skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's that, and there's also the type of investors.

Since retail investors can trade after-hours, we can assume that the people responsible for the drop are either professionals or retail, which allows for irrational selling.

Also, the stock market is a market. So there could be institutional investors shorting bad plays from the individual investors and aggressively selling the stock (since after-hours doesn't have as many traders, it's a good bet to short until market opens tomorrow).

The only factors I personally see to determine Facebook's return on investment/share price are 1. $ per user, 2. potential user growth combining Facebook & WhatsApp, 3. time; which all seem pretty lackluster for the amount paid in the acquisition.
The opportunity cost is much larger if they miss out. It's the difference between ponying up tons of cash to stay relevant or fading into obscurity.
What Happens When You Make The Internet Share A Video Game
In the same way that spatial manipulation of an object from the boundaries defined by its legal owner is considered theft.
well, you could be. Not sure people take the expression that seriously.
I don't get the (mostly posthumous) Jobs bashing that seems to be swelling up. It's seemingly a reaction to the fete'ing he got whilst alive, and I do ended if it is the same people?

He was human - and unsurprisingly a mass of contradictions - venal and spiritual, visionary and vicious, successful and a failure.

Lets not act surprised he used strong arm tactics to get his way - and let's not get too happy accepting Palms CEO as hero in a story he is telling.
Telegam FTW!!!
You have a de facto monetary policy imposed on you whether you like it or not. It is "coercion" only in the sense that it is outside your personal control.

This can be the blind "coercion" of a computer algorithm, the unintentional "coercion" of precious metals mining, or it can be the careful determination of a council of bureaucrats and businessmen.

Removing people from the equation is an option, but it doesn't remove the market forces.
Deep-sea mining projects land in hot water
Both times that third day was weird. The convention center was already partially cleaned up and it had the feeling of somewhere to wait for a flight.
Well that didn't take long!
Price. I only just got my first contract with unlimited sms, before that it was € 0,09 (12¢) after using the few hundred that come with your plan. MMS is not included in plans and still is € 0,50 (69¢). So everything that's an image or goes to a group goes on whatsapp.
In case you're not actually trolling, here is why.

Because a change in market price reflects a change in the midpoint of opinion of people on the future value of Facebook, who are willing to put their money where their mouth is with regards to their opinion -- these are not the opinions of idle chatterboxes.

As such, stock price movement in response to news is a very valuable critique of a company's actions. A change in stock price is arguably more objective and valuable information than any random blogger or columnist whose opinion might be published here on HN.

Does that make it clear?
I didn't get to go in 2013, so I don't know if things changed then, but in 2012 the third day just seemed hastily bolted-on.

There were not as many talks on the third day, and they were the less-interesting ones. The demo pit had been completely dismantled and removed overnight after the second day's program had ended. There was a box lunch instead of a hot lunch like the first two days.

I wound up leaving halfway through day 3, instead spending the afternoon looking to explore SF a little and get a couple beers.
This old post appeared in HN the same day that python.org got redesigned. Is some kind of revenge?
Don't forget Bill Gates.
Great alternatives for outdated UX patterns
In Latin America its the standard because all the big telco companies don't offer unlimited text, so If you got a smartphone and some mb of data each month you have unlimited text, image etc. That was the killer feature, that Whatsapp manage to take advantage of that opportunity.
I don't know enough about fiber to have a very intelligent discussion about it, but from what I've heard, one of the nice things about fiber is that you can run increasing amounts of bandwidth through the same fiber once it's laid as the endpoints improve.

I would expect that the buildout could be funded by a municipal bond issue, with the repayment being handled via the revenue from the customer-facing companies that lease access to the infrastructure. I've heard of municipal networks like this being run profitably and being repaid in a reasonable timeframe (on the order of a decade or two), but unfortunately I don't know more than that.
You'd think the operators of one of the root DNS servers[1] would also have the security to prevent this sort of breach.

[1] http://d.root-servers.org/
but that's not what is happening. You are coercing someone via threats and intimidation to join you in an illegal act. don't get confused by the fact it's described with 'business sounding" words.
The Google of Russia Escalates Its War on Android
I have two additional and unrelated thoughts on this.

First, the astonishing price paid is a very tangible indictment on the management of Facebook, and Zuckerberg especially. Combine this $19 billion with the Snapchat offer and Instagram, and it's clear that Facebook is looking frighteningly like Microsoft, which is to say a behemoth of a company that seems to flat-out miss every next big thing. I can't even imagine how many more things Facebook will end up buying because they failed to build a good product themselves. If I was a shareholder (and I'm not, anymore) I would sell today and never look back. In a world where actions speak louder than words, Facebook is telling us they simply don't have the ability to create value internally.

Second, this is an absolutely perfect microcosm to describe the ever-expanding wealth inequality. I'm not saying this as a lament, just as an observation. Technology has fundamentally changed the way that wealth is created, and I believe it's the single largest cause of the wealth gap. Think about it. Thirty years ago, what would it have taken to create $19 billion of value in a new company? How many thousands of employees would it take? How many years, if not decades of hiring people, paying them, paying suppliers, providing pensions, etc? By the time that company was worth $19 billion, so many people would have been involved...that wealth would've been very spread out. Today, thanks to technology, $19 billion was created in a couple years, concentrated in just a couple dozen people. Folks, there is no escape from this. The genie is out of the bottle.
Which part was unclear?

Websites, especially those concerning technical subjects, should convey meaningful information. The "Ruby" designs are, for the most part, substantially worse at doing so. Characteristics I note include excessive whitespace, limited contrast, and oversized headings/banners.

Could the Python sites be better? Sure, but they're already doing better than Ruby at their primary task: Conveying information.
The real reason Facebook just paid almost 10% of its market cap for WhatsApp
HipChat's fatal flaw, IMHO, is publicly-accessible file downloads, even in private conversation, with no ostensible lifespan (that I've seen). While the URL for shared files might be extremely hard to guess, I can never feel comfortable not being able to predict what files someone might openly share.
if there was ever a reason for hackers to work out a way to measure the affect good coding has on the bottom line - this is it
Conversely, not pounding F5 until I get a ticket makes me feel powerless.
Agreed. But a home run for most VCs would likely be 10X+ return stories than a revenue generating machine that would mature up in 10+ years.
Yeah, I'm giving up on this until someone else weighs in. At least one of us is lacking in at least one of understanding of the issues, English language reading comprehension, and ability to write clearly, and I am running out of the patience to figure out which. Presuming, I hope correctly, that you are not simply trolling.
As a heavy Facebook user, The weakening of the average users' engagement with Facebook is palpable at this point. Maybe the number of people with a "utility Facebook account", for when they really need it, is growing but the energy of the site is clearly shrinking.

The thing is that Facebook when it started was an ideal site for those who otherwise didn't "know" the net/online-world. But that naturally changed. People became more sophisticated in their consumption and more average people transformed trollish people. Together, this clearly reduces engagement to Facebook.
Mobile has a focus problem
Making a messaging service successful requires huge amounts of time and effort. If it's so decentralized that it cannot even be acquired, how could it get built?

To be clear, I don't doubt that the technical side is very feasible. It's the user acquisition side that seems improbable except as a commercial venture.
What if they have 40 million users in ten years? And never generate a dime of serious profit in the meantime.

Remind me what AOL Messenger, MSN Messenger, ICQ, Yahoo messenger, are worth today.
I find Terrence McKenna's argument that consciousness is demonstrably entangled in the material world at a quantum mechanical, atomic level convincing. To summarize, it is known that two similar chemical compounds, differing only in the placement of a single atom on the carbon ring structure of a molecule, when administered in doses at the order of micrograms will either be psychoactive and result in a massive disruption to the human subject's baseline consciousness or be inert beyond our ability to measure an effect.
I'm sure not management material for an internet juggernaut, but couldn't Facebook have taken something like $1bn to have ten potential What's App killers with full facebook integration written and then used the other $18bn to really diversify by buying something out-of band?

Like, I don't know, maybe a steel mill or copper mine or something.
Or a way to say "hey, look how far Python has come!"
A chart that shows there's no comparing Facebook-WhatsApp with past tech deals.
Facebook’s $19 Billion WhatsApp Acquisition, Contextualized
Maybe part of it is for the data on WhatsApp users.

* "In the event that WhatsApp is acquired by or merged with a third party entity, we reserve the right to transfer or assign the information we have collected from our users as part of such merger, acquisition, sale, or other change of control." [they go on to say that they may not be able to control use of information in cases which include "reorganization"]
http://www.whatsapp.com/legal/

Still seems ridiculously expensive.
5 Biggest Legal Mistakes That Startups Make
"announce the next round of cities who’ll be getting Google Fiber by the end of 2014."

- announce which cities are chosen by the end of 2014? or those cities that will have fiber in them by the end of 2014?
You would lose the bet :-)

Keep in mind that the ball is coming straight on, and the batter must discern trajectory (rising, falling) and spin (which affects how the ball curves) and velocity quickly enough that you still have time to move the bat.

For example, a fastball and a changeup both drop at the same rate and spin at the same rate. One is coming at 100mph, the other at 75. Since the ball is heading straight for you, you must perceive speed by measuring how quickly the ball is moving through your eye focus.

Worse, you are expected to bat in an intentional direction. Meaning that you have to hit the ball on an precise spot in the sphere with an intentional amount of force. It's not enough to just swing hard. I'd guess the bat has to be in the right location with a time accuracy of less than a millisecond.

The good batters make good money for a reason.
Whatsapp and $19bn
I think the most important of those numbers is the last one, 0 marketing/pr budget. I've seen ads for viber and line on tv/newspapers etc. and the ads immediately discredited those services for me, as in, if they had enough cash to broadcast TV ads in Turkey(I live there), they were probably handing my data over to anyone for cash, probably (and quite a few of my friends thought similarly). So, for such a service, having no ads/pr might actually be more beneficial.
Why Facebook Bought WhatsApp
Loop Pay works almost everywhere by tricking credit card terminals
WhatsApp: The inside story
Yeah but seasonal implies a (yearly) cycle too.

Plants that die completelyaway at the end of each growing season are called 'Annuals' (vs. perennials), but I think that term would be too confusing to be useful ;)
I've felt this way about every Sam Altman piece that's been posted in the past week (and possibly every one I've ever read). And I feel guilty because PG speaks so highly of him. And then I feel guilty for feeling guilty.
Here in Germany, nearly everyone in my Contact list with a Smartphone got it. Even though there are relatively cheap plans for unlimited SMS available.
... I can't resist. Since when does "secret" in a security context exclude things like keys and passwords? Usually it means things like keys and passwords. You can't say "it's implicit to 'security through obscurity'" because the article was defining security through obscurity. If the audience is expected to be sufficiently unfamiliar to need that definition, they aren't going to know that there's this mystical blessing of keys as "not a part of that". Seriously, where do you work anyway?
I suspect wmf lives in a city that he might define as politically hostile :)
The lack of acknowledgement to the researcher is pretty shitty. I'd expect it will really hurt Tinder's chance of their next vulnerability being responsibly disclosed.
is that suppose to be funny or at least coherent?
But it in no way ensures they stay relevant. It is literally just blindly flailing around buying anything that gets a lot of users out of fear and having no idea how to maintain their position.
Why don't we just call Mt.Gox what it is, a bucket shop?
Why is that a big jump? I'm not saying it will be easy or quick. It does imply that getting from a reptile-level intelligence to a human-level intelligence was a natural process and something that can be reverse engineered.
This would never happen. The market for programmers and athletes are wildly different (winner take all markets).
It is possible to admire someone without thinking they're flawless; or, perhaps, to admire certain traits/aspects of someone without admiring them altogether.

Michael Jordan was the greatest athlete of his time but an absolute asshole.

Martin Luther King had an affair (multiple? I forget.)

Musicians in general seem like pretty terrible people, with many notable exceptions.
but hey, i will get a $5000 bonus if i just sign this paper. What harm can it do?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7251805
True, but that generally isn't the stance that employers take when negotiating salaries - that they need to pay enough for people to feel ownership.

'You have the ability to back out of the deal if it isn't working for you' is a cop out for any failing that a corporation may have. It is true but also leads to no new understanding.
I just did that. iPad here, click target is below 44px.
They have a P/E of ~100. They'd need to grow earnings 7x to reach a typical P/E of ~15.

Not saying it's impossible, but they're already very large. They have as many users as they're going to get (who isn't on there now?) so they need to earn 7x the income from the existing base.
Runaway pulsar spews 37-light-year-long trail in space
Pleasant neckbeard installer for docker on Ubuntu LTS server 12.04.4 amd64
Remember when we had standards and interoperability?

Why would messaging be a winner-take-all market? I mean, it's just pushing around a bunch of bytes. Shouldn't be too difficult to specify.
Also I noticed these Tata "WhatsApp data packs"; so they did partnerships directly with mobile providers. 30m actives in India.
Well , I did have to pay once. Your watsapp just stops syncing until you pay via Play.
How to 'Cure' a Nazi
I think it has to do with the crowd each language tends to attract.

One of the big draws for Python is NumPy and SciPy, so Python tends to attract more of the scientific/statistical community. They're more concerned about data and analysis than aesthetics.

Rails unarguably attracted a vast number of web designers (many trend-oriented, but the point stands) to Ruby by offering a low-impact way to learn some server-side dev. As a result, many of the people who write Ruby (especially on the web) are more design-oriented -- so they trend towards better aesthetics.

This is not a question of capability, nor of libraries, but of community. The almost-tragic part of this article is that it overlooks the fact that the design differences in the pages it links are implemented neither in python nor in ruby, but in HTML and CSS.
Misleading title.
- It trains to respond fastly
I notice a difference: facebook acquires other social networks and seems to be enough big to sustain that.

What if they have 40 million users in ten years? And never generate a dime of serious profit in the meantime.

Then it would be a net loss. But 3B loss for a possible 1 billion customers sustainable business is not huge.
Absolutely. A newborn has all the "programming" necessary for intelligence, but isn't really intelligent until its parents teach it how to be human, and it grows up. How long might an AI take to grow up and what will its parents teach it?
> Hundreds of millions of people sharing rich media in realtime on non-FB services is a genuine threat.

Yup, I agree entirely. This wasn't about getting new users, it was about getting the content to run across their services.
Also SMS is effectively broken. SMS was a useful for the non-smart phone crowd. Twitter initially was a way to get global free status updates via SMS. Now it has reversed.
He lead the design of tons of groundbreaking products.

He was also a world class grudge bearing short tempered vindictive jerk.
Yep, exactly. There are a number of techniques that take advantage of this. Most notable are bump mapping and normal mapping.
> the uglyness makes sites hard to navigate and hard to use

No, ease-of-use and beauty are different things, though often conflated in rants.

I've never used any of those sites so I cannot speak to that aspect, but as far as beauty is concerned in a lot of the examples the ruby site looks more trendy, possibly because they are newer, because python has been around for a bit longer?

Site-wide redesigns are rare for content-focused technical sites, especially volunteer-based open-source projects.
The individual UI components look fine, but I agree it's a bit too crowded. Though to be quite honest I don't care how the site looks, Python is awesome regardless.
Agree, my previous comment was a misunderstanding of your view point , since i didn't understand what was this "right" "left" and "crap" that you were talking about.
EP77 – Getting regular help with your WordPress site – Feb 17 2014
>Why is their stock overvalued?

Because delusional people still didn't learn their lesson from the first bubble.

>Do you have any evidence of this

Their P/E is 112. That's the very definition of overvalued. The price of their stock makes the company worth far more than they earn. If you purchased facebook, it would take you 112 years to break even on that "investment" at their current earning rate.
Huh, you're right. I could have sworn it was taken out in favor of '.format'; I wonder where I got that idea from...?
Well, it supports S390 and IA64. That shows you in which decade much of its development happened.
I don't know, but they have your phone number. In the UK at least that can be done with a premium SMS.
how do people feel about mobile networks? In a lot of locations the speeds are getting as good as or better than broadband. They're cost ineffective right now for anything but short term tethering but that problem could be solved in 2 - 4 years. I just wonder if laying down fiber house to house is going to seem outdated in 5 years or so for anyone except the hard core work at home dev.
It has to do with the leases. If you just sell the car, then you record revenue in the amount of the sale * as soon as the buyer takes possession (typically this is a dealer, and the dealer takes possession when the car leaves the factory gate).

Since Tesla is doing their own lease transactions with a guaranteed repurchase price, the GAAP rules state the lease payments must be treated similar to rental income.

In the long term, it will balance out, but Tesla is providing non-GAAP accounting because changes to the lease/buy-outright mix will cause massive swings to the GAAP numbers, but that isn't really representative of the underling health of the company. The non-GAAP numbers basically assume all cars are bought outright.

* less expected warranty cost.
That depends. At ProPublica we've done a bunch of visualizations with canvas and SVG in the past, and they are powerful tools. However, as part of our investigation into Hurricane Sandy flooding we knew we wanted to make a 3D visualization of NYC of show the storm surge:

http://projects.propublica.org/nyc-flood/

If your data is inherently 3 dimensional I'd say it is worth the effort to dive in, but the majority of visualizations that we do are charts and plots which don't really need to be 3D.
People really need to stop consulting mtgox for BTC prices. I still hear it's "the largest exchange" on the news from time to time, which is equally stupid, as it hasn't been that in a long time. It's a poorly-run, irrelevant exchange, and I feel sorry for the folks with money trapped there.
The Inside Story Of How Facebook Bought WhatsApp For $19 Billion
Here's Why .. http://vmavalankar.svbtle.com/why-facebook-bought-whatsapp
Well that way is kinda a revenge, is a more subtle way of saying "hey, look at python know, in your face!".
I think the distinction GP is trying to make is in this sentence:

> he was clearly also a deeply unethical business leader not to be emulated

MLK's affair has nothing to do with his contributions to the civil rights movement, the latter being the reason that (some) people admire him.

But GP is claiming that the very accomplishment for which (some) people admire Steve Jobs (his success) was obtained via unethical means that should not be admired.
I realize this is old, but I can't help but feel that comparing the personal homepages of the creators of two web frameworks and suggesting that the difference in design should have a say in which language it's best to pick borders on trolling…
If the only goal is an 'artificial' consciousness, it might be more prudent to consider a functional definition of what consciousness is and try to build that. We didn't make computers by modeling how individual neurons perform mathematical calculations.

On the other hand, if you want to go the biological route, there's some awesome work to be done. If I were to study consciousness, here's the question I would ask: how do we separate our selves from our surroundings? Patients with brain-machine interfaces (like moving a mouse cursor) start by thinking about moving their arms around. Then they apparently report that they gradually just feel that the interface is another body part. So if it's set up to change the TV channel, they just imagine that they have a channel-changing organ.

So maybe you want to build a system that can identify what is a part of itself versus what is not, and it's not just a fixed list. So what does that data structure look like? How is it defined, queried, and updated? Defined by what you can 'influence?' So gradated based on my influence? These aren't just broad philosophical questions, they're more specific and actionable.

That's just one possible angle, but it's different than, say, machine learning paradigms where you want to build a machine that can do pattern classification (which the brain undoubtedly does). There are probably other routes as well.
Here's why .. http://vmavalankar.svbtle.com/why-facebook-bought-whatsapp