skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
WhatsApp has become the defacto medium of communication with my friends and family in Africa, emerging way ahead of phone numbers, sms, facebook et al. I am not thrilled by the service, but if you want to stay in the loop, you have to join the bandwagon.
Just remember, next time you read something similar from a startup, it just means they won't do ads unless they get a multi-billion dollar offer. And frankly, I can't blame them.

Edit, also: http://blog.whatsapp.com/index.php/2014/02/facebook/

It looks like this was a defensive acquisition, Facebook cared more about whatsapp not killing them then they care about making money with whatsapp.
"Stewardship" might be the word we're looking for: it has some connotations of personally invested care, but it's also clear that it's done on behalf of someone else and there's no ownership.

Of course, it also has a history of association with servants of landed gentry, which might make people uncomfortable (for good reasons, to the extent the analogy holds up).
Sequoia just landed a 5x return on their fund with this one deal.

At a rough guess, they put in $8m for 15% of the company in 2011, valuing it at around $53m.

A $16B sale is a 300x increase in value, so Sequoia's stake is worth $2.4bn. Their standard fund size is around $500m.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/16/us-sequoia-funds-i...
...or facebook is trying to own messaging. I already have shifted a lot of the work I do on email to facebook messaging.
At this rate they can only pull that off a handful of times.
Bionic is very incomplete though. it is not really worth using outside Android you may as well use Musl.
Arbitrage generally assumes low or no risk.

This would be a bit closer to junk bounds or penny stocks.
They ruined Divvy after buying it.
Network effects. When everyone has to switch to a platform, it's hard. And Whatsapp is free for the first year, which is enough to get people stuck on it.
You can get detailed timing data about parse, plan, execute timings from postgresql logging. Parsing is almost always trivial. Planning can get expensive for complex queries with many joins (large space of solutions to explore). For simple queries there's almost no benefit for prepared statements in postgres. Prepared statements are a maintenance headache and don't play well with session multiplexed connection pooling (like PgBouncer); generally best to avoid them unless you have measured a concrete and significant benefit.
here in Peru the same, it is the standard app to chat
AFAICT it's become the standard in italy too. People use it way more than facebook now, judging by my contacts (and I don't even use it, I just see a bunch of people doing it).
https://www.apple.com/apps/find-my-friends/
There's an undercurrent on the article that is somewhat dismissive of Krebs--i.e. that all his scoops come from tips, and he gets good tips because he's so well known. It even says that if it weren't Brian it would be someone else.

The facts, are, though, that Brian started in the Washington Post mail room and has since worked his way into a column at the Post, and now success as an independent blogger. Neither of those were easy or assured for him.

So I would argue that there is something about Brian and/or his work that is special or noteworthy.
"It's easy to sit there and say you'd like to have more money. And I guess that's what I like about it. It's easy. Just sitting there, rocking back and forth, wanting that money." -- Jack Handey
What the fuck? I'm genuinely pretty blown away at the lack of reading that went on here.

I never said that I can't think of a reason I deserve a raise, I said that a manager shouldn't need to ask, because they should know, since they are, you know, your manager.

But yeah, I guess grasping at straws to be a snarky dick trumps using any logical thought whatsoever. Thanks for the contribution though?
That's a lot of money for an app with relatively little lock-in and a $0.70 (maximum) ARPU.
I believe human-level general intelligence (and beyond) is already inevitable, even if we don't make significant developments in "solving" intelligence. Projects that are already developing stuff like this (e.g. IBM Blue Brain) are just copying the human brain as closely as possible. Of course, this isn't as efficient as it could be (they simulate it all at the molecular level, so you can only get 1 neuron per CPU). However, as Moore's Law progresses, even if we don't make the software more efficient, we will eventually be able to create a fully functional simulation.

But if you look at the history of technology, things we create aren't usually exactly based on models seen in nature. Airplanes aren't exactly like birds. I believe we will find a more "man made" model for general intelligence (maybe not even a neuronal model) that works much more efficiently with the hardware we have available.

Going back to the airplane analogy, we already have the people who strap wooden wings to their arms and jump off buildings (like Blue Brain), but we are looking for the first Wright brothers design.
MeeGo tried the kind of collaboration you mention and it failed horribly. Jolla can use some of the leftovers, but the point about the feasibility and usefulness of this kind of collaboration is already made.

At least one of these platforms needs to become technically viable and then gain traction. I don't think that imposing a broken MeeGo process in such early days is going to help either platform, it could well kill both and then Linux-phone enthusiasts are left with nothing.

It's not a bad thing for "Linux phone" to get multiple chances rather than just one. If one doesn't turn out well, at least all our eggs were not in that one basket.

If we are lucky enough that multiple Linux phone vendors get traction, then it is feasible they could collaborate on interoperability.

If either ever achieves enough market share to make it a zero-sum game between them (traversing some pretty steep barriers to entry left by incumbents), that's a good problem to have and the competition can encourage development for a little while until the issue is settled one way or the other.

Sniping at products which haven't even had a chance yet certainly is not going to help.
Facebook acquires WhatsApp for $16 billion
At least we'll still have viber
I suppose that is its own form of decentralization.
This is fascinating. To think I was trying to convince people that MySMS was better than Whatsapp...
Dijkstra's algorithm is close enough to the Bellman equation for programmers, I guess :)

Also I don't really think taking a Taylor series for the inverse square root should count as an "algorithm."
And goodbye WhatsApp. It was time to move on anyway.
It's official. Facebook is the new Yahoo. Buying a lot of companies at ridiculously extreme premiums.
I don't think they're buying it per current user. It's either about paying for future users (granted, triple the user base and it's still a lot) or a game of defense against a potential competitor.

They bought the photo company at what seemed an outrageous amount in part to co-opt a competitor. In the end it was profitable. They alter their feed to look more Twitter-like, encouraging people to avoid the competitor. I see this as defense too. It isn't about new users, it's about corporate competition.
We are in the great monitoring renaissance
Is it possible that this is also for user retention rather than solely adding new users?
The problem being, of course, that you're then writing Java. :)

I still really like Ruby for its expressiveness and malleability, and don't plan to move away from it any time soon, but a lot of that means digging into these libraries, finding problems, and fixing them. I really enjoy that process, but it's rather inefficient for me to be responsible for the performance of every library in my stack.

Ruby has a reputation for being slow, and while it's true that you're not likely to ever reach statically-typed language speeds, it can be pretty decently fast. The danger with tons of abstraction is that a performance hotspot buried three libraries down can turn your otherwise-fast application into a tarpit. If Ruby library developers made performance analysis and optimization a goal alongside "beautiful code" and "DRY", Rails applications across the board would get substantially faster without changes to the underlying VM.

For example, Sprockets uses Pathname heavily. Ruby's stdlib Pathname is extremely robust and extremely slow. This slows down path resolution for every single asset quite a bit. My custom-patched Sprockets does asset resolution and compilation around 43% faster than stock Sprockets. As you can imagine, this has tangible benefits in the speed of my development cycle, and substantially increases my happiness. I opened an issue on the Sprockets project, but it was closed as requiring too-substantial a refactor. Imagine how many developer-hours would be saved if the Sprockets maintainers were to fix that hotspot?
Is that a record price or something?
It's certainly not something to be published in a scientific journal, but it's a nice subject to bring up and spark discussion on now and then.
I find it slightly irritating and frustrating that there's a patent pending and there isn't even a demo available.
the startup market of other messenger apps? The ones that are around are already big and profitable (KakaoTalk, LINE etc).
> both of those situations are better than sitting at home and thinking "I'm never going to get a job anyways, I might as well not apply".

This just shows that fatalism, whether positive (things will definitely work out) or negative (things will definitely not work out), is a bad thing. It's much better to believe that outcomes aren't predetermined.

A negative fatalistic attitude is self-fulfilling. But some people take an extreme lesson from this: that attitude itself is the sole determining factor of any outcome.

But it's trivial to show that's wrong. Negativity doesn't stop you from taking action: if you think something bad will happen but aren't fatalistic, you will try to stop it. Conversely, positivity doesn't encourage action: if you believe that a positive outcome is preordained, there's no need to take action.
thanks for this link, my gpu-less 2006 laptop had no chance to run the demo by itself (the video is almost borderline laggy ..)
They have a working business model with a whole lot of happy customers that pay yearly.

I really hope to be able to pay for WhatsApp next year as well, I really loved it for what it was.
ARPU vs CTLV doesn't compute.

This is like déjà vu, circa 2000 when I was watching the {{decent}}.corp ticker hitting $60/share after 3 splits.

If anything I don't feel that Justin Frankel and "Mr. Wonderful" made out like bandits as much now.

ProTip to new startup people: now is not the time for your magic mobile IM app. Most potential acquirers' demand is likely sated, making the value of the remaining players in the space effectively zilch, apart from lower cost acquihires and fodder for opening pitch jokes.
It worries me a tiny bit that you work in security, and yet your thinking seems this muddled here. I'm hoping you haven't had your coffee or it's a failure of communication or something...

"its taken for granted that when we are talking about security through obscurity, we aren't talking about passwords and cryptographic keys."

I agree that passwords and cryptographic keys are not what we're talking about - the question is why. Whether, confronted with a proposed setup that relies on the secrecy of X for its security, whether X should be seen as analogous to keys (and thus not a case of "security through obscurity"), or more analogous to protocol or algorithm (and thus a case of "security through obscurity"). There are, of course, other concerns as well.

"That's the exact same thing that I said worded in a different way."

SSID is neither design nor implementation of a wireless network.

"Security through obscurity alone is not a good thing."

I wholeheartedly agree that security through obscurity is not a good thing, but not everything that is bad is "security through obscurity". "Don't broadcast secrets from radios in cleartext" is a rather simpler (and stronger!) rule violated here if you are trying to use SSID as a secret.
MtGox is essentially doing what you are talking about, allowing people to trade bitcoin derivitives (that they supposedly back 1:1 with real bitcoins). Trades on MtGox don't hit the blockchain.
So the last time you valued Tesla, you stuck your head into the sand and calculated a range of "indicators"?

I mean, really, what do you expect people to respond? You are trying to smash water with a hammer.
Instead of stating the obvious, or hating, and congratulating, it would be nice to hear your thoughts on the value of this deal, what FB will gain, where do you see the IM space heading, could this be a Youtube like acquisition, etc...
To be fair, WhatsApp came wayyy before Snapchat came. WhatsApp is well-established and is charging users (at such a low price). SnapChat is hot. But that being said, 16B for WA is still a ridiculous number to me.
Before this people were comparing their value to snapchat's. This is a very unhealthy market that they're creating.
If you're talking B2B products, I would strongly argue that's still true. And remember, the winners in most markets aren't the first, it's the people who copy the first and have a way to sell it.
On the app store: 11 5 star, 2 4 star, 5 3 star, 1 2 star, aaaaand 173 1 start ratings. Seems like possibly a server-overload problem.
My uncle in India runs a construction company, and literally every single aspect of company communication is done over WhatsApp. Each construction site has to constantly post pictures on WhatsApp, and basically all management and payroll decisions are made through WhatsApp discussions. Apparently this is not an uncommon practice, as businesses that were once administered by pen and paper are now using WhatsApp to improve efficiency and reach new customers.
> practices and processes that shift responsibility onto a team of replaceable cogs.

This.

So much of 'agile' in the business world, I see having become an effort to make developers into replaceable cogs or 'commodity' employees. It's not good for job satisfaction and pride, but I don't think it's good for the product either.

It's ironic, because I think most of the originators of the 'agile development' idea had almost an opposite intend, 'software craftsmanship' and all.
For everyone saying this is a waste of money, consider the commentary around Instagram at $1B. Basically the world said that this was a horrible acquisition at the time, but in retrospect, buying Instagram was quite cheap. Buying your closest competitor for less than 15% of your market cap is usually a good idea.

Fast forward to today. What'sapp is the dominant messaging application across the world. Carriers hate it but they can't do anything to stop it. Facebook hates it and no matter how much they improve facebook messenger, they keep falling behind.

This represents a massive existential threat to Facebook's business: engagement. To kill their closest competitor for, again, less than 15% of the company, is a rational decision.

Since Viber and What'sapp have both exited the market, I think it's time for someone to build a new messaging app. There's a lot of room in a once incredibly crowded space.
Actually, now that's an aquire I think would be worth $16/19B. WeChat is f-in huge in China. And they use it for everything, including payments.
Maybe the second sentence is being taken as a prophecy.
Definitely. None of my US friends have heard of or use it, but I have a ton of friends abroad and it's the only way we stay in touch.
Goodbye HN!
Facebook to Buy Messaging Startup in $16 Billion Deal
Not sure what set off the down votes but we can teach a computer to recognize characters for application in OCR. We also learned those characters from being taught in school and reading bad handwriting. We teach computers the same way. How are they supposed to magically recognize them especially since they didn't invent whatever language it is?

Note that I'm referring to artificial general intelligence[0].

0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence
Apple iWatch Was "Released" But We Didn't Realize It
> and multiple submissions, which act as additional votes on the primary submission

Didn't know that; thanks for pointing out.
Tesla's margins are almost double those of other manufacturers; a big part of the profit comes in from their automated highly scalable production. When they eventually release their Model E (affordable performance electric vehicle for the masses) it'll be a game-changer.
The optimizations being discussed in OP do not take any load off the db. They only reduce CPU time for AR to calculate what it's going to ask the DB for.

Unless I'm misunderstanding.
No, I really don't. As I said to another poster, either you guys simply had no time to read a few lines of text or you already had your mind made up before reading them.

I simply think that a manager should be familiar enough with your contributions that they shouldn't need this information. If your boss is this unfamiliar with your contributions its pretty obvious they suck. I also think that a manager making you explain why you deserve a raise is fairly poor form. At this point we were already months past the point where i should have just gotten a raise without a conversation at all. If they had done that up front, I would not have been so quick to leave.
Redesigned Python.org
New Massachusetts Decision Requires Warrant For Cell Tracking
I'm not sure I'd call the WhatsApp of today a startup.
They must reduce the precision of the users input not the reported distances precision.

That's an interesting idea: randomly perturbing a user's reported location.

I've been developing a social network app that, in v1 (development was outsourced to someone else), sent the distance to a particular profile (I'm not sure how accurately). In v2, I wasn't sure what to do so I've left it out, but it's currently at number 3 on my TODO list.

In our case, it's pretty important to be able to do location sorting client side. We have the geo extensions for SQLite and are intending on using that.

So, question: if I randomly perturbed user's locations reported to the server by anywhere from 1-5 miles, would that be sufficient to ensure privacy, while also enabling the app feature, which only needs precision at the level of a few miles?

UPDATE: I thought about this some more, and what I'd do is the following:

1. Take the location of the device and make it imprecise, but accurate. For example, it could be anywhere within a five square mile radius, but it really would be within that radius.

2. On a per-user basis, pseudo-randomly but deterministically perturb the imprecise location for that user, to generate the stored location.

The second requirement is to prevent averaging multiple location updates for the same person over time, to pinpoint a location. Each user would have a different random, but deterministic offset for each five square mile area on the globe.

The perturbed location for that device in that area would be the same for everyone, so you wouldn't be able to merge the output of multiple users "view" of that device's location to increase accuracy, either.

I'd appreciate any and all feedback. Thanks.
> triple the user base and it's still a lot

WhatsApp current has 430M monthly active users[0], compared with FaceBook's 1.2B[1] monthly active users. Tripling their userbase would make them the same size FaceBook is itself.

ED: Corrected as child comments pointed out.

[0]: http://blog.whatsapp.com/index.php/2013/12/400-million-stori...
[1]: http://investor.fb.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=821954
Personally I prefer Voxer. The requirement of having a phone number on WhatsApp doesn't work for me. I'm constantly traveling and and using different SIM cards in different countries. I'd rather have a single sign-on that doesn't require having to use any phone number.
Thanks! This motivated me to clean my monitor.
I am speechless....

Even if I apply all my knowledge about valuation, product market fit, historical knowledge and add a glass is half full attitude to this acquisition I can't fathom that evaluation.

Then I think about instagram selling for "only" 1B and it kind of make sense. Kind of...
Thats unfortunate.
Not true. KakaoTalk is big in S Korea. LINE is big in Japan. Quick check shows of 300 million registered LINE users and 50 million are in Japan.
You think its unreasonable for managers to understand the market rates for the employees they have? I can't imagine you're being serious here...
Whatsapp is everywhere in Venezuela, feel like the only one that is not using it.
See Amazon.

Assuming that was meant to be an example of good customer service, it's an ironic one. I'm increasingly voting with my wallet for local stores over Amazon for any big name items. This is mainly because Amazon's unpredictable pricing, including sometimes dramatically overpricing things for a while, is turning me right off trusting them or assuming that they'll be cheaper the way they almost always used to be.

Free delivery, we'll-call-you-back customer support, and a smartly automated returns process are all great, but they are still vastly inferior to being able to walk for two minutes from my home and buy what I want right now, and being able to return it just as easily on the increasingly rare occasions there is a defective disk in the box.

Between this kind of nonsense and a couple of years of getting Christmas wrong for lots of people, I'm not sure how much longer Amazon specifically will be able to rely on the good will they've built up over the years without a change in course.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_arbitrage
DBAs will be left behind in the NoSQL/DBaaS world if they cannot adapt
It's nice to hear smart people talk about important topics in a down-to-earth fashion. This is why I upvoted.
That's great to hear, I was going to switch from Android to a Lumia Icon (929) this week. Any tools/tricks/apps you can suggest for a soon-to-be WinPhone user? Always been a long-time Nokia fan, but let's face it, they took awhile to get their hardware mojo back. WP8 is also looking pretty slick these days and that helped to seal the deal.
How did WhatsApp gain traction? Presumably most of their users already use facebook, which offers the same messaging functionality as WhatsApp.

So why do people use WhatsApp instead of Facebook for messaging?
And this, too, shall pass away ...
As I write this 18 of 30 entries on the "newest" page are about WhatsApp. Whatever that is - I'd never heard of it before now. It's got four entries on the front page, and the top entry on the front page got 240 votes in 24 minutes. In the meantime a discussion about proofs, computers, automated reasoning, and other such issues has plummeted off the front page. Even though the discussion is civil and constructive, it's fallen foul of the HN "flamewar detector" heuristic.

It's late here, and I have an early start in the morning, so I'll see what tomorrow brings. See then if there's anything worth reading.

As I go, let me ask - what do you get out of HN?
Would be nice to see a little more detail on the clients that need hundreds of connections. I have no experience with PostgreSQL, but do get around this in other RDBs through a mix of async calls, caching and optimising data structures and application logic (meta-data driven schema; indexing content in the app before a db write to eliminate having to retrieve that content to search it, or indexing it using the db).
The bubble spreads across all tech startups. Before it was whether your product could be viral enough to match snapchat's $1 billion, now it's whatsapp's $16 billion.

This creates a very unhealthy attitude around tech startups that will have a cascading effect on the entire industry. It's like a hegemonic military policy. The strategy doesn't matter, as long as you have a big stick.
Thanks for this (I think - I'm still under the effect...)