skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm assuming that hamburglar is talking about the backend that Tumblr relies on, and it's not pretty. They had big troubles with stability at one point last year, including a typo in VIM on a production server that spat out all of their API keys to every user.

https://gist.github.com/zachinglis/29c5c5970d1f3313abd1/raw/...
I suspect different teams are involved with scanning for malware URLs in Skype and implementing core OS protections, so the tradeoff you imply is illusory. Besides, Microsoft already puts a lot of effort into the security of Windows, with seemingly good results. There's nothing wrong with defense in depth.
First off, I admit that I am hypersensitive to any form of bastardization of language. So please don't hate me for I'm going to say, I'm just a victim of my hypersensitivities. But: the word "stream" in the English language means "a steady flow or succession." Or, if you prefer the CS definition, it means "a sequence of data elements made available over time." When I'm looking at a set of boxes of different heights arranged in three columns with no apparent ordering, then I'm not looking at a stream. As other commenters have pointed out, the multi-column layout is more than a different way of displaying things. It redefines the entire experience of receiving posts as something different, something Pinterest-like. Maybe that's a good idea. But please, let's don't call it a stream.
I don't know if this will make Yahoo cool again but if Aol can remain a successful internet company then Yahoo probably can too.
This is good feedback. We wanted to start with an easy mode, so people could on ramp quickly. In this case, you just use {{ }} for various kinds of binding and Polymer will (try to) do the right thing. I suspect we will need an alternative syntax for folks like yourself that want an explicit, engineering mode.
I hate Tumblr. Most Tumblr blogs are an eyesore (in the same way the old MySpace profiles were). I avoid the site whenever possible.
And then Apple releases another form factor and developers scramble!
I am sort of horrified by a garbage collected VM that uses small malloc/free calls to manage memory. I also can't believe the linked article doesn't mention what VM the node.js code was running on.

Edit: reading more of the linked articles, these benchmarks seem to be running on V8? Which seems to be the only platform that node.js runs on...facepalm. Still confused why V8 would be using standard malloc/free calls.
Pageviews. Lots of them.

Of course, Tumblr has no revenue, but when has that ever mattered in acquisitions? :)
Why is "solving the problem" of "trying to contribute to a conversation and not making a fool of myself" something that doesn't makes you happy?
Both the native ShadowDOM implementation in Chrome/Canary and the ShadowDOMPolyfill support reprojection.
Instagram was starting to cannibalize the facebook youth userbase. Instagram worked its way into people's minds, vocabulary, and daily habits. The acquisition was a defensive maneuver by the paranoid Kid in Chief.
Yeah it's a cool as hell demo, I just think it would be really annoying if I were forced to use it to play games.

You could even turn it into a minigame of trying to get the game working. Re-seat the cart. Wedge another on top. Try it with a Game Genie in hopes that'll contact all the pins. Click here to blow on the cart.

Cute, fun to fiddle with, but like all cute UI conceits, there would have to be an option to shut it off because I just want to play some Zelda.
this ITT? http://www.itt-tech.edu/
This would be a really great idea for Yahoo. Their business model is selling ads on content, and the growth of mobile is leaving them behind. Tumblr generates enormous volumes of content and is making the majority of its revenue off mobile advertising already. In addition, Yahoo's demographics skew old, while Tumblr's are much younger.

It's less clear why it would be a good idea for Tumblr, other than being a really great exit for their investors and early staff -- but at the right price, that could be enough, which is probably why the number we're hearing is so large.

The biggest risk for both parties is Yahoo somehow killing Tumblr by starving it of resources (like they did with Flickr, and arguably with Delicious). I think Marissa Mayer is smart enough to learn from that mistake -- she has been pouring resources into Flickr, although it's probably too late to save it.

(Disclosure: I am a former Yahoo)
Hello Brian :)
It can't possibly be for talent. As an armchair advisor I'd have to guess that Yahoo might be looking to buy its own social network to compete with G+ and Facebook.

Maybe someone at Yahoo has figured out a way to monetize Tumblr or something like Tumblr.
Google solved Android fragmentation and forgot to tell everybody
When the world stops punishing people for having opinions, I'll stop using pseudonyms. Until then, I'm not going to martyr myself.
On Chrome on Win8, the background is white, but Firefox and on Dolphin browser on my Nexus 10, the background is black. You probably meant to keep a black background (eg. Workout timer on the start page is invisible on my chrome)
Yahoo buying BCST.com (1999)
Photo sharing is said to be core to what Facebook users value.

I see Instagram as a defensive acquisition -- they don't want to lose market share to a competitor. It took Instagram only two years to reach 100 million users.
I don't like that. It sounds too much like the "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" argument for privacy invasion.
As a pretty heavy Tumblr user (I run a news site there with nearly 100k followers) I'm extremely bummed-out by this news, partly because it seems like a terrible fit and could hurt the dynamic of the product significantly.

On the other hand, Tumblr has been bad about monetizing its product in a way that benefits both its users and itself. (David Karp is on the record as saying that he doesn't want to impose a revenue model on users—something he says would hurt creativity—most recently at GigaOm's paidContent Live conference.) I could see Yahoo taking over Tumblr and being more flexible on this front, which could be a good thing for Tumblr creators, many of which have been forced to troll for traffic on other networks despite the fact that their base is on the Tumblr dashboard.

Having attended that conference, it didn't seem clear to me that Karp had a lot of answers as to how to improve the monetization situation for both the company and end users (they've been pushing a blanket ad model that isn't targeted but is focused on exposure-style marketing), so it could be good on that front.

But on the other hand, this community already has a lot of frustrations with the way Tumblr is operated, and a purchase like this could scare much of that audience away.

I'm sure an exit at this point makes sense for the company. But the whole thing sort of bugs me.
Lots of expensive acquisitions.

Was Mayer known for being good at capital allocation/m&a at Google? I've got the feeling this isn't going to end well.
This is a great list of things that it would be very difficult for Apple to actually deliver.
As far as I know, the answer is "No, but".

No, you're never going to able to have no effects from your formative years with your parents. BUT, it's rarely impossible to deal with this productively. I suspect such a child will always be asking zirself what's wrong with zir, but hopefully ze can also develop an answer to that question, usually in the form of a reliable support network.
Hacking (1996)
That's pretty cool. I wish someone would call me by my online handle.
Feeling Sorry for Tsarnaev
Tumblr is getting old in Startup Years and they've started pushing more "Sign up now!" floaters in your face which means they're getting desperate for metrics to improve so they can look more attractive to investors and/or acquirers.

They can either fight to become a Grown Up Company or they can take the easy way out and liquidate their built up equity in Internet Zeitgeist Funbucks (which apparently is exchangeable into USD by Yahoo).
> Historical experience...

I'm going to guess you're citing Worgl, which was a tiny experiment in a small town of 2000. How about the American experiments in 1932-33? Disasters. Canada? Fail.

> We got the credit crunch because of "liquidity spirals" causing lending channels (banks) to hoard cash out of uncertainty.

Yes, banks decreased lending due to the uncertainty of collateral upon which those loans are based.

> ...brought the whole global economy down...

Define that. Economy looks OK to me, especially compared to environment that spawned the economic theories you're working with. You're employed in a place that constantly complains about the need for more skilled labor and hires my idiot friends with MS degrees and zero experience for $150k/year + options.

> [Hoarding cash worked for the banks because] fiat cash is non-perishable.

If cash was perishable, they would just move it into something that wasn't. Keynes argued this point before me.

> Demurrage ... would cause rational actors to seek other liquid investments to put their assets...

Yes, I 100% agree.

> ... thereby keeping the medium of exchange in circulation and available for lending.

Nope. You need buyers. You don't have any.

Since your currency rots, the consumers that don't spend it all on goods are either trying to sell it or trying to spend it. The vendors that were willing accept it in exchange for their goods are also trying to sell it. The value plummets and eventually vendors stop accepting it. A chunk of wealth vanishes into the ether and we all get a little more "equal" in the eyes of Occupy. Freicoin is a new modality of an old "-ism". The ultimate goal is the destruction of capital. For your idea to work, you need an authoritarian government to enforce it. Terrifying.
I wasn't asking you to martyr yourself. I am an extremely controversial figure. As I said elsewhere in this discussion, I kind of have a foot in each camp. I think about such issues a fair amount. I doubt you really want my backstory.

Peace.
Wouldn't tumblr be the logical next acquisition for Zuck then since it is doing exactly the same.
Respect is at the center of this issue. If you feel you have been disrespected (knowingly or unknowingly), you need to bring that up. At the same time, if you have lost respect, you need to communicate that to the other co-founders. I wrote a post about communication that talks about this in detail - read here: http://www.pranavpiyush.com/communication-for-startup-co-fou...

Either way, communicate! Put it all out there. If, even then, things don't seem like working out (i.e. the other 2 don't see a problem that needs solving), then leave.

As for what you do next, don't start a business for the sake of starting a business. Do it if you have a vision for what the world should look like. If you believe in the vision strongly enough, nothing can get in the way of you building the product/company to fulfill it. If not, don't fret. Working for a corporation is not the end of the world.

Find a place where you will learn something. There's a nice post by Garry Tan about learning vs. earning. Read it. http://blog.garrytan.com/lessons-from-2-5-that-i-wish-i-knew...
Tumblr has been around for over six years and it's getting to the point where if you're asking what's the big deal about Tumblr then you might just be getting too long in the tooth.

Tumblr is interactive MTV for a generation of web addicted kids and Yahoo's DNA is a media company.

Tumblr is a new media company with roots in New York's media and advertising scene. They recently opened a Santa Monica office to further shore up business relationships with Los Angeles' media scene.

If they can build that out within a year and setup profitable relationships, paired with a loyal following, they can ride out the native marketing wave and command a hefty price tag so David Karp can keep doing the oh-so-twee-unconventional-hipster things that he does.

If Marissa Mayer is as legit as everyone claims her to be she gets this. There's only two more missing pieces left for what she needs to do to make Yahoo relevant again.

1. Expect a deal with an enemy of an enemy who is therefore her BFF.

2. Expect more thought leadership around one big concept for the third wave of internet adoption.
I agree with you. Plus we don't know the real story or from the other (the co-fos) points of view, it's hard to decide who are the real idiots, or to put it softly, who are the real masterminds. Especially being a founder, being able to work with any kinds of people is a must.
I too am not exactly sure how to read the three column layout, and that's certainly a frustration, but it does look considerably better than Facebook's layout on my 27-inch monitor just in terms of aesthetics. I imagine I would be less fond of the layout on a smaller monitor.
When they decide to include it in the browser the change will come fast - these days browser updates go very well.
Well, nobody knew (or knows) how big instagram will get. Tumblr has already peaked. Also, tumblr is too anonymous to be of any value to facebook. Not much to exploit there. I don't think forcing Real Name™ upon every tumblr would make for a happy Internet.
For those who haven't read it before: Fire and Motion http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html
Facebook Home prototyped with Quartz Composer
"One of our challenges is we have had an aging demographic," said CFO Ken Goldman. "Part of it is going to be just visibility again in making ourselves cool, which we got away from for a couple of years."

Finding out that a company's management thinks "cool" is something you can buy strikes me as an excellent signal for shareholders that it's time to sell.
It'd make a h*ll of a lot more sense than the summly acq. Hopefully the core tech tumblr uses isn't just a 3rd party.
I'm wondering if this goes through, what could do to the start up ecosystem in NYC (assuming freshly minted devs won't want to twiddle their thumbs for too long)?
I realize it hasn't been like that in about a decade, but whenever I start seeing web-component tech I get bad flashbacks to ASP.net WebForms.
Maybe that's just me but I think the basic example fails at conveying how this library can be useful.

http://i.imgur.com/gMuRxa0.jpg
This video of a talk they gave today is a pretty good introduction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g0oOOT86NY
Oh God, I'm having more ASP.Net WebForms flashbacks. Databinding is one of those things MS never really got right despite having something like a thousand kicks at that can.
Funny you should mention that. Here's an extra bit from the book:

"Meaney wondered if a dam’s licking-and-groorning frequency was just a proxy for some genetic trait that was passed on from mother to child. Maybe nervous dams produced temperamentally nervous pups, and those dams also coincidentally happened to be less inclined to lick and groom. To test that hypothesis, Meaney and his researchers did a number of cross-fostering experiments, in which they removed pups at birth from a high-LG dam and put them in the litter of a low-LG dam, and vice versa, in all kinds of combinations.

Whatever permutation they chose, though, however they performed the experiment, they found the same thing: what mattered was not the licking-andgrooming habits of the biological mother; it was the licking-and-grooming habits of the rearing mother. When a pup received the comforting experience of licking and grooming as an infant, it grew up to be braver and bolder and better adjusted than a pup who hadn't, whether or not its biological mother was the one who had done the licking and grooming."
So WYSIWYG using tools humans are familiar with?
As I thought I will not be affected by this deal if it push through, I remembered that I'm using Tumblr for my blog. I migrated from Blogger to Tumblr because I think Tumblr is so simple. Posting a blog is just one click (I don't remeber how many for Blogger).

With this, I think the rumored $1B acquisition price is worth it. Without a good (or any) business model, I'm worried that Tumblr will eventually die out. This offer by Yahoo is a win win situation for both. I really hope that Yahoo will not destroy the Tumblr feel and environment.

I'm really excited about this. Any what will it turn out to be. And if in any case Yahoo eventually destroys or break Tumblr, I think there will be a new opening in the micro blogging space for young people to use.
Node came later. Had we known we were going to use it, we probably could have avoided using rails altogether.

Would not recommend rails for game dev if you can help it. For a multitude of reasons - speed and environment headaches being the big two.
In a world where Instagram is worth $1B, Tumblr would be a bargain at that price. It fits nicely into Yahoo's content strategy. I like it.
Yes. My real ip is used for all my HN and other posts.
Exactly. I'd hate for a prospective employer to think I code the same way now as I did back in 2005, but I've SourceForge projects up that are at least that old.
Problems with Sendgrid's Service
For the last few months, I have been having problems with Sendgrid's email delivery. Worse, I have contacted support over and over and never get a clear answer. When I raise specific problems, they regularly give me non-answers like "Well, we deliver x percent of emails", ignoring the emails with problems.

The specific issue has to do with using Sendgrid for newsletters. I have had dozens of my customers say they no longer get my emails, despite the fact they always got them with ConstantContact, a provider that I would have thought would be less strong than Sendgrid.

Two days ago, I asked to speak to a Sendgrid manager but still no response. It's a combination of technical issues and poor service.

Can anyone help? Anyone with similar experiences or recommendations?
I would normally let this go, but I really dislike the holier than thou attitude with your "bastardization of language". Computer Science and mathematics would be much poorer if it didn't allow for people to generalize concepts. So let's get started.

1) Streams branch and merge all the time.

http://www.mightystreamradio.com/PHOTOS/STREAM%20PHOTO%202.j...

If anyone's bastardizing the language, it's computer scientists being overly restrictive with their allusions.

2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphrys_law

> But please, let's don't call it a stream.

"But please, let's not call it a stream."
That sounds like it would be an interesting tale to post to HN.
Either that or you're a narcissist and insist on everything being about you. "What's with the baby clothes section on Amazon? Babies can't buy clothes."
All billion dollar companies, no matter how creative, degenerate into the "grow through acquisition" model. I just find it funny how well Yahoo under Mayer fits this paradigm, while Google (IMO) masks it better.
I agree that I don't think it will end well but their stock price has been going up so these expensive acquisitions are paying off, at least in the short run. It's also making these "expensive" acquisitions, not so expensive since they have more capital to use.

They must integrate these assets quickly and do it well or it'll be over for Yahoo. Historically, successful acquisitions on a large scale have not been easy to do.
Yes I did this too. Facebook logon is much more convenient when your real identity is not linked to it.
I think "cure baldness and cancer" would also fit right in there somewhere.
Google's new project will be robots responsible for shutting down old services and groups. Rumor has it that they'll be called "Terminators," and they'll look kind of like this: http://imposetonwallpaper.free.fr/wallpapers/films/terminato...
It's not always 100%, but who else think homebrew is awesome?

I miss it when I go to my linux machines.
I thought Angular was becoming the One True Way. Now I am confused.
Speculation: it will be as bad as the Windows Vista UAC dialog. People will just click Yes to get things moving. Permission prompt is not new, except this time they risk losing their credit card information instead of minor things like leaking their geolocation.
US no-fly error 'allowed terrorist on planes'
I'm a bit myself as well, I need to fire up a Polymer project tonight and work through a few things and see how it goes compared to my experience with Angular.

I was always under the impression that the Components infrastructure of Angular.JS was what was driving the spec for Web Components. Maybe I misunderstood, maybe it is and it's just doing so alongside Polymer, or maybe I should play around with them more and write something up (or the best option, wait until someone more knowledgeable has done the work and summarized it for me)
I've received replies within a day or two from them. Depending if you sent yours during one of the bursts from an HN thread it might of got lost. Try sending them an email now?
Interesting. The OP got me thinking along the lines of manually tagging salient features of each model (as well as ranking models by salience, either manually or automatically based on criteria related to the object that the model represents).
We've solved this in the Matasano NYC office by:

* Going downstairs for coffee

* Playing a round or two of darts
In addition, Yahoo's demographics skew old, while Tumblr's are much younger.

The "younger" part of that equation isn't a good thing. If Yahoo makes any changes to Tumblr, the userbase will respond violently.
Sadly, no cassandra support yet..
But are there really a lot of pageviews? Not from the site owners'point of view. On my Tumblr, I've had posts that get thousands of "likes" and reblogs, yet the Google Analytics counter reads maybe a 100 pageviews in that time period. This is of course because my posts were engaged by users on the dashboard.

The upshot of the dashboard dynamic is that users, at least in my case, dont have much of an incentive to create beautiful permanent sites...just like i dont generally care what my Twitter profile page looks like. The dashboard dynamic also affects the content I put out...I haven't done a scientific analysis, but I would wager that my vertically oriented photos are almost always "liked" more than my landscape-oriented photos...not because they are better, but because vertical photos dominate the dashboard screen area.

And so unless the dashboard is a gold mine of ad revenue, it's hard to see how this will improve Yahoo's bottom line without some extremely clever engineering and design...but not only that, Tumblr's social interaction model is not as addictive as it is on Twitter and Gacebook...less interactions means less data.

This isn't a knock on the Tumblr team...I would love it if they're able to continue the service with a big pocketed owner...the service really changed the way I think about blogging and content workflow...so props to them for making a beloved product
Harj was very active on Quora, Twitter, and other sites answering YC-related (as well as general startup) questions, so I hope some other YC partners step up and fill that role with him leaving.

On that note, thank you Harj and good luck! And congratulations to the new full and part-time YC partners!
#25: "The ability to Find My Friends without having to open up an app covered in leather. This will allow vegetarians to finally use the product."
Mayer is just beginning to try to fix the company.
I hear people say all the time they drink a lot of water, but when you ask them to measure it out, it's a joke.

The answer to this problem is to sit at your desk with a gallon of water. You'll find you've finished at least 3/4 before the end of the day contrast to the 2-3 cups you'd usually drink.
ckem
Just think, at some point we might achieve the replication of capabilities local/native applications had 15 years ago. And then what's the difference, except probably now your data is stored online somewhere.
even tho its not pure css (some javascript is used to generate the html), this is a more impressive demo: http://www.keithclark.co.uk/labs/css3-fps/