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.
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.
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.
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.
I have a two bedroom condo and use one of the rooms as an office/storage. After reading this article I am seriously considering moving my desk to my bedroom and getting rid of some other stuff to make a spare bedroom.
I'm sure there will be some hassle dealing with guests, but it seems pretty close to "free money" in my opinion.
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).
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.
Eclipse is a pretty good framework for building IDEs; there's already a set of plugins for R (StatET) that support debugging with the original interpreter.
One of the projects for 2012 is to integrate Renjin into StatET, including a line-by-line debugger. Any takers?
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.
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".
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.
https://github.com/jtmaher/Passwords