rosenjon

I'll buy one...but your discount code doesn't work. It says "Enter a valid discount code".

facepalm. You are going to put all of a businesses more sensitive/proprietary data in the blockchain. Why? Also, blockchain is the least performant database in the world. When ERP requires most performant database. Why??!!

This is kind of cool. How do you prevent people from running malicious code?

My only concern with projects like Odoo is that open source ERP seems to die off fairly regularly. How robust of a project do you think Odoo is? We'd like to be able to run it for a long while...

I think what he's pushing for is the ability to present any defense that he likes. Under certain statutes, you cannot raise a public interest defense. I believe the Espionage Act is one such statute. You cannot present a defense that is irrelevant to the commission of the crime, and under the Espionage Act it is the release of the information, regardless of intent, that is the crime. See here: http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/08/09/obama-falsely-su...

Venue shopping would obviously help him (ie Silicon Valley vs Arlington, Virginia). However, I think what he's pushing for is to be able to raise the illegality of the programs the government was hiding from the public (and lying about before Congress). It is not at all clear that this type of evidence would be allowed, and is pretty important for how a jury would construe his actions.

The Obama Administration has already ramped up CFAA prosecutions. Adding Civil Forfeiture laws would only further incentivize law enforcement to pursue these cases.

Not that it matters. This guy broke the law and nothing happened. He didn't even lose his job.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwiUVUJmGjs

Exactly. It incorporates by reference statutes from an era where it was actually a huge hurdle to install a listening device. Now every piece of technology is essentially a listening device, amongst many other things.

In addition, it waters down the statute from "intent to defraud" to "willfulness".

Oh by the way, they also want to take all your stuff, regardless of if you're convicted.

The problem is it undermines trust in American technology products in general. If the Snowden revelations were that the United States was bugging Iran, Libya and North Korea and monitoring all their communications, that would be one thing. However, we know now that EVERYONE is under surveillance. Therefore, how do we know they aren't doing this to everyone as well?

Based on the article, are we to presume that this only affects tech in hostile countries? Or are they doing this to US-based equipment as well?

Seems like this will backfire spectacularly when foreign countries and companies stop buying American made tech for fear of these hardware backdoors. Spectacularly irresponsible.

For some reason I can't reply to ikeboy directly. Is there a nesting limit for comments on HN?

Anywho, you can do the search that got him caught yourself.

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3A+bitcointalk.org+ross...

The relevant result is now #2, but used to be #1 (http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-google-search-that-took...)

He had deleted the original comment, but someone had replied and copied the text. He subsequently posted an ad for job postings with the same username and his personal email address (I think rossulbricht@gmail.com).

Basically, he was about as sloppy as it gets if you're running a criminal drug enterprise. Also, his confidant, Variety Jones/Cimon, hinted that he had done some research on Ulbricht and found some stuff. He was absurdly cocky about evading law enforcement. Makes you wonder if he has some kind of psychological disorder.

.1 - 1% equity for your pre-launch company seems a tad low, no?

Check out the following:

http://www.windowsazurepass.com/azureu

http://research.google.com/university/relations/appengine/ed...

The best initial clients are through people you already know. I would put the word out on social media that you are working on contract and specify your skill sets, and you are likely to find someone who knows someone who is looking for web design work.

Personally, I used to like to quote fixed prices for my projects, based on what I knew the approximate time it would take to complete the project. This gives certainty to your clients about how much they will pay, and also incentives you to deliver the project on time and without too many headaches for the client (thus leading to unpaid time bugfixing).

If you don't have any contacts who know people in tech, then another way to go is to start attending hackathons, or to do contract work on freelancer websites. These two options are less desirable, as you will tend to find customers who are much more picky and more price sensitive, but it is a way to get started absent a network.

What you should charge is a tough question. I think it really depends on what you are building. Mobile apps tend to fetch more than web apps. I'd shoot for $50-100 per hour to start out, and you can perhaps bump that up the better you get (especially if you are doing fixed price work and are conservative about how you quote jobs).

For invoicing, I would say Microsoft Word usually suffices. Unless you have an insane number of clients, it's pretty easy to keep track of your invoices by emailing PDFs and cashing the associated checks. For contracts, there are a number of options online for doing freelancing. I would download about 4-5 of them, read them thoroughly, and pick and choose the best options. If you want, once you have put together your ideal contract, you can hire a lawyer for an hour to review (but probably not necessary, assuming you are doing business through a corporation that doesn't have substantial assets).

On the contract front, one thing to note that is important. DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT, sign non-compete agreements. Everyone and their mom is going to want you to sign an agreement that says you will not compete with the product you build for them for 1-2 years (or perhaps more). I would highly recommend against this. By the time you get done working for 5-6 clients, you are arguably going to be non-competed out of pretty much every segment of the software industry in one way or another. When someone asks for this (unless they are offering you a yacht and $20 million dollars) just say no. On the other hand, I tend to view non-disclosure agreements as being pretty harmless (however, read these thoroughly. sometimes people sneak non-compete language into agreements titled "nondisclosure").

As far as legal issues, the big thing is to have an LLC. You should also have a bank account for your LLC. All transactions concerning your business go through the business bank account. Your business bank account should not be particularly well funded (i.e. pay yourself often from your business bank account). All agreements are signed by you, the "Member" of the LLC, not by you individually. Read up on "piercing the corporate veil", and don't do any of the things that might lead to this. If you do this, generally the only recourse someone will have will be against your company, and this allows you to avoid personal liability for issues that arise in the business, assuming you are not grossly negligent in some way.

This is also what I think. Start adding in database latency and other functions that execute alongside your string comparison, and this seems incredibly unreliable. It's not like most calls to a page only execute a single string comparison. Good to know, but seems low on the attack vector priority list.

haha. can you put javascript into dns txt records? very creative...

Looks like this program itself is designed to root your machine. If it has proper permissions, the exeCmd method is designed to be able to execute arbitrary commands on your machine. It's probably a command and control type situation (looks like they even dropped in a javascript file browser), which is kind of odd though if this is part of a botnet. If this script is actually runnable, it would be hard to know what's been done to your machine.

From Coinbase website: Up to 97% of customer funds are stored offline in bank vaults to prevent theft or loss

Visa/Mastercard/Amex take on the risk of deferred payment (you buy something today, and they don't get paid for a month). They compensate for this with merchant fees and high interest rates for those who don't pay.

Bitcoin seems to suffer from similar problems as cash: https://www.rfc1149.net/blog/2013/05/02/why-bitcoin-transfer...

However, it's worse, because its value relative to cash is neither stable nor predictable. If someone comes out with a better protocol that solves these problems in the future (and for which the Bitcoin protocol can't be upgraded), then Bitcoin could be worth nothing.

Is it really smart to suggest that loading all your money into Bitcoin is a good investment strategy?

Money is purely based on trust. That when I take dollars or bitcoins from you today, I will be able to spend them on something real in the future. I don't see why Bitcoin solves this fundamental problem, and therefore, the current system of high fees for deferred payment will apply equally to Bitcoin as it will to dollars or any other currency. Banks protect your money for a fee. How is Coinbase or any other provider in the Bitcoin ecosystem different? Let's just assume that Bitcoin disrupts all other currencies and takes over the world. Why will a Bitcoin money system not have the same problems as our current monetary system? Coinbase is still storing most of their currency in a vault...

That was just my understanding, having spoken to people in the program where I went to school. It seemed like most of them were being sponsored by a company. It would be interesting to know whether this number changes based on the quality of the program. I think many companies will only sponsor a candidate who gets accepted into a top program. Across all EMBA programs, the 35% figure seems right, based on Google.

I'll take a stab at this one. EMBA programs tend to be tailored to people who already have a relatively significant position within an organization. My understanding is that a large majority of people attending these programs have them payed for by their employers. The idea is to provide additional training to people who will have future, higher level roles within the organization.

I think that there are probably different flavors of this type of program depending on where you attend, but from my observations (regular MBA who had some minor interactions with EMBA's during school), they tend to fly/drive in for the weekends and return to work during the week. Depending on the program, you may or may not be exposed to "hard skills" such as finance, accounting, etc, as there is a presumption that students already have some of these skills. My understanding is the focus tends to be more on soft skills like leadership, management, etc, which will help competent employees become better managers in the future.

From the way you posed your question, it sound like you are thinking about paying for this yourself. If that is the case, and you don't already have an undergrad or grad business degree, then I would probably recommend either a full-time or part-time MBA, instead of executive MBA. You will probably get more for your money out of one of these programs.

As my dad is fond of saying, "He who takes what isn't hisn must give it back AND go to prison".

How is this a quick sale? He built the company over 5 years, and then sold it for $19 billion. The sale price equates to an 11% stake in Facebook at its current market cap. That is a huge, world crushing exit.

I hadn't ever used this app before I downloaded it today, just to check out why Facebook payed $19 billion. It looks to me like a total ripoff of the iPhone SMS Messaging App. It sounds like they have a huge userbase, and have been able to monetize it, so there is real value there. However, this valuation seems, quite simply, insane.

Even if all 400 million of their users paid $1 per year (which isn't happening), this purchase price would be 47x revenue. Of course, since many internet software companies are operating in negative revenue territory, this is perhaps reasonable in comparison.

Yes. To talk about startup anxiety, but also balancing everything else in life. I think the desire to problem solve also extends to life issues, and sometimes this gets unhealthy if it all stays in my head.

Ditto. I have benefited immensely from PHP and very much appreciate the contributions from people like Richard. Very sorry to hear this happened to him and hopefully donations help take some of the stress off his family in this very difficult time.

How is that going to solve the problem? The procrastination comes from a fear of failure. Your suggestion is to go take a mindless, shitty job, thereby suggesting this is what's going to happen to him if he fails? First, that's probably not the likely outcome of failure, and second, it's not going to help the fear of failure.

Call it a "vacation", or a "break", or whatever you want. But you have to step away sometimes in order to clarify your thinking. Startups are a marathon, not a sprint. Despite all the lean startup craziness, nothing truly gets built in a day, a week or a month. If he has literally made no progress in a month, then something needs to change. Personally, I think the most effective thing is a change of environment. His office has become a toxic place to go during the day and procrastinate. He needs to get away from it and do something else for a bit, and then come back to it with fresh eyes.

Here are some further suggestions for what he can do to regain some balance. http://zenhabits.net/the-10-essential-rules-for-slowing-down...

nevermind, i see, it's DEAL. I didn't carry the mixup calls all the way down. I guess the "mixup" function call should be a hint.

I was curious after reading this, so I Googled sample questions from the AP Computer Science exam.

https://www.tracy.k12.ca.us/sites/clunetta/Java/practice/pra...

The last question on the test is this:

The method mixup is defined as follows: String mixup(String word) { if (word.length() == 1) return ""; else return mixup(word.substring(0, word.length() - 1)) + word.charAt(word.length() - 1); }

What is the value of the string returned by mixup("IDEAL")?

a) IDEAL b) IDEA c) LEAD d) LEDA e) DEAL

I don't program much in Java, so maybe I'm missing some gotcha, but shouldn't the answer to this be "L"? The recursive mixup call will go: IDEA... IDE... ID.. I, at which point the final return value will be "".

So the value of the returned string will be "" + "L" therefore returning "L"?

In any case, the point of looking at this was to get some sense of whether a kid would even want to take AP Comp Sci. My concern with this, knowing how most of these subjects get taught in school, is that teachers would teach to the test, therefore sapping all of the fun out of programming. Knowing some of this stuff by heart is potentially valuable I suppose, but kind of operates in a vacuum, as practically you have a ton of resources at your disposal when programming (ie Google, Stack Overflow, API references, etc). This rote memorization of things could actually turn kids off of computer science instead of drawing them in.

This is going to sound a little crazy, but you need to take a break. Give yourself a one week vacation, and go do something fulfilling that doesn't involve working on this app.

What do you like to do? It doesn't have to cost money, per se. Go visit some friends for a week, or go on a hike, or just go do something around town you've been wanting to do but haven't. However, try to have it involve other people, and not just be by yourself.

Right now, you're working" every day, but getting nothing done. There is probably a lot of fear that your app won't work, that no one will use it, that you are wasting your time and will have nothing to show for it at the end. Of course, there is the possibility that I am just projecting on you, as I have had all of these feelings and displayed some of the same behaviors, but I guess that is for you to decide.

The purpose of the break is to get some perspective. Life is not all about this app. Even if it goes down in flames, it's really not a big deal. You're smart and you'll find something else you want to do and do that. The self doubt and fear of failure is what keeps you going to the office every day, but getting nothing done.

By taking a break and clearing your mind, you can reassess where you're at with fresh eyes, tackle the big problems keeping you from moving forward, and create a solid plan of action to move forward.

That's just my two cents, having had similar issues...

I predict this is the beginning of the end for these guys. After the emergency funding and layoffs, this suggests that they may be on their last legs. It's either bankruptcy or an emergency sale coming down the line...

Aside from whether or not this method of linking data increases performance, there is a huge cost in relational databases to the complexity created by many-to-many relationships. Even if the performance were the same, the dispersion of data makes it a nightmare to pull together a hierarchical object out of many different database tables, and then to deduplicate the data that is cross-joined (ie in the case of a user with multiple shipping addresses...join user on address => you get the same user record for every instance of address, which then has to be consolidated in code). Then do that times 5-10 other tables and you have yourself a very messy query that is very slow.

These problems can be solved with KV stores, but at the cost of human readable databases. Likewise, with ORMs, you sacrifice performance and direct understanding of how the database is being queried.

There are many advantages to a document-graph model like orientdb for these reasons.