skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't be the only one who disapproves of the misuse if the term, "an offer he can't refuse."

Its used incorrectly everywhere.
OMG. Next step Facebook messenger and whatsapp are merged?
Having worked in higher ed for a number of years, I'm frankly surprised that this doesn't happen more often. At least, to the level of being reported like this.

Faculties regularly operate independently and have their own ideas about the proper way to secure the information they have access to (which, in some cases, is not at all). As a security representative in the central IT department, I was often tasked with finding, reporting and attempting to work with the various faculties that did not follow posted data access and privacy policies but, almost every time my efforts were superseded by "academic freedom".

Incredibly frustrating experience.
Non competes are a legal minefield - and quite hard (and expensive) to enforce
I'll admit to a distinct feeling, that I've started to lose touch with pop technology. I've never heard of WhatsApp. Though I had most definitely heard of Hotmail in 1998.
Facebook turned down WhatsApp co-founder for a job in 2009
There is the old wall street saying - "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."
To everyone calling this symptomatic of a "bubble", remember that WhatsApp was not hyped like SnapChat or Instagram. It wasn't associated with "sexting" or plugged by Celebrities. A few years ago, my cousin arrived from India to start undergrad here .. when picking out her new smartphone, here was only one requirement: it had to run WhatsApp. She didn't care whether it was an iPhone, android or blackberry (back when bb's were a thing). She didn't care about the camera or processor speed. Her decision was based on a measly little app that I'd never heard of. WhatsApp just made something people wanted, badly.

It's even profitable, for crying out loud.

Whether this is a good decision and price for Facebook is to be determined. Many thought Google overpaid for Youtube and FB overpaid for Instagram, and look how those turned out. In addition Zuckerberg likely thought that much like losing image sharing, losing messaging would pose an existential threat to Facebook.

Zuck's strategic track record has been stellar, all the way back to the beginnings of Facebook. The one "mistake" he admitted to (HTML5 vs native) was corrected promptly and thoroughly. I'm willing to bet he's got a much better handle on these things than given credit for. I'm long on FB and buying on any dips.
Uh, no. It's more like "what he did was interesting, in the way that a lot admonishing things you should never do are interesting."
I vaguely remember an article in OMNI about a moss you could launch at Mars to kickstart terraforming.

It was probably all heavily fictionalized, but I keep wondering what happens if some sort of mischievous version of Elon Musk really wanted to just start firing green stuff at that planet to see if any of it would stick.
How much time is left on the party clock? I have no idea, but typically when things are getting really crazy like they are now, the clock is almost out.
Oh, I don't know. Gravity wells provide several interesting properties, such as space and access to a large amount of a wide variety of materials.

Think of it like exploiting a very large asteroid for resources and shelter. ;)
I had a ~5mbps cable modem connection in southwestern Washington State miles from the nearest thing that could reasonably be called a city in 1999. 50mbps represents a 10x increase in 16 years.
Too bad Palm can't sue Apple for this:
http://www.everythingicafe.com/ios-7-multitasking-brings-bac...
I feel like the 'book is having trouble adding new users. This is probably another stab at inflating their numbers for their Q earnings reports.

There are a limited number of users out there. Emerging markets aren't growing fast enough and aren't going to be strong soon enough to support the FB's growth rate. It seems investors rely a lot on the daily users metric as it translates into more potential advertising revenue.

This acquisition will certainly help that number, daily active users.
I am a web developer and the static HTML + JS with a RESTful API sounds excellent.
Even if the company had nonengineers, it doesn't affect the ratio between revenue and engineers. The statistic usually does not imply that engineering is solely responsible for the success. Further, it generally can be hard to determine what portion of revenue is due to engineering versus marketing/sales, since the functions work together in a dependent way to make money.
An interactive Git cheat sheet
>"Rakuten, Inc. is a Japanese electronic commerce and Internet company based in Tokyo, Japan. Its B2B2C e-commerce platform Rakuten Ichiba is the largest e-commerce site in Japan and among the world’s largest by sales." [Wikipedia] //
Every month "admiring Steve Jobs" becomes a stronger heuristic for me on whom to ignore and/or avoid.

Not only was he a sociopath who hurt others (read his biography) but he was clearly also a deeply unethical business leader not to be emulated (read this fiasco and also the latter parts of his biography).

He held some great humane design principles (read about them from Jef Raskin and Larry Tesler etc who came up with and heralded them) and was able to get tough projects through (like many leaders) of course. But I am afraid that is not what people admire in him.
That inverse square root algorithm is a neat trick, but it did not revolutionize anything.

In addition to several algorithms already mentioned, I feel that suffix trees and suffix array algorithms should be there as well. They are making all kinds of approximate searches feasible in bioinformatics.
So much about not selling ads and collecting personal data then I suppose? I actually thought they meant it. [1]

Now I'm really excited about heml.is.

[1] http://blog.whatsapp.com/index.php/2012/06/why-we-dont-sell-...
My experience when I first used WhatsApp on a droid phone was...
* Absolute piece of cake to get started/configured
* Absolute piece of cake to message friends
* No 22c charge from carrier per SMS

Pretty good recipe for success.
Presumably the published purchase price is based off what Facebook's stock is currently trading at today? Assuming a correction back down toward the $100 billion range, the acquisition price doesn't seem so wild.
400,000,000 active users [0]
16,000,000,000 USD
10 years
----
$4 per user and per year
Pointy-haired boss is so yesterday. I vote for [10] boss http://i.imgur.com/uKcUCHd.png
I was talking to a lawyer earlier today and she said something like "97% of Facebook's value is in their IP (intellectual property)" and I silently thought, no, their entire value is in the fact that they have active users. Without the network effects of active users, they are worth almost nothing.

They are like a social networking black hole, what makes them big is that they are already big, and that's all.

So if anyone starts taking away their daily active users, even if they were only taking a few percentage points off Facebook's metrics, they are effectively threatening to break Facebook's business model and put them out of business, and it makes sense to spend almost anything they can afford to neutralise that threat.
There's. Bitcoin or any altcoin.
Maybe they got an extra 0 (zero) in there by accident?!
>If you read up, that is not where this began.

You're right, the first thing we disagreed on was that the article's pretty much industry standard definition of security through obscurity was incorrect because in your opinion, its too ambiguous. I thought we had already resolved that considering the article you linked said pretty much the same thing that I did. It was your second post where you stated that the SSID isn't an example of security through obscurity.

>I still say SSID is - at best - a piss poor choice of something that is barely an example of the phenomenon.

Considering what you listed as your definition of security through obscurity, it isn't surprising that you think the example is piss-poor. Your personal definition is itself a very specific type of security through obscurity. Therefore, anything that deviates from that specific example is going to seem wrong to you.
Nice sci-fi idea, but the surface conditions on Mars are so hostile that the poor defenseless moss would roll over and die.

* Temperatures nearly always below the freezing point of water, often several hundred degrees lower.

* Very small amount of air pressure, 0.6% that of earth, and no oxygen at all.

* Because of the two factors above, no liquid water at the surface.

* High levels of radiation directly from space (primarily the solar wind) to the surface, for lack of a global magnetic field. Astronauts visiting Mars will also need to protect themselves from this threat.

Poor defenseless moss. :)
Why do we care? Are we becoming Wall Street traders and "analysts"?

What use is reporting or reading about stock movements within a day?
Obviously the best way to communicate is via carrier pigeons.
I've heard that same statement about Doge.
It may fall more tomorrow when the market opens.
From this blog post[0], "WhatsApp runs lean. With only 32 engineers"
I am very impressed.

[0]: http://sequoiacapital.tumblr.com/post/77211282835/four-numbe...
Dash Cam Video: Dealer Charges 2 Hours to Move Fuse?
WhatsApp has huge global growth. I heard that little chirp everywhere I went in India. friends in Africa use it all the time. in countries with SMS charges, whatsapp is a good deal.
What about BBM? Personally I prefer it over Viber and WA, and I'm pretty sure it has the same feature set. It also at least brags about being secure (no clue if it truly is)
I don't have a dog in the fight, but "The man did not beat around the bush", is soft praise for his frankness. If you believe it was immoral and illegal, this is definitely spin.

My take: "Steve Jobs likely broke the law, and engaged in an activity that denied thousands of engineers full market wages. I suspect his motivations were to enrich Apple to stroke his own ego."
On the left, I see content. On the right, I see crap that hides content. I'll take the left.
Why not support both 2.x and 3.x syntax?

print ("Hello, I'm Python!")
There're many examples on GitHub, here's one I found just by searching: https://github.com/tbarbugli/django_longpolling
iirc, yann-lecun's conolutional neural nets already ouperform humans at mnist digit recognition, most us mail is auto sorted by those machines...
Facebook bought WhatsApp for the hundreds of millions of payment details
I'd just like to mention that in some countries (Uruguay for example) it's becoming the go to social networks, the "hot" news and stuff are spreading though WhatsApp and not though FB anymore.

I guess that could be one of the factors that made them very interested in acquiring.
3D Printing Future Timeline 2014-2043
You have some valid criticisms of the implementation, though pgsql-hackers has their reasons (http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAHyXU0ybwZZUbuQQVFQMK3...) for the way things are. Regardless, my point is that the situation is not so bad as "Every time that function is executed, it is re-parsed and re-planned."
Twice.

It's a $1.3B fund.
This is an old article. While I definitely agree in general (some are stretched, like Google Apps vs Heroku), Python has been making a more concerted effort:

http://www.python.org/

That being said, I find Python stuff to be, while ugly, good at getting information across. And now, I find Node sites to be the best.
Scientists discover bulk material that exhibits monolayer behavior
It definitely could still be useful. However it may not posses "general intelligence," and therefore may not be applicable to as many scenarios as human like intelligence is.
Isn't a mugging simply identifying the consequence of a business decision?
Python.org just got redesigned today!
The new F-35 fighter jet can be taken down without a bullet ever being fired
Very nice, I don't have the talent to do stuff like this, really amazing to see incredible 3D work and fun being done in the browser.
Making NSA-proof social networking mainstream
Alcoa is worth $12 billion. Deere is worth $31 billion (2.4% dividend, $37b sales, $3.5b profit). Caterpillar is worth $61 billion (WhatsApp is worth 1/3 CAT? lol). Or there's Sony, $17b market cap, $72b in sales.

The truth is WhatsApp is only worth ~11% of Facebook, it's not actually worth $19 billion free-standing, because Facebook's value is mostly in paper that could never be sold for what it's trading at. Nobody is going to step in and pay $19 billion in cash for WhatsApp, and you won't catch an industrial titan like Exxon or Ford swapping its shares for nearly worthless instant-messenger users. Google also wouldn't be so stupid as to do that in my opinion.
huh O.o?
Plus: groupchat. And sending images.
It's not really "pop" technology. Surprisingly, it's not used much in the United States, but in India it's basically a replacement for text messaging. Everyone from a 13 year old child to my grand mom uses it to keep in touch with friends and family members across the globe.

IMHO, they were able to get to such widespread everyday usage because they such awesome and reliable technology. Much better than what Google have been able to provide with their hangouts app, for instance. Messages are always delivered instantaneously if you are online. If you are offline it stores it locally, and delivers it the moment you are online without messing up the order.

Never had any issues with them. They are really awesome. Congrats to them - IMO it's a great acquisition by Facebook.
> "When a major league baseball pitcher throws a 95-mph fastball, only about 400 milliseconds—the duration of a blink—pass before the ball rockets over the plate. And a batter gets less than half that time to decide whether to swing, and where. Baseball"

Bah! That's not a knife. This is a knife: twitch FPS gaming. Quake Live at 250 FPS, refreshed at 144hz, with < 5ms RTT latency. Reaction times can be compared in almost individual milliseconds. I'll put the reaction times of the best Quake Live player (rapha/cypher/evil, whoever) against the best baseball player any day.

Interestingly, my vision is extremely good. I've often surprised people with how far I can see clearly. So screw this app: learn how to play a twitch FPS well: http://www.quakelive.com/
What I want to know is how did they get 5,000 email addresses without spending any money or building anything?
Because Ruby is for designer kiddies that need a way to serve their PSD templates.
Amen. People in Rust are trying to redesign rust-lang.org with a similar shitty effect in mind. More flash and pizzaz and whitespace and less discoverability for actual fucking devs. Don't. Just stop.
Ask HN: Whose job is it anyway?
_My question needs some context:_

I have been hired by a small medical firm to, most importantly, establish and maintain secure communications between about 20 employees and clients. The contract also covers various other tasks such as teaching employees how to use Excel effectively and maintaining a website.

I've had many jobs before, but never had I been in charge of a project or were the most knowledgeable person in the subject matter. I am in direct communication with the business owners as well as the top manager. I advised them on the different choices we had and the owners, upon my recommendation, chose to use FOSS.

Once the owners took the decision, I informed the team of the changes that would be taking place, making sure to be as clear as possible and naming every piece of software that would be used. The top manager took the initiative of performing installation on some workstations before I began my work.

I have just last week completed the installation and configuration of gpg4win, Enigmail and Thunderbird for the selected users. Migration was a breeze, and user adoption is going very well. There have been no problems reported to me in a week (let's hope it'll last).

Now that everything has been set up, the head manager has suggested to the owners that we could instead use the gpg4win Outlook plugin to carry out the encryption so as to benefit from Microsoft's support if needed.

Ignoring technical details concerning the pros/cons of his proposition, what I'm asking is how do I deal with such behaviour? I am not in bad terms with the manager at all, but I do think he should not interfere or influence my job. This might be where I am mistaken.

Is such behaviour normal and desired, or am I right in thinking that division of labour (and hence my work) should be respected? If yes, then how would I deal with this?
This is why the desire for Strong AI boggles my mind. In order for a computer to operate at a "human" level, it would need to make decisions based on things like ambition and fear and greed. It will also have to constantly make mistakes, just like we do.

If it didn't have character flaws, it wouldn't be operating at a "human" level. But if it does have these character flaws, how useful would it really be compared to a real human? Is the quest for Strong AI just a Frankensteinian desire to create artificial life?

I'm curious if there are any good papers looking into stuff like this.
Yeah, I guess it's cheaper if you divide it by 10.
Cute comparison, but it's not really fair. The web was quite obviously more useful than Gopher, while WebGL offers no improvements to the web for its most important tasks of being the standard tool for communication and the interface to most of humanity's services. Somehow the web managed to be "good enough" for those purposes for 20+ years without WebGL.

I think a better comparison is to the Java applets of the late 90s and early 2000s: Cool demos, cool games, totally pointless and enormous security vulnerability. But hey, the Runescape devs made a lot of money off of their Java-applet MMO back in the day, and someone will probably do the same soon with WebGL, and that's what the web's all about.
Aereo forced to shut down in Utah and Colorado
> in countries with SMS charges

The funny thing is that in places like USA, you pay exorbitant amounts (~20 USD per month) for text messaging (when the real cost should be almost 0), yet it's still not caught on here - which is kinda sad.
I really don't see what's so controversial about this. The universe can, as far as our understanding of physics dictates, be simulated in finite computational time. This experiment dictates infinite computational time.

Evolution is a purely physical process. Make up a series of tests more or equally complex to those evolution present, and you'll end up with intelligence - unless there happens to be something very, very special about human intelligence as opposed to other forms of intelligence. Humans are currently a local maximum in the space of intelligences which have been explored by evolution.
And with line breaks:

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
Not for a cost-constrained network appliance. I think you're overestimating how hard this is. Maybe I'm underestimating it - I've been doing things in a "safe"
manner since the 1980s in 'C'. It's second nature to me.

And I've never even been interested in UTF-8, much
less implemented anything that uses it.

I think the OP is a little too cute with "don't use sprintf()" - it and snprintf() can both be used completely safely.

Now, it may well be that the UI can be completely done in, say, eLua and the guts of the thing done in 'C'. I'd go for that if it made any sense to any body else on the team. As a practice, I avoid working on things that will be on the larger Internet.
Desperation shadows reason. I personally think Kik was a better buy.
This is what you would logically conclude by looking at the situation at a glance, but this is not true. Sure, Mt. Gox has the capability of operating just fine. Sure, they were vulnerable and needed to stop withdrawals temporarily, just like several other exchanges that had the same vulnerability. In fact, Mt. Gox did a service to some other companies by providing a warning that the risk of this vulnerability is becoming critical.

HOWEVER, this is NOT the reason Mt. Gox is not, and WON'T recover. The reason they won't recover is because they are taking a crap all over any sort of trust anybody could have had in them. They blamed bitcoin fundamentally and denied their own responsibility. A decision has already been made ever since Mt. Gox addressed the public about the withdrawal lockdown that they CANNOT be trusted, and it is not only based on this most recent folly, but many past mistakes and irresponsible public relations.

I just wish they would just give up and kill themselves off completely somehow.
> ... and the apparent WTFyness of the code.

That's what ID Software thought:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root#Overvi...
Viber has 200M users as of May 7, 2013. Rakuten purchased them for $900M on Feb. 14, 2014.

Very similar apps. Although WhatsApp does ask for $0.99 after 1 year usage. Not sure that is worth the $18.1B difference in price?
I would already be satisfied with a $19M acquisition.
With the RSU it's $19bn USD. That would make it even higher to ~$47 per user
It looks like Brian Acton, Whatsapp's founder was turned down by Facebook in 2009. What a comeback! This must be even sweeter!

https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/3109544383
I think we need a better machine first. The current model of one or a handful of CPU cores with very tiny caches talking to memory over a narrow, high latency bus doesn't seem very efficient for building and querying massive (multi-petabyte), highly associative (thousands of associations) data structures.
Ignore the earlyvangelists
Northern California rain at times this week | California Weather Blog
Why does the site return gzipped content for curl? I'm fairly certain curl doesn't provide the 'Accept-Encoding' header by default.
Are you outside the US?

I haven't paid 22 cents for a text message in YEARS.
The sequences are well worth a read. They're kind of like an overview of modern philosophy in very plain language, very little jargon. Then, just participate in the comments and discussion forum as you feel. It takes very little time to collect enough karma to do whatever.
ossreality, you've been hellbanned for a month. No-one can see your comments.
Except the number of active users reinforces his point, it doesn't make it invalid.

>At the time of AOL's acquisition of ICQ it had 20 million active users¹

Or 40% of the internet using population of the world.

>WhatsApp has 430 million

Or 16% of the internet using population of the world.

40% is clearly closer to "won" than 16% is.
"IMO they probably will"

The market currently has MtGoxBTC priced as though there's a 42% chance of a timely payout. If the real odds are 75%, there's an opportunity to make $200 on a $261 investment.

As such, I have to ask, how many have you bought?
I think it's a matter of precision of the distance measurement. If they round to the nearest mile, then the possible location is basically square mile (technically circle - closer to .8 sq miles), which is less of a privacy concern.