The Haskell Elephant in the Room • Hacker News Board

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#81

Post by jcbrand » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 4:04 PM UTC

I found the description of the cryptocurrency-space as a religion well-written and interesting.

Of course, comparisons such as that are relatively common and has been made many times for the free software movement as well for example.

However, his criticisms of cryptocurrencies are quite off IMO.

> However cryptocurrency companies do not produce anything, instead they offer synthetic financial products which are marketing to the generic public as investments

MakerDAO is basically a decentralized lending facility (i.e. "banks") and Compound is a decentralized money market.

These are actual financial products, they serve real purposes that can also be found in the legacy financial system.

Cryptocurrency engineers are building an alternative, decentralized financial system that cuts out middle men and allows anyone access to financial services (such as accepting money from anywhere in the world, or being able to lend out your capital) that were previously only available to select people.

In one month, July 2020, the Federal Reserve printed more money than the first 200 years of the existence of the USA.

There are serious problems with the legacy financial system, and it's good that people are building systems in parallel.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#82

Post by scottlocklin » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 4:05 PM UTC

It's funny, I remember looking at Quorum's anonymity layer Constellation and thinking to myself how odd it was they wrote it in Haskell; generally a sign there are no adults in the room when coming from a JPMC tier company where actual money will be piped through it. It turned out they had to rewrite it in Java to get it to function reliably.

I have no opinion on Cardano,but obviously something from the ML family is useful if you want to build smart contracts.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#83

Post by cinntaile » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 4:05 PM UTC

sanxiyn wrote: post #65

leshow wrote: post #58

Mentions FP Complete, who worked on cardano I think. So is the accusation that cardano is running a shady exchange and stealing from people? I don't follow the crypto space, but it seems like we might actually want to know which companies are being accused of being shady.

I don't think Cardano is running a shady exchange, but Cardano sure is traded in shady exchanges and people are losing money trading Cardano. I don't think that's a controversial statement.

People are losing money trading a lot of things, including but not limited to stocks, commodities and cryptocurrencies such as Cardano. I don't really see the issue with that?

I'm guessing it's the shady exchanges. There are several exchanges that have been around for a few years now, do you take issue with all of them or are you thinking of a specific one?

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#84

Post by sanxiyn » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 4:06 PM UTC

analyte123 wrote: post #76

bondarchuk wrote: post #11

Very much a generic anti-cryptocurrency rant, and very little haskell-specific clarifications. I understand not wanting to name specific projects (Cardano comes to mind; " Cardano is a blockchain platform built on the groundbreaking Ouroboros proof-of-stake consensus protocol, and developed using the Haskell programming language: a functional programming language that enables Cardano to pursue evidence-based developm…

This is an article about a giant pot of questionably earned money buying influence in a software ecosystem that he's been a big part of. But this is hardly the first time for this, in other cases the pot of questionably earned money came from selling people's data for ads or from Windows licenses. The question in all of these cases is what specific bad influences the money can have on the software ecosystem and how c…

There is degree of questionableness and I think it makes sense to say that some money is more questionably earned than others.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#85

Post by krick » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 4:07 PM UTC

I don't really care for how naïve this description of "how economy works" is or isn't, but being upset that instead of Haskell being used virtually nowhere, it is finally used somewhere is pretty hilarious.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#86

Post by nine_k » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 4:10 PM UTC

I think this is a rather strange way of thinking.

Fortran has been extensively used for nuclear weapons development. Let's stay away from Fortran!

C was and is widely used in weapons control systems. Let's stop using C!

Computers themselves were initially designed for artillery fire control, with an explicit intention of killing people. Let's not touch the technology with such a foul pedigree.

This can be continued ad nauseam, until the whole of the civilization is marked as indecent. Nearly every scientific discovery and techology achievement has been used, or attempted to be used, for some purpose one might find objectionable.

Instead we could realize that tools are outside morals. A knife could be used to cut bread or to cut throats, and it's not the knife's decision, but that of its user. The very same thing applies to everything, from nuclear fission to functional programming.

If you know what's the right, virtuous thing to do in the world, do not hesitate, go and do it. Use the most fitting tool for that job. Do not mind if that tool is used for whatever other, less noble purpose, it's not the tool's fault.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#87

Post by crb002 » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 4:11 PM UTC

Does Haskell have a legible GC free subset that is an alternative to Rust? If not, that is the elephant.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#88

Post by dimitrios1 » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 4:12 PM UTC

If you have ethical concerns with this, but still love FP, just come over to OCaml. You get 80-90% of what you love about Haskell, and there is an established industry in many sectors. Big players here like Ahrefs, Jane Street, and, of course, Messanger and Facebook.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#89

Post by fwip » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 4:14 PM UTC

jcbrand wrote: post #81

I found the description of the cryptocurrency-space as a religion well-written and interesting. Of course, comparisons such as that are relatively common and has been made many times for the free software movement as well for example. However, his criticisms of cryptocurrencies are quite off IMO. > However cryptocurrency companies do not produce anything, instead they offer synthetic financial products which are mark…

MakerDAO created DAI, which is yet-another-stable-coin pegged to 1 USD.

If the Federal Reserve can't be trusted with USD, surely DAI isn't reliable either.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#90

Post by ajuc » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 4:14 PM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #86

I think this is a rather strange way of thinking. Fortran has been extensively used for nuclear weapons development. Let's stay away from Fortran! C was and is widely used in weapons control systems. Let's stop using C! Computers themselves were initially designed for artillery fire control, with an explicit intention of killing people. Let's not touch the technology with such a foul pedigree. This can be continued a…

IBM helped with Holocaust.

It also invented PC.