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The negative sides are very loud, making HN a place that isn't very nice to talk about technical details. You only see the comments people post. HN, like most p

by IanCal 5y ago

The negative sides are very loud, making HN a place that isn't very nice to talk about technical details. You only see the comments people post. HN, like most places, mostly doesn't have a very good understanding of the underlying technology and enjoys the pithy hot takes. "An NFT is just _bad analogy_" is everywhere, and other complaints often read like "Rails? People make blogs with that and I saw a load of blogs filled with spam, I don't like rails". > At the same time there's seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence that a lot of developers are now flocking to these crypto companies, enough that I think its fair to assume its likely true. People build plenty of things for companies without necessarily being wide eyed believers in some honourable quest. For me, there are a few key things 1. Obviously pay. My family are the most important thing here, and people pay me money to write code & solve problems for them. Money can be exchanged for goods and services. 2. It's an interesting space. You've got a global database with row level security for modifications and stored procedures. Everyone uses key based security. On top, the database is slow, those stored procedures have very strict limits and computations need to be heavily optimised. Everything is public. There are now multiple linked databases with different tradeoffs. How do you mix those? How do you ensure safety, security, validity? How do you do off-chain computation and get the results back on chain? 3. It's new. Do you know what happens if I come up with a great new technical idea in most development? It's either a bad idea for reasons others have discovered already or someone has already implemented it better than I could. It often requires very deep expertise to do something truly new. On the crypto side, I've come up with things that are (as far as I can tell) brand new. I find building to be more fun than configuring, and you need to build new things in this space. 4. It's changing fast. There are things you can do now you couldn't do 6 months ago, a year ago, two years ago. The space is very active. I don't know if it'll be the foundation of everything in 10 years, a distant memory of "oh yeah people tried that didn't they" or if I'll be like COBOL programmers fixing legacy weird systems from an ill fated project. All I know is it's _fun_ and _hard_ and people pay me to do it. For a community that builds so many things just to see if they can, I find it quite surprising that so many coders aren't even curious.

zarzavat 5y ago
HN has hated Bitcoin since before there was any reason to hate it. In the very early days there was a positive attitude. However, since the price started to reach double digits, the attitude became sharply negative and that has stuck for the last 10 years. Some HN thought leaders declared Bitcoin a tulip bubble when the price was 1000x smaller than it is now. There are legitimate criticisms of cryptocurrency but the attitude here is more of a hardened loathing punctuated with a minority of more open minded people.
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  > Some HN thought leaders declared Bitcoin a tulip bubble when the price was 1000x smaller than it is now. I don't know that I understand the point you're making. The fundamentals of Bitcoin haven't changed, and it is worse than a tulip bubble.
  - cinntaile 5y ago
    There has only been one tulip mania. Bitcoin on the other hand has gone through a few boom and bust cycles by now. This implies that it's probably not very helpful to compare the two.
    - DonHopkins 5y ago
      Growing tulips REMOVES carbon from the atmosphere.
      - cinntaile 5y ago
        Haha yeah I guess that's true, but I would be surprised if it's a net positive once you factor in transport to the customer. I guess we need a Proof of Carbon Removal consensus algorithm based coin ;)
- pfraze 5y ago
  Extreme libertarianism is divisive, and that was the culture of Bitcoin fans from the early days. It created a negative first impression for people who don’t agree politically.
hiq 5y ago
Note that the 4 reasons you've listed have little to do with the technical merits of what you're working on. If anything, your point 2 and 3 talks more about the drawbacks of the technologies you're using rather than their advantages.
- IanCal 5y ago
  If by technical merits you mean "the tools all already exist" then sure, that's a drawback. But those tools don't create themselves, if nobody works in an area because they can't just install a settled on solution they'd never get built. ML didn't have the tooling it has now when I started with it, using recently released cuda to implement these new "deep neural networks" (more called RBMs at the time I think) on graphics cards because I needed them faster than the released MATLAB code - but now you can pip install huggingface and be away. When I was doing it, ML could have remained a niche area (people always asked me if AI was to do with aliens, and wondered what on earth I'd do with that degree) but has exploded after it hit critical thresholds. Maybe this will happen with crypto stuff. Maybe not. I've been very wrong on cryptos growth since the early days. But, people have business ideas and want them built. I'm building those while solving new interesting problems. Does that really sound so bad as a job? I'm not talking about my specific client work because I don't want anything to come across as shilling.
  - hiq 5y ago
    > If by technical merits you mean "the tools all already exist" I mean the technologies that define this space, e.g. blockchains, ERC20 tokens, NFTs, and so on. I mean that in your comment, you didn't try to claim that these technologies were worth anything in themselves, just that there is a demand for them. > But, people have business ideas and want them built. I'm building those while solving new interesting problems. Does that really sound so bad as a job? No, but then you're also not in disagreement with people who find these technologies to be mostly a dead-end, since you just ignore how relevant these technologies are, you abstract away from the business requirements defined by somebody else.
    - IanCal 5y ago

by IanCal 5y ago

zarzavat 5y ago

HN has hated Bitcoin since before there was any reason to hate it. In the very early days there was a positive attitude. However, since the price started to reach double digits, the attitude became sharply negative and that has stuck for the last 10 years. Some HN thought leaders declared Bitcoin a tulip bubble when the price was 1000x smaller than it is now. There are legitimate criticisms of cryptocurrency but the attitude here is more of a hardened loathing punctuated with a minority of more open minded people.

unfocussed_mike 5y ago
> Some HN thought leaders declared Bitcoin a tulip bubble when the price was 1000x smaller than it is now. I don't know that I understand the point you're making. The fundamentals of Bitcoin haven't changed, and it is worse than a tulip bubble.
- cinntaile 5y ago
  There has only been one tulip mania. Bitcoin on the other hand has gone through a few boom and bust cycles by now. This implies that it's probably not very helpful to compare the two.
  - DonHopkins 5y ago
    Growing tulips REMOVES carbon from the atmosphere.
    - cinntaile 5y ago
      Haha yeah I guess that's true, but I would be surprised if it's a net positive once you factor in transport to the customer. I guess we need a Proof of Carbon Removal consensus algorithm based coin ;)
pfraze 5y ago
Extreme libertarianism is divisive, and that was the culture of Bitcoin fans from the early days. It created a negative first impression for people who don’t agree politically.

hiq 5y ago

Note that the 4 reasons you've listed have little to do with the technical merits of what you're working on. If anything, your point 2 and 3 talks more about the drawbacks of the technologies you're using rather than their advantages.

IanCal 5y ago
If by technical merits you mean "the tools all already exist" then sure, that's a drawback. But those tools don't create themselves, if nobody works in an area because they can't just install a settled on solution they'd never get built. ML didn't have the tooling it has now when I started with it, using recently released cuda to implement these new "deep neural networks" (more called RBMs at the time I think) on graphics cards because I needed them faster than the released MATLAB code - but now you can pip install huggingface and be away. When I was doing it, ML could have remained a niche area (people always asked me if AI was to do with aliens, and wondered what on earth I'd do with that degree) but has exploded after it hit critical thresholds. Maybe this will happen with crypto stuff. Maybe not. I've been very wrong on cryptos growth since the early days. But, people have business ideas and want them built. I'm building those while solving new interesting problems. Does that really sound so bad as a job? I'm not talking about my specific client work because I don't want anything to come across as shilling.
- hiq 5y ago
  > If by technical merits you mean "the tools all already exist" I mean the technologies that define this space, e.g. blockchains, ERC20 tokens, NFTs, and so on. I mean that in your comment, you didn't try to claim that these technologies were worth anything in themselves, just that there is a demand for them. > But, people have business ideas and want them built. I'm building those while solving new interesting problems. Does that really sound so bad as a job? No, but then you're also not in disagreement with people who find these technologies to be mostly a dead-end, since you just ignore how relevant these technologies are, you abstract away from the business requirements defined by somebody else.
  - IanCal 5y ago