rscale

I'm an Evernote Premium user, but I convinced my wife not to start using it because of this apparent misallocation of resources. I've had data loss within the (slow) core app, and the editor frustrates me; thus I find it kind of frustrating that as near as I can tell, most of the development effort is focused on very marginally useful features.

I also find the sentence Aaron faced to be excessive.

For additional context, David Headley received a 35 year sentence for his active participation in the Mumbai bombings which killed 160 people.[1] The median sentence for murder and non-negligent manslaughter in the US (effective 2000) is 24 years, 3 months.[2]

I can't help but find Aaron's prospective punishment to be far more abhorrent than his crimes. It continues to sadden me that MIT used their influence in such a hurtful manner.

[1]: http://www.propublica.org/article/david-headley-homegrown-te...

[2]: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/ascii/Fssc00.txt

The dedicated work-only office was my most important productivity enhancement. It helped me prevent burnout (where I'd just work every single hour), and it also helped my spouse understand when I was "at work" and should be treated thusly.

As an added bonus in the US, a dedicated work-only workspace can be eligible for a Home Office tax deduction.

This is the same reason we switched from darcs to git. The value of ubiquity exceeded the value of our previous preferences.

That's an interesting catch. I'm guessing the gap was because the attacker commissioned the software at low cost, and didn't spot the problem. That said, the attack would still work well because Jeans plays nosebleed stakes[1], so he's not likely to be playing a huge number of games at a time, and he travels regularly for live games so he's likely to be on a standalone laptop.

Multi-monitor setups are very common in the poker world, but the primary monitor would get you a long way. After all, if you sit with him and realize your table isn't on his main screen, you could sit out.

I'm quite glad he thought to drop his computer at F-Secure.

[1] example hands from his online games: http://www.highstakesdb.com/poker-hands.aspx?=&sort=potsize&...

I also have a pair of the Bose QC15s. They're fantastic for my open-plan office. Even very quiet music, when combined with their noise cancellation, will silence nearly all background noise.

An MBA in entrepreneurship has business classes adapted for an entrepreneurial audience.

A typical MBA involves the study of topics such as marketing, finance, risk management, accounting, economics, statistics, operations, HR, organizational dynamics, business law, and strategy.

Many of these can easily be adapted to be more useful for entrepreneurs. A finance class can focus on venture capital more than the bond market. A marketing class can focus on new product development more than the promotion of existing products. A law class can deal with the issues most relevant to startups. The accounting needs of a startup exec are different than those a future partner at Deloitte. etc.

As a clear example of the type of content that an entrepreneurial class could cover, Steve Blank's book Four Steps to the Epiphany originated not as a book, but as the notes for his class at Haas.

The U.S. patents in question:

6,957,224: Efficient retrieval of uniform resource locators; https://www.google.com/patents/US6957224

7,072,849: Method for presenting advertising in an interactive service; https://www.google.com/patents/US7072849

7,099,862: Programmatic discovery of common contacts. https://www.google.com/patents/US7099862

Why T-Mobile made the change is unimportant to me. I care that they made the change, and that they committed to it via zero lock-in contracts. If I feel that I'm not getting sufficient value at some point in the future, I can simply walk away from T-Mobile without spending $325/line in termination fees.

And as for the network, I'm fortunate that it's not a trade-off for me. T-Mobile's coverage has proven superior to AT&T's for my precise work/home/travel combination.

We're using StatusPage and we host on AWS. We decided this was acceptable because they're in multiple AZs in a datacenter that isn't our primary.

The (minor) risk presented by that is softened further by the fact that it's a communication tool, and we have other ways to communicate status with the team and with customers.

I agree with you. It's perfectly reasonable for a firm to pour money into its customer acquisition machine so long as the return is greater than the cost of capital plus a risk premium.

Failure to reinvest every dollar under those circumstances is a Type I error.

I was just thinking that this article could serve as the opening shot in an effort to create venture vehicles for retail investors.

Perhaps the "intense pace of work" is the organizational equivalent of the myriad situations where the marginal returns of an additional hour of work are negative, but it feels like they should be positive, so we work/hack/study a bit more.

Given that description, I could see you working quite effectively in a technical sales role (e.g. sales engineer).

err... "a small convenience to small teams."

Companies routinely fail to disable access to users who no longer need it, creating security risks and increasing costs.

This seems very valuable to large teams, and like a small convenience to large teams.

And if you fire somebody because they make a mistake, the result is a culture of coverups and blame shifting.

Exactly. Even at the lowest transaction volumes MtGox charges 0.6%, so the operator can capture 15bps in each direction.

That said, customers still face risk that the operator could use the deposits for expenses, or for dividends. I'm reminded of Full Tilt Poker, where customers were told their funds were in segregated accounts, but the funds had actually been given to the directors.

The issue was undetectable until outflows outpaced inflows and the music stopped.

It's likely my own ignorance, but I don't understand the concern you're raising. What's the relationship between frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology and communication/antenna records?

If anybody needs true, total anonymity it's worth reading this paper before buying any cell phone: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3607247/pdf/srep...

The paper shows that 95% of cell phone subscribers are personally identifiable from VERY little spatio-temporal information.

Another issue is that an upstream vendor could easily provide the government with the phone IMEIs and SIM IMSIs that they supply to BurnerPhone, without disclosing this to BurnerPhone. This would create a pool of phones that are self-identified as high-value surveillance targets.

If I was in charge of identifying miscreants for a nasty regime, I'd also watch for SIM card changes (an IMEI whose IMSI changes on a regular basis), and I'd especially look for cliques of handsets that showed the same SIM-changing behavior. As such, I can't help but wonder if swapping SIM cards might generate unwanted attention.

The most recent Planet Money podcast is also about patent trolls, and goes into a bit more depth about the guy who declared himself a co-inventor of podcasting.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/05/31/187374157/episode-...

EFF's effort to find prior art and raise money to fight this particular troll can be found here:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/help-save-podcasting

It's due to rarely occurring problems such as APIs down/unresponsive, insufficient/incorrect instances available, and a third major class of problem that's frustrating my memory at the moment. In addition to not scaling up and down (automatically or manually), many of these apps are architected to require as little from AWS as is possible to reduce their exposure. For example, they'll refrain from using ELB because ELB depends on EBS.

These decisions were made by companies that started off believing fully in the promise of elasticity, and gradually shifted to less elastic architectures as they experienced issues. That said, it's worth noting that these are firms with very high costs of downtime, so the magnitude of failures was very high.

I was shocked when I learned that many EC2 users with highly variable traffic don't spin down during off-peak because sometimes Amazon has problems that prevent them from spinning their instances back up.

I love the idea of their cloud services, but the reality is a decidedly less attractive beast.

Excel makes this easy as well:

http://cl.ly/image/1X2S121l2C3O

No nerd cred, but it crosses the finish line.

Facebook's engineering director Jocelyn Goldfein spoke about open office plans during her recent talk at Stanford. She explicitly stated that it decreases her team's productivity, but that it was embraced because it promotes "openness" which is a core value at Facebook.

And if you're using a DNS service that doesn't support SSHFP records, you can generate and distribute a base known_hosts file with your favorite configuration management solution.

That's aligned with what I've seen, too.

For example, I saw a group of seed investors try to identify potential patents in their portfolio companies as a way to increase the scrap value of the firms in the worst-case scenario. But they weren't making go/no-go decisions on the basis of the patents, it was just a slight value-add after a go.

Patents only seem to be of primary importance in a few niches.

a₂) Your investors believe in the value of patents.

Perhaps that we're conditioned to give Bs more readily than we give Fs.

This is far more effective than the collateral I saw from them 2 or 3 years ago. Glad to see they're making a more serious attempt to monetize.

I don't quite understand the constraints on the branded subreddits. That seems like it could be effective if done carefully and disastrous if done bluntly.