I actually think that pasting questions into chatGPT etc. and then getting general answers to put into your code is the way.
“One shotting” apps, or even cursor and so forth seem like a waste of time. It feels like if you prompt it just right it might help but then it never really does.
I've done okay with copilot as a very smart autocomplete on: a) very typical codebase, with b) lots of boilerplate, where c) I'm not terribly familiar with the languages and frameworks, which are d) very, very popular but e) I don't really like, so I'm not particularly motivated to become familiar with them. I'm not a frontend developer, I don't like it, but I'm in a position now where I need to do frontend things with a verbose Typescript/React application which is not interesting from a technical point of view (good product, it's just not good because it has an interesting or demanding front end). Copilot (I use Emacs, so cursor is a non-starter, but copilot-mode works very well for Typescript) has been pretty invaluable to just sort of slogging through stuff.
For everything else, I think you're right, and actually the dialog-oriented method is way better. If I learn an approach and apply some general example from ChatGPT, but I do the typing and implementation myself so I need to understand what I'm doing, I'm actually leveling up and I know what I'm finished with. If I weren't "experienced", I'd worry about what it was doing to my critical thinking skills, but I know enough about learning on my own at this point to know I'm doing something.
I'm not interested in vibe coding at all--it seems like a one-way process to automate what was already not the hard part of software engineering; generating tutorial-level initial implementations. Just more scaffolding that eventually needs to be cleared away.
If passing their interviews isn't the same as being a good developer, then those people have to not only admit that the people they hire may not be good at the jobs they are hired for but they themselves aren't good at the job they sell themselves as doing. It's obviously easiest to accept an explanation that doesn't require them to reach that conclusion.
in fairness to some interview processes there are ways you could legit pass a valid interview and then short change the job. We do a problem scenario / proposed solution that's shared a few days in advance. Good candidates (and good frauds) can ace this with strong technical skills, relevant experience and maybe an hour or so of prep time. We'd take this as strong signal, because (and I'd hope more companies do this) we're optimizing for talented candidates, not minimizing people who are going to work multiple concurrent jobs.
> but they themselves aren't good at the job they sell themselves as doing.
In my opinion and experience, being a competent developer and being a good interviewer are even less related than being a competent developer and being a good interviewee (and the latter are already very unrelated).
You are writing this as if you know what countries Coinbase's call centers are located in and the role of organized crime in their economies, but you don't actually know either of those things.
Lol, that's because while Coinbase emphasizes its commitment to security and compliance specific details about the geographic distribution of its offshore personnel are not disclosed in its public filings.
My perspective was more "That's because you post contentious statements in public fora with no reason to believe that they are true, hoping to get a big reaction by offending people."
> ...bribed AT&T employees at a call center in Bothell, Washington, to "use their network credentials and exceed their authorized access to AT&T's computers to submit large numbers of fraudulent and unauthorized unlock requests on behalf of the conspiracy and to install malware and unauthorized hardware on AT&T's systems," according to the indictment.
> ..install malware and unauthorized hardware on AT&T's systems
That's not as harmless as unlocking phones early. A major carrier that has access to texts, geolocations, and call logs being hacked like that is extremely concerning.
The problem is that it seems like the data that leaked is also the data that would be used to do account recovery.
And what that means is that
1) If you lose access to your account (through either your own fault, or coinbases fault) that the process of recovering it may not be so straightforward anymore.
2) Hackers can try to “recover” accounts now using this leaked info.
This is a huge problem. What coinbase needs are IRL offices where you can go and do things like account recovery, and where people trying to steal money can be caught and prosecuted (and makes a huge barrier for the overseas thieves who are usually doing this)
The only solution here is: hardware 2 factor like yubikeys.
One that I'm using does, but I find it extremely annoying when they have me go to a branch to unblock my account that they locked due to a poorly calibrated risk system (that they need due to not supporting actually secure 2FA methods).
I know it's the massive exception but I was reimbursed when the exchange that tried to rugpull its users felt legal pressure. Things have changed slightly over the years - don't get me wrong, scams are still rampant.
It's been ages since I was in college and had an overdraft or some other bs bank related fee, but the bank manages to 'scam' you legally too. I'm just playing devils advocate and sharing an anecdote, I'm minimally involved in crypto anymore.
Zelle is ultimately a bank transfer. Yes they say to consider them like sending cash, but a bank transaction is at least tracable to a real account owner, who could then be pursued in the case of fraud, and it well might be reversible if push came to shove or if there is documented fraud.
If YOU are the one sending the money of course it is not a hack etc becuase YOU are sending it. If Zelle is hacked and someone steals your money through that hack you will not be left with the loss.
When I was "hacked" two years ago, their final hurrah before I finally got everything offline for a time, they sent zelles as much as they could and was able to recover it without any loss on my end.
Coinbase is identical to a bank because it holds customer funds. Your comment isn't quite the dunk you think it is. Blockchains allow money to be held anonymously without any banks involved. Centralized exchanges are just profiting on speculation and probably should be banned.
My money in the bank in case of fraud is protected unless I voluntarily gave the fraudster my money. If a bank goes bankrupt, my money is protected by the government
First one might be kind true in the US. Second one is only true up to $250k and how much Yellen likes you. But they are not true around the world and probably for most of it.
By law yes it’s only $250K. But when the banks collapsed last year, the government made sure that no one lost money. In fact, no one has ever lost money because of an FDIC insured bank failure.
No they don’t. “Cryptocurrency” isn’t money at all. Just because you can trade it in for money, doesn’t make it so. I can also trade in my hat to the Buffalo Exchange for money. But my hat is not money.
Except for, you know, being able to spend it where you buy things? And deposit it into an actual bank? Those seem sort of intrinsic to how we use money today.
> Except for, you know, being able to spend it where you buy things? [...]
The extent to which you can use it to buy things is a good metric, but I think that comes in varying degrees rather than being a sharp line or binary true/false. There are at least some things you can buy with cryptocurrency, and arguably there are some forms of "regular" (fiat, national, government-issued) money that aren't very widely accepted.
Yeah, it would be more accurate to say that Coinbase is de facto a brokerage but does not have the same level of regulation as traditional brokerages. The result is the same though.
what's more important to me is how quickly can you trade your hat, how quickly can you determine the marketable value of your hat for selling, how close in value can you buy that hat for the same price you sold it, how many hats can you buy or sell at that price?
and that's where hats fail in all metrics to cryptocurrency and how cryptocurrency satisfies my criteria for money
> What coinbase needs are IRL offices where you can go and do things like account recovery, and where people trying to steal money can be caught and prosecuted (and makes a huge barrier for the overseas thieves who are usually doing this)
Watching crypto enthusiasts run into every problem that society already tackled with in the past when developing currency and its controls, and then coming up with solutions that look exactly the same as what dirty fiat currency uses, has been a source of much entertainment the past few years
> every problem that society already tackled with in the past
More KYC creates more problems while solving some others. Why didn't the same society despite KYC/AML tackle the problem pointed at in a previous comment? "Florida teens kidnap Las Vegas man, drive him to Arizona desert, steal $4M in cryptocurrency"[1] Why is there this crime?
Without mandatory KYC laws, this particular attack would be near pointless. No name tied to account, bookkeeping doesn't archive wire transaction details for the past 10 years.
Let businesses easily accept cryptocurrency (like... regular cash?), without a blade to their throat held by the government, and the need for such centralization points will greatly diminish. People get in trouble by p2p-exchanging money with unknown peers; in some instances this "trouble" has the unit of "years".
It's in nobodies' interest to protect cryptocurrency payments as the alternative, other than the activists, and the big groups jumping in on it for the speculation purposes - something they had refined decades ago. There's CBDC is on the horizon.
> Without mandatory KYC laws, this particular attack would be near pointless. No name tied to account, bookkeeping doesn't archive wire transaction details for the past 10 years.
But this attack is already fully pointless with traditional finance. You can't steal someone's bank account at gun point.
Conversely, even without KYC, blockchain based currencies paint a huge target on anyone who uses a small number of wallets to store a large amount of money. Dedicated criminals and even state actors can figure out who owns the wallets by tracking transaction patterns, getting information from vendors, etc. As long as you're actually using your crypto wallets (unlike, say, Satoshi), you can quite easily be tracked. Anyone who you order a pizza from in BTC knows the address of whoever has that wallet. Sure, you can take a lot of steps to protect yourself from it, but it's hard, and one slip-up is all it takes. Opsec is not for the careless.
Also, crypto's reliance on secrets instead of legal personhood to ascertain ownership fundamentally makes it prone to stealing money in this way. Since the money doesn't belong to a legal person, but to whoever knows some secret key, that key can be stolen from whoever has it through simple violence. Even if you're extremely careful not to leak details of your accounts, use XMR for untraceable payments, etc - someone who is physically close to you could see that you're rich and decide to attack just on the chance that you may have crypto, without knowing anything specific.
Good points overall, thank you. This one could be managed by wallet software that'd do its own account tracing in order to separate your histories by generating new addresses for incoming transfers.
> physically close to you could see that you're rich and decide to attack just on the chance
The wearers of premium watches or smartphones don't seem to be concerned for their safety. For an increased payout they could be followed to their home. I think https://xkcd.com/538/ strucks either way.
... I think this is a good counterargument: what's the difference between a wallet and a banking account when everyone today can issue a wire transfer from the comfort of their home. Instant payments and all that. It just adds an extra step of waiting a couple more minutes for the transaction to come through. I assume the money laundering step is figured out by the criminals doing this to you.
Yea see the problem is that you are arguing under some implicit idea that you’ll just accept the results of the system.
Every single crypto property I’ve talked to has ended up at a point where they believes that someone cheated them outside the bounds of the system and then look to authority figures to rectify the situation, like the government.
If you are someone who actually believes that crypto transactions should be unmodifiable by any third party then what you said makes sense. I just don’t think that anyone telling me they believe that isn’t lying to themselves at best, and lying to everyone else at worst
> unmodifiable by any third party then what you said makes sense.
You are right, I do. The same reason I don't think the cryptocurrency is for everyone. And the reason I accept this, is because "traditional institutions" still can be "easily" gamed: enough cases of social engineering around to be considered a norm. Where law enforcement won't try enough or can't do enough to return the money transferred to a hostile account. Following this, if someone smart enough to avoid the banking scams, they are probably smart enough to manage their own wallet safely.
As I understand, the root of the problem is that Coinbase kept lot of sensitive information, including photos of IDs. If Coinbase was fully anonymous, and didn't require any KYC, the impact of the leak would be insignificant because it would be difficult to link user number 12345 with some real-world person.
So if we want to constrain impact of such attacks, we must make companies keep less data and delete them faster. For example, instead of storing a photo of ID, store just a checkbox that the person showed their ID and it was valid.
This applies not only to cryptocurrency, but to any company like Google, Uber, Amazon etc - if they didn't keep extra data, there would be little value in the leaks.
So the blame is not at cryptocurrency, but on companies not wishing to delete the data and governments demanding them to collect the data not necessary for operation. It's the government and capitalists who create problems out of nowhere.
> store just a checkbox that the person showed their ID and it was valid.
Doesn't work at scale. You get bribes, rogue employees, socially engineered employees. In the US, look up the articles about phone/SIM unlocks and SIM card copies. Russia has a problem with e-signatures, that most people have no idea about. It's possible to sell somebody's real estate with one of these. Loans granted just based on passport data. Neither politics nor media highlight these issues. Overall in this case your suggestion tries to handle the symptoms of the KYC requirement.
Here's a more extreme treatment: let people change their full legal name at will. Gender's already kinda possible.
In Russia one can change their name, although it is a lot of pain as you need to change it in all agreements (like bank agreement) and documents. So a better idea is simply not store customer names.
But they need exchanges to get real money to flow in and out of cryptocurrency easily. Without it, cryptocurrency by itself would likely be worth far less than it is today.
Yes that's true, but no need to hold your crypto there as a permanent storage. Once your fiat is exchanged to crypto, immediately transfer the crypto to your private wallet.
As opposed to the bank's ...? Or your other account's ..., what exactly, passwords? Phising is everywhere. How many times have you heard the elderly have their money stolen, both online and in real life? It happened to my grandma. The mailman is bringing her own pension as cash, and guess what, he has scammed my grandma for years! The food delivery guy who has been delivering lunch for my grandma, guess what he did? He scammed my grandma out of her money! We are talking about cash, right now, and no phising involved, just good old "lying".
Hence why cryptocurrency would never replace regular banks for regular people. The situation with scams and thefts has only gotten worse. Not your keys, not your coin.
Yes, I think I’m familiar with the crypto enthusiasts defenses that all boil down to looking at a single aspect of their system in a vacuum and not realizing that if anyone wants to functionally use crypto as a currency and not as a speculative asset or tool in crime, then all these aspects actually have to work and work together
I don't really care about crypto personally (volatile shitcoins) but I think that's a straw man argument. They all know it gets troublesome when it comes to dealing with fiat transactions. The hardcore crypto enthusiasts want to avoid fiat entirely.
If only hardcore crypto enthusiasts who didn't want any fiat had cryptocurrency bitcoin would be worth a couple dollars a piece and 99% of other cryptocurrencies wouldn't exist. The vast vast majority of people who have crypto are doing it because they think they can get rich from it and that's why anytime it's talked about it's talked about in terms of fiat values
Cryptocurrencies are not classified as securities. Bitcoin and Ethereum, the largest cryptocurrencies, were both declared as non securities by the SEC.
Cryptocurrency firms exist in a quantum superposition of bank and not-a-bank until you interact with them, at which point they collapse into whichever state costs them less money.
I mean this isn't the criteria you're looking for but I can trade assets within coinbase's website. It looks like a stock trading platform. I don't for the record.
I don't think commodity, forex or stock trading is built into any bank interface but I don't have enough money to know for sure.
lol they even do fractional reserve things like banks, except they're more shady and don't acknowledge it, now I'm either connecting dots that shouldn't be connected or some withdrawal locks that happened through some big arbitrage opportunities were very suspicious.
If you ever sent money to or from a wallet you control, I'd think a reliable recovery factor would be to use that key to sign a message that Coinbase can verify with the address in their records. Cryptocurrency after all is just another PKI.
And dumb-dumb me just realized how trivial that would be to break. Social engineer someone into sending/receiving money to/from your wallet then pretend to be them requesting an account recovery.
Coinbase would have to make you sign a challenge ahead of time that would mark the wallet as the authorized public key for your account.
> What coinbase needs are IRL offices where you can go and do things like account recovery, and where people trying to steal money can be caught and prosecuted
People getting locked out of their account (which can happen due to no fault of the user, e.g. by an overly nervous risk system) will be really happy to have to potentially travel to a different city to regain account access...
Fine, make it optional. I actually would love a version of cold storage that is: never release this money unless I personally travel to an office if NYC and authorize it.
> What coinbase needs are IRL offices where you can go and do things like account recovery, and where people trying to steal money can be caught and prosecuted
No. I absolutely love my car. I have put 60,000 miles on mine in 3 years, largely from long cross country road trips. It's far and away my favorite driving experience of any car I've ever driven.
>As someone who grew up in a 3rd world country and whose mother owned a clothing factory, this product seems...fine?
People in western countries find things like sweatshops to be objectionable.
>The response is an indication of how little people know about how their t-shirts and shoes are made.
People in western countries are well aware of how their shirts are made, and don't like it, and try to avoid it when possible specifically because they find sweatshop conditions objectionable.
I'm not sure what data you're using to prove this but it seems like many of the largest brands in the US are still using sweatshop labor [1]. Many still have no idea of what's going on in Xinjiang [2]
Are you trying to make the point that people don’t care or aren’t aware of the fact that their clothes are made in sweatshops by linking to a western blog extensively detailing the brands that use sweatshops with the implied point that you should avoid them because they are bad?
Sweatshops are bad. Westerns know this. They don’t want sweatshops.
Seeing YC back a sweatshop management application that uses AI to help managers harass their workers is sad. It would
be similar to them investing in faster slave ships in the 1850s.
I'm saying that people _say_ they have issues with sweatshops but when push comes to shove they're willing to buy the Nikes.
I'm not trying to make a decision here on right vs. wrong just pointing out that most people _say_ they care but they're not really willing to do much about it.
