disappointing to see so many “hacker” news comments complaining about lack of credentials or system-specific expertise.
yes, existing government systems are insanely complex - that’s part of the problem! the essential complexity is not higher than that of a brain-computer interface, or an interplanetary rocket.
we don’t even know what these kids’ mandate is (also disappointing). but if your general premise is “smart outsiders who are good at engineering are always the wrong people to rework complex, inefficient systems,” i’d like to think you’re on the wrong site.
The problem with these types of comments is your filtering reality through some sort of weird hero-complex you're clinging to. It's not realistic and it's harmful.
The people involved in this are not qualified or capable in _any_ manner to be doing what they're doing. They are sycophants.
Worse, it's putting an entire nation in jeopardy.
This isn't "smart, young spirits defy all odds and save the day!" it's really "hitler youth comes in and starts thrashing about until daddy gets his way."
Yep. You can move fast and break things in a SAAS startup or some dumb LLM as a service startup.
But the stakes are much higher in what they're touching. And the way they're being brought in is selecting for loyal sycophants, nothing else. If they disagree musk will axe them in seconds.
You're making swathing character attacks and claiming that you are qualified to know who is qualified. If anyone has a hero complex its you with your emotional argument and alarmism.
Very compelling argument, definitely not partisan rhetoric.
I'm open to outsiders improving inefficiencies. The concern is that these are kids, barely out of college. They don't have the domain-specific knowledge required to rework these complex systems, no matter how smart they are. Plus, given Musk's track record, they were likely chosen more for their loyalty to Musk than for their technical acumen.
> the essential complexity is not higher than that of a brain-computer interface, or an interplanetary rocket.
Sorry, but that's such an absurd comment. These kids don't even know anything about rocket building, let alone they're able to build a rocket from first principles. Second, the US government is much more complex than a rocket; it cannot be understood by a single person. Third, you can waste rockets, but a whole nation depends on one goverment. You can't just experiment with it. Fourth, there are lives at stake. It's not just a payload, or one or two astronauts who know what they signed up for, that are at their mercy.
> yes, existing government systems are insanely complex - that’s part of the problem! the essential complexity is not higher than that of a brain-computer interface, or an interplanetary rocket.
Yeah, and why don't we build concentration camps again? They're super efficient in term of work per unit of food. Colonies are also super nice, lots of free stuff!
Some people should open history books, life isn't about refactoring everything, making things as simple as possible, &c. It would be comical if it wasn't the very first thing you learn as an engineer
If you think a rocket is more complex than hundreds of years of infinitely complex people making decisions and compromises through democracy you're completely out of touch with reality, and if you genuinely think we can just burn it all down because some nerd unilaterally thinks he found a better way to do it you're just plain dumb.
There's absolutely no reason companies can't issue options that automatically convert from ISOs to NSOs after the 90-day period, and leave the NSOs on the table for ten years. There is no downside to the employee or, really, to the company – other than that the options, which were pitched to employees as part of comp, aren't clawed back to the company's pool as quickly.
I've observed many startup founders who are disdainful of employees who leave, ever, for any reason, and definitely don't want them to receive proceeds from any of the company's future successes.
Not gonna sugarcoat it - this is weak. Companies don’t offer this solution that’s better because it’s “complex”.
This is like when engineers say something is going to take a long time because “there’s a lot of moving parts”.
The reality, IMO, is that employees do not have a seat at the table when it comes to negotiating ownership shares. And, predictably, they end up with the worst part of the deal.
In my mobile device it's just irritating how much padding he has. It's basically 3 words at a time. I'd need a phablet to get through this piece even though it's enjoyable righting.
Hey, great questions! I'm on the Filecoin team (but not the proofs/cryptography team, where the root answers to some of your questions lie). Let me try a first pass and tap out for someone deeper on the cryptography side if needed.
> How does this system deal with the "data withholding" problem? In other words, when people provide "storage power" their data will be repeatedly sampled to make sure it is available... but when an entity claims that samples aren't being provided as required by the protocol, how does the system determine that that person wasn't lying, if the sampled data is still provided correctly in a followup request?
Filecoin sort of splits this problem into two parts – "data withholding" from Filecoin's proof-of-spacetime consensus mechanism (a "storage fault" in Filecoin terminology, yes I know there's a lot of new terminology here!), and "data withholding" from a client that's requesting stored data.
Storage miners are required to prove to the network itself, not to any specific challenger entity, that they're storing files. Each storage miner is (basically) randomly challenged once per [short interval] to provide a compressed cryptographic proof in response to a challenge. The proof conclusively confirms that, during that period, the miner was storing the data being they'd previously promised to store. You can ctrl-f "if a miner goes offline" in the linked post for a surface-level description of how the network deals with storage faults. Ditching the data and recovering it later is economically irrational for pretty involved reasons – basically, recovery is more expensive than just storing the data over the short-ish intervals during which faults are recoverable.
When it comes to "withholding data" from clients – retrieval on Filecoin is just a market-based system for bandwidth. The solution to holding data "hostage," i.e. refusing to serve it at reasonable prices, is to store a few replicated copies (just like centralized storage services do for you today behind the scenes). There's really no upside to miners refusing to profitably serve you a file when they know or suspect you can get it from another source.
> The "verified clients" are certified by "a decentralized network of verifiers". How does this system prevent a sibyl attack, i.e how does it prevent verifiers from repeatedly verifying themselves using multiple accounts?
The short answer here – with apologies for the brevity; details forthcoming – is that verified data isn't meant to be scarce, and some degree of over-verification is expected. There will be a decentralized group of folks responsible for (quite permissively) verifying and renewing clients for fixed amounts of data, and declining to renew allocations for clients who seem to be abusively verifying data. We're optimistic that this will dramatically decrease the rate at which "fake" data is stored and (most importantly) ensure that there's always storage available for client data.
> Why is it that erasure coding isn't necessary in this system?
Basically: cool, novel cryptography! In particular, this is where proofs-of-replication and proofs-of-spacetime kick in. Check out this podcast with Juan to learn much more: https://filecoin.io/blog/filecoin-proof-system/
(Also – if you like erasure coding, it is totally compatible with Filecoin whether you're a miner or a client! I would be surprised if this feature isn't developed by the community in Filecoin's early days.)
> How can a user of filecoin get some assurance that the files they are storing aren't just sitting on a server run by the filecoin organization?
Really fair question. First and foremost, as a client, you get to choose your storage miner if you want to. You then have to solve another problem, of course, which is how to map a Filecoin peer ID to a real-world actor (or prove that it's not being run by Filecoin, or whatever). This is solvable in a bunch of different ways, which I won't get into here, but the high-level takeaway is that you're not just throwing your data at an undifferentiated storage interface with obscure inner workings.
More fundamentally – Filecoin is part of a huge ecosystem of open source projects. Transparency is a key value – highlighting the success of the community, including the many decentralized storage miners participating in Filecoin, is really important to us and the only way the network can succeed. You can hop on our Slack any time (https://join.slack.com/t/filecoinproject/shared_invite/zt-dj...) to chat with the many folks already building on Filecoin. If you have other ideas on how we can establish that there are lots of groups operating on the network, not just us, let us know and I'll see what we can do :)
Potentially dumb question: how do cheats even work in a game like LOL? I understand aimbots in a FPS and how they can give a pure mechanical advantage, but the LOL equivalent isn’t obvious to me. Does the client have access to data that’s not supposed to be exposed to the player?
Aimbots work in LoL too, there are champs that are balanced around lots of skill shots (Xerath) who you’d see hitting every single shot all game. There’s also a lot of scripting, both for account leveling or just to automate boring parts of the game. You’d see people afk playing their lane for 20 mins and not responding to anything happening in the game, then suddenly running into the other team for a big fight.
There are still aim bots in lol because there are aimed skill shots for most of the champions. Scripting is abilities is probably the main method of cheating though.
This anti cheat software is for their new game valorant which is a counter strike like shooter.
For what it’s worth - there’s definitely no speed up, for me at least, to ship a pure handwritten HTML + CSS page vs the same page using create-next-app. The latter makes it trivially easy to add new functionality, etc; the former guarantees I have to start over. I also get a bunch of stuff - TypeScript, code splitting, minification, etc - for free, literally no work. It’s nice.
Using Next with Preact instead of React makes the total gzipped JS bundle around 20kb. Takes no time to set up.
If you’ll only ever build one website, sure, use basic tools. If you can amortize the cost of learning the toolchain across many projects, use better tools! (I’m not saying that’s only React by any means.)
Why would I need TypeScript, code splitting and new functionality on a single page with one purpose: to sell?
I’m all for extensible solutions when required but React does not buy me much for the overhead on a landing page that I drive paid traffic too.
Now if a client had marketing team that needed to spin out a new landing page along with an ad on demand without code, I’d use React to build a landing page builder. The server would generate a static page and I’d have something cache that (and purged on modification of that page or a release). That’s perfect use case for React.
But a single page that I’m driving paid traffic to for a new business? Not in react. If I needed two, I have no shame, I’d copy and paste. Then at 3 I’d consider static site generation - on the basis that the build produces static assets only. Perhaps if the campaigns do their job, I can invest in tools that empower my marketing guys to build landing pages for their campaigns.
The fact is I don’t need the interactivity of React on a landing page. I don’t need more functionality on a landing page than CTAs, sales copy and social proof. If I’m putting anything more than that on a landing page, I’m failing. If the landing page is not 100% focused on what I want, which is usually sales or the entry to a funnel, it’s failing.
Now if the product you’re selling, as I said below, IS highly interactive and user friendliness is a selling point, I can see React being of use for live on-page demos of features. Because that’s what you’re selling!
Everyone likes to pile on WeWork, and I get it, but as someone who dealt with both startup and solo office leases in the pre-WeWork era: my God is WeWork's model comparatively amazing as a customer. The spaces are nice, there are no headaches, you can purchase the exact amount of space and duration you need, and you have a guaranteed decent place to do some work or just hang out anywhere you travel.
The "no competitive advantage / anyone can do this" crowd is sort of ignoring the fact that no one did, at least for folks that care about the things I mention.
yes, existing government systems are insanely complex - that’s part of the problem! the essential complexity is not higher than that of a brain-computer interface, or an interplanetary rocket.
we don’t even know what these kids’ mandate is (also disappointing). but if your general premise is “smart outsiders who are good at engineering are always the wrong people to rework complex, inefficient systems,” i’d like to think you’re on the wrong site.