There is this real danger that our thinking, and the things we make, become bloated without constraints.

IMO software has gone to shit since both mobile phones and laptops mostly have massive amounts of compute. We always seem to use it to the limit, just because it's there.

I spent a week with claude and codex re-implementing several packages which had dependency trees deeper than I would like.

Most of these packages are trivial to clone.

"But now you're not getting the upstream fixes" they will say.

"So what?" I reply

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41223625

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

And proof of stake consumes less energy, but still significant.

And the economic gain is tenuous at best.

I wrote an opinion on HN about the carbon problem in crypto as well.

I'm thinking of use cases like distributed domain name lookup systems, identification systems, social networks.

Let's spare ourselves the analogies of crypto mining consuming amounts of energy comparable to small nations, and realize the fact that it consumes a tremendous amount of electricity. This, as we all sit here in the sweltering heat, should make us angry.

I propose that, in theory, we have mined all the crypto we need. Further mining will only empower those with the means to continue mining, which is contrary to the objectives of a distributed block chain, particularly a zero-trust currency. Look no further than the large donations being made by Andreessen and Horowitz to their politician of choice (Donald Trump), mostly because they believe his administration will give them more power with crypto.

Mining crypto is really just a gamified incentive structure intended to motivate sys admins to run nodes on the network. These nodes have become so expensive to operate, the power over the network has collapsed onto a few nodes ... the network effect.

One possible solution is to bundle small transactions into a settlement period, similar to trading markets in the classical financial system. Then these transactions can be settled at the end of the settlement period (24 hours, for example). The problem is that we would need some central authority to collect and bundle transactions, which would require some level of trust.

Is there a centralization/trust tradeoff to be made here against centralization of power and climate damage?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40985596

Points: 18

# Comments: 27

It's fascinating to take dig stuff up like this and replay it, knowing what we know now.

Of course, everyone is using the new ES modules spec now, but it's hard to imagine how we would have got there without working through the ideas which led to CommonJS.

This started before Node.js, when we were playing around with the Narwhal runtime.

One really interesting concept which never got traction was creating a standard library for JavaScript.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40968404

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

Sounds snarky, but I'm serious. You can build anything with it, and it can be fun to use too.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34708225

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

There is some good advice in here to help junior devs level up. But I would start by boiling it down to one that is easier to remember as you become a manager / coach:

Try to remember what worked well for you when you were learning, and then do that for your team.

I have gone back to that well over and over as I've moved between senior, principal, and management roles.

I've been brushing off AI as overhyped, but this is very compelling. I believe the real crux of software engineering is thinking about the problem and organizing solutions today which can be changed/improved/iterated in the future. Programmers too often overweight the time it takes to type things (using short variable & function names or creating terse 1 liners). But if our objective is to make code easy to change/improve/iterate in the future, then it needs to be readable now.

The nice autocomplete features in most IDEs have been a huge win to productivity along with Google search. I think chat AI could be an order of magnitude improvement.

I plan to keep my day job, but there are some things I'd like to build and invest in on the side: A couple SaaS ideas, maybe purchase some community sites, and maybe take funding someday.

LLC or C corp? Can I roll my Roth into it? Does a holding company make sense? What exit pain points could I avoid by structuring it a certain way?

What good resources are out there to learn?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34340747

Points: 2

# Comments: 1