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.
Yeah, nobody is going to notice or care about an error of a cent or two for something like retail, especially if it evens out in the long run. It matters for finance, not for stuff like Uber or Amazon. Just make sure you render it properly on the front end and nobody will care whether you use floats, ints, or decimals. Be consistent in the back end and careful in the front end, ideally with standard functions for translations.
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.
Not to mention the pain if you're selling low value (sub-penny) items, that get scaled by weight or some other dimension. The errors can often throw out invoice totals in the most annoying manner.
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 wonder as well. The self-proclaimed world's largest spa, Therme Erding [1], is the result of an oil drilling attempt hitting a hot sulphur/fluoride spring instead at ~2.3km depth. Today, it powers the entire spa and close by communities with geothermal energy.
Just need a way to efficiently extract the heat from whatever depth and convert it to electricity by usual means.
It's really an almost surreal experience, with encrusted hot spring water pipes and steam everywhere in the district. Sometime you even need to be careful where you step to avoid to be scolded by steam coming up from the ground, likely due to overflow from the hot water boreholes flowing to the rainwater drainage system.
And it's not just the modern hot water boreholes they use to supply the hot spring baths & other users. One time we even saw a traffic code & couple sandbags placed on a random hillside next to the road, as there was steam escaping out of it. :D
I've had an idea that is probably impractical and/or impossible, but seems like it would be neat: Every house should have a super deep hole drilled in their back yard, and a small self-contained Stirling engine [1] generator lowered into it, with wires up to the house. Free electricity on a micro scale, 24/7. I'm sure the idea has been explored by people with a much better grasp of physics and engineering than myself. But we've done crazier things as humans - like covering half of the ground in asphalt and stringing wires point to point around the globe, so it doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
For any heat engine - including a stirling engine - you need a heat difference between the hot and cold side, ideally as big as possible. If you put the stirling engine at the bottom of the hot hole, the whole machine will be hot, there will be no difference in temperature and it will not run.
This also discounts stuff like the need for maintenance, that is hard to achieve at the bottom of a hot & likely very humid if not water filled borehole.
For that reason, most geothermal systems pump water down & then back up again (possibly using multiple wells) & have the heat engines at the surface, where they can be easily serviced & a good heat differential can be achieved, via air or water cooling.
This in the end, is generally an industrial operation though, not really something suitable for every single house. Still helps with maintenance, as you can provide energy for many houses & don't hat to maintain the geothermal power production equipment for each house separately.
Lots of potential uses indeed — also for travel, potential megastructures, and mining beyond the wildest hopes of asteroids but it's likely to be harder to get the stuff (gold, iron, etc) down there than it is to travel millions of kilometers out there through the void and radiations...
And yes, potentially much more heat than we'd know what to do with currently.
Interesting hard sci-fi (well, basic physics principles mostly) about it by Isaac Arthur: https://youtu.be/jZQP2oNDkAM
Disclaimer: absolutely not affiliated with the man but deeply hoping that such perspectives become maintream, normal expectations. Not holding my breath, but one hacker at a time, we'll get there!
Yes. The problem is that the thermal conductivity of rock isn't great, so it needs to be in a "hot" area and to have some kind of underground fracturing allowing water to spread out and heat up.
It must be easier to get environmental permits for geothermal since it has such a small footprint compared to wind and solar and won’t kill any birds, make noise, make pulsing light, etc.
Let me check Wikipedia for you: "The Earth's geothermal resources are theoretically more than adequate to supply humanity's energy needs, but only a very small fraction may be profitably exploited. Drilling and exploration for deep resources is very expensive. Forecasts for the future of geothermal power depend on assumptions about technology, energy prices, subsidies, plate boundary movement and interest rates."
When the article mentioned that the temperature was twice what they had expected, I wondered the exact same thing.
Could they cover the hole, pour water into it and use air pressure changes in the hole to generate electricity? There must be a way to make the hole air tight. I suspect that the rock near the bottom of the hole would already be air tight.
Also I never understood why steam engines release all the hot stream into the air? Doesn't that waste energy to let the hot steam out? Isn't it better to keep the heat trapped inside the system and generate electricity from the pressure only?
Isn't it better to keep the heat trapped inside the system and generate electricity from the pressure only?
Steam engines are old technology. They've been replaced by modern steam turbines, in which the steam is either cooled and recirculated, or used for other processes, or both.
Geothermal steam turbines typically use a heat exchanger and release the original steam, as geothermal steam tends to be very corrosive.
> Also I never understood why steam engines release all the hot stream into the air?
They don't. All practical steam engines have condensers that recover most of the water and as much of the heat as current technology and the laws of thermodynamics allow.
In steam trains it is often injected to the chimney to increase draft, forcing more air through the firebox, improving combustion. This of course uses up a massive amount of water.
For this reason most steam engines in ships and elsewhere generally did have condensers & reused the steam as feedwater, as you describe.
I was thinking that if the steam had to travel up 10km to the surface, that would give it more time to cool down. Maybe in cold countries, they could use outside air temperature to cool rising steam before it reaches the top of the hole.
Yes, but not at a viable cost. Drilling is extraordinarily expensive and complicated.
There's the added issue that rock's thermal conductivity is low, and any thermal borehole would have a limited effective lifespan as it reduced the temperature of adjacent material.
Geothermal energy is a viable and widely tapped energy resource, where it's available. In almost all such locations, it's been substantially exploited, with two notable exceptions: the African Rift Valley (mostly in Kenya), and the Yellowstone supervolcano, a national park in the US.
Substantial developments exist in California (The Geysers), Hawaii, Iceland, Japan, the Philippines, New Zeland, and quite probably elsewhere. 1GW+ plants are possible, comparable with the largest practical thermal and nuclear power plants (generally 1-4 GW, though multiple plants or reactors may be co-located). Worldwide capacity as of 2015 is about 12.5 GW.
The two principle variants are standard and enhanced geothermal. A standard plant utilises naturally-occurring steam, and is far less expensive to develop. "Enhanced geothermal" involves boreholes and often water injection to provide power generation.
I'd followed the case of one such project in Australia, the Geodynamics Habanero project. I'd first read of that in 2014 through a grossly misleading and fatuously optimistic report which struck me as both odd and curiously fact-free. Digging showed that in reality the project was running years late, at 1/50th originally-planned capacity, well over budget, and with significant technical challenges.
Even had the project gone as initially scoped, the wells would have had a useful life of about 20-40 years, after which all available useful thermal energy would have been extracted, and would have to be replenished over ... long time, possibly centuries or more. There's a reason the Earth's interior remains molten -- rock is a very good insulator.
I'm not an opponent of geothermal power -- where appropriate it's highly useful, dependable, safe, and proven. In Africa it stands to make a tremendous difference, where even a small plant would make a tremendous increase in the availability (and probably reliability) of electricity. I'd encourage consideration of developing even such normally off-limits natural park resources such as Yellowstone (specifically excluded from a USGS geothermal resource survey I'd checked on some years back).
But enhanced development through borehole-based wells looks like a very long shot.
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.
The problem with paying it is that even if it works, and all the machines decrypt in a timely fashion, you have no idea if the attackers have left anything else in the network that they could use to enter again.
You might not even find out the original entry point, and stop others following. Also it will be expensive.
You still may never find the entry point if you don't recover the machines. Saudi Aramco and Maersk fell victim to similar ransomware attacks and practically had to start from scratch buying storage devices straight from manufacturers to get back online. NotPetya was so destructive it didn't leave behind much in the way of meaningful evidence. If you don't recover the encrypted data you probably won't recover evidence that points to patient zero anyway.
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.
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:
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.
>[…] We're hoping to cover the transition in education from between Scratch and other tools such as Unity
This would be amazing. Every child want to make games, especially with a 'proper' engine like Unity (or maybe Godot, but I don't think that has as much street cred yet).
Going from either drag and drop in scratch, or very basic python to using a full game engine requires a lot, but if that can be crossed then I think there is a very clear motivation for students to start learning in the first place.
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.
