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If they have 0.3% speed, wouldn't it be expected that they get 0.3% of the coins per month?

3600 coins per day * 30 days * 588.41 BTC/UDS * 0.003 = $189831.60 USD gross per month?

FigBugon Defragmenting Qt and Uniting Our Ecosystem

LGPL isn't compatible with app stores since the user can't relink. So you need a commercial license.

As well, the licensing cost of the enterprise license is $200 a month, that's so cheap compared to a developers salary there isn't a lot of reason not to get it.

Then you can do a static link and make your application a lot smaller (depending on what parts of Qt you actually use) and make installation simpler.

I really like Qt, but I don't use it for a lot of my simple commandline apps because it would turn what could be a <500KB single .exe into a .exe that requires a few MB of DLLs.

FigBugon Defragmenting Qt and Uniting Our Ecosystem

I agree, and I wonder how much further ahead it would be if they'd switched to the current licensing scheme years earlier.

Other than writing native for each platform, which I don't have time to do, I haven't seen any good alternatives to Qt. And I'm not going back to MFC.

FigBugon Cheap FPGA Development Boards: What to look for

They are used a lot in audio processing - digital mixers, effect boxes etc. In a digital mixer, you'll need to get 32+ channels of audio encoded into the correct format, mixed, effects added, re-encoded, and back out in under 10ms, hopefully a lot less. The encoders/decoders and the main mix will usually be in a FPGA. The effects will have their own DSPs.

FigBugon Lisp in QBASIC

While we are all posting these types of things, here is a Scheme I did in Prolog: https://github.com/FigBug/scheme

FigBugon Facebook Reports First Quarter 2014 Results

Don't those essentially mean the same thing?

FigBugon How To Profit From Selling Digital Products

Sure, artificial scarcity isn't required, there are lots of ways around it as many alternative business models have shown. My argument is they aren't always better. When you bring advertising into the equation, the end user is no longer the customer. And the incentives become more page views etc rather than designing a product the end user desires.

I don't see the problem with having a hybrid system. Just because some music os sold as MP3s, doesn't stop anybody from releasing crowd funded music.

FigBugon How To Profit From Selling Digital Products

I'm not sure artificial scarcity is a bad thing, as it allows digital products to exist. As a consumer I'd much rather have the option to choose between a digital product and a digital service. Somethings like email and web hosting obviously have to be a digital service. Things like games and music can be either. And I usually choose the product since it'll exist long after the service is gone. (Assuming no DRM)

I think we may be entering a digital dark age, where in the not too distant future, a lot of the software of today will no longer be useable. There will be no DOSBOX equivalent to play web games of 2014.

FigBugon Move Over Kickstarter, Crypto-Equity Is the Next Frontier

I've come to the same opinion. Reading /r/bitcoin, people are losing their coins every week. And these are enthusiasts. The security just doesn't exist for mass adoption.

6.6% of all bitcoins have been stolen. When you consider around 60% of coins have never moved, that means a lot of the coins in circulation have been stolen.

FigBugon Ask HN: Who started something in 2013/14 which is already profitable?

I started a contracting company in 2014, http://www.motusdesign.ca

We are already profitable, but that's not saying much since we have almost no expenses.

FigBugon Open-source Libraries for Working with Open XML Documents (docx, xlsx, pptx)

So far this looks Windows only. I'm currently using LibXL (http://www.libxl.com/) to generate Excel documents. Anybody know of any other cross platform alternatives?

FigBugon ETA: Building the World's Fastest Bike

I talked to Sam Whittingham briefly after his speed record fell last September. 133.78 km/h beat his old record by 0.6 km/h. I think his record stood for about 13 years. He says now it all comes down to the tires, they are the one component that takes major money to custom make. Nobody makes tires for 133km/h bicycles. As long as everybody is using the same tires, nobody is going to go significantly faster. Hopefully they've found a source for high speed tires.

FigBugon Why don't you want to be a full time employee?

I've been a contractor since 2010. I've never had any problem finding work. I have received 1 job through my website, everything else has been through contacts. Before contracting I had 10 years as an employee of various companies. I think it is much harder to do contracting with less than about 5 years experience, you just won't have the contacts.

There is no trick to what I do, whenever I run into an old colleague, I tell them I'm contracting now. They will either have or know somebody looking for my skills. I've even gone back to companies I worked as an employee and helped them during crunch time.

I think when you are employed full time, people are reluctant to make you offers, but as soon as you are a available the offers seem to appear.

FigBugon I’m Just Now Realizing How Stupid We Are

And now they are buying bitcoin.

FigBugon Life After Losing an Arm

I've never seen a hand that's good enough to type, but then I haven't looked recently. Most I've seem offer limited grip in a few positions.

FigBugon Life After Losing an Arm

I lost an arm in 1991, but had it re-attached. I'm still not sure if that was a good idea or not. I wasn't awake when the decision was made. My Dad argued for, the doctors were initially against the idea, but no doctor now will remove it.

So now I a arm that is basically useless from below the elbow, the only real control I have is at the first knuckle, all fingers together. My forearm is more skin graft than skin.

I've tried a few alternate keyboards, but gave up trying to learn and now just use a regular keyboard and a track ball. I had to learn to write again as it was my dominant arm. Computer programming is probably the best available career, so I'm glad I already had an interest in it.

I really identified with the everything is slower part. There is very little I can't do, but everything is so slow that I just do a lot of things half way. I still don't have a good way to clip my finger nails.

I got nothing from the Workers' Compensation Board of British Columbia do to an improperly filled out form. At the time, if you worked for a family business, you needed to be registered differently, which I was unaware of. Still bitter to this day.

FigBugon Why Canada’s banks have weaker passwords than Twitter or Google

I think you are correct. Even with a hacked account, it's very difficult to move the money into another account without leaving a trail. Either the money will have a hold for days or the transaction can be reversed.

There are also consequences, steal money and you'll probably go to jail. Hack somebodies email, law enforcement probably won't do anything unless it's a high profile case.

Compare to BitCoin. Irreversible anonymous transactions. Far better security and coins are constantly getting stolen. I really don't think BitCoin will succeed since computer security in general is still kinda amateur hour.

FigBugon Dropbox Webhooks

For me it's 'stays connected' For some reason Google Drive will disconnect periodically and there is no reconnect option. You have to exit and restart, and then it needs to re-index everything.

Multiple Dropboxs. New feature, but I can run my work and home dropbox at the same time and they sync to different folders.

Sharing is cleaner. When I invite a Dropbox user to a share, the share appears in their drive. With Google drive, they get access to the share web only but it doesn't sync to their drive. The UI to get it to sync to drive isn't clear, so I end up doing a lot of 'support'

I also find the Google Drive .gdoc files bizarre. They aren't actual files, users don't understand you can't copy them out of the drive to back them up, etc.

FigBugon Set up your own email server in 5 steps

It doesn't really go into what Symbiosis is. Is it something I can install on my linux distribution. Or do I have to use their Symbiosis distribution?

Setting up email is a world of pain, anything to make it easier would be good.

FigBugon YouTube Founders to Sell Delicious, a Social Bookmarking Site

Hmm, not sure where I got the idea costs were that high. I can't find any data anywhere what people are actually paying.

FigBugon YouTube Founders to Sell Delicious, a Social Bookmarking Site

http://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction

I'm guessing y-axis is cents. Looks like it's about $0.25 - $0.30 these days.

FigBugon Common Python Mistakes

> No languages are inherently "compiled" or "interpreted", that's a property of the implementation.

A language and it's implementation are usually designed at the same time. Compiled or interpreted will affect design choices that go into the language. While additional implementations may follow, it can be hard/impossible to design a compiler (machine code, not byte code) for a language that was designed to be interpreted without dropping features (ie eval).

It may be more correct to say 'Python was designed to be interpreted' than 'Python is interpreted'

FigBugon YouTube Founders to Sell Delicious, a Social Bookmarking Site

Bitcoin transaction fees are around $0.40 to get your transaction accepted. While you could pay with no fee, it could take days for the transaction to be accepted. Maybe one of the altcoins would work better. But now you are limiting your customer base to people who have altcoins, which must be a pretty small market.

FigBugon Ask HN: Do you own a 3d printer? What has been your experience?

One on my business partners bought a Formlabs Form 1. When it worked it was great, but it just wasn't reliable enough to depend on at the volume of work it was bringing in. For high volumes you need to by an expensive machine, but prices clients are willing to pay is dropping, and the technology is changing fast. He couldn't make a business case for owning a 3D printer, so he sold it. Shapeways is cheap & fast enough.

FigBugon Man compares his prosthetic hand to a 3D-printed one

I'm a software developer, but I got a copy of solid works from work. I tried to design a Garmin mount dog collar and failed miserably. I then asked a mechanical engineer to do it for me and he whipped it up in a few minutes. I was humbled by how hard it is to design physical products.

If anybody wants to track their dog: http://www.shapeways.com/model/1805713/dog-collar-garmin-mou...

FigBugon Why is 1 GB equal to 10^9 bytes instead of 2^30?

Why not switch to actual GB like the OS X did. I'm not sure why anybody prefers GiB.

FigBugon Why is 1 GB equal to 10^9 bytes instead of 2^30?

Is there any proof that hard drive manufactures actually switched? It's always just repeated as truth. I remember megabytes being all over the place in the days of floppy disks, 1000 * 1000 or 1000 * 1024 or 1024 * 1024. Hardware engineers have always been more likely to use 10^9 (ie megabits) where software developers have always been more likely to use megabytes.

FigBugon The right way to ask users for iOS permissions

Facebook Messenger does it every time you go to the App, it's very annoying. It definitely makes me use it less. I don't think Apps should be aware if they have had permissions denied, functions should just quietly return nothing/false data.

Example: http://i.imgur.com/S4MmKo3.png

FigBugon Top Bitcoin questions I’ve been asked

Something I've been wondering about Bitcoin: If Bitcoin is going to be used as a currency, you'll need to be able to get loans, short term like a credit card and long term like a mortgage. But isn't taking a loan in a deflationary currency very risky? Kinda like short selling, possible to lose/be in debt an infinite amount of money?

Assuming Bitcoin becomes widespread, how do you convince people to take a salary that goes down every year? It's going to take a lot of re-education -- a completely different way of looking at money.

FigBugon Readmill shuts down, team joins Dropbox

I said it 'could be' the next big thing, not it will be. I agree it's a long shot.

Web Apps have been very good to developers. Zero piracy, no installation issues, low support costs. Users like them because it's simple to get started, they aren't tied to one computer. The downsides are all long term -- and it's hard to get people to think about the future, or things like privacy.

I'm not sure where the drive would come from to make it happen. I don't see which company would put in the investment to get it started.