Scirra_Tom

Compared to other crashes where there seemed to be an underlying economic issue - this one feels like it will bounce back quickly at some point in my amateur opinion. Am tempted by some 2022 SPY leaps for this reason.

> Someone's just bought a $1000 call option on a stock that's currently $400? Automated trading systems will probably raise alerts on that stock since someone must know something for that to happen.

Not an expert but I'd be surprised if one trade like that triggered anything, could easily be a hedge.

It looks like the amount is stored as an int, which could overflow when dealing with Bitcoin if you're using Satoshi's as a subunit.

I really don't see any need or benefit in storing values as mills unless you're writing forex trading platforms. It's inviting more mistakes.

Lots of third party implementations will take a few % off your bottom line. That's the main one.

There's a couple of other points here as well:

- If you do enough volume, you're able to negotiate the fee with the payment processor, we've done this successfully. If you outsource, that negotiation is the third parties margin.

- I'm not sure if this is true for third parties, but if they wrap up all your payouts in your native currency (EG GBP£), you lose money on forex. We try our best to have all our EUR and USD sales land in their respective currency accounts, then convert them with low cost services such as transferwise which has saved us a lot of money in the long run.

Saving on your forex and having no third party processor fees, I think in some instances you could be saving in the region of £40,000 to £80,000 per £1mm of sales.

We also couldn't find a third party implementation that would allow us to bill for our product, varied by country, amount, currency AND billing frequency. This fine tuned control can have real benefit, for example we noticed in Ukraine we had high traffic but no sales - by introducing a low monthly UAH billing option we started to grow sales in this region.

Other third party implementations won't handle VAT properly or comprehensively which can create more of an accounting burden, or round VAT transactions unfavourably (size of that benefit is irrelevant to very small obviously depending on volume of transactions!) This gap is being slowly filled from what I've been seeing though.

Using a third party solution for SaaS will always have some level of disconnect, it just feels nicer for the customer when it's all integrated seamlessly. One example being you have full control over branding and distribution of invoices/receipts etc.

I'm currently rewriting our store implementation, and it's complicated.

One example is that some currencies have 100 subunits (eg USD), some have 10 subunits (EG TWD/MOP) and some have no subunits (eg JPY). This is made slightly more difficult in that Stripe/Paypal will treat subunits differently, for example Paypal might treat JPY as having 100 subunits and Stripe will treat it with 0 subunits.

You want to be really careful here not to charge 10x/100x more/less to the end customer than you imagine.

Formatting currencies is also something you need to do carefully as dots and commas mean completely different things in various countries and can lead to unexpected charges for customers.

Don't get me started on VAT :P

All worth it in the end though, I enjoy writing this sort of thing and I do see long term benefit to our business that we do it all in-house.

I'd also recommend future proofing implementations to use longs instead of ints for storing money values. Back when Bitcoin was less valuable we allowed BTC as a currency where 1 subunit = 1 satoshi (100,000,000 satoshis in a bitcoin). It was possible to overflow an int this way.

You also can't really write payment systems with the speed you might write other code in your startup - errors and mistakes here could have real impact on peoples lives. For example, loops that create charges that don't end (possible with both Stripe AND Paypal). Loops can manifest themselves as lock collisions as well. Basically, be careful and if speed is important you probably want to outsource it at the expense of some control.

Would drilling holes deep enough theoretically allow us to harvest thermal energy on a meaningful scale?

Devastating for them I imagine. Website offline since 31st December, purposefully timed attack for maximum disruption I would imagine.

Looks like they had aspiration to IPO earlier in 2019, imagine this would now not be on the cards for a long time.

I wonder how much the ransom is for. It appears to be an enormously damaging attack - I wonder if paying it is the best option for their business at this stage, then follow the money.

Our software Construct 3 (https://editor.construct.net/) I think meets most of these points. It runs offline, and we never have access to the users project files. You can save/load locally, and it runs in the browser. Game project files are zips with JSON + raw asset files. No syncing with the server needed so it is fast, and a design mistake that is severely hampering some of our competitors!

I'm not entirely sure how supporting collaboration in real time belongs on this list. Seems like a nice to have that isn't really related to the rest of the list.

The entire editor is built in HTML5, and the exported games export to HTML5. It was the obvious choice.

That's what we're trying to do and we're making good progress!

As our engine Construct 3 is written in HTML5 itself, Javascript was the natural language choice to integrate with our block system.

All languages have their up and downsides but we love Javascript and think it's suitable because it's used in many industries (not just making games) and is likely to have a growing demand going forwards. I think this is a much easier sell to education than other tools such as Gamemaker who use their own propitiatory language.

We talked to a lot of teachers, and it's a real problem going from block based programming to syntax heavy scripting - there's a chasm there which from a teaching standpoint is sometimes tricky to breach and keep students engaged with.

We've gone for a different approach with Construct 3 which is so far resonating well in education, by mixing our block based programming system with Javascript itself helping to smooth the transition:

https://s1.construct.net/images/v721/refresh/features/learn-...

The above example is a mix of block based and Javascript, but it can go all the way to making games with pure Javascript in script files - we're hoping to cover the transition in education from between Scratch and other tools such as Unity. There's a big gap there.

That's not how liability works. People within the business will be on the line if the business is acting criminally.

Not if you restrict the dataset to the undesirable domain names, it would be orders of magnitude smaller.

If I understand correctly, the full URL is hashed (or at least the first n bits of the full URL). It really isn't computationally expensive to work out undesirable URL's being visited because the undesirable domains are known, and it would be trivial for them to periodically crawl the undesirable domains for all known internal URLs and build a dictionary of hashes.

> It's perfectly fine to block them.

I think there were some legal rulings IIRC in the UK regarding software to auto mute/block/skip ads on TV/Radio, but for the life of my can't find them.

If it was ruled illegal, then it being "perfectly fine to block them" might be correct ethically but not legally, although I suspect the details of implementation might be the important point.

It says he was offered $50k USD for it, so that's how he's valuing it. They can prohibit transfer in writing, but not much they can do about it.

"The Payment Card Interchange Fee and Merchant Discount Antitrust Litigation is a United States class-action lawsuit filed in 2005 by merchants and trade associations against Visa, MasterCard, and numerous financial institutions that issue payment cards. The suit was filed due to price fixing and other allegedly anti-competitive trade practices in the credit card industry."

Another area where giving freedom to these businesses ends up screwing the average person. This is why I like the EU, they are strong on consumer rights. The naive would assume these businesses would naturally want to compete on these fees.

Thanks for reply!

From our point of view, a card where we could use our USD and EUR balance to make USD/EUR payments would be one of the biggest pulls if possible. I think recurring USD charges for UK based businesses are probably quite prevalent.

I don't think many UK startups realise how much they lose out on being charged in GBP on these transactions (especially with debit cards). There's likely an opportunity here to educate UK businesses and use that to promote this sort of card.

> all want a corporate card early on for their business spending (to get it off personal cards)

I'm surprised by this, been a while since we were an early business but didn't have any issue getting a corporate debit card which is more than adequate early on.

Tend to agree but I don't think a card is that big of a deal as in this case it's less Stripe owned as it's a Visa card so pretty sure you'd have some additional protection there.

1-2% cashback is highly appealing from here in the UK but shame to see is US only.

Anyone shed any light on why getting cashback cards in the UK is rare compared to elswehre? Personally I found Tandem which gives 0.5% cashback which is nice but not much.

Business wise we decided to use Amex as the rewards are OKish (comes out to like ~0.5% again I think?) and being able to pay for US services on our USD card is nice and does save money. Benefits overall not great though, probably save ~£1k per year compared to just using a bank issued debit/credit card.

They shuffle a lot. I've seen some online blackjack where it is possible to count cards, but they know this and the stakes are low enough and game speed slow enough it's just not worth the effort.

Met a professional football (soccer) better in a gambling convention here in the UK a few years back. He had a small team of AI computer scientists.

Told me his average bet size was £100,000, and his edge was in the region of ~1% (EV of £1,000 per bet). Interesting guy but you have to have a huge amount of cash and real belief in your model to ride out the variance!

Pretty sure he wanted to bet bigger but there was an issue with available volume.

No good if your Registrar (Namecheap) is behind CF as well!

We have a business account - there is no ability to add USD account without having to go through support who require bank statements unfortunately.

Paypal need a USD account in USA, with a bank statement from said account showing your business name. I don't think that would do it.

We use Barclays and have EUR and USD accounts with them which we can see online and make transfers/payments online with. Allows us to have a USD Amex, and do a lot of our Forex with Transferwise. Saved tens of thousands over the years on Forex with this method, and expensing some of our USD infrastructure costs on Amex helps as well.

Last pain point for us is getting a USD account in USA so we can cashout Paypal USD balances. Found companies that promise ability to do this but after wasting lots of time turns out they can't.

So you agree, banning access and gateways to Wikipedia is effective.

When I go onto an exchange to buy a Bitcoin, someone on the other end is selling it. To sell it, they have to deposit it on the exchange. I don't see why an exchange would buy from other exchanges unless they saw arbitrage opportunities.

If they did see arbitrage opportunities they are engaging in risk (there is timing risk for example) and I'm not even sure they could legally do this as deposits should be ringfenced.

I love the idea of rolling your own solutions, it's fun and challenging and you'll learn a lot especially when it comes to scaling. For actual deployment for a startup though, I struggle to see any benefit whatsoever.