skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One could argue that the sale to Facebook was you being the product that was sold.

The valuation doesn't support the value of the 50 employees or the development time of the application but it does support the number of customers. That's what was brought and what will be used by Facebook.
I'm European, and in Europe there is quite a bit of a problem as well. It's quite relevant, and if you aren't aware of why, you should educate yourself.

Also, maybe people wouldn't think you were a macho jerk if you didn't act like it. Hint: normal adults don't say things like "common grow a pair white knights, smells like virgins over here". Boys trying to act macho do.
% formatting is not Python 2 specific, plans to remove it from 3 have been deferred.
Disclaimer: Highly biased of course ;)

Speaking as a glider pilot in training, its hard to beat the feeling of winch launch or the rising in a thermal column. Flying small planes connects you to the elements while still leaving you in control (if everything goes well). To me its the perfect combination of technology and outside activity.
...so basically it's like HN?
[Insane Prediction] Apple acquires Tesla and Musk becomes new CEO?
New Google maps is rolling out
can someone explain how a free app ends up generating $40 per user?

more importantly, if facebook keeps buying large MAU at costs exceeding their revenues (not profit), at what point will those purchases start generating revenues (if at all)?

at what point will they no longer have money to buy MAU or even generate revenue on those users they purchased and own?

Are we in a new economy now just like 1999?
The blog itself has only one post on it
Good point.

It might also cause trouble with company B "Yeah, we promised your rivals we would tell them if someone like you approached us" is probably not the best foot to start off with :p
SVN has a central repo with some clients.
GIT has a central repo with some clients repo with some clients.

If you want to track your changes even when you don't have access to internet, GIT is the way to go.

Maybe this thread[1] could help you to choose one or another.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/161541/should-i-use-svn-o...
Electronic Condom... Using Arduino
But > 95% creativity "workers" (Art, music, game design, writing) get very little money
I'm not sure this is really a shift. This site was founded by a seed funding organization, so it shouldn't be a surprise to find lots of funding related stories here. It has always been like this as far as I can remember.
That's not how web frameworks work. There is code on the server side which _generates_ the HTML, CSS and sometimes Javascript as well. So viewing the source in your browser can give you some clues, but this doesn't reveal what is going on on the server.
Well, let's take a look at a few random points in the past.

Say, March 2008: https://web.archive.org/web/20080302094434/http://news.ycomb...

Some of the headlines: Logo Design Trends 2008, Microsoft May Buy Email Startup Xobni, Rumor: Microsoft about to unveil web-apps strategy, The Coming Death Of Indian Outsourcing.

Doesn't sound so different. Maybe May, 2010? https://web.archive.org/web/20100524025853/http://news.ycomb...

Headlines: Facebook’s ‘Like’ button makes me lonely, Europeans Fear Crisis Threatens Liberal Benefits, Google Map Mashups are About to Get a Lot Better, Amazon's Universal Wish List button.

Okay, maybe from last year, as OP mentioned: https://web.archive.org/web/20130214172414/http://news.ycomb...

Headlines: The United States Redrawn as Fifty States with Equal Population, Disqus bait and switch, now with ads, Berkshire and 3G Capital to Buy Heinz for $23 Billion,	I Was a Political Prisoner at Birth in North Korea, How Silicon Valley Fosters Plivo's Cloud-Based Telephony.

Nope, sorry, I don't see it.
There are many alternative places you can check out for pure technical discussions.

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming for example.
An interesting historical note is that Facebook's chat system was originally written in Erlang (https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=14218138919), before being replaced with a C++/Java system.
Indentured Servantry sounds like a plan B.

NBD is H1-B fails.
It's just Ubuntu but (presumably) on ARM so ... yes.
Yeah, all those people in India and Africa use latest Iphone :-)
It took more than a month to realize that HN community is a small branch of a seed accelerator by Paul Graham. As such, expecting anything more than what you're getting is naive. Of course everybody here is interested on startups and their stories (failures and successes).

That said, ones needs to define what the word hacker stands for. Until 5 years ago, I'd agree that a hacker is a computer geek with strong ties to the security field. Nowadays I am not interested in security as much as building up things and I don't believe that the word should have these kind of restrains anyway.

The average user level on HN is really high for my standards. I see posts ranging from bio-informatics, to mathematics, economics and world politics. But more importantly I see insightful comments from people on and off the discussion field. So yes, this is a hacker's community and the name is appropriate IMHO.
The site was originally called Startup News. Hell, see the page from back then: https://web.archive.org/web/20070226001637/http://news.ycomb...

MySpace, Facebook, Delicious, Yahoo, TechStars, Y Combinator, if anything they were even more than now.
Same up here in Malaysia. In fact, it's starting to look like the only places that isn't dominated by WhatsApp are America and China.
So how much do you pay per month to a carrier?
In Spain, SMS was also the main way of communicating with mobile phones (pre- and post-smartphone). The benefit of WhatsApp was that you didn't have to move to a different "social network" with usernames and stuff, it just used your contact list, and that it didn't cost anything besides your internet connection. So if someone had WhatsApp, you used that, otherwise you texted them through SMS. You almost end up avoiding communicating with people that don't have WhatsApp because they cost you money...
Friends With Benefits (on how Google+ leaks private information)
US MILITARY STARVING?WAITING TOO GO INTO SYRIA
This is true <in person>, when you have confidence that the presenter is of high quality and on target. It's not true generally, because in reality the needle/haystack problem. Line of sight is better for parralel processing than serial/ sequential a/v.
5 Pilares para o Sucesso com o Google Adwords na Sua Empresa
Facebook Acquisition Over Messaging App WhatsApp For $19 Billion.
To be clear, this article was previously posted on HN [1] but the original title is misleading and I think that the content is relevant. For this reasons, I posted it again with a more specific title.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7181287
They are already cheaper than feature phones! At least in India : http://tinyurl.com/la5g2ou
Actually, I never understood how promotion works here.

As an example, I submitted a website about a project of our own a couple months ago and got 4 points. Never made it past the "new" page.

A month later, someone else submitted exactly the same project and got 70 votes, getting to the front page and resulting in about 30.000 visits to our site.

Same content, different user.

So is this site about interesting content? Or about WHO submits this content?
Money is certainly not an indicator of true success, other than, of course, success of acquiring money. However, why is money vulgar. Sure, there are many vulgar things one can purchase with money. But money in and of it self isn't vulgar.

Many people here want to understand how WhatsApp managed to convince someone to pay so much money for it, perhaps so they can replicate this success and also become rich. What's so wrong with that?
J2ME is interesting. Each phone supported Java Specification Requests (JSRs) and you could look up which JSRs a phone supported. For example, JSR82 is some Bluetooth supporty thing.

The real problem was that between different phones and JSRs, some implementations were really bad (I remember having a Nokia 6500slide with dodgy implementations) and varied between phone models. This was especially odd on Nokia phones considering that there were hundreds of phones running S40 or S60 and yet there were differences between those phones. (If I recall correctly, I had a 5200 and 5300 and there were differences between them). Highly unreliable.

But $16bn unreliable for testing? Not sure. Well done for getting bought though.
That totally depends on what your goals in life are and is highly subjective.
Kill Switches: Phones Just The Start
Unless everybody switches, few will switch. Network effects also create some pretty powerful stickiness.
It's like "Mexicans stole our jerbs" attitude applied to Silicon Valley.

He is bitter that SV has talented Asians and brown people who aren't in their rightful places making cheap MCD Happy Meal toys and running call centers.
It's not about what is possible todo, it's about replacing feature phones in developing markets. They can't effort "cheap" androids, neither iphones. And if they get the money for an "cheap" android they don't have money for the development equipment.
reminds me about Sun buying StorageTek for 4B - a company whose technology and market had very visible end. J2ME on smartphones - basically an oxymoron if one knows why and how J2ME was designed 15 years ago - doesn't seem to be happening (despite predictable post-WhatsApp influx of crazy VC money into such combination in the next half year) and cheap $10-$20 smartphones are the next billions of devices.
No, it's not becoming more and more. It always has, as I've shown in my post linking back to the Wayback Archive. You're all wearing rose-colored glasses.
Goldman Sachs Elevator Gossip
Whistle-blower provision mandatory for listed firms: SEBI
> I think there have been a shift from hacking the technology to hacking the finance.

I'd rather have finance hacking (I was thinking bitcoin) than yet another article on the NSA.
The key success of Whatsapp is IMHO that it uses your phone's address book as contact list. There is no hurdle to use it what is very important for the average user.
The multi platform support from beginning is second thing. J2ME as stated in the article is negligible. I can't understand why this article is on top of HN.
> about half the pilots I knew in 1980 (instructors as well as students) had been killed in flying accidents.

That's extreme. Is there any pattern? Where are you located?
They aren't paying for a J2ME app and the requisite testing. They are paying for the results of the network effect made possible by it.
Nanomotors Controlled Inside Living Human Cells For The First Time
Amen to that, your first successful solo flight is something everyone remembers.

It is just fun!

Regarding the elements bit: The first time I went solo the only reason I stayed up for more than 15 minutes was finding a large bird (kestrel maybe) circling in a thermal and joining it. You don't get much more "with the elements" when in the air than that (Hang gliders excepted).
Yeah but will it satisfy us, if we can't see it making analogies, can't see its semantics; identify with it? This same lack of breakdown into pieces we understand will make it hard to tweak and advance NNs beyond 'good categorizers'.
Are the groups better than what you'd be able make/do on Google Hangouts?
Unless Facebook actually puts their logo on WhatsApp, hardly anyone would notice. The tech community is minuscule compared to the large number of non-tech people using WhatsApp.
New travel planning app for BB 10
Tripomatic has just launched a new travel planning app for BB 10 phones. I would love to get your feedback on it.
I've been doing the same thing!

I believe the higher numbers work like this: every 21 turns, Threes generates a number from 0-20. After this number of turns elapses, if the highest number seen is 48 or greater, Threes skips drawing from the normal set of ones, twos, and threes, and instead generates a "special spawn". The special spawn is a number between 6 and <highest number seen> / 8 (I believe the distribution is uniform).

Source: Threes writes a preference plist that allows it to resume games if the app is killed in the background. The keys to look at are "PseudoSpawnSpecialIndex" and "PseudoSpawnSpecialList".
Wow, I knew flying light aircrafts was dangerous, but this really surprised me. And people tell me I'm taking risks riding a motorcycle.
Forgive me if I'm contemptuous of those whose subjective goal is the acquisition of money.
That's absolutely not true; the security issues raised here are serious issues that resulted in a bunch of changes to the WebGL spec in order to alleviate them. Running untrusted code on the GPU is dangerous.
Also this http://imgur.com/7Bomq9Q
Same content, different user.

And different day, different time, different selection of users looking at /new.

I'm not saying there isn't favoritism (and I don't think that's necessarily bad), but there's also plenty of randomness involved.
Trapped Electron Reveals Its Mass
Fantastic. Ignore what I said, think more about rufusjones advice. The idea of using time as a proxy for cost is brilliant and the idea of using references not for what they say but who they are is also stonking.

btw - I cannot track down a Rufus jones online who seems to be doing what you do - have you a online home?
Is Seattle the next Silicon Valley?
PHP or ASP.NET: Did I Do The Right Thing?
"better" is programmer point of view. From the point of view of users, Whatsapp is simple, does not require an account, and just works. So people use it a lot regardless of the existence of Hangouts and what they can do :-)
Would love to hear from data scientists and those actually doing work with open data on this!
OK, how is Whatsapp different to using SMS to communicate with friends? What am I missing?
US or UK MPG?
They had better not. I much prefer it to .format()
Facebook reaches desperation, not long now till the collapse
And Android has like 80 percent market share outside of US. So maybe it's time for developers here and elsewhere to forget about the "Macs/iPhones 'everywhere', therefore let's build for them first" Silicon Valley culture, and start developing for Android first?

With J2ME phones rapidly declining as they are being replaced by smartphones (even $50 Android smartphones going into this year), and the vast majority of those smartphones being Android (even Microsoft is considering replacing Nokia Asha's OS with Android, therefore killing another a huge chunk of the J2ME market), Android's platform is basically the "new J2ME". So to follow the author's own advice, you should build an Android app.
Email isn't "instant", and you either have to go with a large provider or fight the spam hydra yourself. I used to run my own mail server and stopped because it was just not worth it.

Whatsapp acquired a whole number of users who didn't have computers, didn't have email addresses, and wanted the simplest possible setup that worked.
> world politics.

That's not supposed to be here. Those topics tend to end up in pretty lame discussions.
It's called CDMA:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_division_multiple_access

XOR is just a primitive way of making an orthogonal code.
Two thoughts:

1) Read "The Conquest of Happiness" by Bertrand Russell. It really helped me.

2) If you have the gift of building stuff, a good purpose of life is to build bridges. I don't mean to connect people together. Think of a tribe on an island. The island has another island beside it. People might be able to get from their home island to another, but it is a pain. When someone (maybe me, maybe you) builds a bridge to the other land, all of society gains a little bit. If the bridge is solid, maybe it will last for generations. People will go about their business but their lives will be somewhat improved by the bridge. This is one of the reasons I like to write software. My attitude has caused me some problems in my career. I'm a scientist and I should not be writing software most of the time. But whatever, that's what gives my life meaning.
Thanks for this! The code is a joy to read through, this is really well crafted javascript.
It's free to message people abroad.
It is broadly speaking lower cost, allows media sharing (photos/sound clips) and provides delivery receipts.
Is WhatsApp popular in the states? I'm Irish and living in Spain and in both countries it's incredibly popular. Most of my communication is channeled through it (I'd rather send a WhatsApp then call in most cases)
Well indeed, but the exact same URL, only submitted one month later, should at least have reverted some karma on the user who submitted the project originally. Especially if the project was of his own creation...
Is there a site where you can find other people that want to fly from somewhere specific too somewhere specific to share fuel costs with? I'd love to go up in a private plane for a few hours if it only cost me $200 or less.
I had to check typeof (apparently those two chinese characters are not a string) to fix this, again this is actually useful, but was not expected given the ease of first 3 problems.
You could say the same thing about cars - they are only for getting from point A to B,right?

Yet I very often take my car for a drive, without a purpose or a destination in mind. Drive for a couple hours, through the nearest forests or hills, and then head home. It's fun.
PhD studentship for ProofPeer available (UK-eligible applicants only)
They shouldn't, though, because pretty much every XMPP server I've seen has user-offline message storage for later delivery eg [1], [2], and the "best practices" have been documented for years, e.g. [3].

Unless you actually mean "receive messages [to your device] when you're offline" and how the hell would that work?

[1] https://prosody.im/doc/modules/mod_offline
[2] http://www.process-one.net/docs/ejabberd/guide_en.html#htoc4...
[3] http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0160.html
Also, you generally don't tell someone that's suspected of fraud that they are suspected of fraud. You tell them there's a technical difficulty, and they need to call.
>> How are the "other 3 billion people" without smartphones going to contribute to Facebook's bottom line?

By becoming rich, of course.
NSA Weighs Retaining Data for Suits
It's free. No length limit. You can send pics and vids. No international fees.
My old cheap feature phone had a good enough browser already.
How to become a Ruby on Rails developer
This. This is the answer I have always looked for.

> "But, but, how is WhatsApp any different than iMessage / Facebook Messenger / Hangouts?"

I have made this exclamation multiple times, and my friends in India and Singapore and other parts of Asia just turned up their palms with a "I dunno, everyone uses it and told me to get it."

I refused to use it since I like to use as few messaging platforms as possible (just Google Hangouts right now since it has most of my contacts, voice and video) despite my friends pestering me.

J2ME is the most reasonable explanation. I see why it made Whatsapp itself popular. But still? Almost everyone I know who's using it actually uses it on an Android/iOS smart device. Who is this "everyone" of theirs using it on feature phones? I doubt their friends circle intersects that heavily with rural villagers living on $10/day.

And also, is this really a viable long-term play for Facebook? How does this contribute towards the rest of their product plays?
That can't be right since the UK App Store supports payments and WhatsApp have never asked me for any money (but I was a light user before I ditched it for LINE.)
I'm also not sure isqrt counts as a new algorithm. It's just Newton's method with a bit hack to exploit the floating point format and extract a good starting point.
UK gallons.
Does anyone have any experience with Telegram[0]? Having a desktop or web client is very useful. It doesn't seem like they're coming anytime soon for Threema[1]. And no, Google Hangouts is not an option.

[0]: https://telegram.org/

[1]: https://threema.ch/en/faq.html#desktopversion
So, the $16bn is for a massive network of end-user testers? :-)
The phone number as an id is a very important component to their adoption indeed. So do you posit that WhatsApp's adoption rates being what they are (compared to say Viber which does the same thing) is purely due to first mover?
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I don't know. I'm in the same position. I don't care about 99% of threads, I don't care about startups or other businesses of any kind, and I believe this site suffers from a particular brand of group think I don't associate with.

When there's any technical discussion that interest me, I believe 95% of participants don't have any idea what they are talking about, and 5% sort of know better but are wrong.

Yet I still come. I don't know why, it's like an obsession. I can't explain it.

Maybe for the occasional interesting link that appears every couple of days and I wouldn't have found it otherwise.

Nah, it's not that.
When you submit is also critical.

You get about an hour on the first page of the new page. There need to be enough faces that are interested in your topic reading in that hour.
I'd say more than 99.9% of WhatsApp users haven't heard of Telegram.

WhatsApp users are mostly not early adopters like you and your friends. They are ordinary people, because WhatsApp is is a simple communication tool targeted to everyone. And that's why they keep doubling their user base.
I've been a fair while now and I think it goes through phases and not only that the very nature of the site changes depending on the timezone you access it in, so if your browsing habit changes, HN changes too. Sometimes HN gets political, sometimes it gets programming heavy, sometimes startup heavy.

HN at the weekend, for example, is much more like r/programming, the quality of comments is much more mixed, you still get some great discussions, but there's a lot more commentators who don't really seem to get programming or startups or business, there seems to be a lot more clueless people. And the weekend is when all those god-awful self-improvement articles get voted up.

The thing I do miss is the Show HN: posts of new startups, and they definitely have gone as Ask posts seem to have been heavily penalized so they drop like stones.
You only need one friend you care about using a Blackberry or Nokia for it to matter though. The long tail matters when it comes to communication.
It's cheaper (free). All this value stems from carriers's infinite greediness in making us pay (international) SMS and MMS.
One such "platform" is made up of the 80% of android phones that are cheap and basic with small data plans and limited access to slow wifi.

The anecdotes from the 80s & 90s when annual PC sales for any given year were a substantial portion of the overall PCs in use at the time are interesting. The realization that software could be written for the newest machine and it would run everywhere soon enough is not directly applicable to the smartphone market. I think that out of collective habit, many apps assume that building for this year's flagship models is the best course. It may be, but it effectively means your market is much smaller, especially for free, network effect apps.

These apps and their ecosystems rise and fall fast. Tablets & smartphones are spreading downmarket with devices being sold today @ 10% of the first androids.

A $50 phone won't run everything, but it will run some things - useful things.
Well, you got the "Insane" part correct at least. Why on earth would Apple acquire a niche car company? About the only thing useful to them would be the battery tech (if it's even applicable - I don't know) and they could just snaffle up a bunch of smaller companies working on batteries instead.

Remember that Apple have never paid more than a couple of hundred $M for any acquisition. Tesla would be ... more than that.
One more thing.. I doubt anyone 'updates' a J2ME app, they had to get most of the stuff working perfectly the first time itself.