"CyberSource's patented invention is simple: when validating online credit card purchases, use IP address information (such as IP addresses) as a check against fraud. Thus, the patented method might raise a red flag if someone attempts to make a large internet purchase through an IP address that had previously been used for a fraudulent transaction."
IANAL and this is not legal advice, but the guys (probably) that tried to patent this should go f* themselves.
Rather than do a drive-by downvote, I'm going to say that while I may share your sentiment to an extent, it has been my experience that HN usually prefers more substantive comments.
It's not odd; sponsors pick what level they feel they can commit to in terms of marketing support (booth space, banners, etc) and how much internal support they have for the conference or the community (in this case, Python and PyCon).
Microsoft has been an amazing PyCon sponsor for years, and they continue to support the PSF both financially, and by supplying Python core developers with free, unlimited MSDN accounts to help with windows support.
So, don't take a sponsor level as a specific note about how much cash they do, or do not have - a lot goes into a company's choice about sponsorship.
As Jesse stated, it's just one of their many sponsorships, of PyCon, of the PSF, and of the Python developers. Probably their biggest sponsorship of Python is the generous donation of over 20 VS Ultimate MSDN subscriptions which they also let us renew for free, in order to keep up support of Python on Windows. If you do the math on what that'd cost for us to buy on our own, it's a hilariously large number.
"But, I'll just mention two things that are critical in Multiplan.
The first is the use of naming. You are not put into a mode where you have to use "A10," "B9," "C14," and things like that, which you have to do with VisiCalc. If you want to say that taxes are 6% of sales then you say "taxes are .06 times sales." If you want the sum of all the profits you say "SUM (Profit)" and so we deal with data on a name basis which is the way people are used to dealing with it."
Am I the only one that would love to see this impleneted in spreadsheet software today?
I learned about this feature years and years ago and never used it. Maybe it wouldn't actually be all that helpful afterall. If only I could downvote myself.
"Hoffman pointed to one of his recent investments, Airbnb, a short-term vacation rental website, as an example. The website pairs people looking for vacation rentals with people willing to rent out their homes. As Hoffman pointed out, both parties would want assurance that the other is trustworthy. Airbnb’s answer is an evaluation system based in part on the responsiveness of a host — the faster a host responds, the more reliable he or she is likely to be.
“And that’s a very good predictor of whether this will be a good experience,” Hoffman said. “This creates an improvement in the world.” "
You're so right. I had the same reaction to this and the New Yorker article covering the same.
I got interested in hedge funds in high school after reading a lot of articles like this. But after learning a lot about economics and finance I learned to pick up the sensationalism in these articles.
I think just about every article about a hedge fund has a line like, "consistently beats the market...which most economists say isn't possible." That's not even true. The free market hypothesis has not been given much stock outside of the University of Chicago (Eugene Fama) since the 90's. Most economists who even study such things focus on under what scenario can an investor outperform the market and what types of securities tend to be undervalued.
I'm even amazed that the article doesn't begin by mentioning Ray Dalio's childhood as a chess prodigy/math olympiad/other thing that only really really smart people can do.
These articles typically have a set format:
1. Intro into the mysterious culture of the hedge fund
2. Background on the precocious child prodigy turned market whiz
3. Description of firm's hiring practices of PhD's etc
4. Questioning value of Hedge Fund's to society
5. In conclusion, this hedge fund makes a lot of money...
I almost want to run some NLP scripts over a corpus of profiles of hedge fund managers and automatically generate a dozen of these, print them, and see if I can get a job at Bloomberg.
