skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
IIRC, they used to market the app as "free SMS service", which, I believe, was a key component in getting huge amount of users in 3rd countries.
3 solid thoughts. And I agree with you on all.

My question is more of a "pie-in-the-sky" type of thing, because honestly, who would've thought about Facebook buying WhatsApp for 16B?
This is Sequoia's blog post. It was enough to make me slightly overcome my complete shock at the valuation ...
http://sequoiacapital.tumblr.com/post/77211282835/four-numbe...
I don't understand, what do you think is a reasonable way to make investment decisions if not a fundamental value analysis?
Even distributed protocols aren't a silver bullet. Embrace and extend can make short work of that. As can joining standards boards and playing political games. As can simply turning off federation.

Sometimes I think HTTP and SMTP are only limping along because there's a large enough enterprise base that doesn't want to see any changes at all.

Maybe that presents a defense (get your competing protocol entrenched in corporate IT), but not many technologies get birthed out to the consumer space from the enterprise space the way http and smtp did.
It's a nice design, but IMO, a bit too much is thrown at you on the front page. For someone unfamiliar, it's probably overwhelming.
Which seems to have been invented by Gauss.
Unless the US market is very different, I thought it was pretty obvious that the sellers/landlords are the real estate agent's customers and the stream of prospective buyers are the product...
Design is often an Achilles' heel of software projects, because if a project is very good, some people tend to think that design is irrelevant because people will still use it. And sometimes they do, but it probably scares a good number of people off.

It's good to see an exception of this rule. They probably needed to hire a professional designer to make this happen, but it was worth it.
That changed. The app is now[0] free and it's $1/year, in every platform.

[0]: http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/20/3787472/whatsapp-for-ios-...
Show HN: Mcpdf – a drop-in replacement for PDFtk
I am Raylene Yung, a Facebook Engineering Manager on the Privacy teams
And thet day has finally come, first php.net and now python.org. But the site although looks nicer, is just too much in my face and my lazyness just make me leave it before even think to explore it.
Is the "BETA" tag next to the python logo supposed to mean the new redesign is in beta? One can confuse it to mean python is in beta.
Show HN: Automatic SXSW RSVP Tool
Facebook engineering manager of privacy doing an AMA
They are the de-facto messaging service in the rest of the world (except for China).

FWIW, I'm in the UK, and I'm not aware of anyone who uses it here, either. I too have heard the name mentioned once or twice in the past, usually for undesirable reasons related to things like security or privacy. Even looking them up today, I don't quite see the attraction: what is the USP here?
Winter Knits
And how many decades will Facebook need to make that money from its users? How many decades will it need to make it from Whatsapp?
How do we develop intelligent systems when we don't know how to measure intelligence?
There are a bunch of these. There's the Python 2 specific string formatting as well:

# Input, assignment
>>> name = input('What is your name?\n')
>>> print 'Hi, %s.' % name

Why so Python 2 specific? Why not Python 3? : (
Looking at Whatsapp's legal info some notable info, nothing too surprising:

* "You expressly acknowledge and agree that in order to provide the Service, WhatsApp may periodically access your contact list and/or address book on your mobile device [...] You hereby give your express consent to WhatsApp to access your contact list and/or address book for mobile phone numbers in order to provide and use the Service. We do not collect names, addresses or email addresses, just mobile phone numbers."

* Section 3C concerning not hacking them and giving a list of tools you definitely can't use under the agreement.

* "If you are under 16 years of age, you are not permitted to use the WhatsApp Service."

* "If another user has your mobile phone number stored in their mobile phone address book or contact list, they will be able see your status information unless you have chosen to block such user."

* "The WhatsApp Site and Service are hosted in the United States and are intended for and directed to users in the United States. If you are a user accessing the WhatsApp Site and Service from the European Union, Asia, or any other region [...] you are transferring your personal information to the United States and you expressly consent to that transfer and consent to be governed by California law for these purposes."

* "In the event that WhatsApp is acquired by or merged with a third party entity, we reserve the right to transfer or assign the information we have collected from our users as part of such merger, acquisition, sale, or other change of control." [they go on to say that they may not be able to control use of information in cases which include "reorganization"]

http://www.whatsapp.com/legal/

Reading between the lines it seems you can hack them with fiddler (or the like) and that the legal info is saying "your info is definitely being monitored by USA governmental groups"?
First commercial moon delivery could be sports drink
They're buying access to a winner-take-all market.
That's why they keep them separated.

Kids won't read the small print, and if you read the small print then you don't see ads anyway, you're just a cost to them.
I'm sure John Gruber will find a way to spin this in a pro-Apple light.
So until the point of asteroid harvesting we have a reason to be intimidated?
"gitk" is only part of the story. You'll see the branches and the commit contents, but you still need to run "git gui" to do the actual commit, reset changes, push.
Bow in the presence of a great acquisition.

http://rapgenius.com/Kanye-west-stronger-lyrics#note-40415
I setup my bitcoin wallet in the early days when there was much less infrastructure, and back then it took a while! However, a few months ago I tried a peer-to-peer bitcoin website and I was surprised at how quick it was. I think went from sign-up to bitcoins in my account within about 15 minutes (+ confirmation time).

There's still a significant learning cost, of course, but I'm encouraged by how much better the infrastructure around Bitcoin is compared to just a few years ago. The infrastructure looks pretty professional now, and the security practices are noticeably better (though that isn't exactly hard, considering how insecure the earliest services were!)
Starting to sound like Microsoft post Windows.
Test often, test soon
good article
Why Facebook Dropped $19B On WhatsApp: Reach Into Europe, Emerging Markets
New business model: Become a thread to Facebook.
Humans evolved for a long time before we understood anything about how our bodies work, so why would a brain have to understand itself to evolve?
> Space is cold, but getting rid of heat is not easy in a vacuum.

On the contrary, getting rid of heat in a vacuum is easier than getting rid of heat in an atmosphere. Here's a diagram of human heat loss at the surface:

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/coobod.htm...

According to this source, at the surface of earth, under the atmosphere, a person loses:

Perspiration: 17 watts

Conduction: 11 watts

Radiation: 133 watts

Without an atmosphere, the direct radiation of heat energy into space becomes more efficient (no greenhouse effect), and it's always the most efficient way to radiate heat.

It is the efficiency of direct radiation of heat energy that explains why objects at the surface can fall below air temperature overnight under a clear sky, as they surely do.
What lies are you talking about?
AI is a software problem as well as a hardware problem. It's ridiculous to assume we understand the underlying model of the function of the human brain in general. We don't even understand the physics of it all yet. Be optimistic about AI, but don't be fooled -- it's not as basic as hooking up transistors and thinking they behave like neurons.
Are the world's chat apps really worth $48B? (Oct '13)
I agree with the sentiment, and I do own one and use it as my (only) phone.
Federal court in Utah sides with broadcasters against Aereo
We'll see new angel investors. That will help the ecosystem.
This is old news. You can see his spin here: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/01/23/asymmetry
The nominal fee that already exists and hasn't pared down the userbase? Or is there a new fee?
Idea on top of this: allow a user to pick a landmark or location they want to represent where they are like a university or park, so that its not their actual location being given out, but rather something meaningful near where they usually are from day-to-day.
Who says we don't know how to measure intelligence? The simplest way would be just to select a problem that requires intelligence and measure how good it does at that problem.
Crystal Nights
A few thoughts..

I'm sure like many, I'm blown away at that price tag consider Motorola went for 12B and the recent TWC/Comcast is valued at 45B with both having hard assets. But after some reflections, I can see some positives that grounds my disbeliefs a bit.

1) As someone has already calculated $40/user is really not that bad (though how many overlap with fb already?)

2) You have trusted groups with WA, something you don't really have with FB (facilities are there but I doubt many use it).

3) With trusted groups, you tend to be a bit more open about your dialog so fb could gleen yet more, arguably better, information about you.

The other question in my mind are what other features are of value to WA? Video (facetime-esq) seems like a no brainer...
They can act as a net negative, but localized positives, and if it is positive for someone with capital to spend on it and they benefit from it, then they could care less usually about the negatives.

So that is why you have tax consultants and an absurdly complex tax system - niche benefits profit, and invest to keep it that way (ie, lobby, ie bribe).
> 16B? That's a B, people.

I wanted to put the number into perspective to wrap my head around it and it seems that $19B (I've added the $3B RSUs) was the public healthcare budget for 2013 in my country of almost 40 milion citizens.
... and samaltman.com domain
> If it hit a large city, it could immediately wipe out millions of people.

I'd bet that an ocean impact would be worse, the resulting Tsunami could level dozens of cities.
It's the same thing with aliens. The "evil, technologically superior alien race" is a big trope in science fiction, just as the "super-intelligent and malevolent" (as opposed to the super-intelligent and benevolent/indifferent) is in science fiction, and maybe even with futurists.
Reposting this dead comment both to indicate agreement and alert the commenter:

IE5point5 50 minutes ago | link [dead]

> and I have heard people at work claim "it is dead".

Then people at your work are clueless I'm afraid

-----

My own startup's products use WebGL for simple GPU-accelerated 2D image operations (Bayer demosaicing). It even works on my Android phone.
This is definitely a defensive move against Tencent, who is using Wechat as their weapon for global penetration. Tencent must be seen as a threat, given their ability to monetize their userbase drastically better than Facebook or Twitter. There are rumors that Tencent is also a covert investor in Snapchat as well.

GGV Partner and China VC Hans Tung makes the argument that Tencent's market cap will overtake Facebook's in 3-5 years.
http://www.bloomberg.com/video/could-chinese-competition-bea...
I am now incredibly sad that I have not come across that before and incredibly happy that I have now. Thank you!
It could also be intentionally high to price others out of the market. If this is the new going rate for users, there's not many companies out there that can make acquisitions like this.
You also got to add in the 1 million users they have been adding a month. It doesn't substantially change the numbers unless that growth continues for a long time, but Facebook didn't pay for their numbers today, but the numbers they expect them to have in the future.
Hm, that's contrary to what I'd heard, but I'll certainly defer to you on the question.
This is a much better buy than snapchat I think. But why is FB once again the only one taking social seriously? Hello Google what are you doing...
I seemed to notice the last couple months after I get the messages my service drops on download (but not on upload). I drop to their 5M connection instead. Strangely when I check known download speed sites they work with correct numbers, when I check other means I notice the difference there. So I hope they are not nerfing me wholly except when I try to measure it with known tools i.e. speedtest.net etc. They seem to be nice about it now but who knows, this is the first time they have been as vocal about it.

Sadly the next two tiers (yep we are there) only add 50GB (300) and 150GB (400 total), with the speeds of 25Mbps and up to 50Mbps but if you have higher speeds you will download more and be on HD more, get more files, backup more and always go over.
Computers and Deflation
I see. I just now realized I didn't see it coming because I didn't take their attempted acquisition of SnapChat seriously enough.

They really wanted messaging, and WhatsApp users and revenue are already impressive to the point of making SnapChat look tiny in comparison.
IMHO i think they didn't hire a designer for this, although it looks nicer than what it was, the output seems very amateurish for today standars.
Broadcasters get first victory in court over Aereo
It's well written. And I like the idea that maybe there is one algorithm. That'd be cool.
ZenPayroll Raises $20M from General Catalyst and KPCB
> Space is extremely cold, so achieving a super-conducting state is simply a matter of shielding the cable from the sun.

Not quite so simple. If we're talking about a cable near the earth, where the sun sometimes shines, there are always two heat paths -- from the sun to the cable, and from the cable to deep space. It's not easy, nor is a way self-evident, to make the cable fall to deep space temperatures at a reasonable cost, given that the sun is providing heat energy that must be diverted.
Ah yes, this reminds me of that old joke...

> Why did Facebook buy WhatsApp?

Because Snapchat isn't for sale.
They recently did 54B messages in a 24 hr period
https://twitter.com/WhatsApp/status/420373902980689920
correct, if you are any good at engineering and negotiating
I love the company, but I sold all of my stock a few weeks ago for a nice profit. I'm sure the true value will get there someday, but I'm no gambler.
Why not? ~50 employees, a couple of years old, $8M in funding.
Rescale is looking for a platform software engineer
Rescale is building a simulation platform for engineers (of the non-software variety) to help them design their products faster. Our software has been used by a commercial spaceflight company to design rockets so you really do have an opportunity to make a dent in the universe here.

As a platform software engineer, you will be building a distributed workflow engine and cluster management system that will run compute-intensive simulations across multiple cloud providers.

You'll get a chance to learn more about the processes and tools that engineers and scientists use to build products and how high performance computing power in the cloud can revolutionize this design cycle. Simulation is a $40b market and used across a wide range of industries including aerospace, oil & gas exploration, and life sciences so there are a lot of interesting domains to learn about here.

We are well funded by top tier investors (including Jeff Bezos, Paul Graham, and Peter Thiel) and offer a competitive salary with matching stock options. We are located in the SOMA district of San Francisco close to BART and Muni.

==========

Our ideal candidate has the following qualifications:

* Five years of programming experience with Java or Python

* Deep understanding of object oriented programming, distributed/concurrent/multicore computing, cloud architectures, virtualization technologies, scalable databases, fault tolerant computing

* Expertise or strong interest in the following areas: high-performance computing, code optimization, concurrent programming, security, encryption, certificates

* Education: B.S. in Computer Science or a related field, M.S. or Ph.D. preferred

* Flexibility and dedication to making exceptional products

==========

Interested? Contact us at dev-jobs@rescale.com
He delegates and then goes masturbate in his cubicle.

Arent we all sick of this manage speak/ideology BS??
From what I can tell, though, it's literally the two of those that are controlling the space outside the U.S.
While this is just more detail on old news, I can't help feeling Colligan needs to get as much credit for his statements made here as the others should receive in punishment in forming the cartel to start with. His only failing appears to be not reporting it.
At 400M users, how much more are they really going to grow? Maybe 2-4x. They're at a point where they're almost bounded by the number of people on earth with mobile devices.
That's a bit different; the very purpose of Find My Friends is explicitly to share your precise location with family/friends.
Facebook to buy WhatsApp for $16B
Let's assume that Sequia owned 25% of WhatsApp for their $8M investment. That means that they turned $8M in to $4,000M in three years.
When Facebook went public they were valued at around $50/user, a number they will never reach. This is going to be a lesson learned the hard way by the investors and once Facebook implodes it will make every investor much more cautious, reducing the capital available to startups all around.
Trust me, they've modified it heavily by now and probably use a bunch of side services that don't use it fully. It's a common pattern in messaging startups. Use XMPP, find out ejabberd is the half-decent one, migrate slowly away from XMPP eventually. Facebook had a similar trajectory.
Yeah, they've got a whole lot crammed in there. I remember this being something a lot of people were complaining about when the PSF asked for feedback a number of months ago.

I guess that got ignored.

The bottom of the page is pretty wacky, in particular: http://i.imgur.com/jZ6bUZu.png
Cyclical
The biggest shareholder hero of dotcom 1.0 was Steve Case buying a real company (Time Warner) with bubble shares. But is whatsapp Time Warner? $1/user/year even with a huge user base is still not that much revenue.
IQTELL is the first app to combine Email, Tasks, Projects and more in one place
Thanks for the tip about Telegram. It's really slick! And it has desktop clients too! Unofficial ones, but still… definitely an improvement from WhatsApp or Hangouts.
Hell, Michigan.

Imagine the tagline: "Even Hell has fiber, why don't we?"
It's called a "Gabor patch", and it's constructed by multiplying a 1D sine wave by a 2D gaussian window (it's the sine wave that's reminding you of the basis functions of the 2D DCT).

You'll see these all over the place if you read studies about vision. The (highly oversimplified) reason is that if you imagine the edge-detection processes of a mammalian brain as a set of filters, the impulse response of one of those filters would be a Gabor patch.

This is related to why the DCT is so effective for vision applications, although perhaps less significantly than you might imagine just by looking at the patterns.
If you had AI, you wouldn't need a community like Hacker news, or something along those lines.
This is a serious issue. The notion of "intelligence" is so abstract and intangible, that giving it a concrete definition is nearly redefining it. Likely what we're calling intelligence, is an oversimplification of reality; somewhat akin to the species problem in biology.
Shane Legg (one founder of DeepMind, purchased by Google) has written a number of good papers around the "measuring machine intelligence" problem.

http://www.vetta.org/documents/Benelearn-UniversalIntelligen... is a pretty good place to start.
You get a hell of a-lot of R&D, talent infrastructure and pretty much anything for $16B think Facebook with its engineering talent would find it fairly trivial to replicate the tech. The big consumer internet acquisitions are very rarely about the technologies and more about the installed user base.
Oh I might be wrong about the fee being new.
Infinite CPU seriously? I think if we had even a couple of orders of magnitude compute power we can have strong AI within a few years. It's not a hard problem at all. The limiting thing is compute power (and data to compute with).
Espreso TV  – LIVE (Ukraine)
There are some nice Python wrappers as well [1].

[1]: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pypandoc/0.5.1
No way to delete uploaded images?
I harken another commenters words when I observe that this attitude would've prevented the formation of Viber and What'sApp had they simply accepted the status quo of the time. The same could be said of Google competing with Alta vista and Yahoo.

When a large organization acquires a small one, the small organization gains scale and loses the ability to turn on a dime and to compete in the market with agility. It will take 2-4 years to spin up a real What'sapp competitor, at which time the market should be ripe for disruption.

Just my $.02.

Source: I am absurdly deep in the messaging/telecom world.
He said infinite CPU power which implies infinite number of iterations. In real life it would probably take a lot more than millions of years (because computers are too slow to simulate populations of millions of minds.)
And what do you do after evolving it? We might have less luck dissecting it and figuring out how it works than we do with human brains. It would be a total black box. And the end product is highly adapted for the specific fitness function used to evaluate it and probably wouldn't be good on anything else.
Well, it makes them billionaires instantly, so they have that going for them.
> Hm, that's contrary to what I'd heard

I think some of the confusion arises because of vacuum thermos bottles, which are really efficient at holding onto their heat. But how they work is a bit complicated. They deal with conduction and convection losses by having the vacuum barrier between the contents and the outside. As to radiation, they rely on a reflector that's part of the vacuum bottle, which has the effect of greatly slowing the rate of heat loss by radiation.

So the vacuum thermos avoids radiation heat loss, not because of the vacuum, but with a reflector. That works in space too -- many orbiting telescopes use reflectors to keep the sun's heat energy from heating up the sensors and spoiling their performance.

But a vacuum is a pretty good medium for heat loss by radiation. The moon's surface, heated to several hundred degrees Celsius during the lunar daytime, drops to 26 Kelvins after a few (earth) days of darkness (26 degrees above absolute zero). That's a new figure, lower than had been realized, and seven degrees colder than the surface of Pluto.
Bundler's kind of an interesting example. Its slowness stems from the fact that the semantics of "require" are ambiguous, so it resorts to a conservative-and-expensive search mechanism in order to preserve those semantics.

If you could magically drop support for Ruby 1.8, and make every library use require_relative to load its internals rather than require, I'm pretty sure most of the problems with Bundler would disappear.

Gem developers: If you aren't supporting 1.8, switch to exclusively using require_relative to load your app internals. Consider separate 1.8/post-1.8 code blocks for requiring code. If you'd like to understand why, strace a bundler-backed app load sometime.
All the news links are #example.