skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Right. The sole reason for this acquisition is to corral all the users who are no longer using Facebook as their primary messaging platform back to Facebook, or at least making it so they don't lose the revenue. Just like with Instagram, their interest is less in bolstering their own service than keeping people from going to their strongest competitors. I guess when you have billions in cash on hand you can keep people from going to your strongest competitors by making them no longer your competitors :-)
"But artificial general intelligence might work, and if it does, it will be the biggest development in technology ever."

I'd like to point interested readers to the AGI Conference series[1], the Open Cognition Project[2], and a mostly outdated (2009) but still useful list of everything AGI[3].

[1] http://agi-conf.org/

[2] http://wiki.opencog.org/w/The_Open_Cognition_Project

[3] http://linas.org/agi.html
> Meanwhile, Ruby is used primarily for web development.

What? I just started learning Ruby, and I intend to do some sys-admin tasks also. Am I going down the wrong path?

I know Homebrew is using Ruby as base language, and doing pretty fine.

Is this misleading or what?
> MtGoxBTC is being traded for actual BTC (on exchanges like https://www.bitcoinbuilder.com/)

Without creating an account, nothing on this site reveals how this works. Is this made possible by using the MtGox API and voucher codes as a backchannel?
Same goes for my alma mater. They changed it in 2007 or so and it was a GIGANTIC pain in the ass. Of course it's worth it to not have your photo, full name, and SSN on your student ID card.
Could you clarify what you mean by "doesn't support aarch32"? I can't find any clear definition of what aarch32 means, but my impression is that it's just a new name for what we call "arm", but possibly implying new instructions available on v8, and the ABI is the regular 32-bit ARM EABI. If so musl supports it just fine.
Lawyercats.com is available...surprisingly.
The media massively misrepresented that controversy. He was right to call people out on it, in my opinion.

I take issue with your suggestion that Gruber was putting his admiration of Apple over people's lives. He's not a moustache-twirling villain.
Lots, it's an entire subdiscipline of civil engineering. So by that token, maybe we can also ask how many talented people dream of becoming legislative lawyers.
Turned out to be true - they 19x'd what they would have gotten had they sold in 2012. I think everyone is missing the fact that this was 1.5 years ago - this article is proven CORRECT by today's acquisition, not wrong.
Starting companies to sell them as soon as possible is not disgraceful. Haters gonna hate.
The author has some seriously flawed reasons. "How long would you last reporting to a 28 year old like Zuckerberg?" What's at stake isn't your pride, it's the life of your company, what you've spent X number of years building, the employees that believe in you, your users that you want to serve. Who cares how old Zuck is?
"Like maybe a minimum temperature or a maximum speed..."

Max speed, sure. But minimum temperature? It's zero (Kelvin). Of course there's gonna be a minimum, this doesn't belong here.
Cause it took me a few minutes to find them, the docs for all the functions mentioned can be found at http://nacl.cr.yp.to/box.html

Also for anyone that got this far without realising, this NaCl is not NaCl the google chrome "native client".
I've been looking into using logstash similar to how it's described here http://denibertovic.com/post/docker-and-logstash-smarter-log...
If you have an infinitely powerful computer, does that also imply that you necessarily have infinite storage?
If the "doomsday" event is hyperinflation, then you would have done better to invest that $137,000 in physical gold, rather than some rural hermitage.

If the "doomsday" event is "The Great Tribulation," then you would have done better using the $137,000 doing the 1,050 commands of the New Testament: http://www.cai.org/bible-studies/1050-new-testament-commands

If the "doomsday" event is gamma ray bursts from within the Milky Way galaxy aimed straight at Earth, extraterrestrial invasion, or a massive meteorite impact, then kiss your a$$ and your $137,000 goodbye.
What I don't understand is why the App needs the info, wouldn't it make more sense to change the API so it's just a call to /users?near={co-ord} and a simple list of users is returned without any location information? Sure you could still triangulate by using fake accounts and guestimating the boundaries based on when a user is and is not returned in the list…

EDIT: Ah, just fired up tinder, and saw the "x kilometres away from you" forgot about that haha :D
What is "good"? What is "bad"? For most people, those are forms of pleasure and pain. There is no truly "good" or "bad".

Habit formation is a form of wishful thinking. You're creating a rut of the mind, and as such, become more separated from the reality at hand. Wishful thinking, at its core, is a form of separation from reality.

Normally, external conditions reinforces the habit, and so the rut of the mind gets deeper and deeper. But when external conditions change -- as they inevitably will -- you end up with a psychological dynamic described by the Five Stages of Grief. Most people's notion of "bad" are formed from when external changes forces them out of their comfortable habits. They cling to these habits and wish things would "get back to normal".

As such, there is neither "good" or "bad" habits. There are just habits, all of which keep you from adapting to change, and are just as much out of touch with reality as wishful thinking.
I'm working on one that does low-frequency trading - it did it's first automated trade this afternoon! https://github.com/nfriedly/coin-allocator/

(Although mine is running in the cryptsy exchange, not gox)
Imagine trying to tell Steve Jobs what to do

Easy, do what you want.
Of course you could just get married for life.
Yes, that's exactly how this article gained my upvote. For misclicks and link-bait, I would love to see HN add the ability to retract votes from articles. I have many "saved stories" that I'd love to remove from my list.
That theory is why a lot of people are so screwed up. It is bullshit. Emotions drive thought, not the other way around. You can observe this dynamic within yourself. You can observe it within other people. Go see it for yourself.

I have literally watched people, with this notion that thought drive emotion, attempt to talk their way through things. It never works. When it appears to work is when there is emotional acceptance -- what you call "belief".

What is even more interesting is that a lot of people are emotionally attached to this notion that thought drives emotions. It's both absurd and tragic, watching folks fixated on this notion that thought rules emotion thrash their way through life, creating misery for themselves and others and not knowing why this is all happening.
The problem with iMessage is that you don't know if your friend has an iPhone.
By definition, a prenuptial agreement only covers entering into the marriage. Future assets, especially in community property states, usually have to be specifically disclaimed by the other party in the marriage before they can be considered separate property. For example: A prenup can't specify that a house bought after marriage is separate property, but the non-owning spouse can voluntarily sign away rights to that property as a recorded instrument. This is why some deeds say "John A. Doe, Grantee, a married man as his sole and separate property." (Some states allow for property purchased with separate assets to remain separate inside the marriage but the paper trail on this better be meticulous if a divorce ever happens.)

Editorializing: Why would a spouse be no less entitled to reap the rewards generated by the other spouse's start-up? A relationship, especially a marriage, is inherently two people acting as a unit, so just because one spouse didn't sling PHP and research lambdas all night doesn't mean that either spouse's contribution is more or less valuable. If my spouse accomplished something like this, I'd be thrilled at the success and genuinely looking forward to our life together with much less time and stress investment from both of us, since that means that I was also picking up a lot more of the "home life."
Primarily != exclusively
The Eye Tribe
> Turned me down in 07

Telling the story now is an interesting historical anecdote, but you probably didn't blog or tweet about it in 2007, right?

I can't quite understand why Brian Acton was so public about the companies that turned him down. Isn't this bad for him if he's in a job search? Doesn't this send out a negative message (assuming any employer bothered to look)?
Want to start the Airbnb of X? There's an app for that.
you're not, ruby is an excellent sysadmin language. python has the edge for scientific computing, though, due to the larger base of people using it for that. also pygame is great.
I wouldn't weigh an investment in TSLA with the same metrics you'd use for mutual funds or steady large companies.

Tesla is clearly a growth company. They're creating new categories (luxury, electric vehicles) and building infrastructure around it. They've also only released 1 sedan so they've barely penetrated the market. As a growth stock, I don't see anything alarming about a company that's worth 30x its quarterly revenues. They have a visionary, intelligent CEO in Elon Musk and the image/brand of a car company that's ahead of the game. Not to mention, they make amazing products. FB is valued at 60x quarterly revenue, TWTR is valued ~140x quarterly revenue. I would much rather bet on Tesla becoming the most valuable car company in the world (at least ~$50b in mkt cap) than the insane valuations of social media companies.
Nitpick - Simplex is 20th century.

A cool 19th century algorithm is Radix Sort, though.
Does infinite energy (as infinite CPU cycles) really translate into immediate time? My physics isn't great, but I thought energy was related to mass, while entropy was related to time.
Ruby can be used for sys-admin stuff, absolutely. Look at Chef.
XMPP was designed for desktops with persistent internet connections, it has issues with a non-modified implementation on mobile.
KakaoTalk has more profit than WhatsApp per user I think. Had KakaoTalk been an American company, it would make more and might have been snapped up by someone bigger already...
> I'm not sure why you think what I said means "desirous of concluding the interview process quickly", because I didn't use most of those words and you appear to have pulled them from thin air; frankly, that's weird.

I rephrased you because, if I just quote you, there's no indication that I understand what you mean by the words. You seem to indicate that I in fact didn't. I'm going to call that a success for rephrasing. If I get you wrong, I hope that you'll tell me what you actually meant, which you didn't do here.

Let me try saying things another way. If I ask, "what does 'ready' mean?" and you reply "it means 'ready to move forward in the process'" (my emphasis), you've defined "ready" by reference to itself, which is obviously incapable of being helpful. So I did my best to determine what you might have meant. The entirety of my complaint is that, lacking domain knowledge, and faced with a job ad saying "no knowledge is necessary to apply", I was told "you're not ready to apply, come back when that's no longer the case" and then, upon asking, was not given any guidance as to how to determine whether I was or wasn't ready. So, in answering the question "am I ready to move forward in the process?", all I can do is devolve it into the question "do I want this process to go forward regardless of the outcome (which I can't predict), or would I rather remain paused?". That's purely a question of, in the words I used before, how quickly I want to conclude the process. I can't refer to any other variables or goals, because I can't evaluate those.

> If you're so incapable of self-introspection that you can't accurately judge how well you understand material without external validation [...]

Nobody can do that. Try evaluating yourself without external validation sometime. If you score e.g. a "good", ask yourself "good in terms of what?" External validation is the only thing giving any meaning at all to evaluations.
> What? I just started learning Ruby, and I intend to do some sys-admin tasks also. Am I going down the wrong path?

I don't think so. Ruby has for me replaced bash scripting along with sed, awk, and Perl. It's nice to do all these things with one consistent syntax. And be sure to check out Pry (http://pryrepl.org/)!

I'll give Python another look once v3 catches on.
It's $4B in cash, $12B in stock, $3B in restricted stock. FB's P/E is 111; normal companies are more like 20, let's pretend that FB is a growth stock and say it should be 30. That means that stock price is overpriced by a factor of 3 (and at least 2). So FB is really only paying $4B + $4B + $1B. And I'm guessing that they are only going to end up actually having to cough up 50% of those restricted stocks, so more like $8.5B. So a little under $20/user. What is the average lifetime value of a WhatsApp user? Seems like $20 is pretty, um, optimistic. But, who knows. People seem to pay for those stupid WeChat stickers, so if WhatsApp has anything like that, it could work. Also, there's the opportunity to become a "platform" and promote games and stuff through the service. That's worked fantastically for KakaoTalk, and WeChat is busy trying to copy it.

But I suspect part of it is, what is the lifetime value of a Facebook user? What is the lifetime value of a Facebook user if WhatsApp remains a competitor?
I second the group chat feature. my family had a constant group chat going on it. It works very well. I see that, and the easy way of sharing of voice, photos and videos as a big advantage over SMS.
No - unless the payout is so big that it enables Musk to go all-out with SpaceX.
> Remember when we had standards and interoperability?

And the carriers charged 20 cents per SMS [1]? Yup, I remember those days. No thanks.

[1] http://gizmodo.com/5832245/atts-new-text-plan-overcharges-yo...
This is where the article starts to show its bias. Of course ruby can do everything mentioned as well. Python has a leg up in scientific computing and stats. Ruby has a leg up in web and devops. Saying one "can do" everything, and the other "only does web" is misleading.

As the grandparent said, it really depends on your goals.
Big companies worth less than 55-employee Whatsapp
They were the first good option on Android and iOS and Blackberry when Blackberry was going down hill. In countries where BBM was strong and then started to fade, users went to WhatsApp. It used your phone number so everyone in your address book was using WhatsApp. I saw this first hand in Canada. Kik also did well but didn't gain traction like WhatsApp. Line & WeChat were/are East Asia focused. MessageMe was late to the game.
It just means they were hungry. 1B is a relatively small offer in the world of IT IPOs nowadays.
If this were an all stock deal, and the market cap had fallen by $12B (assuming $12B stock given out), that would mean the market were valuing WhatsApp at $0 as an asset.

If facebook had fallen in value by more than the purchase price, that would mean the market is saying WhatsApp has negative value, even if it had been given to facebook for free (though it could also mean a loss of faith in facebook leadership).

Any loss in market cap following the acquisition means the market is valuing the deal as having negative net value to facebook.
Some people are really bad interviewees. Forgivable because interviews are really bad at predicting fit and performance.
> What the hell was Facebook thinking?

Existential threat combined with huge non-US userbase.

What happens if Google buys WhatsApp? Or if Microsoft buys them?

Facebook has saturated the US market and is, in fact, losing people. I suspect Europe is close if not already there. So, the battle has shifted to other countries.
If an acquirer would pay $23B and the market values it at $23B then you don't make any money. Meanwhile you take the risk of holding a high flying stock. Maybe you're right, but it's a gamble.
Show HN: Ruby version/gemset manager written in Rub
Tragedy of the commons.

Anything free will be overused. FB is paying $X per user for an overused product. Once they try to monetize (ads, higher fees, user tracking), it will quickly become underused.
Looks like Tile.
I think you're right that that was his point. It wouldn't necessarily come out of their budgets, though, it could be done with debt financing on the project itself, repaid purely from the revenues from leasing access to the network to the customer facing ISPs.

I also don't think it would necessarily be used by a small subset of the constituents - it seems as though it could potentially be much cheaper than alternative high-speed arrangements, since the customer facing companies would actually have some competition. Once the initial construction debt was paid down, the govt. could likely reduce the access lease cost, which would be passed on by the competitive ISPs, further enabling access by poorer residents.

I think it would be great for the long-term economic prospects of those areas as it broadens access and makes heavy uses like remote work more viable.

Plus, a good internet connection is a much cheaper form of entertainment than many of the alternatives, including cable, so it could actually save many people money.
"1. Had they stayed independent, these founders would have overseen businesses that would have been vastly more powerful than they were then and perhaps more than they are now under new management."

Had YouTube stayed independent, it would have been crushed under the foot of the media industry's juggernaut lawsuit machine and political ties. Not to mention it was bleeding to death, with no viable business model at the time (it would take the king of advertising years to figure out how to begin to monetize YouTube properly).

"3. Selling WhatsApp to Zuckerberg in 2012 would be like Zuckerberg selling Facebook to Yahoo in 2006."

Not hardly. WhatsApp got roughly 19 times what Yahoo was willing to pay for Facebook. Not comparable scenarios. Even in 2012 it's likely they would have received net value far exceeding the 2006 Yahoo offer, accounting for the increased stock valuation.

"4. You will never have a better business idea than WhatsApp for the rest of your lives."

That's probably true for Koum and Acton, and they just received roughly $8.55 billion and $3.8 billion for their best business idea. On what scale is one going to argue they didn't just pull off a financial coup?

"5. How long would you last reporting to a 28 year old like Zuckerberg?"

$8.5 billion in pocket, this question no longer matters. Go do whatever you want a year or two from now, including buying the NY Yankees if you feel so inclined.

"8. WhatsApp has a much brighter future as an independent company than Instagram did."

Approximately 19 times brighter apparently. And?

"9. You can be the “next Facebook” – but only if you stay independent."

Know when to walk away, know when to run. The WhapsApp crew pulled off the perfect deal.
This is exactly what LuCI does on OpenWRT, except they use Lua, which is a sane language designed for embedded environments.
Maybe that's British English, like "maths" instead of "math"?
Yes. $2-3 for games for quality users, and going up significantly once there's a mobile payments solution that works.
Um. No, your eyebrow-raising idea is not apparent. Of course you don't dwell, you release. Of course you transmute, not absorb. Of course you nurture, not feed.

All of those are emotional skills. Why do you feel so surprised about this?
this was a great one, thanks for the link.
For anyone wondering about the (bad) ratings in the iOS App Store: I bought this yesterday for an iPad mini.

I think the app must use web-based resources, and their site was slammed yesterday. I could do nothing but give it my name, and then it would go to a black screen and sit there -- no feedback, no activity, for minutes. I was left thinking I had wasted my money.

Today the app loads and runs successfully. The interface is bad. Really bad. Text-overlapping-other-text-and-graphics bad.

The controls are iffy. You're supposed to tap various images but sometimes the taps are off by an inch or more.

Nevertheless, it seemed to do pretty much what it is supposed to. It concluded my first session, congratulated me, and died. I checked and it saved my progress, so there's that.

I'm not totally put out since I got to do the exercises, and it seems plausible that it might help my mediocre vision. I hope the usability, design, and load issues are fixed soon.
That's how you think a Rubyist would write Fibonacci? I think one might follow the Python "idea" but avoid defining a function . . .

fib = lambda do |n|
return n if n < 2
fib[n-1] + fib[n-2]
end

puts fib[8]
Likewise, since all computation is equivalent[1], organic chemistry itself is not necessary for intelligence and in fact could be viewed as the "hard way" to achieve it :)

[1] http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PrincipleofComputationalEquival...
IMO that is very unrubyish code.
Importantly, Python has many more libraries and terrific support for scientific, statistical, AI and math work. Also it has IPython :)
Or at least, their answer is (which is pretty biased)
> Here's a prediction: as the easy money QE party comes to an end, the stock market melts, Twitter's growth grinds to a complete halt, investors realize there's only so much time in the day and Twitter has lost the messaging space, Twitter is worth $5 to $7 billion if they're lucky.

It's not the QE money pumping up Twitter, it's a combination of tech being hot and a limited number of shared available (much of TWTR is still in lockup). If it were QE you'd see all sorts of firms with crazy valuations, but the standard blue chips are still pretty standard.
I agree with that. But I'm questioning the reasoning at the end of the story that they better not shut off the simulation, implied to be for their own sake. The observation that their higher-level reality counterparts will likely choose to shut down the simulation exactly if they do themselves, but the protagonists' choice doesn't influence that.
Congratulations, Python team! Your website is now identical to the hundreds of other bootstrap-based websites.

Moreover, the page is somewhat confusing, especially with non-obvious menus, and language that makes links seem redundant. Multiple navbars don't help, either. The page also lacks contrast, especially at the top.

I understand that javascript is generally a safe assumption, but the page should at least be readable and navigable without javascript (or webfonts). Also, it would be better if all the js were at python.org, instead of hotlinking to different domains. As it stands, the page is nowhere near as bad as some, but it's a nice touch.
There's a 5min video on youtube by TED-Ed that sums up the Flatland topic. Is really good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6kn6nXMWF0
Yes his examples are very very unrubyish, it looks like javaish ruby.
That's just security through obscurity. Seems to work for iMessage though, I've heard it's obfuscation is something incredible.
Maybe, but the hash approach seems kind of silly.
I think that one can take from a question like "should I learn Python or Ruby?" that the person asking is generally often new to programming in general. Because of this, I would highly suggest Ruby over python. While the learning curve may be higher, Ruby is more intuitive and reads often as like plain english.

Unless you are an engineer in school, diving straight into Python may not be the best option. Also, many people just learn Ruby to do Rails as well. This is shown with the infinite number of rails bootcamps popping up all across the country.

TL;DR
The majority of people asking this question are probably new in general to programming and looking to do some web programming so learn Ruby in view to Rails.