clef

Well then I guess Apple knows I come here often!

I Just use the factory apps and have nothing else installed, this way no one mines anything out of me.

Maybe It's because fundamentally we don't fully trust machines, so we have to make sure. Three times.

If the universe is holographic, wouldn't it be kind of the same thing?

Well who would be naive enough to think you can make it to the top and play with the big boys by being Mr NiceGuy? Being acquired by Facebook/google/Microsoft/apple is probably what saves a lot of "founders" from becoming the next "charismatic" sociopaths...

>"tinker with shit". That's gold!

A bit of light humour sometimes isn't a bad thing :) It's called "boredom hacking" :) We know it'll have nothing to do with aliens, we can only hope...until one day it's real and they kill us all :)

Spot on.

Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know. —United States Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld

Imagine aliens racing space cars in a circle around an asteroid, on a track made of ice, it's the Niribu 500 :)

>4) a person who illegally gains access to and sometimes tampers with information in a computer system

>This is the last one because it is the least accurate and has been created only in recent times by the media.

By recent times, you mean since the mid/late 80's when hacking sort of got known in the mainstream after phreaking?

>"Anyone that takes a look at a goal and a given set of resources then figures out an unconventional way to achieve that goal"

I want to be rich! therefore I choose to rob a bank (my unconventional way of achieving that goal), does that make me a hacker too? (Like a bank hacker)

Awesome article nonetheless!

They want their beer back :) http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/mar/25/star-trek-warnog...

Oops, what the heck was I thinking? Of course.

Big alien motherships on their way to acquire Facebook?

Unfortunately there is a difference between "backer" and "investor", even if they both chuck money in the project. Would there be such a thing as a kickstarted kind of thing where backers can become shareholders? Or could this simply be a case of "if you invest 10 grand, you get x shares"? This way there could be a way for investors not to ride on the back of backers later on? Or am I being totally silly?

I meant "another company".

And They keep taking ours no matter what :)

Has anyone seen the movie "surrogates" with Bruce Willis?

This is a giant casino for people that have a lot of money they can afford to lose.

The true innovators maybe are the ones that exist by themselves without being "acquired", or before they get acquired (Apple was, is and will probably surprise again in the future, as will Google and Microsoft)

Once they get acquired...well...Skype Hotmail etc etc...(who are they again?)

And that's ok I guess, there's a lot of drive to create and grow (hack?), being top efficient and innovative on a shoe string budget, until you get a nice big fat pay check.

Maybe the little guys with big ideas are only "useful" until they get acquired, by that I mean that maybe it's more of a natural process that one thinks... Maybe by the time the technology is "invented", showcased and becomes stable enough to be "mainstreamed", it's time to collect your dollars and medal for "honourable service to xxxxx industry" and either move onto something else that will be cool and make you more (or less) money eventually and produce more internet "apps" addicts, or retire to the beach.

That's like saying whatsapp is a fancied-up text messaging app..wait, it is.

You reckon Facebook is like the Borg?

Because money. More seriously, VR is the future of a lot of things, if it hadn't been FB, it would have been son either company. Microsoft and google were probably looking at it too but lost to FB (again),

We might use it for teleportation in 500/600 years.

Sometimes I still can't get my head around how something that isn't real is worth anything... Argh, I must be too old to understand now :) I was closely involved in a startup in the first bubble, I remember the hopes and dreams and hype and VCs throwing tons of money to invest into ludicrous stuff,and coffee machines so big and expensive... It looks all the same now, the rich want to get richer and call it "innovation" (I saw a prototype of something huge that was "invented in the 90's by some young fellows, unfortunately it was too early, way too early...and saw it again "invented" by someone else many years later and called "Facebook") and the young programmers (they're called hackers now I believe) were just happy to code and get their pat on the back, feeling special,with stock option promises (I was one of them, I must be an old hacker now :) ... So many smart people working super hard( although pizza and wine at midnight was cool)...

Do you feel special and useful guys? Or does it take $19B to be real special?

But still, HN kicks ass no matter what :)

Amazing

Nokia = hardware /software/factories/ lots of employees (jobs) / history ...= 7.2B

Whatsapp = ? = 19 B

In 5 years time, ideas alone might be worth billions!

I see. I get it now, it does make a lot of sense.

I see your point. How many lives would you estimate are lost/saved because of what OS is being used? Wouldn't any vendor have a "military" version of whatever OS they would use anyway? Which would make it a lot safer to use.. The NSA probably cracks as many windows machines as they do Linux/Unix all over the world, I would think that it's all the same if you know where to go and what to do to get in.

I hear you, I have -2 karma in HN because someone thought one of my answers was silly or disrespectful, for which I apologise, and I must admit that there is a part of me that wants to find a way to get into positive karma again, what for? Even if I had -1000000 karma I could still read HN, I guess we all want to be important or seem important somewhere and there is a whole range between null, moderate and extreme need for feeling validated/recognised by others in order to boost self-esteem. Tragically, being an @$$ to users than seem less knowledgable is one way of feeling better about yourself.. Isn't it easier just to be nice and feel happy to help ?

If windows is so bad, we should by now have had a lot of missile disasters, airport disasters, missile guidance disasters, train station disasters, nuclear reactors disasters, etc etc... I have had my share of sightings of crashed ATMs running windows, but I also seem to remember that sometimes the way things are coded crash the OS, and it's not only a windows issue is it?