skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is very reminiscent of Google/YouTube circa 2006. When Google bought YT it was a small team of people and a pretty nascent product that people really loved, and the usage numbers were out of control. They left the product mostly untouched and let it grow on its own. Though there was major criticism at the time, it is one of the best tech acquisitions of the past decade.
Hysterically annoying typo in the single word that (it seems) was added to the title as editorial. Not a win.
I agree...but the point was not about the revenues, the point was about making sure that when you think about photos - to share or to browse(which is the most used app on Facebook), you think about Facebook. The risk of being displaced by Instagram on that crucial activity was too high for Facebook.
A lot of language designers seem averse to a little whimsy in a design, which is a real shame. Programming should be fun. Then again, there are benefits to being boringly literal, too: you know what “removeTrailingNewline” does by its name, but not necessarily that “chomp” means the same thing.
Congrats to the Instagram team. An amazing group of people that really worked lean and delivered what people really needed.
Tiny Transactions on Computer Science: CS research in 140 chars or less
By having to go out of your way, I meant that every encoding I could think of, whether English or Python or turing machine would rank these two solutions in the same order. In fact, I would be somewhat surprised if there were any encoding that had been used by more than one person in all of human history that would rank the algorithm offered by The Big Questions as simpler than pi/2.

Using unusual encodings like that isn't cheating in general, but when you play a guessing game with other people like the blog author did then social norms start to enter into the picture, and in this case I think it would be reasonable to say that the author did cheat. Either that or, for the reasons jl6 outlined, it was entirely meaningless.

But this isn't entirely confined to games people play. The only difference between the hypothesis that General Relativity is correct and that General Relativity has always been correct but in 5 seconds the rules of the universe will change" is the complexity of the two statements, and I don't think that the fact that you can specify an encoding where the second is simpler is going to convince them that its a equally valid scientific hypothesis.
I've got two guesses:

First, it integrates an incredibly popular mobile destination into the Facebook ecosystem.

A lot of people have been using Instagram as a replacement for their built-in smartphone camera software. You don't even need to go on Facebook to post those photos, thanks to the Instagram Facebook app.

That's ad revenue and location data that Facebook would love to have more direct access to.

Second, Facebook hasn't really been focused on mobile until recently. Mobile features have been second to web features for a long time now.

I think that Facebook has woken up to how far behind they are in the mobile space, and wants to catch up quickly. Photos are probably the most important sector of the mobile space, especially now that phone cameras are generally as good as mid-market point-and-shoot cameras.

Hence acquihiring Mike Matas (Push Pop Press), and now Instagram.
I think something like that had to have happened for the valuation to get so high. Apple may have been in the hunt as well, given their propensity for acquiring popular iOS apps and rolling the functionality into vanilla iOS.
Facebook acting really fast nowadays, especially when comes to require good developers.
The AWS dashboard is a great tool if you're a cloud engineer; it's technical but necessarily so.

As the CTO of OpDemand, I can tell you first-hand that users are willing to pay for a simplified and streamlined AWS management process. Our users want a Heroku-like experience, but they don't want to give up control of their underlying infrastructure.

With that in mind, we focus on tight GitHub integration, a sleek UI (backbone.js/socket.io) and providing a toolbar with 5 dead-simple actions: start, stop, deploy, clone and destroy. We charge for our tool because we save AWS users time and money.
They have a userbase which is 100% mobile, something that facebook doesn't have.

A talent acquisition for $1B? This can's be a serious question.
Well that's interesting... I redesigned the Exec splash page as well.

http://dreamersofday.com/Exec-Redesign

I like your color scheme and how you focused on convincing prospective customers that Exec is a trusted and vetted service.
... Because PhD's can barely feed themselves.

... Because the "smart" people work on Wall Street/for consulting firms.

... Because Facebook acquired Instagram.
Hack attack exposes data for 181,000 Utah benefits recipients
Facebook should buy extragr.am as well the best web UI for instagram
Really boggles the mind. Would love to see the company's financials.
The big question is for how much?
I can't make it out to London (if it's happening there) but I'm excited to see how it all turns out!
The National Cancer Institute's average yearly budget for cancer research is around $4.9 billion. NFL football revenue? $9 billion. Priorities.
Oh, so not tech talent, but talent in developing a loyal and active userbase. That could be worth $1B to FB.
New Analytics Dashboard for Infochimps.com
F*ck Facebook... evil corporation of evil. Harbinger of a world without privacy, it dooms us all.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Announces that Facebook has Acquired Instagram
I get your jab about all JS implementations being somewhat broken (what complex system isn't?), but there's "broken", and then there's "broken to the point of not supporting core language features".
Zuckerberg says they are keeping Instagram independent. Anyone buy that? And if so, for how long?
The price tag certainly is consistent with a 100B price tag on Facebook. I'm going to assume this merely keeps the bubble going until the IPO. In finance land there are rumors of difficulty finding people to buy into the IPO and this should theoretically instill confidence
Facebook Buys Instagram for $1 Billion
2.4 Kernel Releases Come to an End
15 Things I Didn't Know When I Started Dating an Entrepreneur
Why Obama's JOBS Act Couldn't Suck Worse
One billion dollars. Seriously.
Oh crap.... Facebook got their dirty hands on this one. :(
The state in capitalist crisis
> This kind of argument has been used a lot against free open source software, and I doubt many readers of HN are very sympathetic to it.

FOSS is a foot in the door -- how many of us get consulting contracts or even FT jobs implementing or managing that FOSS? FOSS doesn't run itself, unlike a photo that anyone can ship over to snapfish or uprint.
It was also only really possible given the resources Google had to throw at YT. It was years before YT was profitable, and even then it was only with the introduction of intrusive ads that that was possible. A company without Google's deep pockets would likely have had a hard time giving YT the chance to grow organically, without trying to butt in and make it profitable.
I just downloaded Instagram for Android the other day and wondered how to save pictures on my phone with this tool... apparently you can't, so yes, Facebook and them play in the same court: you don't own your things anymore.
Your unsafePerformIO version is essentially what Debug.Trace does.
Perhaps they found Instagram threatening. I'm betting they kill it now that they own it.
Myspace acquires Photobucket for $300 Million
Assuming that we trust these numbers, what does it say about mobile development that Obj-C continues to shoot up, while Java has lost momentum (though still high on the list)? There are more Android devices out there than iOS, but the development market seems skewed in favour of the latter.
Facebook to Buy Instagram for $1 Billion in Cash, Stock
That would mean the likes of pinterest would be next.
I would just sign it, stick it on S3, and forget it. Did I miss why that wasn't considered?
If your goal is to succeed in the real world, of course it is. If your goal is to get Google to beg you to pay inappropriately large amounts of money to acquire you, it's the best idea ever.
So you're betting that they just straight-up lied in their press release.
There was a time I'd loved to see a Niagara-based desktop workstation. Making Gnome and Firefox run well on a dozen underpowered cores would do a lot towards making parallelism more mainstream. I think, however, this train has left the station.

I wish the GPGPU crowd good luck.
Google+ reaches 100 million mark
Google+ now with 100 million users is part of overall google experience along with Youtube,Google Play,Google images etc ..

Well though the performance of Google+ is not as fast as compared to Facebook but still Google+ contributes lot to the bussiness prespective of many organization…Mytechmafia is a hardcore follower of Google+.We wish in India we understand the significance of Google+ and does not consider Facebook the end of social networking era.
plenty of small startups

Still makes little sense. If you have no IT guy then you're likely not using big resources, simply because you wouldn't know how to set them up.
Very interesting read... it boggles my mind how complex our organisms are and how cancer forms and takes everything over from the inside.

We can't even "cure" a relatively simple virus like the cold or influenza, and cancer is like 10,000x times more complicated - gotta respect all the hackers who're working in the medical field...
They won't, but they'll schedule an appointment with a trusted local service provider.
I'm pretty sure that Facebook has "handling a lot of photos" sorted:

http://gizmodo.com/5841667/facebook-photo-library-dwarfs-eve...
FriendFeed wasn't taken out back and shot either -- it's still running, albeit with some broken features. It doesn't hurt Facebook to leave a service running.

With Instagram, I think it's a case of user acquisition trumping product strategy. If lots of people are joining Instagram, Facebook wants to own it regardless of how it fits with their main brand.
Instagram Acquired By Facebook
In my life, I've learned and used the following languages, in this order: Logo, Basic, Pascal, C++, Java, Python, Ruby, Clojure. Each time that I learned the next language, I thought it was a great improvement on the previous, and I wondered what I had been spending my life doing with the previous language.

My experience is that with Clojure is a testament to pretty much everything in "Beating the Averages" (http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html) It's hard to know for sure, but I have a feeling that I will end up using Clojure far much longer than the rest of those languages, combined.

If you are contemplating learning a language for one-off commands and sysadmin scripts, then I kind of prefer Ruby over Python and Perl for expressiveness and readability. Most Rubyists are of the Rails persuasion, but I still have never learned Rails.
That comes from node-gyp (Node's addon build tool)
Sophacles probably meant http://www.gnu.org/software/software.html#allgnupkgs Looks projecty to me. :-)
When I read the headline I thought two things: a) Wow, the Instagram guys deserve it, congrats to them. b) I need to delete my account.

The second point is because I have been actively trying to avoid giving fb more data than absolutely necessary. No ill will towards Instagram.
After only one week using Instagram for Android it was already my favorite network. Congrats for the Instagram team, but I cant deny that I just lost much of my sympathy for the network, since I can´t stand the way that Facebook handles privacy anymore.
The sentiment on this thread would be really different if instead of an unnamed calendar, the client was Coke running a $3MM international campaign and offering the author $100.

Why is that?
Sound of a good app flushing down the toilet

Uninstalled. Congrats to founders though, well executed, guys.
Facebook will add all the locations to their giant, evil database.
To expand tmhedberg's first paragraph, take the sequencing behavior of any imperative language (represented by the ";", say) and generalize it.
LispNYC and EmacsNYC: Large Scale Development with Elisp
YouTube is a content paradise though. There's tons of value there and you can sell ads against it or even charge for premium services.

Where's the money in Instagram? The content is practically worthless and their only real value is in their userbase. Even though I use the Instagram client, most of the time I see photos, they come through Twitter. So that also reinforces for me that any value is in the users and not the actual content, which is mostly crap.

I'm more convinced that we're in a 2nd bubble now more than ever.
Hello from OWASP Royal Holloway,

I to am willing to help with venue and or whatever awesome goodness is required - I would be well chuffed to participate in an emacs conference! Just let me know what you need, and how I can help.

Dennis
Although I agree, this goes without saying.
Because, like AI, molecular biology is complicated and there are no quick hacks.

Some things are meant to take time and be right. First time.

Survival rates are spectacularly better than they were fifteen or twenty years ago and they are getting better all the time.

Also there is no one type of lung cancer, brain tumour or bladder or bowel cancer either. There are many different types. Half the battle is identifying (and successfully treating) the right sort.

I still think there will be cancer in fifty years time. But we won't have to die from it. We may never eradicate it though, because it is a tough, complex bio-engineering problem, closely allied to programmed cell death and immortality. That's another tough nut to crack for the same reasons, inexorably intertwined as they are.
Friction is my big guess; Instagram is effectively a drop-in replacement for your smartphone camera, with some extra features that are incredibly popular right now (e.g., the overused look-ma-its-the-70s effect).
This is one of the most fascinating and frightening things I have ever read. It really feels like staring cthulhu in the face.

TLDR: Breast cancers, for instance, have been shown to harbor at least 1,700 different mutations, but only three of them showed up in at least 10% of patients, with the great majority of them being unique to each patient. The most recent study in Nature discussed above shows that even a single subtype of breast cancer that is generally treated clinically more or less the same, TNBC, varies wildly (and almost continuously) in the genomic changes and mutations each tumor has. Not only that, but each TNBC is in essence several diseases, because each TNBC is made up of many different clones that have evolved as the tumor itself grew, progressed, and evolved. All of this occurs even before the tumor has been subjected to any treatment at all. As if that’s not bad enough, it would appear that tumors are a mosaic of groups of many different tumor cell types that develop through branching evolution such that metastases can be very different from the primary tumor and even different regions of the primary tumor can be very different from each other, so much so that finding a “favorable prognosis signature” on a core biopsy means only that that one area biopsied has that gene signature. Large areas elsewhere in the tumor could have the unfavorable prognosis signature.

And even more interesting if you look at the history of a tumor the mutations goes back for a fairly long time, possibly on the order of 30+ years. While it may not be an actual cure, removing abnormal cells early may be more effective than trying to treat cancer in the last 1-10% of it's lifetime when it's already become a diversified killing machine.
Yes.

http://newsroom.fb.com/Announcements/Facebook-to-Acquire-Ins...
One good thing about being bought by bigger player is that it creates a void for other smaller innovative startups. Instagram is easier to compete against now than when it was independent.
A better question would be: what were the chances that Google could acquire instagram and use them to make a charge at facebook?

The question, of course, sounds a bit laughable. But the answer is a non-zero number big enough for facebook to pull the trigger and defend their territory(social networking & photos).
Bartosz Milewski - The Downfall of Imperative Programming
My preferred was visibone.com but sadly it is not including the latest techs.
I had a pretty novel task done.. not especially cheap, but it was worth it — http://www.taskrabbit.com/new-york-ny/t/express-ship-blu-ray...

Get to the Quiksilver store in Time Square
Purchase a Blu-Ray disc of Art Of Flight
Ship to a San Francisco address with FedEx Standard Overnight
I don't want to live on this planet anymore
I should thank you for the brilliantly written article. All the claims have been mentioned clearly, and the reasoning strung together in a coherent manner.

I agree with the fact that getting the optimization isn't intuitive, but the basic O(n^2) on which the idea is based is almost trivial.
What's the point of living if you can't have a little fun? Living merely for the sake of living is pointless.
Nor is one about embedded systems. The core GNU tools are written in C and actively maintained, and are commonly referred to as the "GNU project".

I'm not sure why you are pointing this out.
Controversy releted to Obama's fb wall
> This is very reminiscent of Google/YouTube circa 2006.

In that it was a startup acquired by a big company? Yep.

> When Google bought YT it was a small team of people and a pretty nascent product that people really loved, and the usage numbers were out of control.

Like most startup acquisitions, the team size is relatively small and there is significant traction in the market with headroom to mature their footprint.

> They left the product mostly untouched and let it grow on its own. Though there was major criticism at the time, it is one of the best tech acquisitions of the past decade.

This is not going to be one of the best tech acquisitions of the next decade. YouTube helped to propel Google into content. It also helped to commoditise web video in a massive way: reminiscent of the way which Google commoditised search (YouTube is probably just short of being a byword for online video at this point).

Instagram is a photo service in a sea of other photo services. Photography has been around on the web in meaningful ways for a long time. Flickr lost out to Facebook in the community stakes, and Instagram is doing great in whatever-the-fuck market it's in (the share-to-my-twitter-followers market?), but this is not Google acquiring YouTube.

Bookmark this comment. See you in 2022.
If photo filters are worth this much, I'm in the wrong business.
amount of open source code written in a particular language ≠ that language's popularity
Some suprising facts from Big Data.
Same reaction here. Pretty sad to delete it, actually. The other day I was using Instagram as an example of a social app with a friend list that WASN'T Facebook. sigh

Edit: spelling.
I imagine that the app will stay separate in the app store and be its own network, but that photos will also be pushed much harder to FB network and they will attempt to connect data about IG and FB users so they can sell ads against both.
Cancer research is a lot quieter and less entertaining than a football game.
I bet the first line of the deal was: "Don't fuck with us anymore please."
It was a good ride.

What's the next Instagram? Is there an alternative?
This was EXACTLY my feelings. I sat down after lunch, read the headline, opened up my browser, changed my user profile information and deactivated my account. Good luck Instagram, but I can't stand Zuckerborg.
Does that make sense ?

Not when you don't have an IT guy. I mean, what is the scenario here? Some contractor left you alone with an elastic EC2 app, that scales magically simply by turning instances on and off? So you have this highly sophisticated application yet nobody who knows how to operate it, nor capacity monitoring? And your best bet is to seek some crummy outside monitoring to aid your... sales-guy(?)... as he pulls the levers?

Seems a little far fetched to me.

If you're a small startup with no tech clue then you're probably deployed on a shrink-wrapped solution (e.g. heroku) to begin with.

I guess I just don't see who they're aiming at here. Their marketing clearly suggests small business with no tech clue; but how did such a business scale to a point where savings are possible in first place then?
Why? Just on principal that as soon as a big company buys a little company, the product will inevitably get worse?

Nothing has changed for the end user yet, has it?
Unfortunately you still have to write in to cancel your Instagram account.
Ask HN: Campfire or HipChat
I wont be using Basecamp Classic or Next. And I am leaning towards HipChat. Just wondering why should i go with Campfire. And which one are you using and why.
Right, Torvalds started writing free software for a hobby. But then he got hired to work for a company. He didn't work for some company for free, hoping that some other company would hire him. There's a difference between doing whatever you want for free vs. working for a company for free.
What are the odds that that figure is actually in real dollars?
The main reason they were acquired? Not the tech, not the audience (does FB need either?). I guess for the brand + engagement? Someone said as a defense against the big G acquiring them later - sounds plausible?
Amazon's S3 object count kisses 1 trillion
I am Jeremy.. and I am not sure I would tell you the same thing. The Happstack webserver is pretty darn good. Of course, I think we can do even better. In fact, I think we can do better than warp.
This is precisely the problem, and I'm glad you mentioned it.
If the cost to produce a calendar-grad image is so cheap that an amateur can produce it, perhaps the force of creative destruction has rendered the traditional photographer to compete on the same ground, perhaps it is time for traditional photographer to reconsider the service they are providing.
I think the mere fact that they just raised $50M @ $500M valuation is the reason that this price is so high.

Those investors in that round had to at least double their money...if the price was indeed $1B, that's all they did. Just 2X. Although, the argument can be made that a 2X return in 1 - 2 months isn't bad...but then again, VC funds don't have a 2 month life, so over the long-term value (i.e. 10 years most-times) of that fund I am not sure how beneficial that is.

Although, I guess they can't be too pissed because it must feel good to be able to at least return something to their LPs in such a short time frame.
No. Some deals will include "no-shop" and other similar clauses to prevent this sort of thing, but it's definitely not a requirement.
Thanks for the feedback. This is part of a series of posts. The next post will review some basic linear algebra, and then I'll start showing some statistical analysis with Julia.
A sum of animalistic urges that we HAVE control over.
Just because you have an animalistic urge doesn't mean that you don't control it with reason.
You know what's cool? A Billion Dollars.
Can someone please tell me how Instagram's actual content is worth anything? We're talking about photo-filtered cell phone camera shots here. Facebook doesn't need a user acquisition ploy.

I guess maybe it's a move to keep users in Facebook, but I'd be willing to bet a million bucks that almost everyone is discovering Instagram content via Facebook or Twitter.

Seems like mostly a huge waste of cash.
Ruby/Clojure analogs
I have the answer. It's a simple one word answer. GREED.

But seriously It's the money that keeps us from curing cancer, or lack thereof. Nothing else. As human beings we really need to decide what's more important....Wealth or our survival and wellbeing. We're too smart as a society to let things like lack of money keep us from curing disease and exploring other planets.