dsuth

I was under the impression that the whole point of Bitcoin was that it was a decentralised currency, and your coins lived in your wallet. What is the value of actually entrusting your coins to 3rd party where they're outside of your control? Just the ability to exchange them for USD? Why would you keep coins with them on a long-term basis?

> There are plenty of entrepreneurs on HN alone who given the resources Gox had could manage to not (unknowingly) lose half a billion dollars due to broken programming in the timespan that Gox did.

Easy to say. Nobody sets out to fail.

Absolutely not. Purge systems like this WILL go off if they are not bypassed. Typically you have a short amount of time to hit the 'don't purge me, bro' button, before the system dumps.

They're designed to protect critical hardware, not people.

I think this is key, and it's important to understand that the self-discipline you are required to learn to excel in school and university is a large part of the reason you're there in the first place. It's not just about learning what's being taught, or even 'learning to learn', it's about conditioning your brain to function while withholding rewards for significant amounts of time.

I can spend hours and days programming incredibly boring, repetitive code, because the end result is valuable. Teaching your brain to understand this is the struggle the OP faces.

BTW especially with maths, teachers mostly fail at providing any context above 'learn this rule, so you can apply a slightly more advanced version of it next year'. There is a huge amount of context and thought around the mathematics that's being taught, but little effort ever goes into expounding it. If you're struggling with maths in particular, try reading up on some of the history of the topics to find out why they were invented, and what problems they solve. It brings an incredibly richness to what can be a fairly dry, abstract subject.

Agreed. The subset of people who think they're great, and are great is vanishingly small IME. In fact after around 15 years of working as an engineer, I can think of maybe 2 people who fit that subset, and easily 50 who were legends in their own lunchtime.

It's gotten to the point where anyone who proclaims to be an expert in something is immediately suspect to me. The smartest guys I know never have to say it, and truly never brandish their skillset like some kind of gaudy prize. That kind of attitude makes it very easy to be undermined.

Wait no longer! At the bottom of the linked post:

More importantly, McCaleb replied to my email. In response to my question "Did anyone ever actually trade card for card or money for card on Mtgox.com?", he replied "yeah they did".

You mustn't work in an office environment then. The only significant break from MS products I've seen has been Lotus Notes... which was significantly worse than Exchange.

MS Office is the defacto file format for office work, and MS Office on non-Windows platforms (ie. Mac) is so bad as to appear intentionally crippled.

Sadly, twitch gaming is not something that improves with age. Think more strategic gaming (and no, Dota2 doesn't count).

Depends on weight.

That sounds like an expensive way to do it. Shin splints are incredibly common for runners of all types, and a lot of the solutions are well-understood.

1. Get fitted for proper running shoes. There should be shops nearby that will watch your running style, and advise the right shape of shoe for your foot.

2. I wouldn't recommend running 'barefoot' full-time to start with, either with something like Vibrams or literally shoeless, but this is actually what fixed my shin splint problems. Most people who haven't trained in running are terrible heel-planters - striking the ground first with the heel, then rolling through. That jars your shins and legs (and upper body etc, it's all connected) something fierce. Running barefoot pretty much forces you to knock that shit off, and the results are quite dramatic.

So maybe don't go straight for barefoot, but either do a few short runs on grass shoeless, and pay attention to the way you're running. Aim to run on the balls of your feet only, and slowly relax into a flatter running style, but DON'T HEEL PLANT.

So. There are sports which don't require competing with other people in any real sense - take a look at rock climbing, hiking, riding bikes, SCUBA diving, tai chi, yoga, dancing etc etc. Some of these can be solitary if you don't like big groups.

On the physical pain side of things - that's just the hump you have to get over, and I agree it sucks. Once your body is trained to do a basic minimum of exercise, the endorphins outweigh the painful aspects, and it feels good man. Like, really good.

To your original question, I suspect 20min a day walking is a bit low, both in terms of your overall exercise per week, and intensity. Intensity counts for a lot in fitness, IMO it's worth pushing it a couple of days a week, go for a run or something. Or join a club that does some kind of fun exercise.

1000 calories a week seems a little bit low, but I'll admit that's just anecdotal - I'll do about 1kcal in a single 10 kilometre run.

In terms of fitness and general health, I notice a big difference if I'm getting regular (ie. most days of the week, allowing for 1 or 2 rest days) exercise of about half an hour, and at least one longer run/ride/whatever, out to about an hour or so. Take any excuse to do things the hard way when you're exercising - push up hills, do sprints, to intervals etc, and you'll notice an amazing difference.

Only downside to all this exercise is that you really need your 8 hours of sleep a night to recover.

Likewise disappointed at what passes for discussion on this topic, on Hacker News of all places.

It's recently been suggested that it actually is possible to drain someone's wallet using transaction malleability, if they are not using the reference software. See below:

https://anders.io/the-troublesome-history-of-the-bitcoin-exc...

At this stage those two thing (free and peaceful drug trade, and illegal drug trade) are very much the same thing.

This is weirdly incorrect for a number of reasons.

Firstly it's not simply a domain change. There's very good reason to believe that the architectural problems MTGox are facing today may be due in part to re-using not fit-for-purpose code, from the earlier revision of their product. Yes it never went live, and yes it's new people now; both of those things are irrelevant unless there was a complete code re-write at some point.

On to your next point, there certainly is a problem with being in over your head if you're dealing with financial trading. Some industries are not suited to amateur attempts, period. Think of the amount of litigation MTGox are opening themselves up to, not just in terms of people who use them, but based on the wider impact to the BTC community if they really stuff things up. Not good if they can't show due dilligence beyond "LOL we're a startup, what do you expect?".

People have been calling it that for as long as I've followed BTC and MTGox; that is, after all, it's name.

And there have been serious questions about it's credibility in all that time as well.

> Medicine hasn't fundamentally changed our quality of life.

Maybe not for you, but I think many current and former developing countries would strongly disagree. Take a look at this: http://annualletter.gatesfoundation.org/#section=home

Not to mention the environmental concerns with putting industrial complexes in one of our most pristine environments.

I hope you weren't seated at a desk when you wrote this out; it's a pretty horrific knee-jerk reaction.

Nowhere in the article does it suggest that sexual assault based on clothing is ok. It's actually a well-reasoned article which draws some good parallels between the way you act, and the way people react to you (not just sexually, but professionally and socially).

For my part, I think it's unfortunate that the advice given in the article is good, but at this point it's fairly true. I've worked in professional office environments for the better part of my life (in engineering), and dressing provocatively as a woman IS a sure way to make people treat you less seriously.

The author's points about women sending signals, and their typically passive role in engaging with the opposite sex is spot on. We just need men to come to the table and work on their social graces a bit more I think (and some women to stop playing the 'flaunting it but upset by attention' game).

Oh god, I bought this hook, line, and sinker. Son of a...

As I understand it, Apple also required any app selling things in iOS to give them 30%. Which is why for example, Amazon does not have an in-app link to their ebook site through the Kindle app. Bitcoin could potentially circumvent this.

I don't think anyone is forcing you to use an iPhone? They are well within their rights to decide what is and isn't acceptable on their devices. And you're well within your rights to buy something else. Or buy nothing (crazy concept, I know).

Agreed, the first thing that comes to mind is "careful what you wish". At present, the NSA has an obvious vulnerability in that their data centres are somewhat in the open, and scattered around. If this scheme actually worked, they'd simply use it to enforce even higher secrecy, and complete autonomy from local state utilities.

This is a dangerous path to go down, essentially assuming the role of aggressors against the state, and causing them to harden their defences. It would completely subvert the key concepts of democracy, and end bloody.

Change the law, change their oversight, work within the system to improve it.

As you would, really.

Not here (Australia). iTunes can take anywhere up to 40 minutes to download enough of a high res movie to start watching. And can then randomly stop the movie as it fails to keep up enough bandwidth over the 1:30 or so run duration.

Torrents are normally half an hour from start to finish.

I think a lot of time is wasted trying to interpret comments with spelling/grammar problems. Every time I see something like 'should of' instead of 'should have', my brain trips out and I have to re-read the sentence.

For a typical blog post, the amount of effort required to get it right is minuscule in comparison to the number of eyes which will (hopefully) read it. For a public relations employee, it's just a matter of professionalism.

In some cases IAP actually facilitates better games. Developers can put in enough effort to get the base game up and running, and then use IAP to spur additional content development throughout the life of the game.

I'm thinking specifically of Hero Academy here. A really neat little turn-based strategy game which cost a few bucks when it came out, and had (I think) 3 teams to choose from the beginning. More teams or different skins for your team cost extra. This was the best use of IAP I've seen, and facilitated the devs getting what was essentially a proof of concept out, then building on it.

For gamers it gave you the freedom to just buy the base game, or only pay for the additional features/teams etc that you felt were interesting. I would never have paid $20 for that game off the bat, but because I had the freedom to choose what I DID buy, I probably ended up spending a lot more, and happily so.

So IAP is not inherently bad, it's just frequently (and intentionally) misused to turn games into cash generating slot machines via intentionally bad game design. It doesn't have to, and isn't, always that way.

I never had the click about pointers, I guess the way they were introduced to me just made them feel intuitive.

I'll never forget the time when programming changed from mechanically entering statements, to controlling the flow of data through a program though (also in C). Definitely a brain-expanding experience :)

Don't these bans typically have to do with things like exporting cryptographic softer or techniques? This is the first thing that popped into my head.