skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"even when there were better offers from domain flippers during the time"

It's quite common in the domain business to claim that you have offers that you have turned down. I would take that with a grain of salt. By the way while it is possible that the seller was telling the truth I have been in this business for a long long time. Most likely it was merely posturing. And for the record nobody flips domains quickly. It can take years and years.

(Also I strongly agree with the luck assessment..)
IdeaKwivr – The Presenter's Toolkit
Why SV Tech Wunderkinds Will Only Have 1 Good Business Idea in Entire Lives
>> Conversely, not pounding F5 until I get a ticket makes me feel powerless.

Actually, last year they implemented some kind of IP-based persistence for each potential attendee: you could try to get on queue for a ticket on your smartphone or laptop and every time you access the timer did a reset.
It's about the user's contact graphs and making the connections stronger. They're buying user's phone books.
And with frivolous awk formatting:

Arizona Phoenix
Scottsdale
Tempe

California San Jose
Santa Clara
Sunnyvale
Mountain View
Palo Alto

Georgia Atlanta
Avondale Estates
Brookhaven
College Park
Decatur
East Point
Hapeville
Sandy Springs
Smyrna

North Carolina Charlotte
Carrboro
Cary
Chapel Hill
Durham
Garner
Morrisville
Raleigh

Oregon Portland
Beaverton
Hillsboro
Gresham
Lake Oswego
Tigard

Tennessee Nashville-Davidson

Texas San Antonio

Utah Salt Lake City

cat jader \
| sed 's/ - /\t/g; s/, /\n\t/g' \
| awk -F'\t' '{ printf "%-18s%s\n", $1, $2 }'
Texting is a replacement for short phone conversations. Email was (and still is) a replacement for memorandums. Nobody ever cared if their phone conversations were persistent, and so texts are actually an upgrade from that.
Is that while a call is in progress? That sounds like what happens when a cell phone that is not in use, transfers from switch to switch like you describe.

Or the instructor I had taught us outdated information.
"the man turned down 6 figure offers"

I'm in this business. It's quite common to claim things like that. And being offered a sum of money and actually closing a deal are two different things anyway.

That said they did get a good number on the domain and it is possible that the seller did get offers for 6 figures. But the fact that he said that really means nothing as there is no way to verify that. It's a negotiating technique.
Daredevils scale 128-floor Shanghai Tower without ropes
... and please tell me it's because they didn't like his answer to why manhole covers are round.
Thyself
my site url
Facebook’s WhatsApp Acquisition Leaves Snapchat Hanging
That's too bad. Instead of talking to Apple about licensing the reality distortion field generator, he should have been talking to Google about licensing their self-drive software.
>let the market sift out the successful founders

Sure, of course that's exactly what they're doing.

But just giving up on being able to identify these sorts of people when there's tens of billions of dollars at stake seems like an irresponsible business decision.

At these acquisition prices, it's worth putting a great deal of effort and money into alternative processes.
Spiritual
spiritual
Yeah because with the engineer crunch and all, there clearly just aren't quality folks out there. :-\
Getting the Most out of Knockout.js Computed Observables
Steam Greenlight gets death sentence
Aereo loses copyright fight, gets banned in 6 states
>> 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.

Well, I'm not completely sure if it is that easy. Last year they had a first queue to get a ticket which did reset every time you opened a tab in your browser or entering via another device. After that, you had another queue to access your personal data, and finally you needed to use Checkout for buying the ticket. Not sure if they're going to do the same, but I'd love to hear some kind of programming challenges to get yours.
I'm curious what you mean by wealth creating work? I think you have thought about this deeply. So, if I code as an employee, that is not wealth creating (for me). Is working for yourself always wealth creating (or at least, an attempt at it)?
I came from a Python background, due to some hardcore Django experience at a co-op job I got, and I found learning Ruby (Rails too) to be a breeze. Syntax and structure-wise, the two are pretty similar. I thought Python had some tricks up its sleeve, but man, the one-liners you can write in Ruby are killer.

At the end of the day, programming logic is all the same. If you understand how an algorithm works and have a solid knowledge of at least one language, you're all set.
i had the following, icq, msn zone, msn messenger (live, hotmail.....:-), aim, irc, meebo, y!messenger, sms, blackmerry messenger, gtalk/hangout, facebook messages, twitters dms. so far I'm resisting whatsapp, viber...

I'm curious what the future will bring.
>>It's gonna be one tough mission for FB to convince WhatsApp users they're not gonna be playing around with their data.

99% of the WhatsApp users won't even know FB acquired WhatsApp. The half of remaining 1% don't really care about their data.
MonkeyBrains requires LoS to any one of their radios, which aren't all located on Sutro. Permission shouldn't be a problem if the landlord is OK with tenants' satellite dishes on the roof. Even then, you can install any communications antenna (within reason) on areas you control in your lease (e.g. a balcony) thanks to OTARD [1]

[1] http://www.fcc.gov/guides/over-air-reception-devices-rule
I'm not claiming that life on Mars would ever be easier than life on Earth. But there are plenty of ways in which nasty things could happen on Earth that the population here is simply not prepared for. A major asteroid impact or supervolcano eruption could cause terrible weather for years (even if we don't go all the way to the "atmosphere is a pizza oven" point), and it would be awfully tough to keep feeding our cities. At that point, most industry collapses, and we're all interdependent enough that the ripple effects could wipe out the vast majority of the human population, or even all of it.

Having a self-sufficient population on (say) Mars would make it likely that some portion of human civilization would survive such a disaster. I guess you might argue that we could achieve much of the same effect by using the same technologies to establish self-sufficient populations in safe(r) locations right here on Earth: underground or deep underwater, for example. But those would still be more affected by local disasters than a colony off-planet would be, and I feel like it would be harder to recruit people to live there (and harder to guarantee that they were truly self-sufficient). As you say, Mars would attract the adventurous. The Underground Civilization Vault would just attract the astoundingly paranoid.
Wow I didn't know you could search apps too, it appears you can see all apps someone uses "Apps used by <name>". I guess that could avoid the awkward moment on dates... "Hey do you like Candy Crush?"
Indeed. There are plenty from a lot of countries, even to places where there are not Google offices there.
Hardly. There are way too many engineers fitting this description (and ones that don't) that apply to big companies than those companies can hire. Also, the hiring is done by people so it's bound to be imperfect like anything human. This is just marketing ploy. "We only try to hire the best" is the best anyone could really claim, however even that would be inaccurate as many of the best engineers are likely to not apply (already working, different area, don't want to put up with the interview, don't want to work for said company etc.).
There is a transcript on this page http://hedgeaccording.ly/2014/02/elon-musk-to-bloombergtv-we...
MeeGo was the merge of Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo.
You're aware Jan, the CEO and other founder, is a Ukrainian immigrant, right?
Just goes to prove that being rejected is not the end of the world.
Next up: https://www.djangoproject.com/
Interesting speculation. I can't say whether it was related in my case - certainly it wasn't first-order (discussions I am very vaguely recalling revolved around satellites, but it was at least a decade and a half ago), but it could easily have been a cause of the meme in the first place.

I do recall someone explicitly stating that radiation is a poor means of losing heat compared to convection and conduction - which seems to just be wrong.
China Is Africa's New Colonial Overlord
Not taking 19 billion would have been a truly foolish business decision. I assume this link was posted to imply this is a disgrace, but he can hardly be faulted for building something so successful that it is a target ft acquisition. Also this wasn't just a quick sale, it's great for his team and a big step for him since he'll be joining Facebook's board.
What version of Django is this using?

The fact that the whole site is on github is fantastic. Incredible resource for learning Django development.
The perfect combo: Intellectual and addicting!
The autopilot discussion at the end was more interesting than the Apple part. Side note: Betty Liu looks stoned.
That's true, I don't know what the goal of an AI will be. But if it does anything at all, it's more likely to be indifferent to humans than compatible with our goals. An AI programmed to solve a difficult optimization problem might convert the entire mass of the solar system into a giant computer. An AI programmed for self-preservation would try to destroy every tiny possible threat to it's existence, and store as much energy as possible to try to stave off heat-death.
Yeah, deviantart had that problem at some point as well (if you gave deviantart your position).
> This isn't all that unusual. Most people realize that hiring processes are really random. In some ways just hiring anyone who applies, firing them after 90 days if they don't work out, and keeping track of who has been through once is probably a better system overall.

"EMPLOYERS: avoid employing unlucky people by immediately tossing half the CVs in the bin" - Viz top tip.
To sell it to others a little more than you did: Folks, if you like that story you may well like Greg Egan's novel 'Permutation City'.
Apple question is at 6:24
Who makes the decision about data retention in these cases? Do they plan with breaches in mind? Can anyone who works in that position shed some light on this?

Last spring I received a notice in the mail from a university I had been accepted to four years ago, but did not attend, that my personal information was exposed in a data breach just like this one. The free year of credit monitoring isn't comforting. Why on earth is sensitive information like that kept? The likelihood of people being affected just goes up.
Putting cabinets on sidewalks still seems like a very minor point and still part of the "People United Against Everything" syndrome affecting so much of America. Maybe U-Verse is not that much faster, but faster is still important!

If Sonic / Monkeybrains can deliver 1gbps, all the better.
Sonic.net leases the lines from AT&T. 40mbps as far as I remember is a bonded ADSL+ service requiring two phone lines. Even then 20mbps is a theoretical maximum which falls off the further you are from Sonic's DSLAM. The U-Verse boxes brings the DSLAM much closer. In my apartment's case, I can only get 5mbps from Sonic.net while AT&T is able to deliver over 20mbps.
Relevant: Why we don't sell ads : Whatsapp (2012)
http://blog.whatsapp.com/index.php/2012/06/why-we-dont-sell-...
I think they don't charge countries that don't support payment on app store
Why would a university ask for an SSN? What use would a university make of the ssn?
Mixpanel and it's free! https://mixpanel.com/
The second line should read.

colligan (Palm CEO): thanks steve, but no thanks. also, sure that's not legal.
Yes, things are perfect now. Don't change anything!
Knocked offline by DDoS, game site promises $13,000 for perps’ conviction
Is NPM worth $2.6MM?
Berkeley Restaurant Health Inspection Visualization
Fine! If you guys won't hire me I'll go out and start my own world dominating business you'll want to buy and then you'll have to.

See you in a few years suckers!
Elastic Load Balancing – Perfect Forward Secrecy and more new security features
Seems more like a proposed partial decoding. And certainly nt the first.
> If you base the commission on the discount negotiated off the list price of a home, you may push the Realtor into low balling offers and not closing deals [...].

That's not too bad an incentive, because all other incentives lead to them closing more often than you'd like.
Timing with them also can matter. Their sales people have quotas and goals for the month. You may get a better price towards the end of the month vs the beginning.
And on the other side of the coin you have my folks in China who all use WeChat for everything. In fact, I was much more familiar with WeChat than WhatApp.
That's the American housing market, I believe.
>Django==1.5.4

According to the requirements.txt (https://github.com/python/pythondotorg/blob/master/requireme...)
Yea, and MIMO is should be not only beamforming (which, best case scenario, gives you one strong channel); but it uses multipath to create essentially two channels at the same frequency.
Or rather, all creditors?
A dipole is not directional? The radiation pattern of a resonant dipole consists of toroidal lobes normal the to axis of the dipole with nulls at the axis of the dipole.

Source: I do NEC simulations of my antennas for amateur radio.
Can't create a new account from the login screen.
Yes, exactly. It's like a sneaky way of asking if physics is deterministic, alluding to the paradoxical relation between determinism and free will.
Only the first few engineers get that kind of equity nowadays.
> We can only evaluate the price based on the business they have, not imaginary alternate revenue streams.

I would really like to agree, but given recent valuations that doesn't seem to be the case does it?
I'm always late to adopt things.

But the issue is if everyone else is on a system, the only way to sanely communicate with them is to join that system.

I had to join FB and Orkut for the same reasons.
I think that would be an incorrect way of reading it. At his level, he would be negotiating executive responsibility and a huge salary. I'm sure any of these companies would love to have had him as a "senior engineer".
There are lots and lots existential crises that could befall mankind. To avoid having our eggs in one basket it is best to colonize other planets. (of course there are other reasons for colonization).

Short list of extinction events: global nuclear war, major asteroid hit, deadly disease that can't be contained, skynet like scenarios if AI turns out to be possible, global warming making us go Venus like etc etc.

The chance of each of these events is very small (except probably the last one which many would say is almost certain), but why would you not hedge your bets? When colonization would be so cool - the final frontier after all.
So, time to buy.
Git is a Directed Acyclic Graph
It did use Newton's method, and the cool part was that with a carefully-chosen initial value, you only had to run 1 iteration to get a reasonably good result.
Vegemite #ScavHunt2014
Yea the novelty is essentially that he's (allegedly) managed to make MIMO work with "non-local" antennas, which is really tricky in practice due to the sub-nanosecond phase synchronization required.
Yes. It's short for "Tesla's earnings beat expectations in Q4"
What’s more effective: Long or short landing pages?
I think it would be awesome if the main page had an online interpreter so that a visitor can run the examples in the code slider. Also, I noticed that the project repo has a Procfile, however it starts the Django development server. Do you use Heroku for development testing or production?

Nice work and most definitely a refreshing change.
I'm in Ecuador and most young people (which is a lot here, the average age is 26) use a combination of Whatsapp, FB and SMS. Ex-pats avoid SMS as they are usually on pay-as-you-go plans on $20 phones.
It can't be like this forever, as the network effect leans towards a single messaging solution, the carriers will lose their hold on SMS as a revenue stream. But this will depend heavily on universal Internet access.
that was fast.

I was going to do it myself but ~24 hours later here we are :P

thank you internets!
They did no marketing. $0
Fascinating.

Clearly Aereo could sell antennas that people install. And they could also install those antennas. Presumably they could rent the antenna and the cable to them instead of selling it. So at what point does it cross the line into a service that is illegal? When they use a signal booster? When they convert it to a digital signal? When my neighbor signs up too and they use a common cable along the way?

I suspect the real problem is that the tech has just changed too much; at some point original intent stops making sense when the circumstances change enough. If we had a well-run legislative branch, presumably they would have noticed this problem a few years back and patched it. Or they would have delegated the problem to a regulator whose job it was to keep on top of things. But that's not the world we live in.
how are you going to create a generative process that seriously engages how and where the biases emerge?

E. T. Jaynes would have said that you do this using your knowledge of the physics of coins and coin flipping. One of the examples he uses in his book Probability Theory: The Logic of Science is a robotic coin-flipper that can control the process so as to always make the coin land on the same side, i.e., the "bias" is in the flipping process, not in the coin itself. If you don't know anything about the flipping process or the relevant physics, then you have no way of constructing any hypotheses about what sort of generative process might be involved.

It is far easier to just say "empirically, biases seem to be distributed like so."

This corresponds to the case where you don't know anything about the underlying physics; in Bayesian terms, you are assuming a maximum entropy prior with a constraint--the constraint being the distribution observed in the flips so far. But if you do know something about the underlying physics--for example, if you know the coin is being flipped by a robotic flipper with such-and-such design--you might be able to come up with a much better prior using that knowledge. I'm not sure whether that sort of thing is included in the frequentist's concept of a "generative model".
Think about it. It's not about cable internet getting faster. It's about rent seeking monopoly. Once all their subscribers are belong to you, there is no reason to advance any further. Just erect legislative barriers to progress and charge people to your heart's content. Read Tim Wu's the Master Switch. Communications companies have been doing this since the telegraph 160 years ago.
Ask HN: Do you Consider Life to be Futile
I Have no Formal Background in Philosophy. All I've Learned is from Internet and Books such as The Stranger(Camus),Sophie's World(Jostein Gaarder.) etc.
It would be really great If you can give Elegant Arguments for either case .(And please don't bring uncertain entities(like God) or concepts).Thanks.
My point was more that he was here, is good enough to get past all of the phone screens, probably did pretty well in person, but was passed over. My thinking is more that large companies with many open positions might want to consider the person for another position at least.
Here's the terrifying thing; it probably wouldn't take a hundred years or our trust for this to happen. This is making some strong assumptions, but the first AI could probably improve itself. Making better AIs that make better AIs and so on. Very rapidly (possibly only hours, days, weeks) it could become much much smarter than humans. If that happens, than we don't know what's possible, but it could probably do a lot of things we consider impossible. Like hack computer networks trivially and spread itself through the entire internet. Solve the protein folding problem and design working nanotech.

Within a week it could pay/blackmail/manipulate some humans somewhere into developing some crude self-replicating robots or nanotech. Then almost immediately afterwards it consumes the entire Earth in a swarm of rapidly self-replicating nanobots.

...or something. How should I know what a mind literally millions of times more intelligent than me would do. It's like predicting the exact next move a chessmaster will make. I don't know, but I'm confident they'd beat me quickly.

The goal, of course, is to make an AI which won't do this. If the AI decides to terminate the human race, we've already failed making it friendly and it obviously doesn't share our goals and values. But what are our goals and values? I don't know if anyone can answer that. I'm not sure if there is a satisfactory answer.
And they only have 55 employees...
What is WhatsApp? I saw the name somewhere before, maybe on HN, but who are they that they can command a price in the billions? Isn't it a messaging app? Why isn't Pidgin worth $16 Billion?
All the sudden I'm super super happy I've been collecting heap analytics all this time! Huge update guys! Great job!
You bet this is just like interferometry -- astronomers those days can actually perform it with thousands of miles of separation. Although they're not really forced into the economies required here.
How is that working out now? From my vantage point, Apple is standing still.
+1 for having the big picture
Thanks! The relevant snippet:

LIU: [...] Is there any truth to a possible partnership, merger with Apple?

MUSK: Well of course it’s – if – if – if one or more companies had approached us last year about such things, there’s no way we could really comment on that.

LIU: Well did you have a conversation with Apple?

MUSK: We had conversations with Apple. I can’t comment on whether those revolved around any kind of acquisition.

LIU: Are you for sale? If there was a right price, are you for sale?

MUSK: I think that’s very unlikely [...]
I think this one will be the turning point for Facebook, remember that M & A in the corporate world have history of senseless and expensive moves that end up bankrupting the company who buy it, $40 per user is an extremely risky bet when Facebook themselves can't even monetize it's own userbase. This appears to be a road to become as big as possible so that you can't possibly appear to fail when faced with companies like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo who are after profitability aligned with their own products.
Clean, Modern Objective-C
Well, do you really think a regular person will care a lot about storing data? Ok, maybe after Snowden's leaks they will give a second thought about sharing intimate pictures but other than that... For us, HNers, it's hard to understand 'a regular person' because we are far from.

Speaking of reasons, I would say doing one thing and doing it well.

After FB has invested all that money, their messenger app is still behind. Sync issue was a big one. Up until recently, FB messages wouldn't reach my phone or they would reach hours after being sent. And I don't live in a forest in Africa.

Second, I find the UX poor. It's hard to point out but using e.g. WhatsApp just feels more... natural. Don't know why.

Also, I think the fact that your phone book is the first class citizen is a big one. You don't need to add, confirm anything. It's just already there. And that makes a perfect sense. If you have a phone book with all the contacts, why would you need a new list of contacts.

Basically, WhatsApp is just SMS on steroids. Taking a proven technology and improving it. That's also innovation.