skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If not my family, then maybe I could go Robin Hood, steal from the rich and sell cheaply to the poor.

Note "for value". If the price is unrealistically cheap, the courts can point out that the buyer should have been suspicious.

> I can't imagine that it works that way. I can believe that as a buyer of stolen good without knowing they were stolen, you won't be punished. But you will still have to return the stuff.

You don't have to return it, it's yours now. The point is that the bona fide purchaser is not a criminal and acted in good faith. If, however, there is the slightest whiff of a hint of a suspicion, those bona fides collapse and title reverts to the original owner.

It is harder to prove bona fides than you might think. Got a great price? Not for value, test fails. Knew the seller? Not bona fides, test fails. Bought it from someone who has no history of selling those items? Possible notice, test fails. And so on.

Look, here's the thing. Lawyers and judges have been working on this system (the common law) for nearly a thousand years. For day-to-day stuff like property, the loopholes are well and truly closed and have been for hundreds of years.

That I was an inadequate law student and now am an inadequate explainer does not change the fact that the common law is pretty damn adequate at providing sensible legal protection for almost all imaginable transactions.

(IANAL, TINLA)
No he didn't. He withdrew them as proof of concept. Right now it's not even clear who he should give them back to. Furthermore, unless he caused the selloff there was nothing wrong with putting in his $0.0101 order. I suspect the bitter people on the bitcoin forum are the ones who had $0.01 orders in and assumed that fractional values would be rounded down the the nearest cent. They were hoping to make some easy money from others' misfortune and are angry because they were outwitted.
There are two sides to this story. Here is Mt Gox's response: https://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=20250.0
The point that I think everyone is missing here, is that there are different kinds of "talent." The mythical "5x more productive developer" is almost certainly not 5x more productive at all imaginable tasks, and would almost certainly be completely miscast if assigned to doing some jobs... jobs that probably need to be done (depending on what the project is). IOW, I don't believe there is such a thing as a (universally) "5x more productive developer". What there are, are people with certain talents and strengths, that - when aligned with what is being asked of them - result in great productivity.

IOW, the person who's a guru at coding machine-learning algorithms in Java, is probably not also the person who is a guru at writing OS kernels in C, who is not also the person who's a guru at writing web applications in Python, who is not the person who's 5x more productive at writing automated tests, etc., etc.

My personal belief (which I'll freely admit is based on no scientific research) is that the best scenario is to have a team where the members of the team are each as talented as possible, respective to what their role on the team is. And it's entirely possible that the ideal team will not look - at first blush anyway - like a team of "5 rockstar developers" as people might imagine it.

To go back to sports analogies... there isn't one universal "rockstar football player" talent. The talents needed by a Quarterback are different from that needed by an Offensive Tackle, which are different from those of a Wide Receiver, or a blocking Fullback. And to win games, you need people who have the requisite skills at each position. But you can't judge all of them by one generic metric.

I think a lot of you guys also underestimate the value of chemistry on a team. A team that has been together for a while, where the members have learned each other's strengths and weaknesses, and where the members truly work in harmony, can accomplish a lot even without "superstars."
Mother Searches for Son | KATC.com | Acadiana-Lafayette, Louisiana
That's different: the bank would take a loss to pay you back, even if it couldn't recover the funds from the thief. MtGox isn't proposing to take any losses, as far as I've heard.
It took almost 4 hours to discover that anyone could log in without a password? There has to be more to it than that, right?
If the exponent isn't growing, it is not exponential growth.
Ha! Must be a browser thing; I actually measured it with xScope.
Before seeing this crash for the last couple of days, it felt like the advantage was that bitcoin users were mostly geeks, and mostly trustworthy.

Yeah whatever. 90% of the people using Bitcoin don't believe in the Federal Reserve system or fiat money and just want anonymous online cash transactions. There is nothing wrong with such beliefs or desires, but the idea that such people are on a higher moral plane is the complaint of a naive person at best.
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I had transactions in the flash crash that weren't rolled back and I lost a big chunk of cash (well, for me).

I just don't see how an exchange that doesn't have builtin failsafes/circuit breakers can just roll back trades. I think that in this case, the exchange should be liable. He was just exploiting the market.
Having a patent pending is a scare-tactic use by alot of companies to scare off competitors. Some companies will keep re-applying for a patent even after being turned down, simply so they can keep displaying a "patent pending" mark on their product.

I'm no expert on patent law, but I would enquire as to which patent applications he's referring to (an ambiguous "we has patents" statement doesn't get them anywhere), and then I would check the applications and the filing party's previous filing history. If they're a pending troll, ignore and move on. If they don't have any actual pending patents relative to your work, ignore and move on. If your work predates his patent application, file a prior art declaration with the patent office against his patents, and move on.

Personally I dislike software patents to the extreme. I believe copyright is enough for software. If people want patent protection on their software, they should have to demonstrate working code that shows their concept in action, and they should submit the full source code with build tools and instructions. The point of patents is that 50 years after a patent is granted, the public should be able to pick up the patent and exactly replicate the original invention from the patent materials alone. I know that is certainly not the case for most modern patents, especially software patents.
True, they won't work everywhere that well. There's another presentation from Peter Norvig: http://norvig.com/design-patterns/ppframe.htm

It has a lot of examples which fold into one liners in dynamic languages or are simply "the way it could be done" instead of a pattern (they don't require additional code or attention - see abstract factory).
Whoa there. Your parity-checked bytecoins are only worth 7 bitcoins each (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8-bit_clean).
>How do you know?

Pubkey auth connecting to openssh on freebsd to hippa- pci- sox- and sas 70- compliant storage with a warrant canary and you can give them a call to talk to the engineers (I have). Looking back dropbox feels like a fly by night in comparison.
Hacker Monthly is basically an HN wrapper, and seems to be doing well - 5,000 subscribers as of a few months ago[2].

[1] http://hackermonthly.com/
[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445314
Except the only reason taxis can "show that they matter" by shutting down is because they've been given a monopoly from government (via medallion system).

The result of this monopoly, at least in San Francisco, is a shortage of cabs, poor customer service from cabs and high prices.

All this strike proves is that no matter how good they have it, they'll always ask for more.

The fact that cab drivers also managed to form a union means nothing other than they're smart because they can leverage that to get a good deal for themselves (at the expense of every other person living in San Francisco). Forming a union doesn't suddenly entitle them to anything.

Uber is a long due competition to cabs. It improves the lives of people living in San Francisco. If cabs can't compete, then they deserve to lose and Uber has every right to compete with them.

That is the point of capitalism: ability to compete. Taxis don't deserve special treatment. Neither does Uber, for that matter.
The comparison of 5 to 1000 is misguided.

In the early stages of a company, where you need creative thinking, new ideas, rapid iteration, and are building the technical foundations of the company, you need the 5 brilliant engineers, and wouldn't have anything to do with the 1,000.

In the later stages of the company, when you have 500 enterprise customers creating support requests and you have internal payroll systems etc., then you need the 1000 engineers.

And in technology, if you don't have the 5 at all times, you're on borrowed time. Look at what Steve Jobs, Jonny Ive, and pals did to Nokia.
Remember folks, unit testing is your friend.
Did anyone else read the headline as "US Government Wants Double Precision Sentences for Hackers"?
If I were this guy, I'd have my attorney try to get an immediate injunction in place. It seems like mtgox is just making this up as they go.
Hey, it's free labour.
I haven't kept anything that absolutely had to be secret on Dropbox, but I have kept stuff that I'd slightly prefer not to be public.

I'm going to change my behavior, the only things that go on Dropbox now will be completely public. They've completely lost my trust.
I've been sleeping in a hammock every night for a little over a year now.

Hammocks are cold, that is the biggest problem. You also can't really just flop down on one and lounge out the same way that you can in a bed.

From a totally utilitarian standpoint of "place for sleeping", a hammock has some benefits. It's small, it's highly portable (mine fits in my backpack), and it is pretty comfortable.

In reality, though, most people use their beds for a lot more than sleeping. Reading in my hammock is pretty difficult, so is using my laptop if I want to type anything. You can't comfortably fit more than one person in one (unless you've got a garden hammock with spreader bars on it).
They should be going out of their way to retain these.
The blog post mentions that they ended all logged in sessions, but did they also rollback any new sync settings set from the start of the incident to when they did their cleanup? eg:

User Joe's account is logged into by attacker Tom. Tom sets his computer as one of Joe's "My Computers". Does what they did to clean up the problem invalidate this or does Joe have to log into his account, look at his list of "My Computers" and remove the ones he doesn't recognize manually to stop Tom's system from automatically syncing all his stuff until he does finally notice (which is likely never for most users, I'd assume)?
I really want a hammock in my (small) office. Any great options?
Sure.

I live in a very old house that is made of brick, so I couldn't really mount mine directly to the walls (I could, but I'd rather not anchor things into the brick on a house I don't own [it's a rental]).

I bought a hammock stand for $100 and it fits in my rather small bedroom just fine.
On the other hand, the commercial pressures of operating complex metal and concrete structures way beyond their design-life may lead to pressure to relax standards, that when combined with aging materials, lead to a chain of events that creates a serious accident.

We've had quite a few very narrow escapes in the US. Here's just one:

Davis-Besse
http://events.nace.org/library/corrosion/NuclearIndustry/nuc...
>High pressure inside the reactor vessel pushed the stainless steel outward into the cavity formed by the boric acid. The stainless steel bent but did not break. Cooling water remained inside the reactor vessel not because of thick carbon steel but due to a thin layer of stainless steel.

Picture of corrosion here:
http://www.nirs.org/photogallery/davisbesseimages.htm

Personally, I'll support nuclear power if based on a reasonably clean low-waste producing technology, and if it can be proven that a safe passive shut-down is possible under station black-out conditions, without human intervention.
Now we know why rocking babies to sleep works.
Open textbooks - what do you think?
Really misleading headline. The study wasn't about hammocks at all, just a normal bed that sways. Makes me think more of being on a boat. I haven't experienced the effect, but David Foster Wallace wrote about it: http://www.harpers.org/media/pdf/dfw/HarpersMagazine-1996-01...

(Not going to give the page number of the sleep thing because I believe everyone should read the whole thing :)
Not that it would really change anything, but there isn't much wording around apologies or being sorry about letting that happened.

More details would have been nice too. Allowing anybody to log into anybody's account is a big deal, even if in the end a small percentage of people were likely affected. It's not like I couldn't access my account for a few hours or that the sync got messed up somehow.

Also, it'd be nice to know how the bug was discovered on Dropbox's side: did they realize it themselves or was it from nice people who found the problem?
I'm shocked that Dropbox didn't actually unit test their authentication method. Doesn't it seem like there is something else going on here?
This has a lot of potential. I'm going to try it out, and if it is as ruff as timerickson said, I might have to come back to it once they sand it down.
MtGox new password scheme SHA512 still insecure
https://support.mtgox.com/entries/20208066-huge-bitcoin-sell-off-due-to-a-compromised-account-rollback

"SHA-512 multi-iteration salted hashing is in enabled and ready for when we get users reactivating their accounts."

I used to use a SHA-512 multi-iteration salted hashing scheme for my website's account passwords and after the Gawker attack and about 5 other HNers telling me it was not as secure as bcrypt, I decided to test cracking my own hashed password with a GPU brute force.

All I can tell you, is that it is NOT secure. Even with multi-iteration salting. It's just too FAST, that's the problem. BCRYPT allows you to adjust the WORK FACTOR to make it SLOWER and therefore not economical to brute force passwords.

----

After the hacks and now knowing that they are UPGRADING their password hashing scheme to a process I used TWO YEARS ago; I will safely say that I will not use MtGox now or in the future.
Come now. Ruby is extremely dominant here.

Also, Indiana is boring, has poor infrastructure, and any special events that would lure young people are concentrated almost exclusively in Broad Ripple/Mass Ave/etc. Mass transit is a joke. I mean, really, bus stops in a ditch?

I was born and raised in Indiana; Greenwood no less. After high school I left and lived all over the world. Indiana is bland and very boring. It has very little in common with the East coast unless you're talking about places like Wilmington NC or Jacksonville, FL. Oh, and the utterly shit weather.

I still don't get your defensiveness. I moved back for cheap schoolin' since I'm still an in-state resident. It's fine if you're ready to settle down and play some golf, mow the lawn, etc. But in the context of my blog post, where businesses are doing exciting things with Python, Indiana is dead in those terms.
>The Vermont Yankee plant has the same design as Fukushima Daiichi and was approved for a 20 year extension, ten days after the Fukushima meltdown

Are you suggesting that Vermont is likely to be hit by a tsunami?

The Fukushima plants did not 'fail', they were beaten to fucking death. For whatever reason, the regulations in Japan did not consider tsunamis of that magnitude possible, despite the fact that they have happened several times in recorded history in the same region.

>Also, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) "has never turned down a plant relicensing"

That's probably literally true. This is because the process involves a long period of examination and overseen investigation by parties with no stake in keeping them running - it would be obvious that such a requested license would be turned down years before any kind of formal 'No' would be issued, and continuing to seek one would waste millions of dollars.
Same for me -- no close friends use it. Not much of a point: Increasingly, I see people using Facebook places, which has similar functionality, as well as geotagged tweets.

I seldom used my Foursquare account until I started getting into Instagram, which has a really good interface for easily sharing geotagged photos on Foursquare, Tumblr, email, Twitter, and Facebook.
Ultimately, there's the way things should be and the way things are, and Bitcoin already has a stigma. Sure, it's not illegal right now, but that doesn't mean it's legal either. That's all I'm saying. Imagine the headlines:

"Virtual currency used by drug traffickers stolen from users, courts play world's tiniest violin."

If a drug dealer steals a kilo from another drug dealer he's not going to take it to the courts. Thinking you will be entitled to some form of legal recourse should something similar happen to you when trading bitcoins is, IMO, foolish at this point.
I'm not very comfortable with the idea of them using Jef Raskin's name in that way. Perhaps it's a well-meaning tribute from their point-of-view but from mine it seems like a sleazy attempt to capitalize on someone else's reputation.
The 643 he has are 'worth' $10K at the $17/btc rate. That would be triple the $3000 he 'had in his account' so either way that would be not a bad return on $3K.

Raises other questions about whether clients can 'conspire' to hold records of sales (vs rolling back the transactions). In real 'cash' situations you have to give back the actual currency, in a bitcoin world its a rollback of the sell record, but now you've created Heisencoins have you not? Sold by some accounts, not sold by others?

Interesting to watch the intersection of the protocol and the reality.
It does not ring true to me that looking at overhead costs are the "worst" way to pick a charity. Is there more to the picture? Sure. Is the Red Cross as impactful as PIH dollar for dollar? I doubt it. And if you look at the numbers and engage critical thinking, instead of just setting an arbitrary "overhead" threshold, you can spot things like growth for growth's sake, or fundraising for fundraising's sake.
The article says it "increased the length of N2 sleep, a form of non-REM sleep that takes up about half of a good night's rest." Presumably this is at the cost of REM sleep? How is this then a good thing?
It's sad how much a certain subset of HN users have the memory of a goldfish when it comes to this sort of history of technology.

Back when they just had OSX, market-share meant nothing. It was all about quality. When Android released and iPhone was dominating the smartphone sector? Market-share was all you'd hear about. When Android surpassed iPhone in market-share? It's all about the size of the App Store, man. Android Market set to outnumber the App Store? Doesn't matter, look at how much more money Apple's paid to its developers! (Let's conveniently ignore the fact that the App Store's been around about twice as long).

Now we get the see the same arguments happen all over again for the tablet market. I, for one, will enjoy watching it repeat itself with my bowl of popcorn.
Most was expected, but this is pretty cool:

Geolocation Header: App Engine will now include a header with every client request that represents a best-effort attempt to identify the country from which the request originated. This header, “X-AppEngine-country,” can allow you to customize content based on the origin of the user. We hope this means no more “Select your location” drop downs for users!
Perhaps the idea of monitoring the number of failed authentications and placing both an alert when the rate goes over a certain threshold and when it goes under a certain threshold doesn't seem so apparent until after the fact.

Might be a huge lesson here to learn for other services to monitor their authentication system in both directions.
"I think, is whether you can successfully identify the 5 vs 1000 when recruiting."

Hm...I think the question is, can you do it reliably? Anyone can get lucky once, but we're talking about acquihires for tens of millions of dollars. You've gotta have a pretty high degree of confidence in your decision to shell out that kind of cash for the promise of the future productivity of a team.

"A secondary open question would be whether an existing team of 5 who currently outperform some larger number tend to continually outperform them after being acquired."

If the research cited in the article is to be believed, most super-stars cease being super-stars after acquisition. Maybe the odds get better for teams, but it sure seems like a lot of brilliant product teams get acquired by big companies (even "good" companies, like Google), never to be heard from again.

This line of reasoning has always sounded like Valley Conventional Wisdom to me. Take a small, high-performing team and stuff it into a big bureaucracy, and the culture of the bureaucracy is going to win.
I don't know 1 person personally who uses it. Must be a valley thing?
Wouldn't a functional test have caught this better? Ideally a unit test would use mock objects for all external resources, so it probably wouldn't have caught this. A full end to end functional test would have.
No one knows that they didn't unit test these methods. Bugs can arise from the unexpected interaction of separate components also - does anyone seriously think that unit testing is a silver bullet?
All of the 'nuclear disasters' in history collectively did far less ecological and environmental damage than the BP oil leak last year.

People tend to rate dangers they don't understand very well much higher than those they do.
Oh yeah, I forgot about the size-of-appstore arguments.

Edit: So how am I supposed to interprete the downvotes? Is it just a vote against me being dumb enough to forget it? That the argument doesn't exist? Please explain!
I must remind you that DMCA email did contain name of the company who sent it (and it was "Dropbox", if I remember it correctly). I guess, Dropbox administrator had to type it by hand (I doubt they frequently send DMCAs from "Dropbox") - and it is hard to imagine that UI was unclean on purporse of that field.
2 major issues in 4 years (unless I missed something?). Not bad - can't say the same for some 'traditional' companies.

As long as this average doesn't spike I am very happy with Dropbox overall. They have enabled me to do so much and to work better.
if(strcmp(attempt, password))

{

// looks good!

letThemIn();

}
Troll Fail: Righthaven Smacked Down Again (EFF on how RH is in trouble)
Inside the archives of Spionage Activities in Brussels during the Cold War
Um... you're presuming a fixed supply of uber cars. This simply is not true, especially in the medium/long term.

Raising prices amidst extreme demand is a good way to maximize profit on the supply you do have, but expanding your supply to fulfill demand is almost certainly the better course in the long run.
I agree, and as such this article leaves my main question unanswered: with a bed that rocks (or a hammock), could I get the same amount of rest in less time?

In other words, what is the ratio of sleeping hours in a non-moving bed to a rocking-bed?
How much status your job has depends on what circles you travel in. I remember meeting a guy in SF who worked for the IRS... he said it in a really embarrassed way. I used to have the same embarrassed tone when telling people at cool startup parties that I worked at McKinsey.

In other parts of the country/world, the IRS guy or the McKinsey guy is the highest status person in the room.