skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As far as I understand the purpose of WhatsApp, Americans use SMS instead. The ones I talk with anyway.

Everyone either has unlimited texting (the price of which isn't considered since they get it with a cell plan that they want for other reasons (probably data)), or keep it under the monthly free limit.
On the one hand, this is almost impossible to scientifically prove. You can't reproduce companies, as in building the same exact product with equally talented people where one has great cultural continuity and the other doesn't.

It comes down to the way you want to spend your time. If all you want is a paycheck, that's fine. Take the money, go do something else you feel is more important. I don't mean that we are a family in that we're trying to replace your actual blood relatives.

If you're spending 10 hours a day with a group of people, would you rather give yourself to a cause with a group of people you trust, believe in, who you genuinely want to see succeed beyond any selfish desires of your own, or a group clocking in for a paycheck? Ultimately, which situation do you think will make you happier?

I'm not asserting that it is what everyone wants, but these are our values. This is the type of company we want to build.
Why can't it check for bit-flipping along the way and such like using techniques similar to error correction codes. And do every calc at least three times or something. Come on people, you're letting the side down!
That's amazing. It can be easy to write off WhatsApp with an ethnocentric view, but to hear how other people are using it on the other side of the world certainly adds a new perspective
TeamViewer Corporate v9.0.26297 Cracked
"But how do we make a computer program that decides what it wants to do? How do we make a computer decide to care on its own about learning to drive a car? Or write a novel?"

Perhaps it'd be better to ask: why would we want a computer to do these things? I certainly do not want to live in a world where computers have their own motivations and desires and the ability to act on the same.

Actually, I can put that more strongly: none of us will live very long in a world where computers have their own motivations, desires, and the ability to act on the same.
2. source?
That's more than a bit of a stretch. More like, Apple cares about the security of their sandbox and having exclusive control over the sale of software on their platform, and doesn't see the need to include a feature that a) practically guarantees security vulnerabilities, b) weakens their control over content for iOS, and c) users don't really care about at the moment.

Jailbreakers have exploited vulnerabilities in FreeType of all things, but who cares, let's just give them more ammunition! I'm sure it will work out fine.

Apple: Dead and done for because they made a sane decision. You heard it here first, folks.
CEO of Whatsapp prided on not listening in private conversation or collecting personal data, which Facebook ACTIVELY does.
I agree that we don't want to provide favorable terms to companies who aren't interested in managing telecommunications infrastructure as a public utility.

I've heard the population density argument, before.

It's bunk. If it wasn't, we would expect to see reasonably priced 100mbit+ residential fiber service in NYC, SFO, SEA, and other densely populated metro areas. Instead, we see somewhat reasonably priced 1gbit residential service in Chattanooga, TN (1/10th SFO's population, and 1/20th NYC's), wherever Google deigns to pick a fight, and places like Sebastapol, CA (with a population just under 8,000 people).
Clearly there is a defent "yo mamma" joke in there.
Ryza has real issues with transcription. Riser? Riza? Raiza? Ricea? Rysa? Raitser? Because it's totally arbitrary, there's also trouble getting people to associate the word with what you do. And I think both of those lead to issues with retention.

In their shoes, I would have gone with something that was suggestive but not purely descriptive. For example, Kickstarter is a great name, and Indiegogo is pretty good too.

That said, naming a company a fucking nightmare, and as far as I'm concerned, anybody who has gone through it without gnawing a limb off or calling their company Drgnblv did well.
[automated test] is the hard part.
Not sure what package you have, but Shaw has caps.
http://www.shaw.ca/internet/plans/
GlassesOff is used to improve near vision.
Facebook and Twitter are seasonal?
Mt.Gox is the only one who can withdraw whatever it wants from Mt.Gox. Its not a regulated field here.

Be Mt.Gox, sit at the bid and buy all the Bitcoin you want for $260ish. Get it over to hidden accounts \ people you took the time to set up in the last X months and sell at $600ish.

Laugh all the way to the bank........million and millions and let all you guys A. Believe in Mt.Gox or B. it goes out of biz, who the flying fuck cares, they just cleaned up.
Interesting. I guess the firmware team/department have a new incentive to make awfull software now.

We'll just make it barely function and the poor sap who doesn't notice any problems untill the waranty runs out will just have to pay for support.

Wonder if you could sue or ask for a refund if the hardware doesn't work and it's clearly their fault.

Aguably they were selling defective hardware that they refuse to fix from now on. That would be a fun argument in court.
Is that because SMS costs a fortune in Europe? As an American with unlimited SMS/MMS, I don't see the point of WhatsApp at all.

I guess maybe if I wanted to send a text to somebody in Europe.
A single 8mm investment almost definitely would be.
Thank you! I still ask Ben Shneiderman to review stuff that I write, and value his feedback -- I've learned a lot from him, and he really cares a lot for users and is great at explaining stuff. He's the one who insisted on calling it HCI instead of CHI, to put Humans before Computers. I got to talk with Mark Weiser about The Sims before he passed away, and he thought it would be popular, but he never got to play it, unfortunately. He certainly had a clear vision about where ubiquitous computing was heading, and would be fascinated and excited about what's possible now, so I try to be that way myself on his behalf.
Not taking inflation into account. 400 million for 9 million users adjusted for inflation is a bit over $60/user
Did this happen to Instagram?
In one fell swoop, Snapchat went from fools to geniuses. Unbelievable.
Uh, and football field. The output of this proof if laid end to end would fill 37 regular sized football fields.
Some years ago the dominant messaging apps were icq and aol messenger and msn messenger. I think almost every new generation just uses their own messenger.
Indeed, my bad. I reckon I had Techcrunch' article on the side and I mixed them up (Boy, the excitement!).

EDIT: The article was from Forbes, not Techcrunch: http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/19/5427332/facebook-is-buying...
Spend $19billion here in the hopes of segmenting the market with more startups hoping to cash in?
How to be smarter than your Investors
interesting, i suppose its free? because it isn't here in germany which is why whatsapp is massively popular.
In the entire history of HN, nobody has ever made themselves look smarter or their argument more compelling by calling another HN user a shill.
you seem pretty convinced living computers would kill us all. this seems like a pretty big assumption to me?
Facebook buying WhatsApp for $16 billion
I usually don't poo-poo acquisitions but this one surprises me for a) the valuation (Facebook really couldn't convince them to exit for 5 or 10 billion?) and b) Facebook really needs to demonstrate that it can get into these markets itself.

With all the supposed ingenuity, developer talent, money and existing users, why can't Facebook build anything besides a news feed?
Serious question: What is so compelling about whatsapp? There are so many IM protocols out there.
This is just sick. Does at least some tax apply to such transactions in the US?

Or think what the Gates Founation woul dbe able to do with just, say, a quarter of this money.
Other people claim that FCT was proven by computer. Most of my colleagues say it was proven by Haken and Appel, who programmed a computer to perform a finite search. People who work in the area - including me - say it's like getting Wolfram Alpha to solve your integrals, while you do the actual thinking about what integrals need solving, why, and what to do with the answers.
It's phone number based, so it's disconnected from your social media presence. You don't have to add anyone or allow them access to whatever you might share with your circle of friends. In my experience it also handles group chats better than Facebook and grew popular before the advent of the Facebook messenger app.
No, they just become the buyer at Mt.Gox for all those sellers, then turn around and sell either already funded accounts with all the Bitcoins they already have had, or they move the ones they just bought round about to the accounts at other exchanges. Who gives a flying fuck you can trace it. You wanted to sell at $260...not them.

Who do you think is buying over there for X sakes! All these new buyers coming in? blah
Where I live, a lot of people use Telegram. It has less cluttered interface and is also much faster than WhatsApp on unreliable connections.
Except for any promise of privacy.
Space is cold, but getting rid of heat is not easy in a vacuum. Not sure what that means with respect to this particular project, though.
Ask HN: Recommendations on Chat Application
Basically pretty much what the title says. The news on WhatsApp today got me thinking (I've never used it) that I need to replace my existing chat solution (GoogleTalk). There are many different ones out there like WhatsApp, Telegram, Silent Circle, Line, ChatSecure, Cryptocat, WeChat, Kik, Hangouts, etc.

I'm curious about anyone's experience with any of these and I think I'd ultimately like one that's more secure if the options are there. Also, I really need it to be compatible both with mobile devices and on the desktop in some form.
I think I will nominate myself to be the single person on Hacker News, who after an announcement of a huge mega-acquisition, will skip all the high-minded analysis and discussion of business models and ROI, and simply say:

Wow, I wish I had a $19B acquisition -- I'm jealous :-)
I never understand the comparison of user bases to populations. Makes no sense to me whatsoever.
They are what they want to be. This is not regulated.
http://www.kurzweilai.net/vicarious-ai-breaks-captcha-turing...

I think they have done that.
I wonder if people will be happier or more frustrated with the lottery setup.

And... I wonder if such a lottery system would help take on general ticket scalping. (I could see a lottery mechanism doing some kind of 'real person' verification.)
I'm not a web developer, but that sounds pretty sane to me. However, the important part of their decision, I'm guessing, was not so much the PHP part, but the "get people who actually know about the web to do this for us." Someone has to build the site either way, and I'm guessing the embedded engineers they had working on it didn't really know how to go about that.

EDIT: Another possibility is that they already had PHP devs working on their corporate site or whatever, and they wanted to use them instead of hiring another team.
Same thing with the diamond merchants in India. A lot of deals and much of the communication is now done over WhatsApp. People in India get a smartphone for the sole reason to use WhatsApp, whether the individual is a servant or a rich businessman.
~$40/user.
Skype, second time, sold for ~$15/user.
Time Warner just sold for ~$4/user.

Good thing for FB bank account that "OTT messaging" is just a fad while the carriers get their acts together ; )
With infinite CPU power and infinite RAM, fully general artificial intelligence is a trivial problem (see: Marcus Hutter's AIXI).

AI is an optimization problem: how do you build smart software within realistic constraints.
something of an afterthought

Cf. the comical performance of the entire rubygems ecosystem (no least bundler).

A programming language community can hardly make a stronger statement about their general mindset wrt performance than tolerating such an unmitigated trainwreck at the very core of their ecosystem and _every single developers_ daily workflow.
Sports Talk 920 02/19 by The Wacko Network | Sports Podcasts
Hipchat* - Mobile + Desktop support, along with a simple API and lots of integration points out of the box for Jira/Bamboo etc etc

*Disclaimer: I work for Atlassian
"(if we exclude the US and China)"

That's at least half of the world, if not in users, at least in revenue. What the hell!
>WhatsApp charges annually for this (already free elsewhere) service.

You get a free trial year. "For all phone types, WhatsApp is free to download and try for the first year. After, you have the option of extending your subscription for $0.99 USD per year."
genetic algorithms have already evolved the strongest SC2 builds on their own. why couldn't training them against each other build a pro level bot?

i realize there are a lot of mechanics the program would need to be aware of, but they're finite.

writing a bot that can learn to play Starcraft on it's own, on the other hand, is the harder problem.
haha, and where is JBoss now and what has it done for Red Hat?
35 Things I've Learned Working in Startups
Thanks gane5h. Can you point me to an example that shows how to use django framework for long-lived requests via gunicorn/tornado?
How is that not just a matter of not all of the information being available? What does uncalculable mean here?
Android users pay an annual fee.
LinkedIn Wants to Be Your Soapbox, Not Just Your Résumé
Facebook to buy Watsapp for $19MM
Probably. I doubt it's possible to look at a piece of code and evaluate whether it's worth feeding it the equivalent of ten years of basic education. If we ever write a program that exhibits "creativity, or desire, or whatever you want to call it" on a basic level after however many months the researcher can afford to run it for, then it'll suddenly get a lot of funding and time and potential for growth.

For all we know, we already have the Algorithm and all we need to do is run it for years on the best computer available "just to see what happens".
I'm of the belief that you should reveal as little information as possible regarding your web stack. This alone indicates that they're running Django, although that could probably could have been guessed pretty easily considering it is Python.org . Also, from a security perspective, I would prefer to have the admin site only accessible from an internal network, perhaps on a subdomain, and require people to use a VPN to make any sort of admin changes.
Nothing, so far as I can tell.

I have a 12/2 package through Cox and routinely go over the 250GB cap. Other than an automated email saying I'm over the cap, nothing happens.

A year ago, I used 750GB in a month after setting up online backup on a computer. Nary a word.
Yes, Whatsapp does.
Let's recap why this is bad: The government raided the guy's house with a ridiculous SWAT team including guns and helicopters, instead of asking him to visit court. This was not only a waste of time and money, but did not go through any form of due process. On top of this, there is documented interference prior to the event by US politicians associated with the RIAA.

New Zealand has a free trade agreement with China. They don't need the US.
Relevant article Why Selling WhatsApp To Facebook Would Be The Biggest Mistake Of Jan Koum's And Brian Acton's Lives (2012):

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2012/12/03/why-selli...
"I'm dumb and can't be bothered to learn anything" -jonpo

strong post.
Nice! Had to go to preview.python.org to see it.

One comment: As the main feature goes between code examples, the box grows. This makes the rest of the page jump around - which is frustrating if the viewer happens to be reading it or clicking links.
This is the house on Google Streetview: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.720003,-122.392886,3a,75y,15...

And listed on Zillow: http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1122-Hollister-Ave-San-Fra...

It was last sold in 1997 for $50k. It was listed several times between 2009 and 2012 from $499K to $589K. It never sold. Looks like they've given it a fresh coat of paint between the streetview image and the Craigslist photo.

Zillow estimates it is worth $386k. And similar houses in the area are also listed at a similar price. I would say that this Craiglist seller is a little high on the price.
>SSID is neither design nor implementation of a wireless network.

As it relates to the physical implementation of a network, part of the implementation includes configuring the devices. Security through obscurity can be something as simple as manually assigning a non-standard port to a service (such as HTTP). The example of disabling the broadcast of an SSID is also a valid example of security through obscurity.

You seem to have an issue with me using the SSID as an example because its so easy to defeat that it would be a waste of time to even try. Like I said before, that's the entire point. Its obvious to us now, in 2014, but for years people were told by 'experts' to disable it as a security measure. Some individuals actually used to attempt to secure their networks by hiding the SSID instead of using a password. The prevalence of this kind of negligence is one of the key reasons that disabling the broadcast became the prototypical example used to explain why security through obscurity doesn't work.

In short, its not an example I made up on my own formed from a lack of understanding security, its an example that's used in textbooks and security-specific certification study guides. Its an example that's taught in introductory IT and IT security classes. I'll try to find some more specific citations to put your mind at ease, its been quite a while since I've taken an introductory course on the subject.

https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Avoid_security_by_obscurity

>not everything that is bad is "security through obscurity".

And I agree with this, but my example most certainly is a valid case of security through obscurity.

Update: Better Sources

From Hacking Exposed: Wireless, 2nd Edition Pg. 80

From the first paragraph on security through obscurity:

>Many wireless networks today operate in hidden or nonbroadcasting mode. These networks don’t include their SSID (network name) in beacon packets, and they don’t respond to broadcast probe requests. People who configure their networks like this think of their SSID as a sort of secret. People who do this might also be prone to enabling MAC address filtering on the AP.

From Enterprise Security: A Data-Centric Approach, Chapter 7

>In order to provide security through obscurity, methods such as hidden SSIDs and MAC address filtering have been employed to keep the wireless network invisible to eavesdroppers and more difficult to connect to for an unknown host.

From Certified Wireless Design Professional Official Study Guide, Section titled SSID hiding.

>In order to provide security through obscurity, methods such as hidden SSIDs and MAC address filtering have been employed to keep the wireless network invisible to eavesdroppers and more difficult to connect to for an unknown host.

These are just a few examples out of dozens, if not hundreds.

I'd sincerely appreciate it if you would educate yourself before implying that other people are incompetent in the future.
For perception, maybe. The neocortex (hint: where we do everything we consider "thinking") operates on entirely different principles and is not interchangeable with perception.
I see what you nean: the computer as a tool, rather than as the one that does tge proving.
Where the seasons extend over a few years - yes. MySpace, Friendster, Slashdot, Hotmail etc. were the same.
I was just about to post this on here, cool to see someone already has!
Ah, but we weren't given infinite time also, so you might be able to evolve an AI, but it might take many millions of years (like it did with real life).
This is your heads up to stop thinking in terms of features. Value != technology.
Yes, the smaller guys never really integrated themselves with the rest of the team and were pretty smug about the whole situation all when the parent company started to go down.
True, the reasons are different. But the motivation is the same : to stay ahead of the competition. In my view, and based on my own experience, Whatsapp is being used as a light-weight social network built around messaging and optimized for mobile phones. In fact, I share a lot more stuff with friends and family on Whatsapp - including pictures/videos/messages - than I do on Facebook.

The more Whatsapp satisifies my sharing needs, the less I use Facebook. And that is a competitive threat to Facebook. Instagram was similar - a light-weight social network built around photo-sharing.

I think Zuckerberg is a deeply strategic thinker trying to avoid the pitfalls of the "Innovator's Dilemma". Both Instagram and Whatsapp are classic examples of what is described in Innovator's Dilemma - light-weight products that can slowly eat into the market share of the incumbent, and ultimately displace it.

Edits : formatting.
I'm still trying to understand why Bitcoin won't fail
Facebook To Buy WhatsApp For $19B
Usage fluctuates. The value is in the users not necessarily the company or the tech. When users start bailing to another platform what's left?
San Francisco's confirmed case of Measeles may have exposed thousands
Not sure how you're figuring that. At best - 1.5Bn users locked in - you're at less than $1bn _revenue_ (after you net-out the 30% that goes to Apple or Google for an in-app transaction) and much lower net profits (presumably, it costs some fraction of a dollar in ops, bandwidth and cpu to support a paying user for a year.)

Also, even at $1bn in revenue, this is 16X sales... that's usually the kind of price you'd see for a company that can still grow a lot. When you have 1/12 of the world's population as users, and you're capped at $1 per year per user, there's not a lot of places to grow. Clearly FB valued this based on strategic value to their broader platform.
Thanks, that's definitely one that wasn't on my radar thus far :)
The Jobs tab looks too sad. :D
The sad part is that due to Whatsapp, I can't escape my
doom because EVERYONE I contact daily uses Whatsapp. I
would basically kill myself socially if I were to delete
Whatsapp.

I have been playing around with deleting my whatsapp account (for different reasons) in the last couple of months, but haven't because of everybody uses whatsapp. But I don't share your sentiment. I just used this acquisition as a trigger to actually delete my whatsapp account. And I don't think I'll miss anything really significant (the SNR went done quite a lot lately anyway): I'm still as reachable as I've been before.

Maybe I can manage to bring more of my social contacts to actually use an open XMPP client anyway ...
WeChat is made by Tencent, who's market cap is $143B.
crazy to think WhatsApp is worth almost as much as Netflix or Tsla. I think they overpaid. Will short the stock at open tomorrow. I was long $25 to $55, but this kind of recklessness with a young management team is destroying shareholder value.
You mean almost at the height of the dotcom bubble? Maybe that should say something about this acquisition.
Yes... there's also RCN in DC as well yet in my neighborhood I can only get Comcast.
@kayoone No it's NOT free. US is just slow picking up new tech. It wasn't too long ago when Verizon was charging $10/month for 100 or 500 texts a month, with MASSIVE over the limit usage fee. The smart/young ones alternative but generally most don't care. And while most complain about paying $ for service that may not get used, they continue to pay, because they have the $.
Maybe they're not just paying for users. Maybe they're paying for the strong infrastructure of the messenger and the talent associated.