skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ugh, their website doesn't even explain what platforms it works on. Their home page, about page, and FAQ don't mention it at all.

Their purchase page has mysterious Apple and Windows icons, with a message saying "Is Now Available on the iPad".

But is there a Windows version, which the Windows icon would suggest? Or is it Windows Phone? OSX version? Web version? It says "Available on the App Store", but on my iPhone I can't find it.

And if it's only available for iPad, it doesn't even make sense that the site has a purchase page.

http://ultimeyesvision.com/purchase.php
Well, given that there are roughly 7 billion people on earth, and the number with mobile phones is currently 4.3 billion, that means WhatsApp is at 9% penetration of a still growing market. I think they can grow a little bit more than you estimate, and regardless, 4x of 400mm is an increase of 1.2 billion users.
Facebook is barely 10 years old and they're already the new Microsoft...maintaining dominance by acquiring every major competitor that poses a threat. And I'm not necessarily saying that's a bad thing.
Ukraine IT activists ask for help
Not this again. I get the latest news on Hacker "News". That includes one of current biggest apps selling for $16B or whatever it was.

It is also a way to pass the time. Instead of playing video games, I can waste my time reading things that have some sort of relevance to technology and such.
Facebook made $2.14 / user in Q4 2013 [0]. That means they need more than 26 years to return that value.

Or they need to find a way to increase revenue greatly without alienating users too much...

[0] http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AMDA-NJ5DZ/2971107785... (page 12)
I'm glad people are finally realizing what they're giving up for convenience.

I personally don't mind having no privacy if everything becomes super convenient, but at least people are cognizant of the tradeoff now.
There are plenty of AI projects that don't copy the brain and are pretty successful.

IBM Watson is the obvious example, and the many successful Deep Learning-powered image recognition projects are another.
University of Maryland Data Breach
All the news and events are from 2012.

Colours and fonts are better, but there's too much detail on the homepage imho.
Libtorque: Event library for manycore, heterogenous, NUMA Unix systems
But what is a problem that specifically requires intelligence to solve? How do we know we're measuring intelligence, and not the programs aptitude for the particular problem?
Looking back the this parent's original statement:

> I'd prefer that government entities remove themselves from open Internet pursuits entirely.

What you are describing doesn't follow this. You are in support of regulation, the thread OP isn't.
Why is their stock overvalued? Do you have any evidence of this beyond you thinking there is a bubble? Honestly curious, since it seems to me their stock is rising for a reason: the fundamentals of the company are strong, and they have demonstrated an ability to rapidly react to new trends.
Why does dividing by zero in JavaScript result in Infinity?
Couldn't agree more. I guess most of us remember the MSN messenger. Back then me and my teenage friends thought it would stick around forever - up until skype came along.
1.2B is monthly active, 750 is daily active. FB doesn't publish just registered users.
$19,000,000,000. Just making clear. 19 Thousand Million Dollars. 19 Billion. For a mobile app.
Me too. Can't beat 6€/month for infinite SMS and 300MB internet.
Because you are made of atoms that can more efficiently be used for something else. Morality (and all human values) is a purely human concept that evolved in the specific conditions of human evolution (and even just our specific culture.) AIs are not anthropomorphic, they don't have to have anything like human minds or values.
Someone should tell them that their font icons don't display properly in Firefox. Did a drunken lemur design this? sigh
With the caveat being that Twitter isn't rationally worth anywhere near $30 billion. Even if you said their sales was income, they'd be trading at nearly 50 times, and at that point they'd still be worth twice too much.

Here's a prediction: as the easy money QE party comes to an end, the stock market melts, Twitter's growth grinds to a complete halt, investors realize there's only so much time in the day and Twitter has lost the messaging space, Twitter is worth $5 to $7 billion if they're lucky.
The numbers are staggering: 450 million users in less than three years. That's a real company. That's more users than most startups will ever see in a lifetime of use let alone daily usage.
At least Cox isn't too bad in comparison with the horror stories I've heard about dealing with Comcast or TWC... still, it is not fun to deal with them. Plus, 1 gbps for $70 sounds a lot more appetizing than 50 mbps for $74.
That's just it. We know how to measure the efficiency and accuracy of a given task, but we don't know how to measure "intelligence"
yes yes and yes.

But boy - 16 billion.
I also had to go to preview.python.org to see this.

My first impression was very favourable. The design is clean and well implemented for the most part.

The menu design is quite effective, except that most of the first panel, under About, seems like low priority background information that won't interest most visitors. I would have thought promoting the material on getting started, and on major areas like downloads and documentation, would be the highest priorities here.

I tend to think having basic code examples high up on a programming language's home page is a good thing, and I like the general idea here. However, if it were me I'd move away from the automatic switching to something with manual controls to cycle through the examples. As others have noted, the content below keeps moving, along with all the usual problems that make carousels a bad idea.

It's a shame they're still using the Flux font in places. I get that it's traditional, but it's simply not a very good font, and it brings an amateurish feel to an otherwise very professional-looking page.
This investment must've returned their entire fund
Hard to compare though. Microsoft had barely any internet/web users back then. They had zero email users.
Facebook has a billion or so give or take. All of which can get Facebook messages in their mobile apps already. How much overlap is there with Whatsapp?
We already have a candidate algorithm[1], which is successful in a broad range of applications[2][3][4].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning#Convolutional_neu...

[2] http://deeplearning.net/reading-list/

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning#Results

[4] http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/06/google-x-neural-ne...
They might not want to, and it might be more of a homogenization than outright killing. I think the final third of Stross' Accelerando speaks rather well to this possibility - if you don't want to be converted into computronium so that you can participate in Economy 2.0, you'd better emigrate.
This purchase is large enough that the carriers might notice it but they will be completely unable to follow through on doing anything about it.
From WSJ liveblog of the FB-WA conf call:

“Monetization is not going to be a priority for us,” Koum says.
“We’re focused on the growth.” He says he’s looking ahead 10-15 years.

http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/02/19/live-blog-the-face...
I view FB as a very dishonest company. Here are my reasons.

1) Hiding stuff from users, stuff that is personal to users and putting it for sale. It is not like they make it easy to change options either.

2) Mark said on more than one occasion that he wants to make the world
a open place. His actions don't reflect it. Remember, the one time somebody hacked into his FB account(or somehow got access to pics) and posted his personal pics, and FB was not too pleased about it. There was even a press release about respecting his privacy(!!).

3) Not too long ago, FB made ties with Republican faction for H-1B visas. Not too wrong with it(I am on H-1B myself), but they supported a Republican bill that has to do with environmental protection(went against it), to gather support for H-1B visas.
It's almost like they would go to any lengths to get their stuff done.
I find it hard to believe they(FB) have idealistic goals.
Higgs-Boson particle found in womans handbag
To be fair doing startups with the goal of getting acquired by FB has been a thing for a while.
Theoretically maaku is right. With infinite RAM and CPU you would just have to execute every random string of bytes until one of them happens to be strong AI. Of course, there's probably less than 1% chance of it being friendly...
good fucking lord
Anyone else know why they're shutting it down for Android?
> What he dreamed up is in my opinion better than fake buttons on a touch screen.

No you are "new to multitouch" in the sense that you haven't tried to implement multitouch yourself, conducted a user study on multitouch learning curves and intuitiveness, or used a real life application exhibiting the multitouch you claim to understand for a prolonged length of time.

Seeing one video qualifies you perfectly for being "just introduced to multitouch."
WhatsApp CEO was rejected by Facebook 4 years ago as it tried to sell its app
Zuck should probably be fired (gracefully step-aside, courtesy of shareholder activist pressure, given his voting control) when Facebook is forced to do a $16 billion write-down on this. WhatsApp won't even be worth the cash they're paying for it when the music stops. They just bought today's version of ICQ for $19 billion. This acquisition leads me to believe Facebook is most similar to Yahoo at the peak of the dotcom bubble (the acquisition strategy, the massive overvaluation, the weak advertising platform). Yahoo was a portal, Facebook is the same premise but in social networking (the all-in-one champ). There will probably be pieces that spin out of the social networking scene that end up producing the next Google, while FB languishes as the new Yahoo.
Plus they didn't even cost 1 Billion. Chump change.
Zuck:

http://i.imgur.com/GoA3NSp.jpg
Super pertinent and more in depth article on this subject:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man-...
I know this secondhand and first hand from the companies mentioned (and another I won't mention) but the actual studies are "corporate" IP unfortunately. You are encouraged to try different schemes yourself if you have a phone or tablet dev kit though.
And what's the point of it? They already have a working push messaging infrastructure for 1+ Billion people.
I think you can start by reading up on emotional intelligence to gain awareness and then applying it more to new situations.
“Computers Are Useless. They Can Only Give You Answers” -- Pablo Picasso
Bullshit, I'm in the UK, everybody I know uses WhatsApp.
It took FB 10 years to get to where it is today. Is that a process that WhatsApp wants to go through? I mean the finality usually ends in either an acquisition or an IPO; having shareholders on your mind constantly seems pretty stressful. I suppose they could've stayed private and seen what's possible.

Either way the Forbes website is visual chaos and I'm still nauseous and disoriented after reading that article.
Plus other similar apps like Wechat, Line etc are more advanced.
‘We need the iPhone of guns’
To be fair, WhatsApp has an incredible number of very active users. It's not like the companies in 1998/99 which had no revenue, no users, but spent millions on Super Bowl ads.

That said, this is a staggering amount to pay. I'm not familiar with Facebook's financials, but I'm surprised they could even afford this. I'd chalk this up to Zuckerberg's paranoia about no longer being #1 and less to a bubble.
"As it relates to the physical implementation of a network, part of the implementation includes configuring the devices."

Arguable, but then what makes keys and passwords "not a part of the implementation"?

"You seem to have an issue with me using the SSID as an example because its so easy to defeat that it would be a waste of time to even try."

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

"In short, its not an example I made up on my own formed from a lack of understanding security, its an example that's used in textbooks and security-specific certification study guides."

I wasn't questioning your understanding because you picked the example, but because you seem to persist in conflating things that seem clearly (and meaningfully) distinct. If textbooks and security-specific certification study guides use SSID as a canonical example of security through obscurity, I'm more worried not less.
Not really. Just pick your favorite AI problem and see how well it does on that. Pick a bunch of AI problems and see how well it does on all of them. Weight the algorithms by simplicity if you are worried about it over-fitting.
Is it even possible to monetize the app to such extent? I tried to use it a few times but never managed to see any hard money potential inside.
High performance webserver for PHP on Windows
Is there a need for a high performance webserver written in PHP running PHP applications like Magento. The server is delivered with easy installation/setup, drag-n-drop deployment and speed is at least on nginx/PHP-FPM level, even higher! Actually there are versions vor Linux, Mac + since some day for Windows also ... what do you think?
I think it's the other way around.

I assume that an AI will be more intelligent than us if we build it right. Then assuming that a randomly designed intelligence has the same goals as us is a huge assumption. Most humans don't even have the same goals, and we're 99% similar to each other.

In other words - the assumption that a random intelligence shares our goals is a much bigger assumption than that a random intelligence will be just like us.
Not adequately covered in the linked conversation is the fact that division by zero is undefined in mathematics. The logic goes like this: if dividing A by zero to produce B is allowed, this implies that multiplying B times zero equals A. Not a rational implication, therefore it's undefined.
Exactly. So what will they buy next? Snapchat for 50 Billion?
Top 5 Richest Music Millionaires In The UK And Ireland – Top 5 Awesome
I hadn't thought about the prospect of advertisers using WebGL for banner ads. That's... kind of gross actually.
I'm not sure that is crucial - I'll bet there are terms associated with the allowance of access to the already rasterised images along the lines of "solely for individual reading".

However I'll leave it there as it's too complex an issue to address generalities rather than the specific nature of the inputs, processing and analysis and intended uses, commercial aspects and such.

I pray every blessing on your knowledge sharing endeavours.
I think the number of active users is what makes this comparison invalid. At the time of AOL's acquisition of ICQ it had 20 million active users¹. WhatsApp has 430 million. In order to eclipse WhatsApp, a competitor would have to get substantially more than 10% of the entire global population.

ICQ was dominant in its heyday, but the game wasn't won yet, so it was theirs to lose. In some sense that's still true: we have another 4 billion people yet to join the game. But we're nearing the endgame and as we get closer to the "everyone already has a good messaging solution" line it's going to get harder and harder for an upstart to come in and eat everyone's lunch.

¹ http://ec.europa.eu/competition/mergers/cases/decisions/m184...
> and you're capped at $1 per year per user

Why would that be the case? There are always other revenue streams to be explored using the same user base.
"Measeles"? You couldn't copy the original headline? Before you object to my correction, consider that the headline makes your submission unsearchable using "measles" as a keyword.
There's no such thing as a decentralized conmunications tool. Even email requires the centralization provided by ICANN.
However, they also used an example showing that integer division returns a float, which is a behaviour specific to Python 3.
Can you fix this too http://awesomescreenshot.com/0432do7d8f ?
I believe it is related to the browser handling of local(fontname) tags in the @font-face. This would explain why Chrome uses the incorrect local version and firefox uses the correct remote version
Facebook just bought WhatsApp
“Facebook turned me down” (2009)
What the hell? Semicolons are great and all, but this author completely abuses them. It sounds like they are arguing that it should take the place of the period in text communication, because the period now conveys anger (intentionally or not). In fact, the examples given (in which I agree it does so) show the period used at the end of the message, not between disparate messages for which it's perfectly appropriate.
Whatsapp – Why we don't sell ads (2012)
Rubbish! I'm in the UK, and I've never even heard of WhatsApp.
I would say it depends who are you using it to talk with.

If you want secure chat I like jabber + otr
Fortunately, with infinite processing and storage, time is irrelevant. :)

Flip the switch and you'll have real intelligence (as opposed to our lazy Approximate Intelligence) just in time for the immediate heat death of the universe.
It's one of less great messaging apps. Needs your phone number to work (i.e. you change sim cards, your account changes). Works only on phones, not tablets (no iPad Version). Doesn't have a web or desktop version (such as Line or iMessage).
I recommend the following strategy:

1. Don’t ship any new features without writing unit tests for them first.

2. These new features most likely rely on parts of existing code so write a few tests for that existing code with each new feature.

3. If something breaks in production write a test for it at the time that you fix it.

Little by little you’ll increase your code coverage without grinding development to a halt.
I like braces though. And raw html. And I don't think tools should enforce significant whitespace if they compile to languages which don't care about whitespace.

And this makes me horribly, terribly behind the times and now i'll just be in the angry dome...
Nah, WhatsApp clearly was growing at an astronomical rate. They would have been neck and neck with FB in the near future. WhatsApp is I mean was a serious threat.
I have BellAliant 80Mb/30Mb in NS. No cap.
Dear HN users: If you are even minimally interested in the topics that this post "covers", please, do yourselves a favour and open up any book about machine intelligence instead of reading such uninformed and negligent posts.

I urge you to, seriously.
> How much overlap is there with Whatsapp?

This is the question. Apparently a sizeable number of teenagers and pre-teens have zero interest in FB. It's where their parents post cat pictures and make dinner plans. From what I understand, Kik, WhatsApp, and Snapchat are all what's "cool" with the under 18 crowd. This move may ensure that FB still has sufficient data to mine on this demographic in the future.
This +infinity.

The National Broadband Network is the one policy that had reasonably bi-partisan voter support, but the new conservative government has seen fit to abandon the admittedly more expensive, but more future-proof 'Fiber to the Premises' in exchange for what was going to be 'Fiber to the Node' but is now 'Multi-Technology Mix' or more appropriately 'Massive Telecommunications Mistake'...
> Android is right now number 1 in terms of market-share because it is open.

You're making a massive assumption regarding causality.
That's what intelligence is, being good at a given task.
In Spain the same as that, or even more so. That's 45MM people at a single strike.
Is that really worth $16 BILLION though? Think of the marketing they could have done to get those users in those countries with 10% of that money.
The demo:
http://vimeo.com/86746051

sure makes it look like he is broadcasting 6 QPSK modulated video streams on the same frequency.

1\ it requires ridiculously precise location feedback from the receiving device

2\ it probably requires ridiculous amount of synchronized transmitters

3\ + lots of computation

Experts claiming it works, but not the way he sells it makes me think there is something fishy with the demo, like maybe he isnt really broadcasting on same freq or something.
I found this incredibly helpful. Could you list any additional resources for CBT and positive thinking you might have? I have some other question if you don't mind, my email is in my profile.
Not all TLDs have to be priced the same. .com could be $250/yr and .biz could be $8/yr.
The Story Of Facebook's WhatsApp Buy
I was really curious to see the pull request, so I hunted it down: https://github.com/sstephenson/sprockets/issues/506

Edit: if you just want to install a gem and skip the why, the parent has this blog post: https://www.coffeepowered.net/2014/02/09/faster-pathname/
I might have to use that the next time I pitch a client on the virtues of unit testing.
No.

Most companies are conceived with an explicit exit strategy in mind from day one, and that strategy is usually:

SELL OUT TO THE HIGHEST BIDDER AS FAST AS POSSIBLE, AND
RETIRE EARLY, WHILE SOME OF US ARE STILL YOUNG ENOUGH TO
ENJOY LIFE.
An article mentions that Whatsapp spent $0 on user acquisition and marketing. If that's true, then yes, it's around $500 million/engineer.
We can stimulate a computer with the equivalent amount of information in much less time than years, though.
I don't think that's the right jargon. Darkworkers/lightworkers are more about serving yourself vs. the greater good. (i.e. making money via phishing is more darkworker while building Watsi is more lightworker.)
I'm astounded at how frequently people are apparently making breakthroughs in sending raw text between people.

I keep thinking that's a mousetrap, and people somehow keep making money off of* better ones.

Shows how much I know.

* Or at least building huge userbases on...
I can think of at least two reasons why this is superior:

1) You need to have multiple base stations installed roughly equally spaced. This seems to support heterogenous spacing of the stations

2) With lots of low-powered base-stations interference and obstructions start to become bigger issues. With many reachable antennas, a small fraction that have interference or obstructions should merely decrease SNR a bit rather than drop completely.

Of course advantage #2 seems (to me) to be theoretical; I'd like to see how this performs in the real-world.

The other issue I can see is moving receivers and/or moving reflectors. Imagine having this work, for example, when you are near a wind-farm, with many moving reflectors changing the apparent signal strength continuously.

I know someone who worked on a similar problem in the past, and temporal coherence in real-world situations was close enough to the feasible round-trip delay to the data-center. (e.g. if you need to recalculate every 150ms and it takes 125ms round-trip to the data center, you only get 1/6 the theoretical benefit).
Can anyone explain what's up with this GAAP/non-GAAP business? I am aware of GAAP, but i thought it was something you either followed or were naughty and didn't follow, not that you could simultaneously follow and not follow.