skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, I also caught this mistake.
Inheritance heavily used in textbooks, but in real life systems, composition more prevalent.
I agree.

I'm totally biased against Goldman to begin with and based on what I read in this article (assuming it is truth) I do think they should be on the hook for dropping the ball here (though I don't think they should be on the hook anywhere near $1 billion, maybe $100-200 million or so).

However, it sounds like this was a clusterfuck across the board, and the founders and their then-CFO aren't totally blameless here.
I'm not going to touch the typical FOSS arguments because that is going to lead down a rabbit hole we've both been down about a thousand times I'm sure.

That said, while Safari is a nice browser, it's horribly insecure. Just looking at Pwn2Own, it gets killed straight off every year, and those involved usually remark about how trivial it is.
Virtually every business entity and sub-entity, large and small, have customers and vendors. Customers generally expect to receive a worthwhile expertise, product or service from a business. Along the same lines, vendors generally seek to provide worthwhile expertise, product and/or service to a business.

The provision of these products and services at all levels may or may not involve:

A) Either a vendor or customer of the business desiring or actively seeking to harm said business (i.e., the opposite of the businesses best interest)

B) Either a vendor or customer of the business having no opinion or and no interaction whatsoever with said business outside of the provision of product and/or services (i.e., having no interest in the business)

C) Either a vendor or customer of the business intending to help and/or provide worthwhile help to said business (i.e., having the businesses best interests in mind)

It is quite possible that a businesses vendors and/or customers do have said businesses best interests in mind (example C above). Examples A and B are also possible.

Saying that "only -you-" have your best interests in mind is certainly a possibility in some dealings, but my guess that other scenarios are also common.

I agree that it may be wise to assume negligence and double check extremely important matters to a much greater degree than normal. The scenarios outlined in the linked article are a perfect example of negligence, inexperience and lack of communication at many levels. But, at some time, you simply must trust others and can only use your wits, experience and the expertise of even more parties to ensure that those involved in your dealings are doing what they should to the highest professional standards.
Ballpark on a typical researchers salary?
It does not work as advertised.

The bizarrely written code (no, really, read it) does not do anything useful as is; even bypassing the apparently intentionally erroneous JS, the best I can tell is that it's expecting you to modify your JS interpreter to make "unescape" execute the shellcode contained in the string, which makes it not a "remote exploit" but a (potential) local exploit someone stuck into an HTML page for some ridiculous reason.
Although I agree with you entirely, I can't help but play advocate of the devil here...

Dropbox started because of frustration over college documents that kept getting misplaced or lost. This guy obviously knows a lot about backups. Where can I sign up?
Have you ever tried to read any Demeterized code? It's an idea that needs to die.

If I see book.line(n) and I want to know how it counts footnotes, and Book::line is defined as this.sectionWithLine(n).line(n) and those are defined in terms of Chapter::line and Page::line I'm going to need notepaper. And as I'm flipping among five nearly-identical functions with the same name, I'm going to have a terrible time finding which one has the footnote logic in it.
You're right. I said I use it because I really don't care that much about security, and find it better suited to my needs. But if I did care about security, I certainly wouldn't run Chrome either (for the reasons stated); I'd use Webkit or Chromium, or plain old lynx like our friend Richard.
I agree too. I also realize that the Times article can't possibly delve into every detail. It's quite possible that the incompetence at Goldman Sachs was egregious and that Goldman really should be massively punished. But, like you, the article does not show the Dragon executives in a flattering light either.
Which is too bad, I imagine that some version control even in it's simplest form could be good for everybody. At least I know a couple of non-tech types that could use it.

But you're right, it's very complicated.
Yes, there are some gems in here, nestled among the chaff of new VAX commands and building operational schedules. I found this bit amazing, from vax84:

This brings up one of many problems with games of skill that
include monetary payoffs ... As an example, consider a
multi-player space war type game where you win money by eliminating other
players and receiving what they have won so far. The house percentage
could be falling into the sun. What do you suppose would happen out in
the parking lot if you overheard the guy in the next console scream "I just
got a ship worth $10,000!" and you had just been about to return that
much to your home base before some turkey blew you out of the sky...

Rusty foresaw EVE Online twenty years ahead of time.
Thanks. I saw them when it was first discussed and immediately requested an invite.

Unfortunately it still means that I am missing out on dealing with 6.698 billion people in their own currency instead of 6.700 billion.
Make money online with kindle : John Divramis Internet Business Blog
> Signing away your life's work without
> calling your acquirer's customers

The founders were PhD's whose expertise was in voice processing, I find it believable that they figured that the Goldman bankers were professionals that wouldn't "execute a transaction against a company that basically didn't exist."

Places where I do think that they deserve some blame:

1. They seemed to have some reservations about the company. They questioned the Goldman Sachs' bankers about them. It doesn't seem like they got a very satisfactory answer, but instead of pushing for one, they just assumed that the bankers knew what they were doing.

2. They let that phantom memo fall between the cracks. No one followed up on finding out who sent it. No one followed up on this idea that the accountants need to do the due diligence instead of the bankers, even though the suggestion 'shocked' them.

3. They went to meetings, and made agreements without consulting the bankers. Sure the bankers probably should have warned them about (e.g.) taking the all-stock deal over the half-cash/half-stock deal, but I find it odd that they would make this agreement without consulting the bankers. They could have either gone over the possibilities prior to going into the meeting, or made the agreements contingent on a review by the bankers.
Sofía Vergara Colombian actress
Nothing changes. Nodejs is still idiotic.
Design has become much more important since WinXP and design is one of the pilars of Win8- Microsoft may not have taken it too seriously in the past, but it certainly is now.

The design of Win8 has been very meticulously planned- I don't think we'll see any significant changes at all.

I am curious though about how often they plan on updating platform apps such as mail- will we see significant improvements every 3-6mo, or will it be tied to the OS release schedule?
This sort of story makes me feel the as horrified and disgusted as I do when I hear a story about how someone's child was molested by someone they trusted.

I can only hope that if, in the course of the trial, it is established that these are the facts. That Goldman pays dearly for it.
Well this comes to mind... http://bit.ly/LitFKQ
so the horror story here appears to be that from a javscript application i could get a blind write to any location on the system.

this is powerful but undirected. locations of important code have been randomized in your operating system for quite some time. if this technique even works, to turn it into an 'exploit' you would need to know the location of the code that you want to patch, and knowing this requires yet another exploit...
Yep, mixing data with executable code sounds like a great idea.
آیفون5
> natural gas is a fossil fuel and burning of fossil fuels leads to climate change.

We are going to burn something. Better it be natural gas than oil or coal.

I guess at some point in the future we'll have lots of nuclear power and won't need to burn anything, but right now we do.

Natural gas is the cleanest energy source we have, in some ways even cleaner than nuclear.
Check Out the Top 4G Apps for the Motorola Droid Bionic
It really isn't clear what GS was providing if they didn't do the most basic due diligence. I did that kind of stuff as a lowly associate at a university-affiliate VC fund, so I don't see how a firm being paid millions of dollars can't find someone to make a few phone calls.

Proceeding without the DD questions being resolved and going ahead with a last minute change to the deal doesn't seem like incredibly good judgement on the founders' part, but then again, shouldn't GS have - in their advisory role - warned them about any of this? And, while the founders being non-business type people may excuse them from some of the blame here, their CFO really doesn't have a similar excuse and probably didn't do them any favors.

Where was Seagate at in all of this? Unless I missed something, they owned 25% and could have at least been useful in helping with due diligence on the supposed Asian customers.

If all of this is true, GS really doesn't look good here, but a lot of people had a hand in this getting so screwed up.

OT: Was anyone else surprised by how much vacation the supposed junior level associate was able to take at GS?
Facebook announces SPDY support
this is not unknown. this appears to be an attempt to exploit AI39, which has been known for the last five years http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/openbsd-misc/2007/8/8/1531...

and if you want to read the actual bug in Intel documentation, it is here: ftp://download.intel.com/design/processor/specupdt/313279.pdf
> But with cross-cultural perspective, would consider the trousers (often in the form of "pajamas") worn by women in China and southeast Asia developed in cultures where peasant women certainly did not have opportunity to ride horses

The article notes that Qin warriors (as in the scary red-faced general Guan Di, terracotta warriors and the unification of China) had an advantage over the other kingdoms as they had trousers. And male fashion is often driven led by the military.

eHow (yeah, worse than wikipedia) says Chinese peasants originally wore one-piece dresses / sacks. Along the River During the Qingming Festival (1085-1145 painting) certainly shows lots of trousers, but that's almost 1000 years after the Qin dynasty.

Pajamas came to the UK via India and the Middle East; but that was well after the time period in which trousers became popular. The Qin dynasty and adoption of cavalry by the Romans is a really long time ago.
This reads like there is something missing from the story. They already had an office and a 9 person team, but they needed to borrow $4k from their parents to meet Branson?
US pushing India to hike cancer drug price
It's crazy, isn't it? I don't think I'm ever going to "upgrade" the OS on my new iPhone. My iPhone 4 went from obscenely snappy to slow as my 3G when the 4 came out.
> Okay, well, let's say for the point of argument is is morally okay for other companies to "borrow" Apple's design, and this is just tough luck for Apple. In that case, why not just let them "borrow" everything about Apple's products?

If a competing product has particular features, I do think it should be permissible to re-create those features in your own product. That's the reason why many folks here are against software patents - because the idea behind a feature should not be protected if a competitor can produce the same effect with its own engineering.

> In that case, why not just let them "borrow" everything about Apple's products?

They can't, though, because they wouldn't have access to those aspects. Design and features are two things that are publicly exposed to the world, and personally I think you should be able to implement features your competitors have. Similarly, while I wouldn't copy a design wholesale, I don't think it should be wrong to take elements from others' designs.
There were a few things that were hard for me to follow in this article:

1. If the company was worth $1B before as X before selling it to Y, wouldn't Y+X be at least worth $1B?

2. If L&H made fraudulent claims, why not make a claim against L&H to recover the software, brand, intellectual property? According to the Wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lernout_%26_Hauspie) their software ended up being bought by Nuance (Siri).
Dotcom millionaire now bankrupt and arrested for selling drugs and guns
I'm also an object luver; I prefer to think about my designs in objects in a very anthropomorphic way. There are plenty of examples of bad and good designs in any language, while any paradigm is not a panacea. Bad OOP designs only dominate the industry b/c OOP dominates.

You can build some beautiful systems with a functional programming language, especially if you are into formal mathematical elegance, I've ween some amazing things done with Haskell. But the systems I work with are very intrinsically stateful; objects just work better.
Wow....what's with all the negativity?

I, for one, am stoked that Danielle is doing this.

As a bootstrapping hacker that lives outside of the US (much less the Valley), I don't have access to the "tips and tricks" that many valley startups have to acquire users.

I lap up every blog post about customer acquisition from Dave McClure, Sean Ellis, Noah Kagan, Andrew Chen, etc. like a prisoner-in-solitary-confinement-with-nothing-to-eat-for-48-hours-getting-a-hot-meal.

I actually JUST made a comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4245908) basically requesting this on Gabriel Weinberg's story about 'Traction Mistakes' - and it got a number of upvotes, and still does.

So I don't get where this shit storm is coming from.

Perhaps all the people that loved this idea upvoted and didn't leave a comment and the trolls, because there is no downvote, feel they have to come and spoil the party for everyone else.

If you don't like it, then don't say anything. Move on.

The fact of the matter is that you won't like everything that appears on HN - because you are not supposed to. Some people like some stuff, others like other stuff.

If you read this post properly, and did some research into who the author was (I don't know her, but I did research first), you would get a good idea as to the credibility of the potential knowledge that she is able to share.

No...HN is not turning into Digg. "Power Users" are not moving anywhere. Many of the same people with 10,000+ karma that have been here for the years I have been here are still here and still provide useful insight.

The only thing that is becoming more frequent is the bunch of cry babies that like to shit all over people's work and proclaim the death of HN.

If you don't like it. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

As for dmor, please ignore the naysayers and hit us with that knowledge.

Thanks :)
Great one. Elon is so fascinating. We definitely need more people like him. I wish I could see what our civilization would look like if more of our smart and driven people tackled important problems rather than go into finance or Web 2.0 startups..
I stopped following proggit months ago for the simple reason that there's too much not-about-programming posts. Too much of the content was "announcing my iphone app!", "omg industry gossip!" and stackoverflow repost variety. And I was sick of it.

I tried for about 2 months to politely explain to posters why their posts didn't fit the guidelines and then I quit and gave up. Why fight an inevitability?
By my reading, this is 100% fake. My best guess is that the author has an unstable computer, and they believe that occasional crashes while running parts of this JS mean that their exploit is working. Another possibility is that they tried to reimplement a C exploit in Javascript without understanding the difference between the languages. Either way, it doesn't work.

There's all kinds of bizarre silliness in the "exploit". They're passing URL-encoded x86 assembly to unescape() in a void context, as if that'll somehow execute the code in the result. (This technique is sometimes useful in heap sprays, but they aren't using it in a way that would work for that -- in particular, they aren't creating NOP slides or saving the result anywhere, so the resulting code would be almost impossible to hit.) They're claiming to have a "microcode VM" with a "scrambler + dynamic encoder + multi-pass obfuscator", but no such thing is in evidence. There's sillier things still, but I'll leave it for now.

I've run the PoC code, because I don't see anything to fear, and, as expected, it does nothing. The "Check vuln" button always returns "your CPU isn't buggy", because it's simply checking that the "test()" function returns 1 (which it does), and the "PoC Run!" button throws an exception, because it ends up assigning "[object Object]NaN" to the global "unescape" and attempting to call it. There is no way in hell that this code could ever have anything resembling the intended effect, on any Javascript interpreter, platform, or architecture.
Reminds me of 4 lessons I read about start-up exits:

Don't swap your stock for another.

Don't deal with anyone with a question mark over their head.

Take the lower valuation with the company you trust more.

Don't celebrate until the cash is in the bank.

All 4 rules were broken here. Seller beware.

Reasons?

When someone swaps a stock - they implicitly value it less than what they get. Hence if you swap your stock with someone else, the buyer implicitly states that your stock is worth more than theirs. Losing deal.

Would you marry someone you didn't trust? No. Then why would you swap your baby for theirs?

Certain return with someone you trust is 10x better than a "certain" return from a flaky agent.

Nullify any agreements that don't put cash in the bank and give you more risk than reward. Take the breaker clause. Or lose everything.
This seems to be false according to the scan here: http://books.google.com/books?id=Tm0FAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA1#v=o...
As to coming up with the "simplest" representation, that's almost certainly excellent advice whether doing OO or FP. It should be noted that Hickey has a rather specific notion of "simple" that may be rather different from more typical intuitions. This is why Hickey had to differentiate between "simple" and "easy", where "simple" means not intertwined with other things, NOT what seems like the least amount of work. The least amount of work is what is "easy", not what is "simple".

If one is encapsulating the representation behind an API, this simplicity principle is much less important for the representation than it would otherwise be, however, as any complexity of the representation is fire-walled at the API. And the Law of Demeter is a good principle for helping to keep an API "simple", as functions of the API that follow The Law of Demeter should return only data and not objects.

I'm still not sure how this API business meshes with Hickey's advice, however. He seems to be rather adamant that hiding data behind an API is the wrong thing 90% of the time. I have no feel, however, for knowing if something as complex as a book falls into the 90% case or the 10% case.
My impression is that Pwn2Own skews hard towards Safari for two reasons: the Air that's normally a prize is more desireable than the random cruddy Windows laptop, and Flash is a much softer security target than Safari itself, so that's usually what gets exploited.
"PayPal has [nothing] to worry about for a long time."

I'd be careful, sometimes these articles are alarmist and over-reacting but a lot of times they predict the downfall of companies years ahead of their demise. Digg, Palm, Kodak, Yahoo, etc... A lot of these companies all display similar patterns right before things start to get bad for them. They stop innovating, they start getting surrounded by competitors, they get too comfortable thinking they're "too big to fail" and have the "network effect".

Look at Palm alone, it was a leader in PDAs and in a few short years it was gone. The internet and technology are changing at extremely fast speeds. One year you're safe, the next year a competitor has taken your market share. It all happens so fast now. Easier to start, easier to implement, easier to set up, and little by little it's no longer hard for your client to switch payment systems.
If that's the really the rule ekm2 is referencing, the rest of his comment falls apart. This rule is found in the first section about derivatives in any college or high school calculus textbook. They lead you on for a good many pages that calculus problems are actually practically solved by reference to this equation, then grudgingly admit (after forcing you to use it many times) that the power rule, among others, exists.
If you think that the primary problem in payments is technical, maintaining data integrity while bits get shuffled around, then you tend to expect that things like user base, convenience, user experience, aesthetics, etc. will have a big impact on the rising or falling popularity of any particular payment service.

If, on the other hand, you think that the technical problems are just the foundation and the big problems are actually things like regulatory compliance, fraud reduction, reducing cost of payments, and maintaining strong relationships with processors, governments, and banks then the landscape looks a hell of a lot different.

Paypal has already tackled the easy problems, and has been tackling the harder problems a lot better than any of the competition, with the very significant exception of customer service. If you want to trade money between any two individuals on the planet paypal is by far the most likely solution to the problem aside from air mailing gold coins. And paypal spends a hell of a lot more effort on things like detecting and mitigating fraud (and money laundering, and phishing, and so on) and expanding into more countries than most of its competitors. That's why they're still on top.
Scale when you need to
Minecraft Migrated Account Session Vulnerability Security Advisory
AI39 is apparently "Cache Data Access Request from One Core Hitting a Modified Line in the L1 Data Cache of the Other Core May Cause Unpredictable System Behavior". But Javascript isn't multithreaded, so I'm not sure how the author claims to be tickling this bug. (Their commented-out "THREATED[sic] IMPLEMENTATION" doesn't invoke any form of multiprocessing. In fact, it doesn't do anything at all.)

Additionally, AI39 doesn't even affect any of the CPUs they tested on! It affected some early Conroe steppings, but the Core2 (T5750) they tested on was Merom, released several years later, and the Atom is a completely different µarch altogether.
I would assume you are looking at a self serve model for small businesses? Many of them are traditional in nature and might not be so savvy of using a cloud based solution.

Do you have a assistant program where independent agents can go and sell to small businesses and get a commission from you?

We are also building solutions for small retailers and (in our case being in India) we are doing direct sales.