skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been playing with antenna phasing and I have a preliminary result for three cellular antennas:

http://i.imgur.com/tyyVh0j.png

The antenna locations are marked with blue dots.

In this diagram the size of the high-signal-strength lobes is much larger than would be true at cellular frequencies, but it gives a sense of how this idea works. By adjusting the phase at each antenna, the lobes can be moved around to accommodate different devices within their range.

As I expected, increasing the number of antennas past three doesn't really improve the outcome enough to justify the increased complexity.
Whatsapp charges $1/year IIRC. So, with 400MM users, you can expect ~$400MM/year revenue?
I can't fathom why the Simplex algorithm wasn't included, it's considered, with reason, the most important algorithm of the 19th century.
Okay how about this for a definition of compulsion.

You do not want to do it, it causes you a lot of problems and pain, and yet you find yourself doing it anyway. That is compulsion. Have you never once experienced this in your entire life?
I've never seen Jade before.

Python + Jade + CoffeeScript + SASS (original syntax) = No more braces evar!
LINE ( http://line.me/en/ ) is massive in Asia and some European markets.
"15/1 should be enough for anybody!" - something TWC would say.

Seriously though. Why are most of us still in the bandwidth dark ages?
The question here is where do FB see the value? Is it a pure defensive play about messaging or are they after the social graph you could extract (along with a lot of other juicy data) from the WhatsApp DB?
Of course the world is more complicated than that - but just saying it's more complicated is not a constructive contribution.

We can talk about problems we perceive and try to solve them, or we can sit around saying things are complicated. Let's do the first one.
I had a look at their site, but the MX[1,2,3] phone doesn't seem too special in design; it's an iPhone clone like so many others at first glance.
Is that just the English market, maybe they have other phones as well?
First marketplace for mobile application templates is rising
In the usual the current iteration of our product will stay ad-free, but we'll release a new version later and everyone will have to switch to it way.
"But mostly I use it because all of the people I generally interact with in real life are on it. All of my family, friends and acquaintances use it."

I like how you nailed the reason for Facebook buying WhatsApp.
This was back in the 1990s, but I worked in what was basically a data entry company, where the processing was a mixture of scanned forms (Scantron style) and human key entry. The project I was on was image scanning the forms for other purposes, so we had a neural net handwriting recognition system that we were comparing to human key entry at a large scale - millions of documents.

What we found was that human key entry significantly outperformed the neural nets, even when the data was carefully handwritten in constrained boxes. Humans were so far ahead of the heavily trained neural nets that the software was basically unusable at that point.

Of course, that was nearly 20 years ago, and things have probably moved on quite a bit. But you can still see the basic problem in Captcha-style validation on web pages. Computers just can't be trained to recognize distorted text that humans can read pretty easily.
Not the OP you are replying to but as someone who has a windows phone, here is a fews tips:

* Download the offline maps for your region/country. It comes in real handy when travelling in an area without 4g and when your battery is running low.

* You can similarly download a offline radio mix for the your preferred genre.

* Enable Glance (Awesome feature and battery booster).

* Disable the super sensitivity touch screen if you don't use gloves. Those could be a battery drainer.

* Switch the default search on the browser to Google.

* Download Connectivity Shortcuts, Group Tiles and Custom Tile Maker
I wonder what other credible contenders for "most overlooked technology" are.

I think "physical tamper evidence/tamper response" is one, along with hardware security functionality (crazy secure virtualization extensions, etc.) -- essentially competing with Intel not just on power but also on security features. Although Intel is leading in this area with TXT and now SGX.
It will be!
It helps me keep in touch with people I really want to be in touch with: friends, family, co-workers, my soccer group.

It just works perfectly without ads, slowness, UI changes.

It's simple to use, my mom & dad uses it easily (>60).
Facebook Stock Falls 5% in After-Hours Trading Following WhatsApp Announcement
I guess that's why WhatsApp uses it ;)
Despide the fact that everybody got a strange feeling when reading the name "Facebook" in combination with WhatsApp:

Congrats to the team of WhatsApp to build such a successful product in five years with a team of 32 engineers (~ $500 million/engineer). Reminder: They nearly replaced the SMS service worldwide.

Let's hope that the words by Mark Zuckerberg will be the truth and WhatsApp will be kept as an independent product in the future.
There are many classes of problems in computer science and AI falls into one of my favorites. If today the world had a machine with infinite CPU power and infinite RAM we still wouldn't have a good AI.

We just don't have the knowledge to utilize such resources to write an AI that could, for exampe, play League of Legends or Starcraft at a level beyond professional gamers. And it certainly couldn't write a best selling novel. It could solve an arbitrarily large traveling salesman problem but it couldn't do those other things. I think that's kind of awesome.

I'm not saying it can't be done. Assuming we humans don't kill ourselves I think someday it will. But it's a long, long ways off.
Well yes, and the other side are all those people that keep themselves up-to-date on their stuff. If your information base is summed up as "a colleague has that car, but they recently had fires, so surely they are not worth X", why are you doing options?

(I have a theory of course: TSLA shorts stock supply is scarce enough to carry a very significant premium. So you enter options, where it's easier to find that "other side".)
When you sell to a customer, you're making them a promise.

Unfortunately, it is a promise that has no value. With the kinds of exit we're talking about, the promise is readily broken, and with little or no adverse consequences for the start-up.

Meanwhile, there may be strong incentives for a small business to pivot away to a different strategy or to take a lucrative exit, even at the expensive of existing customers. This situation is magnified dramatically as soon as any serious outside investment is involved.

You said it yourself, right at the end, if you just consider something you wrote from the other side of the fence:

Large vendors succeed by executing to a known plan.

Large organisations in general like executing to known plans, and relying on a start-up almost inevitably brings a much higher risk of having to change those plans than relying on more stable, established suppliers.

And while small organisations might be more nimble when it comes to changing plans, stability in the supply chain is possibly even more valuable in that context, because you have limited resources. Integrating with any external dependency takes work, and if you're going to do it, you really only want to do it once and then not worry about it.

The kind of lean, MVP-producing, pivot-happy, investor-funded, five-minute-old B2B tech startups we often discuss on HN are the antithesis of that stability. The really good ones offer enough advantage over doing things another way that using them is still justified, but most simply don't and it's hardly surprising that a lot of potential customers shy away from them and head for more stable ground even if it comes at a somewhat higher price.
Strange no one is mentioning threema, getting popular in germany.
Crucially, here the rasterised scan is made by the publishers, and whoever runs the analysis software is allowed to access the digital image.
Google Fiber chooses nine metro areas for possible expansion
Instagram is pretty much the same.
What what? And, what the hell is an infinite number?
Except that people weren't paying to get a Hotmail account. WhatsApp users pay $1/year, so their revenues are around that of Twitter's.
I'm not a lawyer, but I believe a semblance of conscience is sadly not allowed for in a bankruptcy. If the Experiment.com people, like most startups, fail to make it, then I'd think they're by default obligated to get the best price possible for the assets. I think doing anything else (e.g., giving a company asset to a founder) would require a founder to agree.

Like goatforce suggests, I would have made sure the deal includes a buyback clause. I'd do that even as a founder, because a) it's the right thing to do in this case, and b) it would let me negotiate a lower price because I'm not making the guy give up his 15-year dream of making sure it is used for something good.
It's madness. Are the people involved aware that 16B is a number with 11 digits? It's a serious question.
I just can't get my head around that valuation. For something that's basically a feature, when they already have that functionality baked in, built out to a similar scale?

It's not an acquisition for talent, or technology, so what is it? It's an acquisition for investors probably. To argue back against the people who say the kids are leaving FB. Well guess what, we BOUGHT the thing the kids are using. And it's 'mobile first'.

They can probably continue to buy the 'cool app of the week' for the rest of their existence. Probably not at THIS scale, but certainly the $1-2b range. The rest of their user base is pretty solid. As long as they can show their advertisers that they're appealing to young people too, it's probably a strong plan.

They just really screwed up on messaging, and let these guys grow too big before deciding or being in a position to buy them. Doubt they'll let it happen again! They'll have their eyes open and will snap up ANY new apps that show strong user growth in younger markets.

Tech people have a major bee in their bonnet about Facebook. We kinda assume the kids are flocking away for the same reason we are: privacy. But it's not. Kids just get bored easily so they like to try new things. Young people aren't 'leaving' Facebook, they're just using other stuff alongside it. Facebook just has to provide one or two interesting buzzy distraction apps to last until the kids turn into adults, get jobs, and use Facebook exclusively again because it's where everyone is, and they don't have time for 15 separate apps any more.
Steve Jobs threatened Palm’s CEO, court documents reveal
It just can't be the same under Facebook. It's a matter of time until my whatsapp entity and my Facebook entity (I don't have one today) will merge.

Same thing as Google tries to do with Youtube users. It just doesn't make sense to have two types of users in your system.
It's pretty much fear in my opinion. The main platform Facebook is already not cool anymore, so they have to buy cool things to stay cool.

Only problem is, if you're not cool and you acquire cool things, these things automatically become not cool. But we'll see.
> "... it will stay the same and will not develop those features that could have threatened Facebook in the long term."

That's fascinating and completely believable. The question will be can FB move those people to their own platform in the future and quietly retire Whatsapp in the future.

It's interesting that the CEO of Whatsapp is joining the FB board since that will affect the direction both products take.
Would investment necessarily be limited to one fund?
Webstorm/PHPStorm are the best tools that I've used. Their line of products are the only IDEs with working navigator panels for Backbone.js.
Fair enough, but can we imagine a better algorithm?
[cfe-dev] RFC: A virtual file system for clang
And like 110% in Argentina.
I've been pretty happy with Cox Cable in Phoenix/Tempe... I generally get 105-120mbps up and 20-35mbps down in speed tests. I'm generally limited to however fast I can get something from the server at the other end.
> In basically all markets outside of the US, however, they are dominating the messaging space

...WhatsApp certainly isn't dominating in the Asian markets, you only have to look at WeChat.
http://www.whatsapp.com/faq/android/21119703
just because you're processing things doesn't mean you're processing what's required to understand conscious/intelligence.
You can argue that versace is wrong on its own terms, but people aren't buying versace for the same reasons they buy candy crush power ups. Maybe you're right, maybe Candy Crush high scores does impress someone, but that's a superficial observation. the real question is why should it impress anyone? what did King do to make that impressive?

And is it really impressing other people that is truly the motivating factor in buying more power ups? Or is it.... the exploitation of bugs in the human operating system? The construction of game mechanics to manipulate people's emotions into doing things that don't make rational sense?
The attacker "is" the iPhone in this situation. The attacker creates his own requests and has the server talk to him in order to gain location info.
same old texting.
It seems very country-specific... In east asia generally, China (ex HK), Taiwan, Japan, Korea, etc, whatsapp doesn't seem to have much presence compared to LINE / kakaotalk / wechat...
Its not nonsense so much as system borders.

Look at the border between the Argentine financial system and ours. I suspect you want to be very careful right now... Or the Ukraine, where a shooting civil war has broken out today, I imagine forex market is going to get weird. Or the euro PIIGS recently or right now. Or Zimbabwe for the last decade or so. Or Germany in the 20s.

Anytime you cross financial system borders, especially if you don't understand them or even understand that there is a border, things can get a bit dicey.

I guess what I'm getting at is you're describing an emergent property of cross financial system transactions, nothing to do with BTC at all other being one particular example of a cross system border.
I'm exactly in the same boat as you and this really stresses me out. With WhatsApp I finally felt like I could stay in touch with people easily and "casually" without being on Facebook, it has became a big part of my daily routines.
I'd imagine they'd go with super-conducting cables personally. Space is extremely cold, so achieving a super-conducting state is simply a matter of shielding the cable from the sun. Shouldn't be too difficult... At least, not in comparison to building a space elevator in the first place!
Previous discussion (when this design previewed):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5389656
What made you jump to RoR?
Today I started using Threema.
Secure, group chat, picture stuff, and privacy seems alright.
Wow, that seems like a dangerous perverse incentive to me, if the founders kept working for the parent company after the acquisition.
It also tells the next Whatsapp that they can hold out for $20B.
For a while I tried Bikn, which worked pretty well but covered up the standard iPhone connector and replaced it with a Micro-USB. It also broke within a few months.

Then I tried the Cirago iAlertTag: http://www.amazon.com/Cirago-IAT1000-iAlertTag-iPhone-Black/..., but it's pretty flaky. You have to leave the app running in the background, so if you forget or reboot or whatnot it's basically useless. And then you have to replace the batteries, so ultimately, you end up having to keep track of more than you would have had you simply remembered the thing you got the tag for.

Generally speaking though, for the absent minded like myself, I really need a solid implementation of this idea. One that a) is difficult to accidentally trigger while in my pocket, b) has a long battery life, c) minimal setup/fiddling wrt the mobile device.
Hey that's me. I'm new to Ycombinator but I'll answer questions here too!
1. Tesla's market cap is $23.74B, on a public market. A premium over that would be needed, but it's worth noting it's not a ex nihilo VC valuation.

2. I know everyone is having fun dreaming about Apple buying Tesla, but I really don't see any sane reason why it would actually happen.

3. Why would anyone buy Tesla? Why do we want Tesla to be bought by someone? Worth noting that success stories of uninnovative large companies buying smaller innovative ones to reinvigorate themselves doesn't work very often.
I've always assumed any real machine intelligence would be scalable to the point where even if it started at a millionth the functionality of a human, it would end up far surpassing humanity.
Entrepreneurs: 7 Pitfalls to Avoid When Hiring a Lawyer
I actually like Cofactor best. It basically screams science crowdfunding and is noticeably less generic than Experiment and highly spellable unlike Microryza.
Found tumblr posts from sequoia on why Whatapp is great.
http://sequoiacapital.tumblr.com/post/77211282835/four-numbe...

This is confusing for me though.

1. WhatsApp prides on:
No ads
No games
No gimmicks

And WhatsApp doesn't collect personal data.

Facebook is OPPOSITE of those attributes of WhatsApp.
I was actually messing around with something similar (using only the radius information) a couple of weekends ago. In case anyone is curious. Node project just pushed to github:

https://github.com/tmsh/guess-city-on-radius
Additive Manufacturing  Marches On
How this negotiation evolves until the point of reaching this sum?

Is it like bargaining in the suoq (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Souq) ?
A lot can change in regenerative medicine. Unless of course you're closer to 60 than you are to 35, in which case, still likely to be true.
$40/user - $345m/employee

Truly amazing! If you remember the days when JBoss was acquired by Red Hat, this is the same "value" as one JBoss per Whatsapp employee. Incredible!
If you had a machine with infinite CPU power and infinite RAM you could _evolve_ an AI. Greg Egan wrote a great story about that: http://ttapress.com/553/crystal-nights-by-greg-egan/

Someone tries it, with mixed results.
Having close to a half a billion MAU isn't a real company?
I think that's pretty blatant plagiarism.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7266768
Don't look at it as a messaging company. Look upon it as a communication company. Over the last 20 yrs, any company which has make communication with others easier has profited handsomely....eg Skype, mobile-phone operators.
Except Facebook is now generating a serious quarterly profit, which contributes massively to their underlying valuation.

There's no hope of WhatsApp ever justifying this purchase price, not even remotely close. Facebook shareholders just got screwed massively. This deal will be written down in a big way. Zuckerberg threw a dart at the board out of desperation.
Either regular text messaging or Apple's iMessage (iPhones are most popular in the US). My sense is that they don't really do group chats (a heavily used feature of WhatsApp).
I think one of the next hot emerging careers will be connecting and interfacing traditional computational algorithms for the bits that are clearly orders of magnitude more efficient than using a multi-layer neural network to do them into neural networks, SVMs, and/or whatever comes next that figure out how to allocate such work from raw data feeds.
It depends what you consider a 'home run'. I consider building a sustainable business that will generate revenue and create products for the next 10/20/30 years a home run. I would consider building an app, having no business model (admittedly Whatsapp app was generating revenue although I doubt it was much), and being lucky enough to get acquired by a company willing to pay stupid amounts of money to kill a competitor and keep you away from other competitors the furthest thing from a home run.
Even if its a rope-a-dope its potentially a smart move. He needs to roll-with-the punches and keep in the lead. Once evaporative cooling kicks in, its not going to be a good ride. So its really best to do whatever is possible to stay ahead...even if that means being the borg of social networking. He has enough of a lead and can accept enough dilution that it remains worth it to continue to layer the next generation of services. A touch passive agressive perhaps, but its perhaps agressive enough to keep the party going another year or two. Which is the time he needs to plot the next move...I mean its unlikely he's going to invent the next FB ;D.
http://www.python.org/admin/ shows Django admin.....sigh...
Their "fix" will do nothing to prevent location information leaking. Making more accounts and getting more distances will increase the precision just as seeing more satellites increases GPS position. No matter how much noise they add, they will always be vulnerable to this attack in the same way with enough time, even the most subtle timing attack will be exploitable.

There is a way they can fix it properly though. What they need to do is report the actual position of the user, not the position relative to a position you give it. This may seem less secure but if it gave that latitude and longitude to within 3 miles, for example, it would be impossible to locate a user more precise than that.
> It's less appealing when you realise that there's probably a miniscule fraction of WhatsApp users that don't have a Facebook account.

Remember that while many of those have both WhatsApp and Facebook, they are far more likely to use WhatApp than Facebook. You can ignore facebook but cannot ignore incoming texsts.
Still insane.
Seems like WhatsApp has a large user base all over Latin America (no hard data, just what I gather from some comments I have read).
Did he just say you give us infinite CPU power? Why not bruteforce it then? Starting from the number 1 to number 2^800000000 for each program it generates by that number test the program[automated test] to see if it is intelligent. If intelligent then tell it produce a book.

[Everything can be seen as a state space search.]
I think you two are disagreeing about terminology. You're the ecpert in the field, which (correctly) makes you more sensitive to terminological distinctions.

What's not disputed I guess, is the commonly (to CS-educated engineers) held notion that FCT is a high-profile math problem that was solved/proved by intensive automatic means rather than a human written proof, and that that raises questions regarding the meaning of "proof".

At least that's what I took home from it.
TestFlight Android: End of Life 3/20/14
"But how do we make a computer program that decides what it wants to do? How do we make a computer decide to care on its own about learning to drive a car? Or write a novel?"

if intelligence is solved by reverse engineering the brain at a molecular level surely consciousness and creativity are?

"And maybe we don't want to build machines that are concious in this sense."

if the physical composition of the brain defines intelligence and conscience, i'm not sure you'll be able to pick and choose. i am all for artificial conscious though. yolo.
>> "a team of 32 engineers (~ $500 million/engineer)"

Only if you consider the other employees worth/value to be $0.
they dont buy the users or the app or the team. What they buy is massive mobile usage. Lately i always thought that Whatsapp was becoming the next facebook as event planning, foto sharing and of course messaging transitioned from fb to whatsapp. Looks like fb thinks the same, they feared whatsapp.
"the furthest"? :) Really, that's "the furthest thing" from a home run that you could think of?
you mean $1 once when they first install it?
the 'pay this amount' was a well known scam message
That's the risk you run when shorting any stock, especially one with an already high short interest. It's better to just avoid the overvalued companies.