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Fiat money doesn’t work without military and war and that stuff is the most expensive. Fiat is trash.

This discussion is worthless. Fiat money and the entire banking system uses energy as bitcoin and creates far more environmental waste then bitcoin.

They included in their calculation this for keeping it safe too?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yr-LaMhvro

sure, because it's monopoly money. And after it's "made", then what? Bitcoin uses the kWh to run it's entire transaction and verification system and it can do it with a level of accuracy, accountability and real-time overview that is totally unimaginable for any fiat currency. At least compare apples to apples

Here is the link to the original comment thread. Or you can comment here to start a discussion. Author: bitsteiner

Cost me 5 years. ;)

Wow, now that's a wage gap!

Great return on investment, if you ask me.

It takes money to make money

I briefly dabbled in counterfeiting in the 80s and while it was very lucrative, there were some downsides. First off, having effectively infinite money gets to your head real quick. At one point I had 10 houses and probably 20 cars. Everyday I partied and every night I worked the press. I decided to quit when I flew into a rage and jammed my business partner into the counterfeiter press, squashing him beyond recognition. I really didn’t have a choice about quitting though since the press was broken. At that point I had more money then I’d ever need anyway. Now I just sit back and create new cyptocurrencies, which ironically makes me even more then counterfeiting and is semi legal

That's why I make $20's as I get a better return for my 13.2 cents. /S

Also that 13.2 cents has to be borrowed with interest.

It cost 1.7 cents to make a penny this year, and 8 cents to make a nickel.

Hmm. I can understand why different denominations cost a different amount -- anti-counterfeiting measures are more stringent on the higher denominations... but why is the $50 more expensive than the $100?

Technical word for this is seigniorage. This is one of the many reasons the US wants to maintain the dollar as the world's reserve currency.

Well shit, I'm gonna start making those at home!

Well that's not counting how much it costs the CIA to vacuum the excess printed cash up through drug and weapons trafficking and counter drug and weapons trafficking

Best ROI.

Is this a front end redesign or a ground up rewrite of the entirety of Reddit? (Joel is talking about the latter in this article.)

As someone who is not a programmer, I can’t imagine how frustrating (and rewarding) some of that coding may be. Props to all of you, and I appreciate what you all do for the world.

As a freelancer who has taken on a lot of "fixer-upper" projects, I disagree a thousand percent. Most legacy code is garbage, and should be treated as such.

As someone who threw out an entire codebase and spent the last two years rewriting it: no, I was not wrong. There's good (bad?) reasons it was difficult to read before: it was a mess. The new codebase is so well organized I can put it down for long stretches and get reacquainted with it easily.

The key here is whether you're scrapping an idea or just your execution of it. In my experience, my original ideas are often sound, and when I later ask why I thought of something so ridiculous, it usually turns out there's very good reasons for it. But execution can always be improved, and sometimes that requires low-level rewrites. Everything else is just iteration.

If its shit code of course it will be harder to read than write.

The idea of the rewrite is to make it easier to comprehend.

The reason I want to throw away old code is because when you first write a program, you aren't really sure what the best way to do things are. You might not even be quite sure what you want to do. Once you write the program, you have a much better idea of these things, and could rewrite the program in a much cleaner way.

Of course, your manager doesn't want to allocate time for that, because the first version works, doesn't it? So then a year goes by, and someone looks at your code, and wonders to themselves: 'what the fuck is this?'

While he may have a point, he picked the absolute worst possible example in history to illustrate it. Netscape 4 was garbage. You couldn't even resize the window without a complete reload. Hundreds of glitches in rendering. Getting absolutely destroyed by IE in every way. They made the best decision of their lives ditching that buggy codebase and beginning what would become Firefox, a revolutionary browser at the time. I'm almost certain trying to build Firefox off Navigator 4 would've been an absolute failure and disaster.

Back in 2013 I pushed my team to rewrite our codebase in RoR. Originally it was a 600k+ line PHP and JS app.

You are giving a gift of two or three years to your competitors, and believe me, that is a long time in software years.

It took us roughly 3 months to get stable.

It’s important to remember that when you start from scratch there is absolutely no reason to believe that you are going to do a better job than you did the first time.

We learned from our mistakes. I 100% stand by my decision. The increase in productivity was invaluable. The code base is now less than 30k lines. Don't haphazardly rewrite your entire codebase, but don't take this article too seriously either.

Edit: I realized I wasn't counting the templates in the RoR app while the templates in the PHP app were all included in my initial count. And in an effort to be fair, a more accurate total for the RoR app actually stands at 41k lines. While going back to investigate I also found that the PHP app had a 25 line license in almost every file, amounting to roughly 86k lines of license.

It’s harder to read code than to write it.

Except that's it's not AND it's not the reason most people want to throw out old code.

There are changes in technology, there's bad design and bad code out there and constantly applying bandaids instead of biting the bullet and starting fresh is a bad way of looking at things. I'm not saying throw out the code every time but there needs to be a line drawn at some point.

Case in point some of our in house software is in VB6; It uses controls that have no 64 bit version ocx because whoever made the controls stopped existing before 64 bit os and I'm not even sure we could get them working registered on windows 7 32 bit for that matter. This means we have to have a windows XP VM in our pool in order to make bug fixes or update features and hope to god nothing happens to corrupt that box and its backups.

It also means I can't install VB6 into a more recent version of windows to run debug in an environment that matches what one of my users has. Instead when I want to debug something I'm not experiencing on DEV I have to add a ton of Msgboxes that yell various profanities where I THINK the crash might be and see which profanity doesn't pop up. Had an instance where the user changed his region settings to french, and it Borked a CDATE() somewhere because it didn't know how to deal with the french version of the Month.

The programs talk to a set of access databases and has some of the most convoluted code I've ever seen. I hate that code with a passion, doesn't mean I can't read it, it's just retarded.

For instance whoever coded this originally made a Replace function that overwrites the built in Replace function with a significantly worse one that is prone to infinite loops, because why the fuck not?

Or how about the fact that every table is loaded into a "temporary" table before being read.

seriously...

Everywhere in the code there is a call to a function that drops tblTemp followed by a select * into tblTemp from whatever table they need at the time no joins or anything fancy like that and THEN the code does a select * from tbltemp where blahblahblabedyblah.

This software runs at over 60 locations across the country, I have to interrupt these people's workdays for 20-30 minutes to run fucking compact and repairs in access at 99.9% of these locations on a weekly basis because they run the risk of hitting the 2 gig database limit.

Not to mention every SQL command you have to write has to take into consideration the fact access is a "special needs" child and doesn't like to follow normal conventions. It's the Internet Explorer of databases.

There is stuff in there that has 100's of lines of buggy code doing things which I could do in 20.

Have I mentioned it's VB6 code yet? Yes I have. Know what that means? No Try/Catch. Error handling/logging is shoddy at best and non existent in most cases.

Here's the thing, I can read old code fine... the problem is that it reads like the fucking Twilight Series...

This article has an interesting way of ageing. When I read it the when it was first written I absolutely agreed with Joel, the rewritten version of netscape was absolutely atrocious.

However ten years later the decision to rewrite was completely vindicated with the success of firefox. Joels was then dead wrong. Mozilla would not have succeeded in making an IE killer tied to the very brittle code base of the original netscape browser.

Today the field is even more interesting, mozilla has a very interesting rewrite project with Servo. Now I think Joels main point stands, a lot of the instinct programmers have for wanting a rewrite is because it is much harder to read code than to write. As anecdata I do see a correlation with skill and how much maintaining a programmer has done

As a programmer, I have about a 0% urge to “throw away” old code. However, I have a 100% urge to rewrite old code one function at a time.

Any mature codebase will be full of non-obvious code that is there to support what I like to refer to as invisible requirements.

Invisible requirements are requirements that do not appear in any design doc or user documentation, but the existing codebase has been written to support them. They are often the result of architectural or design decisions made during the original development; modifications made to workaround bugs or performance issues; well-known application features being used by customers in unexpected ways. Invisible requirements often fly underneath the automated tests, and nobody knows that they are there except maybe the crotchety old developer sitting in the corner (if he or she even still works for the company).

Any existing codebase is chock full of invisible requirements. Starting again from scratch means going through the pain of discovering them all over again (or finding completely new ones). This is not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes a codebase is so bad that you need to start from scratch. This is usually the case when you can't even make minor code changes without tripping over some invisible requirements.

I think it would be very interesting to see how developers' attitudes about this "rewrite vs. fix it" issue corresponded with years of experience.

I'd guess that new developers would lean toward "fix it," developers with a few years of experience would turn toward "rewrite." And the grizzled vets would be back at "fix it."

Piecemeal refactoring isn't something most developers enjoy, but in contrast to a total rewrite, it can produce positive, tangible results very quickly. It can be fun. It is also, from a business standpoint, safe and cheap.

Fast, safe, cheap: choose any three. How often do you get an opportunity like that in engineering?

Something Spolsky doesn't mention here, but something I've noticed in my own projects: What you recognize as "cruft" in old code that someone else wrote often turns out to be, on much closer examination, "features." It's not until you examine it in the kind of detail required for a rewrite that you realize all the subtleties of the way Feature A and Feature B interact with each other. Your rewrite might be slightly cleaner than the original, but it's not going to be the sleek glistening monument to your own genius and discipline you imagined when you started, because the interaction between A and B just turns out to be complicated. Not complicated as a programming exercise, but actually complicated in the real world.

As Perlis put it all the way back in 1982:

7. It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.

I feel like Netscape and Borland are very different from the software most of us are working today. Netscape is a desktop application with a massive code base. I'm currently working on web services and front end apps on the order of 10k LOC. I feel like rewriting Netscape is a much bigger effort (and more likely to go wrong) than rewriting these front end apps and web services.

Also, FYI this article is almost 20 years old

I mean, where I work the control software we use has been in continous development since the early 90s. Which makes changes which would take 5 minutes on new code take 4 hours instead.

There comes a point when the old code should be thrown out.

It depends. I've been on many projects where the initial project requirements were "Oh, it's easy, you just need to do A->B->C->D".

Then you hit testing, or worse production, and then all kinds of wackadoo requirements materialize. "Well yeah, Most of the time you do A->B, but in these 3 situations you go to C, then back to B, then to D for 2 of them and C for the 3rd one." "Oh yeah, this other situation requires you to go to E, then spin a D20 and decide to go to B or C or end it in F". <time passes with more of this going on> Oh yeah, we don't do the B->Q->M on 3rd Tuesdays anymore, now it is B->R->E on 2nd Thursdays...

Last year I finally was able to fix one of those that had been going on for 10 years because I refused to directly translate the logic between languages during an upgrade.

I think most code, no matter how well designed before hand, is designed mostly on the fly. You always run into things you didn't think of and adapt. This leads to cludges and breaking the design. Once everything is done and it works, I love nothing better than tearing it all down and re-writing it with all lessons learned.

No.

Very often the old code IS shit.

Reading may be harder than writing but that does not change whether the code in itself is bad.

I hate rewriting but very objectively the net result of the rewrite is often MUCH, much better than the prior version. This often happens because lateron it is more clear what the code should be doing; and whether it is doing it in a good way.

Sometimes a language design can also become better, and old expressions can be re-written in better ways too.

The old mantra build one to throw away is dangerous when applied to large scale commercial applications.

It's not a mantra without reason. I already have the quotes written up from The Mythical Man Month:

“Programming system builders have also been exposed to this lesson, but it seems to have not yet been learned. Project after project designs a set of algorithms and then plunges into construction of customer-deliverable software on a schedule that demands delivery of the first thing built.”

“In most projects, the first system built is barely usable. It may be too slow, too big, awkward to use, or all three.”

“The discard and redesign may be done in one lump, or it may be done piece-by-piece. But all large-system experience shows that it will be done.”

“The management question, therefore, is not whether to build a pilot system and throw it away. You will do that. The only question is whether to plan in advance to build a throwaway, or to promise to deliver the throwaway to customers.”

“Hence plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.”

The whole point is that the first time you make any system, you don't know what you're doing. Every decision has a non-zero element of speculation. Some of those decisions will be fundamental. Insights from making the first system mean you can make the better decision without speculation the second time. If you try to keep the old system forever and just patch it repeatedly, that becomes an uphill climb: the longer you maintain a difficult-to-maintain system, the harder it becomes to maintain. You'll eventually reach your goal but you won't have planned for all the extra work. Even as the authors of a system.

The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they’ve been fixed. There’s nothing wrong with it.

Yeah, that's the problem with crappy code. You think that there's nothing wrong with it because it's been tested. But how do you know? Nobody apparently understands the code. Often, code is so bad that nobody knows how buggy it is. Look at OpenSSL, for a public example.

The code that programmers hate to maintain is when it's like walking into a haunted house and ghosts follow you around whispering seeds of doubt every time you open a cupboard or walk past a mirror. They'd prefer to set fire to it and put the fire out with holy water.

People like clean, simple code because it's obvious that it doesn't have problems.

I think most programmers work in a similar way: imagine a problem, then decompose the problem into its constituent parts and attack those simpler, isolated problems.

The problem with a large codebase is that no one, not even the person that wrote all of it can fit the solution in their working memory. The tendency of programmers (who generally underestimate complexity) is to say: wait a minute, this problem doesn't require 10 million LOC, I could easily solve this problem in 250 lines of elegant Haskell.

There are situations where the legacy codebase is completely unsalvagable, but I think more often than not it's throwing the baby out with the bath water, except the baby is an engine that, while flawed, is generating business value.

While he makes some valid points, sometimes the codebase is just bad.
A tangled mess of rushed spaghetti code full of "TODO" and "FIXME", and lots of temporary hacks.
At that point starting from scratch can be the right decision, sometimes.

Rewriting something from scratch is bad as its too slow. But not improving beyond what your competitor are capable of is fatal, Chrome overtaking IE, Facebook overtaking Orkut and Google Search overtaking Yahoo Search are prime examples.

And Gamebryo is extremely limited in its capabilities. Small and trifling updates won't make it a modern game engine. "It just works" for now, but one day it won't.

There are a lot of things that still need to be fixed/optimized on gamebyro befor they should make a new game. As well as actually having some kind of QA testing, and supporting their games for more then 1-2 years.

Can confirm, code is easier to write than read.

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She didn't even say that.

Welcome to fake news.

NATO vote, we care about the votes, not her "attitude".

No, she said “zero” not “zero fucks”

https://imgur.com/nrY858B

“I’m sure Ms. Cortez means well, but there’s almost an outstanding rule: Don’t attack your own people,” said Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) in an interview earlier this month. “We just don’t need sniping in our Democratic caucus.”

So telling her to sit down, be quiet, and play nice isn't the same thing? Maybe she's trying to light a fire here in some dead wood.

Good. While I don't agree with a lot of her positions, the fact that she's willing to stand up to the establishment dems who can't stop sucking wall street or corporate cock is great.

and once again the GOP clutches their pearls...

Yyyeeeaaahhh!!!

When people talked about throwing a wrench in the system, this is closer to what I had imagined.

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I wanna know if it's legit so I can renew my passport lol

Start taking action. Call out fake news reporters and distributors. Selling fear of hate in any market is terrorism if you ask me.

Don’t click on CCN shit.

CNN is very fake news. Sad

yeah who would believed them. Ofcourse it was big FUD

The title is immoral

Even tho she didn’t say this , the title isn’t wrong .

Misleading headline with a very, VERY selective quote.

I agree with her that government should take strong actions to start draining wealth out of the top 1 % and back into the middle class. However, this statement in particular isn't really accurate. Again I find myself agreeing with AOC in principle but wishing her specifics were different.

Imagine I start some company out of my garage, and it does really well, so I hire a bunch of people who I pay really well. Eventually I take the country public, but I retain some large portion of the shares so I still have control over the company I started. The company continues to succeed and becomes worth hundreds of billions of dollars, so my ownership stake is itself worth billions. I don't really see anything immoral about this story, which is sadly hypothetical for me but basically what happened with the like of Bill Gates and the cofounders of Google. It's how a lot of billionaires get their net worth that high.

I think that anytime one of these billionaires sells stock for a profit, they should be taxed at 90% on most of it, just like income in what should be an extremely high tax bracket. And there should be obstacles in place to ensure that companies play fairly with respect to their competition, which would make it harder for some of them to be worth so much so quickly. There should also be rules tying executive pay to average worker pay, and a change in the ethics of corporate America from serving shareholders to serving employees and customers. There's a lot to be done to reduce the wealth gap, and I'm not endorsing every specific thing today's billionaires did along the way to get an advantage over their competitors. But I don't see anything wrong in principle with the process of somebody becoming absurdly rich because the thing they created becomes absurdly valuable.

out of contact much? You left out the part about extreme poverty.

Total bullshit headline. That's like since Fox News shit.

The title of this post is bullshit. It is a gross misrepresentation of what she actually said.

STOP misquoting her!! Jesus Christ, this is like the 4th misquoted clickbait article about her I have seen today.

This headline shady af And I’m starting to think that all the headlines since ‘Ocassio says: tax the richest 70%’ are just creating an image of ‘FUCK THE RICH’ -person

Downvoted due to misleading headline

I'm going to buy an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez T-shirt, poster, coffee mug....

I love this woman,

and I don't care if the trump chumps vote me down...

BTW, if you are a progressive,

and you aren't upvoting comments you like,

please put down your bong and do it now.

The only reason trump is king of America

is progressives that were too lazy to vote

Yeah that whole profit motive thing. Let's abolish that. Turned out real great for the Soviet Union.

This is so incredibly stupid. Like way left of Scandinavia stupid. The people these days that go "I want socialism like Sweden. Let's abolish profits and eliminate the extremely wealthy. Wealth is immoral" don't actually understand Sweden, socialism, or human behavior.

I can’t stand her.

How is she so stupid?

I bet billionaires have “zero fucks” to give to her opinions.

Holy shit the headline completely chops the quote in half.

Success is immoral. She has a few failures under her belt and will not tolerate anyone who doesn't hate success.

The inversion of America. If you work hard, and you succeed, all should be taken from you.

She's absolutely right, however what's not mentioned is:

- Bill Gates has already donated $50 billion

- Warren Buffet has already donated about $3.5 billion

It's a thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Giving_Pledge

(Most) People work to become billionaires, and a lot of them start out in life with very little. Look at Elon Musk for example. He was born in South Africa, it’s not like he grew up in the most loving family, but his net worth is 11.5 billion. The man gets stuff done! He works hard and uses his intelligence to keep on moving through life, no matter what challenges are thrown at him. He started PayPal, Tesla, and Space X. Last year, Tesla almost went belly-up, but he saved it. He sets up a TENT where he hired a ton of people to build the Tesla Model 3, which became the highest selling luxury car of 2018 and saved Tesla. There’s nothing immoral about someone’s hard work paying off.

I love how reddit is full of billionaires worried that AOC is coming for their money.

The hill is garbage - fuck this bullshit headline.

Nice headline

Stop letting this idiot have air time. There are lots of people who work hard on both side of the aisle to make a better country. Stop with this BS. JUST STOP! Start covering the doers and the people who are trying to move the country in a positive direction. She is a nut.

Basic economics sail completely over her head. What a dingbat.

So working for a living and doing well for yourself is immoral? Wtf?! This donkey needs to go back to the farm and graze on free grass.

It is a little like saying they want to get google out of their lives while using youtube for income and having 3 gmail addresses.

You can't cut amazon out of your life while (carelessly) shopping online

Why do they have two prime accounts?!

For CDNs just use decentraleyes. Then block amazon requests through ublock and no script and umatrix if u use it. Bam amazon blocked. Not hard.

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