adgar2

Never spending is at odds with mainstream economic theories. You are proposing reducing spending without any particular bound beyond "necessity."

If you want our economy to be based on food, water, and shelter, just say so. But it will conflict with how the rest of us want the world to work.

Saving is a good thing.

Never spending is a bad thing.

My parent poster was questioning the latter. Not the former.

Do you use Google+ at an enterprise?

If not, you seem to have missed the point of this article.

> A deflating currency might disincentivize spending, but it won't halt it. And what's so great about incentivizing spending?

When you find yourself challenging the basis of nearly all economic theories, it might be time to step back from the bitcoin breadbowl.

My favorite:

> 30. A Legitimately Interesting Technical Blog Post

> 3 points by happy4crazy 5 hours ago | flag | discuss

You're right about Google and Amazon, early posting on my part.

But I'd say the iPhone was easily a multi-billion dollar project.

> Spotify need the record companies, but the record companies don't need Spotify. For now the record companies are squeezing Spotify for all their revenue, but it's no trouble to them if Spotify goes out of business.

I suspect Spotify knows this, and is betting on getting too big to fail before the record companies push them under.

I'm being constructive to zacharyvoase. You can't please everybody with every statement you make without being a sycophant.

They provide value to the owners of the roads from which customers are towed - roads typically owned by the public. Your analogy is folly.

Microsoft and Apple both have multi-billion dollar projects.

Edit: Google and Amazon likely don't, actually.

What do you call the role of the individual whose job it is to implement account management? Do you not call that person an engineer? If not - whose responsibility would you say it is to ensure shit like this doesn't happen?

According to timestamps, it took ~5 minutes for you to realize your mistake. It may be worth waiting those five minutes before posting, in the future.

All I can say to that is thank Christ it's not 1996 anymore.

> Assumptions make a...

"Head of Product" sounds like a product manager, it doesn't even sound like an engineer at all - this makes it even less surprising that these pathetic security holes existed.

Just to be clear, that means my assumptions you lambasted were generous. Not folly.

It's not helpful, it's realistic. My exact wording was "your time will be better spent elsewhere."

We each have 24 hours in a day. I spend 8-9 of mine sleeping, 9-10 at work. That doesn't leave much leftover for me.

If zacharyvoase wants to spend his precious free time educating people who haven't done any due diligence to learn how to build a secure web app, that's his prerogative. But I don't see it as a good use of his time - there's already tons of resources out there that will do a better job than zachary. Is HN supposed to be a newbie education destination?

Since you presented 2 possibilities here, neither of which are accurate, what is your response to the reality of the situation?

Except you're talking about a payments startup. In startups, engineering talent isn't very important.

> The difference between reversing a string and pulling data from a database are, literally, completely different tasks. The killer is that the latter is something that a candidate will do in a job.

Why can't you do both? Seriously? Pulling data from a database is orders of magnitude harder to get right than reversing a string.

Exactly. When you go to provide your information to a website, you need to consider "what are all the possible outcomes of this?" We can't use the reputation of the providers of a service as a proxy and thus have zero information about what to expect. Since you almost never have the source code for the website you're giving your information to, using your logic, just never give your data out. Right?

I had to look up WePay on Google. The wikipedia page says they have 30 employees as of a year ago, did YC and 1 round of funding.

I have to be honest - that doesn't demonstrate a high level of trust at all these days. It's sad, but true. Plus, if you say they're "ex-WePay," I assume they were just everyday developers for WePay, not critical resources.

Dude... this guy clearly doesn't understand security. I'm glad you're trying to help him out... but your time will be better spent elsewhere.

You're so right! Writing secure web apps is for pussies.

> Is it considered apropos to state how surprised you are that developers who come across as relatively senior are capable of making an incredibly fundamental security mistake such as this?

Only if you're concerned that you can't tell who is "relatively senior." In this case, your judgement was unfortunately wrong.

> I don't think I've encountered a site that had accounts edited this way before.

Any site that employs the pattern of specifying user account routes using the user's primary key in the URL needs to implement authorization. This site clearly skipped that step.

To me, this looks like the stereotypical bare-bones rails deployment by a newbie.

It might be time for pg and co. to reconsider the idea that engineering doesn't matter and that startups are just about people. This is pathetic.

Just to be clear: you are agreeing with your parent poster. Here's your response: Facebook's value IS lock-in, and companies with real technical prowess will fail because they rely on producing something new.

Explain. If you can't produce a god damned string reversal function in 10 minutes, why would I believe you can produce a bug fix to your own, complex code in a few hours? That's what interviewers are considering: the interview is a proxy to see if you can come close to the requirements of the job.

You just compared Zynga/OMGPOP employees to 5-year-olds who don't know better than to tie their shoes.

> I feel sympathy for any employees who exercised their options at IPO

Why? People choose their alliances. OMGPOP and Zynga are both trying to cash in on fads without bringing much real value to the marketplace. Why should rank-and-file employees get more sympathy than the big fish running the show? They chose to do the jobs they did.

And now the real heavy lifting for Google web search is C++, as everybody with a clue knows. What's your point?