skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure, my hope is that if they emailed me (NOT at mobile me email, but a non-Apple address) at my Gmail which is setup for 2-factor, for confirmation that'd be ideal.

The irony is that they are all setup for 2-factor auth...the phones I have already are the second factor. The idea that someone, anyone, with a phone and my password could make effectively unlimited purchases against my saved payment instrument without being challenged makes me, as a former banking engineer, cringe.

All I'm asking is that new phones authenticate and be challenged, expecially if they don't match clearly recorded existing behavior patterns.
why not try google app engine ? its reliability increase many folds since its start ( hardly an hour downtime in my app in HR datastore...).
Note: "the guy" is Jonathan Blow, who created Braid.
There was no private content in that mail. The whole of it could be expressed as "LOL UMAD?". I don't think I would have responded so kindly in Jonathan's place. I probably would have taken this as an opportunity to tell Sam Odio what I really think of his actions. So, yes, compared to that Jonathan absolutely took the high road. But also from a philosophical perspective, redirecting this toward the public participants of the card experiment was absolutely the right thing to do.
why are you saddened by his reply?
I'm finding myself in a significant minority here, which is always an interesting time to stand back and reflect. I hope this post doesn't come off as a troll; I am genuinely curious where my beliefs diverge from the majority.

I cannot understand why Sam's charity raising has raised such an outrage. Here is why.

First, what he did was within the bounds of the experiment. Johnathan provided the Starbucks card to be used in any way people saw fit. Did he take advantage of some flaws within the system? Sure. Did he use it for something that it wasn't expected to be used for? Yes. But that makes him sound closer to a hacker than a thief to me. [1]

Second, this outcome is significantly better than what had before been believed when the $100 drops were noticed on the account. Most people (myself included) figured people were just lifting money from the account for their own means. On the moral spectrum, donating money is about as far away as possible from that suspicion.

The facebook page also fails to elucidate me.

Someone says (paraphrase) "no one should be able to appoint himself the arbiter of how someone else's money should be spent." But isn't Jonathan (or perhaps the Starbucks corporation) dictating this by requiring them to put money on a Starbucks Card - not a VISA card, for instance?

Another person says (paraphrase) "Sam is donating other people's money without their consent." Didn't people give up any control they had over their money by putting it on Jonathan's card in the first place?

Or maybe it's just because (paraphrase) "Sam is flaunting how smart of a hacker he is." If so, I missed it.

To be honest, and unless someone can point out where I am wrong, what Sam has done impresses me more than the initial concept of the card itself. If I had donated $10 to the card and it had instead gone to charity, I would have been fine.

[1]: One definition of hacker: "A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and stretching their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary." Taken from the Jargon File.

Edit: One last thing. I tried to make this post as anti-inflammatory as possible, and if you think I failed, please let me know why.
Well, I should hope "those" DS games don't require complicated dual analog stick controls since the DS only has one input pad (though some games do use the 4 cross buttons as something of a second dpad) and it is digital.

Pokemon could arguably work okay on a touchscreen-only device, but that's one title cherry picked out of thousands, there are tons of DS games that would suffer greatly by being stuffed into a touchscreen control scheme, and that includes lots of games that are nothing like "Call of Duty". It isn't about how complicated the control scheme is, it is about the need for actual physical switch controls. Even games with dead-simple control schemes like Bomberman or Tetris have this issue (and yes, I know there is Tetris for the iOS -- it is an abomination that proves my point nicely, IMO).
Oh really? What if they raise the price of postage on First Class mail by one cent. Would you look at the stamps, scream bloody murder, and stamp (hah!) out of the Post Office?

Sure, increase prices, and demand will fall, but it's not perfectly linear, and even a one cent increase boosts revenues considerably.
"The safety of our customers is our No. 1 priority, and we're going to do what we can to keep people safe," Allison said. "We're just going to leave it at that."

If the people running the BART system were so concerned about BART customers' safety, they wouldn't have been shooting unarmed customers in the back of the head with a pistol while sitting on top of them after assaulting them. That's the thing the people want to protest, and they say the protest can not be allowed because of "safety". BART is not concerned about safety. BART is an unsafe system because their own employees murder the customers.
First of all, I think, you are greatly underestimating the role of productivity growth in fighting poverty.

Apart from the forces that directly increase productivity (science, markets, entrepreneurship, etc), I think, the most important factor for creating broad based wealth is transparent, evidence based, predictable governance and a functioning legal system. It's not about low taxes or high taxes or small or big government. There are very low tax countries that work and very high tax countries that work and everything in between.

So if I was going to do non profit work, I would look into ways of creating transparency, shedding light on areas that affect many people but suffer from lack of good data. Try to connect new sources of data related to poverty and make it available to the public, to economists, social scientists and governments. Or try to make money flows visible to fight corruption or misinformation. Things like that.
Thanks for the hint!

Actually I did not know about this option. I've just fixed such bug in one of our tools, written using wxWidgets for Windows. Have to check MSVC on this option.

At the same time a coworker was able to get the Xbox360 analyze thing and it worked finding suspicious stuff in the runtime code.

But we have only the professional version for PC :(
I think the olive branch comment is consistent because it conveys an absolute lack of insight into the way your actions are perceived by other people.

Sam, the things you wrote on your blog regarding the whole incident left me speechless at first. It wasn't just because of what you did, it was the tone of superiority and confidence you exhibited throughout that made me really angry - angry enough to attack you very harshly in the other thread. I'm not a confrontational person either by any means, but this actually made me mad enough to explode like that in public. I can only try to imagine how it must have felt for Jonathan.

If you're saddened by his reply, that means you still don't understand the moral bankruptcy of your position. Sam, what you did saddened a lot of people. I believe in the end, it's not Jonathan you need to reach out to, it's your own moral compass.
I never understood why ripping this experiment off was novel. If I put a 100 dollar bill on the street and said "take it, and do something charitable with it," and you subsequently took it, and then bought two handles of liquor and called it a day, why should I find you interesting?

The whole experiments novelty is how about accessible the money is, so who cares that you can run some script and rip it off?
I think what might be considered sleazy by Ivy League academia standards (taking ideas without attribution, deliberately misrepresenting things to potential competitors in order to maneuver around them) happens all the time in the business world and would mostly be classified as "hustling" by entrepreneurs. For an idea to have value by itself in the business world, it must have patent protection. Otherwise, it is freely copyable without attribution and most of the value is derived in the execution of it. This is different than academia, which is mostly about the proper attribution of ideas (though universities will patent ideas that they deem commercially valuable). While it's a fair point to argue that since Facebook was started at Harvard, the ethics of academia should have applied at the time, it has long since morphed into something well outside of that where the rules about copying and attribution are different.
Yup, sorry meant marco.
Sam, you need to realize you can't do something morally heinous and zero it out by doing something morally acceptable. Just as donating to charity doesn't excuse you for what amounts to wire fraud, being the first to break the ice with Jonathan doesn't entitle you to forgiveness.

You've come through loud and clear about your personality. Now it's time for you to make a decision that will affect nobody but yourself: Will you choose to learn from this and be a better person, or will you rationalize it all away and live in blissful ignorance of your own self? I sincerely hope this whole saga makes you a better, more open minded person.
This is badly written. The first paragraph of the article suggests the civil disobedience in Israel is far from classy, but in fact that first paragraph describes London and is meant to be juxtaposed to the next paragraphs that describe the protests in Israel. Some commenters already interpreted it wrongly.
I think it's too easy to focus on specific problems (food/water/medicine), rather than focusing on the cause of these issues. There are many countries that have the resources to take care of themselves, but lack the social and political structure to do so.

Someone needs to take care of these problems in the short term of course, since there are people suffering today, but it is also important to focus on how to reduce their needs.

There's no technological magic bullet to solving political and social issues, but there are ways to reduce them. One major problem in some parts of the world is corruption. I'm not thinking of the white collar corruption that can be found in the western world, but basic corruption such as having to bribe your child's teacher so that he will let your child in. In some cases you even have to bribe health personnel for the right to "free" health care or other forms of aid. In some countries the corruption is everywhere and is hurting the society.

If someone could find a cheap and reliable way of reducing corruption you would do a lot of good.
I have been to doctors and a lot of them have told me "We don't know the cause" and "There is no cure for it". It leaves me a little disenfranchised at the medical system. But the keyword "good" skin doctor may be what I need to find. Thanks.
Firstly, Sam's antics would've been a good discussion if he had taken out $10 out of it and given it to a charity. But the sheer scale of 'hack' i.e. to take a grand total $600 out of the card when the average single expense on the card is hardly $20-40 is plainly out of the way. In my personal opinion, that was never the part of the experiment.

Secondly, the idea that he actually makes a blog post which suggests buying an iPad and then ends up advising to donate it to a charity. It all makes everything very fuzzy. What exactly are his intentions ? Is he just trying to link-bait? If he done something similar with the penny tray, I am sure he would've been taken to the cleaners by the people alongside him.
more pictures from the israeli demonstration:
(slomo artzi singing)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRp02b8H2_o&feature=relat...

protest in israel= love + live music
I'm not sure where you get your facts from, but the truth is that a) the majority of the Israeli population supports withdrawl from the West Bank and b) the settlements were built on what is by every consensus the area that should one day be the Palestinian State.

As an Israeli I refuse to control another people. I think it is immoral and wrong. And yes, the settlements are wrong, and they continue to corrupt us and our morals, day by day.
I have downvoted you because your comment is an unwanted personal attack on this sites users.

If you disagree with his, in my opinion correct, assumption then please argue such so that we can all be smarter.

Thank you.
best line- "one truth I quickly learned in
college was that professors who made
attendance at their lectures irrelevant were the only ones who needed an
attendance policy."
Right now it's kept internal for most purposes, but there's no reason not to open it up. The idea behind managed crowdsourcing is that end users shouldn't need to deal with reputation and crowd management themselves.

The next version of the API will support the ability to assign work only to individuals with certain skillsets - very powerful! You'll get exactly the crowd you need for the job you have.
What Sam did was pure genius in a self promotion kind of way. Some people may not agree with his tactics but clearly he knows how to act on opportunity. The lynch mob on Facebook is somewhat out of control, and spans the spectrum of intelligence one would expect to find there. People who are calling for Sams arrest over this are just going overboard.

I completely agree that this is more a hack thing than a theft thing, it's within the bounds of the experiment.
Actually, Nintendo's old cartridge-based games already did this to some extent. You were simply plugging in a circuit board, which could, and often did have additional processors, memory, etc on it.
I had a quick interaction with Lon on TC about the situation.

To me is sounds like "Sam" is doing this for personal gain. It feels like promoting, marketing. Because in all the posts about this, referrals are thrown to his business and his brothers. Which to me is wrong in the first place, as it was about the card not their damn business.

Secondly, it was theft wasn't it? The card wasn't his, it was a good that was lend to him. In this case not only him but severals others as well. It was lend in a leap of faith, no matter it was an experiment or it wasn't. It wasn't lend to be stolen from.
If everyone steals something they lend, the world would be an even shittier place. Because if that was the case, I am going to try and borrow a car.

So it was illegal in the first place.
Second place he used script to monitor the card and its movements. Which is illegal unless he had a wiretap approved.
Third, he was not the owner so he committed theft.
Fourth, if it was for charity - USE YOUR OWN GODDAMN POCKETS! You sold a business in the past to Facebook, you have more then enough to go buy.

Or am I seeing this all wrong? Could be, as I am far too young to maybe see the greater good.
>Sam's charity

giving your own money away is charity, redirecting somebody else's money isn't a charity, it is management at best theft at worst
John Carmack Interview: GPU Race, Intel Graphics, Ray Tracing, Voxels
israelis don't want to overthrow the government but to make a real social change which help socialy all israel's citizens: men and women, arabs and jews, seculars and religous....

this is what social justice is all about!!!!
I think both the original Jonathans Card post and Sams post are blatantly obvious link-bait. Also, people clean those penny tray things out all the time. You just don't hear about it because there are tens of thousands of them and no one tray contains $600++
I've tried the standing desk before for a couple days but
didn't really like it. I may try giving it another shot.

Remember to alternate between sitting and standing. If you can't get a motorized standing desk, get a tall task chair to accompany a stationary standing desk.

Also, get a footrest to use while standing.
> Second place he used script to monitor the card and its movements. Which is illegal unless he had a wiretap approved.

Not stating my position on this entire debate with this comment; but, to be fair, he was simply monitoring an API that Jonathan himself provided to see the balance, so there was no wiretapping or illegal card accessing to determine balance going on.
Sure, but that's why we have layers of security so the attacker has to be lucky more than once and it gives the defender (theoretically) a better chance of getting back in the game with the use of intrusion detection systems etc. The problem is, I guess, partly that people find it hard to motivate spending time and money on the inner layers (before it's too late).

(not saying that it's easy or that the attacker doesn't have an advantage)
Sam, just man up and apologize. Some people think you are a monster. Some people think you might be doing the right think, kinda. Guess which ones are louder?

It's not just that you took the money. You also insulted everyone for being so shallow, when they were trying to be nice. Trying to take the moral high ground is never a good idea, when people think you are wrong. And some people will think you are wrong.

Just use the line: "Yeah, I was wrong to take so much. I'd give it back, but some other jerk will just transfer it all, now that the vulnerability is public. Sorry. So I'm giving it away. But please remember, if I hadn't found out that you could transfer the funds, somebody else would have. These sharing apps are great, but they have to be set-up so that no one person can bring them down. Sooner or later, it was bound to be exploited."

You could also suggest a fix - "this would work, but only if people only donated small amounts. Nobody will transfer the funds if there's just one or two coffees. It would be safe to start the card again if everybody would try to keep the limit under $20.".

Also, you could suggest that the card occasionally put out public service announcements. Aside from warnings about high limits, it could ask the iPhone toting yuppies to throw a few bucks towards the Horn of Africa, which is experiencing the worst famine in years. Or donate to a local charity. But don't make it sound like you are taking the high ground.
I think the reason that giving the proceeds to charity is seen as so offensive is because the implied social contract was that people could use the card at Starbucks to buy something and they could contribute back if they felt like it.

Even though Sam's intent to donate to charity is noble, the means by which he set out to achieve this lacked nobility. He took advantage of something that was on the honor system and acted dishonorably by violating the conditions under which the card was to be used. Unfortunately the original Jonathan's card page is no longer around, but as I recall it stated you could use the image to make an in-store purchase or use the number to reload the card.

Using the number and brute forcing the PIN (if I recall correctly) to siphon money off of the card and then use those funds to do something other than the stated purpose goes against the implicit social contract that everyone was participating in.
Within the spirit of the experiment? Jonathan himself says no: http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/08/12/jonathans.card.ha...

I don't see this as self-promotional. Jonathan's open letter now ranks on the first google results page for "Sam Odio". I think this will have a hidden effect on Sam's career. Any hiring manager or venture capitalist worth his salt will learn about what Sam did, and make a value judgement on Sam's character. You only need to look at the Facebook page to see this means bad news for Sam: https://www.facebook.com/jonathanscard
and in other news just 1 hours after the demonstrations in south israel ended, 2 rockets from Gaza exploded on the Israeli city of Ashkelon!!!

THE PALESTINIAN TERROR CONTINUES AS USUAL...
It seems you are trying hard to rationalize Sam's actions.

> Did he take advantage of some flaws within the system? Sure. Did he use it for something that it wasn't expected to be used for? Yes.

Ethical hackers don't take advantage of flaws, they usually try to fix them or disclose them privately in a responsible manner.

> Most people (myself included) figured people were just lifting money from the account for their own means. On the moral spectrum, donating money is about as far away as possible from that suspicion.

Did you consider the possibility that he did this for his own benefit? Instant fame and "moral exhibitionism" come to mind...

> Someone says (paraphrase) "no one should be able to appoint himself the arbiter of how someone else's money should be spent." But isn't Jonathan (or perhaps the Starbucks corporation) dictating this by requiring them to put money on a Starbucks Card - not a VISA card, for instance?

Jonathan isn't forcing anyone to put money on the card. People chose to put money on the card to contribute to the experiment. Feeding African children isn't part of the experiment.

> Another person says (paraphrase) "Sam is donating other people's money without their consent." Didn't people give up any control they had over their money by putting it on Jonathan's card in the first place?

They did give up control legally. We're talking about morality here. People expect their money to buy someone else a coffee.

> If I had donated $10 to the card and it had instead gone to charity, I would have been fine.

Most people aren't fine with that. If I want to give to charity I give to charity, if I want to be part of this experiment I put money on the card.

How Sam spends the money is completely irrelevant in my opinion.
His taking the money and auctioning it for charity DID make the experiment more interesting, but I understand the anger.

Partially, it's the amount he took took, as you say. $100 would have been more reasonable.

I think it was also Sam's tone in his blog post. Perhaps buying strangers coffee is not as worthy as buying food for starving children, but it made people feel good. Sam essentially dismissed it.

I think that's mean spirited. There's a lot of needs in the world, and different people are interested in different things. Do we really want to get into a debate over whether giving money to MSF is better than an animal shelter?

Indeed, I can both donate to stop hunger AND buy a stranger a coffee.
The important lesson here for HN entrepreneurs to take away is that connections can matter as much as a startup's product itself.

If we are to go with the assumption that your houseSYSTEM was feature-comparative to Mark's The Facebook (and for the sake of argument, we'll assume your assessment is accurate), then Chris Hughes' person connections to The Crimson may have very well been one of the significant variables that resulted to your products having radically different futures. While it's a romantic notion to think that a sufficient amount of blood, sweat, and tears will ultimately lead to success, the reality is that an external factor such as getting into Y Combinator or having a well-timed TechCrunch article can (fairly or not) make or break a startup.

Remember to get out of the office once and awhile and network. Simply delivering a product is not enough.
Skillshare vs. Betterfly: a battle of vision and execution
How to fit more than a thousand words into a tweet
> Did you consider the possibility that he did this for his own benefit? Instant fame and "moral exhibitionism" come to mind...

I wouldn't even give Sam that amount of credit. I think the charity donation was an out. A way to get him out of this mess with a minimum of damage to himself. If he hadn't skimmed such a huge sum of money I doubt he would have even gone public about it. I'd imagine he was sitting in a coffee shop, all sense of morals put to the side as he was getting giddy about his cool script that was making him free money. Only after he walked out the door with $600 in pocket did he realize what he had done.
I too would be interested in jonathans opinion on this.