skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Wage theft" goes beyond the large tech companies. It it institutionalized by the investors as well. Investors won't invest if employees are paid market value. That's a reason why it's better to be a consultant than an employee.

Everybody is trying to manipulate the game to their benefit. C'est la vie.
Wow! 2-3 million concurrent TCP connections? I just discovered C10K last year :( Is this a fundamental difference between thread based networking and evented network IO? What am I missing?
I welcome the change and think it is a good solution.

I'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned yet, especially for the HN crowd, but it's relatively easy for any developer to write a bot to auto-register them-self. One could even use Selenium.

There is a very popular Google Developer's MeetUp and space for 200+ runs out in less than 5 minutes of unannounced meetings opening up for registration. I am 100% sure that a lot of bots can and do register for these events.
I wouldn't consider the non-poaching agreement unethical... Not in the least. (though such a statement won't be popular here for obvious reasons!)

Nor is threatening other companies with legal action...
I believe the parent means, basically, "rock stars" (or "pop stars"/"country stars"/"rap stars"/whatever), the Locutus-like avatars of the music-industry, who are given songs written by the producer's songwriter and told that they're "theirs."

I think Japan is a lot more honest about this, in that these people are just called "idols" and aren't expected to originate any sort of authentic thought or message; they're just transparently icons in the employ of greater corporate forces, who go on talk-shows, and get talked about by paparazzi... and sometimes perform music.
This suggests that its userbase is EXACTLY complementary for Facebook.
So why didn't Indian telecoms implement all-you-can-eat messaging to stop the erosion of users moving to WhatsApp?
Any word on if either were married?
Facebook going to mobile operator business. They have very good relationship with Microsoft. Microsoft has mobile platform and Nokia and Skype. I think FB + MS will create something to change whole telecommunication platform. Many mobile operator companies afraid that.
Rick Falkvinge: Without Anonymity, Free Speech Does Not Exist
Arcade games using Flat UI
Consensus analyst 12 month estimate (Feb 15th) is Hi: $82, Lo:$24, Mean: $70. So basically, consensus growth on the year in the stock price is 3%. Compare that to a market of 32% last year. Does not look like the analysts think FB is going to grow much. It's going to take a while to grow into that valuation.
I would say that the reason he struck gold (which is different from being valuable) is because he's a good programmer who happened to work on a break away product.

There are much more good programmers out there than break away products like WhatsApp.

You can't create successes like WhatsApp just by hiring good programmers. There are plenty of great teams that didn't achieve product/market fit and failed.

There are plenty of great programmers at Facebook or Google that do important but not wealth creating work (not on the scale of WhatsApp wealth).

In cases like this most likely the reason why WhatsApp is popular is that there was a person in charge who had the right vision for the app and came up with just the right set of features and a little bit of luck.

But even that person isn't valuable per-se in the sense that you should hire him for your company at all costs hoping that he will create similar wealth for your company.

I'm sure I'm butchering the analogy, but those are Schrödinger's successes: you can only tell they're successful at the time of the exit, but not at any time before that.
He built an extensive marketing company around aesthetic changes and "innovations" of existing (sometimes decades old) technology and amassed large quantities of wealth and influence in the process, all using illegal and questionably legal tactics. There is almost literally nothing to admire about him, other than his marketing genius (which was, and still is, in my opinion, far and away the best the industry has seen in years, or decades, or perhaps ever).
I'm saying this isn't needed and serious innovation. It's a popularity and standards game. We definitely didn't use carrier pigeons before Whatsapp. IM clients have been ubiquitous for years.
No. SSL is security between a client and a server and the purpose of it is to prevent people in between from touching your data. In this case they are not intercepting any data, but using the iPhone API to get data that the iPhone app receives anyway.
Actual inter-level causation is not needed for the characters to experience events as they do in the story. The rules that imply that all levels would unfold identically are low-level. Human narrative events that alias as inter-level causation are high-level, sort of emergent effects.
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Basically all courts agree that the rights of an individual to find employments to support their own needs and their family trumps a company's desire to beat its competitors.

If Apple really were worried about losing secrets, they could have paid for garden leave, e.g. pay employees who leave for 6 months to just stay at home.
Of course they're unattached. It's just another instant messenger. Or are people still loyal to ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger...?

(Even worse, WhatsApp relies on teenagers. How many social circles endure beyond high school? Do you still IM people you knew back then... or even as recently as two years ago?)

Maybe adults will fall back on the best messenger based on technical merit (probably Hangouts?), but WhatsApp is neither sophisticated nor particularly appealing for the long term. I'll put down money that it'll be forgotten within the decade. What the hell was Facebook thinking?
Trust me. They will change. A year or two later they will add some integration with FB. I am sure they have a bigger plan for the future (instagram, whatsapp, fb) in one platform.
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And yet in both cases of being denied by Twitter and Facebook he aired the negative news and kept a positive outlook.

That's the sign of a smart person in my book.
I tell you one thing, if I was in control of MtGox I would be buying all these bitcoin's up and making a huge profit when I indeed did fix my problems. Insider Trading in Bitcoins is basically happening right now IMO. This seems like a brilliant scheme to not only fix your business public persona by restoring and refunding everyone their money, but also make leaps and bounds of cash.

Crash your own market, buy your coins back knowing your going to restore it. Restore your market, prices come back up, huge profits.

EDIT: unless I misunderstand how all this works. I am assuming public sales coins for lowered value, mtgox insider buys knowing they are going to fix problems, mtgox insider then sells later.
I think you mean Pigovian, not excise, taxes, and you'd still need a way to model the relative benefits vs costs of hoarding. With e.g. carbon taxes, one can estimate the harms of global warming (rising sea levels, lost biodiversity) and find the social cost of an emission, then levy a tax so that people only do those carbon emissions whose welfare gain exceeds the environment-driven welfare loss (which exist, despite the rhetoric from the fiercest advocates).

When someone proposes n% inflation as a way of "taxing" hoarding, what's the corresponding model? What's the "rising sea level" there?

In cases of a ~100% "inflation tax" (aka hyperinflation), we see the harms clearly: people have to spend money almost the second they get it. They have to move up purchases and otherwise arrange their lives in ways that are extremely welfare harming, and which probably outweigh the benefits of the greater economic activity it induces.

(Contrary to a lot of talk on hyperinflation, I don't see the chief problem as being volatility; even with stable, predictable hyperinflation you have the problem of losing the main benefit of money, which is that you don't have to know what you'll ultimately be buying in order to produce something for sale.)

So likewise, to justify a Pigovian argument for inflation, you would likewise need a model, or otherwise gauge the magnitude, of the "costs of making people move up purchases [when they'd rather save and decide later]" -- the costs that become extreme in the case of hyperinflation. And yet virtually everyone enamored of the "we need to encourage economic activity" argument for activity has nothing in the way of this. Hence my frustration with it.

(The analog of hyperinflation in carbon taxes would be a ban, or absurdly high tax, on burning of fossil fuels, and has the corresponding welfare harm that the avoided fuel usage -- or costs in evading the ban -- far exceed the welfare harm of the emissions themselves.)
I think you mean 1/1000th of what FB just paid... seems like it would be a good investment to me!
It's simple. It's instant. Not everyone (especially in Asia) has a Facebook account or even wants on. SMS was already what was powering communications in Asia. Whatsapp took SMS , added images, group chat and removed the cost.

Also, it was free and works on Android (Very important in South Asia).

Many older people get smartphones just to use whatsapp to communicate with others. I'm not joking. I upgraded my mom to a smartphone against her will so that she can use whatsapp to communicate with friends and family more easily.
There were no guards on the site and they sat and ate sandwiches while waiting for them to arrive much later.

"Breaking in" was just walking through an easily made hole in a fence.

They should be paid for pen-testing the facility which was obviously never done.
> Too high of a risk for companies.

The problem with PARC and AT&T labs wasn't that having a bunch of really smart people doing interesting stuff failed to produce brilliant, world changing ideas, it was that the companies in question weren't always good at capitalising on them (arguably for the better, in the case of Unix).
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This.

Their goal is to change politically hostile environments by deploying in friendly cities. Then, residents of the hostile cities will start asking, "Why are we paying extortionate rates for shitty service?" Even if Google Fiber never gets to deploy there, the threat of it will hopefully be enough to get cable companies to act more fairly.
I guess I still don't get it. I can send images and group chat via SMS. Does this really do anything any different? I'm not asking just to be contrarian -- I'm just wondering if I should try it out and try to convince my friends to do the same.
You are comparing Skype to WhatsApp? Don't you think it's kind of apples and oranges? Skype had technology that Facebook itself uses for video chat and WhatsApp supposedly has a large user base which mysteriously enough is so different than FB user base, that it's worth $16b?
This app specifically improves clear vision at farther distances, which seems far more useful on a daily basis, especially since a lot of people don't have good vision. Compared to twitch games that only improve reaction time in a very limited practically applicable scope. Considering the small amounts of time investment necessary to get good results, this app seems much more useful than playing quake.
I can only speak for myself, but in the US I have never seen any need for it. I text or iMessage with my friends, and while I have had WhatsApp installed for a long time, I've never found something it does better for me. If I needed to communicate with people I couldn't text with, or if I were paying per text, it would probably be more compelling.
No, for their own interest they should do what they can to combat the most vital threats.

>What would happen

That would be more of a problem for Microsoft's Skype.
The documents are UK classified that doesn't mean they created them necessarily. Indeed it has no bearing on authorship. For example a document on which a dictator of another country gave their plan for a nuclear strike against their enemies would likely be classified Top Secret as soon as a copy were possessed.

Yes, strictly speaking there is likely to be copyright infringement when a UK agent, say, copies a foreign document. But then there will also be treason, trespass and other similar crimes being committed [along with breach of other treaties than just TRIPs] that are also necessary if agents acting for the UK [or any country] are going to carry out such work.

Espionage is generally a crime.
Ask HN: What to do if you see your coworker job searching?
At work today I was remotely pair programming with a fellow dev on my team. During his screen share, he accidentally pulled up a browser window that had various tabs showing open developer positions. It happened quite quickly so I didn't say anything at the time, but now I'm wondering what to do.

He's a very likable guy and I consider him to be one of the top devs on our team and in our company, so I definitely don't want to see him leave. Unfortunately though, we aren't very close personally, so I'm not sure if I should bring it up to him. For all I know he wasn't even looking at jobs for himself...

I appreciate any advice you all have on whether or not I should bring it up to him, project manager, etc. And if so, how to go about doing it. Thanks!
This can easily result in too few connections at a local peak. If each box is allocated 3 connections (and postgres can handle 12), you get high latency in the event that your load looks like [6, 1, 1, 1]. This happens occasionally due to random chance.
That means "We would rather accidentally reject great engineers than accidentally hire bad ones. Our hiring process reflects this."
New Google Maps is now rolling out to everyone's desktops
Looks like Google is rolling this out to everyone. Personally, I'm not a huge fan of the design, but that's entirely subjective on my part and I recognize that.

HOWEVER, what is not subjective is how slow it is and how often it causes my browser to hang (judging from the comments on this article, I'm not the only one who has experienced this...). Has anyone dug into it to see what it is that is causing this version of maps to be so resource-intensive?
They were just valued at $19 billion. Kind of not a startup.
How Jan Koum Built WhatsApp
Stupid question but will "existing" whatsapp users have to use their/create a new facebook account to use whatsapp starting in a few months?
You got the color of the ones and twos swapped :p

Great job!
I actually linked to convolutional neural networks on the Deep Learning page as the algorithm.

But I do agree with your point.
It's different in the US. Buyers and sellers both have agents. They split the commission when a sale goes through. In some cases they end up being the same person (e.g. if an individual approaches the buyer's agent directly).
NYTimes actually pointed out another curiously-related Tweet [0] from the other co-founder, Jan Koum:

"totally agree with Vinod Khosla. people starting companies for a quick sale are a disgrace to the valley...
3:47 AM - 17 Jul 2012"

[0] https://twitter.com/jankoum/statuses/225134737285578752

edit: I am not criticizing Jan at all and would gladly do the same given the same position.
It might make more sense when negotiating with a selling agent rather than a buying agent.
It's amazing the performance difference with WebGL on Chrome vs Firefox. It lagged to like 5-10 fps with Chrome, but am getting 60+ it seems with Firefox.
It really depends on what your trying to do - you might be overthinking it. I think rounding all inputs to the nearest minute or two of latitude and longitude is probably sufficient for most cases... Basically, treating the world as a grid of some sort, and dealing in exact points at that level.
Firefox android? Maybe it just works so well I didn't notice it was working at all....
>I can in UK law take Shakespeare works and publish it as if I was the original author //

It's fraud - http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/35/section/2, cf. Section 2(1)(b)(i).
One number $ 3.5 billion...
That's because bank infrastructure or CAD/CAM or ERP systems aren't particularly new or exciting, so there's no reason for a mania to take hold. The upside is generally known. But something like Snapchat or WhatsApp or hell even Tesla have these crazy "blue sky" opportunities, so people can extrapolate a kajillion dollars in profits one day and no one can definitively dispute otherwise.
I pressed F11 to go to full screen. The message didn't change. Anyway, I saw a circle pointer and spots on the screen so I started clicking them one by one and they got 'cleaned'. Finally, I removed all the spots that I could see. Nothing happened after that. No message.
No, rather I think that the room had nothing to do with sleep -- light control had everything to do with it.

I tried just about all of the other tricks short of sleeping pills, none had any meaningful impact.
Hah! So awesome.
MMS works very unreliably. At least for me and every single other person I know who has tried it.

Heck, even SMS can sometimes be unreliable, especially on international roaming.
12 Tips to increase the odds of your Startup to be acquired by a Tech Giant.
Whatsapp may be many things, but one thing it isn't is a "quick sale" - it's something of lasting and useful value. I'm willing to wager 5 years from now, Whatsapp will still have a significant portion of the world's messaging traffic.
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It's important to know what a person admires, and why, and how fully they appreciate the strengths and flaws of those whom they admire. Any kind of blind admiration is not a good sign.

Certainly ascribing all of Jobs's ideas to other people from whom he copied them is a pretty good heuristic for ignoring people too.

That said: I suspect Jobs's view of the anti-solicitation deal was not that he was lowering compensation (although no doubt it had this effect) but keeping employees focused on his projects. After all, being chased by headhunters is very distracting, and if the net effect is you get a great offer, a better counter-offer, and stay, as far as Jobs is concerned you've just wasted a bunch of his time.
> But if we already know the generating process, all the hard work is already done.

Yes, I agree completely, and I believe that so would most frequentists! The point, even among the most strident critics, is rarely one of whether Bayesian approaches are useful; it is that Frequentists regard the proper domain of what they call "probability" to be exclusively related to generative processes and relative sampling ratios. From a purely technical point of view I see nothing wrong with that, even if it is a somewhat strict position (having trained primarily in mathematics I'm comfortable allowing people their strict definitions as long as they are recognized as such).

As a natural consequence of this divergence, Bayesian modeling allows you to explicitly punt the problem of generative modeling for the tricky bits, and it puts a nice big warning label on it saying "If you botch your prior, you're going to have a bad time." The biased coin is a perfect example. Knowing the bias, the generative process for a sequence of flips is trivial. But how are you going to create a generative process that seriously engages how and where the biases emerge? It is far easier to just say "empirically, biases seem to be distributed like so." At this point the Frequentist says "Well, that assumption is not derived from a formal model and is only loosely falsifiable, but if I accept it as a substitute for a generative model then you and I will reach the same conclusions about posterior probabilities."

I know of no frequentist who would disagree that getting good generative models for complex phenomena is often extraordinarily difficult. Where they disagree with Bayesians is whether doing something other than that should, strictly, be called "probability" or, whether it is more appropriate to call it something like "semi-empirical subjective-belief modeling".
Surprising Facts About the WhatsApp Acquisition
Selling anything for billions of dollars has never been and never will be a mistake for anyone.
Technology will continue to commoditize and move fast. The trick is to operate in that spread between what is commoditized and what is custom.

If you want to stay with web/consumer-facing development, find the parts that are in demand but not commoditized yet. Right now that appears to be mobile development - responsive web, apps, etc. There is still no good development process for high quality responsive websites.

Computing has always grown towards abstraction - can't remember the last time I wrote a routine to manipulate video memory directly, but I can do things with graphics in 15 minutes that blows away anything I could do in hundreds of hours when that sort of work was required and profitable. Same will happen with web.

Alternatively, the business value of spreading a client's message has not changed and the technology landscape is becoming more complex. Maybe focus more on the strategy and value of the messaging than the technology used to transmit it.
I don't think you know enough to take action. You might draw incorrect conclusions from what you saw and it may have unwanted results if you raise this with a project manager (or him).

Usually there are other signs as well when an employee is looking to leave (search online). When those confirm your suspicion you could consider talking about it. But from just a few open browser tabs I don't think you can draw conclusions (it may well have been recruiter spam that looked curious).
It bothers me that this uses "quantum computing" since it plays into common, frustrating, misapprehensions of what quantum computing is even theorized to do.

They could at least call it a hyper-computer or acausual timeloop processor or something.
that's a good point. if the first guess point (60.000000N, 10.000000W) is a mile away from the wanted point. Then doing binary search on range say [60.001000N, 10.000000W] and [59.999000N, 10.000000W] will most likely to hit a boundary case (leap from 1 to 2 or 1 to 0). If not we then can make the search range a bit larger.
I've had Cogeco (180down/20up) in the suburbs and currently have Rogers (250down/20up) in downtown Toronto without caps. Rogers charges a bit extra for it, but no-cap plans are definitely available.

> Canada is definitely behind the US for internet access, it's even behind many (if not most) third world countries.

I completely disagree with this. Cogeco kicks the pants off of the options available in downtown SF in my experience.
Or, people are realizing that there might not be enough actual BTC to back all those MtGoxBTC.
Hangouts is also a messaging app that is meant to replace texts.
Doesn't that assume everyone has priced in the news already? I mean, it might fall another 5% by this time tomorrow and completely invalidate your thesis - having said that it seems to have recouped some of the loss already. I just think it's going to take more than a few hours to see the full effect.
Looks great! I recently wrote a clone of Threes for the JS1k 2014 contest:

http://js1k.com/2014-dragons/demo/1667

Such a great game.
I inferred from your comment that you think people who idolize Jobs should be avoided because he has strong negative personality traits/flaws/etc. I'm addressing that most people -- which include those who are famous and have achieved significant things -- have flaws.

I don't see how I'm defending Jobs. I certainly don't think he's a particularly good person, though I admire his achievements.