skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Something happened in the course of evolution to make the human brain different from the reptile brain, which is closer to a computer that plays pong." - i beg to differ on this statement, clearly the complexity and sheer magnificence of the human brain did not come about by mere chance, if this was so it would have been easy to replicate this.This is proof of an intelligent creator.
Good link.

> "Mr. Zuckerberg says the deal fits into Facebook’s journey to become a mobile company."

Can you morph from desktop to mobile? Who succeeded in this? I wonder what's the price tag on previous pivots to mobile.

Apple - mostly organic, mini acquisitions. Possibly $3-5b for iDevices development?

Google - half organic with some big (failed) acquisitions (Moto). Possibly $10b net

MS - mostly acquisitions. Possibly $15b including Nokia.

FB - mostly acquisitions. Total "journey" cost so far: ~$20b

This certainly feels like FB is walking in MS steps.
My exact thoughts too - "thank god, a site redesign that doesn't think a colour gradient is the devil". I like the philosophy of 'digitally authentic', but that doesn't lock you into being flat. Can't wait for that fad to be over.

Great design, with only minor issues.
I would always go Git - once you're used to the flexibility and freedom, going back to SVN is like being hobbled.
Facebook is trying to buy its perceived competition, i.e. the "next" Facebook before it can actually become The "next" Facebook.

Same thing as with Instagram.

The fact that they can spend so much money on this (and that their investors allow it) shows just how much they want to remain on top.
Well, you got the "Insane" part correct at least. Why on earth would Tesla want to be acquired by Apple who stifles innovation and would most likely try to make an 'iCar' instead of something looking good and having great engineering at a cheap price.
WhatsApp has been bought by Facebook. Time to try out the better version.
Could WhatsApp become Facebook’s Gmail?
A short comparison of Gmail and WhatsApp and what is the thing they have in common.
yes that's my opinion.
That's a bad idea, it would need quoting as the `#3` would be considered to be a comment in most shells.
As i told before, the control part is not faked. We have a dedicated PC communicating with an Arduino UNO via a Serial port (USB). PC gets (web) requests forwards it to Arduino and then it controls the airpump and the feeder.
I want the freedom to do what I want, and in my case that involves a certain quantity of money. Not tons of it, but more than I have now.
http://threejs.org/ may be relevant.
Food Crises: Predictive validation of a quantitative model of food prices
In most cases, avgas will be under half your total expenses for the year. You have to fly well over the average utilization for gas to dominate over maintenance, insurance, hangar, database updates/charts, etc.

Even at 100 flight hours/year in a thirsty airplane, you'll spend maybe $10K on fuel. It would take a very simple airplane, hangared very cheaply, and no abnormal maintenance events for the year, for those other costs to be under $10K.

Few privately owned planes fly even 100 hours per year, and most of the non-fuel costs are largely fixed, meaning you pay them all just to fly the "first hour" and then subsequent hours just cost fuel and a small wear-related maintenance allocation.

Airplanes are cheap to buy, but not cheap to fly. The cost of gas hurts, but doesn't dominate in my experience (owning three airplanes over 15 years, and flying my family on most of our domestic travel east of the Mississippi).
Ah. Blackberry. I forgot that is included in the J2ME target devices. That explains nearly everything, although any of my friends who had those blackberries have transitioned since, and now people are just (well played WhatsApp) locked into the service.
See, this is respectable, if not that common. But when I tell people I sometimes just take a train somewhere new and then come back, they look at me like I'm weird.
The most useful part was the comment:

> I think it’s worth emphasising that stash stores just your changes and not a snapshot of the entire tree.
This means that you can create your stash on one branch and then pop it onto another branch. When you pop from the stash a merge is done including any conflict resolution that may be necessary.
There's paying the bills, and there's lust for percentages of 16 billion dollars.
Instead of having the client use the distance data to filter out people within a certain radius, the server could do the filtering and send back the result.

Of course, you could probably do a lot of requests from different locations and intersect the results to find a more accurate position of the target with this fix too, though with some randomness to each request on the server side it will probably make it not worthwhile.
Marvin Sapp – My Testimony
If you liked the stranger give his book the myth of sisyphus a try. You'd probably enjoy that.

There are no elegant arguments. Eventually you'll find a book, an idea, or an experience that speaks to you ... and that will make you comfortable in not knowing.
What about the advantage gained by time, i think a major drawback to human improvement is the effect of death.Given enough time and accumulated experience, self improvement is possible.A machine cannot succumb to death.
The US is a pretty big market. 320,000,000 people, most with at least some disposable income. There are also plenty of advertisers that want to market their products to Americans, which means you can choose between ad-sponsored or for-pay business models.
A friend of mine was given as a gift one of those "Discovery Flights" where you are taken up and get to fly the plane, which is supposed to entice you into signing up for lessons.

Not only did he get to do the takeoff, they let him do the landing.

He had a little trouble keeping it from turning on the takeoff, and a lot of trouble with that on the landing. Afterwards, they found out why. Something had punctured a tire before takeoff, and it was a little flat during takeoff, and a lot flat during landing.
Whatsapp actually uses a modified XMPP server
The biggest problem is IMO the delay (20 to 30seconds). Many people believe the majority of the stream has no idea how it works. Even with democracy implemented, the delay is still a blocker.

But I have no idea how this could be solved (best thing would be multicast directly from source to viewers, but this doesn't work on the open internet, which it why sites like twitch exist).
And who are you to say what is the "correct" amount of money for people to desire?

This really wasn't the appropriate thread to hijack for this discussion anyway; I came here to talk about Erlang.
Maple: Realistic preprocessors-based CSS framework for mobile.
A well-written article which traces the lives of Jan Koum & Brian Acton in some detail

http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/02/19/exclusive-...

Koum : “I want to do one thing, and do it well.”
Ask HN: New here, could somebody answer some questions?
So im new here, and mostly user reddit.
I keep reading articles here but never commented etc.
So wanted to know what kind of people hang out over here, and similar to reddit, does asking people to check out your app/startup/etc a bad thing over here, or its okay, if you have enough 'karma' etc?
I must've misunderstood the article then.
Looks awesome. Keep going!
If you need to get non-programmers (Mathematicians, other engineering disciplines) to use the repository, and everybody is located on one geographic site, use SVN. (Because of TortoiseSVN).

If you have money, and everybody is located on one geographic site, and you are making something huge, then use Perforce.

If you have a distributed team, you need to use either Git or Hg.

If your team is composed of experienced developers who like to do their own thing ... then Git is the only choice.

If your team is composed of less-experienced developers, or you want something that just works & won't confuse & distract neophytes, then use Hg.
How much red tape is there if one wants to cross an international border?
If you joined HN in 2013 it's way too soon to start waxing nostalgic.
> Side note: dynamic hash tables just hit Erlang THIS MONTH. So, that's probably not a good reason anymore.

What? Erlang's hashtables are called `ETS` and `DETS` and have been there since at least 1997.

What I believe you are referring to are `maps`, which while they have the syntax of scripting languages' hashes, are nothing but trees. Access is far from constant time.
Then again Erlang had these a while ago. They are just adding syntax sugar and pattern matching.
I'd encourage people to call up your local flight school and schedule an intro lesson. It'll be about 45 minutes, no real "book learning" component, and the cost will vary (they'll tell you) but should be $150 +/-$50 range.

You'll either immediately be hooked (me), or at least see/feel some of the excitement and decide whether or not it's worth it. Either way, you got a novel experience.

I completely agree that I wouldn't leave tech to go fly an airliner around on a schedule.

I used to stop by the airport 2-3 evenings per week and just fly around for an hour; it was a great way to push all of work out of my head and truly relax. Now, with a family and much more demanding job, I fly to go places, for currency/training, but very rarely have time to "just fly".

It's not for everyone, but anyone even close to on the fence should take an intro lesson. Little to lose and if you find you like it, it's a quite enjoyable hobby.

Feel free to email me with questions.
"The founders conferred. They were prepared to settle for Ryza.com, but suddenly Experiment.com was available. That’s like being engaged to a high school boyfriend only to learn that Brad Pitt is interested in dating you. Never in their wildest dreams did they consider that they could get a domain like that. What to do?"

Stick with the person you love, right. Yeah, tell Brad Pitt to take a hike. Yep, that's definitely the right thing to do. Aww, high school sweethearts. That's lovely. What a nice story.

Oh. Wait. Huh? you dumped high school sweetheart for that wally off of the Chanel ads?

Sigh, I suppose it was... "inevitable" (http://youtu.be/mGs4CjeJiJQ)
Read what you linked to again. It says Brahmanism was a caste religion. It then goes on to say "The Buddha, himself born into the warrior caste, was a severe critic of the caste system." Then "Even during the time when Buddhism was decaying in India and Tantrayana had adopted many aspects of Hinduism, it continued to welcome all castes and some of the greatest Tantric adepts were low castes or outcastes."

It then states that "despite this, various forms of the caste system are practised in several Buddhist countries".

"Buddhist" countries having castes is not the same as Buddhism being a caste religion. Buddhism is not a caste religion.
Strange, where are you from?

I'm the same as you - heard the name, never used the app. In the recent 4-5 months though all of my friends migrated to WhatsApp. I'm from Eastern Europe and when I cruised around other countries from the region there were many people who used that too. Maybe has to do with the fact that some telecoms still charge insane prices for a piece of SMS when you deplete your free quota.
Threema - https://threema.ch/en/
"Consciousness is data. [...] The data of consciousness--the way things seem to me right now--are data too. I am having a certain sensation of red with a certain shape right now. I am hearing a certain quality in the tone of my voice and so on. This is undeniable as the objective data in the world of science. And science ought to be dealing with that."

David Chalmers excerpt- Conversations on Consciousness by Susan Blackmore.
Dan Brown gets little money?
It looks somewhat influenced by the current Ruby webpage.

One minus is that some of the color choices on the code blocks are not optimal. Dark grey on black is not exactly the most readable..
It's an intersting thought indeed, but I wonder if any neuroscientists would back it up.
What Customer Service Should Look Like
That's not value, that's called 'price'
This would be so much better with a NKRO keyboard, I can only do 2 keys at once :(
WebGL SID-emulator in C++ compiled to JavaScript with Emscripten
Perhaps among the Erlang community but I only found out as a result of digging into the company.

Would be great to have someone from WhatsApp speak at CUFP this year [1]. If anyone reading this can encourage them to do so (or put me in touch with someone one there), that would be great.

[1] http://cufp.org/
People not part of the subculture would probably call them nerds :]
yup, mind-body problem is a fascinating topic I've had the pleasure of reading into.
Yeah, you're right, I can't find anything saying Arch is using eglibc either. I did get my information on it from that Wikipedia article, I guess I should have checked the citations.
My (German) mom just asked about WhatsApp. So it must be mainstream.
I am more interested in why they switched away from Erlang, that is the opposite of the usual story.
We were trying to make airplane-sized birds, which don't exist in nature for a variety of very good reasons.

Equally, our materials science wasn't good enough for flapping wings at the time.

I expect to see flapping wing designs appearing in micro-flyers within a decade. At the insect scale they're really useful:

http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/newsevents/casestudies/2011/Pages/Tin...
> How are the "other 3 billion people" without smartphones going to contribute to Facebook's bottom line? When they don't even have Facebook?

That makes them even more valuable. Why should Facebook buy users they already have?
you have so many downloads, are you still struggling with users? Can you explain further on this
You seem to have misunderstood. The point of the "Eternal September" is that the effect that used only to happen once a year started to happen all the time. It was once the case that the newbies and the clueless would flood UseNet in September, the start of the college year, asking the same questions over and over and over again. Then AOL gave internet access to everyone, and so the clueless weren't restricted to just September.

So the fact that this comes now, not in September, is an exemplar of the Eternal September, not an exception.
Without knowing the details, I assume that WebGL poses a high security risk.

Considering that Mobile Safari has access to lots of confidential data (eg. iCloud keychain), and runs in a less restricted sandbox (can make data pages executable), that's probably the last place where Apple wants to try out some new technology.

EDIT: It's weird how iOS is now arguably the most secure mobile platform, after all the shit they got from Blackberry in the beginning :)
I just want to know, how much are they making from cars and how much from other sources, namely credits related to pollution laws which are nothing more than handouts
Can't tell if there was only one guard or whether they were off-site.

"The activists, who got past fences and security sensors before dawn on July 28, apparently spent several hours in the Y-12 National Security Complex before they were stopped — by a lone guard, they told friends — as they used a Bible and candles in a Christian peace ritual."[1]

Either way, if it was a real terrorist, they'd likely have several tons of "highly enriched uranium" now.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/08/us/pacifists-who-broke-int...
That's what I don't get. If nothing will change for the users, then why did Facebook acquire them? Why did they bother? Just so that they can run statistics and include WhatsApps numbers in there as well because they now belong to the same organisation?
Stock Footage – Google Groups
I would love an app that matches passengers to GA flights going between airfields, essentially a ride-sharing option for small aircraft. Pilots could offload a bit of the fuel cost and passengers could go between short range destinations very fast if they're lucky.
They had trouble finding/training enough Erlang engineers.
If the first strong AI has goals that we don't like, and we aren't able to identify that and force it to change the goals by destroying it or reprogramming it - then "acting friendly" won't change these goals, and it will ensure that all future AI generations have it's initial buggy goals, not those that we might want.
In Holland, WhatsApp dominates, and it's not a $10/day country.

It dominates because SMS rates were too expensive here. Even when Mom & Dad would buy you an iPhone, kids were choosing Blackberries (!) as their primary phone because of internet messaging.

WhatsApp was seen as something worked with non BB devices (iPhones, Androids). It pretty much murdered the cell phone providers who were giving away cheap data rates and betting on income from increased SMS usages. Whoops.

When iMessage and Hangouts came along it was really too late. The process flow for most users who want to send a text is: go to WhatsApp first, if the user isn't there or doesn't respond, send an SMS and be frustrated with them.

Anyone could have beat WhatsApp in NL, but didn't. If the telcos would have given out unlimited SMS messages, it probably wouldn't exist. If BlackBerry would have released iOS/Andriod versions, they probably would have been the standard in Holland. If Apple would have released iMessage earlier, instead of (presumably) not wanting to piss off the carriers, it would have stood a chance. ... certainly if they also released apps for other platforms.
Network – iOS Podcast App – Free For 24 Hours
It's only free if you have a data plan, right? (or connected to WiFi). Historically in NZ, SMS has been basically free, unlimited but data has been 10mb, 100mb etc.

We're now trying to catch up on the world with our data plans on 3G and 4G networks, but even then it's about $50 NZD for 1gb data.
Ukrainians are making news. The country is seeing protests over a cancelled trade deal with the EU, a Ukrainian immigrant sold his company for $19B.

It's easy to see why Ukrainians would want to align with open economies of the west than with Russia.
I is only me who is thinking that everything that worth $16B is happened on the server side and J2ME is just a crap?)
was that safe?
The question that comes up for me at this point is whether there is much that is dispensable about humans when it comes to exhibiting intelligent behavior (running on 100 watts, no less). It turned out that for abstracting useful flight dynamics based on birds, there was a rather simple rule: lift > weight. Sure, reducing it to that simple formula may not help you build a machine that maneuvers as well as birds and insects do, but we didn't need that for flight. We just wanted to cross an ocean in less than 6 weeks.

Whether the flight analogy carries on to intelligence, in my mind, depends on how many of our subsystems are 1) indispensable for intelligence, and 2) reasonably computationally reducible.

From neurotransmitters to ganglia cells to hormones and bacteria in the gut, we have found a lot of subsystems that contribute to our abilities to make diverse, everyday decisions that the ideal AI we are discussing would have to make. The cortex actually seems like one of the most orderly and therefore reducible parts of the apparatus. The hormonal system that regulates emotion based decision making may be far more difficult to abstract and less efficient to model. And there are many many other systems. Could it be that without details of those subsystems, our AI behaves in less than optimal ways the same way a human would? How much can we get away with reducing biology to simpler rules while maintaining general intelligence?

It is possible I suppose that all those biological dependencies are merely hampering an ideal algorithm for generalized intelligence that we are only crude approximations of, a powerful and simple algorithm we can finally free of biological constraints, -- but it's too late to get into the probability of that hypothesis! In any case it's not clear to me how that kind of nonhuman intelligence would serve us.
Are these going to be Google Android or AOSP based? Is there a clear baseline to target and distribution strategy to cover this mass of devices?
I think you're missing the point. It's not there's anything wrong with people _doing_ boring useless tasks, the problem is that they _have to do_ boring and useless tasks.

It's not condescending towards the people, it's criticism towards the system. The system is wrong, the people are its victims.
Would something like golang even need lock-counting like BEAM ? I think the idiomatic way to work with golang is goroutines rather than mutex, etc. However, I'm not sure if any goroutine mailbox profiling tools are available.
This doesn't explain the success WhatsApp had in Europe.

Germany, The Netherlands, Switzerland, etc. WhatsApp dominates all of these markets.

I think a reason for this is that in Europe, we're not used to unlimited text plans. Unlike the US, we don't have to pay to receive text messages, only to send them, so there is little incentive to get an "unlimited plan" anyways. But ultimately, you still end up paying 20 cents or so for a text message, whereas with WhatsApp you pay at max 1 buck per year.

Secondly, for a long time, WhatsApp's user experience was simply much better than what Facebook had to offer with their Facebook messenger app. There simply was no alternative to WhatsApp for quite some time.

I actually resisted hopping on the WhatsApp train for a long time, but when virtually everyone of your friends uses it, you will join up sooner or later.
>Let the clients handle end-to-end encryption with something zk DH/OTR/SMP.

ZeroMQ also has its own experimental elliptical-curve encryption protocol now: http://curvezmq.org/ They call it experimental, but I've haven't heard anything negative about the implementation from the cryptographers, and elliptical curve crypto is well-established (it's the basis for Bitcoin's key signing, for example). Also, it's closely based on Daniel J. Bernstein's CurveCP.
Exactly. And that's the problem. It's a race to the bottom: people are rewarded for something that in the end benefits no one.
You forgot the marketing and promotion. (BTW I'm a techie trying to be a humanie :)
The definition of term "artificial general intelligence" is "intelligence of a machine that could successfully perform any intellectual task that a human being can".

Humans obviously can perform intellectual tasks that a human being can perform, thus humans are machines that implement general intelligence.
I'm an extremely heavy user, hundreds to thousands of messages and images per day, and I've had the same messages so I think it's the heavy users that they're allowing for free.
Do nothing unless he asks or talks to you.

I regularly take a look at what developer roles are on offer. It doesnt mean I want to leave my job.

I use it as a way to see what companies are using what technology.
How to Launch a $30k iOS App using Amazon Rankings as a Guide
For this article to really make sense, we will need to know how many J2ME users _really_ us Whatsapp.
Yes, there are many users with featurephones. But how many of them use Internet on it? Can i afford an internet flatrate with 20$/month income? Nope.
In Spain and Italy "sending a Whatsapp" is almost as idiomatic as "Googling something".

It has basically replaced texting. Even my mom use it, which for me it's the definition of "wildly popular".
Venezuela's Internet Crackdown Escalates into Regional Blackout
On the other hand, how does Facebook expect to monetize these millions of users who are living on $10/day?

The number being thrown around yesterday was that Facebook paid $40/user. Bearing in mind that a good percentage of these users will never provide any ROI, it is one more reason to look like it was way overvalued.