skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure that your numbers account for share dilution. Let's assume the employee stock pool is 10% before any funding is raised so the founders start with 90% and the employees 10%. Assuming your numbers above are correct, the founders are left with 72% after the first round of investment (500k at 2.5m = 20%) and the employees are left with 8% (think 72 + 8 + 20 = 100). The second round of investment takes 35% of the company, leaving the founders with 46.8%, employees with 5.2%, first investors with 13% and the new investors with 35% (46.8 + 5.2 + 13 + 35 = 100). The third round of investment takes 8% of the company leaving the founders with 43.056%, the employees with 4.784%, the first investors with 11.96%, the second investors with 32.2 and the new investors with 8% (43.056 + 4.784 + 11.96 + 32.2 = 100).

If my math is correct, the founders may have ended up with more like $430,560,000 between them ($215,280,000 each assuming 50/50).
https://easylist.adblockplus.org/blog/2011/09/01/easylist-st... is the first thing i found, talking about 11.5 million total users and 80% of them using easylist, 9.2 million. According to the blogpost, the still existing (i just noticed that this was after the update-behaviour change) monday-peak was 118.5% of the expected (week total / 7) - 73 million download in august, so (73 / 4 / 7) * 1.185 = 3 million for that specific list and 3.75 for all of them. Hope i didn't miscalculate ^^
Add to that the growth till than. The easylist.txt seems to have a size of 528kb.
There are no absolutes in science.
"Sell to Goole" era is ending. "Sell to Facebook" era is beginning.
You can easily define your own type that is "everything". But how useful is a dict in python with keys and values of varying types? I've certainly never used one.
>Design and UI talent for mobile apps? Don't they already have Mike Matas?

I don't know who Mike Matas is, but given the quality of the Facebook for Android application and the amount of time Facebook's been spending on it... well... $1 billion is still a lot to buy a team to make your Android app not suck.

Though, on that note, the Instagram team wouldn't be the one to buy. Another startup that (took ages to) port their UI to Android and kept the crufty old iOS appearance.
This price makes plenty of sense if you think of as "instagram was bought for x% of facebook". I don't know facebook's current valuation, but I could be convinced that instagram is worth something between 2-10% of it (500M users vs 30M users, all sharing pictures daily). The reason for the billion dollar number has nothing to do with instagram, and everything to do with facebook.
I wonder if the investors (Sequoia, Greylock) knew of the pending acquisition offer from FaceBook when they put forth the 50M investment? If they did, that was the easiest investment ever.
The truth, as with many things, probably falls somewhere between the author's stance and yours. The rise of "free" simply represents a new dynamic in the market for artistic works. To be fair, it is a dynamic that places downward pressure on prices, and that's not necessarily great for most artists. But it's a dynamic that the market has created and is absorbing, and so artists must come to terms with it.

As an artist, you now have to think very carefully about how to price your work. If you believe your work is of exceptional quality, then by all means, price above the market. Likewise, if you believe your work appeals very specifically to a segment that's willing to pay X price, then go with X price and target that niche. If, on the other hand, your work is fairly generic, of average quality, or generally nothing special to any special groups of people, then making a living as an artist is going to be tough for you. Your choices are to price it to market (which may be $0), or differentiate substantially (enough to bear a nonzero price).

Practically speaking, moral arguments on either side are somewhat irrelevant. Instead, what matters is the artist's positioning relative to everyone else. Today, more than ever, you'll have to make yourself special -- or specialized -- if you want to earn a decent living.
> When’s the last time you saw an image in a calendar or on a urinal cake and said “Gee whiz! I like that enough that I want to track that artist down and send them money!”

Well, I'm not in any business that has much need of the kind of photography you find in a calendar or on a urinal cake. But if I were, then yeah, if I saw a really nice photo in a calendar, I might give the photographer a call.

Also, if I were a photographer building a portfolio, I might be happy to have a calendar with my work in it, alongside proof that it was indeed my work.

That's not to say that people who want free stuff in exchange for publicity aren't going to overstate the value of that publicity, of course. As a general rule, if someone offers to give you X in exchange for Y, they are probably going to try to get you to think X is worth more than it is, that Y is worth less than it is, or both.
Hmm not convinced its so bad.

The 16bit-ness seems hardly a problem.

The overflow thing seems a hassle.

Forth cries out.

Lets remember what this CPU will be used for - it'll be a way for the programmers to optimise their space-ships, and everyone else will have to cut-n-paste the scripts they find out there.

So someone port factor...
Yup, that's fair. I meant more that it encourages you not to get carried away with things that don't matter. But you're right, there's still a lot to be said for regular refactoring.
South Park Episode 1: Jesus vs. Santa, viral in 1995.
Instagram has a social network!? I must be missing something when I open their app. It seems like a "add a funny filter to your picture" sort of thing.
But back to the original proposition, is this indicative of a bubble when you drop 1 Billion, or >1% of your estimated market cap on a preventive/defensive measure?
Endre Szemerédi wins Abel Prize
Here's the super basic tool/script I wrote for it: http://pablop.github.com/trello-weekly-report/

I'm planning to improve this over time, purely as an exercise to get more fluent in Python and Git.

This was actually a good excuse to get started with GitHub :)
This is the more cunning way. Something like Linux would be hard to sue, and people would be faster to notice and cry foul. By picking your targets carefully you can efficiently make the whole industry scared to use an 'undesired' technology. Expect more of this, especially in mobile.
Larry didn't say he didn't want to live anymore, just not on this planet.
Usually, that's not how it works (VC's don't reinvest) but I will have to admit I'm fascinated by the story behind a large round so quickly followed by an acquisition. Too bad we'll likely not hear it.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. Evolution is simply the changing of allele frequencies over time, which can certainly happen in the absence of mutation. Although, I don't know that I would say "plenty" of evolution can happen without mutations, but I guess that depends on what you think "plenty" is.
Yet another DCPU16 simulator (but this time in clojure)
So, I found something very interesting in Mark Zuckerberg's post about acquiring Instagram:

> we're committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.

Facebook has always integrated whatever it purchased (that I know of) very tightly into the core product, or just done an acqui-hire. Instead, they've taken what is arguably the best way to share photos and decided to keep it as a product that exists on its own.

This is a major strategy change for Facebook and speaks to something I have suspected for some time - they now understand that in order to continue spurring growth, they cannot just acquire and roll in every product. As the ecosystem starts to hit a long-term maturity cycle, other products that fulfill particular functions better will be key to maintaining dominance over the market as a whole.

Let's face it: G+ cannot topple Facebook (though it probably wasn't intended to anyway), Twitter is fairly specialized and Pinterest has come up with a new way to share that fits neatly with the other two. Instagram makes immense logic as a purchase for Facebook as they'll control one of the most important ways people share photos outside their product, neatly roping everyone that uses it right into the FB circle without feeling forced to do so.
I'm pretty good at Haskell and prefer print to debuggers in pretty much every language. I'd rather have the computer produce output for me to read than to have to hand-hold the computer through evaluating my program. It's easier.
It's funny, just a few hours ago I was going through my apps looking for rarely used ones to delete. I was on the fence about Instagram; I'm not using it much but I left it there "just in case". Well, seems this acquisition solved the dilemma.
Problem is mostly with classification. Is ping a hacking tool? Is cmd.exe a hacking tool? (black window sure looks dangerous...) Is g++ a hacking tool? If not, can I carry around source code of a port scanner and a compiler on the same laptop? Is that the same as transporting disassembled gun?

(Any debugger is a killer cracking tool too)

I predict a big market for tetris clones with port scanning functionality...
Ask HN: Why did you get into programming?
I was searching the web for reasons _why_ people got into programming, but my searches only came up with programmers talking about _how_ they got into programming.

Please tell me HN, why did you get into programming? What was the reason/urge/goal that got you into the game?
Gary V predicted the Instagram acquisition, RIM collapse and Pinterest explosion
Call me paranoid but for them to spend $1 billion on this silly thing tells me they think there are big profits to be made with facial recognition data.
Parallel-o-gram: Local Live Instagram Backup
Ah, okay. Sorry about that :-)
Facebook to buy Instagram for $1 billion
any corporation with a cure would have an immense advantage over any competitors
Interesting hypothesis. What do you think they are varying here, and across what population?
In 3D games with significant view distance, they often use low resolution copy's for displaying distant objects. These low resolution copy's are progressively replaced with ever more complex versions as you approach. I suspect you could mix in some blur to get a smoother transition and enable even lower resolution copy's while avoiding the 'pop' that occurs when you suddenly get the high rez version of an object.
So, what is Revenue Performance Management (and should you care)?
Hold on, I think I misinterpreted something. Is Node-Five a Web framework or a native application framework?
Wii U components cost $180, price point $300?
Well... 1B is an amazing amount of money, but it is "just" 1% of Facebook post IPO value. What are the odds that Instagram growing more and more, the market freaks out, and Facebook stock loses 3-4% in a few weeks. Facebook buying Instagram is an insurance against this bumpy ride happening, and at a price much less that what it would be on the stock once Facebook becomes public.
Know how to hack a video game console? The U.S. Navy wants you
google~~
Heh.. Perhaps you might use an apple computer to help cure cancer and you probably wouldn't use a football?

>who gets to decide what spending is "right" and what's "wrong?"

None. Noone. Perhaps not wrong. Interesting though.

Sorry guys, guess I kind of ran this one right off the rails. We underspend on medical research proportionally. That was all. I just tried to pick something a little more interesting than the TSA to joust at this time.
The one doesn't replace the other. I wrote a JS debugger for Emacs so as to have a debugger when I wanted one. I still use print statements more.
I am amazed at all the passion that 0x10c has generated, whether among folks who have immediately started implementing VMs, assemblers, compilers, and such, or among folks who dislike Notch for whatever reason, not to mention everyone else in between.

The headline here, incidentally, is a little inflammatory and doesn't reflect the article's polite and technical tone. That's unfortunate, because the article itself is worthy of a read.
I actually agree with that. They definitely knew the FB deal was in place when they agreed to the funding.
Like everyone else already said, VCs can't reinvest so they dont really want 2x returns.

Anyways, there's a excellent blog post that explains this very clearly. It is written for founders to understand the VC's perspective when investing. Does anyone know what I"m talking about?
You may be correct.

I was just doing some rough calculations to show an approximate 'low-figure' of their take.

It is very possible and likely that they took away much more (because all of the variables could have changed).

For instance, that first $500K round could have been convertible debt which would have converted in the $20M round. If that's the case, then those investors ended up with 2.5% instead of 20%. That drastically changes the math and gives the founders more equity and a better outcome.
Facebook buys Instagram: Great move?
> a shift in priorities would be refreshing.

Agree, but as tptacek pointed out, there's a lot of commerce happening in football. If majority will shift their concerns to health problems, then the commerce will be happening there. Not sure if it would be necessarily a good thing, and it likely would require strict regulation.
Do you think that there are other portions of the universe capable of comprehending itself? Other than this pale blue dot, do you think there are parts of the universe that manage a reasonable projection of its entirety into a small low energy volume?
> This performance optimization doesn't really work for variable-width blurs...

An alternative would be to use Summed-area tables [1] where each texel contains the sum of all texels that are above and to the left of the current texel. This allows variable-width blurs to be computed in constant time, using only four texture samples (!).

And the concept of a variable-width blur is an approximation to a related concept in photography/optics called the "circle of confusion." [2] The circle of confusion, combined with bokeh sprites, are usually what AAA games are doing for depth of field [3].

See [4] for more details.

[1] http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch08.html

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_of_confusion

[3] http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/BokehDepthOfField.html

[4] http://mynameismjp.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/bokeh/
Not using semicolons seems fine enough. Going through and removing the semicolons that you already used seems like you're just trying to start drama. Why not use that time to do something that effects the code positively or negatively?
Exactly. They have over 27 million users. Surely that played a role in the acquisition as well.
It seems everyone is saying hello to bootstrap. Too bad very few build anything memorable upon it.
I totally agree, but it doesn't explain why there are so many treatments not available in the U.S., but available elsewhere. Islet cell graphs, for example.

Personally, I'd encourage EVERYONE with a chronic disease to become a quant, so that they may live long and healthy lives (after leaving finance).
> Photo sharing is something that everyone is trying desperately to solve.

Honestly - is this not a solved problem? I have a hard enough time choosing what service to use to share pictures on, there's not exactly a dearth of services in this space.
Cancer research... but you need to also factor in cancer treatment costs.
> Google is doing just fine out of Android.

By what metric?

> iOS may be better marketed, but there are a hell of a lot more Android phones out there.

Yes. And Google has made more money out of those fewer iOS phones than it has from the many Android phones.
Thanks. I agree with that. Can you refer some open source cloud management projects.( like https://github.com/nodejitsu )
And? This is pretty old news…
"when would you need to exploit a 0day vulnerability as part of legitimate system engineering?"

When you think you have just found a 0-day in your systems and want to check if you are right or not.
I can't even down vote but I'll offer an a different point of view.

(lose every battle) != (lose entire war)

Perhaps this a a proactive measure to eliminate some bagage that accumulated during the succeses they had in the areas you mentioned above. Perhaps this is an opportunity to refocus on the areas the have recently lost but still have competitive technology?

Fwiw - this is a reaction to the phrase "Lose every battle" more than anything else. Also, I looked around and I don't own anything by sony and can't remember the last thing I bought from them so perhaps they are still going to lose the war.
They sort of did it with Beluga- it became "Facebook Messenger" but was never integrated into the main app. At the time I was confused as to why they'd do that, but if you think of it as a replacement for the stock "Messages" app, and Instagram for "Camera" then it all starts to come together.
Agreed. The 16-bit char won't be a problem because this isn't really a "general-purpose" CPU. It will only be used in one game! "Eight 16-bit registers are also not enough to perform 64-bit operations entirely in registers." The whole premise of the game is a mistake manipulating 64-bit numbers. The author talks as if this were physical hardware used in production systems. And the section on timings completely ignores that fact the Notch pulled some numbers out of thin air.
Yes. The instant Facebook bought them, user trust went out the window. There is active, intense, well-founded mistrust by users regarding Facebook's ability or desire to protect user privacy in any way.

Indeed, anyone paying attention can see that Facebook actively and systematically attacks user privacy. Instagram just became part of that.

So yes, something has changed.
Totally agreed. Engineers at instagram worked days and nights for years for probably the same amount of money that the inside traders make overnight, literally.
The key to writing highly parallel programs in my opinion is to have a set of primitive, highly parallelizable operations (like MapReduce) and languages that make it natural to use those operations, either implicitly or explicitly (see http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust... for an example of such a language).

For a very different example of a more general-purpose language designed for large amounts of parallelism, see go. (Many of the same people were involved.) Note that it is much easier in that language to create accidental bottlenecks that are hard to track down than in Sawzall. (That's the trade-off when you let the programmer have more control - they can do more interesting things but also get the rope to hang themselves.)
I can't help but think that maybe Crockford's plan was to eliminate JS semicolon use all along by sparking a nerd backlash, and that he's a goddamned evil genius.
A user in another thread aptly described it as Twitter with pictures. I don't use Instagram and don't really see a reason to, but that doesn't mean others feel the same way.

Roughly speaking, you might say:

Facebook: Social with everyone (polysocial?)
Path: Social with close friends (oligosocial?)
Pair: Social with your S.O. (monosocial?)

Twitter: Microsocial in text with everyone
Instagram: Microsocial in pictures (nanosocial? :P)

Having said that, I actually had a recent discussion with someone about how the heck they were going to monetize the service, and we didn't reeeally come up with a good suggestion aside from the expectable ads and premium filters.
Instagram: Microsocial with everyone
How To Unlock AT&T iPhones
DSLs have a significant up-front cost. If all goes well, the cost gets amortized over many usages and you come out ahead. But it takes a while. One-offs are not worth it. This is probably true of abstractions in general and not just DSLs.

Another thing about DSLs is that you have to nail both the D and the L in order to get it right, so they are hard to make. Language design is not at all like program design.
Ok downvoters, not asking for a billion dollar valuation, just saying it was a good match with instagram
I believe they'd argue the removal of semi-colons has a net positive effect on the code as Zepto.js is in essence a minimalists version of jQuery. This is particularly important for mobile sites which benefit greatly from site assets remaining in memory.
path seems to be experimenting with in-app purchases for additional photo filters.
Moving photos from one service to another is doable, but it requires a LOT of effort from the average user (relatively speaking). Even if another company made an "import instagram photos to service X", the perceived effort of moving would prevent most users from finding such an import feature and making the move.

Photos are a pretty solid natural barrier that could protect Instagram while they made that long trek.

That being said, stickiness and perceived lock-in with photos doesn't make the trek any less arduous.
Some are, some aren't, I'm currently not if you must know :)
It was a giveaway.
The content of the cookie isn't compromised, but you can trivially sidejack a cookie on an unencrypted connection and access the information through the website itself, in essence stripping any security. Arguably encrypting the cookie is a waste of processor time, but more importantly I think you may be giving people a false sense of security. The proper way to do secure interactions is via SSL, and I'm not sure encrypted cookies vs simply HMACed cookies gives you any true security advantage (as session storage or anything else).
I've sold a half dozen sites on Flippa (and the SitePoint Forums before Flippa was spun off from that). The largest single sale was $90,000 for a site selling a WordPress plugin I developed.

It doesn't matter how much junk is also for sale on Flippa as it's all very filterable and searchable, and those filters and searches can be saved. I have them saved as daily e-mail alerts so I just skim the new listings matching my criteria once a day.
Instagram is a photo service in a sea of other photo services.

You're mischaracterizing Instagram. It's not "a photo service," it's the photo service. 30M iOS users plus 1M new Android users in 12 hours.[0]

Instagram is the main mobile photo app. With this purchase, Facebook strengthens their mobile position the way Google strengthened their content position with YT. The acquisitions are very similar.

(edited for a stronger point)

[0]http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/04/07/instagr...
Why are you surprised? Most startups are built to either go IPO or exit through a buy out. Considering many startups (including Instagram) do not even come up with a profitable business model, it excludes IPO and therefore only leaves an exit as a way for investors to recoup their investment.
I had a small remote control toy car when I was a child. One day I got freaked out when I heard voices coming out of it.

It turned out I wasn't going mad, the thing was picking up local CB radio.
Facebook To Buy Instagram For $1 Billion
I'm aware of the benefits of using cookies for session state, just not sure encryption itself offers serious benefits without encrypting the entire browser session via SSL. And it may offer disadvantages from an understanding standpoint, where people think the encrypted cookie provides more security than it actually does.
That just reflects it's status as the de-facto starting point. You could equally state that it's too bad that very few build anything memorable with HTML.
I think an argument can be made that a consistent coding style is important to open source projects.

And honestly this is, intentionally, a tiny library. If it took more then 10 minutes I'd be surprised.
Google's revenue just by being an ad broker? $36 billion in 2011.

As it turns out, people's priorities are making money.

https://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html