skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Plus, if FB sold Instagram to someone else (like the public) today, they'd make a massive return on 1 billion dollars. Massive.
In comparison, the Airbus A380 cost $11bn to develop. Is this really wise capital allocation by the street? Imagine what valuable technology could be built with this money. I for one, sold my stock in facebook just now.
>Arguable, but then what makes keys and passwords "not a part of the implementation"?

They are part of the implementation of a network, but the issues involving passwords and cryptographic keys are so complex that they generally aren't lumped into a conversation about security through obscurity. I made the statement in response to your claim that someone obtaining your SSH key would render SSH an example of security through obscurity, if my definition and the author's definition were used. With that line of thinking, the entire cryptography industry is merely security through obscurity and we should just give up. In practice, cryptographic technologies aren't considered to be security through obscurity unless the technologies are provably broken to a point where only an idiot would rely on them (such as WEP or LANMAN). As a caveat to this, when a cryptographic algorithm is hidden from the public in order to remain unbroken, it does become an example of security through obscurity. I just object to the idea that this is the only meaning to the phrase.

> I object to SSID as example of "security through obscurity" because I think it doesn't get at the core of what's wrong with security through obscurity and it has other far more glaring issues - so someone can fully grok that keeping SSID secret is not worthwhile and see "why" but without that "why" generalizing to (say) the company saying "We use our own proprietary cryptosystem. We can't show anyone the algorithm; it's more secure that way!"

The issue we began with was that you stated that it was not an example of security through obscurity at all. That was an incorrect statement and it still is. If you now want to argue that its not the best example, I would agree with you.

As an introductory example it does a good job of explaining the concept to a layperson or even a technical person that's still a bit inexperienced. Could you find a better example to give to a room full of newbies? Probably, but that wasn't the issue we disagreed on.

Its also important to note, that in a room full of security experts, you would be able to delve into the more complex aspects of the issue without losing the audience, so of course the example would be different.
It is not universally believed that intelligence is ineffable. The most cursory Googling turns up lots of serviceable definitions articulated by smart people. Unfortunately, it is just complex enough to let people argue about it forever.
Exactly, Europe is an inverse of the US when it comes to SMS and data prices.
This is a messy, tricky subject, with many exceptions to these simplistic rules... but I think its mostly emotion->belief.

Our primal reptilian brain reacts to things faster than our conscious brain does.

People (almost always) choose/rationalize their beliefs by the emotions they get from them.

Smokers believe it will kill them, but their emotions over ride the belief, with the new belief that "I like it"

Religious people "believe" because:
parent approval - good feeling
heaven - good feeling
rejecting belief -> ostracism - bad feeling

How many people actually "believe" they are going to hell?
No one ... because it unimaginably bad to entertain the idea for a second.

Try to imagine youve got amnesia and your belief system is wiped... do you stop feeling emotion? (you might if you dont recognize your wife etc... but you will soon believe she is your wife by the emotions you get from her)

Try to imagine you have no emotion except a baseline dull neutrality.. how does this effect your beliefs?
(youd stop believing in anything because theres no reward/punishment to, you'd become ambivalent to everything)
Yeah, at a minimum they should have been able to lower the price by threatening to make the exact WhatsApp functionality a subset of Facebook.

(A page out of Microsoft's play book.)

Edit: The Facebook Messenger has the features of WhatsApp already?! News to me, so you have a point re FB advertisement. :-)
What does WhatsApp offer that regular old text messages don't?

Is it just a price thing?

I can group chat, send images, and send video with everyone, even people with dumbphones just fine using text messages (MMS).
Off topic but I posted this yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7261606). I didn't think you could repost articles (or at least it hasn't let me do it in the past.)
"Deep Learning" is not itself a candidate for anything, because it's not any single algorithm, but a category of approaches.

Deep Learning generally refers to machine learning algorithms that deal with stacking multiple layers of simpler functions to enable more complicated functions, and optimizing all the parameters to best fit your training set and generalize to new samples (the hard part). Though it usually refers to neural networks, I dont think there's any reason it doesn't also apply to other layered approaches as long as there's a relatively unified learning algorithm applied across the whole system.

There are clearly many different deep learning algorithms, even if you just count the permutations of tricks you can choose from to improve layered NN generalization. Though to be fair I think very good progress is being made towards developing "better" algorithms in the sense that new ones (e.g. RBM pretraining + dropout) usual perform better than than older algorithms, no matter what data you use it on (now network architecture is another matter entirely).
Disney is valued at $103B. That includes ESPN, parks, cruises, Star wars, movies, merchandise, etc etc etc. So how's What's app is 1/5th of it?
Do you think public shaming like that is going to work?
This is what HN is for! Not articles about Steve Jobs threatening Palm execs. Also, don't forget to press 'g'.
how on earth do they charge it if you don't have a credit card associated with your play account? Because I've used whatsapp for well over a year and can't figure out how they'd charge me.
$12bn of it is stock (as is the employee grant) so in fairness they're paying prices inflated by optimism about retaining and monetizing social network users mainly with currency inflated by optimism about retaining and monetizing social network users.
No, you have taken a "stick my head in the sand and pretend the last 30 years of progress didn't happen" and repeating it without understanding. I do web development in haskell. I have thousands of concurrent connections to a single process, which is using 32 cores without problems. There has not been a single race condition, deadlock, mutex bottleneck, etc, etc. Just because you are happy with an absurdly primitive language, doesn't mean those of us in the 21st century are ignorant.
Scale matters. $400M vs $16B.

How much of that $400M price was set based on $-per-user?

On top of that, this was back in the first bubble, and we saw how that went.
From what I can tell: You just lay it on your phone and it "just works". That is, you use phone numbers and it sorta places SMS. No accounts to create or sign into, no contacts to add, etc.
> Practically speaking, you typically run pgbouncer on the same box as postgres.

I've done this, long-term, in production. This is not how PGbouncer is designed to be used, and it causes serious problems under load. (I am still doing this, but I have it on my todo list to remove this glitch from my architecture, as it caused my entire site infrastructure to fail once during a launch.) Put simply: PGbouncer is single-threaded; it is not difficult to end up in situations where the one core PGbouncer is running on to be at 100% while the remaining cores (in my case, seven) running PostgreSQL are having no issue with the traffic.
Someone should make:

http://canyouwithdrawfrommtgox.com ....and just have a giant font "YES" or "NO".
>Also, I wonder if anyone has used bots to perform HFT using bitcoin in the same manner that was used on traditional stock exchanges.

Kind of:

https://github.com/maxme/bitcoin-arbitrage

I'm not a Bitcoin expert but I believe the problem is that moving money between exchanges takes quite some time and that reduces the volume that can be traded.
We probably can't. Unless it's an extremely fast algorithm, we don't have the processing power to make it run faster than our brain.

We'll can in a couple of decades, probably. But not now.
I know the year before last the tickets were transferable if you claimed you couldn't attend, but they weren't this past Google IO. Not that people don't register and then just sell the badge or share it anyway.
Because the title on HN is "AI", which makes it a small click target [1], prone to accidental upvotes.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts's_law
WhatsApp has no serious revenue, the valuation is similar to the dotcom bubble in financial terms.

Companies in 1998/99 weren't lacking in users. ICQ was purchased for $400 million in mid 1998, and had over 80 million users a year later (over 100 million by 2001). It too was run by a thin team, of just 70 people total (quite the accomplishment considering the technology of the time).
It makes not receiving a ticket feel less insulting.

1) No feeling of "I missed the 2 minute window"

2) No feeling of "I couldn't buy it because your system was down"

I mean it still sucks for people that can't make it, but want to go, but at least everyone at least gets a chance this way.
They charge $1/year with the first year free. Last year they had ~250M users and today they have 450M. So, about 50% (or 40% or 20%) of their user base is paying $1/year. So, their annual revenue is $90M - $225M depending on the assumption. Even with a $1M/employee burn rate, their op ex is <$50M. Hence, they were profitable.

Another data point on their finances - The only external funding they've taken is $8M from Sequoia in 2011. It's unlikely that that could last them till now with 32 employees.
Not that alone. Here in the UK SMS is often unlimited. People still prefer to use Whatsapp. I and most of my friends have virtually stopped using SMS.

Another advantage are international SMS. Again more relevant for say Europeans than for Americans.
If you want a real quick tour of different programming languages I would instead recommend.

http://learnxinyminutes.com/
http://mashable.com/2013/07/10/hemlis/

NSA proof messaging app from the co-founder of the pirate bay. The website says they will open source it, however it only runs on their infrastructure.
Microsoft also paid $8.5 billion for 663 million Skype users in 2011, which works out to $12.82/user.
Startups in Oakland
So I understand the value of WhatsApp now that the network is absolutely enormous, but can anyone shed some light on how WhatsApp differentiated itself at first?

It seems like it's just basic user-to-user messaging over data, with a list-like interface that looks like every messaging app on my phone. How did they convince people that this particular proprietary solution was the best? Did they somehow remove friction in getting your friends to join? I feel like using Google Hangouts or any other proprietary messaging service is the same... I must be missing something.
> It's not like the companies in 1998/99 which had no revenue, no users, but spent millions on Super Bowl ads.

It's not? They had users back then, too.
It's never really about the raw text itself, but the context. Facebook, Whatsapp, Forums, Twitter, SMS, Etc... are all just text but in radically different contexts. Something tells me we haven't seen the last of the innovations in good ol' plain-text.
What is the analysis that concludes that buying Instagram for that price was cheap?
It's no more shit for mobile than the HTTP+JSON "protocols" people ship every day.
So as a non-scientist, let me see if I understand.

There are lots of uncaught errors floating around out there in scientific papers, and many of them can now be found with this software. But the exposing the errors so that they can be corrected is tricky because: A) you have to have legal access to a paper in order to scan it, and B) even if you do have access, under the current rules only the publishers have the right expose the errors, and they're not interested because they want to avoid the embarrassment.

Am I understanding it?
Hell yes! I saw a prototype at PyCon last year and this is just awesome, really great stuff. Glad to see Python continue to evolve.
You know, since I heard the news I kept hearing people make that argument and I thought, "But Whatsapp and Facebook are completely different products and markets." ... And then I realized that the only thing I use Facebook for is keeping in touch with people. And Whatsapp could easily fill in for 80% of what I do on Facebook. Indeed, they are trying to neutralize competition.

Sadly, I remember the days of Microsoft's near-monopoly on desktop computing, and I'll be getting rid of whatsapp within the week. On to Telegram or whoever is willing to make an identical app that isn't owned by FB or Google or whoever. The question will be whether I can convince others to switch.
It's definitely a leap, but there's a decent amount of information (not proof however) on the subject laying around. We still don't understand how the brain brings about consciousness. I guess I should say it's not a huge leap to assume it has something to do with other things we also don't understand. Given quantum effect and number theory still elude us in areas, it's a decent approach to assume they might be related.

I've debugged problems in my code that, at first glance, appear to be unrelated to each other. Given something is slightly off in one area isn't a proof something of in another area is related, but it's a good place to start looking.
From reading Gates' annual letter, it doesn't sound like a whole lot would change with that bit of extra money. The things they want to do, like vaccinate multiple continents, take orders of magnitude more money than they have.

Not saying it wouldn't be good or nice, but I don't think we'd see a noticeable difference. After all, they could always step up their spending from, what, $4BN a year?
Only he doesn't spin it as far as I see it:

"Could be legal trouble for Apple (and a bunch of other companies), though"
Ev Williams: Learning from Twitter to Make Medium
I do not know who "they" is referring to in this post.
D3 and React – the future of charting components?
Basically it just says that following one set of guidelines (the GAAP) their numbers are this, but following another set of guidelines (their own preferred accounting guidelines) their numbers are higher. It's kind of like the difference between listing your cumulative GPA and major GPA. The numbers are the same, it's just the ones you choose to include that are different.
Facebook buys Whatsapp for 19 Billon
You're right, they take a lot of shortcuts, but the point I was making is that simulating parts of organic chemistry probably isn't inherently necessary for intelligence.
Don't they literally all do it? Line, KakaoTalk, WeChat, iMessage, BBM...
Anyone else think the "users" obsession smells an awful lot like the "eyeballs" obsession?

Oh but these companies have revenue? WhatsApp and Snapchat have no meaningful revenue in comparison to their valuations. And the companies with revenue, are being valued at insane multiples (infinity for Twitter, 85 to 100 times for Facebook, 800 or so times for LinkedIn).
Whatsapp is 5 years old.
Your friend probably had a problem with azimuth (head alignment), which can usually be fixed with a small screwdriver:

http://www.endino.com/archive/cassettes.html
I think the reason the inverse square root function got so much coverage was because of the bithacking of the float format, and the apparent WTFyness of the code. Also didn't it use Newtons method, not a Taylor series expansion? My math at that level is stale.
> is a business like any other

If it's a business, then it's a business full of tyrannic monopolies. Science publishers are essentially leeching public money, because government funding goes only to people who publish through those publishers. That is a perpetual loop that is impossible to break, since scientists are incentivized (with public money) to publish through established journals. That is not 'clean' business like any other.

OTOH, open access doesn't mean that one has to do away with all the established journals, just that they have to make their content open to everyone. There are other ways to cover their operating costs, like charging for publishing (a better model, in which scientists have an incentive to choose the journal that offers the best value/money).
I saved 59 stories in the last 7 days. I don't expect to be able to find any of them in the future (in more than 1 month). The only realistic way to find old stories is to use the search feature, if you can remember a few keywords.
Feature preview: Vagrant Boxes 2.0
Blackberry should have sold BBM to Facebook and shut it's doors. Their whole market cap is about a quarter of that.
The fact about WhatsApp that blew me away is that they have 72% DAILY active users. I can't think of any other service with that kind of engagement. Even Facebook must be impressed at how often people come back to WhatsApp.
All companies in the US are required to report GAAP numbers according to the rules. Some companies choose not to follow the rules. But this is risky, because eventually someone with an accounting background will detect the discrepancies, and notify the SEC.

Thus, it's become fashionable to report both GAAP and adjusted numbers, and highlight the adjusted numbers in your press releases. Now the SEC can't get you. You've followed the rules and reported the GAAP numbers.

During the dot-com bubble, companies used to report GAAP earnings alongside EBITDA. Earnings before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization. In other words, we earned all this money, if you pretend that all of these other expenses didn't cost us anything.

As Warren Buffett pointed out: "References to EBITDA make us shudder — does management think the tooth fairy pays for capital expenditures?" Charlie Munger called them "bullsh_t earnings."

EBITDA eventually got such a bad rap that companies stopped using it after the dot-com bubble. These days, companies that want to distract from the GAAP numbers will report "non-GAAP" or "adjusted" earnings. This simply means that instead of mechanically excluding ITDA, each company makes its own decisions about what to exclude.
If 1 MTGOX BTC is backed by 1 actual BTC, yes. The fact that they are not doing this is certainly interesting.
As far as I know there is a decent amount of information against the fact that brains are quantum computers.

On the other hand there is a talk by Hinton on youtube [1] that sheds interesting light on some variants of deep learning and the way the brain uses (classical) noise.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DleXA5ADG78
Yes, tracking is one technique to get around this. It's generally difficult (though not impossible!) for a few reasons. The first is that most telescopes are set up to track the sky -- they can move pretty uniformly along with the rotation of the earth, but they're much jerkier when moving to other locations on the sky. In an alt-az telescope this doesn't matter, but most telescopes aren't built on alt-az mounts.

The other reason this is difficult to do is because it's hard to guide the telescope. The bright guide stars you're using to correct for the small motions the telescope is making due to wind, etc. are now moving in your field of view and can't be used to guide the telescope.

Finally, you have to know the trajectory pretty well to do this. You have to not only know how fast to move the telescope, but the right direction to move the telescope. This can be done for a well studied object where the uncertainty in the trajectory is pretty small. But if the object hasn't been observed for 14 years, you probably won't have very good knowledge of its trajectory.
> Ask Altavista and Myspace about that.

One particular search engine or one particular social network wouldn't be missed if gone, but I bet search engines and social networks would be missed if they all went away completely (and it would also be pretty bad if the Internet shut down entirely).
Boooorrrrring.
I hope those guys do something interesting with their billions. But so far the only billionaires that realize the power of a billion dollars in personal capital seem to be Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
Facebook is around 60% DAU I think.
I have trouble imagining that infrastructure supporting 400M users "runs itself".
Well it is already. The Facebook Messenger app. They bought Beluga in 2011 who produced that app originally. It's just that Facebook seems to have no Marketing folks, nor budget, nor strategy. So it never caught on and Whatsapp sailed past.
Presumably IPv6 will be a major change - that will allow every person to have an IP address for every device they have and retain that perpetually. Then we can have true direct messaging and use open protocols (XMPP?) each person choosing a client to manage their end; like how email works now.

If you can send from Whatsapp to FB messenger, Viber, Skype and whatever - and vice versa - that's surely going to democratise messaging?
MeeGo tried that kind of collaboration with whom? There weren't any qualified partners. Who was shipping Linux phones?
The Bell Curve is a Myth
I'm sorry, I honestly don't see the problem here. Is it illegal or somehow immoral to identify the consequence of a business decision?
Not too bad for the two founders then. 6.8 billion dollars each.
This doesn't make much sense to me since most of the transaction was in cash.
I've experienced that, but I don't blame the company that sells the product. Have you surveyed Candy Crush spenders to see if the game causes them lots of problems and pain? I highly doubt it does for very many.
I thought I'd find a ton of comments about how awful it is, surprised. More than one part of the page strained my eyes to read. The code samples and success stories are the worst. Websites are made to be read, if you make that hard you've failed at design. Needs to be a lot simpler. If this stuff was fixed it'd be awesome though
That's a valid point.

It's certainly worth it for someone coming from abroad (assuming you have something to offer the community).

Ask yourself the following questions:

1. By how much could the valuation of your company increase from building up those early connections (investor intros, hiring leads, early adopters of your service)?

2. Would that outweigh living expenses?

3. Would it still outweigh living expenses after considering the effect of a smaller budget on your company's runway?
I agree, but there are still a few things Whatsapp lacks, in particular convenient end-to-end encryption that might not be feature for the mass market, but is probably interesting for enterprises.
Yes, but they've continued to invest in Instagram as a product. Will they do that here as well?
tl;dr:

jobs: let's not hire each other's employees anymore, m-kay?
colligan (Palm CEO): thanks steve, but no thanks.
jobs: have you seen our patents and pile of cash, ed?
you're entering a world of pain.
It's an interesting effect, if it exists.

A researcher charging money for an app based on an effect which he has not finished studying -- no blind study yet -- is a really... odd... thing to do in my opinion. Were it me, I wouldn't charge before the blind study is done.
Perhaps you're right. I was thinking more of companies like Pets.com and less of ICQ, though obviously ICQ is a much more direct analogue to WhatsApp today.
"Gox Trading Like a Rigged Market?"
How much did they pay for Beluga in 2011 (which then became Facebook Messenger - an app that does pretty much the same as Whatsapp, if not more)?
How little (if anything) did they spend in Marketing that app since?
Sounds like a costly mistake.