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I hope, in this case, given the really close parallels, it wont be facetious to say: Hari Seldon! Fact following from fiction?

In general very nicely done, but the $4999 option with every detail negotiable seems a bit amateurish. "Lets throw a number and see what sticks"

Having said that, the intention is, I imagine, noble. You want to be, and be seen, to be flexible and willing to work with your customer. But I think the way its presented will come across as wishy-washy.

I like the design, thought it may be a little busy at times. But certainly eye catching.

I think the linked article answers that question well: the ONLY obligation is to be honest, not dissemble about the truth.

So long as the primary leverage in an investment bank's business was people (skills, relationships), they were happy being partnerships.

In the 80's as investment banks discovered the joy of trading profits, they realised they could then leverage capital (pun intended). That therefore led to their finding more capital, in one of three ways, all which started to happen in the next 10-15 years : merging with commercial banks (which in turn allowed commercial banks to earn larger returns on their capital ... much better than lending to the neighbourhood convenience store); going public; and pressuring regulators to allow higher debt/capital ratios.

So, as with everything, a simple matter of incentives.

Exactly, this is weird. Till march, @wakemate twitter account was asking saying its email address is arun at wakemate.

I was about to order one, even though I had to wait a long time for my wakemate. However, after reading this thread, I've decided against it. Too much drama.

Personally, I think this is more about a sense of power, rather than simply 'billionaire envy'. I've seen that people at a certain level think that normal rules don't apply to them. This operates quite insidiously too, it's not always a chest thumping, fist pumping, 'I rule the world' kind of behaviour. I imagine Mr Gupta thinks of himself as a regular law abiding citizen, but didn't think there was anything wrong about him helping out a friend with his contacts.

Also, I'm quite astonished by the fact that that 60 of the 66 charges have been resolved by guilty pleas or verdict. In many of these high profile cases, detractors claim 'witch hunt', and a quite often win on appeal. However, with these statistics, anyone who claims that there isn't something rotten going on is on doesn't have much to stand on.

All in all however, a 63 year old man who was something of a personal icon is going to jail. Sad, particularly for his family, but count me impressed by Preet Bharara.

This seems to be taking some liberties with the facts, and it is unfortunate if they are able to get away with this. He said they're unsure if email addresses have been taken, but is very sure that no customer has been harmed!

Even assuming that no email address has been taken, the fact that this list of passwords is now seeding rainbow tables across the world is a quite harmful, I think (and this is true irrespective of any advice to users to use unique passwords). Also, for a site as large and supposedly sophisticatd as linkedin, not using salts is inexcusable.

I have been a long time user of linkedin, and have no plans to stop using it. I certainly dont want to hang them, but an acknowledgement of mistakes are expected, otherwise declarations that it wont happen again have no weight. Disappointed.

This post was discussed constructively on the Julia mailing list some time ago, and spawned a long and interesting thread. Worth perusing for some followup.

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!searchin/julia-...

1 based array indices are indeed a very opinionated decision. But I must say it isn't a very difficult thing to switch one's mental models around. Its very easy to get used to.

Agreed, one should know the strengths of your language, and avoid the pitfalls. Every language has its share of both. But the effort, I suppose, is to increase the surface area of the strengths.

So one of the claims of Julia is that you write code in the most natural manner, and depend on the compiler to make it fast. So, for example, the claim is that adding the optional type parameters do not necessarily make your code faster... type inference is good enough in most cases (there are obvious counterexamples, eg with global variables, but its true in the majority of cases). Also, unlike for eg. Matlab or R, vectorising your code does not necessarily produce performance gains, arrays are good enough. One of the side effects is that the standard library is implemented in the language itself, and thus extending built-in types is a breeze.

Therefore, I think its a very interesting effort in itself. Whether it is good enough to displace any other language is a completely separate issue. As said below, the base of useful libraries in languages such as R is phenomenal. But that should not, I think, preclude admiring a very interesting new language, for the possibilities that it hints at, if only as a highly engaging mental activity.

Personally, and subjectively, I think the combination of the above, and multiple dispatch, causes the language to have a highly pleasing sense of elegance.

This is good advice.

There are a couple of things I'd add. If you're more than just a couple of founders, ensure you have a watertight no-solicitation agreement, in addition to an NDA. More than information, employees who know the domain are valuable to the competitor.

Finally, the one overriding thing to keep in mind for all offers -- dont let it be a time or energy sink. Its easy to fall into that trap, if the first couple of conversations are productive.

The flickr username is not the same as your yahoo username. They are linked, but can be different strings. You sign in to flickr using your yahoo username (ie, your @yahoo.com email address) but your flickr username is a completely different string.

The reason for this, I suppose, is that flickr was an independent entity, with its own user database, before being acquired by yahoo. It was long after the acquisition that yahoo insisted on linking it to your yahoo ID. Some will remember the brouhaha that caused.

I don't think this can be construed as 'fanboy dismissal', though the term 'fanboy' itself is controversial.

Post purchase dissonance reduction is a well known cognitive bias[1]. And what can be better for dissonance reduction than someone telling you that you have good taste, and anyone who buys the competition is a philistine?

I should point out that this does not impute anything to the quality of the products themselves. I just posit that blogs such as Gruber's play a active part in the ecosystem due to our cognitive biases. They are not merely a passive observer.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-purchase_rationalization

It was a documentary investigating online bullying. Not a 'news' story of the day.

And so it begins.

While this leaves me with an icky feeling, being a java developer, I'm also cognizant of the fact that one of the major criticisms of Sun from the financial markets was that they could not monetize java very well.

It'll be interesting to look back in 10 years and see how Java has fared under Oracle.

The title on HN seems to have converted the 'not equal to' in the original into 'equals'

I get your point, but I'm still uncertain about whether to feel happy or disappointed at the fact that everything goes in circles.

We (the internets :D) spend all this time getting out of the AOL walled garden, only to go back to the Facebook walled garden. Seems like an utter waste of effort.

But maybe the glass is half full, and we will be out of here soon.

I've not had a formal CS education. So the first time I had to write a mini compiler, I decided to do it by hand, for its educational value, rather than use a parser generator. Google got me Crenshaw's paper (Lets build a compiler), and I remember it was very simple to follow his code to write my own. So yes, much recommended.

Yes, in the long term, printing money will lead to an inflationary spiral. The expectation of that will cause higher interest rates. But the fact remains, that in an emergency, it is a possibility. And the possibility of creates greater safety/willingness to lend.

Moody's in its latest assessment says:

"The global role of the dollar, which underpins continued demand for U.S. dollar assets, .... provides unmatched access to financing, meaning that the U.S. government can support higher debt levels than other governments"

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/08/moodys-why-the-...

Sure, it can cause inflation, but it is incontrovertible that governments can always replay local currency debt by issuing currency (except the EURO, where priting money has been offloaded to an external entity). Which is why sovereign debt in local currency is always the risk free credit, by definition. And the US is in the enviable position where, due to the nature of the dollar being the global reference currency, all (most?) of its debt is denominated USD.

So I'm left puzzled at the recent debate about the US debt.

There is an option on facebook to prevent anyone else from tagging you in their photos. Its in you account privacy setting.

Google+ lets you approve all tags.

Here's the original source for Uwe's email: http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/www-announce/201107...

Not sure why a third level reference is being passed around.

This assertion (among many other gems) was originally stated in the Mythical Man Month, by Fred Brooks, published in 1975.

OK, I understand why creating specific handlers might warrant a heads up.

I suppose I'm unsympathetic since every authenticated web app I've done in the last 10 years has been SSL only. But that was too 'enterprisey' perhaps :). Also I imagine that this is such an obvious thing, it wasn't a case of being unaware of the issue, just taking a conscious risk-reward decision on being SSL-only. Particularly for the really smart developers at github. One could argue that since nothing bad (that we know of) happened before firesheep, it was a valid decision.

All in all, I think Firesheep has done a big favour to the web as a whole.

PS. this thread has degenerated to using github as an example, I should probably point out that I love and respect github. really.

I'm sorry, but this is a cop-out. Even five minutes of thought on how you authenticate your users would have shown that it depends on one string being a secret. Most people acknowledge that passwords shouldn't be passed in the clear. So what's the difference between a password and a session cookie in terms of its sensitivity. This is security 101. I think its highly irresponsible, and a disservice to users of all web applications, to suggest that this is new in any sense.

And, in a practical sense, who would you have expected the creators of firesheep to have warned? The top100 sites? the top500? At what point should github have entered the list? Again, this is not a vulnerability in a specific app, its a well known design error.