skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Extortion is a weird, upsetting crime. It seems to be a waste product or high-entropy end state in a stagnant economic system.

First, the powerful extort constantly. When VCs use their social connections to other VCs (the culture of co-funding) to pull the "we'll turn off the whole Valley" card, also known as "the reputation threat", and get people to sign bad term sheets, that's extortion. Most bad reference and negative reputation issues that exist in the Valley come from people who refused to be extorted. But when people in power do it, they don't call it "extortion". They call it "power".

Likewise, most people who acquire power did so by extortion. Not in the hold-up sense, but by happening into important information on powerful people and being able to leverage it into the investment of said powerful people in their careers. All that said, it takes a certain social skill to pull off. You can't just send an email saying, "I know <X> and will release it unless you provide <Y>, <Z>, and <W>." You'll piss that person off, and it's a felony, and even though you'll probably never do jail time (because the extortion target still doesn't want "X" to see daylight) that person now holds the cards. You have to be really subtle and it's best if the extortion threat is unsaid. One of the reasons why fraternity affiliations are so powerful is the implied mutual extortion that comes from living together for 3-4 years at a time of life in which people tend to be impulsive and do incredibly stupid things that their adult selves will regret.

If you're in the same frat, you're bound to have dirt on that person, and if that person becomes powerful, you'll cash in. If you say, "I'll reveal <X> unless you <Y>" you won't get anything, and you could end up in jail... but if it's a tacit agreement, that person will support your career in perpetuity. Perversely, the network effect of this tacit, mutual extortion is positive for the group of people it covers because it spreads good fortune around.

Extortion seems to be a by-product of stagnation, because it's the ultimate zero-sum activity. It's what people start doing to each other when they give up on new contribution. Oddly, the frat culture (for all its ugliness) seems to be an adaptation to this because, while it creates a low-level tacit extortion field, it also prepares people to handle external extortions (from "the proles" who "have no right") and to exercise power (cough extort others).

What's strange about this rash of online extortions is that it seems to be coming at a time when, objectively, there shouldn't be a sense of economic stagnation. There are, arguably, more opportunities for positive-sum contribution than there ever were. But the social distance between capital and effort/talent has never been greater, especially on a global scale, so that might explain the problem.
I'm subjective, but I think Spotify uses slightly innovative ways of organising. See:
* https://labs.spotify.com/2014/03/27/spotify-engineering-cult...
* https://labs.spotify.com/2014/09/20/spotify-engineering-cult...

Happy to answer questions.
No, that's not the same thing. The law doesn't say that you can't have any pirated content on your service. It says you can't knowingly have pirated content. Once you learn about a stolen movie on your site, you have to take it down.

When, like Dotcom, you instead actively solicit pirated material, optimize the pirated material on your site for quality, and pay users to put more pirated material on your site using a sliding scale based essentially on how pirated the material is, the DOJ reasonably concludes that you are not a public video site like Youtube, but rather a criminal conspiracy.

Dotcom appeared to have been operating under the misconception that a "notice and takedown" system insulated him from that charge. Dotcom didn't actually read the DMCA, because notice and takedown is only ~half of the responsibility of an online service. The other half, written right into the DMCA, is operating without red flag knowledge of pirated content.
It's not even about fixing this one issue. Or improving my life.

It's about enforcing fairness, and not continuing to signal to the rich and powerful that really, they can get away with anything. That their wealth and power doesn't place them above the law.

And I believe that in the end, when abuses like this start getting punished in a meaningful way, and moves are made to prevent further abuse, all our lives WILL actually improve.
They call it "Open Allocation". "Holacracy" is similar as well.

A few other companies doing it...

* Zappos — http://qz.com/161210/zappos-is-going-holacratic-no-job-title...

* Treehouse — http://ryancarson.com/post/61562761297/no-managers-why-we-re...

* WL Gore & Associates (parts of the company) — http://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/nov/02/gore-tex-tex...
10. when the soda's weight approaches the weight of the part of the can remaining above it (equality being the limit.) My initial thought was "...as half the can" but that's inaccurate.

... I think
The Animated Guide to Emacs Paredit
Linus could easily do "lindent reformat" commit every once in a while or even automate it. It seems they do not care that much for the styleguide?
The power that prosecutors have is unbelievable, especially when it comes to using the plea bargain. Here's a fantastic look at the history of plea bargains and how they get used to bully people into pleading guilty when they aren't.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/nov/20/why-inn...
Technically, manipulating commodities prices to build higher profits will drive prices up for consumers making them poorer.
YouGov profiler – nice visualisation of marketing and statistical data
Thanks for the details, indeed I'm finding out that it makes some sense from their perspective.

Still, there's no notice of Booking.com sharing your data. The fact that hotels print it out and leave it at the reception is again another problem, though not entirely Booking's fault.

I still wonder why they chose to work like this, seeing as it's so easy to implement an authorization process without sharing card data.

I see that they're starting to shy away from requiring card details, which is a good thing.
This appears to be a case of front running, which is illegal in the commodities market.
So your cure to the sickness is to bring about the sickness itself?

The good thing about this point of view is that you will be happy whatever happens.
What kind of crazy hijinks are the banks going to get into next?

I expect no change from any elected official, even though my elected official is Liz Warren...

Every time some huge scandal like this is broken (LIBOR, aluminum fixing, mortgage default swaps) I openly wonder how long it's going to be before people start wrecking things out of anger.
Slide 11: Even Yahoo's Engineering Manager for Mail crops the ads out their own product screenshots. :(
Crowdpac – See what US politicians really stand for based on donations and more
This is more than a bit snarky.

I find traveling home for both Thanksgiving and Christmas is prohibitively expensive and difficult to acquire sufficient time off for both from work. I usually opt for taking no time off Thanksgiving week, holding a Friendsgiving, and then being free to spend more days with the fam at Xmas time. Friendsgiving is not always an excuse to avoid family.
It's not just precious metals. Remember the aluminum price manipulation from these guys last year? http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/aa0rnb/john-oliver-s-arcan...
Not true. Napster operated for over two years before being shut down.
Have you checked: www.assembly.com & www.kickstarter.com
The sad part is the people who refuse to recognize this and keep repeating the 400 year numbers. That probably only makes it even more terrifying for the next defendant. Hopefully their lawyer will tell them what they're really facing, but it can be tough for a lawyer (we all hate the lying lawyers, right?) to overcome peer sentiment.

Perpetuating these myths does a disservice to anyone who believes them. If you want to take away prosecutors power to threaten, stop giving it to them.
Yes, TCP will reorder if necessary, but that will introduce some delay and overhead at the host. The missing sequence number (the out of order frame) will cause queuing as TCP waits for it to arrive or requests retransmit, so keeping streams in order in the network is more efficient.
"some typedefs are OK because Linus is used to them, but he doesn't want to take the few seconds to figure out any new ones."

NO

Because the wrong uses are more numerous than the right ones. It's that simple

Creating typedefs for integers is mostly useless and causes confusion, except in the cases specified.

Of course, if you work with a small project it's easier than with a big project like the kernel.

And of course I admire Linus for cutting through BS and usually avoiding it.
It's the same. In you're making a big enough transaction your bank is going to get flagged and look into your banking activity. How is that not a breach of privacy too ?

Privacy is a continuum.
Do you have any information on how exactly Attlasian works (links to some presentations/posts would be great)? From what I know they are not even close to Github/Valve kind of flow. But I might be wrong.
typo in the 4th word. "salable" instead of "scalable"
Springest in NL (and some other companies too) practice Holocracy

http://devblog.springest.com/holacracy-at-springest-dev-team...

As far as i know the only 'new' management trend that has catched on here.
Is there a system that favors the people?
It's funny that this showed up on the front page, because yesterday I logged into an old Yahoo email account for the first time in a few years and was absolutely astounded at how awful the UI was.
I don't think that is what was meant by OP. I think they were asking about the atmosphere/organization inside of the company, rather than companies that allow people to collaborate.
What if you wanted to work in a completely different field, go to law school, or quit your job and start a new business?
> Do not unnecessarily use braces where a single statement will do.

if (condition)
action();

> and

if (condition)
do_this();
else
do_that();

The Apple SSL bug (https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2014/02/24/anatomy-of-a-got...) makes me wonder if this is really worth the potential for introducing bugs.
Supported variants and OpenType features for each Google Font
Source Code of Unity's new UI Tools
It may sound counter-intuitive, but I think access to the raw data in markets can. A good example can be found in a movie called "freakonomics". Purely based on analysis of data, data scientists can PROVE (statistically this would mean almost 100% chance that the numbers don't add up) that something is being rigged.

So you don't really need a confession or even to investigate anyone in particular. All you need is the data.
Possibly 10 weeks of interests on the profits (of those 10 weeks). I am a bit pessimistic.
In fairness, the DOJ also shouldn't be publishing falsehoods in press releases like this.
Facebook Ad Campaign Changes: What Marketers Need to Know
Queue Portrait: Nicholas Zakas [video]
Here's a direct link to the preview it kicks out: http://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/thisarmy/fo...

The fonts link straight to Google's Specimen pages and the features link to Microsoft's OpenType documentation. http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/featurelist.htm
Wow, a new level of sociopathy has been reached here.
The prosecutor basically confused grand jury by throwing 50 different stories at them. He didn't make a case because he had no intention to charge him.
By definition it wouldn't be fraudulent if it was legalized.

One interesting point is if it was legal, it would be in the open, and market forces might intensely force it out. You vs your ex- and future- coworkers in the regulatory agencies is pretty easy to outsmart, you vs every other player is harder to outsmart.

Another interesting point is in the olden days when stocks were traded by telegram and fractional prices and computers were human females with arithmetic skills, an abstract false market where we pretend there's no insider trading is simpler and simpler was computationally required. In 2014 thats not a valid argument anymore.

20 firms with 20 slightly false insider modified prices are just going to result in slightly wealthier arb players and slightly less false prices.

Rather than not knowing who will get screwed when by insider trading but there being a long term average cost to the economy of X making it all public would result in a known predetermined measurable and predictable cost of perhaps X/10 or X/100.

There are a bazillion different forms of insider trading, and this discussion would be somewhat separate from the classic trade secret brokering, where stocks trade hands before a confidential public announcement.
Meizu's Ubuntu phone is closer than it appears?
Apple has long been about the user experience. In fact its largely where it derives its competitive advantage.
The comments regarding the Occulus Rift or "OR" are largely, I believe, a different area of VR. I cant imagine Apple pursuing a VR-Minecraft path. Rather I think Apple is trying to invent a new method of user input == replacing the KVM.
Every other attempt at VR seems like a mere extension or just another thing to plug into a usb port. Apple would be foolish to take this path.
One thing you could consider doing if you are serious about the project is replacing the standard debian testing kernel with the proper kernel.

Debian guts all non-free packages, and binary drivers from the kernel. This greatly improves hardware support.
Amazon Fire Phone (Unlocked GSM) – $199
FbStart – A new program designed to help early stage mobile startups
If only inference engines were sophisticated enough to solve this impossible problem...
Ask HN: How should one start working on an open source project on GitHub?
I want to start contributing to an open source project but its already so mature and I son't really know where to begin digesting the source code. How do you guys do it?
Moving the joyent/libuv repository to libuv/libuv
They are protected under the safe harbor porvision of the DMCA which basically says that if someone says "That's my stuff, take it down" they have to take it down. However if no one complains, YouTube can argue that millions of videos are added everyday, they can't possibly screen them against every piece of copyrighted music/film ever made.
Gore always gets named in this context: http://www.gore.com/de_de/aboutus/culture/corporate_culture....

Atlassian seem to be doing things differently.

Umantis in Switzerland democratically elect their CEO: http://www.umantis.com/en/press/haufe-umantis-ag-employees-e...

I'm very interested in this question as well, especially companies in Amsterdam, Berlin, Hamburg and Copenhagen. Anyone else know of companies doing things differently?
You are correct. Selling other peoples work for pennies on the dollar, is a legitimate business model, and not a criminal enterprise.

This case had nothing to do with MU hosting other people's work and content, tricking the general public into signing up to a paid account to download it, and generating 400MM of revenue from it at the same time.

It had everything to do with the horse carriage industry trying to stop the automobile.
No I still have the code, just no commit history.
It's a little more nuanced than that. They are aware that for example much foreign TV content is going to be on their site without active intervention. However, they don’t actively protect this content without direct assistance.

Basically, unless you complain we are going to pirate the hell out of your content.
There is no connection between CryptoLocker and ad targeting. What you're proposing would do very little to thwart tracking (imho strong identities would make it easier) and completely kill the open Internet where I can send and receive information from people I don't know, maybe even people I wouldn't want to know otherwise.
Choosing more days on Xmas fits what I said about making time for family.
Open Source, Community, and NoSQL
One interesting common theme through many of these (helium balloon in a car; ice melting; bolts in a boat) is how counterintuitive buoyancy is. You can see why, when he had it figured out, Archimedes went all 'eureka' down the street naked [citation needed].

Similarly, the heated metal donut and gravity of a spherical shell questions challenge easy assumptions you may make. If your mental model of a torus is that it's a bent cylinder, you might conceive that when it expands the dominant behavior is that the cylinder gets fatter; if you mentally model gravitation of solid bodies as if it is equivalent to gravitation from point masses at their center of gravity, you'll assume a net attraction toward the center of a hollow shell.

The lesson to take from these puzzles is to modify your mental model so that the answers to all these questions become intuitive too. And that's why I love 'puzzles' like this - they help you deepen your understanding by focusing you on the places your assumptions might catch you out.
It is a breach of privacy, and it has some unpleasant side-effects:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/26/us/law-lets-irs-seize-acco...

Accompanying HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8509500
They aren't required to actively protect whole classes of content. They're simply required not to operate with specific knowledge of individual pirated videos on their service.
What an odd trend. First Netflix moves part of their infrastructure to Node (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8631022) and now Yahoo is doing something similar. Node.js is great but I don't think huge enterprise systems for some of the largest brands in the world are necessarily the best fit. I wish they'd provide some insights on why they're making that particular move.
You've said this a few times, but you leave out how scary it must be to be charged in such fashion. Some people are uninformed and plead guilty just to avoid that scary fate.

I know you're not saying anything more than "This isn't actually what it would have turned out to be," but what would it have turned out to be if these charges had stuck? I'm curious how long a felony count of computer fraud or cyberstalking will land you in prison for.
We've been doing Open Allocation at Monk Development (http://www.monkdevelopment.com) for about a year now, but haven't yet written anything about our experiences.
One more thing: they are sharing my personal data without my consent - in this regard, it is very different than me providing my card data over the phone.
But it's still going to be fake desktop app, right? It seems Google is the only one to buck this trend.
Interview with creator of PostGIS on Boundless Geo and open source GIS software
Well that is a heck of a lot more than I can do...
Show HN: Italian EXPO 2015
Fair enough. I first heard the term used outside of normal context used to describe Juggalos and fans of ICP. I think that explains my strong aversion.
Lawsuit accuses Uber of fleecing [Boston] Logan travelers
I wonder if the move is the reason Yahoo Mail has become even slower than before.
Ask HN: Which OS decision(OpensourceXproprietary) is conceptually more secure?
Which OS decision is conceptually more secure Property based OS (MAC OS X) or Open Source OS(BSD, Linux)
Yes, I know we might find the exact answer, but I just want to hear your opinion on this unanswerable question. Also, you can denote exact OS kernel or arch. as an answer if you have rational reasons
Would be interesting to see some performance benchmarks in comparison to previous iterations.
There very definitely are people who think that way who make policy decisions - most of them. They see themselves as invulnerable demagogues, and their apparatuses as being able to do anything, because they say they can. Computers are this amazing thing you can wave a wand at and anything can happen, and because it came out of a computer, you know it's GOT to be right.

We used to have a saying for this, which was "high on their own bullshit".

Career politicians are just that - in politics, for their career. Not for your sake. Not because they want to change things. Because they see a trough, and daddy stuck his nose in it and did alright, so why can't I too? This doesn't require any particular knowledge of the world around you, or empathy, just a machiavellian drive to clamber on corpses until you reach the top, where you can crown yourself king of the ashes.
Maybe that explains why there are 5 year old critical bugs in their products...
Mmhmm, tell me, where can I sign up for your newsletter?
Yes I think this is what the question is about. Some people might call it "Holocracy" or something like that...
Ask HN: Anyone interested in this as a service?
Hi, I am creating a appstore for indie developers who wish to penetrate the Chinese market. It is basically an online web store with a chinese front-end. However, I am considering just changing it into an normal appstore as I am unsure how many developers would be interested in it.
These years are a boon for financial education: we are getting to learn everything: derivatives (including swaps, by the way), forex, the libor, the meaning of a Ponzi scheme (thanks to Madoff), insider trading, and now front running.

I say: these years will be taught in law schools and in finance masters for ever. History in the making.
FYI: The page layout is broken in the latest firefox 34 beta on mac. It appears to be the image that is breaking it.
Maybe you can elaborate why you are mentioning them here?
Well, we already have botnets, so such a scheme can't possibly work (especially if there are public channels, such as IRC or Twitter etc. to control them).
> There is nothing wrong with the world.

You need to go travelling.
The Silicon Valley "success, scale, fail" process doesn't work in Silicon Valley either if you look at average long term returns to average VC investors, rather than all the positive side effects.

The difference is that the returns from successfully scaling up in SV make those successes glaringly obvious and desirable to emulate

Scaling up across 105 more villages, on the other hand, simply produces more anecdotes for the pitch deck for the next wave of funding, which will need a bigger amount (and face a greater chance of it being hampered by evidence of something, somewhere having gone wrong). Appropriate milestones and accurate measurement are as much a part of the problem as the solution. Imagine gauging the relative suitability of an early Pets.com and Amazon for follow on funding not from their sales, SV style, but by interns flying out to foreign lands to quiz villagers on how their purchases had improved their quality of life.
I don't know, but that's not what happened in this case; the defendant had an extremely competent lawyer who specializes in computer crime cases.

How long could your sentence be? With no criminal history and for offenses deemed non-money-making, your sentence could be so low that you fall below the threshold for probation. On the other hand, if your crime is deemed serious or you have any history, 3-4 years might be more realistic. If you ran the world's largest credit card ring --- really, if you did anything with credit cards --- think more along the lines of 10-20 years.

Interestingly, that last point has been a truism in the "computer underground" since I was a teenager. Break into phone switches. Own up Unix boxes. Release viruses. Just don't fuck with credit cards. It remains truish today.
Yahoo seems to be championing React more than Facebook! With the flux-router-component they are trying to solve something that FB hasn't really addressed and it shows that they're actively trying to share the solutions to practical problems people come across when working with Flux.