charged. Linux at this point really just has a political "tinge" to it with the free software stuff, but Bitcoin is drenched in politics. So people are responding with their political brains rather than their raw technical brains.
I am not trying to imply this is bad. The politics are intrinsically worthy of thought and discussion. I could wish for a higher level of discourse on political matters, but humans have been doing that for lo these many thousands of years and I doubt this is the year that's going to change. Our "political brains" are complicated, messy things, tied into tribal instincts, personal identity, and all sorts of other messy things that make it difficult.
The general quality of discourse on any thread seems to drop hugely whenever politics comes up.
We seem to be able to leave each other alone when it comes to using vi vs. emacs - the odd joke comes up, but that's about it.
But politics? There seems to be this attitude of conversion, missionaries, convincing, it's kind of frustrating. I think it's healthy to question one's views sometimes, but not to face a constant onslaught.
Looking a bit harder, the language people use here is quite clearly politicized and strange - people use past tense, which I find difficult to interpret as anything other than trolling. No-one would say 'Linux was a good OS', because it currently exists and is used daily...?
> The general quality of discourse on any thread seems to drop hugely whenever politics comes up.
Yeah, politics is the mindkiller.[0]
Dan Kahan's research could lead to some interesting suggestions about why this might be.[1] There are many questions we answer dispassionately about facts, but then there's this other series of questions about the world, where we really don't answer with reference to specific knowledge. They seem primarily to serve as litmus tests for measuring group identity.
As it happens, contradicting someone who is really just talking about their identity just makes everyone upset.
Certainly conversations can change some people's minds on some political topics[2]. I've had a few rare 'conversion' experiences when talking with friends. But it's usually in really specific situations with certain approaches to open discussion that are just really hard, sometimes it takes multiple discussions, none of which seem that monumental, but have a cumulative effect. Both conversants have to rely on a lot of care and patience. All of that is made much more difficult by the impersonal and ephemeral nature of conversations on the internet.
The debate about Linux desktop or bitcoin need not be political. But I'd like to offer an indicator for when things inevitably become 'political'; when there's no provably correct answer and the use of force is involved.
> The debate about Linux desktop or bitcoin need not be political.
I agree, but that doesn't mean we should silence people who bring up political issues.
> But I'd like to offer an indicator for when things inevitably become 'political'; when there's no provably correct answer and the use of force is involved.
That's a good indicator that pretty much everyone would agree.
However, what constitutes "use of force", however, changes from people to people. Some people believe that merely having a state is "use of force". Other people believe that having a billion dollars to bargain is "use of force". It gets crazier: other people believe it's neither. Or both. Etcetera.
Experimentally it can be informative to refresh one's controversial comments as this can show the total may have received many more up and down votes than the final total suggests.
My inner statistician would be interested to see up & down totals as a metric of controversy.
FUD merchants, social media management, astroturf, superpacs, brigades, vendettas are common enough on Reddit and the Post-Snowden zeitgeist demands we consider Orwell's '84 where the mere possibilty of being observed is enough to bring general opinion & behaviour to heel.
> The general quality of discourse on any thread seems to drop hugely whenever politics comes up.
I'm not so sure about that, especially when compared to other forums. People here often cite specific laws, articles, and papers when making political points[citation needed].
I've run into the sentiment you're talking about both online and IRL. It puzzles me as well.
Three factors come to mind:
1. There's a deep-rooted idea today that money comes from the government and that everything else is a scam. Bitcoin challenges that idea.
2. Bitcoin refuses to die despite the predictions of just about everyone who first learns about it.
3. The technical underpinnings of Bitcoin are counterintuitive to say the least. That makes Bitcoin hard to understand even for the technically-oriented.
The combination of longevity, casual disregard for convention, and counterintuitive nature gets annoying after awhile.
Nor are these factors restricted to those who can't stand Bitcoin, its users, or the idea of private money. Many of the most vocal Bitcoin advocates today went through a period of disbelief or outright hostility toward the idea.
As I posted further down - most of the issues here seem to stem from people having this idea that in the extreme long term Bitcoin takes over the world and 'their' (as if this is some sort of holy war?) green bits of paper become firewood or something.
That isn't a realistic model for how the world works and is really just an odd way of thinking.
I can play Quake 3 and have fun with it, and post blogs about it, without thinking it's going to destroy every other video game out there ever, without debating whether it even is a video game, etc. Hey, it has fast inverse square root, that's cool, but it's not going to result in the actual world being deleted and exchanged for CGI VR land.
Fundamentally it seems to be that there's some element of 'faith in the concept', that is turned off when it comes to money, perhaps as a protection mechanism. I don't know.
... Just chill out, you know? I might go out for a run soon. You can still walk, don't worry, it's not banned (I also walk, it's useful, maybe we can be friends?).
In the pre-Gox days of the Bitcoin subreddit you could find plenty of people advocating exactly that - that Bitcoin would make not just 'fiat' money obsolete but government itself.
Any idea, good or bad, is vulnerable to being discredited by its most annoying public advocates. Bitcoin 'hate' is mostly a reaction by people who encountered this and got fed up with it.
Not to mention that Bitcoin is explicitly anti-environmentalist: it's built on vast amounts of wasted electricity.
> anti-environmentalist ... vast amounts of wasted electricity
Ironically uses politically-charged language when discussing how bitcoin gets political.
How about: "I'm concerned with the amount of electricity devoted to mining."
Some of the bitcoin-is-going-to-take-over advocates could counter with, "That electricity cost is a lot better for the environment than the standing armies required to secure fiat money."
And, of course, the idea that bitcoin changes the world so radically that no one has an army anymore is absurd. But I think you've just touched on another reason why people react so strongly to bitcoin-related articles.
It's like, bitcoin started out with a pretty good-sounding idea: decentralized currency, like the old Gnutella network except for money! hey I like it!
Then people start talking about it and the first next step is "hey and bitcoin takes control over money and puts it into the hands of the PEOPLE" except it doesn't! It doesn't at all! Control over the money supply, there's at least some tenuous link between votes we regularly cast as citizens and the people making those decisions. Decisions over bitcoin's economics? Better start coding, except no one will accept your patches to bump up the 21 million bitcoin supply...not so democratic.
Then the conversation turns to pretty goofy new-world-order stuff, like "bitcoin will eliminate the need for nations to have standing armies!!" Except the reality is, look at how the bitcoin people themselves squabble like a bunch of old hens, in the face of what seem to be legitimate critiques. These are the people leading the way to a new world order? I don't think so.
And then we look at the environmental costs, and that's not good. Or the deflationary economics of the system itself, and those aren't good either. Or how it seems a lot more like an elaborate ponzi scheme, and that's not good either.
Basically, what bugs me about bitcoin is that legitimate critiques are always brushed off with really absurd replies. Kinda kills the whole thing for me.
I'm not sure which bitcoin advocates you're talking to, but they seem pretty far out there.
As for monetary policy, I would look to the history of currency devaluations in the wake of wars and emphasize that bitcoin cannot be devalued in the same way. Not that a nation would use bitcoin as its currency, but it begins to look more like the gold that used to back fiat currencies.
Even Rome debased its currency to continue paying soldiers, while throwing the citizens under the bus.
Re environmental costs: a future protocol change could update the proof of work function if this gets out of control.
> deflationary economics of the system itself
Strictly speaking, bitcoin's monetary base is monotonically increasing and never actually shrinks, which would be monetary deflation. I would also challenge the conventional wisdom that says "Deflation bad! Inflation good!" Again, not that a nation's currency will be bitcoin. It exists alongside other systems, behaving more like gold.
Ponzi scheme is almost not worth mentioning as the allegation is obviously ridiculous.
You've just demonstrated the breach with reality in Bitcoin-land that is most personally irritating to me--the conflation of democracy with consensus/mob rule.
Democracy isn't (and never was) just "majority preference that is inferred from behavior". It's the regular, structured process of checking in and putting the rules that affect people up to a group decision, i.e. voting on stuff on a regular basis, and exposing the rules of the system to that process.
Having a regular vote on the # of bitcoins? That'd give it an element of democracy. But bring that up, and you get the kind of nonsense you just gave us.
And it's funny, in bitcoin-land, the very idea of democracy seems really offensive, and I think I know why; I think that the hardcore bitcoin advocates look at bitcoin as a way to get into a system and come out on top. The actual levers of power in the world are closed off to most of us, and getting into them is a long, hard process that involves skills very few in the computer industry have (or want to develop). Bitcoin gives its adherents a way to feel like they're going to be kings in the new world order, and suggesting the democratizing of this system would of course threaten that.
No one in bitcoin-land ever comes back to me and says "Yeah, you're right, we should involve more people in the decisions behind how this thing is run." That power's seductive (well, that fictional, imagined power of being a king in bitcoin-land), I guess.
> Democracy isn't (and never was) just "majority preference that is inferred from behavior". It's the regular, structured process of checking in and putting the rules that affect people up to a group decision, i.e. voting on stuff on a regular basis, and exposing the rules of the system to that process.
You don't seem to understand that it's a P2P system. Which authority are you proposing counts the votes and enacts the policies?
And democracy isn't three wolves voting to eat a sheep. How are you a part of the community that you deserve a vote, even if such a silly thing was possible? Why should you get to vote on what other people are doing?
> Having a regular vote on the # of bitcoins? That'd give it an element of democracy. But bring that up, and you get the kind of nonsense you just gave us.
Because it's literally the worst idea you could have, short of replacing all keys with the number 7. The entire point of Bitcoin is a non-inflating currency. Even if you could change this, which thankfully you cannot, it wouldn't be fair to the people who joined in the beginning.
You're saying you'd rather ruin the system for everyone because you aren't a ruler. Which is precisely why the system was designed to keep people like you from getting any power, ever.
> And it's funny, in bitcoin-land, the very idea of democracy seems really offensive
No, the idea of your idea of a democracy being imposed on people who you're mad at because they don't listen to you is laughable.
You clearly just want to vote for ridiculous things - seemingly to punish people for not inviting you in the beginning.
> No one in bitcoin-land ever comes back to me and says "Yeah, you're right, we should involve more people in the decisions behind how this thing is run."
Of course they don't. And rather than think about this you've decided you're right.
Of course, what anarcho-capitalist cypherpunks mean when they talk about "democracy" is fundamentally different than what everyone else means. From that point of view, consensus as dictated by the free market is probably the only legitimate form of democracy.
How is everyone expressing their choice not a democracy?
What should happen? Who calls for votes? Who counts them, and who forces everyone to change - or not? In a decentralized model how exactly do we add a central authority without centralizing everything?
And further, why would we want to? So that people who aren't involved can have a say? I don't setup a 1-800 number to let people vote on what I watch for movie night - it's only relevant to those who attend.
Similarly, if you don't like Bitcoin then rather than getting involved just to mess with it, why not get involved in something you do like?
> no one will accept your patches to bump up the 21 million bitcoin supply...not so democratic.
Why would anyone willingly dilute their own money?
> legitimate critiques are always brushed off with really absurd replies
> And then we look at the environmental costs, and that's not good. Or the deflationary economics of the system itself, and those aren't good either. Or how it seems a lot more like an elaborate ponzi scheme, and that's not good either.
These are not legitimate critiques without real data to back them up. Without real data they are conjecture based on emotion.
> "That electricity cost is a lot better for the environment than the standing armies required to secure fiat money."
There are better alternatives to brute-forcing hashes and generating nothing but waste heat in order to mine cryptocurrency. At least those cycles could be put toward something useful, like the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC). Gridcoin uses proof-of-research in BOINC as the basis for compensation.
Who would decide which BOINC projects work with Bitcoin? What if I made a BOINC project for calculating the number 4 and did it before anyone else noticed it was available? How much bitcoin should that be worth? There have to be ongoing decisions about what BOINC projects are accepted and how much they're worth. Who makes those decisions?
More realistically, what if I privately know a fast algorithm for an obscure type of protein folding, and then I push for a new BOINC project to be accepted that focuses on the specific type of problem? I'll be the only one that can mine it efficiently for a long time. If I calculated my expected profits, I would probably see that it's worth it for me to pay a lot of money to lobby the people in charge of the BOINC-coin decision process to get my project accepted. Unless BOINC-coin only uses a fixed set of projects over all time, or is only worth negligible amounts, then lobbying like this is going to influence what projects it accepts.
Even if BOINC-coin uses a fixed set of projects, then there's a problem of what work units are given out. I imagine many projects work like SETI@Home where some data is given out to users to process. If processing the data is worth money, then it might make sense financially for me to artificially construct datasets that I've already solved, and bribe the SETI@Home administrators to insert my dataset into the worker queue, which I will then quickly "mine" for BOINC-coin.
A BOINC-coin isn't fully decentralized. It requires trusted people to be in control choosing which projects are worth it and to secure the authenticity of the data sets. Bitcoin is about minimizing the need for trust in administrative systems like this.
Even if you solve the above problems, the proof-of-work system needs to be hard to compute but cheap to verify. Many BOINC projects' work units aren't cheap to verify. They just have several users redundantly recalculate the same work units to check that they get the same answers.
If the PoW serves any other purpose than mining bitcoin, it can't be used, since there won't be any opportunity cost in mining on the most recent chain.
> What stops me from attacking that network by mining on my private chain with a double spend?
Nothing stops you mining on a private chain, but since you have a small minority of the compute power, the network doesn't care about your private chain. The same is true in Bitcoin.
> I have no opportunity cost.
You could be mining blocks that generate useful byproducts and currency.
> Nothing stops you mining on a private chain, but since you have a small minority of the compute power, the network doesn't care about your private chain.
Right, this is not an issue for small miners. But if you have a significant part of mining power, it's important that there is a significant opportunity cost mining on the wrong chain. That can only be ensured by using a PoW that is wasteful outside the currency you're mining.
I'm not sure I follow what you mean. I didn't mean that this be used for mining bitcoin, but rather that there are other cryptocurrencies that have useful by-products. Am I misunderstanding your comment?
These other cryptocurrencies are less secure than bitcoin.
For them, the cost of attacking the network by mining on an orphaned chain is lower, because by definition the PoW has a useful by-product.
The more useful the byproduct, the less secure the coin.
Edit: to illustrate, imagine a PoW that computes cures for cancer. Somebody can now mine on whichever block of the chain he wants forever, since he's producing a cancer cure anyway. The incentive of a block reward (within the currency) is not primary. Thus there is diminished incentive for the network to create a linear blockchain, where everybody mines on the most recent block. Without that, you cannot order transactions.
A cure-cancer PoW where each block fixes all of cancer is ridiculous.
A more apt analogy would be that each block would solve a protein folding or active site matching problem for cancer. Then each solution would be public, and useless to mine over again.
Except the miners don't gain value from discovering a protein fit, so they have no incentive to mine the wrong chain.
Even then, as long as the coin value is larger you will have a consensus with the miners to to mine the latest block. Any sidechains will be neglected, which is why this "no value or nothing" attitude doesn't fit a blockchain network.
I understand the arguments that people have against proof of work but unfortunately they are extremely short sighted with respect to the whole system. You could say the same thing about all the infrastructure surrounding gold, but crypto-currencies and gold have serve a very valuable purpose that gets lost in the details: they have many of the properties of ideal money.
Gold isn't as valuable as it is today for any other reason. You can dream about a theoretical currency with a proof of work that accomplishes something but it won't have the same properties of ideal money until it is more widely used, mined and attacked.
Also don't forget that space heaters _actually_ do nothing but generate 'waste heat' and no one seems worried about those.
This is true! You don't have to agree with them, though. The network still exists and is cool and useful regardless. You don't even need to use Reddit! I don't hang out on reddit.com/r/visa (does it even exist?)
>> Not to mention that Bitcoin is explicitly anti-environmentalist
I think it would be fairer to say that it's 'a-environmentalist'. The badness or goodness of energy use for PoW just wasn't really a concern.
When I play Quake 3, my computer uses more energy. I consider that an acceptable compromise. Perhaps there are people out there that don't, so they don't play it.
I would find it quite odd if they criticized my habits, though. We should be trying to get along, not looking for chances to grumble at each other, you know?
> Not to mention that Bitcoin is explicitly anti-environmentalist: it's built on vast amounts of wasted electricity.
That like saying Tesla's are anti-environmentalist, it's built to waste vast amounts electricity.
It's quite literally non-sense. Point at any other nations currency that consumes less energy than Bitcoin; you think printing bills and minting coins doesn't use energy? You think moving giants piles of cash around in big trucks between banks doesn't use energy? You think banks and guards and trucking don't use energy?
Bitcoin is the pro-environmentalist approach, it uses far less energy than a typical currency does.
But the whole bitcoin network does a tiny, tiny number of transactions compared to any of those other systems. The cost per transaction (of the system, not to the user) of bitcoin is comparatively huge.
I think the perception that all Bitcoin advocates think that Bitcoin will "Destroy" all fiat money and we will all be worshiping Satoshi for delivering us, is wide spread and mostly false.
...And I'm sure you thought you're writing a perfectly objective, well-argued post. However, while speculating on bc-distractors' motives, you've characterized them as naive technophobes.
If someone with, let's say a doctorate in cryptography and a preference in 'fiat' reads that, he's going to feel a bit insulted and double down on his position.
He may (and I'm just speculating a hypothetical here) start daydreaming about going around with a metaphorical hammer of wisdom trying to beat some ideas into every bc-daytraders' head. Like the idea that a majority of western societies actually support the general concept of democratically-elected governments wielding some power. Or that having some screws to adjust in regards to monetary policy may be preferable to not having them, some problems notwithstanding.
All this is not new, by the way. This discussion lines up pretty well with the conflict over libertarianism, both demographically as well as philosophical.
To point 1. Most who don't understand bitcoin think the federal Reserve is a government agency. But these same people got (and still are) angry at the banks for their part in the great recession. If they really understood what happened in 1913 with the creation of the fed their heads would spin.
Those that understand the big picture and the threat central banks pose to a nations sovereignty, and the debt slavery of its citizens, are the ones who truly appreciate bitcoin
This is why many bitcoin proponents comes across as naive, broad political statements bordering on false beliefs come across as juvenile and in many cases fanatic.
Stay with the facts and reality, a.k.a. the technology, statements like the above create a toxic environment in which the bitcoin community currently finds itself deeply mired in.
I will be the mature one here in hopes you understand the problem with the "bitcoin" attitude.
If you want bitcoin to succeed talk about the technology and adoption, this is a complex enough topic in of itself with many real issues. The success of bitcoin depends on this 100%.
If you want to talk about economic saviorism cut the bullshit, it has a nagtive effect on bitcoin. Putting people down you don't know is a sure sign of immaturity that will get you no where and you have exemplified what is wrong with the bitcoin community 2x in this very thread.
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.
Lightning Network is much much closer to going live now. That would be a federated (email/XMPP like) system to drastically boost the number of transactions per second that it can handle with retained security (a malicious LN server can at worst temporarily freeze funds and reverse only unsettled payments).
You don't need to trust third parties even with mobile devices, the Bitcoin Wallet app on Android uses the SPV protocol where a malicious miner has to outpace the rest of the miners to fool you. It uses the code library bitcoinj. Headers-first sync only made this easier to do with minimal resources.
I find it less and less likely that Bitcoin will be replaced given the amount of investment (both time and money) put into the system. If Bitcoin was remaining stagnant, I'd be pessimistic as well, but there are a multitude of improvements that will be deployed over the course of the next year.
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.
Sidechains are an answer, for you, if you don't feel the current blockchains scale for your needs. For micropayments, or whatever. But they don't solve anything per-se because nothing is broken.
Pay to publish is a feature. It's the rate-limiting mechanism we'd need anyways, but directly tied into PoW and reward.
Make your coin and ask people if they want to use it instead of bitcoin. It's so easy, and you can be proven right.
It's really polarizing because it forces us to question what we think of as currency. Is it sufficient for it to be scarce, durable, verifyable and fungible or should it have some independent utility or backing?
Some of the vitriol is backlash against the zealots who feel that Bitcoin can/should enable elements of anarchy.
I think that's only true if you follow this idea that Bitcoin is going to take over the world, become a global reserve currency, we should hold 100% net worth in it, whatever.
Regardless of correctness, that sort of attitude feels really stressful to me (to think about the ultimate endgame of anything that ever happens under some 'ideal' circumstances). I don't think it's healthy.
For the time being, we have a cool technology that lets me use asymmetric crypto to send people a tenner on the other side of the world. If it all fails or drops massively in value tomorrow, I lose the small amount I have in my wallet.
I'm sure some cypherpunks figured that GPG meant we would all plug ourselves into the wall and be anonymous and stateless and stuff. That probably won't happen, but does it make GPG useless, worthy of ranting about?
There is one important property of currency that you are missing in your list: accepted. Currency that is not accepted as payment for things has little use as currency. It is easy enough to create something that meets all of your requirements, but unless people are willing to accept the currency in exchange for goods and services, it is useless.
Of course, currency has a very strong network effect. Its value is tied very closely to the number of people who use it.
I have no stake or interest in Bitcoin, and I wrote it off some years ago. I find it kind of annoying when there are stories about it or altcoins in my news feed (in lieu of other things). It's noise in my signal. This is just my own personal feeling; I wouldn't go as far as to describe my feeling towards Bitcoin as hate.
I can't explain the feelings or motivations of those who actively detract from the technology. It's probably similar to Apple "hate". Or inverse "fanboyism".
I saw Bitcoin as another Second Life, great for smart young programmers to have a new sandbox to play in, but not actually useful for working adults. I was similarly "annoyed" by all the Second Life media hype happening after I had written it off.
They are waiting for bitcoin to become the number #1 currency. Just like people joke about 'the year of linux'. Guess what, linux is still around. It doesn't need to be #1. There may never be a 'year of linux', but it doesn't mean linux is a failure.
I see, I don't see it being successful at that, in trade. I see it's blockchain and consensus model being used as settlement on a broad and broader scale.
I find Apple 'hate' far more understandable because of their market share.
Bitcoin makes up a tiny portion of the market and is completely optional. I mean, it barely even exists.
Apple's activities (notably 'tivoization'), threaten general purpose computing.
Regardless I still try to come to peace with it (i think it's very important to have a positive mindset). As long as I can still buy my ARM SoC boards, x86 machines, etc, I'll be happy. If that starts looking dim, eh. We'll see.
It's a technology for allowing money to bypass the rule of law. By design it concentrates power in the hands of property owners, and allows them to undercut democratic rules against activities with negative externalities - and since it's more expensive than currency, those are the only use cases that make sense; prime use cases would be things like drugs, smuggling, tax evasion, child porn, terrorism. I think IED control software is a pretty fair comparison actually, except that IEDs are somewhat more democratic.
Cash isn't quite as bad because it's less practical, but yes both are primarily useful for crime and antisocial activity. I would be suspicious of someone who paid a large bill in cash (or used gold, or bricks of drugs); wouldn't you?
I'm not answering your question as written because I disagree with the concept of cash and "bricks of drugs" as being equally suspicious.
Being suspicious of cash is very dangerous. Historically, the poor rely on cash far more than the rich, so if we start demonizing it, really you're demonizing the poor. Politicians know this and often exploit it to help their rich friends.
Bitcoin has the capability to be the great equalizer, not just across economic bands but also across country borders. Your fear of it seems unfounded, though the paranoid part of me does wonder if you work for Visa or some other financial institution.
That'd be a proof-of-stake coin. They exist. You're thinking of in proportion to their percentage of the network mining power. Which for a pool (cartel?) can be sizable.
But that it is more akin to controlling the post-office than controlling the bank. People can be inconvenienced but not stolen from (except in certain cases with confederates of the post-master) and those can be guarded against more easily than avoiding phishing email from "your bank".
> those can be guarded against more easily than avoiding phishing email from "your bank".
What risk measure are you using there, and what ease measure? E.g. waiting for 6 blocks for transactions to settle (best practice AIUI) would be a serious inconvenience when e.g. paying at a restaurant.
You expect a restaurant customer to perform a double-spend for their dinner bill? One confirmation is enough for, roughly, anything worth less than the block reward. When you sell luxury cars you may want to wait a bit longer.
Mostly, attacks on the protocol itself (instead of your android wallet, etc) require significant mining effort and usually waste it effort by making the block incompatible with the global network (the double spend). When the cost of the item, divided by the number of blocks the merchant waits, is greater than the block reward divided by your likelihood of finding enough consecutive blocks to cheat - it may be worth it to try.
Specifically for food - you're supposed to mention coupons and traveller's cheques at the start of the meal, giving the restaurant time to prepare. The confirmation time (one, or maybe two blocks) could be handled the same way - pay a bit early.
One or two blocks is 10 or 20 minutes, no? That's not going to make you popular. Maybe bitcoin can replace coupons and travellers' cheques, but that's not a very big market compared to cash and cards.
You say that like I failed my sales pitch. The restaurant was your example, and I'm not trying to get you to use Bitcoin.
fwiw, I have paid btc in a restaurant and it was seamless because they didn't bother waiting for any confirmations because they had our faces on camera... Fraud is fraud so they weren't worried. Flash the QR, scan the QR, check the numbers, hit okay, done. 20s for me, and maybe another 20s for the merchant.
But yeah, some stores don't take credit, some don't take cash. All depends on their workflow if seconds matter.
> You say that like I failed my sales pitch. The restaurant was your example, and I'm not trying to get you to use Bitcoin.
I object to the claim that it's easier to guard against a hostile bitcoin network than against phishing emails. It may be possible to use bitcoin safely for some use cases, but it's more effort than avoiding phishing emails.
If you wait for a single confirmation you're almost 100% safe, and this is a feature that almost every wallet has. They alert when a transaction to an address of yours has been confirmed some number of times. If you aren't selling diamonds or fancy cars, online to anonymous people, the right number of confirmations is one.
For a server, it's just like another card reader with a different UI, it's not some high-tech payment box they need a PhD to operate.
(Spear-)Phishing emails often include your boss's real info, fairly convincing text, proper formatting, etc... They've tricked trained CFOs out of millions.
Using BTC is like using Instagram, there's a ton of complexity behind the scenes but if you aren't a systems integrator it's essentially seamless.
> If I posted an article about Linux 4.1 or something, I wouldn't expect to see comments saying 'meanwhile, I used Windows yesterday, and played GTA5, and it was good'.
Back in the 90's when there was more of a religious fervor around Linux the way there is around Bitcoin right now, yeah you would have.
The vitriol is no mystery, it's an obvious reaction to the way so many people have rapturously talked about Bitcoin as if it's going to make governments irrelevant.
We're at the beginning of Bitcoin being treated more like the novelty that it is, and possibly finding a niche where it can be useful over the long term. As it enters this phase where the hype around it dies down, the vitriol will as well.
I believe most people don't realize that to support Bitcoin you either have to adhere to extremely polarizing political beliefs or be completely neutral about it (because you don't care or you don't know). (IMO, of course)
People who are neutral might fail to realize the political implications of Bitcoin and immediately jump to "those people are mental, why do they hate us?"
That applies pretty much to any political discussion ever.
The article is a bit tangential to what I imagined based on the headline, so I won't comment on that.
I would be very happy to pay for journalism, though.
I don't know if it's always been this way, but traditional news media seem to basically report a thing, with some unfounded commentary, and that's that.
I would love to see a 'general affairs' version of something like lwn.net.
Headlines like 'Inflation hits 0.5%' are just bollocks without explaining what inflation is, why it matters, what 'real return' is, whether real return is actually useful in $CURRENT_YEAR, etc.
In the UK we seem to have a relentless focus on personalities which is quite frustrating. 'Cameron this, cameron that' 'Osborne will be...' - focus on the policies, please, I don't care about the politicking. They'll be in for four years regardless, you know? It's just gossip.
My guess is that it's based on the instantaneous nature of news nowadays. If the Daily Mail has something on their front page, as The Guardian you need something up very soon if not now. If not for ad views, simply for relevance.
It might be time for me to start picking up The Economist again. I liked the weekly format, it seemed to give them time to actually flesh things out a bit.
If you haven't been exposed to it, it's just jargon. That's the point. You are testing for jargon rather than ability.
It is the distinction between saying 'implement FizzBuzz' and going silent, and actually explaining what it is. As an interviewer it is easy to forget that whilst you may have asked a question 20 times, this may be the candidate's first encounter with your terminology.
Trees and graphs are fundamental to computer science and there are only two ways to traverse them. I don't know what kids are doing these days, but I learned this because of my high-school curricula.
In other words, it's OK if you don't have a formal education in computer science, but when you don't have it, you need to make up for it by learning on your own, because this is basic stuff that high-school kids are learning. And it's even worse when people do have that education on their resume and don't know BFS, because it means they cheated on those courses.
And what would you prefer for a hiring test? Straight IQ tests? A requirement for public, open-source contributions? Or are you speaking of querying databases and fading out divs? I think we can all agree that neither is entirely fair.
And keep in mind that for all the pain involved in the interview process, the only alternative is optimistic hiring for a test period, except that doesn't work because it causes distress to everybody involved if it doesn't work out. This is why many companies now prefer internships, because thus they are dealing with young people that don't have big expectations.
I think fundamentally the idea of paying developer X 40K and developer Y 80K (because developer Y has been twice as effective in the past) is broken, because it negates the impact of environment.
If you pay someone 150K GBP in London they can live next door to the office, have TaskRabbit like services perform all household tasks for them, and spend their time exercising and reading 24/7. They will kill it.
Pay them 30K, and regardless of pedigree, they're going to struggle.
Somewhere in there is a balance and I argue it's far less to do with certification and more the circumstances of life which as an employer you have huge discretion to influence.
Basically, it's about steelmanning. Why is someone bad? Is it that they're inherently genetically dysfunctional? Or is it that they haven't been coached well or have a difficult environment?
Given good faith, most of the developers I know have the ability to be amazing. I include myself in that (am I that good? dunno, impostor syndrome innit). But they are stifled by needless nonsense. Management, open office, low pay, commute, stress, basically. Kill the stress and you get your '10x engineer'. Keep the stress and your '10x engineer' turns into a chocolate mousse.
Are you sure you replied to the right comment? :-)
From my point of view, an interview really isn't an exchange between equals, but a meetup where two parties meet, state their demands and evaluate each other. It works in both directions of course.
So first of all, I'm not hiring :-P
I see your point though and I don't agree.
First of all, the point of the interview isn't to determine whether somebody is bad, or improperly couched. Surely interviewers would love being able to do that, but it's not possible to do it in a couple of hours.
During the interview all you get to do is to apply a noise filter to get rid of the incredibly bad ones. Because without that filter you can get people that are a very bad fit and that can cost you the project and the morale of your existing employees. It's incredibly taxing to fire somebody. Every time it happened to see a colleague being fired, internal discussions, personal attacks and bad feelings happened internally, every single time and not just at one company. And then in big corporations, because of the risks involved in firing people, you get an even worse effect - you see them "promoted".
And with a noise filter you can naturally have many, many false negatives, as in people that are in fact good, but won't pass the test and interviewers are willing to have that risk, instead of risking false positives.
Of course, from what you're saying, I think you believe everybody can be great. Well, yeah, I think everybody can be great at something useful, but not everybody can be great at something specific. We software developers are too idealistic at times. I don't see surgeons going around telling other people that everybody can be a surgeon. That would be a preposterous thing to say.
On the other hand I do think that if companies want good people, they should invest in education.
> The whole principle here is that there exists a growing portion of developers who can't be bothered with interview ping pong.
I can agree with that. I'm not into interviewing myself. I'm not into switching jobs that often either. I can't be bothered with that because I've got satisfying things to work on already. Capitalism and the free market cuts both ways, right?
You're right about learning. Everyone should be doing this ALL THE TIME. Problem solving and learning ability are what you should be measuring and then deciding if their past experience justifies the position/starting rate. This is far more likely to serve you well than testing the finer points of some algo/tech that is simply a building block of a solution to a far bigger set of business/technical challenges.
But you cannot measure problem solving and learning ability without relying on a set of common knowledge to use in your tests.
Again, are we speaking of giving out straight IQ tests? I think there's plenty of people that would be against that, plenty of people that consider IQ tests to be fundamentally flawed. And if not IQ tests, how do you measure problem solving and learning ability?
Maybe you give the interviewee something to do, like an algorithm or a piece of code to develop on the spot, right? But maybe your personal expertise doesn't match with what the interviewer wants or needs. And the interviewer has to give you some problem to solve in some way.
I remember that at a coding interview I was given the problem of programming a Lego Mindstorms device to detect obstacles and do stuff. But then the problem was really about reading a document on the C subset used to program the device, along with the several couple of functions needed to control the motion and read the sensors. Was that measuring learning ability in any way? Of course, if you think that the skill of reading a technical document with precise instructions is so rare. But that wasn't real world problem solving.
So how can you test real world problem solving? Do you give candidates a homework? Ah, but then you run into another problem: the good candidates, the ones that might actually solve your homework, are rarely interested in spending their time on such things, because most good people already have jobs and a life and things to do and you can consider yourself lucky if you get their attention for a couple of hours.
In that light, I don't think it's that unfair to give problems to solve that rely on basic algorithms and data structures, especially for companies where the problems solved are much harder than that.
I've been programming for ~8 years as well and have implemented BFS multiple times, especially in occasions where I have to travel nested data structures and want to print them in a specific order.
BFS and DFS are the bread and butter of tree/graph problems and every software engineer is expected to encounter them at least once in their life. What if you want to debug a complex data structure or just a tree and want to print out its contents in order? Is it really such a weird thing? It's akin to asking to do a for loop through a list to print the elements, except slightly more complex (but certainly something that should be achievable by intuition rather than by memory).
I guess I should rephrase. I've been programming for ~8 years and I've never been presented with a problem that insisted I know what BFS was explicitly.
It is intuitive, which even further pushes the question "Why do I need to know this to be an effective programmer"?
You don't need to know BFS, you need to show that you can come up with a BFS implementation if you need to do so. You can always say "wait, remind me again, which one was BFS?" and the interviewer can certainly tell you at least what the conditions are. Maybe he might think a bit less of you (although I personally wouldn't) because BFS is a really really common name in the jargon of a programmer, but still it's better than simply blanking out and then angrily claiming that it's unfair to ask BFS.
A similar question could be "Can you print in order all the elements of a given tree/graph?", would you find that more fair compared to straight out using the word "BFS/Breadth First Search"?
Yeah, I think presenting the actual problem rather than a jargon test is a better way of determining a programmer's competency, but even then I'd prefer to ask questions specific to the problem domain, like if you're a streaming company ask about compression algorithms.
My favorite questions are when companies ask actual problems they're having and try to get the interviewee to suggest solutions and/or implementations.
How can anybody have knowledge about compression algorithms without knowing what BFS is? This is like claiming to be a mathematician and not knowing what rational and irrational numbers are.
You speak about the problem domain, but the primary problem domain we are facing first is programming. And without a shared vocabulary, you can talk with other software developers, but you aren't going to be very efficient in that communication. So going back to the problem domain, as software developers we are supposed to master whatever problem domain we are facing, in order to efficiently communicate with the business side in their own domain-specific language. How are we supposed to do that if we haven't even bothered to learn our own domain-specific language?
But it goes deeper than that. Many software developers these days rely too much on libraries, without knowing how they work. And this hurts them a lot.
This is all about standing on the shoulders of giants. And it all starts from the most basic data-structures and algorithms. BFS is right up there with the characteristics of a List or a Map. It's common knowledge that everybody should know. And this common knowledge is half of "Introduction to Algorithms" by Cormen et al. So instead of reading another fluffy piece on Agile methodologies or on soft skills like the "Pragmatic Programmer", or other such bullshit, maybe people should read this one instead.
One recent problem we had was one of scaling out our micro-service-based infrastructure. And I've heard from colleagues wild ideas like "oh, lets introduce an external queue, like Kafka". DevOps for some reason think external queues are the solution to all problems. Yeah, great, but this isn't a freaking webpage reading from a database, we've got singletons, as in producers of truth that need strong consistency in their decision-making because we aren't that smart and you're just moving the problem around, because locks don't freaking scale, no matter how smart your queue is. Or "we'll just add Akka Cluster or Finagle or whathaveyou, should take care of it". Dude, yeah, we've got singletons, which means we need to do sharding and have a protocol for failure detection, so maybe we should talk about that first.
This is just a recent example. Developers are so eager to jump to the latest fads and the latest cool things, without thinking for a second if those solutions would work, only because they can't imagine how these tools are even implemented. And this isn't something that a superficial Google search can fix, because the unknown keeps piling up, the more complex the system is, until the shit hits the fan and you throw your hands in the air and bring in external consultants to fix it. And if you think the UI is spared from all of these problems, think again. I've seen dozens of Javascript-enabled interfaces with performance issues, only because of the "thundering herd" problem happening due to sloppy event handling. How many UI folks understand how Facebook's React works? Not that many.
Because it's not intuitive to some people. Some people just don't 'get' it. The assumption is that such people are probably also not good software developers.
No, it's not a test of whether you know it, it's a test of whether you can implement it. If the candidate doesn't know/recall what BFS is, it's trivial to demonstrate the basic idea on a whiteboard, and it's the candidate's job to convert the idea into code. (Which, at the end of day, is pretty much what the vast majority of coding is about.)
It's still not realistic. People don't code on whiteboards. You code (today) with all the resources of the internet at your fingertips, and if you need to invert a binary tree you will use a well-tested implementation from a standard library.
It's not supposed to realistic. It's supposed to be a test of programming ability that fits into an hour interview with time left over for talking about other things. Real world projects last months or years. You can't fit that into an hour, so you have to make do with something that can.
Which is why they're not asking you to do it in an actual job. It's a proxy problem that is easy to communicate so you're not spending the entire interview explaining the problem. Arguably, fleshing out a spec would also be a valuable test, but not the same one.
Sometimes actual code too. For instance, if I'm designing an optimization pass for a compiler, I'll write toy IR programs and show how the optimization pass will rewrite them. And I'll do it on a whiteboard.
I know for damn sure that, if I'm implementing something algorithmically tricky (not BFS, though), I first sketch the details on a whiteboard or a piece of paper.
To a degree this is true, but there is also significant value in having (and retaining) that broad base of knowledge that a good CS program or some systematic personal studies will get you. Most of the time you're not going to get a "implement this algorithm" you're going to get a "solve this problem we have" and you need to know the standard tools that are available to get you to a first approximation solution.
Depending on what their listed requirements were, I think it's reasonable to expect you to know standard terminology, though I wouldn't count it against you if you asked to be reminded of the details for one or two things.
Why would an interviewer assume a front-end dev has a CS degree or has invested personal time in studying algorithms rather than other (probably more) relevant topics, such as various frameworks?
That depends. Mostly because front end job listings still often list a CS degree as a requirement. Also, I think it's great when people enjoy working on the front end since I don't particularly, but I still want to work with people that aren't hyper specialized.
I think you might be underestimating the breadth of front-end skills required to properly develop, test, deploy, deliver, monitor, analyze, and optimize front-end applications. Including the myriad third-party integrations that other teams need, from CS to marketing.
Well, I wouldn't have considered half of those things as part of "front end development" work, but it pretty much drives my point. I'm a firm believer in the idea that you'll be more effective at all of those things if you have a general baseline knowledge of CS, so that if you need to you can (relatively quickly) understand how and why all of your tools work the way they do.
Most specialized fields have jargon. It is the common language between the practitioners of that field. At what point should a person be expected to know some basic ideas and the words associated with them for the field they work in?
Well, if the knowledge of a particular thing is useful for that job, then yes, that's reasonable.
But we know that most of the time this isn't true. <1% of software developers write sorting algorithms on the job, and even fewer of those actually need to know which one is Bubble and which Quick and which Heap without reference.
If I'm a multinational company, I want my accountant to know what transfer pricing is. If I'm a self employed joiner, I don't.
Problem solving tests are good. Memorization tests are terrible. We have search engines for that.
I think memorization tests of the sort that ask what FunctionX you should use from LibraryY for a particular situation are terrible.
I don't consider asking a developer about basic data structures and their properties as terrible. This is foundational knowledge that is useful for nearly every programming job. Knowing about lists, hash tables, trees, etc and their operations or tradeoffs is extremely important.
Similarly, having a developer that can reason about the runtime and memory complexity of the code they write is important as well.
These are the "lingua franca" things that I was speaking about in my previous post. Even if particular developers think that the above things aren't useful to them, I would argue that they are probably wrong and just don't know how or why they are.
Sure. I know what a list, a hash table, a tree are because I looked it up whenever I saw someone mention it, and eventually internalized it.
But before that, I'd used them for 10-15 years without knowing the name because it doesn't matter. Take a hash table. Python calls it a dict. C++ calls it an (unordered) map. Java calls it.. whatever it calls it. It's nice to have that 'hash table' google term to find the thing you want in a new language, but otherwise they're just words.
Actually in usage I type {} in Python and it is what it is.
I'm not arguing that these things aren't useful at all.
I'm arguing that the distinction between the CS-ified person that has spent the effort to learn what the words mean to pass interviews is not substantially more knowledgeable or useful than the version of that person that will have to find it out in the future. It's marginal.
Basically it feels like a sort of 'table manners' test. You've put the fork on the wrong side of the plate, so you can't eat dinner with us today, you scoundrel.
Don't take this to mean that I think that computer science is useless. Far, far from it. It is simply that I think that relying on jargon is testing whether someone genuinely has a CS degree (or equivalent without certification). It's not testing whether someone is a good programmer.
If that's what you want, just ask for it. Let's not waste each other's time and money.
The anger here exists because people want good faith interviewing, and instead they get "bloody hell the last 20 people were crap I can't be bothered any more" interviewing.
>> Java calls it.. whatever it calls it. It's nice to have that 'hash table' google term to find the thing you want in a new language, but otherwise they're just words.
Actually, they are more than just words. Try not to conflate the abstract data structure itself with the language-specific implementations which can vary quite significantly. Also your flippant, dismissive attitude on quite important CS concepts wouldn't take you far. It's better to frame your argument like this ... "There's no point in testing for X or Y because ... e.g. we won't need X or Y to perform the job we are being tested for" which is quite reasonable as most devs CS-minted or otherwise will agree with you. & also while it might not be useful to rote memorize every single CS concept, it's sensible to at least have a passing familiarity. Why? Well, not being able to recognize what BFS even stands for in the first place is enough to raise a red flag anywhere.
>> Also your flippant, dismissive attitude on quite important CS concepts wouldn't take you far.
Please try to avoid this. We can discuss without resorting to attacks.
>> "There's no point in testing for X or Y because ... e.g. we won't need X or Y to perform the job we are being tested for"
That's what most people are arguing for I think, so I agree with you there.
>> not being able to recognize what BFS even stands for in the first place is enough to raise a red flag anywhere.
By doing this you are throwing away developers that have made their respective companies millions in revenue. It's not hypothetical. One day, a non-CS trained developer will come across a tree and use it. And then they'll learn.
You seem to be arguing that non-CS trained devs can learn these things when they come across them. I wouldn't disagree with that.
I think what I see as the real concern is a case of "not knowing what you don't know." If you aren't exposed to at least the fundamentals of this broad base of CS knowledge you aren't going to know that they are available to you when you need them. Learning about a tree when you first read about it is great. But that person will still have huge gaps in their CS knowledge compared to someone who systematically studied it.
I also don't think this is so much about having a CS degree, as it is simply having studied CS in some fashion. I've worked with plenty of talented self-taught developers who took the time to learn these things on their own.
I think really what we're arguing about now is the distinction between hiring for a Google position (pushing the absolute state of the art) and hiring for a position creating accounting software or something.
I don't think that it's reasonable to expect to be hired into a top tier position as a kernel hacker at RedHat or a database expert at Google with an English degree and a few weeks of github commits.
I think that most software development jobs don't need the level of technical chops that are being asked for - and that many of the developers that actually have this level of ability just don't need the company (this post might be an example of that).
Some of the job requirements I've seen make me think along the lines of - 'hell, if I can do all of that, why would I work for you for peanuts?'.
Hey, whoa, stop right here. std::map and std::unordered_map are not at all the same thing, and if you're going to be using them in a manner beyond "trivial" it's important to know the difference between them.
That's not what happened to the OP. He was asked to code up a solution to maze searching problem. The statement of this problem is understandable by a 5-year old kid.
Every employer I've worked for has made the experience farcical. If not at the start, then over time. You interview for one job, and eventually end up doing something else.
A full time career that doesn't pay enough to buy a home. And they say software developers are overpaid.
I think the end-game for me is to just go camping with a laptop or something. I'll code for fun, rather than trying to meet this 'market demand' which provides people with studio apartments, temporarily, in exchange for ~all of their productive hours.
> You interview for one job, and eventually end up doing something else.
LOL yeah, that's what happened to me for my last job. A recruiting process that lasted 4 bloody months for an electronic designer position, and when I was finally hired they put me on software testing; not only I had never done this, but I had never heard it was a thing. Anyway, after less than 2 months I was better as this than the CS graduates who had been doing it for several years and they were asking me for help in their work.
But now I have been unemployed for 2.5 years, I made it to the interview stage only once during that time, and I have given up on even just applying to any job offer for the last 5 months because it is absolutely pointless and humiliating to be repeatedly discarded by people who are clueless, who don't give a flying fuck about the persons they "harvest" and lack the basic respect in social interactions (like spending 2 minutes of their precious time answering a question, not blatantly lying, doing what they said they'd do, or even just showing up at the very appointment themselves fixed!).
So yes, in a way, I've quitted and I am getting ready to become a street beggar when all savings are gone. In the blogger case, his situation is too fresh, I don't think his mood of the day will last long for this time (and after all, he got plenty of interviews, at least), but I am really really tired of these completely nonsensical recruiting processes and their humiliating consequences.
I'd say a majority of those who graduated my CS class 6.5 years ago now own their own home, and that's in the UK where devs aren't as relatively well paid and house prices are high. There are plenty of good employers out there, though they don't spend all their time hiring because they have low turnover.
As for "eventually end up doing something else" isn't that career development? We can't bemoan having non-technical senior managers if some developers don't go on to do that.
> I'd say a majority of those who graduated my CS class 6.5 years ago now own their own home
I think what you mean is that they have a mortgage they'll be repaying for a long time. Houses are still too expensive to buy in the UK with a junior- to mid-tier developer's salary in the UK, even if you went to a place like Cambridge and worked for Google.
> A full time career that doesn't pay enough to buy a home. And they say software developers are overpaid.
The average salary for a "software developer" job posting in my city (Charlotte, NC) is $101k. The average income in Charlotte is $53k. The median home value is $167k. 60% of the value of a home in a year is pretty good.
I've also lived in Sydney, Mannheim, San Francisco, and Seattle, and I noticed similar economics in each of these places (where the salary of software developers tended to be quite high relative to the average income). Do you perhaps live somewhere with a very different trend?
I don't know when you lived in those cities, but things have evidently changed. I've lived in Sydney and Seattle. Median home price in Sydney is currently ~AUD$1 million and median home price in the Seattle area has reached ~USD$0.5 million. Average developer salaries in those cities are certainly not 60% of the value of a home.
I didn't mean to imply that in each city, a software developer makes more than half of the price of a home in a year. What I am asserting is that, in contrast to the previous post, software developers can afford homes in these (very expensive) cities and they can do so at a much higher rate than the average resident.
An average software developer earns about $85,000 in Sydney, so you're right, they're priced out of the central city's market. Senior software engineers make $100-150k, so even they make only up to 15% of a median downtown home.
I lived in Macquarie Park, a suburb of Sydney (which is ~20 minutes by public transit from the center of the city). The median price for a house there is $619k. That's well within reach for a senior engineer, although admittedly more of a stretch for an average developer.
Software engineer salaries in Seattle average $111k. As you've said, the median home price there is about $500k, which is very much attainable for someone earning six figures. The average income in Seattle is $37k, showing that (just like in Charlotte) software developers make about 3x as much as the average resident, and are in fact one of the few groups not yet priced out of central housing.
I should also note that the $53k income is household income. Median personal income is $32k, meaning that a software developer makes over 3x the salary of a normal Charlotte resident.
This reminds me of the Game Boy Advance SP and how it removed the 3.5mm jack for seemingly no reason other than to have me buy an adapter.
I won't buy a phone without a 3.5mm jack. It just works. I don't need digital audio. My (medium-price-range) headphones sound utterly glorious, there is no utility here.
To be honest, I'm not sure whether I'll ever upgrade my 2013 Moto G. It'll probably break eventually.
When did I become a luddite? It's like, at some point, things stopped getting substantially better, and just became sidegrades with annoying tweaks for the sake of it.
I want my toaster to take... bread. Not tomatoes. Bread is what I eat for breakfast, not toasted tomatoes. :P
Ultimately it's not really about software developers, is it?
Most of these issues seem to be management decisions.
Like giving a car mechanic a few cheesegraters and a dog, sticking him in an open field in a thunderstorm, and asking him to rebuild your engine.
He could be a prodigy. But there's water in it, man. There's bloody water in it.
Half of the stuff on that page should not involve any programming at all. The nPower one, for example. Yeah, it's broken, but that's not the actual problem. The problem is that it would take about 5 years to report the issue, so no-one knows it's broken. Just give an email address or a telephone number, and actually employ customer support instead of paying yourself $50M/second. Done.
I disagree. While there are management/process/whatever issues, there's also a lot that could be improved by the devs.
For example, take the podomatic example - that's just a sloppy function written by a dev. The NPower thing is just sloppy setup of the website and bad links in email templates. The MS thing, well why did the devs add jQuery to a site that is so incredibly static?
Devs make a lot of decisions that influence the quality of software and I think we need to start taking more responsibility for that.
As a layman these sorts of reductions always seemed pretty strict to me. It seemed like a backdoor way of banning ICE's.
We know that we need to hit zero CO2. I think that regulations on emissions are the complete wrong way to go about it, though. Health issues in cities are irrelevant if global warming means the cities are underwater.
Tax the fuel, give incentives to renewable energies and batteries, and let the market sort it out.
Or, have the government seriously attack on the research front.
It feels a bit like we're sitting here with this 'money' abstraction and pretending that energy research is too expensive, when realistically, governments across the world have the might to make clean energy the next Apollo project. Why aren't they? That would be a fantastic legacy for any president/prime minister/whatever.
The UK could take bits of land it owns, chuck homes there, give some fresh university grads in shit economic situations some research to crunch on. Like Manhattan 2.0.
You can't just say to people 'oh, your car is impossible, let's go and sniff each other's armpits on the subway, and you'll have to walk to the countryside'. It just doesn't work.
>"It feels a bit like we're sitting here with this 'money' abstraction and pretending that energy research is too expensive, when realistically, governments across the world have the might to make clean energy the next Apollo project. Why aren't they? That would be a fantastic legacy for any president/prime minister/whatever."
Apollo wasn't very successful. I say this as someone who is personally an aerospace nut, and owns every space or aviation documentary he can get his hands on.
Apollo succeeded in getting a dozen men to the moon, but it did not succeed in promoting the exploration of space, or creating a great deal of technological innovation which benefited the populace at large (for the amount of money spent). Apollo was also very unpopular, except for a little while between Apollo 9 and 12. Most of the population would have been happier with a new refrigerator or air conditioner, and those appliances would probably have had a better lasting impact (for a number of reasons).
I agree in some ways, but I think energy research is different, because if it actually works it directly results in stuff for everyman.
The actual goal of Apollo was 'put a man on the moon'. Which is super cool, but obviously not all that directly useful.
By contrast, a program whose explicit goal is to make batteries better, or make solar more efficient, or bring fusion reactors closer to production, or even just generically 'do some energy research' is a lot more obviously 'good'.
Governments have a record of being very good at collecting and spending money on extraordinarily expensive projects, but are very bad at making things cheaper and more affordable.
GP's point was "tax the fuel". It doesn't matter what the govt does with the revenue - for my pov, current taxes on fuel don't compensate the huge externalities and side costs of it: Half the police is dedicated to roads, half the city space is roads and parkings, 75% military is attacking petrol producers, we have cancers and asthma, and the global warming will cost us natural disasters and economical inequalities. If we integrated that cost to the gallon of petrol, which would only be fair, the gallon would be 5x or 10x more expensive, and we'd watch the economy innovate, as GP said.
First we can immediately lower the income tax. Second, the current price is actually a loan on all of the victims. Third, the tax can progressively increase along the months, so industries can plan exactly when their renewable products will be market-competitive.
I don't think 'affordability' is the relevant metric here.
I'm talking about EROEI - the viability of doing it at all.
Private enterprise can play the capitalism game and make it cheaper. But it won't invent breakeven fusion to begin with. The risk appetite just isn't there at that level of investment.
I think the way to look at it would be to imagine that you are optimizing some utility function which incorporates some mean and some variance.
The risk of going for a clean energy project is massive. It can fail completely, it could work but not return much profit, there are lots of ways it can go wrong.
However - the problem here is that the 'do nothing' state is not static utility. Do nothing results in everything going to shit, with very little variance.
Our capitalist systems aren't really set up to deal with that, it's a tragedy of the commons. That's why you need things like taxes on oil - to force the utility function to accommodate bad things.
Why should space programs have any benefit for the populace in terms of transferable technology? Joe Public has no need for an ultra powerful rocket engine and the technology that runs that doesn't really have a place in his car or waster/dryer combo. The "technology transfer" argument has always been a bullshity way to get laypeople to support NASA. It has a dubious reality and no space program should have the goal of creating non-space innovations. How successful would SpaceX be if we had them worry about making the next velcro or whatever? Not very. It should just be a good space program. Funny I don't see this this weird standard applied to the Soviet space program, which sites like HN and reddit applaud uncritically.
Also I completely disagree with the top-down central planning argument you're suggesting. If we threw this kind of money at a better fridge, the government would have created a $10m fridge made by a dozen military contractors and each part made in each of the 50 states. You can't just throw money at every problem at expect wonderful results. The history of government spending proves this. The government is only good at large scale edge cases. Everything else is best served by private industry, free markets, capitalism, etc. There's a reason the Soviets were sending spies by the boatload to copy US chip and industrial designs. They just couldn't create this level of innovation via the top-down command method you think magically works.
If anything, Apollo is a tremendous success on so many levels. Its amusing that you consider putting a dozen men on the moon to be a "meh" accomplishment. I've noticed a lot of younger people have this strong anti-NASA view which is ahistorical and overly critical. Its a shame this level of angry contrarianism is in style as it diminishes the amazing accomplishments NASA was able to do, usually under strict budgetary concerns with endless political meddling.
Among other things Apollo was also really expensive propaganda with a lasting impact. In that context it worked well. 50 years later and the US is still the country that put a man on the moon where probes are generally forgotten outside of Voyager.
Energy research similarly has a lot of indirect value outside of simply changing local emissions. By reducing costs you can push world wide adoption through economics not just politics. And create economic incentives to keep improving things over the long term. That's a lot of leverage and well past what direct spending on 'clean' energy could have achieved in the 1980-2000 timespan.
The only way that I can think of to respond to a derailing comment in an effective and meaningful manner would be to engage its substance while synthesizing it with the underlying topic of the thread. Otherwise one is just perpetuating the obfuscation of the original topic of conversation. Whether the Apollo project was "successful" depends on how one views its nature and objectives; germane at least insofar as whether this is a plausible model for research as a strategic state investment, whether such action would be possible or effective, as contrasted with the alternative course of reframing the context in which undirected economic activity was occurring so as to induce a similar degree of investment and subsequent change in the commonly used technologies.
So what nickff is actually saying is that when considering the Apollo program as a model for the response to the CO2 crisis, it would be important to understand the ways in which it failed the putative goal of human expansion into space. I think that he would view the Apollo program as analogous to the discovery by Americans that the Chinese had succeeded in generating a net gain of power for a few minutes from a research fusion reactor. Responding to this by declaring that the US would build the first commercially functioning fusion reactor "not because it was easy, but because it was hard" might go a long way towards quelling the moral panic brought about by the appearance of Chinese ascendency and American decline, but it might be problematic insofar as sustainable and optimal investment in energy (source) research was considered.
As a self described "space nut" how can you fail to see the investment in innovation without the immediate return on ROI that the program brought? That's what makes the Apollo program special. We did something outside of the capitalism system but was funded from it, to achieve something no other company would even touch. That's where the magic lies.
> The proper way for you to indicate this sentiment is to downvote my post, and avoid commenting, as per the Hacker News guidelines.
Eh, I'm hoping dang will come by and detach the comment. It was a pretty classic middlebrow dismissal. "No need to read the comment! Someone compared something to the apollo project!", and etc.
> My point was that governments are unlikely to support 'moonshots', because the 'moonshots' are unpopular, as well as being bad investments.
There are other categories of public sentiment than popular and unpopular. It's not at all true that we don't fund things to the tune of tens of billions of dollars per year in the face of public lack of attention and apathy (and, actually, sometimes approval).
I have heard many people say that a 'green energy Apollo project' is necessary, and I am pointing out why Apollo is a bad example. I did not intend to dismiss the parent's ideas, though I disagree with a few of them.
> Most of the population would have been happier with a new refrigerator or air conditioner, and those appliances would probably have had a better lasting impact (for a number of reasons).
Except for the tons more CFCs this would have put into the atmosphere, and CO2 produced from running non-replacement unit. Refrigeration would likely be net positive to quality of life, but it has drawbacks as well as benefits.
> It feels a bit like we're sitting here with this 'money' abstraction and pretending that energy research is too expensive, when realistically, governments across the world have the might to make clean energy the next Apollo project. Why aren't they?
I think we're scared we won't find a cheaper source of energy than fossil fuels. At least for a few generations. Confronting the reality that society will have a smaller energy budget going in the future compared with the past is a scary prospect for democracy, because it challenges a leg of the "growing pie" assumption.
The idea of 'cheap' makes increasingly less sense going forward as the abstraction of money falls apart due to automation.
What matters is EROEI with externalities included (e.g. energy cost of carbon capture or sea barriers or whatever).
But even if we play that game, in the UK we already pay something like a 75% combined tax rate (probably higher now) on car fuels. So we've already priced in 4x. And household electricity bills are generally trivial compared to stuff like land cost. We can, and will, afford it in monetary terms.
I don't see how this is an externality though. Whatever benefits fossil fuels provide in the form of cheap energy and synthetic building blocks should surely be already factored into its market demand?
'The book received mixed reviews, with Jay Lehr of The Heartland Institute saying, "Written in a conversational style that is easy to read and understand, this book can serve as a layman's guide, refuting the absurd claims that man controls the climate, while explaining why the current abundance of oil and gas due to hydraulic fracturing will leave all efforts to impose wind and solar energy in our rear-view mirrors."'
So obviously a book containing some ignorant claims doesn't rule out it containing insightful claims, but rejecting global warming outright is pretty damning - what positive externalities, exactly, does he refer to?
An externality is a cost or benefit not borne by the parties to a transaction. Cheap electricity is not a "positive externality" because the benefit inures to, and is fully captured by, the buyer of the electricity.
I don't know you'd compare it. What's the true cost of dependence on, ultimately, human muscle power? With, uh, slavery and such. GDP per capita took a vertical path after 1790 , when it'd been flat since the Babylonians began brewing beer.
Well, if the outcome is loss of our habitat then the eventual cost is the sum of the world's economy times however many years it would likely have gone on without the abuse of fossile fuels. And we don't have to compare to muscle power since there are existing methods (since at least the advent of nuclear power) on how to run a CO2 neutral economy with only a moderate immediate loss compared to what we're doing.
I'm afraid it's probably more necessary then, because you need sound justification for any action to be taken. I have to admit - I use models in my day job, and I'm nervous about binding law and treaties based on them.
And I don't see any projections where total loss of habitat is on the table. It'll be more like Mesa Verde, where pre-Industrial warming presumably rendered the home of the Anasazi uninhabitable. Even them that's 100 years out.
> And I don't see any projections where total loss of habitat is on the table.
The more I read about it, the more it seems to me that valuable information continues to be poisoned, clouding our judgement.
See for example the following extracts from wikipedia [1]:
> "Research carried out in 2008 in the Siberian Arctic has shown millions of tons of methane being released, apparently through perforations in the seabed permafrost,[20] with concentrations in some regions reaching up to 100 times normal levels.[22][23] The excess methane has been detected in localized hotspots in the outfall of the Lena River and the border between the Laptev Sea and the East Siberian Sea. Some melting may be the result of geological heating, but more thawing is believed to be due to the greatly increased volumes of meltwater being discharged from the Siberian rivers flowing north.[24] Current methane release has previously been estimated at 0.5 Mt per year.[25] Shakhova et al. (2008) estimate that not less than 1,400 Gt of carbon is presently locked up as methane and methane hydrates under the Arctic submarine permafrost, and 5–10% of that area is subject to puncturing by open taliks. They conclude that "release of up to 50 Gt of predicted amount of hydrate storage [is] highly possible for abrupt release at any time". That would increase the methane content of the planet's atmosphere by a factor of twelve,[26][27] equivalent in greenhouse effect to a doubling in the current level of CO2."
Yet in the same section, you know what the introduction text reads currently?
> "Most deposits of methane clathrate are in sediments too deep to respond rapidly, and modelling by Archer (2007) suggests the methane forcing should remain a minor component of the overall greenhouse effect.[17] Clathrate deposits destabilize from the deepest part of their stability zone, which is typically hundreds of metres below the seabed. A sustained increase in sea temperature will warm its way through the sediment eventually, and cause the shallowest, most marginal clathrate to start to break down; but it will typically take on the order of a thousand years or more for the temperature signal to get through.[17]"
So let me get this straight: Because someone found a model from 2007 that makes things look mostly fine, we ignore empirical data from 2008 that shows that a Clathrate Gun of 50 Gt could go off at any time? Please someone tell me how I'm wrong just so I don't have to go crazy here.
So, you want precedent for a loss of habitat? How about [2]? Now look, I'm not saying that this is a certainty. But one has to assign a percentage of risk for this happening. I can't do it, I'm not enough of a modeller, but so far I haven't found any conclusive evidence that would either lead to such a calculation or could tell us with certainty that the risk is close to zero. If it isn't close to zero, I'd argue that we have to do everything we can to make sure it is. Because the insurance policy for a catastrophic damage happening at, say, 1% chance, is worth paying up to 1% of that catastrophic damage. My intuition is, it's way more than 1%.
This stuff is different from and often at odds with CO2 emissions. Taxing fuel works great for CO2, since the amount of fuel you burn corresponds very strongly to the amount of CO2 you emit. But it doesn't work at all for other sorts of emissions like these, because they depend heavily on how you burn the fuel, not just how much you burn. Often, burning everything cleanly means burning more fuel overall.
> >> Health issues in cities are irrelevant if global warming means the cities are underwater.
which isn't true. Moreover, you didn't really give an argument for why this shouldn't be tackled at both ends of the problem. The smell is the least of our worries with particulate emissions.
You're aware that Tesla has driven the cost of batteries below $200/kwh 5 years ahead of schedule? Batteries than can go in light vehicles, heavy vehicles, any sorts of vehicles. They will only continue to get cheaper.
Its really frustrating, its impossible to get work as a researcher - even for shit pay !
Money has really dried up ( or maybe there are too many graduates ). In the UK their is a push from universities for students to self fund their Phd in aeronautical engineering !
Its the most regressive thing you could do, but whatever - democracy.
This is an incomplete description of what is happening here. The world of academic research is undersupplied in funding, but massively oversupplied in researchers.
There is no need to add more researchers; we can't fund the ones we already have. Efforts like the one you describe are demotivating people from training in a function that we don't need more of, which is a reasonable thing to do.
I agree. It's ridiculous to say that 99 parts per million of pollutants "passes" and 100 ppm "fails". There's no incentive to do better.
But a tax of $1 per ppm multiplied by the annual number of miles driven will create powerful demand by consumers for lower taxed cars, and the car makers will do what they can to meet the demand.
CO2 reduction will happen one filthy, grotty transaction at a time. It'll take exactly as long as it will take and there's probably [sweet fanny adams] anyone can do about it, other than build a thing that helps it along.
I have living relatives who saw the transition from mules to tractors. It wasn't just nicer, it meant killing yourself much less slowly. Yes, they are that old, and they all look like tintypes from the 19th century - that gaunt, hollow look that working that hard gives you.
> there's probably [sweet fanny adams] anyone can do about it
That's a pithy defeatist statement. Personally I got a job at a renewable energy company. There are many avenues you can take to help tackle climate change.
Excellent! Just please realize probably two-ten percent of the people I know were in alt. energy the first time around, after the Gas Scare in the 1970s. It just takes a while ( and the "defeatism" was just related to how long it will take.)
You proving me wrong would the best possible outcome.
Yeah, tell me about it! The urgency (or lack of it) is what drives me crazy. At least there is hope though, for example huge changes are happening now in China at a crazy pace. I hope it won't be too little too late, the magnitude of what we need to do is daunting.
>The UK could take bits of land it owns, chuck homes there
"Chucking homes there" would be a good place to start improvements, actually.
Designing zero-energy homes and offices is not hard, but housing developers have been slow to adopt the practice. Looking around, it seems like most modern house plans/blueprints have no preferred orientation to the single greatest energy source: the sun (or if they do then housing developers ignore them). When there's literally no "sunward"[1] on the map, then the cheapest of all energy reduction strategies -- passive solar design -- is all but impossible.
Why isn't the climate zone given on a house plan? Because the assumption is that you'll just consume energy (typically fossil fuels) to make up the difference. We're designing buildings totally backwards: starting at form and bolting on function.
The ideal would be adjustable parameters based on local conditions. South facing windows based on heating-degree-days, overhangs based on latitude, floorplans that adjust to ground topology and microclimate, etc. So you punch in the site conditions (or sense them), hit "compile", and it spits out blueprints for a zero-energy passive building specifically suited to those exact local conditions.
This is more similar to how plants develop -- by sensing and adapting to local conditions, they incrementally design themselves to suit their habitat.
[1] that is, south in the northern hemisphere and north in the southern hemisphere
Actually, strict bright-line artificial limits like this are a great way to encourage innovation by using regulatory power to harness market forces to achieve a well-defined goal. In this case, the goal of MPG standards is actually not CO2 emissions or health, but using less oil. The international market for oil is quite broken and easily manipulated, and the global resources of oil are limited.
I absolutely support government-funded research into improving automobile technology. As you say, clean energy is critical. The obvious place to focus energy research these days is on storage technologies from small scale chemical batteries to large-scale potential-energy solutions. We have the technology to generate clean energy relatively cheaply today, but we're missing the storage solutions to even out cycles in wind and solar power, and the continent-scale electricity grids we need to efficiently distribute the power to where it's needed.
It's one thing to trick the tests by 2x, maybe even 3x, if the tests are too strict for the real world. But not by 40x like VW did...And I believe they said only to gain a 10% performance boost. That's just stupid on VW's part.
Anyway, the emissions scandal + the rise of EVs, will finally make all manufacturers try and push as many EVs on the market by 2022, when the new Euro 7 standard is official. They will need to lower their "fleet's" emissions, and the only effective way to do that is to push as many EVS into the market as possible.
So in the end these regulations served their purpose. I'm happy for it.
While I agree that the comment was off-topic and not really adding to the discussion, the issue is not getting old. The leaks happened barely a month ago, with no obvious repercussions (save Iceland).
The story has been swept under the rug as much as possible and I will support anybody keeping it in the limelight.
Termux[0], the best Android terminal emulator (in my humble opinion), recently had mosh added to its' package repository.
I currently use it and it's very nice. It makes me long for a better handheld though (my 4" Moto G screen is difficult to type on, even with Hacker's Keyboard).
I can have tmux sessions running on servers with say, an irc client running, mosh in, chat away for a bit, turn it off, the irc client continues running. Perfect. Same for e-mail using mutt, notes that are backed up on the server automatically using vim, etc etc. Really nice workflow.
Give me a handheld device with ssh/mosh support and I'm happy. :)
I'm running Termux on a Pixel C and I love it. With the keyboard and all it's the Linux experience i wan't on the go. Local compiling works real nice for Go applications and smaller C++ and C stuff. Or Node.JS, Python and whatnot.
It's also available from F-Droid, though i recently became aware, that somehow I only had the ARM version and not AArch64, so keep that in mind. And it also works flawlessly on N.
With Termux, you can ssh into your Android device over Wifi. If there is no Wifi available, you could use your Android device as a Wifi hotspot, connect to it and SSH (you could even use mosh, as others comment that it can be installed in Termux) into your device.
I do not know if you can SSH into your device if connected through bluetooth.
Termux is a bit of a different concept to JuiceSSH. Termux is just 100% terminal, you can install packages through apt in the command line, use standard Linux utils from your phone and on the local file system. It has no GUI.
Personally I like JuiceSSH because it has a nice simple UI for setting up and saving SSH connections. I like the extra buttons for things like ctrl/home/etc.
I'd definitely want something like Termux if I was using Android on a device with a keyboard, but for the sort of things I use a terminal/SSH for on my phone, I prefer something like JuiceSSH. Shame it's not open source though.
On topic, JuiceSSH also supports Mosh out of the box.
Another commentor expressed it, but JuiceSSH is proprietary. In most cases open source is more of a preference for me than a necessity, but I may need to sudo or access root over SSH, and there's no way to review closed source code. JuiceSSH (IMHO) has too much control over my computer for me to use it based on the assumption that I fully can trust the developer.
Agree. Really wish mosh support would be merged into standard ConnectBot. The linked build on the mosh site is hacked into an old version of an old ConnectBot fork.
I haven't tried JuiceSSH, I use CM and only have F-Droid installed (not play store). Most of the reason I use termux is to get away from proprietary apps (I can run all free software on a server and SSH into that).
Juicessh has implemented mosh but stops just a bit too soon.
it would be great if they could support suspending a mosh connection so that you can have a resumable connection without having to have the radio on all the time.
Know of anything similar which supports android gingerbread? I'm using JuiceSSH now but I would love something with package management features like this.
Yeah, that's something I find really odd about most mobile games. They seem designed as a way to basically put the brain into a low energy state or something, rather than actually being interesting.
My personal experience of games like Candy Crush is that people play them on the subway or whatever when there's nothing else to do. If they had a book with them they'd read that, if someone handed them a Nintendo DS with zero effort they'd probably do that (if they could get over the ego thing).
I can't really imagine anyone setting themselves up for a marathon casual gaming session. They seem marketed to be one level above 'watching paint dry' and used in circumstances where that's the only alternative.