skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
4. The number of times WhatsApp has through unprecedented incompetence compromised the privacy and security of its users and failed to keep even basic authenticity guarantees in what is a decades old central server model.

Why muck around, they were bought because of their massive user base and user base only. They succeeded regardless of their constant attempts at sabotaging their success, and its testament of massive market failure. We need to abolish the closed gardens to ensure inertia doesn't stop bad products from failing.
When people talk about the future, they always seem to think that it will be the scientific jobs that get roboticized last. I think it will be the opposite, it won't be long before systems like this one will be able to analyze the scientific literature, identify shortcomings, and tell us what experiments to do next. Science will become less about creativity and problem solving, and more about following directions; eventually becoming completely automated.

http://www.aejournal.net/content/2/1/1
Turned me down in 07' after a handful of phone interviews, flying me across the country, and 8 hours of in person interviews with 3 separate departments... but not before I got their CTO so shitfaced drunk he botched a 2AM code push to production and helped convince Zuckerbergs little sister into riding a mechanical bull.

I regret nothing.

edit: Worth noting I was a 22 year old self taught programmer that hadn't experienced addressing O(log n) in a CS course, working with massive amounts of data, or large scale Linux sysadmin stuff. I wasn't fit for the ranks when compared against ex Yahoo! and Google people running for the same positions. So at least I made the most of it.

edit2: I got the interview after finding a bug in their authentication system that would allow a password hash collision to spit out the e-mail of the user that the collision occurred with. Meaning I type in a bogus email, and a password, after the post the login form would come back with the email pre-populated of the user that the hash collision had happened on, I type in the password again, and I was logged in as said user. It was a small bug I found by accident and then afterwards asked if they were hiring...

edit3: http://i.imgur.com/sePVdgI.png
FB after-hours price now down a little over 2%.
Sweet victory. They didn't hire so he built it anyways.
That goes against everything engrained in big org culture.
You just need enough cores so the infinite loop completes in a finite amount of time.
Who cares, really?

Look at Slackware's website: http://www.slackware.com/ it looks the same as ten years ago. Why? Because it works.

It's a website, not a piece of art, I want to get information not hang it in the wall.
"Stanford right across the street... that must be pretty handy for recruiting efforts." - Me

"Hah! Yeah, we hire them to answer our phones." - Them
Actually I'm in Austin where we're theoretically going to witness three-way fiber competition between Google, AT&T, and Grande (although I suspect they will all find ways to avoid serving my house). I do find it sad that any thread about broadband seems to devolve into whining about how crappy it is in $MY_LOCATION.
I see it different: there are a lot of people doing [relatively] unethical things all the time while preaching about ethics to business wannabes. It's not only about Steve Jobs.
You overplay your hand. There is a very large luck component to it, sure. But I mentor at entrepreneurship events, and there is a very wide distribution of people who want to start companies. Some of those people are obviously more suited to the work than others.

I think that's especially true for people who, like WhatsApp, do things that are different than the common wisdom [1]. I had dinner recently with a friend who worked for Jeff Bezos years ago. She remembered Bezos coming into a meeting in something like 1999 excited about eInk and how it was the future for electronic books. Everybody single person in the room thought he was crazy. They didn't get the Kindle out the door until 2007, and most people thought it was crazy then. But it worked.

You could call that pure luck, but I think that's only true in the most abstract sense, where everything we are is luck.

[1] http://sequoiacapital.tumblr.com/post/77211282835/four-numbe...
A mixture of similarly styled versions of all of the above.

If your asking "how" to design something, you need to look at the medium it'll be delivered to.

Apps don't do hovering tooltips. You can build tutorials to take the place of that.

When space is confined, you might use an icon with a tooltip. When space is plentiful, a verbose button is better. All of these items styled in the same style gives cohesiveness to the UI.

When dealing with responsive designs such as websites, you may hide a verbose button and replace it with an icon. A user will most likely not scale a browser to see if its responsive, but a user may use a website on both a desktop and a mobile device. Most users don't understand that a responsive website is usually the same website with a little code to scale things. In other words, to use a verbose button on a desktop version but an icon on a mobile version; the user adapts because thats the interface / space constraints they expect.

(2 cents)
Wow, there's some hostility there. The bundler team has accepted performance pull requests from me before - I'm sure they'd be happy to do the same if you were to add this --fast flag. Perhaps you should show them what code literacy looks like.

The issue is the require means "search the load paths for files matching this filename, filename.rb, filename.so, then search relative to the requiring file for the same if nothing was found". Bundler manages loads by finding all the gems in the bundle (which have been pre-resolved and locked), then creating a load path which satisfies the dependency order. So, when you `require "foo"`, the (extensively large) load path is iterated looking for a match. Given the number of gems (and thus the number of items in the load path) in a typical project, it's not difficult to recognize why this might be slow. Over the course of a load, you will perform hundreds or thousands of require invocations, each of which has to perform this iterative search.

This seems unnecessary, except you have to know how to resolve ambiguities. Consider something like this file: https://github.com/rails/docrails/blob/master/activesupport/...

What does that require statement mean? It's a require statement that asks Ruby to require something called 'benchmark', from within a directory that contains a 'benchmark' file. There are, in fact, multiple matches for "benchmark" in the load path. In order to ensure that the right one is loaded, you have to perform that iterative search, in order, to make sure that you always arrive at the stdlib "benchmark" before the ActiveSupport core_ext "benchmark". Yet, in the majority of cases, by convention, when you require some file in a library, you're actually wanting to require some file relative to your requiring file. It's obviously inefficient to iterate the entire load path looking for some file that you know lives in a subdirectory relative to the requiring file, but since Ruby doesn't have any way of knowing whether you mean "load the first hit of this file from the load path" or "load the file relative to the requiring file", it has to perform the slower, more conservative search.

This is what require_relative is for. That lets you tell Ruby "Hey, skip all the load path shenanigans and just load this file relative to the requiring file". Since you don't have to do the extensive load path iteration, the search time is constant, rather than linear.

I've experimented with a few "--fast" systems, including pre-emptive load path iteration and caching (doesn't really make a difference; you aren't going to beat stat by any significant margin), and load path "baking" (for each file loaded in the manifest, keep the resolved absolute path and replace relative paths with absolute paths"), but I've yet to come up with a solution that properly replicates Ruby's search-and-load behavior, and invariably ends up breaking on some edge case. Fuzzy semantics are kind of a bitch like that.
I don't remember seeing this in the movie.
Google tried to get everybody onto jabber. It didn't work and they fell behind, so now we have hangouts.
WhatsApp is huge in Malaysia, where I'm from. WeChat, Line, and those other messaging apps are tiny in comparison.
Surely "Simple arithmetics" in the second code example should be "Simple arithmetic", singular.
An important distinction indeed. I stand by what I said: I find people who admire Steve Jobs the person for anecdotes like the one about throwing the iPad prototype into a fish tank to have similar qualities of hubris and arrogance which I personally dislike. In a way I am of the opposite view: I will do business with them and hold my opinion to myself. For me it is a distinction between who I would have a drink with after hours vs n avoid in social situations.
>OK, yes, "retain continuity of addressability for every device" then - you'll need something at your end to push a signed notification out indicating your IP address change but there's no reason that can't be seamless like texting your contacts a new phone number but without any interaction needed.

so, you mean like dynamic updates to DNS? tsig-signed nsupdate? It's old technology, and would do what you describe (well, after dns caches empty. Yes, you get to set the TTL, but even with a short ttl, I wouldn't count on a dns update percolating down in less than two hours.)

Of course, there are problems with the end-to-end model you describe, where every device is publicly accessible. (Don't get me wrong, there are strong advantages to the model, too... but there are problems) I think I'd feel a little weird, a little naked without a statefull firewall in front of my consumer devices.
I think the dream would be to couple a literature-analyzer like this with a specialized search engine like Wolfram Alpha.
The Google Fiber Privacy Policy seems relatively strong in the "Google Fiber Internet is a dumb pipe" sense:

Technical information collected from the use of Google Fiber Internet for network management, security or maintenance may be associated with the Google Account you use for Fiber, but such information associated with the Google Account you use for Fiber will not be used by other Google properties without your consent. Other information from the use of Google Fiber Internet (such as URLs of websites visited or content of communications) will not be associated with the Google Account you use for Fiber, except with your consent or to meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request.

https://fiber.google.com/legal/privacy.html

(Google Fiber TV, not so much)
Tesla is strongly positioned (effective first mover, superior execution) in a rapidly growing slice (electric vehicles) of a stagnant market filled with cut-throat competition (U.S. automobiles). The present valuation precludes a Cupertino-style citadel in the luxury market - Tesla has to burn Ford, GM, and/or Fiat's market shares into the domestic market and/or steal their growth in emerging ones, or burn their capital trying.
Don't worry comcast will make you pay more after the merger, so you'll get your wish granted by an evil genie.
Network effects, probably. Given a choice, I'd use something else, but all my friends and contacts are on WhatsApp.
I think this is the biggest thing. I'd love to do a data collection on founders and see what percentage of jobs they collectively got rejected for.

P.S. Care to hire me?
$ date --date=@1392860866
Wed Feb 19 20:47:46 EST 2014
Yup, for some reason I was looking for xkcd comic.
I have to say, this really makes the most sense. It seems that a new bubble is growing as we speak, it's just a matter of time before it pops.
140 Characters Of F*ck, Sht, And ss: How We Swear On Twitter
> Before Excel, they wouldn't be doing it all. Baby steps. ... Spreadsheets as a paradigm is HUGELY successful at allowing normal people to do number crunching

Spreadsheets were a thing before they were put into computers, you know...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreadsheet

> The word "spreadsheet" came from "spread" in its sense of a newspaper or magazine item (text and/or graphics) that covers two facing pages, extending across the center fold and treating the two pages as one large one. The compound word "spread-sheet" came to mean the format used to present book-keeping ledgers—with columns for categories of expenditures across the top, invoices listed down the left margin, and the amount of each payment in the cell where its row and column intersect—which were, traditionally, a "spread" across facing pages of a bound ledger (book for keeping accounting records) or on oversized sheets of paper (termed "analysis paper") ruled into rows and columns in that format and approximately twice as wide as ordinary paper.

Spreadsheet applications made book keeping jobs much easier, to the point that book keeping (not programmer) is on the outs as a speciality job.
There is admiring someone's work and there is admiring the person. I can admire the iPod as a revolutionary product (the one that changed the industry where others could not), without admiring anything in particular about Jobs.
The irony of this is that Ronald Reagan, Peggy Noonan's favorite Rethug to idolize and write hagiographic BS about, is responsible (in part) for the messed up state of society (the 1% etc, 2008 - everything over the past 30 years that has lead America into its current quagmire). Reagan laid the groundwork for blatant hypocrisy among the right to be acceptable.

Yes, an analysis of the actual actions of Reagan, etc would show he was really more "liberal" than the BS artists who hold him up to be the epitome of 'conservatism' would like to believe, but what I'm talking about is the shift in social attitudes - "Greed is good" etc - the _propaganda_ that the right / authoritarians successfully use as a smoke screen to wreak havoc on the rest of us, the global economy, etc. That mantra has only gathered steam over the years and now America is reaping what it has sown. Reagan should have been impeached for the Iran-Contra debacle, and by giving him a pass, a precedent was established that finally lead to the Iraq war (and $3 trillion dollars wasted on an illegal war - and no one who lead the West down that road will ever be punished)

So once again, yet another hypocritical Republican "conservative" incapable of taking responsibility for their actions. Yes, there are other factors in play, but the veneration of Reagan makes me sick because it is a symbol of how screwed up a society America is, contrary to its self-delusions. And now we have Obama, Marxist liberal, who is busily turning the US government into the harbinger of the New World Order (which the authoritarians on both sides are going to love). Don't get me started on the hypocrisy level of Obama...

Yes, lots of hand waving generalizations. But I'm trying to get at some abstract aspect of how societies can change. I suppose it was all inevitable, given what we know of how empires collapse. I really don't see America fundamentally recovering from any of this.
Of course a Core 2 Duo has 169m transistors rather than neurons. Interestingly you can do a rough calculation of how much processing power would be needed to do the equivalent of a human brain and it's quite a lot. Hans Moravec calculates it a about 100 million million instructions a second ( http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm ) based on the processing power required to fuctionally equal the human retina which is reasonably understood. A core 2 duo does something more like 2.7 thousand million instructions per second and so you'd need about 35,000 of them for brain equivalence. So you're talking in 2014 terms of a a top end supercomputer rather than a macbook.
If he was hired by Facebook, he wouldn't have (co)developed WhatsApp. If Facebook hired him, he would most likely be worth (to Facebook) as much as any other random Facebook programmer.

Unless he's the one who started WhatsApp, it would have been developed and successful anyway and Facebook would have to buy it for the same amount of money.

The reality is that product/market fit is much more powerful force than programming capabilities of any single engineer.
Soros, Buffet. But overall, yes, the improverished imagination of billionaires never ceases to amaze me.
You might have a point if they hadn't previously turned down a $1billion bid from Google.
"Sting money" used in extortion/bribery/hostage situations can be and is repossessed based on those serial numbers.

Not when it's too far removed, but if it's a few steps down, i.e., cash given to a friend/relative, cash dug underground in a secret location and the loot found by someone else, etc - I believe it would be successfully siezed also in those cases.
I actually got to know about the Acquisition on Whatsapp! My friend from NYC messaged me on it. Unlike SMS, what I really like about it, is the group chat feature. At any given day, I'm chatting on a group chat with friends from here in the US, Canada, India, Singapore and the UK. For that I pay $1/year.

It's probably paid for itself in just a few days of use.
This was a very well written discourse on the existence of different universes, and a bit of an intuition about how to think about them.

It reminds me a lot (though it is quite different) of "Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions" [0]. This book gave me the best intuition yet about what it would be like to experience a fourth spatial dimension.

Having said that, I still don't quite know what to think about it. I definitely don't have a mental picture of what it would be like. All I know is that when I was reading the book, I had a part of my brain clicking along, which felt like it understood what it is to experience an additional spatial dimension. Yet there is still very little actual comprehension going on in there.

[A bit of a spoiler alert follows]

It starts by explaining in meticulous detail what it is like to live in and experience fictional 2D world instead of the 3D one we are used to.

Then, the main character transcends into a 1D world. The book explains to the 2D inhabitant what it is like to live in a 1D world. Explaining this to the 2D inhabitant is the same as explaining the 2D world to us (and our 3D world).

Finally, the character moves up to a 3D world, which they cannot comprehend. However the explanations which are given to the character are quite intuitive and satisfying, and help to explain what it might be like for us to move up one dimension and experience it.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland

p.s. The book is also a hilarious parody on victorian era attitudes towards women.
don't feel guilty. I'm blogging to practice writing. It surprises me at least as much as you when articles like this do well on HN and makes me feel embarrassed I didn't make them better (there are some posts I work really hard on and hope people like, but this was not one of them)
For perspective, this is about Sony's market cap. LinkedIn's market cap is ~$24B and Twitter ~$30B.
I Just Deployed to Azure via Git
Oh, and just because you have a infinitely powerful quantum computer simulating infinitely many recursive universes with their own infinitely powerful quantum computers, correlation != causation doesn't apply anymore?
I think that's a critical conclusion: messaging in the age of bytes is nearly worthless monetarily. You have to be able to hold your base hostage to really milk it financially (eg as Verizon and AT&T have done for years on SMS). It's why webmail and instant messaging have never produced much financial value. If you can't hold them hostage, I think you'll find your audience unwilling to pony up for what effectively costs nothing to transit.
If Mark Zuckerberg was a freshman in college again in 2014, what chances do you give him of creating a $170B company in the next decade? How about in his lifetime? How about a $1B company in his lifetime?

I'd say on the order of 1. 1 in a billion 2. 1 in 100 million. 2. 1 in a million.

Sure he is smart and driven and has had every opportunity available to the one guy on planet earth who will achieve what he has. But that doesn't mean he's qualitatively different than the millions of others equally intelligent and talented who didn't buy the winning ticket.
The only thing that Facebook does not have today (post acquisition) is a good Video Conferencing app. That's the only reason why I use Google Plus - for Google Hangouts. A Google Hangouts competitor that has it's features (multi-party unlike Skype) would be worth building.
Like a cheap certain-to-flop ripoff of Hannah Montana...
Buying WhatsApp isn't going to help too much there. SnapChat is still gaining steam and it won't be long until there's another serious competitor on top of that.

The market has shown time and time again that in the messaging world it's extremely hard for one force to stay dominant for too long. Unless this pattern suddenly breaks today, Facebook will continue having to shell out many billions to keep buying these companies. I'm not convinced Facebook's profit is enough to keep that up.
That's weird. They did lots of publicity with Nokia and Movistar in Argentina.
Seems to me Facebook just obtained another few hundred million not using their messaging services data...
Services with big fan-out effects can get very expensive to run. But I do believe product simplicity can lead to code and infrastructure simplicity which gets as close as you can in this industry to "runs itself."
Bitcoin mixing is trivial to defeat.

(a) Forbid offering and using it;

(b) if 'tainted' money enters a pool, then the operator and/or the participants become jointly liable for returning back all of the money;

(c) seize money from whomever is easiest to reach.

(d) observe casual people never ever participating in such mixing after the first publicized case.

All of the above is within powers of legislators+lawenforcement, and there are precedents of them doing different-but-similar things for other ways of money laundering.
Well add 1 to the "rejected but went on to be awesome" Brian Acton.
Do you have this analysis handy? I find valuation...yada yada yada about as convincing as the other posts citing Tesla's great prospects. Tesla's margin is about 25%, so your valuation sounds like it would be way off out the gate.
App uses historical and geographic data to generate realistic decoys.
How does a rejection of a significantly smaller offer disprove the point?
why should we care about this more than other things in our lifes?
I like your candor.
read hpmor.com. It may not be the optimal way, but it is the funnest way.
It also appears to have quite a remarkable instruction set.
Get the extended edition on BluRay.
As an alum of UMD I'm really annoyed by this whole situation.

While I was an undergrad there, there was an incident with social security numbers being revealed on parking mailers that were sent out (http://marylandrha.blogspot.com/2008/07/social-security-numb...)

At the time I was wondering why the heck do people sending out parking mailers have access to my SSN?

After seeing this article I'm again wondering why the heck does the university retain SSN for alumni?

edit: the reason I mention this is because I think having reasonable data policies in place can help mitigate the severity of such events
Too high of a risk for companies.

Better to let the market sift out the successful founders than to payroll a hundred of them, hoping for a big win. Think of how many unsuccessful founder types that Facebook didn't hire too.

Also if this guy was working for Facebook, odds are he would have ended up on messenger, and someone else would have filled the SMS market need for Whatsapp in India. Then Facebook would be acquiring that company instead.
Presumably the AI in the Google cars must have something like a fear of crashing or hitting a pedestrian even if its just something like score that the algorithms calculate.
Add 1 to that list. Wow!