skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not that I care nor that it matters, but I am going to go out on a limb here and assert that there is no way that the following is true (even plus or minus a few %):

"The Foursquare user demographic breakdown is currently about 50/50 male versus female and 50/50 for international versus U.S.

Two points:
- Foursquare media and coverage is overhwelmingly American (thus lending to American users)
- Foursquare appeals to a young demographic. Young demographics in gadgets and apps are dominated by young boys

I say this via my experience owning two gender neutral apps, one a mobile social network and the other a tool with over 50,000 and 100,000 users. In the absense of a pink icon and a "my little pony" picture, mobile apps overwhelmingly attract more males than females. My app, without even trying, has males on a ratio of 2-1. They are just more experimental. I recall reading a long time ago, when twitter had in the tens of millions of users, that its user base was also overwhelmingly male.

Anyway just thought I would share.
> A buyer of stolen goods is unable to take legal ownership, it doesn't matter if he doesn't know the item is stolen.

This is (subject to numerous exceptions) not correct. While in common law you are correct, in equity, if the buyer is a bona fide purchaser for value without notice, he or she can get title.

(IANAL, TINLA)
Would you rather read 1000 science fiction novels, each by a completely mediocre author, or read 5 science fiction novels, each by a great author?

(Or, more fairly -- if you have one great author on staff, it is possible that you might produce a great novel. If you are unable to find any great authors at all, how many mediocre ones will you need to hire to make up for that fact? If you go so far as to hire 1000 mediocre authors, will they somehow "add up" to greatness?)
The Chicago School versus the Austrian School
How to launch a book 2 years late and totally suck at it
The first big problem is how do you select the 5 great engineers. To be able to judge a level of talent you need to be at least 1 or 2 levels below that. Otherwise, you just cannot know tell if someone is good or if someone is really good.

This is a big problem in many companies because they don't have anyone to judge. The problem extends further because if you want to hire the judge you can't judge the judge.
I'd have to agree with everyone else on here that this probably wouldn't take off. Specifically with services like Flipbook coming out I don't see how even writing a HN wrapper would give you a real advantage.
Yeah... I got that far, but it still has nothing to do either of them.
Heh. Do you think your banking institution is better?
He didn't place the $0.0101 order. "I also decided against this, when I realized that whoever placed the gigantic sell order was probably doing so for the exact same reasons and I knew how that would make me look."
Former steam valve monitoring engineer here.

The motivation for moving from "per valve" to "total for all valves" was cost savings in monitoring. There are thousands of these in plants. Operators didn't want to have to check each one individually, so they got the rule changed to a total measurement.

To actually measure they "randomly" sample their valves, monitor, and then extrapolate to the rest. I say "randomly" because the best ones get checked repeatedly.

The steam valves are designed with pressure relief valves. When pressure exceeds a specified limit, the release is opened to the atmosphere.

Increasing releases is a symptom of other issues in a plant, some very dangerous and some just a reflection on increased utilization.

Example of what happens when steam goes wrong: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_New_York_City_steam_explos...
The concept is interesting but why did you use such a similar name to another popular service? It was really the first thing I noticed and I really dislike that.
Average salary of the owner of a MS partner business is $106K is
That's a really good point. Who says that there really was anyone with that many bitcoins in their account? Maybe someone just hacked the database, put 500,000 btc into an account, and then sold them on the market? We know the user database was dumped, so why shouldn't we think that someone edited the account balances too?
Unless this was changed in the last six months, the administrators did not amass bitcoins in their own accounts; each account had its own balance.
Sounds like they need to add a spec where a valid user tries to login with an invalid password. That's quite embarrassing.
>I don't see the problem with a rollback.

Suppose I gamble my life savings, buy Kleenex shares. Tomorrow a report comes out showing that using paper tissues causes allergies and prolongs colds. The shares tank ... I'd like a rollback please!

Strangely enough the guy that saw the report first and shorted those shares making millions doesn't want a rollback.

Of course he wants to keep the money, he traded correctly on what was apparently a correctly operating exchange and won. That's how this sort of gambling works.

MtGox screwed up. Why would they allow a transaction that crashed the exchange so easily?
Bitcoin transactions are all public, but on Mt.Gox you can't see who the other side of a trade is.
Socialcam hiring engineers to build the future of mobile video
They say that less than 1% of all of their users logged in during the vulnerable time frame. I suspect those are weasel words to downgrade the apparent severity of the problem. A more useful metric would be # user logins during vulnerable timeframe / # user logins per day.
Getting a Divorce from a VC
Hmm, but what if the attacker wasn't in it for the $currency?

What if he were in it to destroy Mt. Gox, as they say, "for the lulz"?

Making all their customers angry and causing a run on their escrow accounts might just do it more effectively than trying to withdraw whatever could be obtained through their online trading platform.
So, would you say the same if I placed a standing buy order two weeks ago, and it was automatically executed?

How is a buyer supposed to know if the seller is making a bona fide offer, esp. where the buyer may place its buy order in advance of the sell order?

I stand by my position that it's up to the exchange and the seller to protect against unauthorized sell orders.

Of course, under extreme circumstances, the buyer will see that something is out of place – as is exactly the case here, where the buyer came forward because he felt that the sell order was not valid.

BUT (and here's the most important point): who gets to decide when a case is "extreme" enough to put the burden on the buyer? It's not a call anyone should be able to make, unless there are clear rules, published up front.
I agree. Stress tests like this are inevitable, so the sooner they happen, the better hardened Mt Gox and other exchanges can become.
How much better? Give me a number so I can judge if I think its relevant...
You don't understand something until you think it's obvious.
Except "luxury" carries a very specific connotation around price and social status.

This isn't a fur coat, a diamond ring, a Tiffany lamp or a gold plated cigarette case.

This is a product that costs the same as its competitors. But is nonetheless better in almost every respect.

That's not a luxury brand. That's just a making better shit than everyone else brand.
Yes, micro-USB is the standard which most phones, and some other devices like the Sony Reader, conform to these days. What's wrong with that? I've never seen another phone connector standard become as popular; before micro-USB it was mostly proprietary connectors.
Coding Horror: Performance is a Feature
"I had to try several times, but eventually I got a buy order in, offering to buy as many bitcoins as I could for $0.0101."

He did place the $0.0101 buy. Your quote is regarding withdrawing the bitcoins from Mt Gox.
Windows Phone 9 = Kinect + Projector?
Weren't these the same taxicab drivers that were complaining that, even though Uber is a limousine service, they were encroaching on the taxicab market? Wasn't there a threat of jail time and fines from the city of San Francisco for every customer Uber picks up?
Sure. But that happens maybe every 20/30 years. Not every 6-12 months.
And Uber is showing that the passengers matter, and that the cabbies shouldn't take them for granted.

It's just two more moves in the endless battle for power and resources.
From my research, it looks like the Listbox enables UI virtualization by default. It didn't help. I ended up finding some helpful soul's NavigationListControl and limiting the number of results until the user taps a "show all" button. It helped a little. I think the final solution will be pre-allocating the first N data items with empty strings so that the initial cost of the Listbox is incurred at initial-page-layout-time rather than at keypress-time.
This is a good question. In addition, if anyone has good resources on setting up a development environment that includes things like unit testing and continuous integration I'd love to have it. I always want to implement these concepts into my projects but find myself getting so caught up in the complexities of setting them up that I just say screw it and move on to working on coding without these additional tools.
Quadratic growth is f(n) = n^2. Exponential growth is f(n) = e^n, or 2^n, or 10^n, for example.
I suddenly have a desire to write a companion piece based on my experiences talking with women I just met: "Awkward one-liners explained."
Managing successful employees
I have to wonder about a UI tool whose website adds 60px of blank space to the right.
Charge 499 per location, and $99.99 per location per month if they want support/upgrades (limit the amount of support hrs). 22499=11K, plus 99.9912*22 = 26K per year extra.

Do you have a sense of what they're currently paying/what the competition charges?
Since the standing issue was decided and made the rest of the case moot, the fair use analysis is dicta. Thus, it is not legal precedent.

Even if the judge did decide the fair use issue, it's precedential value would be low - applying only in the district where the decision was made. In this case, that would be the entire state of Nevada.
Those arguments are never really true.
Great articles, including those from the links.

I have troubles in finding such a position, even though I focus on start-ups only.
New gadget charges mobile phones over campfire
Lifetimes of Cryptographic Hash Functions
http://idelit.com/
When Nick Leeson traded fraudulently with Barings customer's assets did they get a do-over?

--

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_trader - shows other examples too
So you avoid X altogether? How would there be updates without X? And if using X, why not use apps that have desktop update functionality (where that is important)?

I'm legitimately curious as I've been experimenting with the same cli apps and found some worth it (vim, weechat) and others a regression.

Is it just for the ability to use these programs on a remote server? Or do they improve workflow even on a local machine?
Yes, what I mean is that if I was 99, I wouldn't care much about being punished for being a thief. I could therefore make a lot of people happy. If not my family, then maybe I could go Robin Hood, steal from the rich and sell cheaply to the poor.

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. I am not a lawyer either, though.

If it works as you describe, let's found a guild of 99 year old Robin Hoods...
So, in the end it's not two red herrings, but an extended practice within journalism.
عبد الحليم حافظ 
عبد الحليم حافظ عبد الحليم حافظ عبد الحليم حافظ عبد الحليم حافظ عبد الحليم حافظ عبد الحليم حافظ عبد الحليم حافظ عبد الحليم حافظ عبد الحليم حافظ
Although I understand your perspective, and I agree that they have to do something to "make things right," I'm still inclined to accept the rollback.

As much as I hate to use analogies, its the best way I can think to explain my reasoning. If someone (a hacker) robs a bank (user on MtGox), and they throw the money on the ground as they fleeing the scene of the crime, only for it to be picked up by bystanders (profiting users), what do you do?

To me, simply returning the money (rollback) seems to be the simplest effective solution. Maybe I'm being too utilitarian, but it seems too complex to add additional funds into the system, especially when we're talking about nearly 10% of the entire value of BTC. Additionally, it establishes a strange and dangerous precedent: hackers can get away with upsetting the market. And who can make sure the hackers & profiteers aren't working together?

I don't think there's really much you can do to repair faith in the exchange in the immediate future. More importantly, people will keep money as BTC the exchange if it is value is stable (or deflating). Even now, I'd be more worried about the market than hackers.

I'd love to see an insurance company spring up. It'd require major capital, but it'd really help strengthen the value of BTC by providing security and resolving nearly all of these issues. (Things I'd do with $1M...)
Rebuttal - Lulzsec ups the ante
I think it isn't about the engineers' skill, but more on how they work together as a team. 5 superstar pricks will get you nowhere. 1 superstar plus 4 average engineers that work and take directions well, and you have a team. Even with just 5 average engineers, as long as they get the job done and take to instructions well, you're better off. The problem with superstars is that they usually have huge heads, and would rather prove a point than make things work. A superstar with a great work ethic and is a team player, now that is worth the money.
By what measure are they "very good" web browsers? Certainly not rendering speed, javascript benchmarks, or standards compliance.
He stole 600+ BTC, though. And now he resents giving back the BitCoins that are supposed to be "rolled back". Not so benevolent in my opinion.
It seems that the main focus of the article is on the difference in brain activity, not the sleep time. I would imagine that the time to sleep is not as important as the quality of the sleep thus attained.
The key untested question then, I think, is whether you can successfully identify the 5 vs 1000 when recruiting. I think it would be pretty easy to show that there exist teams of 5 that outperform teams of 1,000 (certainly teams of 20 outperforming teams of 4,000). (be grateful you haven't had to work for any of the latter)

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. I would bet that the performance gap would be close to the same. At the very least I would suggest that the cases from other industries give us next to no insight for software development.
Agreed. I never noticed it until I saw the post regarding the the api contest.
Even better, write a statistical module for scipy that's competitive with R.
I'm not going to comment on the taxi regulation system in SF because its pretty ugly. But the drivers have to drive for about 15-20 years to win a medallion. SF is changing this process and wants to start selling medallions for about $250,000. If you're at the top of the list (ie you've been waiting 15 years) you get first chance at buying a medallion but you're SOL if you don't have the 12K deposit.

If I were someone near the top of the list but hadn't been saving up I'd be pretty pissed too.
no offense, but how is it that you both did not realize that and care? didn't you first check the price?
"Mises stressed that the important heritage of sound economic thought is not a collection of empirically tested claims about the behavior of economic variables. Rather, economic theory is an internally coherent framework for interpreting "the data" in the first place."

Bingo. No doubt the author of the piece would disagree, but he just distilled every failure and problem of "libertarianism" (if not capitalism in general) to a single paragraph. And "interpreting 'the data'" from that school of economic thought has come to mean nothing more than endless rationalization, instead of any reliance whatsoever on empiricism.
The difference is that the BTC being sold were stolen. It is a completely different thing from what you describe.

If tomorrow it was discovered that the BitCoin protocol has been hacked and BitCoins are worthless, a rollback wouldn't be justified.
I'm not sure I totally understand. Is he saying that the users who were already logged in during the code update were the ones who had access to any account? Or is he wrangling words and letting us know that < 1% of Dropbox users had active web sessions at the time?

I understand the challenge that the Dropbox team finds themselves in here, but I'd very much like more details as to exactly what happened and what was possible for 4+ hours. I'm less interested in they're eventual report of the bad stuff they think did or didn't happen during that time.
It's actually 135px if we're nit picking.
Graphene May Gain an On-Off Switch
Now that I've looked at it, I think I'm glad neither are involved.
The prices are reversed in Japan: Softbank gives away the iPhone and charges less for iPhone data plans at about US$56/mo whereas Android phones will cost you $500+ for the device and $75/mo for the data plan.

Yet Android has overtaken the iPhone there too.
So, is it possible to set up an indoor hammock in a small room?
That's a fantastic idea for a web service. Google, are you listening?
The problem with your analogy is that once spent, your bits become worthless. If for instance, I made a song and then you pirated it and then I no longer had it on my hard drive any more, then that is what's happening here.

Similarly, my password to my bank account is "just bits on a computer", but you could steal that from me, and take all of my [real] money. In that sense, it is theft. Piracy is copying, theft is moving.
I'd say the confidence is pretty shaken up because the exchange has been hacked.

I expect from my bank that they give me back my money if it is being stolen from me, why would I not expect it from MtGox (if it is within their power). Banks routinely roll back fraud transactions and nobody complains - except the fraudsters, of course.
Yeah, if they're going to be scabs, and undermine the leverage that striking creates, they should at least be up front about it.
I've also been picked up in that S550 in SoMa. Technically, it's not an AMG motor though, only the trim is AMG :)
The fact that this could happen is a fairly significant indictment of their technical capabilities and the amount of trust they deserve when it comes to safe-guarding your data.

If there's anyway in your code that deserves unit and integration tests, it's your authentication system.
He's saying that for any account to have been potentially compromised due to this bug it would have had to occur during the ~4 hour window the bug was active. During that window less than 1% of all dropbox users logged in, so that puts a cap on how many users could potentially have been compromised. Of course, of that "less than 1%" most were probably valid logins, so that 1% doesn't represent only compromised accounts but rather a ceiling on how many could possibly have been compromised.
This guy doesn't really have a leg to stand on. Just like when the flash crash happened on the real stock market, transactions are going to be rolled back.

One thing that has become abundantly clear from reading all of the comments on the Bitcoin forums is that the investing knowledge of most BTC traders is much less than your average equities, fixed income, or ForEx trader.

MtGox is a pretty low budget operation, but even a low budget operation isn't just going to let someone steal the equivalent of $10,000,000 USD and not reverse the transactions. It would be like your bank telling you "sorry, someone transferred money out of your account without your authorization, but we're just going to let them keep it because, hey, they won it fair and square by hacking your account."

(As I write this last line I realize there was recently a court case regarding this exact issue, ETF fraud, but it occurred over many days and the company had authorized an agreement that they would check their account balance daily for fraudulent transactions.)
If I were launching a technology or developing a project, there's a good chance I'd rather have five average engineers than 1000 average engineers.
web surfing (is that phrase even in wide use anymore?) is the sole reason I bought a NOOKcolor... which is incidentally exactly what I'm writing this on. It is of course rooted.
If you’re concerned about any activity that has occurred in your account, you can contact us at security@dropbox.com.

I'd like the full access logs, including timestamps and IP addresses of every time my account was accessed in this timeframe. I've written security@dropbox.com about this, and am waiting to hear back.
If uber wants to make sure everyone who wants a taxi can get one, they should raise prices, otherwise they're ensuring an uber shortage.

simple supply/demand economics.
Thank goodness. Don't get me wrong -- glad Righthaven lost for many reasons -- but if this judge's ruling on the fair use of full reprint were to become precedent I think the web would be lost to a landslide of "scraper" sites (more than it already is). They'd just add a line of commentary and go.
Sounds like a market opening there. Who wants to start an exchange? A true exchange, so you wouldn't have to front a dime, except for the virtual server. IE: You're only matching orders and taking a cut, not putting any skin in the game.
I don't know how Mt.Gox arranges it's accounts, but it's possible it came from the mt.gox BTC pool?
Of course it is (my roommate and I set up two hammocks in our dorm room between the wall studs) however the article suggests that simple rocking (not necessarily 'hammocks') is the key. And doing that is easier, in that you need only put your bed on a platform that can rock. (baby cradles have rounded ends sometimes for that).
n(n-1)2 is a strawman itself: a 1000-person organization will probably have 3 levels (900,90,9) with each person communicating mainly with team members or the level above or below, so O(nlogn) communications channels, probably.
I know I'll never use their services now.
It seems possible that Mr (or Mrs) Mt. Gox is playing them all big-time and attempted to do something clever, messed up and got found out. Of course if you can change the rules and roll back the game at will then you can do what you like. /cynical
It seems the hacker got access of a copy of the database by compromising the machine of an audit.

If this is really the case, he couldn't possibly edit the main database with only that.
Can you point me to the evidence that the coins were not put up for sale by the owner? I did not realize that was established.
If you already have equity, talk to a lawyer and leave. If you don't have equity, just leave.