> “When we identified a user trading on classified government information, we referred the matter to the DOJ & cooperated with their investigation. Insider trading has no place on Polymarket. Today’s arrest is proof the system works.”
Today's arrest is proof that Polymarket may have incentivized a key decision maker in this operation to make decisions in a way that would let him profit. This is peak levels of head up ass arrogance.
If I 'choose not to let you post on my website' would you consider this a ban? This reads like a really dishonest shifting of the goalpost for what is effectively censorship of literature. And, if you look at some of the books that were "chose not to have this book in their library" it overwhelmingly focuses on books that feature queer characters, or discuss these themes. Any honest observer knows exactly what is going on here, and as others have noted, this was not limited to school libraries.
Software "engineering" also differs in the way from more formal engineering in that there are very rarely absolutes, there's often many different correct ways to solve a problem, each possessing their own pros and cons. So, it could feel like "guessing" choosing a certain approach over another, but more senior people usually have an intuition brought from experience which one will work better and be more informed of the tradeoffs, so it looks a lot less like guessing.
Yet when we talk about controlling trains, airplanes, freight ships, medical devices, nuclear power plants and space stuff we suddenly know how to do it?
There is software engineering and it is known how to do things that absolutely must not fail. It is just thst these standard are not commonly deployed if nobody forces you to deploy them. And why would you? Costs money and a software error is widely treated like divine intervention.
There is a big difference between knowing something must not fail, and how to make it so it will not fail. The latter is where opinions and approaches often differ, in ways that more formal engineering does not.
I'm very wary of anyone in tech/software eng that says "this is the only right way to do this." I'm aware those attitudes exist everywhere.
I once found a very interesting definition of engineering. It is about making something that just barely does the job. Doing it better costs more usually and doing it worse costs lives.
Not much different in software. There is always many ways of solving problems and that is typical of any engineering. Contrary to sciences.
> There’s not enough women in technology. What a fucked up industry. That needs to change. I’ve been trying to be more encouraging and helpful to the women engineers in our org, but I don’t know what else to do. Same with black engineers. What the hell?
See what the current thought leaders in tech believe and say out loud and this makes a lot more sense.
This would indicate wherever they were hosting their site on no longer exists. 503's even on pages that should mostly be static suggest the backend no longer exists, or whatever ingress they're using in front of it disappeared. As far as I can tell every single page on their site is 503'ing.
They are putting out a lot of stuff that to me is very obvious to read between the lines what led to this because I've been brought in to clean messes like this before:
>The goal of the current maintenance is to fix a lot of long-standing issues with the site. The underlying infrastructure was getting very fragile as technical debt accumulated over time. A team is working very hard right now to make sure that once the site is back up, it's on much better footing and will be solid and reliable for the long term. Despite the unfortunate amount of time this is taking, it will be a major benefit to the site in the long run.
They are saying it was "spring cleaning" or a migration that took out the site for days. "infrastructure getting very fragile" reeks of bad or nonexistent ops practices, probably very little or unreliable IAC (if any, I've seen shops get by for 10+ years by just clicking things in console, til unfortunately it gets to this point).
This though, rubs me the wrong way:
> We want to offer a much better quality of service going foward. We understand that the lack of communication has been frustrating, and I have been closely watching social media and reporting the community's feelings up the chain, so your voices are being heard. The plan was not to have a long outage like this, but due to factors beyond the dev team's control, things have taken much longer than anticipated. Please be patient with us - I will keep updating here and on our other social media.
"Factors beyond the dev teams control." Sorry, no. If you have an ops team, you don't get to toss blame over the wall like that, and if you don't, you have no one to blame but yourselves. I feel bad for whoever the unofficial official ops dude is right now. These kind of infrastructure "tech debt" woopsies come from years of people just not giving a crap to doing things properly, it's never seen as important until it suddenly is. Hope they learn a lesson and hire an infrastructure guy properly. There's long been a persistent delusion in the pure dev world that they should be able to be completely agnostic to the hardware lying underneath their beautiful code - ideally yes, in practice almost never, unless you come from a place that has the significant resources to make something nice like that, or are willing to pay out the azz for managed cloud services or licenses.
It is entirely possible, especially in small companies in my experience, that “factors beyond the dev teams control” means “technical founder with severe myopia and decision fatigue who prevents “complexity”” as they see it, which for them means everything you discuss here as being necessary.
It can be as simple as a terraform apply wiping out huge swaths of the backend infra, getting that back, depending on how disciplined you are, can take in the order of days/weeks.
This is a great, reflective article that made me think of specific situations I've been in with people in my career that did not possess the same level of introspection. They are everywhere, which is why those interview questions he mentions get asked.
Particularly though, this hit home -
> The interviews were not silent on my end. I was not freezing and saying nothing. I was pretending. I was trying to sound like I knew, hoping the interviewer would believe me and move on. They always knew. You cannot fake technical answers in front of people who have asked the same questions hundreds of times. Looking back, that performance was worse than just saying I do not know. It wasted their time and it delayed my own learning.
This is the thing that absolutely maddens me with some people who I have worked very closely with before. They don't know enough to know that they don't know, but either are so insecure or with outsized ego, they cannot admit it publicly, because that threatens their sense of expertise. They also aren't willing or able to do the "boring" work to catch up (that the author mentions at one point). The farther you go into your career without getting past what this guy went through, the worse it gets, and you'd be shocked how long some people can last living in this world, which to me looks like hell.
I've had people confidently tell me stuff about niche areas of my expertise I knew they'd never worked on in their life, and start trying to drive decisions around those things based on that fake expertise, and being in the awkward spot of "do I protect their ego, let them fail, or tell them to please listen to me?" But I found when you do the latter, it falls on deaf ears, because they do not know enough to even understand that you can tell the confabulated responses they give to questions tell me immediately they have no effing clue what they're talking about, so any feedback will just be interpreted as threatening or incorrect.
I'm positive I have done this in the past, not saying I am perfect, but entering a mid to mid senior part of my career now and having worked with a ton of different people, when I see it now, I'm very unsure how to deal with it. This guy, bless his heart because it's so honest, likely received tons of direct feedback he wouldn't or couldn't listen to.
Today's arrest is proof that Polymarket may have incentivized a key decision maker in this operation to make decisions in a way that would let him profit. This is peak levels of head up ass arrogance.
reply