bigbird · HackerTrans

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

Here's a little script that does something similar with some features that make it more useful (for hackers at any rate):

https://github.com/jtmaher/Passwords

bigbird

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

It's actually a bit worse than this -- basically this is analogous to putting the $12k in a storage locker and then posting on the internet the exact location of the locker.

Given that a bitcoin client was almost certainly running on this box, basically anyone could have connected to the bitcoin network and established this guy's IP address as a target.

If you run bitcoin software, you are advertising your IP address as a high value target.

bigbird

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

Note that ths is just an API - to use it you still need to be a subscriber, and nothing they offer is cheap. In the tradition of their Excel APIs, this doesn't even come close to giving automated access to their entire database.

This API seems like a marketing tool designed to get people to build algorithmic applications around expensive real time feeds from Bloomberg.

bigbird

vor 15 Jahrendiscuss

There's a grey market in "zappers", which are POS devices that keep two sets of books automatically. Lots of small retail businesses rely on this type of tax fraud to stay in business.

bigbird

vor 15 Jahrendiscuss

I get what you're saying, but the guy in the article is talking about renting an "extra bedroom in a nice neighborhood". Look at that guy's place -- he's got a duplex penthouse in what appears to be fairly nice shape with at least 2 bedrooms. Most likely substantially more than $1000/mo.

bigbird

vor 15 Jahrendiscuss

If you've already got a nice pad in NYC or SF, is it really that likely you can't come up with $10k? At most that's only a few months rent...

bigbird

vor 15 Jahrendiscuss

The TVs delay the sound to match the latency in the video processing. Very annoying if you have a computer attached with any sort of real time audio (microphone, guitar, etc).

bigbird

vor 15 Jahrendiscuss

Looks like a very interesting project.

Does the JVM environment have any tools that would facilitate building a better R debugger? That's one area of the R ecosystem that could use a serious upgrade IMO.

bigbird

vor 15 Jahrendiscuss

I also don't think that what the article describes is "gaming" the system, except maybe for the part about pretending to have not heard the questions before.

Generally, the reason I ask such questions of candidates is to make sure I'm dealing with someone who can actually analyze a problem and get a reasonable result. So if they nail the questions because they took time to study and get good at interview-style brain teasers, that's actually fine with me - it proves the person can execute a plan to get correct results.

I'm not sure I'd call anyone who successfully "games" the system incompetent.

bigbird

vor 15 Jahrendiscuss

The total variation distance is an upper bound for the absolute difference in probability over all subsets of permutations.

In particular, we can consider the set:

   U = {all permuations that have never been seen by a human}

The counting arguments in the article lead us to conclude that the uniform probability of U is very close to 1, i.e. almost all permuations have never been obtained by a human shuffle. The Bayer-Diaconis result implies that for certain types of shuffles the probability of ending up in U is at least

   1 - (the total variation distance above)

So for 8 shuffles, we have a probablity of at least 82.4% of landing in U. This is considerably weaker than "every shuffle is unique".

bigbird

vor 15 Jahrendiscuss

It's actually pretty easy to make an employee friendly "deferred compensation" program in the U.S. as evidenced by the way most financial firms structure stock grants. Under these plans, the stock continues to vest, even if the employee is laid off. The only way to lose unvested shares is to quit or get fired for cause.

This type of program is really good for retaining highly paid employees in established companies, but might not be ideal for startups.

bigbird

vor 15 Jahrendiscuss

Bezos started out on "Wall St", working at D.E. Shaw in NYC.

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