skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First, an analogy.

In my very humble opinion the value of snapchat is set similarly to how the value of MySQL was set at $1 billion at acquisition by Sun seven years ago, a tremendous multiple, despite its being open-source at the time with next to no revenue. (Its revenues were something like $48 million, so Sun purchased it at 15-20 times earnings.) In the opinion of myself and others, the price was set by the value, to Oracle (the leading database company), of MySQL not doing an IPO as it had been planning shortly before[1], or Sun not competing with Oracle head-on. In fact, within 24 months of that acquisition, Oracle, a roughly $100 billion company[2] besieged by competition from open-source databases like MySQL and a flagging share price, itself completed an acquisition of Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion. What are the chances that would have happened if Sun hadn't first paid $1 billion to own a direct threat to Oracle? According to one person, Larry Ellison often said, "It’s not enough to win—all others must fail." [3]

Basically, there is an elephant in the room setting the price of Snapchat. The price has nothing to do with revenues and everything to do with the elephant. The elephant is trading at a market cap of $211.61B. That elephant is Facebook.

Snapchat is worth $20 billion because Facebook is worth $211.61 billion and it's a direct threat.

It was about a year ago that Facebook paid $20 billion for Whatsapp[4], when FB was trading at less than it is today. (And in a move some viewed as desperate [4]).

$19 billion seems downright reasonable viewed in that context. What are the chances Facebook will pay more for it? Not low.

Snapchat is three and a half years old and has about 200 million monthly active users. This chart from around the time of the whatsapp acquisition is all you need to look at: http://slicecommunications.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Wh...

Snapchat is a threat: http://www.businessinsider.com/snapchats-monthly-active-user...

And Facebook has the money and drive to make it bolster their own numbers instead. This is why it's worth $20 billion.

-

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/stories/2007-06-26/the-worth-of-...

[2] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=oracle+market+cap+Apr+2...

[3] http://steveblank.com/2014/09/25/watching-larry-ellison-beco... (apparently this quote appropriated from Gore Vidal though)

[4] http://www.cnbc.com/id/101432344

[5] http://www.cnbc.com/id/101429929
This argument keeps coming up. The problem is this is based on exactly one data point. So saying "historically..." is hardly relevant!

The automation that is happening now has never happened in the history of the human race. You simply cannot extrapolate from past events and say it'll be like that again.
All the services they provide don't justify the cost (30% of sales!) in any way. The only reason Apple is able to charge a fee so high is because they are the monopoly provider of apps for the most popular (or the richest) mobile platform.
It appears that it is already down and is crushing bloggers into underground or into arms of few (one) big players.
> The relentless specialist themed sets sucks. The move towards many small fiddly pieces and some specialist pieces to create a Lego-thing sort of sucks.

Very much this.

I have a couple of kids, and I try to steer clear of the specialized sets. I've heard stories of friends' kids pointing out set after set in the store and saying "Done that one. Done that one. Done that one. ..."

They have no sense of dumping out that giant bucket, delighting in the rushing chatter of a plastic avalanche, then asking themselves, "What do I want to build today?"

Sort of makes me sad...
The article alludes to one core bastion of economics - "the invisible hand", without mentioning another - "as humans, we are creatures of infinite wants".

With that in mind, a computer can never truly replace a human, as there would never be a purpose in creating a machine that 'wants' things that are different to its owner. Along the same lines, as robots fulfil each current human want, new wants will simply emerge.

A trite example - A robot that cleans my floor satisfies a current want, but I want a robot that cleans my whole house - every surface. After that's fulfilled, I'm likely to want a robot that can reconfigure the house based on my predicted needs, and after that, a robot that works in conjunction with others to make sure my preferred dwelling config is available in the right place and the right time every night. I'm likely to keep working in my job to have this, and my career will no doubt evolve to reflect the group need that people have for these robots.

The selfless robot in Interstellar is a realistic scenario - incredibly helpful, but programmed to want what its owners want. Imagine endless configurations of that - I think it's a likely future.

'Stupid' machines have been replacing humans since the industrial revolution, but humans have just taken a position higher up the chain. The article claims that 'smart' machines will end this process - I disagree. The greed of human nature will mean we always have to work.

Edited for phrasing.
Are brands paying though? I don't see any ads.
"I think it’s safe to say that most independent developers are generating annual revenue in the tens of thousands to low hundreds of thousands of dollars range."

Most?!
One of my female friends has been through broadly similar experiences, and so sadly I'm not particularly surprised by this article. I'm glad that it's been posted, and am somewhat saddened by the defensive nature of a lot of the replies here.

Yes, a few of her examples are a little weak, but I think it paints an overall picture that isn't hugely encouraging for the state of SV, and one that I have no trouble believing.
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Tobacco (HBO)
It is more based on thousands of years of data. Every generation likes to think that they are unique, and that "this time everything is different". In reality life will go on.
Why would someone with a monopoly over the software on millions of devices ever reduce prices?
I would assume that previous poster was referring to stackexchange forum other than stackoverflow.
People forget that Apple pay for hosting and downloads.

The cost of hosting the 0% rate apps (99.3% of all apps[1]) would not be a small cost at all.

[1]: http://metakite.com/blog/2015/01/the-shape-of-the-app-store/
WWII was a time when the potential fate of the entire world was at stake. You had no choice but to be as ruthless as possible. It was a completely different situation.

In Vietnam and Iraq, that simply wasn't the case. Neither of those countries were worth going "all-in", and it's a good thing we didn't.

Your proposal is not a good one. The increase in civilian casualties will only empower the rebel forces in the long term if we had a "Total War" situation. Not to mention it's completely unethical.
It's also politically correct and fits in with the current generation's thinking of "you can be anything you want." This comes up now and again on HN as well about whether everyone should/can learn to program.

Will practice make someone better than the average person? Definitely. But to be the best in the world, you have to have some genetic advantage - be it your body composition or the way your mind works.

I always like to point out the ice hockey player Ed Jovanovski. He didn't start playing hockey until he was 11 (which is pretty late) but was drafted 1st overall into the NHL just 7 years later. However, his dad was a semi-professional soccer player so his genes probably gave him an advantage over others who started playing much earlier but didn't make it.
It's not on the list since it was released a few versions ago! Try it in the latest stable version, and please file issues on GitHub if you run into problems. There are already a couple of known issues filed there that are being looked into, but at least the PHPStorm developers have told us that it works well enough they are able to work on XDebug+HHVM support in their IDE.
The proposal is flawed from a financial perspective to Apple.

Credit card fees are higher as a percentage of the price, the lower the price. Apple pays close to 30% to credit card companies for a one dollar transaction, whereas a hundred dollar transaction costs just a few percentage points. (I think this is due to a fixed per-transaction fee added to a percentage-based fee.) This is why retailers often place transaction minimums for credit-card purchases.

It's to Apple's benefit to consolidate multiple app and music purchases into one transaction to reduce the total percentage paid out. They do this by offering iTunes gift cards for sale at stores and by consolidating multiple purchases from the same day or two into one transaction.
What Is Holding You Back? – The Power of Thought
I don't know anyone with an iphone and rarely see pictures of them. As such, i simply am not familiar enough with them to figure out whether it's an android or iphone just by looking at it, especially since the UI is very generic and android mods and ISP OSes plentiful.
I will have to disagree here. I vigorously eliminate clutter because I believe it has a definitive impact. Having a bunch of "things" in my field of vision and in my house makes it harder to find the few physical things I really need. I suppose you could argue it isn't clutter, but organization, that is important. But clutter is the enemy of organization.

The more decision fatigue I can eliminate the more I can focus on what I need. All of the other existential pains the author suffers from, I do not. I think "de-cluttering" is an activity many people undertake for a variety of reasons. For me it is all about eliminating decision fatigue and making it easy for me to accomplish the real work I want to accomplish.
Yeah. I usually don't pick this particular nit in common speech, but when you talk historically, it sounds really weird to say that the Industrial Revolution gave rise to the Third World.
Back in my days in academia, I used LaTeX for math and physics. I liked that LaTeX separated out formatting of content from the display. It made it easier for me to focus on the getting the ideas and wording right and someone else worried about producing nice looking templates.

Since then, I have switched over to Markdown for most of writing. There are still ways to embed LaTeX when needed for equations, but without the added complexity of full LaTeX.
Changed what? Compared to the functionality offered by Open/Libre Office even "years ago" Google Docs is a non starter.

Except if you don't need all of that, in which case you could do the same work with 10 other small scale word processors even in 2000.
We've been using it in production for about half a year now and it's been great. It especially shines when you have iterative algorithms were you e.g. first need to group-by something then process that a bit, then split it out again and process that a bit more etc.
This kind of task is just so much faster in Spark than in MapReduce, it doesn't even compare. Also their API is much nicer and so are the underlying ideas (RDDs in particular). I think it will mostly replace MR in the future. If you are starting a new project now I see few reasons to not use Spark if it fits the bill.
> isn't downvoting supposed to be used to drop conversations that are trolling in nature

I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness. - Paul Graham[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
Sure, but they don't have to be caustic and quite so unpleasant in the chat room.

I am outing, specifically, Terenko. In all my years as a forum contributor/mod I don't think I've encountered such a poisonous dick as that person.

I know you do a lot of good work for the PHP community, along with Gordon and many others, but, my friend terenko is truly a knob end and sadly encourages others who are up and coming PHP debutants to behave the same.

It really made me weep as a diamond mod why you guys tolerated his snide comments and activities.
That's definitely valid. However, in the vast majority of cases where someone complains about CV-PLS in my experience, it's because they had their question closed.

For example: http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/158712/147370

Look in this very thread. You have people saying it's a horrible practice. Yet nobody really saying what should be done instead.

The fact of the matter is that there is a huge problem on SO of under-moderation. Over 11,000 questions have >=1 closevote right now. CV-PLS is one technique that the community has found effective in keeping the site searchable and with good content.

The people who are against it, I'd love to hear ideas on other effective methods. But to say it should be forbidden is a bit short-sighted.
Agriculture provides for the basic needs of humans. What do humans do once their basic needs are met? Some of them go on to do meaningful things that expand the human condition, such as devoting themselves to the arts and the sciences. The vast majority of them turn to zero-sum status games.

This is a serious problem, because the more physical wealth can be provided by robots, the more those status games necessarily become about obtaining power over other humans. This puts capitalism, as an enabler of this kind of status games, on a path to escalating conflict not just with democracy but with human rights.

Of course, many would say that this is already happening. For now, the conflict is simply at a level where human rights violations and everything that goes with it can still be exported to third world countries.
The goal of Zen and all Buddhism is to achieve "Enlightenment", a state of mind where one fully internalises the rather Daoist idea (remember the Yin Yang) that God does not exist and due to this Good and Evil are not different at all (an illusion) but are one and the same. Believing that Right and Wrong are equivalent is the same as denying they exist at all, hence Nihilism.

All of the practices done before this (meditation, compassion, tantra, etc) are--as in other branches of Hindu and Dharmic faiths--understood to be merely optional "yogas" or activities to fill the time and enjoy oneself in a Nihilistic world.
$499 Mac Mini is good enough for writing apps.
These seem to be results for the intestinal microbiome. There might be different results for the skin microbiome, the sinus microbiome, or the vaginal microbiome.
Ideas for Vehicles to Explore Saturn's Moon Titan
It's definitely a scary proposal for management to accept. The company I pitched this to was a 15 year-old web dev / digital agency with ~15 employees and <$2m in revenues. So a pretty tiny and poorly performing company. Management liked the idea because almost all of their revenues were going into wages.

But there must be a particular type of company, at a particular scale, with a particular ethos out there that would be up for giving an automation initiative a shot.

If it worked, it would make for an impressive news story which could spark others to follow suit.

Imagine an economy where everyone's job was to automate their job...
Agreed, but he doesn't use ALL CAPS for internal links. If you look closely[1], you'll see he uses small caps which are typographically distinct.

[1] check the a.xref stylein his CSS: http://practicaltypography.com/styles.css
This sounds like a cool idea - if and only if everyone coordinates to it together fairly, which seems extremely hard to achieve. I can see tons of caveats, e.g.

- If you automate away your non-tech co-worker (someone who can't contribute much to the automation of jobs other than his own), will he get the bonus? If so, how do you assure people doing the automating won't feel treated unfairly as the non-tech guy just got bonuses for doing nothing?

- If someone automates you away, will you get anything? Will you be angry?

- If you keep automating away your co-workers, who's gonna be left to help you automate yourself away? (assume for a moment that you have the most difficult to automate job in the company)

I mean... this could work if you'd manage to set up incentives so that everyone in the company works together and not against each other. But I'm not sure how to do this, especially in a way which doesn't leave anybody feeling he's being treated unfairly.
Why should Apple justify the cost? They only need to provide the benefit (access to the overwhelming majority of iOS users) and let developers opt in or not.
Neat.

How closely does NeoOffice track LibreOffice (or is it a fork of original OpenOffice and not LibreOffice at all?). For instance, are new features in the latest LibreOffice (like better MS Word import) present in the latest NeoOffice, or will they be soon?

That I can't really tell from their web page leaves me not optimistic.
they had a secondary goal to find Bin Laden they achieved that goal too.

In a different country, a decade later, by completely different means, after he'd been allowed to escape Afghanistan. Hardly a rousing success. In fact, a total failure, necessitating a number of different subsequent attempts. If you fail repeatedly and then succeed once, you don't get to call the first failure a success.

What then happened was what is commonly known as peacekeeping.

No. What then happened is commonly known as alienating the local population repeatedly, losing all your popular support, becoming the laughable tool of local animosities, and in so many ways just fucking everything right up in an orgy of incompetence, aided so admirably by the British who shared many of the incompetencies, but managed to demonstrate some of that at even greater levels and still, to a large extent, refuse to accept how appallingly badly they did. Face the facts; initial invasion a success, attempt to build a nation total fucking cluster.
Not necessarily addressing the speed portion, but if you're going to give a key to a repeated item in React, it is best to use the index instead of a unique identifier(if the overall DOM structure does not change much between renders) so that React does not destroy and recreate each item on tree change.
By definition, somebody has to have a most heavily locked door in the world.

In your analogy, it's clear to me that the US is better suited for that status than any of the other realistic candidates.
I have no doubt that life will go on but that isn't the argument here. The argument is that while automation kills jobs in one area but create more in another. There's no logical basis for thinking that's a consistent pattern. Large scale mechanical automation is only a few hundred years old.
The problem is that the official version of OpenGenera still runs only on the long defunct Digital/Compaq Alpha platforms. The emulator version is (or "was" because it's not a work-in-progress) a proof-of-concept for a port to x64 Linux, hence the dependency on old versions.
Naturalism (as we currently understand the laws of nature) doesn't totally imply determinism. There is some quantum uncertainty at the lower layers. But that isn't the same as me having free will, because my free will doesn't control the quantum uncertainty.

As for compatibilism... it looks like "you can't totally prove that materialism implies no free will, so it might be possible." No mechanism, not even a guess at one, just "it could still be". Forgive me, but I don't find that very persuasive.

I think that my objection to most of the compatibilism stuff is this: What is the "I" that is going to choose? In a purely naturalist view, all I can be is a collection of matter that obeys the laws of physics, because there's nothing else for me to be. I'm a machine made out of atoms, nothing more. It seems to me that all these compatibilist arguments aren't really taking that seriously. (Perhaps not surprisingly, since they're being made by philosophers, not physicists.) They therefore have some intuitive, experience-based idea of what a person is that sneaks in to their arguments, rather than really grappling with the implications of the purely naturalist position.
Maybe some of these jobs won't be replaced with a robot, but will become completely irrelevant/unnecessary?

Instead of having a robot hairdresser, what if cutting hair wasn't even a thing? e.g. maybe we'll all get holo-wigs that let us change hairstyles as easily as profile pictures.

Similarly we don't talk to switchboard operators to enter URL in the browser addressbar. We've got AI that does it better and doesn't judge :)
Bellevue man among 100 finalists to train and possibly die for Mars One mission
And some discussion of the statistical-significance test(s) used, since from the tables, there are some big differences in category proportions. (The text and the charts aren't clearly in agreement.)
Get more user feedback (ohhhh the goodness, nom nom nom)
If you happen to try FreeBSD don't let that be your only impression of BSD based systems. Try OpenBSD too, if your hardware is supported and all the software you use is available you won't be disappointed. OpenBSD more or less just works provided the previous conditions are true.
You mean like this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YBumQHPAeU

(Edit: NSFW)
> in a much more friendly fashion by other tools.

Examples?
Can't Uber drivers start being drivers or stop being drivers whenever they want on their phone, other then when they are driving someone? Can't they choose which customers to take? Using their own cars? Many drivers have 4 apps open at once and then turn off the others when they accept a pickup. Couldn't you just call them lead sourcing companies?
That's why I hate political labels. What do you mean by saying "he's a marxist"? Does subscribing to one of Karl's ideas require automatically subscribing to every other?

I know you meant this as a joke, but I want to emphasize a general point - one of the things that totally dumb down conversations about economy is people grouping ideas under labels like "communist" or "libertarian" or whatever and evaluating them in batches.
"or the vaginal microbiome"

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you can detect a gender difference here.

On a serious note, for better or worse it seems that 'microbiome' is often used colloquially to mean 'gut microbiome'
Why did we tolerate it? Because we weren't given the tools to do anything about it. We couldn't kick or ban people. We couldn't moderate our own room. All we (as owners) could do was move messages or flag. We got yelled at every time we flagged something, so we learned to live with it. The only other option we had was to leave (which many users did, even leaders).

Today, we have the ability to kick-ban. Awesome. But he's also calmed down a lot. And is seen as a resource.

It's gotten a lot better over the years, but there is still work to be done in there. But now we're starting to get the tools to handle it. Which is awesome.
what's wrong with having a service layer that isn't sandboxed, and an application layer that is?

What's stopping you from running your filesystem and network requests through a local service... you can sandbox all the rendering and other access, and tighten controls on your service interface.
Yep. SourceTree with BeyondCompare hooked up works rather well, been using it for a couple years now.
I'm curious, what kind of company? What industry?
Damn commies! :)

The founders, directors and investors could still own 51% of the company.

Heck, if they wanted they could offer only the bonus payout incentive structure with no equity or revenue share. In essence that would still encourage employees to automate the company. Employees work themselves out of a job, and the owners reap all of the automated revenues.

Or you could not be a dick.
It's probably because if your data is spanned across two pages, it may require a lot of page swaps if you access data back and forth?