skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If anyone is interested in AI, I highly recommend joining Less Wrong, a community started by AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky. He started the community to convince people to focus on the "friendly AI problem". [1] I actually recommend that everyone read LW, but especially if you're interested in AI.

[1] In a nutshell, the friendly AI problem is: assume we create an AI. It may rapidly become more intelligent than us, if we program it right. As soon as it becomes significanlty more intelligent, we will no longer be the most intelligent beings around, so the AI's goals will matter more than ours.

Therefore, we should really give it good goals that are compatible with what we want to happen. And since no one right now knows how to define "what humans want" good enough for writing it in code, then we'd better figure THAT out before building AI.
OK ok, but it is economical insanity.

On the moon, an electric rail launcher with 5-10G only needs to be a few km long.

(Iirc, 1G acceleration of four minutes is the launch velocity of the moon? ~ 2.4 km/s.)

Edit: This assumes local materials for the electric launcher. If everything is skipped from Earth, it might be different. But, consider -- if you need to launch so much stuff from the moon, you must already have the infrastructure to build things there.
marginalrevolution.com a blog by two Econ professors where I saw this linked two days ago.
Why does it matter? If if solves the problem then it's as good as if it was fully intelligent. Who cares what goes on inside the black box?

If you worried about it overfitting to a specific problem, give it lots of problems and weight the solutions by complexity. So you heavily favor simple algorithms that can learn to solve a large class of problems, over ones that are more adapted for those specific problems.
On the UK’s Equating of Journalism With Terrorism
Social networking is all about network effects. The biggest threat to Facebook's position at the top of the pile is that another social network will come along, start to gain traction (most likely initially with users that aren't current Facebook users - e.g. early teens) until it reaches a tipping point where current Facebook users start migrating to the new social network because that's where the people they want to interact with are hanging out.

Once that tipping point is reached, the migration is likely to happen rapidly and irreversibly. By acquiring companies like Instagram and Whatsapp, Facebook is not only preventing them from usurping its social networking crown but bolstering its own position against future emerging competitors.

$19bn might sound like a lot but it's cheap when you consider that the risk of not buying Whatsapp is that it eventually obliterates Facebook in the same way that Facebook obliterated Myspace and the original Bebo.
That doesn't seem to fix anything. Suppose you round to miles. Now I just sample the system until I find the "border" where the reported distance changes from 1 to 2 mile, and then I know the distance is exactly 1.5 mile there (or 2 miles if they round down).

Repeat for two more points and you have the same vulnerability.
I don't understand the logic behind these types of posts that add no value to the poster and the people discussing it in comments.

Is it a signaling mechanism to attract people working in this area? I'm sure you have already turned them off by showing your naivete. So no value to you.

To people trying to discuss this by racking their brains and looking for new ideas, Any one with a quint decent thought/idea will never share it here to enlighten us laymen. So no value to us too.

So, what's the point HN, and why all the upvotes?
> Verizon had started selling off it's Fiber installs before 2009 (which I still scratch my head at).

Well, it's not like they were trying to get rid of fiber. Verizon sold off all its wireline operations in rural and non-core areas. Fiber simply went along for the ride.

What Verizon was trying to get rid of was the copper. No company would be willing to buy the copper from Verizon and then compete against FiOS. Thus, the only way that Verizon could get any buyers was to bundle the copper together with the fiber.

This would make it more difficult for Verizon to attempt a market entry at a later date, as it would have to start from a position of no infrastructure.
I Am a Ukrainian
I wonder if this is significant in requiring that the person then has set up payments; that must lower the friction on getting those users then to buy other things or make further payments. The time and effort expended is probably for many worth more than the dollar spent?
This was sorely done to retain users but I predict users are going to leave both services and join Viber. Will Facebook also buy Viber?
According to Sequoia's post, they are adding 1mm users/day. http://sequoiacapital.tumblr.com/post/77211282835/four-numbe...
Boosted delivers first boards to Kickstarter backers
er.. Line? KakaoTalk?
Gamer youtube 
http://www.youtube.com/user/MuhdAmir27
I was amazed how big whatsapp was in India and now in Mexico. Cool story.
Lots of my friends use it for group messaging instead of text messages (in the UK). That it has traction is its feature.
AI was also the subject Gates pointed to when asked a similar question on the AMA thread the other week on Reddit, I believe.
The simple issue is that Facebook is the one that is overvalued, not WhatsApp. I'm sure it was mostly paid for in stock.

If you don't think Facebook is overvalued, that's fine, but you can't complain about WhatsApp then.

Also, I doubt this reduced Mark's control of Facebook. Just his common share equity. He still has the special class of voting shares that I'm sure all he really cares about.
Zuckerberg's Rationale for $19B WhatsApp Bid
50 employees? That's awesome. Twitter has like over 2000. Sure, Twitter's infrastructure is more complicated, but still.
I've had whatsapp since before it was available in the play store (they had a beta you would manually download back in like 2010 or 2009 or something) and I've never paid a cent... maybe because I signed up when it was still "beta"?
Cyclical means they'll come back up. Somehow I doubt that's the case with MySpace, bebo etc.
Facebook is running 2b+ in Ad profits at an 8x YoY growth. If owning social networking and communication stays this profitable and Whatsapp helps solidify Facebook's dominance, the purchase is entirely justified. Remember, Whatsapp basically killed SMS outside the US.

We always scold people and companies for not taking huge bets once they become successful. Huge props to Zuckerberg for staying hungry and willing to take risks.
> gracefully step-aside, courtesy of shareholder activist pressure, given his voting control

Good luck with that. He carefully maintained voting control over his own company so he'd never have to do that.
I agree with this. In South Africa we use Whatsapp more than anything (including BBM these days). When I rocked up in Canada, I found that very few people use Whatsapp here, since BBM is losing market share, I find that most if not all of my colleagues are just using plain ol' text, as they get unlimited texting from their providers.
Just goes to show, on paper, founders aren't always the most appealing employees.
They acquired the attention. WhatsApp created the expectation in a half billion people that they will help them exchange messages with friends and coworkers. That expectation is what is being valued. If Facebook could steal just that expectation and change it from 'WhatsApp' to 'Facebook Messenger' in peoples' heads then WhatsApp would be worth $0 to them.
Any suggestions for getting started in the LW community? Its barrier to entry means I can't seem to vote on anything, etc. It's quite intimidating really.
From 5 minutes of reading it seems that it's huge in overseas markets where people want to avoid the cost per SMS message fee, am I correct?

If you have a standard plan with the phone giants in the US, all calls and texts are generally unlimited, but you pay for data now. Is that why it's not as big in the US?
Why do we need signal assignments?
We (my friends and I) use group messaging heavily and none of us use WhatsApp. MMS supports group messaging just fine and lots of my friends have iPhones so iMessage works just fine there.

We do pay more than $1 per year for unlimited text messages but I don't know anyone that doesn't get unlimited text messaging these days.
Nice example with visual crypto, but does this scale? Are there algorithms able to generate arbitrary number of patterns where groups of two or more of those patterns form desired groups of signals?
Basically generate 10 visual crypto pictures and be able to get different messages by combining random pairs of pictures.

Because this is whats needed for this to work.
Those numbers don't explain why FB bought them. They don't really explain paying $19,000,000,000 at all.
> I believe, was a key component in getting huge amount of users in 3rd countries.

In the UK as well.

Although many people have free effectively-unlimited SMS in the UK, this costs £ and not everyone has. Also consider that international SMS are charged at extortionate rates, and I know some teenagers who have busted through the limit of "unlimited" SMS.

And so, the introduction goes: "I'll text you - do you have Whatsapp? Oh :(". This social pressure has driven almost everyone onto the service. And people have kept using it because it's just as functional and less restrictive than 160 characters.
Greed is a powerful motivator, but I'm with you. If MtGox hasn't gotten their shit together in the year since they started having problems, I don't see why they would now.
Yea like search. See altavista, goto.com, inktomi, google...
"However, when you go to the grocery store to buy stuff with your InflataDollars, the grocer will also expect the same discount for the InflataDollars they buy."

Hm. Partly true, but only if their time horizon is the same as your boss. It definitely gets complicated here - we probably need rigorous models and/or simulation.
Now facebook will access to my contact list :( It is really difficult to remove Whatsapp as it the primary communication tool for most of my network. Really sad news.
The CEO just had a higher price than most other people.

To get $16bn cash from Facebook is hilarious.

Next time a start-up says they won't pay you market rate because of x, y, and z just walk away and laugh. For the sake of a few thousand dollars in wages, you could make them billions.

Don't work for cheap bastards. Funny how engineers are supposed to sacrifice yet we never see a lawyer or accountant charge below market rates, and their work can save businesses millions as well as jail-time.
%-based string interpolation still works in python 3.
From Techcrunch:
" In a staggering comparison, Facebook also notes that the messaging volume of WhatsApp approaches the SMS volume of the entire global telecom industry — and that it’s adding 1M users a day."

It's a super fast growing messaging app, mostly used internationally, that is a legitimate competitor to Facebook; it's only a timeline/profile page away from being essentially another Facebook.

Don't discount the power of messaging apps -- whether they be aimed towards younger folk (a la Snapchat) or aimed towards international audiences (a la Kakao Talk.) I think it's not an acquisition Facebook WANTED to do, but HAD to.
They don't simulate it at the molecular level. It takes super computers like DE Shaw's Anton (hundreds of customized cores specifically designed for molecular simulation) weeks to simulate a few milliseconds of one single protein in water. IBM's approach is at a much higher level and is taking way more shortcuts.
Here's a link to the app on the iOS App Store. Seems to be iPad-only at the moment.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ultimeyes/id805408944?mt=8
Depends on how tight the circles are and the compartmentalization. I would assume dictator dudes have multiple overlapping inner circles that compete with each other. Geodesic thought crime.
MSN had 350 million active users a few years ago. And they just pissed it into oblivion. MSN had Skype feature set before Skype, but did nothing to publicize it.

And also, think - MSN had everyone's friends info, as well as frequency of contact and so on. It would have been a perfect way to launch a real social network. MSN fumbled that too.

A comedy of errors.
It reads like a type of cooperative base station, which means geographically separate antennas are used to transmit signals that add up to a "clean" signal at the receiving antenna, in which interference is cancelled. That's equivalent to a form of MIMO, in which the antennas are widely distributed in space. Consequently, I'd expect it to be subject to the same limitations as MIMO.

I'm predicting that the breathless claims of "no limit" are based on being the only show in town. As long as the system is controlling every transmission in a volume of space it will do well, and you will be able to add users until you reach the same limits that a MIMO system would hit if it was the only transmitter. Start adding uncontrolled interference, and things will start to degrade.

Maybe the next step, would be for the distributed base stations to use receivers to sample the spectrum. This data could be fed back into the cloud and an attempt be made to predict and cancel the uncontrolled interferers. The FCC (or local equivalent) might take a dim view of this though, if it turned out that the cancellation was effectively jamming other users.

--- Edit.

Just adding, in my experience, if you want to understand the latest radio communications technology, speak to a radio astronomer. When MIMO first came out and people were trying to figure out its limits, it turned out that the radio astronomers already knew the limits, based on their knowledge of large antenna arrays. I'd guess the astronomers would look at this current technology and think "very long baseline interferometry".
Facebook has 1.23B monthly actives and 750M daily actives. Your WhatsApp link is using MAU as a metric.
I've actually studied psych. Econ and game theory are worthwhile disciplines too, and sometimes make better predictions when money is on the table.
> we'd better figure THAT out before building AI.

Why don't we just give that task to the AI? It'll be smarter than us...

Maybe the problem is that people are too easy to understand: We want "Brave New World", but we don't want to know about it, or that we want it.
The nmbers are actually irrelevant. The key thing is that Whatsapp has the potential to become a rival to Facebook (or be acquired by some company that seeks to compete with Facebook).

Facebook needs to avoid that at all costs, so is prepared to pay whatever it takes to acquire potential rivals, thus removing the threat.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7267516
>PL/pgSQL function plans are cached

Read your link. They can be cached. You have no way to ensure that they are. And you have no way to have the planning done up front at all, you have to wait until the function is run, and even then every code path in the function has to be exercised to get it planned. And then half the time it doesn't think it should bother to cache the plan anyways. And it is per-session, not shared. So every single connection has to start over with an empty cache every time, and there's tons of duplicate plans in the cache wasting space. Not cool, and by far the biggest thing keeping a ton of "enterprise" customers on SQL server and oracle.
Defining human values completely and absolutely is an extremely difficult problem that might not even have a solution. AI on the other hand is probably inevitable sometime within the next century.
If Rails stops using the two-step parse/execute PostgreSQL commands (which are supported without issue by PGbouncer, and which is how you are supposed to get bound parameters) when prepared_statements is turned off (a setting which intuitively should only turn off using standard SQL named prepared statements), then that's pathetic behavior (even for Rails) and should really be fixed.
Plus it's not like they will 'convert' those non-Facebook users and make them use Facebook suddenly. So then the question comes up on how to monetize this thing to earn back the $19,000,000,000
Those are functions, not stored procedures.
GitHub Issues integrated with Aha
MG Siegler has been writing recently about the "great unbundling" of Facebook and how mobile apps are increasingly good at one thing only: Instagram at sharing Photos, Paper for reading the news, and now WhatsApp + Messenger for communication. It's becoming increasingly true as we see Facebook trying to buy the new dominant players in any space that could be a threat in the areas it holds dear: sharing photos, statuses, or anything else it deems important.

I would have to think that the stock drop is due to the price they're paying for a startup that had $8 million in funding.
I'm just going to stick this out there because I'm a futurist and it's my role to share with others what I'm thinking about. What I share may be flat out wrong, scary, half assed, or appear to be crazy. So be it.

We've advanced a lot in the last 100 years. We're starting to see a bigger picture forming with the advent of compute and networking capabilities. Combining simple elements of these basics give rise to surprising and interesting behaviors. See "Twitch Plays Pokemon": http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57619058-93/twitch-plays-po... as an example of suprising behavior.

The more we look in detail at the universe around us, the more puzzling it gets. Prime numbers spirals are unexplained. The two slit experiments results indicate the observer plays a part in collapsing a particle's probability wave. The effects of dark matter could be a result of parallel universes. You couldn't make up weirder shit if you tried.

It's not a huge leap of logic to assume some parts of our brain operate at a quantum level. Given that first statement comes to a truthful fruition, I don't think it would be entirely unreasonable to assume AI will do so as well. Given computers already use some quantum properties, it's also reasonable to expect advancement in AI lies in this direction.

When they announced Google was getting a D-Wave computer, I got really interested. Granted, they know beans about how it works (and whether or not it actually works at all) but it's still crazy interesting to consider.

As I said, I could be wrong or crazy. Or both.
Just under half a billion a year is a decent amount coming in, I'd say!
> It's not an acquisition for talent, or technology, so what is it?

http://i.imgur.com/yzo9kc1.jpg
In point of fact two companies were the primary contractors for the redesign of python.org, but since I am no longer in the loop I will commend you to wait for an upcoming PSF blog post that will give the details. Design was indeed a major input to the project.
If I was a FB holder think I'd rather take a 10% dividend:

$19000000000 (purchase price)/2547000000 (number of shares) = ~$7.50 per share
Some hackers p0wn3d printers at the Navy and sent duplicates of all print jobs overseas. Seems like a great hack.
Not so much these days, this place is getting filled with liberals who seem to have majored in the arts, not computer science of engineering.
It might not be a lot of revenue, but I'd hazard a guess that it's pretty inexpensive to run. Hundreds of times cheaper per user than something like Facebook.
That's a viable approach to solving the problem. The question is, how do you trust the unfriendly AI to give you a correct solution?
The stack is open https://github.com/proevo/pythondotorg
Social isn't serious. It really shouldn't be.
I'm curious: why did you restrict your analysis to 5 years?

On the one hand, I'd expect Tesla to have tech-like growth for 10 to 20 years. On the other hand, competition is bound to happen eventually. How did you pick 5 years?
It's shaping up nicely. I appreciate it's a responsive design, but please consider the code example slideshow is broken on resize. Also, consider increasing spacing, the content is too crammed below the header.
The entire site is Open Source. If you rely on obscurity for security then you've done it wrong.

VPN and the like would be nice but not hardly required.
I think you're reading too much into it. On HN, it is extremely common for people to make very authoritative sounding posts, especially counter intuitive ones. This is the case whether the topic is net neutrality, Godel's Incompleteness Theorem or the existence of black holes or whatever. You just take it with bags of salt and move on. Also, for many, the Wall Street Journal is not only a credible source but a battle cry. It's just very common on HN, don't think it is automatically astroturfing or pure propaganda (sometimes it is).
This is my least favorite comment after every acquisition ever. What is Facebook worth to the public right now per user? $160. 4x as much - FB makes 4x as much in market cap per user than WhatsApp. So

1. What's to complain about?
2. It wasn't all about users, it's about the network, growth, potential, space
3. Give me some context for why $40 per user for a company that makes a ton of money on their users is too high?
If you only have `2 * n cores` connections, doesn't that mean that you can at most have `2 * n cores` transactions running at once? I suppose on larger servers that is fairly reasonable (as you want these transactions to be very short lived anyway), but it does seem like you don't give yourself much wiggle room.
The New Sidecar Has Arrived
All I'm learning from this thread is that some people see infinite regression where others see tautology.

edit: what I mean:

Person 1: "What if we're just measuring the color of the sky? What if we're just measuring blueness? What if we're just measuring a wavelength of light? ... ..."

Person 2: "The sky looks blue."
Just curious. Why couldn't you use text messages to contact the same people?
I think it's because the site is in open beta. Let's give them a few days to hash things out. ;-)
Another minor quibble: IRR is usually expressed as a percentage (e.g. 700% per year rather than 7x).
Interesting fake highlighting.
T-Mobile Responds to Blackberry Outrage
It's accurate to describe the XMPP standard as 'used' by many but 'supported' by few.
Why spin it when he could simply not cover it? (Which he did, by the way.)

Gruber actually does post things that cast Jobs in a negative light. Get over it.
I did it this way: 100x return is 800M, 200x return is 1.6B, so 16B is 2000X return, which is 200,000% return in initial investment.

I think it's less than that though, since obviously Sequoia didn't get 100% of the company for their 8M, I think they walked away with 2.4B after this deal?
>You can get detailed timing data about parse, plan, execute timings from postgresql logging. Parsing is almost always trivial.

And yet you can get >50% speedups for super common queries like "select * from foo where id = ?" if you prepare it once and then use execute instead of just running the select every time. Seems like maybe you're making assumptions you shouldn't.
Minneapolis kinda sorta not-quite has at least some parts with fibre.

http://fiber.usinternet.com/coverage-areas/

Barely though to be honest. >.<
I am pretty sure that I've seen these. I have to say, I admire Steve Jobs in a sense that I admire Frank Underwood character in House of Cards serial.
> It's not a huge leap of logic to assume some parts of our brain operate at a quantum level.

To the best of our knowledge it is still a pretty large leap of logic.
You don't need to point a microphone at somebody's face to record them, nor do you need to point a camera lens at them to record them.
Yeah yeah yeah. Heard this one before.

Acquired company says it's business as usual, nothing will change, and then 6 months later things slowly begin to change and then after the vesting period of the acquisition finishes, and the newly minted sail off into the sunset, it all goes to hell.
It's interesting to note from Whatsapp legal info that they say it's only for USA based users.

cf my comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7267310 or http://www.whatsapp.com/legal/