People think it is a magical black box because the code in the parent comment, and in the thread you linked, is three and a half years old, and HN does not run these days on exactly the same code that was open-sourced in news.arc.
It's one thing to charm writers. But what about charming readers, too?
As a reader I am not charmed.
I find it all too similar and slick. It is "designed" to within an inch of its life. The text and pictures don't seemed anchored to anything and just seem to float there on the page. This deprives them of any weight. It makes everything feel pompous or grandiose.
But almost all of the things on that page -- standing orders, direct debits, day to day banking, maintenance, transactions -- are free of charge at most UK personal current accounts.
The only thing I noticed that would have a charge is sending money outside the UK, even to EU countries.
You might get a massive increase in personal freedom and privacy from using bitcoin. But there is a difference between Pure Bitcoin, so-to-speak -- everyone is their own bank -- and a bitcoin-based service.
On Circle's website, it states: "Keeping your money safe is our top priority." That suggests Circle, too, is in actual control of your money -- like the retail bank service they aim to improve.
So how do you know the things you write -- recording transactions, storing your data, restricting access, hacker susceptibility -- won't apply here?
My point is that faced between two choices where a consumer gives someone else control of their money, the traditional system in many places is so far ahead in terms of reach, convenience and regulation compliance that a startup has a lot of work to do.
Every time I read an headline about "bringing bitcoin to the masses" I'm reminded of the saying that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.
> "We don’t think consumers should be charged for using their own money."
Where I live (UK), I can't think of anything bitcoin services like Circle offer that is definitively better than my existing bank setup.
I'm not charged for using my own money. I don't pay a monthly fee for my bank account. I don't pay anything to send money to other people in the UK, which covers 98% of all the people I send money to. If I do send money to people in the UK, it's usually virtually instant, because of Faster Payments. I can withdraw money from nearly all ATMs in the UK free of charge -- the only exception are rare independent ones in places like nightclubs and out-of-the-way convenience stores, and I honestly can't ever remember using one. I can check my bank balance on my phone -- by app or by SMS. In lots of outlets I can pay for small value transactions, anything up to £20, just by waving my bank card.
I understand the banking system in the USA is ... different. (Some would say behind the times.) But in the UK at least, promoting a bitcoin-based service based around the concept of better retail banking is a hard sell.
You didn't mention that you thought the app was simple. You said you thought running crowdfunding for it was dishonest and immoral.
In any case... Parsing 35TB of HTML, JavaScript and images, and then releasing that as structured data, on top of rebuilding a sustainable web service? I don't think it is simple at all. It's not exactly a hackathon project.
> -b /- root(b^2-4ac to the tune of Pop Goes the Weasel
Woah. In the UK the most we got was SOHCAHTOA: "Smiles of happiness come after having tankards of ale", or "Some old hag cracked all her teeth on apples".
Electronic publishing services, namely, publication of text and graphic works of others in the field of general encyclopedic knowledge; providing education, entertainment and information services, namely, providing information via the Internet in the field of general encyclopedic knowledge.
With the austerity measures in place in the UK in recent years there have been a few cases of despair at councils closing their swimming pools and leisure centres to try to cut costs. This is often despite fewer and fewer people attending them over the years.
Public swimming pools are a rich seam for nostalgia in Britain. Many public swimming pools were originally built in Victorian times and so fall into the "Always There" backdrop of a city, things you never really enthuse about but would miss if they were gone.
Lidos, public outdoor pools, make up the other half of Swimming Pool Nostalgia. Most were built in the 1930s. They had already fallen out of fashion, really, when I was a kid -- since holidays abroad had become cheap -- but there was one quite near us, about 30 mins drive away, and going there was a bit of a treat.
There have been a few campaigns in recent years -- some successful -- to restore lidos or at least preserve them.
The class was usually split up in to groups of about 10, depending on age / proficiency. There'd be a teacher leading each group.
There would also be the lifeguards from the pool. If I remember rightly, this was at least two, if not more -- there always seemed to be one sitting up in the high chair, and there always seemed to be one patrolling the pool edge.
It was a 25m pool, and while the school was there it was closed to the wider public.
I suppose there's the argument that most of the earth's surface is covered in water; it would be useful to not be afraid of it, to know how to move in it, and to be confident doing so.
But then, I grew up on an island where you're never more than 75 miles from the sea; undoubtedly that's affected my worldview.
> In the UK, learning to swim is part of the national curriculum, unlike the US.
More details on exactly what kids in the UK are taught:
Swimming and water safety: All schools must provide swimming instruction either in key stage 1 or key stage 2.
In particular, pupils should be taught to:
- swim competently, confidently and proficiently over a distance of at least 25 metres- use a range of strokes effectively [for example, front crawl, backstroke and breaststroke]- perform safe self-rescue in different water-based situations
Key Stage 1 = Years 1 and 2, so aged 5 to 7 years. Key Stage 2 = Years 3 to 6, so ages 7 to 11.
From my own experience 25 years ago that last bit, about safe self-rescue, involved:
* how to enter water safely if you need to (ie. jumping or lowering yourself in, when not to dive etc)
* making floats out of clothing (ie. your old pyjama bottoms)
* swimming underwater, including through hoops weighed down on the pool floor with bricks (presumably to mimic navigating tight flooded spaces)
* treading water (for AGES)
* mushroom floating (not sure if there's a technical term for this?)
* how to recover somebody from the water
We went once a week to the council pool on the other side of town and pretty much everyone, all 30 of us, had learned all that by the time we finished and left for high school aged 11.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BTFON#Collaborations
Belgium, Germany, Greece, Jersey...