skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Its not absurd, that has been our experience the majority of the time.

It is absurd, and saying "I only look at people who like hamlet, and all I see is people who like hamlet" doesn't make it any less absurd.

>Your comment about Yesod having nothing unique shows you never really used Yesod or are very intentionally trolling

Again, stop with the accusations and consider the very real possibility that not everyone shares your preferences.

>For example, Snap does not have type-safe urls and Happstack has a very different approach to its related routing

Except that I can use web-routes with either, and end up with the same thing. How exactly does "yesod does a trivial thing like routing slightly differently from the default way snap/happstack do it" become some compelling unique feature? How easy is it to not use yesod's routes?

I would actually appreciate if you could list some other examples. We use postgresql, so nothing persistent related was of interest to us. If we don't like the templates, that leaves form handling and some trivial stuff like sessions, routing, etc. Sessions are effectively the same across all three, routing is more flexible in snap/happstack than yesod, and yesod's form handling appears to be "like digestive-functors but dependant on persistent". If you think yesod is a good choice for someone who won't be using persistent or hamlet, then I am genuinely interested in hearing the reasoning.
Use http://dummyimage.com instead.
The game is scored in profit. Revenue and market share matters only as a means to the end of securing profits. Android has a huge market share (and, dearly bought), but even 1st & Goal doesn't matter unless you actually score.

I don't keep super close track, so maybe Apple's commanding profit share lead is eroding sharply. Last I checked, "commanding" was indeed the word for it.

Again, all I'm saying is that you can spend a lot of money for a huge footprint in the market and still find yourself at the bottom of the value chain: you can be the guys facilitating a lot of commerce for other people without taking a significant cut.

If you don't believe Google cares about that, why are they wasting their time with G+? Facebook isn't going to be a search engine. Nobody believes that. The worry is that Facebook is going to commoditize search by moving the profits it generates somewhere else.
Do I need an oscilloscope?
For those of you that are looking for alternatives now:

http://lifehacker.com/5899690/dont-bother-with-instagram-her...
Kind of odd to see a Facebook property running ASP.NET :D
I'm sorry but Instagram is not worth 1 billion dollars. Nevertheless, congrats to the founders!
But, if I remember correctly, the haskell map is typed, isn't it?

In python you can mix the types of both keys and values in a single dict freely.
I doubt you, or anyone else, was saying that then youtube was purchased. It merely looked popular.

It turns out what Google was buying was a chance to maintain their lead in how people were going to use their computers.

Facebook is now buying a chance to maintain their lead with how people are going to use their phones.
I agree that it's unlikely that medical research is less well funded than sports. I do think it's plausible that "critical" medical research (excluding ailments like small-penis and spring allergies) is less well funded than sports, for some reasonable definition of "critical", but I'd be unwilling to put any money one way or the other without doing a bit more research.

I will say, however, that pharmaceutical companies put a tremendous amount of money into researching and marketing treatments for common minor ailments.
Not saying I'd like to see it happen, but Pintrest would fit in well with Google+, moreso than Facebook. Google+ really does the sharing+comments thing well.

It's hard to know where to root. Independent start-ups give great competition to the big players, but I know a lot of people go into an MVP with the goal of making a large exit. It's a great way to get funding for your next startup.
No but why raise so much money at such a lousy valuation if you're 30 days away from a billion dollar exit?
Wait, so what Node-Qt and Node-Five would both allow you to use exactly the same code?
I thought the same thing. The unknown that I came up with was distribution channels. How would I get these great calendars that I created into the hands of the people? Certainly not unsolvable, but much more work and much more risk (up front capital) than just creating a calendar.
For 2 main reasons that I can think of:

a) You don't know if the acquisition will actually happen. Therefore if it doesn't, you aren't left with nothing.

b) It gives you a stronger bargaining chip to increase the price of the acquisition because you literally have a strong alternative. Instagram could tell FB to screw off, they are already getting $50M.
I had the same thought, but this link is for an article written in 2007.
You can't always have it both ways, having interesting, challenging problems every day and also making good money, sometimes it works out that way, other times not. I was in a somewhat similar situation where I left a very small startup at one point for a much more boring, but stable job, however I felt it ended up giving me time to explore my own interests relating to programming and even start some personal projects, where I otherwise would not have had the time. Why not take the slower pace and use the extra time to work on some of your own projects and plan out where you want to go next, sometimes some "down time", relatively speaking, in a career, can be a good thing
FB acquires Instagram? Time to Download Your Photos with Instaport.me
Because some people who are in the right place and at the right time and who work extremely hard and make smart moves can become inordinately wealthy? This makes life not worth living for you?

Don't forget that to the 2 billion people who live on about dollar a day, your material life is paradise and your wealth equally as appalling.
I for one find cancer research much more fascinating, there are always new surprises and twists to learn and discover. With a football game, we already know the rules, the outcomes are not all that diverse, and people have been playing the same kind of game for ages, I get bored really fast.
Don't forget the other costs of "moneyball" like giant stadiums every 10 years or so in every major city reorganizing the entire downtown as they are built.

Mostly I agree with your above point about discretionary government spending though, but it would have been pretty low hanging fruit to just say (once again) that the money spent saving us from terrorists would save a lot more of us from cancer.
Visualization of the 15,000 Warm Weather Records Broken in March 2012
Hey HN, I'm the in-house Recruiter at HeartFlow and I'd like to emphasize our need for an experienced smart developers, in the following roles:

- Cloud Services (MPI, HPC, algorithm design, C++)
- Web Apps (LAMP, Java, Javascript, XML).

We're a fast growing Stanford-alum startup that is well-funded and growing quickly. Check us out at www.heartflow.com

Feel free to contact me directly at sgiha@heartflow.com for the job descriptions or follow kluikens' link above.

Sandra Giha
The acquisition was made 5 years ago. It's an old article.
I don't think they would outright and blatantly kill it. I think there are lots of scenarios in which Instagram becomes irrelevant due to neglect or intentionally crippling it. Ultimately, Zuck wants to keep people within Facebook's walled garden.

Google's acquisition of YouTube was different, because it was an opportunity for Google to serve more ads. I just don't see a similar opportunity for Facebook in the Instagram acquisition.
The API already only gives access to 612x612 images with limited metadata. All Facebook has to do is keep them from improving the API.
Has anybody tried https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/service for this?
I agree with you. But this shows the culture in fields different from ours. What the photography area is witnessing is what we saw when free software came about. Smart photographers are using this to their advantage, whereas others are cribbing about it.

I wonder how hard it would be to negotiate a deal where the photos are given for free, but with a caption or footnote pointing to the photographer's website. That would make the calendar the best advertisement he has had in years. People are going to be staring at his photos all year long!
Dtrace conf 2012, Dtrace in Node.JS
I wonder what valuation of Facebook made this deal worth $1B.
Hackers Weekend, Dining Philosophers
Photo sharing is something that everyone is trying desperately to solve. When I open the G+ app on my iPhone it wants to upload all the new photos it can find on the phone. I would imagine the Facebook app does the same thing, but I don't know. The OS has cloud storage for photos baked in. When I plug the phone into my computer, Dropbox wants to automatically find and upload the photos.

Everyone is trying to get into this, and for good reason, I think.

My family is filled with people that always have access to a camera and to the internet via their phone. We're spread out geographically and don't get to see each other very often. There is a HUGE opportunity to bring us closer together that would be greatly valuable to us. I would love it if part of our daily routine included looking at all of the photos anyone in the family has taken in the last day.

There are lots of solutions for us to do this, but for whatever reason, nothing has taken hold. Maybe everything is too manual, or maybe social networks are still focused too much on the browser and not enough on mobile. But for whatever reason, it's not happening for us. I suspect we are not alone and I think the explosion of people trying to get me to buy into putting my photos on their free service is indicative of this.
> do not allow running of the GUI in anything but the main thread

That's right. AFAIK everything is running in a single thread.
I know they're saying they won't do another acquisition like this, but why not Pinterest too? It would make more sense to me than Instagram.

http://www.privco.com/research/top-5-reasons-facebook-should...
100% return in 3 months (it won't close to the end of the quarter) is an annualized 400% return. If you're a VC you took $50M out of a fund put back $100M, now you can make 2 bets at $50M when before you only had one. I don't see any way that this isn't a great deal for the VCs.

That being said, this wasn't part of the S-1 and Facebook really has to tell potential investors how this will affect the financials, so presumably there is a revised prospectus or perhaps S-1 in the works.
congratulations guys!
From the TC thread:

Christine Herron · Director at Intel Capital
"It's common to use an impending investment valuation to drive a higher acquisition valuation. Strategic/acquisition values are typically much higher than investment values. eg, as of today, Instagram is worth more to Facebook than it is to Sequoia, because Facebook gets strategic value in addition to market value. Also note that an investor with a signed term sheet would be fully aware that acquisition discussions were taking place, as well as what valuation range they were in. I would be surprised if Sequoia did not go into this with eyes wide open. They win either way - an instant 2X multiple on investment (and a crazy high IRR), or a highly desirable company that they believe has growth potential. Call me jealous."
When you say "better funded than sports", you're implicating advertising. But advertising revenue is in part of function of the broader economy. F-500s don't buy Super Bowl ads because they love football.
If someone with more knowledge than me would answer this I'd appreciate it: Does this mean I can write a full-blown iOS app in Lua? Or will there be technical and TOS limitations?
You are Thinking about your Career Trajectory Wrong
The valuation wasn't all that high. It was just twice that of the last round. In order for the investors that just came in to get any sufficient return on their investment, they had to at least double their money. Ignore, for a second, that it was just 1 month (or 1 night as Techcrunch suggests) - it doesn't matter.

The purchase price is usually determined based on the latest round of financing.
Zepto goes semicolon-free
and keeping Instagram away from Google. it's a good move.
Clicky link http://getdropdock.com/
Notch succeeded in creating an absolute clusterfuck of an ISA in his new game
That's good, thanks. While we're here, I'd like to drop a link to every BBC Radio 1's Essential Mix from 1993-2011 on Soundcloud: http://soundcloud.com/das-boy/sets/essential-mix.
Thank you, that's a good list! Dealing with cell arrays and text vs. numerics is why I do my pre-processing in Python. Matlab's job is to read in the data, run it through various algorithms, collect accuracy statistics, and show plots.

For us the issue is not so much Matlab as a programming language, but rather availability of new algorithms and ease of parallel processing. The licensing issues involved in getting the parallel toolbox running on multiple workstations seems like a headache, which is part of what is motivating us to look at R.
Not the same, but sometimes similar. (For example the QPainter API is similar to the Canvas 2D API, etc).

Node-Five is for folks who are more familiar/prefer HTML5 APIs over Qt's proprietary API.
But, quite possibly, it could be .5X, or .25X... Current FB valuation is somewhere around 25X revenue ...
I came to Lisp via "The Little Schemer", and I recommend it for people who are new to Lisp (and/or programming). It's short and sweet, but explores some really interesting and deep ideas (recursion, higher order functions, the Y combinator, the halting problem, and interpreters). I like to think of it as "SICP lite".

It won't teach you Clojure, but it will open your eyes and set you on a path to Clojure, and I think give you a very strong grounding for Lisp. At least that's what I think it gave me.

On the other hand, if you really want to get up to speed on Clojure specifically, Rich Hickey's talk "Clojure for Java programmers" is a great intro to the language. I don't think you need Java experience to get something out of it, it's mostly targeted at non-Lispers without much functional programming experience.

http://blip.tv/clojure/clojure-for-java-programmers-1-of-2-9...
For that matter, I'd be pretty happy if I could sell 200 copies of a calendar at ~$10/profit on each one. Hardly a full-time business, but it would turn my money-sucking photography hobby into something that covers buying some new equipment.
Interview with Carlos Miranda Levy, Founder of Educar.org
I was replying directly to the undercurrent of your message which is rather hard to miss.

"This seems ominous for Google...a shaky claim in mobile....what's left for them...sink tens of billions into mobile and still wind up on the bottom of the value chain...utterly outmarketed"

That's the TLDR version of you pulling Google into a relatively small acquisition of a largely irrelevant tool that a subset of one relatively small platform is even engaged in. Most people reading this story quite rightly react "Instawho?", whereas you see it as a clanging bell of doom for Google. And I'm the emotional one?
I just canceled mine five minutes ago with this form:

https://instagram.com/accounts/remove/request/
How Not to Sell (DegreeCorps Story)
What's the point in singling out sports entertainment?

Apple cleared $100bb predominately selling consumer electronics, should everyone who bought an iPad feel bad for not donating that $600 to cancer research?

Facebook just threw a billion around on a photo sharing company.

Microsoft just threw a billion so it could acquire some more patent ammunition.

Everyday billions and billions of dollars are thrown around to buy all sorts of things, who gets to decide what spending is "right" and what's "wrong?"
This is so true. I managed to covertly teach monads to a coworker who had never heard of monads or functional programming before, all without uttering the word monad. Luckily they were familiar with LINQ notation (which is pretty much do notation) and I used analogies such as wrapping and unwrapping. I used a custom c# maybe type as the concrete example. They were able to intuitively grasp it in a couple of days (whereas it took me about 2 months stumbling through online tutorials learning it myself).
When VCs make money they generally don't reinvest it, which is why they always look for 10x in the long term rather than 2x in the (very) short term.
And people say we're not in another bubble.

People through comments saying things like "well, VCs needed to double their investment - this lets them do it in a few months"

Wish I lived in a world where I should have expectations of a several hundred percent ROI on investments.
We haven't cured a lot of things. Well, we've cured lots of small things, but few of the doozies.

A baldness cure has been ten years away for the last thirty years. No cure for blindness, AIDS, lost limbs. Remember the blue denim dye that killed cancer? What happened to it?

If something is "ten years away", it means we simply don't know how to do it, we are just hoping for someone else to come up with the tech to solve it for us. Even if it's "five years away", it's suspect. Why not just release it now? Oh, because it doesn't work. I'll believe something if it's being currently tested on monkeys.

We simply don't have the technology yet to solve these problems. These problems won't likely be solved in medicine, but in another field that discovers the solution accidentally, likely in nano or AI/statistics.

If you want to speed things along, make sure the government is dropping lots of coin in R&D in many NEW or PROMISING fields, not just medicine. Encourage intellectual property rights for innovative firms that do real R&D, and not just relabel their old products. Encourage your smart friend to go into bio-stats and not quantitative finance.
Reasons To Launch A Startup in St. Louis
I don't see anyone reacting "Instawho?", let alone doing so "quite rightly". Instagram is extremely popular. Stories about how Instagram's backend works have been at the top of the front page on HN for weeks.

I think you think this is some kind of Jets/Eagles thing here, and I'm wearing the green jersey. No. I don't have a side, and I don't think the competitive battle happening here is rational; I just acknowledge that it is happening.
Dear Facebook: My student loans are for sale at cost. Please contact me for details.
I guess even Amazon will eventually pick up the phone

Why would they?

You'd have to push dozens of GBit/s to even appear on their radar. The only time they'll call you is when they can't charge your CC anymore (a sustained 1 GBit/s will set you back $1000/day at their current rate).
Chrome Developer Tools: Memory 101
It's nice to see that Zuckerberg's letter actually addresses some key concerns about Instagram's future--a courtesy I haven't seen offered by many recent "acqhirers". However, to echo several other comments, it'll be interesting to see to what degree the stated intentions are actually upheld.
Hmm, I'm sorry to have (mis)spoken for you. I assumed you would tell him that since you appear to have been pretty open about it on the mailing list and in IRC. So you think happstack-server is better than snap-server? Or just that I am over-stating the difference?

I know there was talk of switching happstack over to warp, and then more recently of writing another server instead. What is it you are planning to do better than warp, performance, correctness, features or something I'm not thinking of? Is there anything in particular that made you decide not to use warp?
Uh, the cookie directive isn't being ignored.

In the UK, for example, the directive was implemented on 26 May 2011, but website owners were granted a 12 month grace period to 'get their house in order'.

From 26 May 2012 site owners will face penalties for non-compliance.
Fascinating paper on returns on cancer research out of the NBER argues that for about $300 billion in cancer research expenditures from 1988 to 2000 the US created 23 million life-years worth, in aggregate, about $1.9 trillion [1]. That comes to about a 52% smoothed return. Pretty good given that the S&P 500 grew at about 14.6% over the same period (though if similarly smoothed yielded about 42%).

[1] http://www.nber.org/papers/w15574.pdf?new_window=1

[2] http://quicktake.morningstar.com/index/IndexCharts.aspx?Coun...
This was originally brought up on another blog: “Ever wonder if any publishers have actually collected any of your contribution?”.

Where’s the accountability for Readability? How do you know if the blogs you read are hooked in with Readabilty? If they aren’t, is the money kept in some sort of interest bearing account as an incentive to signup? Shouldn’t that already be disclosed somewhere?

You don’t have these problems with Flattr. Both Instapaper and Readability could simply scan for the Flattr link during the same time they’re stripping out the other elements. The Flattr link could then be dynamically added to either program if it exists.

I don’t understand why Readabilty, Instapaper, and blogs don’t integrate with micropayment systems like Flattr (http://flattr.com/). Readability’s 30% cut seems like a lot. Why reinvent the micropayment wheel and limit it to just blogs? Other than the payment system there isn’t much functional difference from Instapaper. (disclosure: I’ve only sampled Readability whereas I’ve used Instapaper for a year+)
You are really driving down a completely unrelated road here.
Well...if I am not mistaken, the way VC investing works is once an investment return is made - they have to distribute it back to the LPs immediately. They can't just "re-invest it" into other companies.

Unless those economics have changed, but I don't think they have.

It is in that light why I say, it seems a bit precarious. Essentially what would have happened is, these VCs would have contacted their limited partners and said, we have an investment we want to make - send us the money now (this is after the limited partners already committed to giving them that money). The LPs then wire the VC fund the money. The VCs then wire that money to Instagram.

3 months later, Instagram wires the money (assuming it was all cash, which we know it wasn't) back to those investors, which then have to wire the money back to their LPs. So technically, it doesn't REALLY help their portfolio as much as if they got a 10X return in a few years because the money was put to work for a shorter period of time.

Although, if you are 'annualizing' the return properly and assuming a 33% return each month, then the yearly return is actually 29X (compounded), but we digress.
Kevin Systrom Turned Down Facebook — Now Mark Zuckerberg Buys Him For $1 Billion
So Facebook is like giant a rail company in the late 1800s.
Dear Future
Which business model do you prefer - ongoing revenue or one-time payment?

There's more money to be made by treating the symptoms than there is providing a cure. Anyone you know with a chronic disease will tell you that since their diagnosis, the price of everything related to the condition has gone up dramatically... cancer, ADD, diabetes, asthma, etc.

I wonder what ad-supported pharmacology business model would be like? Medicaid meets Madison Ave.
"the product is valued enough to not be summarily taken out back and shot"
Let's be clear here: connected people doubled their money overnight. There should be a special tax for insider-only capital gains like this.