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Ask HN: Who are the "snake oil salesmen" of tech?

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21–30 of 49 posts

Re: Ask HN: Who are the "snake oil salesmen" of tech?

#21
post #16

So sorry to observe Blockchain tech/ppl as a perfect example of a snake oil / snake oil sellers. I can clearly see a big future on this field, kind of a Democracy 2.0, the "short script which is going to replace all the governments". But the myriad of dudes who don't know even the very basics of cryptography but having some excellent sales skills make me feel sad sometimes.

Are you a Balaji S fan?

My fanness is full of Satoshi N.

Re: Ask HN: Who are the "snake oil salesmen" of tech?

#22
post #16

So sorry to observe Blockchain tech/ppl as a perfect example of a snake oil / snake oil sellers. I can clearly see a big future on this field, kind of a Democracy 2.0, the "short script which is going to replace all the governments". But the myriad of dudes who don't know even the very basics of cryptography but having some excellent sales skills make me feel sad sometimes.

Democracy is hell on earth. Whether it is a system of government, or a means by which groups make decisions or peddles their wares. The majority tends to encumber, enslave, and/or murder the minority. The eventual outcome of any purely democratic state or process is tyranny. This is why the founding fathers choose a republican form of government that uses democratic processes. Recall that Socrates was sentenced to die by a majority vote. With that in mind, then yes, the faux value assigned to "tech influencers" is a form of democracy that's just as poisonous as people who seek to "save democracy."

Re: Ask HN: Who are the "snake oil salesmen" of tech?

#24

Anyone who pitches a "safer" computer language, or methodology. Rust, for example. People who sell memory that they know is unreliable, otherwise RowHammer[1] wouldn't work Most of the "CyberSecurity" industry... the Operating System should be doing their job, but isn't. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_hammer

Not a memory development guy, but I am a rust programmer and have managed cybersecurity teams. Rust is amazing for memory safety and good programing practice. And cyber… is a lot more than the OS.

Re: Ask HN: Who are the "snake oil salesmen" of tech?

#26
post #16

So sorry to observe Blockchain tech/ppl as a perfect example of a snake oil / snake oil sellers. I can clearly see a big future on this field, kind of a Democracy 2.0, the "short script which is going to replace all the governments". But the myriad of dudes who don't know even the very basics of cryptography but having some excellent sales skills make me feel sad sometimes.

Democracy is hell on earth. Whether it is a system of government, or a means by which groups make decisions or peddles their wares. The majority tends to encumber, enslave, and/or murder the minority. The eventual outcome of any purely democratic state or process is tyranny. This is why the founding fathers choose a republican form of government that uses democratic processes. Recall that Socrates was sentenced to di…

You are right my man. I can not say I understand democracy as well as Bitcoin, all I can say that cryptography field is among the least trivial things in the Universe.

Re: Ask HN: Who are the "snake oil salesmen" of tech?

#28
Vendors of elaborate, configurable, "enterprise" tools for software development and monitoring.

JIRA, SonarQube, VeraCode, Coverity - all these apps that seem like a good idea in principle, but end up being misconfigured with complicated workflows, and generally get in the way of ever making changes to software and get used to tick the security box instead of actually fixing anything.

Re: Ask HN: Who are the "snake oil salesmen" of tech?

#29

Anyone who pitches a "safer" computer language, or methodology. Rust, for example. People who sell memory that they know is unreliable, otherwise RowHammer[1] wouldn't work Most of the "CyberSecurity" industry... the Operating System should be doing their job, but isn't. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_hammer

Imagine an idea more detached from reality than yours. Wow.

Re: Ask HN: Who are the "snake oil salesmen" of tech?

#30

Anyone who pitches a "safer" computer language, or methodology. Rust, for example. People who sell memory that they know is unreliable, otherwise RowHammer[1] wouldn't work Most of the "CyberSecurity" industry... the Operating System should be doing their job, but isn't. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_hammer

Not a memory development guy, but I am a rust programmer and have managed cybersecurity teams. Rust is amazing for memory safety and good programing practice. And cyber… is a lot more than the OS.

I would be more worried about the opposite: future software and devices will use memory-safe programming languages like Rust, with C and assembly limited as much as possible, so things like the iPhone and the successors to the Nintendo Switch won't be able to be hacked or jailbroken to run software that wasn't approved by the hardware vendor, because there will be no buffer overflow exploits or dangling pointer vulnerabilities in them.
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