elemeno

I don't think they'd be quite as hard to displace as people assume either. I've not spent very long looking at MtGox but I'm sure that all the usual tricks that real-world exchanges use to boost usage would work against MtGox as well - offering tighter spreads, lower transaction fees, encouraging market makers with incentives such as refunded fees as long as they're covering the market for a certain portion of the month, etc.

Because the daily volume of global FX markets is in excess of $4.5 trillion. The total value of all BTC in existence right now is in the low, likely single digit, billions of dollars.

A major volatility event in BTC will have an almost non-existent effect on FX markets - were every bitcoin exchanged for dollars in one day, it wouldn't even make up 1% of that day's FX trades globally.

A major volatility event in a major world currency (USD, GBP, EUR etc.) would have a massive effect on pretty much every market - it would effect FX, Futures, Fixed Income and Commodities markets, not to mention stock markets and derivatives markets.

Given the absence of the later, it's pretty safe assumption that the volatility is in BTC and not conventional FX markets.

The security and technical challenges aren't as high as most people seem to think and are pretty familiar to people who work on the technical side of trading in the financial world. I would imagine though that most of the people with the knowhow are already in jobs lucrative enough that theres little incentive to write a BTC exchange.

Or at least that's how my calculations go - while I've got the technical and financial background to make me tempted to write a derivatives platform for BTC, I already make a decent salary and my perceived risk vs profit calculation doesn't work out to a number that would make it worth my while. Unless I get bored enough to do it anyway!

Since Mono still seems to be going strong and seems to be one of the official platforms for F#, I'm not sure that something that happened seven years ago is necessarily great proof that they're smothering Mono.

You generally can't just change the policy - you entered into a contract with the people who paid $99 for a year of free delivery. You can change the policy for new buyers, but the agreement with the older ones still exists.

The build-your-own-space-launch-system isn't a small difference, and I'd argue it's where much of the educational aspect of KSP comes from. It teaches you how to design a spacecraft and forces you to work out exactly what you need to get a spacecraft into orbit and then to another planet. That's something distinctly different from Orbiter which focuses on the 'how to fly a spacecraft' aspect.

A gas chromatograph? I'd imagine it would need a decent database to compare to as well, and it certainly wouldn't be too trivial a task.

anarky - your comment is showing up as dead, which is a shame since it was interesting

> And 5 years before Cryptonomicon there was Tim May's Cyphernomicon (which obviously inspired the title and theme of Stephenson's book).

> In 1995 there was Stephenson's short story in Wired about digital cash - "The Great Simoleon Caper".

> Of course, the protagonists of Atlas Shrugged had renounced paper money and started using privately minted gold coins from Midas Mulligan's Bank way back in 1957.

That's not correct with regards to the dollar. It's inflationary because the purchasing power of those dollars in the bank decreases more rapidly than you accrue interest on them.

The current US inflation rate is around 2%, so unless you're making more than 2% interest on your money every year, your purchasing power is going down. For point of reference, yield on a 1yr treasury bill is around 0.14%.

Bitcoin is deflationary because, once the coin limit is hit, the number of available coins will decrease over time simply due to coins being lost. As the currency contracts, the purchasing power of a coin goes up over time.

In a world where BTC had an inflation rate of -2%, 1 BTC now would buy what 0.98BTC will buy in a year. Any investments you make now need to yield in excess of 2% per annum for you to be better off. In an inflationary world, an investment only needs to beat the T-Bill rate for you to gain (or least be less worse off), which allows for less risky investments.

The point the author was making is that quality digital journalism is in a tough place right now, with small budgets to spend on features, but also the expectation that they'll churn out good work and worthwhile articles.

They're not claiming to own the style or colours, they're claiming that some of illustrations used in FlatUI are illustrations that LayerVault owns the copyright to.

The rebuttal is a DMCA Counter-Notification. They're easy to write and just asset that you do in fact own the copyright, or are otherwise authorised the use the materials that the DMCA notice referred to. Once that's been done, the host has to restore the removed content within a certain time period and the issuers of the original notice have to take action directly against you (as in sue you) if they want to pursue the issue further.

Before we start yelling about "abuse of process" though, we might want to wait for more information about what's actually going on here. It would hardly be the first time one small company has used another company's assets without permission, so perhaps we should see what LayerVault has to say before getting so worked up.

We might want to see if they're actually trolls first.

While I know it's pretty de rigueur on HN to assume that anyone who issues a DMCA takedown is evil/a troll/an idiot who doesn't understand the internet, it doesn't mean that some of them aren't being filed because their copyright is actually being violated.

Until there's more evidence either from LayerVault that DesignModo has used their assets, or from DesignModo that they haven't - something beyond DesignModo just shouting "they're lying!" in any case, perhaps it's best to withhold judgement for the time being.

University of Bristol teaches Haskell in the first year (along with C, Java and a Prolog varient called Frill) if you're doing CS or CSE (Computer Systems Engineering, four year mix of CS and EE).

I wouldn't be surprised if Oxford and Cambridge both teach it as well since last I looked (well over a decade ago now) their CS courses had a heavy theoretical slant and Haskell and the Lambda calculus go together well!

I'd imagine that the likelihood of being taught Haskell at university correlates well with the university treating CS as an offshoot of it's maths department.

The taste difference might not be worth the price, but to my mind the difference in how the hens are treated more than makes up for it.

I think that both Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall have done programs that have covered how poultry is farmed, but which ever one it was that I watched it definitely left me with the lasting belief that I don't want to eat eggs or chicken that isn't free range.

I've got a feeling that I first heard this story in the paperback version of the Jargon File - The New Hacker's Dictionary (3rd Ed). That book alone is a pretty great compendium of stories from the 70s and 80s.

"boffin" is British slang for a scientist/researcher. It's got generally positive connotations indicating that the said person is smart.

Since The Register is a British site, and is also known for often being somewhat tongue in cheek, there really isn't anything to read in to their use of the word.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boffin

From the caption, it looks like the S3 was just being used as a compass. It's a strange state of affairs when, in what's effectively a war zone, it's easier to use the compass in your phone than a real physical compass!

In the UK, it's not unusual for employers to offer private health insurance (or at least, it's pretty common for profesional jobs - I can't comment for other types of jobs!). From their point of view, it's comparatively inexpensive and the cost is probably easy recouped from their employees being able to get health problems dealt with faster than they might on the NHS so they're off work for less time.

Edit - Given that we've got the NHS as well, losing your private coverage isn't such a big deal. It's nice to have, not a must have.

I'd imagine that it's a result of people running into the same issue whilst duel booting Windows on Macs with Retina screens.

Yup. You can happily pay for private insurance, or pay out of pocket for private care, and you'll be able to get all the drugs that the NHS thinks are too expensive for the benefits they bring, or surgical procedures that are considered experimental.

Both of your examples are tragic and clearly represent failings of the system - some of which have since been fixed, and at least one of which would likely have happened in the US as well.

I hope you'll forgive me if I sound callous in this post - I certainly don't mean to, but I also recognise that this is a touchy subject when talking about someone's own family.

In the case of your great-uncle the problem is likely that it was the 70s and fourty years ago there was nowhere near the same awareness of the symptoms of cardiac arrest amongst non-physicians. If the doctor wasn't there, chances are it wouldn't have been picked up on. Even had he been rushed to hospital, his chance of survival would have been pretty low - heart attacks are still a major killer in the 2010s where even in London, which has the highest survival rate in the UK for heart attacks that occur outside a hospital, the survival rate is only 30%. Keep in mind though that survival rates have increased significantly over the last fourty years with advances in diagnostics and treatment as well as improved defibrillators etc.

Your grandmother's case is a more clear cut case of failure. Waiting times have long been a problem in the NHS, but it's a matter of resource contention, and it's a problem which they're trying to improve with the guarantee that patients should start treatment within 18 weeks of their first appointment and that tests should be done within six weeks. The only, very rough, numbers I can find for the US suggests that scans and tests are normally done within seven to twenty weeks when cancer is suspected. Even in the US, the problem of resources exists - there's only so many hospitals that can perform certain types of scans, and only so many doctors who are capable of properly interpreting the results. The thing I can't comment on is whether or not the physician who saw your grandmother should have treated it as a higher priority or if, given the symptoms that were presented, it would be reasonable to assume that there was a benign cause and it being cancer was pretty remote possibility. If it's the case that his prognosis was obviously wrong given the symptoms, then there's a case to be made for malpractice, or at least a complaint to the GMC and/or NHS trust.

It's not about autistic biases for me, at least not when the topic is the NHS. All of my father, uncle, aunt and other-half are doctors all of whom work for, at least in part, the NHS and are respectively an oncologist, dermatologist, GP and ob/gyn. As you might imagine, I spend quite a lot of time listening to them talk about the NHS, their particular trusts and their hospitals and the failings of all the above. All of them would much rather live here where you'll be looked after by the NHS, and can also have private care if you're willing to pay for it (though often the only difference is that you get a nicer room and shorter waits for non-emergency operations), than in the US where the patient is merely the mechanism through which you bill the insurance company.

> In a system where you can't sue your healthcare provider for egregious malpractice because they're a governmental body and are thus subject to the same citizen-sues-state rules as law enforcement or any other public service, I fear for the quality of our healthcare.

That's nonsense, hospitals and NHS Trusts are routinely sued for malpractice, along with the doctors involved. There's nothing special about any part of the NHS that makes it impossible for them to be sued - they're not part of the state, they're just state funded. Hell, you can sue most government bodies in the UK since there's no restrictions on suing the state, only against suing the Crown.

It makes your 'multiple relatives' claim seem somewhat suspect.

They were freshmen studying wine and wine making.

As another comment on here points out, the power produced from the solar panels is nowhere near enough to power the charging station. At best, it helps them offset the costs slightly due to the difference between the price they sell the (solar) power to the grid, and the price they pay for power from the grid - there's a 18-20 cent/kWh difference in their favour.

From the jobseaker's perspective having a salary range listed, even if it's a broad range like "various positions $40k-$100k", tells me whether it's worth my time applying.

If the range of numbers doesn't cover what I want my target salary to be then it's simply a waste of my time to spruce up my CV, write a cover letter and get the process started. Chances are that I won't be in a position to ask what the salary range is until I'm in an interview, but by that point I've already invested a not insignificant amount of time into applying for the job - especially since I've had to take time off work to come to the interview.

Frankly, I feel that any job advert that doesn't include solid indications of what the company might be willing to pay is either a company that's arrogant enough as to believe that my time is worthless, or it's a purely speculative advert with no real job there. Either way, I'll be passing them over in favour of companies with some more respect for their applicants.

There's a decent iPhone/iPad app called news:yc in the App Store already.

It doesn't sound like these layoffs were prompted by money problems, so asking people to take paycuts for 'the good of the company' wouldn't solve the problem of there people who no longer fit into the company vision of what they want to be doing.

It also mentioned that they had staff on hand to help calm someone down if they started to have a bad reaction.