skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not saying this is the absolute case, but sometimes these things are defensive plays (e.g. instagram was starting to control more % of photographs - something that is pivotal to Facebook's continued success).

Sometimes the ROI is in retaining your value and not dying, as opposed to getting $$ out of the investment.

I'm guessing if you want to be the #1 social network for a long time, you don't want people being social outside your platform. I'd put this purchase in the defensive bucket.
Isn't WhatsApp in Mountain View, CA?
What makes you think that? Facebook already has its own messaging platform, while Whatsapp advertises themselves as a direct replacement for SMS.
Exactly. Use both (with caveats), they sit at different levels.

It's like

cloudflare/varnish/nginx -> rack -> rails -> app
-> memcache

Anything you can use to take load off the DB, which in turn may hit some sort of blocking I/O call (SSD or HDD) is a very Good Thing (TM). Or a sleeping heroku dyno. ;)
Also, I wonder if anyone has used bots to perform HFT using bitcoin in the same manner that was used on traditional stock exchanges.

There are certainly people out there with trading bots hooked up to the various exchanges. I know at least one guy who was trying something a few years ago. Because the volume is so low (~ few $M daily) I don't think there are any big players there. Also the market data and order entry protocols don't look like they would be suitable for the really high speed stuff.

That said, the market data and order entry protocols are really simple and I think most exchanges offer them for free. An automated bitcoin/dollar trading program would be a pretty easy thing to whip up. It would probably be a good introduction to automated trading for people that are interested in that sort of thing.
More than just number of users, I think now its about number of man hours spent on facebook products.
They both seem ridiculous.
I read your comment and thought, yes it would be absurd to apply this to cash and therefore it seems also absurd to apply it to bitcoin. However, there are people who would like bitcoin to fail, perhaps because they are part of the established financial system and so, it's possible that a court might rule that because an individual bitcoin amount can be traced back to a crime it should be confiscated.

The thing is, that potentially that causes problems for cash. As soon as technology is capable of tracking cash in the same way the same legal argument could be used. This is already relatively easy for electronic balances, but technology that tracks bank notes is quite easily imaginable.

I wonder what the case law for electronic cash balances is.
No I want Marta just like I want my fiber. Accessible anywhere in and outside the perimeter.
Facebook to buy Whatsapp for $16 billion
I got both of my rear cheeks handed to me on earnings today. (I was long a fair number of puts on TSLA.)

I believe in the company's technology, and the Model S is quite nice (a colleague has one), but the stock is WAY, WAY ahead of itself here.

"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." rings quite true for me today.
Information shamefulness baby stay sharp shadows calm taxes
lusts tendernesses READ clearness feedest loving
Wow, that sure is going to be a massive result for Sequoia.
They own Ryza.com as well.
$16B for something I've never even heard of. I feel like I'm living under a pile of rocks.
Or they simply don't want/can't afford seeing large chunks of users move their usage away.
The secret defiantly does more harm than good...Ive meet crazies the believe they can cure their sickness with their thoughts
It just shows that all those Series A/B rounds at $15m-$20m won't buy you traction nor success. Or as many VCs would say "the market wasn't ready"
Fair enough, but is the author's name alone sufficient? Surely the article wasn't fully read by every upvoter.
By 60 I'll have been in a wheelchair for 25 years, so as far as I'm concerned this statistic is absolutely true.
Great, the only way I was able to stay in contact with people without using facebook is gone. Cancer.
Not only that, but thanks to the fact that the Earth's rotation (and thus the plane of the equator) is tilted off of the orbital plane, even equatorial satellites far below geosynchronous orbit will only pass through the Earth's shadow at all close to the equinoxes (twice a year). Most of the time, you have eternal sunshine throughout an orbit. It's as though the metaphorical baseball player takes a flying leap so that the umpire can see him over the pitcher's head.
I would also add that a lot of venue arbitrage strategies are too cumbersome to implement in bitcoin because you need to store collateral with multiple exchanges unlike equities or other proper financial markets.
Seems like Mark Zuckerberg is turning crazy day by day!!
Zuckerberg just announced via Facebook profile: https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10101272463589561?stream...
Founded by ex-Yahoo people too.
Just rounding a location integer can be done in less than 10 assembly instructions. May be the time spent on that can well be compensated by transferring less data (orginally we transfer a float now we only transfer an integer).

Anyway, the point is processing this one sensetive information on server side really take little time. Maybe only several nanoseconds? The network latency is the botttleneck, not the proceesing of several bits of data.
Interesting post. The way I look at it is from the perspective of a human baby. How do they become intelligent? They have the "sensors" to detect features and will be able to recognize their parents. A lot of things are then learned, like touching a hot stove and from getting a formal education. For a machine to be artificially intelligent it would have to learn from its environment but also take formal instruction. That seems like a lot of ground to cover and this is what makes it unrealistic (for now).

You can have a machine read every book in existence but how long will it take for it to understand in the same way a human reading a lot of books would need to understand it somehow.
HN Chicago Meetup – Tonight 7pm
Facebook acquires Whatsapp for $16B
I'm no Facebook fan, but this isn't entirely true is it? I mean Instagram has pretty much stayed the same. It gained a video feature. Otherwise the same?
As an Englishman, I feel left out :(
Because he basically is mini-Paul Graham.
And for any ads company how much time customers spending on theirs product defines the ROI
Seems like by tomorrow this blog post well get deleted from the blog!!
Today , I feel I am really bad at maths counting return percentages. Sigh $8m -> $16b.
As the documents were produced by the government, they are unequivocally in the public domain. You can't be called out for copying them under copyright law.

One of the nicest things about the US copyright system is the rule that things produced by the US government are in the public domain. That is very much not the case in all countries. In the UK, the government does own the copyright on the things they produce, and they commercially sell it.

OpenStreetMap started in the UK because the government produced maps (by the Ordenance Survey) were very heavily copyrighted.
I grew up minutes from there, and there are even better ones (in the same vicinity).
I'd say the better way would be to develop the entire GUI with static HTML + JS files talking to the embedded device through a REST-ish interface.

That way you can get a clean separation of the front and back ends, and the web developers get to work with exactly the tech they are used to.
How'd you get your friends to move over to Telegram? I'm trying to get that ball moving with my circle of friends.
I'm convinced that Facebook is just investing in the market for ridiculously high purchases, artificially inflating the market.
That is not correct. Issue at hand is that mtgox potentially lost a lot of bitcoins due to transaction malleability. Question is - are they solvent? Or to rephrase that, do they have enough bitcoins to payout when large fraction of people decide to withdraw at the same time.

Market seems to be betting at "unlikely".
I agree. It seems like just a waste of money. Maybe Facebook shoud just give money to users? I might even
use Mark's site the right way; with my real name and honest
profile. Or, just give more to the right charities?
The protocol component in BTC to firm confirm a trade is not at this time entirely amenable to buying and selling one million times per second or whatever. Maybe one transaction per minute?

Also there's no arbitrage opportunity where buying nine shares of a NYSE stock at 2.01 and one share at 2.00 means the "real" price is 2.009 but the NYSE stubbornly won't trade in fractional pennies (made up example numbers). The BTC transaction would just be one simple 2.009 transaction not some foolishness involving ten thousand trades or whatever.

You could have a BTC derivative market with somebody acting as the market maker just like NYSE, although thats kinda at cross purposes to the whole idea of a distributed currency.

There is no market maker so picking winners or losers by deciding who gets to front run vs who doesn't, is also kind of meaningless.

Or the TLDR short version is no it isn't gonna happen due to some inherent design issues.

There are some interesting issues. There's no particular technological reason GOOG couldn't say F the stock exchanges and issue a derived cryptocurrency and let people arbitrage between their new stock equivalent and the rest of the world. Well, there are a couple legal and accounting issues, but like I wrote, no technical issue.

Would not be totally surprised to see a BTC-like infrastructure replace existing monolithic market maker trading structures. Probably the same crooks owning the whole works, I'm talking about it as a deployed technology not a social phenomena or whatever. Much as running TCP/IP in 2014 doesn't mean anymore that you're part of DARPA.
I think the decline in birthrate helps us. If we get to under a billion, we strain the planet less. But there are plenty of other ways for us to make ourselves extinct.
http://d.pr/i/2LPx Mark's post about it.
16B? That's a B, people. While there are a lot of whatsapp users (and people have to pay to use it), wow, that's still a lot of money! How can they justify revenue that way? How can any company ever consider such acquisition? I don't even think Google can even make 16B like this.

See this discussion: http://www.quora.com/WhatsApp-Messenger/How-much-revenue-is-...

$20M net revenue, at most, right? With future expansion and side commercial services, I make $1B per year, fine. But that's after tax. So WhatsApp must make A LOT more than $1B. I really don't see anything else. But that's only when WhatsApp can continue to grow and actually gain that much of commercial income. Someone who have dealt with acquisition tells me how 16B is the right number. I would pay $5B just because WhatsApp is well-established.
The point is that Facebook doesn't want you using anything in parallel.
We've agreed to acquire WhatsApp
Uhm, no .. the app will still get the info. Why not just send "3" or "4" etc. for aprox distance?
>> If you take an 8x8 chessboard and remove any
>> black square and any white square, the resulting
>> mutilated chess-board is guaranteed to be exactly
>> coverable by dominoes, each of which covers exactly
>> two squares. We can program a computer to conduct
>> an exhaustive search to show that this is true.
>> Would you consider the program to be an automated
>> reasoner?

> Yes,

That surprises me. That feels a lot like describing Eliza as a conversationalist. Technically true, but ultimately unhelpful and unenlightening.

By way of contrast with the above described brute-force search, which also only works on a fixed size board, here's a proof that works on all NxN boards, where N is even.

We can construct a tour of the squares, visiting each exactly once, each time moving from a square to one of the squares with which it shares a side. Removing one black and one white divides this into two (or possibly only one) segments. Each can easily be shown to be of even length, and therefore each is coverable by dominoes. QED.

If you simply enumerate a very large number of possibilities, it doesn't feel like reasoning.
you are.
How many active users does WhatsApp have? I'm trying to put this in perspective with the Instagram purchase and the Snapchat offer... finding it very difficult to understand the math behind this acquisition, although it is obviously linked to the recent plays with Messenger.
Damn, from any viewpoint you want to see it, just damn.
They dont, they merged all three. After all touch is the future ...
Props for Aaron's continuous work on mature optimization of Ruby & Rails. I recall his yeoman's work on Ruby dtrace probes and Rails initialization time.
The default stored procedure language is PL/pgSQL http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/plpgsql.html and has been available in Postgres almost forever.
Critically speaking, this article doesn't add anything. I don't know why I read it. Can anyone explain why they upvoted?
A third way is by diffraction- any beam, including a laser, will spread out as it travels. You get less spread with short wavelengths and large transmitters, but both of those imply expense. If you use long wavelengths and small transmitters, you need huge receivers to get all the beam energy back.
WhassApp is the standard in Mexico. It replaced Windows Live (MSN) Messenger after they killed it by trying to make everybody switching to Skype and the interest of the people shifted to mobile.
You could argue the same about Instagram, but perhaps this is defense. That said, it's at something like a third of Facebook's market cap.
I would agree, but if you don't update WhatsApp it disables itself after a week or so.
Hey thanks for the link.

I would love to test all your hypotheses, I'm skeptical. My
impression is that, even if you compare dense high-income areas (Manhattan, SFBay), many other countries are still coming out on top. For instance, Warsaw (!) metro area: 631.4/km2, Manhattan: 27,227.1/km2. I don't have the numbers but income is much higher in Manhattan.

Wikipedia tells me I can get 60mbit/s down for under 25 USD in Warsaw and I think that is uncapped. I don't believe any comparable deal exists for Manhattan. SFBay is similar.
As someone who installed it to see how it works and rarely uses it, this is the first thought that crossed my mind
430m active users and 18bn messages sent per day.
Mm, it's not quite that simple. If you were on an exchange where people were trading real!Bitcoins for MtGox!Bitcoins, then you could try to interpret the discount as equaling the market estimate (and the bitcoinbuilder.com prices seem to put the overall risk at something more like 40% if I'm understanding them right); but this is the price from an exchange which only has MtGox!fiat and MtGox!Bitcoins - so you're seeing something which is more like 'conditional on MtGox failing, are they more likely to pay out Bitcoin or fiat balances?'
Why would they ruin it? They didn't ruin instagram. I'm not a fan of facebook but I don't agree here.
I didn't... they started showing up on my contact list. I then found out that they read about the app on the newspaper.
This deal isn't so that Facebook can sell ads. This deal is so that Facebook can protect its flank and simultaneously assault Google.
Neat story. Were there any provisions should Microryza go out of business? Not a lawyer, but seems that org would be legally compelled to flip the domain for a price much higher than 54k, which could lead to the domain being used for something not 'nobel' as the seller intended.
no, I can see how Snapchat is unique and fresh. WhatsApp brings nothing new to the table.
WhatsApp seems to think themselves above ads still. If they're lucky it'll stay that way.

http://blog.whatsapp.com/index.php/2014/02/facebook/
400,000,000 active users [0]
16,000,000,000 USD
----
$40 per user

That's an incredible cost. We can assume Facebook is paying for the userbase, the app itself and it's infrastructure would basically run itself. It's less appealing when you realise that there's probably a miniscule fraction of WhatsApp users that don't have a Facebook account.

> WhatsApp will remain autonomous and operate independently. You can continue to enjoy the service for a nominal fee

Now it makes even less sense.

[0]: http://blog.whatsapp.com/index.php/2013/12/400-million-stori...
The word is "stewardship".
Mark Zuckerberg announces WhatsApp acquisition
Don't feel bad; no one really uses them in the US (except us foreigners to communicate with friends and family abroad).

They are the de-facto messaging service in the rest of the world (except for China).
Externally it appears this way (I can't talk about infrastructure in any real detail).

Latency is the same as if you were running MySQL on any other platform AFAIK. If the database is cold, yes, the DB is spun down. An incoming connection will cause the DB to spin up, and in most languages the common MySQL connector will block until it's ready, so it doesn't require special coding around. Databases almost always come up in a matter of seconds.
I'd heard the name, but I've never used the app and don't know anybody that does. Though according to this article (http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/20/whatsapp-dld/) they have hundreds of millions of active users, so clearly some people are.
according the WhatsApp blog, its going to be staying ad-free. http://blog.whatsapp.com/index.php/2014/02/facebook/
Anyone have a link to the previous vulnerability (from July 2013)?
When these bubbles really get crazy, you start questioning your sanity and wondering whether maybe you're just plain wrong. You actually start wondering if the valuations are justified after all, whether it be a house, stock certificate of a tech company, the mineral rights to some acres in the Haynesville shale, or some land on the Vegas Strip. My head hurts.
400 million
http://blog.whatsapp.com/index.php/2013/12/400-million-stori...
Everybody has a price. I'm curious to know how many offers have these guys received during the past years.
Better yet, how do we get people to move to something distributed so that Facebook (or Google or anyone else) cannot acquire the service.

If we just move to another decentralized messaging service, that service will eventually get gobbled up as well, and we'll have to rinse and repeat.
They are an exchange, not a shop. They would be buying from their users, not themselves.
Why do you love it? I'm honestly curious as to what it does that SMS, Messenger or other messaging apps don't do.
How much revenue does WhatsApp have?
I think everyone is wondering this haha
Clearly this is an anti competitive move. Both functionality and users overlap with FB's own products.

So, for how long can FB pay billions a year to keep competition out of the market, when the barriers to entry are so low (as Snapchat and Instagram both demonstrated)?
> Vacancies in NYC are incredibly low

Same in Sweden. Often you need to be on a waiting list for 2+ years to get an rental contract in a large city in Sweden (longer in Stockholm[0]). The impatient among us flit around on 6-month second hand rentals. Or you buy an apartment with an untenable loan and hope the bubble keeps inflating...

[0]The wait is currently on average 7 years in Stockholm municipality. 15 years if you want a centrally-located apartment. http://www.svd.se/nyheter/stockholm/lagenheten-ar-din-om-att...
A month later: http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/20/whatsapp-dld/
It can be less about scalability and more about user experience. I have several apps that I only need one or two dynos to run, but I invested in caching/performance anyway because it's a better experience for the (few, high-paying) clients who are using them.
>they probably will

At this point it appears that MtGox could go either way.
I'm not upset in the slightest. I am merely expressing my belief that they will not succeed. Ubuntu on smartphones does not make me angry any more than, say, Mars One. It would be neat if they succeed, but I do not believe they will.

I am not demanding that they correct whatever is wrong with their organization and product that resulted in the failure of Ubuntu Edge, I am asking if they have corrected the problems that resulted in the failure of Ubuntu Edge (in other words, I am asking if there is a reason that I should reevaluate whether or not I believe they will fail. If they have not made changes after Ubuntu Edge, then I don't see any reason to think that they won't fail again.)

I guess you are saying that the Ubuntu Edge crowdfunding effort was not an earnest attempt to produce a phone but was rather a sort of survey meant to gauge interest and support. If that is the case, then I think the results of the survey are quite clear, and support my assessment of their chances.
As others have pointed out, the domain probably earned some points all by itself (and multiple submissions, which act as additional votes on the primary submission). It was also posted by a (popular) YC alum, which typically also accelerates upvotes.
Love whatsapp, hate Facebook.
As soon as they are trying to integrate whatsapp with Facebook I'm deleting that thing.
I don't think your point makes sense here at all.

""I'll need to get approval/budget from higher up and they're going to ask me why."

My boss should be able to answer this, and he shouldn't need to hear it from me. We work together every day. If he needs me to give him a list of reasons why I deserve a raise and doesn't already understand those reasons, he's simply not a good boss. Also, fwiw, this person was the CEO, so they didn't need to get approval.
Assuming Sequoia took that for 20% of the company (fairly standard), they just made $3.2bn. For every $1 they invested in WhatsApp, they made $400 back. </napkinmath>

However people feel about the VC game, 400x IRR are why so many people play.
Just 50 employees. http://blog.whatsapp.com/index.php/2013/12/400-million-stori...
Numbers That Explain Why Facebook Acquired WhatsApp
The discount is more complex than that.

Most users also aren't able to withdraw fiat from Gox, so there isn't a liquidity advantage to selling your coins (which would raise the supply and lower the price). The 50% discount is probably because users believe that if Gox dies, they will have better odds of eventually recovering dollars rather than coins. These users believe the coins may have been lost, stolen, or end up unrecognized by the bankruptcy court.

Also, there is lots of speculation about price manipulation at Gox. Some users believe that Gox is artificially lowering the price to help fix their insolvency.
Yes, if Mt. Gox is certain they can deliver on the locked-up account bitcoins, then it can use its cash reserves to buy bitcoins elsewhere, then trade with its own account holders, effectively letting them cash out a little early in return for Mt. Gox taking 50% of the value.

Alternately, if Mt. Gox is certain they canNOT or will not deliver on the locked-up bitcoins, they can trade some of the locked-up non-existent ones for real ones and recover 50% of the value.

Either way, Mt. Gox makes a killing because they know the state of their books and their future intentions and you do not. They can bet knowing the outcome of the bet.

This is why you want financial regulation.

(Incidentally, this is what Goldman Sachs is doing with aluminum and other commodity markets.)

If Mt. Gox has your money or fake money, you need to contact a good class action law firm and see if you can get them interested.
Or facebook is trying to trivialize and destroy the startup market.
It's a bubble. I don't beleive it can sustained over time. So simple apps sold for huge quantity of money
The fact that FB chose to pay $12BN in stock for this tells you something about what they think of their current valuation.
Email is dead.
I think there are people whose writings are of generally high enough quality or sufficiently provocative or informative enough that nearly anything they decide to publish would be worth reading.
Facebook to buy Whatsapp