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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

> or at the very least they don't give a crap about anything at all

They were the market leader, with substantial revenue and lots of cash flow.

Why they didn't prioritize hiring some people and securing their platform is still beyond my understanding. It's up there with the $100+ billion in cash Apple is evidently not using to hire enough code reviewers or implement adequate security processes for their most important and sensitive code that supports their entire (massively profitable) business.

I really wonder where people's priorities are. They're not total morons; it must be an interesting reason why these circumstances happen. It's not hard to solve these problems with money - so there has to be a neat (if utterly dysfunctional) story behind it.

Seriously, guys. Spend $20 on a flu shot for your golden goose.

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I couldn't agree with this more. It's human nature not to prepare for a theoretical risk. But once it's happened to you, and to many others in the same industry, it's just foolishness not to invest in prevention.

I imagine there's also a bit of outsider-preference going on here. There's no lack of people who could have been hired to implement controls and audits that would have easily caught a slow leak of coins, but they're part of the Obsolete Fiat Economy and thus irrelevant. "Dunning-Krugerrands", indeed.

I don't think your (or their) equating "competent programmers and businesspeople with common sense" with "obsolete fiat economy" is what happened - it's not really a meaningful logical jump. There's got to be something else.

> It's human nature not to prepare for a theoretical risk

That's a substantial generalisation. Some people, especially in software engineering, spend a great deal of their day thinking how best to prepare for theoretical risk.

Yes, it is a substantial generalization, or perhaps a sentence not carefully crafted to withstand nitpicking.

In my job I do the very thing you describe. That said, I'm spending a lot more of my day preparing for the more likely risks, rather than the ones I can just dream up. I doubt many people here are posting from their bomb shelters full of emergency food and water rations, antibiotics, radiation treatments, either.

My point is that I could forgive the first lapse. Fool me once, and so on. But Mt. Gox had their precarious position quite expensively demonstrated to them. A competent management team would have made security and fraud management their top priority nearly 3 years ago when they were last caught with their pants down. It's hard to see them as victims in this because they were so negligent in their responsibilities to their customers.

> Apple is evidently not using to hire enough code reviewers

It's naive to think that the more people you throw at the problem, the less bugs there will be.