no_future

Anyone know how much Upcoming was originally acquired for?

Didn't you hear? Google was upset about not employing enough minorities even though 1/3 of its workforce is Asian, so according to Google Asians are white now. Diversity!

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/28/google-releases-emp...

Why did people suddenly realize now that there is something fishy going on with a LOCATION BASED APP that claims to be anonymous and privacy-oriented?

>Anonymous profiles

You just defeated the purpose of anonymity

>Linus Torvalds

>Steve Ballmer

>Reed Hastings

>Mark Zuckerberg

What imbecile wrote this?

I don't understand why Quora requires signup to JUST VIEW the questions and answers? How do people doing nothing but viewing it affect the site in any way, aside from getting it more pageviews, which is generally a good thing? I understand having an account to contribute, but just to view?

The problem with this type of thing is that by removing one inconvenience it creates a host of others. The lock needs to be wifi connected which requires power, so I have to put batteries in it and change them every 6 months to a year, which I don't want to be bothered with. Changing batteries in smoke alarms already bothers me enough. And I don't need yet another web interface bothering me and sending me push notifications for something that should essentially require next to no thought, locking and unlocking a door.

From their FAQ page:

>What if there’s a stranger at the door, and I approach to answer, will the door automatically unlock?

>The auto-unlock feature is also optional and can be disabled at any time, depending on your behavior and use pattern. The August Smart Lock uses proprietary techniques to mitigate false unlocks from the interior side of the door.

Seems like it would be more annoying than convenient. I would rather take a simple NFC enabled lock without fancy lights and internet connected bells and whistles on it, since NFC chips consume very little(or no) power and a ton of smartphones ship with NFC connectivity. NFC, unlike Bluetooth, which this lock relies on, requires you to actually touch your phone(or put it very close) to the receiver, so the scenario mentioned above wouldn't be a problem, nor would encryption be a problem since the transaction would be nigh impossible to eavesdrop on since the communication is so close range. Would also be cheaper to manufacture, with a cost of 10c per NFC receiver tag compared with $5 for a low energy Bluetooth one.

Just something that would make it easier for my family to get in and out of the house without worrying about whether they remembered to take their keys or lost them, since they are all glued to their phones anyway.

Is this some kind of ironic/tongue-in-cheek thing? I feel like some of the people in this thread are taking it too seriously.

All this crap is easier said than done.

There are many in electrical/mechanical engineering which is I guess considered to be applied physics, to give a couple examples: Thomas Edison and Felix Wankel.

The goal of top-tier colleges is to make as much money as possible, like every other business. Thats the reason they've come under fire for letting in students from China and the like that cheated on their SATs and rejecting tax paying US citizens, because they can charge the foreign students huge premiums.

I see. As I said I don't live in the city so I don't know why people do whatever they do there. Looks like I stand corrected, apparently in some cases using Uber everyday is cheaper than owning a car in SF.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/12/technology/personaltech/wi...

On a sort of related note, why do Uber and Lyft create so much drama? Brazenly sabotaging each other, burning shit, super-conspicuous launch parties, etc. Does this drum up more customers or something? I don't know about you, but a company whose job it is to get me safely from point A to point B in a motor vehicle pulling crap like this doesn't exactly sit well with me.

I think Snapchat is a cool company, and they showed their technical wisdom by building their original messaging service with Java atop App Engine, so they could scale effortlessly and just focus on the product. While this might not sound like wisdom per se it certainly shows more competence than all the tech companies building on top of garbage like node.js or whatever flavor of the month tech mouth-breathers happen to be hyping at the time, and then months later releasing a blog post about how they had to switch their entire architecture to an actually capable system, as if doing stupid things that cause you headaches later and wasting time fixing your broken garbage when you could be working on the actual product instead of doing things right the first time is some kind of engineering feat.

They have 100 million + users(not as small as it seems in these days of throwing around huge numbers), see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_virtual_communities_wit...

The offers and valuation they got I assume are based on(aside from their huge funding rounds) the usual vastly overblown targeted userbase analytics advertising blah blah. I say vastly overblown because the revenue potential based on the targeted ads hooplah really isn't what its made out to be. To put this in perspective, Facebook has 10x Snapchat's users and made around $8 billion in revenue last year, so a little over twice of its bid for Snapchat. So unless they planned on putting extra special magic fairy dust ads on Snapchat(a platform of which its dubious what kind of ads will be successful/viable on, if any) after acquiring it, there are better companies out there that they could have acquired if they wanted to increase their earnings.

I think specifically Facebook's offer wasn't based on Snapchat's earning potential, more on the fact that Zuck seems to get antsy when the Facebook empire loses face(pun not intended) to any other platform in the least. He paid $1bil for Instagram when it had 30 million users, way more than it was valuated at at the time. The press made it seem like he alone spearheaded both offers, and that Facebook's board/other execs were barely involved in the decisions.

Google allegedly attempted to outbid Facebook for Snapchat, offering $4bil, which struck me as odd, seeing as their better known recent acquires included a machine learning firm and a company that makes smart home products. I thought Google had learned it's lesson in the social space after the colossal failure that was Google+.

how does yahoo actually generate revenue now? the only people I know of that mainly use Yahoo mail are in countries like India where ads are worth next to nothing, and nobody uses Yahoo search. Is it just from ads on their properties?

Yahoo right now(and when they bought Tumblr)

http://a.pomf.se/gsxzwx.jpg

Idk, parking and traffic may suck but I couldn't justify shelling out out my hard earned cash any time I needed to get somewhere. Once in a while is fine, but only people with lots of disposable income who don't care about saving money I'd think would use them daily. In cities there are buses and subway systems, SF which seems to be where Uber gets the most usage has the BART which is great, and you can always walk.

Seems to be the same case with Airbnb, I don't see any normal people using it, it seems to be rich people who want to make some extra cash off their nice condo/vacation home.

I'm sure people ask this all the time, but why do these companies have such high valuations? ($17 billion for Uber - really now?). I mean they already generate revenue and are profitable, so shouldn't the value of them be proportional to their profit?

I don't live in a major metropolitan area, are Uber/Lyft really that big of a deal in cities? They seem like something only yuppies would use. This article is from a non tech/startup related publication so it would seem that they have penetrated the public conscience.

Let me preface this by saying that I find it ridiculous that many people seem to think there is some kind of intellectual/aptitude discrepancy between males and females. To reference the article itself("math is hard"), in my personal experiences in high school at least, I knew more girls who were awesome at math and science than boys.

Can people not just do what they like and shut up about it? Why does every single little thing have to devolve into some huge scene about race/gender inequality? There are good parts and bad parts of working in any field, learn to deal with the bad parts, that's life. Leaving a field that you otherwise found interesting and enjoyable because "the men were rude to me", or "I was the only ethnic/gay person there" really isn't helping your case. Do people really feel the need to fit in so badly that the fact that everyone at their workplace is not like them is enough to make them leave their field of work? Try being someone who comes to this country and doesn't speak good english. You're all people and share a common interest in tech, try to make the best of it for Christ's sake. If you aren't happy with the conditions, try and be someone who helps make a difference. By leaving and writing passive-aggressive blog posts you are part of the problem. Some of these people really just need to get over themselves(boohoo I was the only black trigender pansexual in the office and people joked lightheartedly with me, the horror!).

This generation really is the overly entitled, whiny group that all those middle aged columnists seem to be writing about.

They may have a point about the maternity leave thing though, I don't see that one brought up often.

California is the only US state where it's completely illegal to own an assault weapon. Something about that doesn't sit right with me, though you can take that with a grain of salt cause I'm from Michigan.

Macs have by far the best build quality for the price, with great displays and hardware as well. They can run most all of the dev tools that you can run on Linux(yeah there is always going to be that one person yelling about X specific thing that doesn't work as it should).

Recently I'm doing iOS dev and you have to use a Mac unless you plan on emulating. iOS strikes me as a platform that so-called hackers would like, seeing as how mobile is a fairly new frontier with unique and undiscovered uses, and Apple is always putting out new iPhones with interesting new hardware and APIs, unlike boring old CRUD webapps and desktop apps which have been stale for years. I was just blown away this week with the amount of insane stuff you can do using GPU hardware acceleration on the newer (5+) iPhones, its like everyone is carrying these little powerhouses around in their pockets. Though I guess you could also say that the closedness of the platform and ecosystem would be repellent to hackers, I personally don't get my panties in a bunch about this, I just like making cool stuff.

Interesting. Enet seems pretty barebones, but I guess that would be beneficial for games where there can be a lot of variance in gameplay, what with the parent post's explanation of the level of precision required.

So basically this is just a guide on how to use Homebrew? I see nothing time-saving or "hacker" about this.

Fascinating, I've been interested in what kinds of serverside software real time online games(WoW, Call of Duty, etc) run for a while now, but haven't been able to find much info on it.

Seems that they would need to be optimized for many very high stress concurrent connections with as little latency as possible, so I'd guess that they run C/C++ and/or Java? Do they use something like Websockets, or do UDP/TCP or some other persistent two way connection method? There don't seem to be any publicly available libraries focused on this kind of thing, so I assume that they develop their networking stuff mostly in-house.

Anyone that knows about this stuff willing to share?

thats metal as fuck

Isn't this the company that the lady who caused that dongle fiasco worked for?

Am I the only one who thinks anyone that talks about software development methods(agile, scrum, etc) is trying to pull a fast one on you?

Why would they want to destroy it? It's insanely profitable.

You can create a social networking app in 2014 with not a single standout feature and it will get users?

And here was me thinking that to be successful now you needed a somewhat original idea or a flawless execution, shows what I know I guess.

>Internet of Things

I don't know why but this phrase makes me irrationally mad, more so than other buzzword terms. Almost as mad as when a TV/webseries is referred to as belonging to the "slice-of-life" genre.

>because they knew Ruby

If the only language I know is Visual Basic should I code my web stack in Visual Basic and deploy it to Microsoft Azure?

A surefire way to tell if a developer is lazy(and not in the good way) and takes little pride in their work is if they show an interest in a platform or language solely because its in a language they are familiar with, instead of picking tools that are the best for the job at hand. I mean this reasonably of course, if your app is a reasonably good fit for Ruby and you're familiar with Ruby more power to you. I just don't understand companies developing odd domain specific/specialized software in languages and platforms not meant for it and then complaining that it runs too slow.

Something I'm also unsure of is why almost every company these days seems to be choosing Rails to build on. It doesn't seem to be that they are just picking the language which has the largest available pool of developers available; from what I've read Ruby as a language was completely obscure until Rails came along, and even now isn't used much outside of Rails and the occasional script. Python is really popular and used in many domains ranging from web to scientific computing to interfaces for stuff like Arduinos and has a batteries-included de-facto web framework, Django, so I would imagine there were more Python programmers available, but you see far fewer companies using a Python stack. Java also has lots of battle tested web systems and there is a sea of cheap Java developers(might as well hire a cheap dev if your initial product is going to be a rushed piece of shit), though it is verbose, has a longer dev cycle, and is considered to be for the enterprise type businesses run by Wall Street fat cats everyone is trying to "disrupt".

Is it because Rails is just trendy, or some other reason?