ajsharp

Using your malware botnet to click on fake ads and generate 27mln in actual ad rev is pretty damn crafty.

Only part I'm unclear on is whether they were actually operating the network/marketplace, or just falsifying the publisher and user parts of it. Sounds like the latter, in which case, I wonder which ad networks got gamed.

"The email said that company said the breach was discovered weeks after system upgrades in July."

Wow. They emailed customers but made no public announcement that people's email addresses and personal info had been stolen and now available on the black market.

This is absolutely atrocious incident management and disclosure. I smell a lawsuit, possibly from the state or federal government.

Yea maybe 6 years ago, but today this is no longer true. Speaking as someone who rents a free-standing house in LA, and has looked at what renting in New York would cost. LA is no longer cheaper, as a good portion of New Yorkers have migrated in pursuit of this exact ideal.

This is wonderfully concise and spot-on. With respect to the American health care system, it's painfully accurate. An unbelievable amount of economic activity in the US health care system ultimately boils down to a whole lot of ceremony in order to fit a square peg into a medical billing code sized hole.

That was a whole lot of chewing for very little meat. If this article were a tweet, it could've been "use cookies instead of JWT's bc is if all you need is a UUID for a database lookup cookies work just fine, and are prob encrypted using symmetric encryption just like JWTs."

Respect to the author for trying to generate some content for the company blog, but the end result ultimately comes down to a relatively trivial decision in order to save a few bytes.

Wow this is a tremendously bad look.

This is incredibly cool and makes me want to play minecraft again.

"British-made zippers bore the brand name Lightning, which had to be carefully ground off the metal pulls with a dentist’s drill."

This whole piece is unbelievably cool. Thanks for posting.

I'm confused by the idea that this is bad in some way. The point of business is to make money. For startups in particular, the entire commercial goal can roughly be broken down into one of three things:

1. Build a lasting private business (Mailchimp) 2. Go public (Facebook) 3. Get acquired (Instagram)

Obviously, I'm ball-parking here, but 99% of startups with "successful" outcomes happen via acquisition. For the vast majority of most startups, acquisition is the only viable outcome other than failure.

A lot can change in a startup in two years. Startup founders are fallible human beings after all, and are as likely as anyone else to say things that, in retrospect, were hopelessly idyllic or optimistic. Everyone who founds a startup on some level believes that they're building a company for the long-term. Either way, it sounds like they were a fairly small company, probably struggling to break through in an incredibly competitive vertical.

Hopefully they all just made a whole bunch of money.

This feels like a natural "rookie of the year"-esque extension of living in a post-trump, nothing matters world, and frankly I'm pretty excited about it.

Great point, completely agree. It took me several years to understand that the quality of the technology is only a single component (often a very minor one) to making a successful product (let alone a successful company).

For a more in-depth / intermediate book, I recently purchased "Open Crumb Mastery" (https://trevorjwilson.selz.com/item/open-crumb-mastery-for-t...) by Trevor Jay Wilson (https://www.instagram.com/trevorjaywilson/?hl=en). It's a really deep dive into chasing that open crumb dragon. I'm really enjoying it.

Sure, they're good for his business. Tariffs are generally good for the industries they protect, at the expense of consumers, because prices will rise in that industry. So one industry and it's employees receive protection from foreign competition, but consumers "pay for it" on the backend with higher prices.

Yes yes a thousand times yes.

"Let's begin with an analogy"

[4 paragraphs of fantasy explorer game references]

All I've learned is my brain hurts.

> More likely, the United States would take a tougher approach and attempt to ban cryptocurrencies.

This article is pure conjecture.

If the government has an opportunity to collect tax revenue, it will. Collecting tax on cryptocurrencies is theoretically straightforward: Require exchanges to report in the same way stock brokers do, or they're banned from operating in the US. As an investor, you get taxed on your realized capital gains / losses.

10% is awful. ICOs desperately need sensible oversight and regulation.

On Spolsky's quote, wouldn't that mean people undervalue aesthetics and beauty?

Capitalism.

Slack is an excellent product with a seemingly top-notch engineering team. But Slack has had multiple published security events the last couple of years. Including a DATABASE BREACH. E.g. someone either left a db open to the public, or didn't have ssh password auth disabled, or any number of no-brainer security practices.

Again, no hate for Slack -- growing as fast as they have is an incredible feat. But heavybit is, um, pushing the definition of "secure" with that title. LOL.

* https://slackhq.com/march-2015-security-incident-and-the-lau... * https://www.wired.com/2017/03/hack-brief-slack-bug-everyones...

CNBC is a joke. It's the Techcrunch of financial news. Occasionally they publish something of value, but mostly it's just repurposed press releases and garbage commentary.

Bitcoin will never be a currency in the traditional sense, as it fails the stable store of value test, which then impairs it's ability to serve the other functions money (unit of account, medium of exchange). However, Bitcoin and other cryptos are more like investments that also happen to be massively efficient global wealth transfer systems (relative to existing methods). CNBC's crypto coverage continues to be shallow, click-baity, disappointing garbage.

It's entirely avoidable. Just don't commit secrets to source control. Ever.

Mediocre US-born programmers, rejoice!

stay hungry. stay foolish.

[Googles: "how to entrepreneu"]

NO RESULTS

[gives up]

Using a javascript framework to generate a static HTML site is like building an entire car so you can extract just the chassis from it.

Eagerly awaiting attacks on the car simile. Go.

Bill Campbell: Maker of Silicon Valley Assholes.

That seems like a low standard for courage. Larry Page is the CEO of Google (Alphabet). He can fire pretty much anyone he wants, including (and especially) the CEO of a company he acquired. Firing an asshole seems like the reasonable thing to do, not courageous.

But let's be real for a moment -- the guy was probably not fired because he's a prick. Who knows the reason, but ultimately Alphabet is a public company that demands results (and returns) from assets (companies) it invests in (acquires). My hunch is that Nest (and/or it's subsidiaries) were not delivering, and the CEO is ultimately responsible.

It probably didn't help that the guy is an asshole, but let's not pretend that Larry Page walked through the Nest offices like a white knight, sensed a "negative energy", interviewed the sad-looking office manager, and determined the CEO was "damaging to company morale" and therefore MUST be replaced.

Page is the CEO of the one of the largest and most important publicly traded companies in the world. He has a legal and fiduciary responsibility to do right by shareholders. If the Nest CEO was putting up numbers, he'd still have a job, period, asshole or saint.