The latest PyCharm 4.0 IDE from JetBrains support just this feature, and it's great. I am guessing that the upcoming 0xDBE will support this in a standalone app if you don't need a full blown IDE for another language outside of SQL.
This explains some weird EC2 stuff we saw yesterday. A good reminder to check up that a box starts up as expected (mounts disks, starts services, etc). It's easy to get lazy about that sort of thing when you're moving fast.
I've been following this story for a while, and it seems that no one can say for sure if this is embezzlement or gross incompetence. Based on leaked memos it seems to be most people are learning towards the latter, but I'm curious if there's any evidence either way.
Based on the claimed transparency of Bitcoin, I would have expected embezzlement on this scale to have been noticed earlier, or at the very least have people be able to follow the Bitcoin trail to determine what is actually happening.
My gut feeling, speaking as an outsider reading the news, is Karpeles was never dishonest, just hopelessly out of his depth and too stubborn to ask for help.
In the normal course of events I also would expect money disappearing over that long a timescale to have to have been embezzlement by an employee, and I would certainly consider that a plausible hypothesis here. On the other hand, reading the IRC chat transcript where Karpeles talks about how he's been under so much stress that it's ruining his health, it's obvious he made the classic mistake of trying to work so many hours he couldn't think straight.
So I'm guessing either he delegated the accounts to someone with no oversight and it was an inside job... or he refused to delegate, which meant the accounts were in the hands of someone too tired to be capable of coherent thought, which amounted to the same result as nobody looking at them, and an outside job would suffice.
Moral of this story for customers: don't risk money you can't afford to lose.
Moral of this story for founders: don't try to be a hero and do more than one job's worth of work, especially in a domain where a screwup may cause significant harm.
I've spent way too much time following this and I agree with your thoughts as well. Karpeles seems to personify the phrase we know in software development - that he knows just enough to be dangerous but not enough to be competent.
"During this time, Mark Karpeles was active on the forums and developer boards and appeared to be implementing fixes to Gox software to address Tx-Mal."
He really should not have been looking for solutions himself.
>He really should not have been looking for solutions himself.
Actually, I think at this point he had waited too late to ask for competent help. Here we have a custom Bitcoin client, written in what is probably a tangled hairball of PHP. The Bitcoin protocol is already fairly complex, and even Bitcoin software written by competent developers using modern software development methods can be tricky to understand (see btcd for an example of a well-engineered client).
How many engineers could fix that in a reasonable period of time?
Add to that the fact that there are only a handful of competent programmers in the world who also are experts at the Bitcoin protocol, and I'm not convinced that he could have convinced any of them to take on the task. Most of them are already wealthy, and they have a lot of reputation to lose by trying (quite possibly in vain) to fix a dying company.
Mark's biggest mistake was in trying to do this all himself once Bitcoin really took off. So yes, a valuable lesson for entrepreneurs.
Thank you for one of the few rational comments I've read about the whole ordeal. And yes, as a Bitcoiner since 2011 (who last dealt with Gox that same year), your assessment of Karpeles is spot on. My impression is that he's not dishonest, just the classic Dunning-Kruger programmer we've all worked with.
The hard thing about accounting for these Bitcoins is that we keep track of them via addresses, but Karpeles was robbed at a lower level of abstraction -- via outputs. So he's probably struggling with that.
EDIT: I should have written that my impression is that he's not a thief. I suspect he has been dishonest about what he's known about his company's situation, in the sense that he's probably lied by commission or at least omission. But I don't think he stole anything.
Note that it could also be negligence and fraud. For example, they might have discovered the losses early but hushed them up in hopes of making it up later. That's a classic way massive financial issues happen.
However, the transparency of Bitcoin only helps if it's used that way. There have been proposals to develop approaches so that anybody can externally verify an exchange or "bank". But as far as I know, MtGox hasn't released enough information for other people to verify their story.
Thanks for the insight, I still thought the Bitcoin protocol would have had enough transparency to make the case clear as to whether or not this is a situation of dishonesty or incompetence. I guess the protocol does not provide the level of transparency I assumed.
I've been following this story for a while, and it seems that no one can say for sure if this is embezzlement or gross incompetence. Based on leaked memos it seems to be most people are learning towards the latter, but I'm curious if there's any evidence either way.
Based on the claimed transparency of Bitcoin, I would have expected embezzlement on this scale to have been noticed earlier, or at the very least have people be able to follow the Bitcoin trail to determine what is actually happening.
This is really nice. I said I'd by $5 for a desktop version but I'd pay $10 for a Chrome extension that could work on selected text or (even better) the Gmail compose text box.
Reading this thread on Reddit actually puts in perspective how hard it must be for governments to design and implement effective economic regulations. It's a real balancing act.
It's hard to tell from the included screenshots, but both based on the dimensions of the Facebook Ad (it looks like a "Right Hand Rail" ad and not one that run in the newsfeed) and the fact that a Mobile App Install statistic was not provided, I think its fairly likely that the Facebook Ad in question might not have been the Mobile App Install [1] format. That type of ad can be targeted only to people who are consuming Facebook via the Facebook client for your desired Mobile OS (in this case Android) and the call to action will be direct install. It will also indicate precisely how many install occurred via the Mobile App Install conversion stat. The add in question would have been a link to the play store via the web -- even if the user is not on a mobile device.
If I am correct (I can't be sure given the article), the results are not surprising. A properly run Mobile App Install Campaign can yield sub $2 installs depending on the app being advertised, but that assumes requires some experience running online ad campaigns.
I recently got a Mac-compatible model of what is essentially the original IBM Model M "Clicky" keyboard from the original manufacturer who now operates independently of IBM [0]. I really like it a lot, and it's $50 cheaper than the CODE keyboard.
I doesn't have the ability to switch keys (for Dvorak or whatever) but I don't need that feature. It also lacks the hardware switch to go from Apple\PC mode, which I might actually use.
In my opinion, this is not because they expect Google+ to be a true competitor to Facebook.
The addition of information in Google+ user profiles allows them to compete with Facebook advertising in a key arena -- targeting ads based on self-volunteered user information which is more valuable and trustworthy rather than trying to derive this information based on browsing\searching patterns.
Google+ serves to enhance Google's ad products more than it does to provide value to customers.
Having said that, Hangouts (which most people consider a part of Google+) is a succesful product.
I would question the notion that self-volunteered information is more accurate. It's easy to "like" or "follow" something. It's quite another to buy it or make search queries that seem to lead to a purchasing decision. Which data is better for advertising?
Well, in my experience people don't "like" or "follow" things they wouldn't mind seeing frequent (borderline annoying) updates for as a direct consequence. So while the act of liking and following might not lead to a direct sale, it's a reasonable argument to suggest that the people who do that are a good, receptive audience for a targeted ad campaign.
Ad targeting might not only be more effective, but it could also save money by not spending money futilely throwing a product in the face of users who are just not interested.
It's essentially not just a way to opt-in to advertising, it's a way to opt-out of all the other things you might not want. Whether this works 100% of the time is another debate entirely.
https://www.jetbrains.com/dbe/