skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>That's totally a legitimate criticism

I was adding it to my original comment when the driveby downvoters arrived.

>Complaining about your phone's battery life when you can just as easily not visit the site has a lot less weight to it.

Do you really think that advertisers won't latch on to WebGL if it becomes widely adopted? I'm not "complaining" about the possibility of seeing some WebGL on $game_site, I'm worried about the inevitability of the banner ads that I already can't block on my phone suddenly becoming filled with eyecatching, battery-wasting 3D graphics, just as banner ads these days already use CSS3 animations to the same effect. I don't see why that isn't a valid concern.

Also, it's a matter of principle for me that apparently web developers don't agree with. I like the web as hypertext + the dumb terminal of our time. I don't see how things like WebGL benefit anybody but game developers and advertisers. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one that sees the value in keeping the dumb terminal and the cross platform application API separate. We need both. There should be a simple way to run a game on all platforms (err, ignore for the moment that it already exists and is called SDL), and there should be some kind of easy-to-use "dumb" interface to society, but we're doing the world a disservice to combine the two.

Maybe I'm crazy, but I think certain vested interests are determined to turn the former into the latter, because they want to have their advertising pie and eat Apple's/Microsoft's/etc's app store pies as well. Maybe they were from the beginning, what with the talk of Netscape being at war with Microsoft.

The web is practically necessary to lead a normal life at this point. That people would focus not on taking the core of what makes the web actually matter for communication and as interfaces for the important services in our lives, making it simpler and more secure and more portable and easier to develop for, but instead on making it harder and harder to get down to that core, seems almost as wrong to me as banks in South Korea that require IE6.

That's the kind of principle I'm talking about. I understand if you don't agree with me; a lot of people have a lot invested in the web these days. However, I also don't see why I should have to bite my tongue about it.

@pyalot2 it's not FUD, because more code always means a larger attack surface, and OpenGL implementations happen to be a particularly large and historically poorly tested source of code. Bounds checking buffer accesses is an improvement but it doesn't magically make the implementations free of bugs. Check out this article from a while back on the state of OpenGL implementations for common chipsets used in Android devices, and tell me with a straight face you trust random webpages to talk to them:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6450747
they can't, it's owned by Tencent which has a $100B+ market cap.
You don't have $26K deposited in Gox and by the time you could do it the opportunity will be over.
Looking at the market cap, it's around $128 Billion USD.
Partially relevant link to resource helping engineers think in terms of biomimicry: http://www.asknature.org/
Well going by itunes top 20 free social networking apps, you still have kik, tango, oovoo, & zello.
Am I the only one upset with this? I don't use Facebook - haven't and never will - because I hate how I and all my data will become their product on registration. Sure, Whatsapp has its quirks being proprietary and all, but now, I am basically doomed. Whatsapp says they will stick to their core and stay independent, but I have 16 billion reasons to believe otherwise. The sad part is that due to Whatsapp, I can't escape my doom because EVERYONE I contact daily uses Whatsapp. I would basically kill myself socially if I were to delete Whatsapp. I really, really hope Whatsapp stays Whatsapp but knowing Facebook we are fked either way.
I am sorry that my idle speculation became the top comment. At least it amounted to flattery.
Not broken. I know that was the term used at the time, and it was a classic case of trying to describe something new in outdated terminology.
I think the statements I benchmarked were more complex and slower, so there wasnt much in it. It was a while ago though. For simple selects it could make much more difference.
I want to underline that last point. Doing something that is fashionable is a bad idea. Doing something that was fashionable and whose big players are now getting snapped up is a terrible idea.
MtGox have halted withdrawals, so you can't sell the coins elsewhere at the moment.
Added that distinction after the fact. The rest of the product "design" is done by me, the founder/dev.

I don't really think someone needs to be hired for the sole-role of planning wireframes, interaction, and flow.

That is a core skill of any maker.
It takes two sides to make a market...
The lock-in is the network effect, and well, if you're aiming for 1-1.5B users (which can be served with virtually no employment and hosting costs) you're looking at 1B $ yearly profit.
ASP.NET Forms Authentication in 4 Easy Steps
> Reading is a mental process, whereas vision begins with a physical stimulus

Key word here is begins. The input from the eyes is fed to a complicated signal processing system, and vision is the output of that system.
This acquisition is not YouTube or Instagram. This is a peak of the bubble purchase, that will be massively marked down for accounting purposes a few years from now.

Smart to buy them? Sure. For $19 billion? Nope.
Am I the only one who thinks this is beyond crazy?

Youtube was acquired for less than $2B (and not even in cash!)
1 million new users a day and most likely in countries where Facebook is not growing as quickly...
Hahahah whoops - that does make much more sense :-)
Reading is a subset of recognizing objects. Practicing reading makes you better at recognizing written language. This app lets you practice recognizing Gabor stimuli, which makes you better at recognizing a wide range of physical objects.
Interesting to see that they use Erlang. http://www.erlang-factory.com/conference/SFBay2012/speakers/...

I wonder if this is still valid?
They should have got one for their own IP. It would have shown it all went to Redmond ;-)
If anything, Bitcoin is inflationary
I suspect they're just trying to protect their market share in messaging, in the same way that buying instagram allowed them to protect their market share in image sharing.
Mice whose sensitivity to pain can be dialed up or down by shining light
It was not a conclusion just nobody pointed the provable connection.

Sorry you are wrong about the scientific method. The proof came later, the hypothesis first. If two improvable events came together it's worth the investigation beyond if the events are related at the end or not. When I said connection I meant two events happening at the same time.
Ask HN: WhatsApp for $16B.... What for Tesla?
I know it's a big big fat ginormous juicy rumor, but if Whats App sold for $16B, how much do you think Apple would pay for Tesla? Or Tesla theoretically get from let says, Google? Personally, I think the value-add is greater than Whats App for Facebook.

So....
- What's your valuation of Tesla?
- What's the value proposition for a giant tech company: New Market? New Product? Product infrastructure? Leadership and Innovation?

Chime in with your opinions. I'm very curious to see what your thoughts are.
Don't worry, when they pay $25B for Snapchat this will also seem cheap!
And it's shit for mobile.
Good point. How do you know if something works before you've put in the time to use it?
I'm not sure you can call the Euclidean algorithm a "computer algorithm", it having been discovered some 2,000 years before computers existed.
I hope they'll convert this abomination into a proper XMPP service. On the other hand Facebook doesn't federate with others anyway, so it's one selfish beast buying another.
yeah, you link to lua.a or lua.so and a very small stub to run the code. There is an example here https://github.com/justincormack/ljsyscall/blob/master/examp...
Actually, I am curious if such generic name is a good choice.

You need to tell people that you use Experiment the Crowdsourcing Website, not experiment with crowdsourcing or use your experiment to crowdsource funds.
And the same for googling.

(And BTW I really liked Microryza; I do know that it may be hard to spell (still easier than mycorrhizae), but Ryza sounds nice too!)

And an anecdote: when I was mailing with Cindy Woo almost a year ago, I joked about the tagline:

"

Mic[r]oryza

Mycorrhizae spelled in the sane way

"
You really think Instagram was a bad purchase.
It's not currently possible to withdraw your 26k worth of BTC from MtGox, and for a long time now it is very difficult to withdraw USD as well. You could buy 26k of MtGoxBTC right now and wait for them to start withdrawls back up, and that would indeed net you a nice bit (assuming the market doesn't fluctuate very much during that event). However, right now it seems most are betting against that ever happening.
Just look at the whois. If the admin email is brokerage@buydomains.com, they own it.
I'd love to see Google buy up Frontier's FIOS lines. Their service isn't bad, but I get the feeling they don't really want to be in the fiber business and just got stuck with it in the Verizon purchase.
i'm missing something here, archive.org show no differences :

present http://web.archive.org/web/20140219035142/http://python.org/

past http://web.archive.org/web/20131130224018/http://python.org/

update : http://preview.python.org/ in case you see the old

update 2: Am I the only one to want a (js based client side) repl + tutorial and side docs as the basis of any language website ? the new layout is a bit lighter than the old, but it looks like they're selling cookies. Sorry to be ranty.
Is it ever true, though, in these situations?
Selling ads takes a lot of staff. So not selling ads...
There's something which tells me it won't work, and I can't prove it yet. But I think it's provable with a relatively straightforward simulation.
Also standard here in Chile. FB Messenger is somewhat common as well, but WhatsApp has the largest following by far.
I don't think they want anything. They just don't want WhatsApp to compete with Facebook chat. The nominal fee charged to users will pare down the userbase and perhaps pay off a portion of the cost of purchasing.
What is Divvy? If you mean Divvyshot I thought it was a talent acquisition.
Damn, Zuck is far more paranoid than I thought. He's going to have to come up with a better strategy than buying every company that presents a potential existential threat though. Especially at these prices!

I actually think it wasn't such a bad idea to buy Instagram. He paid 1% for something that really could have killed him. But paying $16 billion here is pretty much surrender as far as I'm concerned.
As others said before, it's most likely a defensive move, against other interested parties but also against Whatsapp itself. I don't use and thoroughly dislike Facebook but I'm using Whatsapp groups daily with my closest friends and my climbing mates. In that sense Whatsapp has started to move beyond SMS and towards the social network market.

With such a large user base and their established mobile presence it would have been fairly easy to challenge Facebook in the social network field, so Zuckerberg might have seen that coming as well. In that light the announcement that Whatsapp will basically stay the same actually makes sense - it will stay the same and will not develop those features that could have threatened Facebook in the long term.

Well, I already sent some messages to my friends to move on to threema, which has the added benefit of having encrypted messaging and being located in Switzerland.
My screen is too dirty to be able to play. :(
4 Startup Tech Trends to Look for in 2014
I can't believe it either.

Few miles from FB and Whatsapp is Tesla, people consider it
massively overvalued at 25Billion. It is almost laughable.

When you are a compulsive liar, people catch up to it, and
you will all live in a lie world. This is very close to
how Ponzi schemes work.

Billion is a lot of money. Since FB lied through their teeth,
considered themselves demigods and levied idiot tax on poor
investors, it is their time to turn around and take it in
the rear.

Come on guys. 16B$?
$40 per user is roughly inline with the $3B Facebook was prepared to pay for Snapchat (though we don't have precise numbers on Snapchat MAUs).

This is another defensive move. Hundreds of millions of people sharing rich media in realtime on non-FB services is a genuine threat.

It's really a direct result of smart mobile devices. Facebook used to own the user's contacts, but now independent apps have direct access to device contacts without Facebook.
I'm 9 months out of school and I'm in Canada... I'd love to move to the Bay Area though.
After this message they raise their glasses and make a toast
Whatsapp uses XMPP for the reference. However they modified the protocol to be incompatible (on purpose) and it's not federated obviously.
Provocative title (from Slate themselves), but I'm pretty sure the article doesn't at all indicate that an iWatch was released. Just some enabling technology.
So an article that lacks all substance besides "be optimistic about AI" is front page material on HN?
I took that to mean "most modern men could train themselves into sufficiently good shape to run a marathon" and not "most modern men could get up off the couch right this minute and run a marathon". The former statement, I think is probably true. The latter almost certainly isn't (I think).
If you're confident that MtGox will eventually get their shit together and that bitcoin will have at least that value when you can, then it's a gamble worth taking.

It's not a gamble that I'm taking, but I understand the motivation of those who would.
The part that confuses me is Facebook has a messaging component... I can use it to message international people without incurring international SMS rates (which is a big reason a lot of people I know use WhatsApp).

WhatsApp charges annually for this (already free elsewhere) service. So I'm pretty confused why people would use WhatsApp rather than one of the many (Kik, Hangouts, Facebook, etc.) alternatives available?

If people could migrate their WhatsApp account they pay for into a Facebook account which is free it's a win/win for FB. They get the users ditching the paid service in exchange for adding nice numbers to their quarterly reports for signups, and they get a nice revenue stream for the hold outs that avoid FB because it's FB but are willing to part with $1/year for that functionality.

Smart move on their part, wonder if their name will taint the product for the existing userbase and send them to the aforementioned alternatives.

edit: said $10/year, I accidentally a 0.
Nice redesign. It'd be neat if that panel of code was a live REPL.
Your argument makes perfect sense when you're talking about real companies, with R&D, marketing, technology and all that. GM buying Tesla for 15% of its worth might make sense. But in the social space, companies are entirely seasonal, the barriers to entry are none, there's no way to predict user traction or behavior.

I understand this is how Facebook intends to keep itself at the top of the social heap, but with recent valuations (starting at Instagram), it'll be incredibly difficult to maintain this for long.
For me, "There are certainly some reasons to be optimistic. Andrew Ng, who worked or works on Google’s AI, has said that he believes learning comes from a single algorithm - the part of your brain that processes input from your ears is also capable of learning to process input from your eyes. If we can just figure out this one general-purpose algorithm, programs may be able to learn general-purpose things." is what was most interesting to me. The idea that there's a fairly simple algorithm to learning, applied in the brain, which produces at least the basic learning capability, and possibly consciousness.
Assuming this is an acquisition, it's a poor one. Facebook undoubtedly paid too much for this.
Why does it make less sense to let it run independently (at least for now)? A team of 50 people are running a service that serves 400M MAU. That's impressive by any stretch and when you factor in that all of those are mobile users that's a compelling case for a company that purportedly had trouble figuring out it's mobile strategy.

I guess FB is in the market for any large scale mobile apps (first photos, now messaging) to ensure they have a dominant foothold on mobile.
im curious, what do americans use instead?
DNS is tricky. Dump your cache and see what comes up.
Because it thinks. It takes in information and performs an analysis on that data. Surely over the time it would take to evolve, my brain thinks that it should understand that more than anything?

It understands how every other organ works in explicit detail at the the molecular level.

The only thing my brain can imagine, is that my consciousness is disconnected somewhat from my brain. It's as though my consciousness is inside a machine that it barely understands the workings thereof. Like a dog riding in a car.
In so much as none of this handy-wavey social business models have ever proven to have sustainable profitability, yes.
Because most real estate purchasers aren't sophisticated enough to manage their end of a deal like that well.
What's your definition of a real company which excludes WhatsApp?
No Campbell. Guess I'm too sticks for Google Fiber. :\
It made more sense for MS though. They were basically kickstarting their internet services and had very few users.

Facebook can mine some more data from this I guess, but something rather marginal from what they already have.
No one can tell, really. Arguably, Instagram was bought for what it could have been, not for what it was.
good article, I would love to see more articles in this situation considering I am sort of in the same situation. One competitor , soaked up all the cash in the space including cash from google, but they arent exactly rocking.

And we are about to do it better - but its nerve wracking knowing they can take us out if suddenly they did do it right.
Whatsapp has virtually no market share in the US. In basically all markets outside of the US, however, they are dominating the messaging space. Text messages in major EU countries like Germany and France have been almost completely supplanted by WhatsApp.
Waze was a great Israeli exit as well.
Nice catch! Fixed and will go live in a bit.
Well, the definition of "ready" you offer seems to be something like "desirous of concluding the interview process quickly". I want to know about the useful sense of "ready", "likely to conclude the interview process successfully". Quickly getting a rejection is of very little benefit. Obviously, when I first contacted them I wasn't hoping to prolong the interviews as long as possible; they told me that I wasn't ready to continue at that time. But they also told me that I should be the judge, based on no criteria, of when I was "ready" to continue.
Note that it was only a beat on "Adjusted Revenues". Top-line revenue was actually a miss (615M versus 680M estimates).

That being said, I Think the future is rosy for Tesla but TSLA is strained
I agree that a (human) extinction level event is unlikely on Earth. However, from my perspective, the surivale benifits of moving to another planet is more to protect us from sudden unforeseen changes. Even if Earth is still more habitable then, say, Mars, we would have already set up and been using the infrastructure on Mars needed to survive, whereas our current life on Earth is much more dependent on planet supplied infastructure, which is at liberty to change suddenly.
The other benifit is that we can take lessons and technologies applied to living off world, and apply it on world.
twitter just told me to go there http://preview.python.org/
I conjecture that this price is a reflection of the fact that facebook realizes their stock is way overvalued, and so they used this opportunity to make a huge purchase which would be too expensive otherwise. The fact that a huge amount of the purchase price in stock is a strong signal for this. These same sorts of deals happened in the first internet bubble (although this is clearly different as there is also a huge amount of cash changing hands).
And after that think about Flickr selling to Yahoo for like $20m?
...and a python 2 print keyword instead of the python 3 print function.
The guy talking (Ravi, one of the founders) is a DJ -- so that explains the techno music.

https://soundcloud.com/sexrayvision
That's a little specific.

SIAM put out a 'ten algorithms of the century' https://www.siam.org/pdf/news/637.pdf a few years ago and it's really tough to argue with six or seven or eight of them.

(MCMC, simplex, Krylov, Householder decomposition, QR, Quicksort, FFT, Ferguson&Forcade's integer relation stuff (that led to stuff like PSLQ), and fast multipole)

And FORTRAN.
They're going to switch to a lottery system for admission. thats kind of neat.
Funny, there's a missing space between "for" and "Internet.org", and someone already bought the domain:

http://forinternet.org/
But if you build something people really need, you get classified as a utility

This is misleading oversimpliication. The issue is the viability of competition, not really the "need" of the consumer. In the case of cable/telcos, competition is precluded by a variety of non-market barriers. These barriers create problems for functioning markets to capitalize competing entities, regardless of availability of capital, technology, or managemnet skill. So, in a sense the government is responsible for the "mess" of limited cable and telco competition. And they are (as a result) on the hook to limit the damage of their anti-competitive public policy. The logic of limiting competition is some variation on the theme of "natural monopolies"; this is the origin of "utility status". In other words, it is almost strictly speaking a supply side issue and a government policy issue. The levele of demand is really only a second-order part of the equation; although internect acesss is being blurred in a sense of becoming a <perceived> public good (like infrastructre). But in a certain sense, it is not really a public good. The latter are typical removed from the market altogether. ie, Roads are for the most part free. Telephone and cable service, have not really been treated this way. What is sort of different is that the Internet has been priced more like a road thank like cable service. The cable companies are of the view they are "entitled" to price it like a cable service because their strategy is to monopolize access and to extract rents from their "entitlements". The public interest, from a cultural and economic perspective, therefore of what goes over the pipes can be sepertated from the pipes themselves. The pipes should and could be treated like "servicies" for which people pay. But the cable companies could and most likely should be denied and access to the data and the economics that flow down the pipes. The government could legislate the cable companies asset value to zero, if they need to. They could pass legislation to destroy copyright's perpetuity value {etc}. There is plenty of leverage to bring the cable companies to bear to a public interest position. At least technically. In reality, we know who is already in the pocket of the cable companies though +D.
I think that airplane analogy is really important for innovation in general. A lot of the activity often ascribed to progress really just amounts to someone building a lighter set of wings for the guy getting ready to jump off a building. (The counterargument, of course, being that that is progress--even if the lighter construction isn't too helpful in the current design it would be later on--but it's not the "macro" progress it's so often billed as.)

Anyway, it's just interesting to be reminded that context is important. Being able to distinguish between insanity and genius seems like it would be a super-power.