skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Limiting governments from making corrupt or short-sighted mistakes isn't usually considered 'regulation', but even if it is, this 'regulation' is also simultaneously local-franchise 'deregulation'.

And it's more sensible, since competition is a cure-all, than federal 'neutrality' rules about what services are allowable.
In order to keep up FB's stock valuation the need to show continued growth which slowing at a vary rapid rate. WhatsApp is adding 1 million new users per day. That's what zuck bought. And the ROI? Will be the market applauding FBs growth and driving the stock price to $100.
> things aren't usually exactly based on models seen in nature

I prefer to view everything as nature and natural.
What's the point in that from Facebook's perspective? Encouraging others to start competing with Facebook too?
>They bought the photo company at what seemed an outrageous amount in part to co-opt a competitor. In the end it was profitable.

Are you talking about Instagram? Unless I've been living under a rock I haven't heard or read anything that says they're profitable.
Google placed bid of 1 billion $ and mark just multiplied it with 16 ! lol!!
Facebook is trying to own mobile, period. That's all that matters to them and they are doing whatever they can to do it now, when it is still relatively early.
Don't forget banks that may have tried to get them to IPO after the Twitter success
One can only wonder how many services or products that provide true value and innovation around the world could have been created with that much money instead...
Surely your money is where your mouth is, right? You're going to make a killing guaranteed! Where can I subscribe to your newsletter?
>ou self publish, and most people regard you as a kook. You publish in Nature, and suddenly you're someone worth reading.

Nature (and others) are (in theory) peer reviewed journals with lends a sense of credibility that self publishing doesn't have.
What it adds is the simple point, "be optimistic about strong AI in the near future".
Show HN: Pertinacity – A weight loss hack.
To be honest, why not? I can see WhatsApp having more active users than Facebook in the future considering their current growth %.
Because it has an exceptionally short link title.
It's cheaper than SMS for most people, and it's what everyone uses.
Can anyone put in numbers what the benefit is for FBK in paying so much for whatsapp? I just don't understand how a messaging company can be "worth" so much, even after extrapolating the expansion in user base.

Don't get me wrong - WhatsApp is a great product and very easy to use on top of that (using phone number as id is a great idea to onboard users in a very intuitive way). But I fail to see where this valuation is coming from.
@psbp ... and before that it was Instagram's $1b. It was a running joke back then.
Minor quibble: IRR is usually an annualized measure. I come up with a number just over 7x (assuming 3 years, cube root of 400-1). Not that it makes it any less insane.
More specifically, I mean systems designed by biological evolution vs. systems designed by human thought.
There is a bug on the front page:

>>> print 'Hello, I'm Python!'
File "<stdin>", line 1
print 'Hello, I'm Python!'
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
>>>
Not sure if you're suggesting that they will tax those benefits specially or if they'll raise general taxes to cover for the tax-avoidance of those benefits.

Either way, health care is the precedent here. Wage freezes in WWII resulted from FDR's Executive Order 9328[1] left employers in a lurch. The government had control of all wages, earnings, etc., and those wages were (basically) frozen by position. A tax man made $x, while an ad man made $y, no matter where they worked.

This put employers in a tough spot because, so long as incomes were the same everywhere, hiring was difficult because they couldn't raise wages to attract candidates, so they petitioned the government for an exemption on health care benefits, as a way of attracting new hires and competing in the market place. In competitive industries, as these benefits were given in lieu of free market wages, benefits became fairly lavish, and for competitive positions, health care benefits became the norm even after the wage freezes were eliminated, but the net result was that health care as a benefit grew 700% in a 20 year span.

The sum of all that of course is the system we have now, where health care is so broken as a system that we're going to 'fix it' with more of the same, but that's another discussion.

[1] - http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/executive-orders/19...
I'm reading $19 billion...seems almost unreal that they'd be worth that much. But if it is the choice between paying that or Facebook dying as their users migrate elsewhere, it might make sense.
Only if you assume that "horseless carriage" was a good term. I'm guessing lutusp is trying to say that was dumb, too.
Try this:

FB market cap ~170B

.75B users (EDIT: originally quoted FB 1.2B users, but that is the total count and WhatsApp quotes active users)

--> market cap implies roughly $225 per active user.

In that light, 40/AU is cheap. Even if you assume 50% overlap, 80/AU is still a deal compared to how the market values FB users
From the press release[0]:

"... and WhatsApp’s core messaging product and Facebook’s existing Messenger app will continue to operate as standalone applications."

Why is that, I wonder. I was really excited when I heard the news since WhatsApp is the most used app and Facebook Messenger is the second, they becoming one would have been nice.

And chatting my friends on WhatsApp using Facebook Messenger [on the web] would be a killer feature for me, I feel the need for a web interface/desktop app every time I receive a message on WhatsApp and my phone is away.

[0] http://newsroom.fb.com/News/805/Facebook-to-Acquire-WhatsApp
Down 5% during the day, up 12% after hours.
$3B in RSUs for employees. Assume 50 employees and equal share - that's $60M each. Wow.
Pretty amazing that this is precisely what Microsoft paid for Hotmail in 1998 : $400 million for 10 million users = $40 / User. [1]
The parallels are striking : Whatsapp is to messaging today what Hotmail was to messaging in the late '90s.

[1] http://news.cnet.com/2100-1033-206717.html
I'd think "you broke it, you fix it" (same developer is responsible for the code all the way thru QA and deployment) with mostly-competent devs would actually lead to very good code. I would also think that trying to limit people's agency (most forms of "process") would reduce quality via lowered morale.

And if your devs aren't mostly competent, the best you'd get from any process would be mediocre code.
They just had a run-up from 130 to an all-time high of over 200, they released early that they would be exceeding expectations.. and you had a put out for earnings?

Irrationality exists in many shades, I guess.
Facebook suddenly acquired the world's (if we exclude the US and China) most popular messaging service. I communicate with this app with all my friends, and share stuff that i have no intention of ever putting on Facebook. Everything that once seemed 'private' is now in the hands of a website that forces it users to share as much as possible with marketeers and advertising companies. It's gonna be one tough mission for FB to convince WhatsApp users they're not gonna be playing around with their data.

If there's one moment to launch an email-like distributed protocol and app for instant messaging (and somehow convince all my friends to use it), i guess it's now.
> "the part of your brain that processes input from your ears is also capable of learning to process input from your eyes. If we can just figure out this one general-purpose algorithm, programs may be able to learn general-purpose things."

This is the Holy Grail of CS. I believe we're closer than most people would expect and I think it's going to be a race to the finish line.
Explain to me how a brain can evolve, and yet not understand how itself functions?
Standard with all the cool people in Nigeria.
Glad to see nothing will change, I hope that will be true on the long run.
Another interesting interpretation is its a psuedo-future. The cost of having BTC tied up at mtgox isn't so much 50% its more like $300 of volatility. Something like "By the time these guys 'fix' everything and I regain access, I'll have lost $300 via volatility and/or inflation and/or some kind of net-present-value calculation". Now I have no idea if you interpret that delay as two weeks or two years. Just saying its yet another interpretation.

Before yields went to zero I had a treasury direct account and occasionally the .gov found it necessary to pay me $1000 next month (or whatever it was) in exchange for my giving them only $999.whatever today. That doesn't mean a "thousand dollar T bill" is worth less than a kilobuck, its just discounted by time. The feds discount isn't much. At least some owners of mtgoxbtc seem to think their discount is worth about three hundred bucks.
I ask, cause I'm not sure- do anybody make real companies anymore?
One thing that crosses my mind whenever I imagine creating a human level intelligence is that it takes humans YEARS of constant stimulation to begin to exhibit intelligent behavior... Sometimes I wonder if we'll have the algorithm may before we realize it...
very useful, tnx.
Even though at the time it seemed ridiculous I could understand paying $1bn for Instagram. Photos is Facebook's most used product and Instagram was stealing users photos on mobile.

$16bn for WhatsApp I just can't understand. Facebook has a brilliant messaging app. Lots of people use it - even people who use WhatsApp continue to use Facebook Messenger.
So, now can we get someone to make an open source, distributed, and NSA secure chat client?
This is just ridiculous. As per their latest financial statement, $16B is $B more then they have in the bank. Part of that is stock, but still...

On top of that, it's 8 times more then their 2013 net income!

People say it's defensive play, but to me it looks like overly aggressive play with huge risk and very little potential. Facebook already has huge market share with their messaging platform, and they really don't need this that badly.
Why we don't support coin miners on Ninefold
Why the One Appealing Part Of Creationism Is Wrong
Because unless there's some proof, there's no reason to believe that the two events are related.

Case in point: last year's meteor event over Chelyabinsk, Russia took place shortly before a publicized close-pass of Earth by asteroid 367943 Duende. Many people quickly jumped to the conclusion that the two were related when, in fact, they were conclusively not.
And 32 of them are engineers - http://sequoiacapital.tumblr.com/post/77211282835/four-numbe...
you're right on about this stuff. someone once told me "yeah rails is great except the libraries have fugly internals"

but it's trueeee I prefer scripting languages to Java but there are a few of them available on the JVM. To be honest, I think the right balance is in the dynamic-OPTIONALLY-static typed languages.

Java interoperability solves this in a way... I've been taking a look at Dart for similar reasons. I just don't think the answer for me is RoR. Once I learned a Lisp (Clojure) and a lot of javascript I realized a lot of the syntax features I like about Ruby exist in many other places

What RoR really has going for it is the gem community, but if they're hard to trust and come with a slew of other problems...? Tough choices
How to piss off, demoralize, and demotivate your team
Does anyone know any alternatives (with group chat)?
I upvoted because HN does not have a separate 'save' feature like Reddit, and upvoting is a quick and easy way to tag it as "read this eventually".

So I reflexively upvote anything that looks even vaguely interesting.

In this case, I did read the article, and would probably have upvoted it anyway. Why? Because it stands to serve as the seed of an interesting discussion.

Personally, I don't give a fuck if the article itself "adds anything" or not. Who cares about that? It's irrelevant. If the topic itself and/or the content of TFA are interesting enough that it gets a bunch of interesting HN readers talking and commenting and linking and sharing stuff, then it's a worthwhile article in my book. Not everything has to be an earth-shattering scientific breakthrough, that's published in a peer-reviewed journal, blah, blah, blah.
It's interesting to see that they went back to a two day conference. For the past two years it was three days long.
This guy is doing it:
http://williamaadams.wordpress.com/2013/03/13/is-that-cool-o...
Twitter:

241,000,000 active users
30,230,000,000 USD market cap
----
$125 per user
I think the point others are making is that unlike, say, your height, "vision" is actually a combination of raw input from the eyes, and the subsequent processing of that input by the brain.

Therefore vision can be improved by making the eyes better - contact lens, lasik, etc - or by making the brain better - presumably what this app is doing.

A (very poor!) analogy would be how you you can use post-processing in software to capture better images, even without changing out the lens or the camera. Upgrading the algorithms in the software will result in better images.

Note that I'm pretty skeptical of the claims as well, but I also acknowledge that this falls within the realm of possibility. About to download the app so I can verify for myself...
That's a far cry from "show me all female friends of my friends near me who are single and like the walking dead" or "all males in nyc who work at X company and use tindr app".

Facebook gives zero privacy to anyone using it. If I walk into a coffee shop and see someone interesting working there, I can just run a graph search and page through the results until I have their entire life history online.
I'll just jump in here and cheekily plug my service: http://tradewave.net

There are a lot of people building trading bots for cryptocurrencies, and it's pretty easy to get started by yourself. But not everyone has the chops or patience to do it well; for example gathering, aggregating and storing data across the various exchanges is a huge pain. So my site abstracts away that stuff.

You can't do real HFT with Bitcoin (and others) as the infrastructure just isn't there yet. The lowest I've heard is 15-30 second trades and even that's rare. Most people go for 1-2 hours.
Fascinating. I couldn't get it to work for me. Maybe I didn't gaze long enough at the color images. Or maybe it's my introversion:

"One paper found that it is stronger in extroverts than introverts, and might be a reliable test for extroversion."
I'm not sure that sort of relativism makes sense. Making a really bad purchase doesn't make your earlier merely bad purchases less bad.
...and then we'll just need to figure out how to make humans more creative.
Dumb question I genuinely don't know the answer to: what's to stop me from buying a hundred Bitcoins from MtGox for $26,000 and selling it elsewhere for $60,000?
I was using active users as a metric in my parent comment, using the same measure Facebook has 750M active users for a cost of $227USD per user.

[0]: http://investor.fb.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=821954
The only reason I ended up using it is a European friend who wanted to stay in touch. This data is old, but it gives you a rough idea: http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/04/global-messaging-market/mes...

7% penetration in the US, 16% in Canada, 84% in Germany, 97% in Spain.
Buying Tencent? That's gonna cost them a bit more than this...
Where is the source for that $19 billion figure? I don't see it in the post, and it sounds ridiculously high to me.

EDIT: For reference, the previous title was "Facebook Buys Whatsapp for 19 Billion Dollars"

EDIT 2: I see now that there's a TechCrunch article [1] claiming a "$16B in cash and stock" figure. That article cites a regulatory filing [2], which states:

> options to purchase WhatsApp capital stock will be cancelled in exchange for an aggregate of 183,865,778 shares of Parent’s Class A common stock (valued at $12 billion based on the average closing price of the six trading days preceding February 18, 2014 of $65.2650 per share (“Specified Price”)) and $4 billion in cash to existing WhatsApp securityholders, subject to certain adjustments such that the cash paid will comprise at least 25% of the aggregate transaction consideration. In addition, upon Closing, Parent will grant 45,966,444 restricted stock units to WhatsApp employees (valued at $3 billion based on the Specified Price)

Amazing and somewhat dizzying that it's actually that high.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/19/facebook-buying-whatsapp-fo...

[2] http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/0001326801140...
That's splendid news!

I firmly believe that it is consumer apps, and consumer apps alone, that can give blazing home runs like this one.

Despite the risk, numerous deaths, blood and corpses all over the place. Somehow valley since last September had been running after enterprise junk but that's not where the gems lie (My opinion of course!). There is money in enterprise but no home run possible over there.

Edit: I like the way the edited title of this thread: Facebook (whatsapp.com).
Advanced Blogger's Guide: How Jump Start a Kicking Personal Brand
Facebook to buy messaging app WhatsApp for $19bn
>> 2. Cell tower antennas are simple dipoles, not directional antennas.

> This is where you went wrong. They are in fact directional antennas.

No, they (simple dipoles) are not. Read my quote above -- a simple dipole is not directional. Your reply says that an array of such dipoles can be made directional, which is true and a point I made as well, but it's a different topic.

> I appreciate your enthusiasm for debate but please do some more research into cellular radio before you weigh in further.

That's my advice to you -- before you change the subject, learn enough to realize that you're changing the subject.

> If that comes across harsh

Harsh? How about wrong? Dipoles are not directional. Cell tower antennas are vertically polarized dipoles, therefore they aren't directional. An array of dipoles is directional in a crude sense and as expressed in your linked article, but not remotely comparable to a phased array, the topic of the present discussion.

> I don't know how to communicate this more gently.

Let's see if you gently recognize your error. If you move the goal posts, obviously the game changes.
An Encounter with Your Old, Awful Writing
The dirty little secret of secret-sharing apps
Always wondered why they didn't buy out Surewest or Consolidated Communications. Instant fiber subscriber base, right-of-ways, and complementary service areas. And the money found in Google's couch cushions would probably more than cover the costs. Easy way to add 100K subscribers...
15 Hottest Harvard Freshmen...?
why ? viber and whatsapp are still there and will be in the future, i dont see new room for a messaging app.
That only strengthens my argument: market values at ~225 / active user
Thought process are really interesting to me, what kind of literature and teachings are you referring to?
I get charged a fee per SMS, but I just need an internet connection with WhatsApp. Even when I'm abroad and I switch my SIM card to a different provider contacts can still reach me.

I can have group chats in WhatsApp and send video, images and sound. Plus I like how it lets me know if messages have been delivered. It's also fast and doesn't drain my battery mercilessly. The times I've tried Skype on my mobile device I can see my battery meter go down as I type.

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.
Yes, exactly, and as I wrote "although thats kinda at cross purposes to the whole idea of a distributed currency."

A great plan if you want to buy coins for $632.58 and end up getting $260 for them because of a centralized system failure in an inherently decentralized protocol.

There's an old saying about idiots, idiot proofing, and long term trends in idiot breeding under idiot proofing environmental conditions. So invent a decentralized massively redundant system, someone WILL find a way to centralize it, and SPOF it, yet still blame the designer when it blows up. Like a law of human psychological nature.
GenY vs 97er
You have taken a FUD sound bite and repeated it without understanding. The language is not at issue here. CPython's GIL does not make threads useless at all, and there are already Python interpreters without a GIL anyway.

An addiction to globally shared state across threads multiplies race conditions and scaling problems, even if the GIL magically goes away. If you are incapable of using even processes effectively then I really fear for you when you have to scale out horizontally.

I'd say this more nicely if I could think of any way, but you don't know what you're talking about and you should read up before you begin talking about it again. It looks bad and you might mislead someone.
The closest option is XMPP. Unfortunately it's suffered an extreme case of scope creep.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP
Destroy? There will be a host of new messaging startups created off the back of this, and suddenly the Snapchat valuation looks sane. Do one thing that Facebook does but better is the new gold rush. Sure, most of them will fail hard without raising a cent in revenue, but others will start to threaten to chip away at Facebook's market share..

Anecdata: I get a lot more messages on FB messenger than WhatsApp...
Utah court issues injunction to stop Aereo
PL/pgSQL function plans are cached. Functions written in other languages may not be, I don't know, but in my experience PL/pgSQL is the most widely used.

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/plpgsql-implementa...
They won't let you withdraw in any currency afaik.
Really? The essay "Andrew Ng thinks there's one algorithm underlying all intelligence. Also, I hope we get conscious computers." is a mini Paul Graham essay?

No PG essay is so lacking in content or original ideas. Conscious computers? Who hasn't thought of conscious computers? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intellige...