skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It kind of blows my mind that patents can possibly be worth north of a millon dollars apiece. How is this possible? How does it make economic sense, especially the idea of buying 800 bundled together instead of picking and choosing the ones which actually have value.

I get that they win litigation, but is even the loss of a lawsuit more costly than the amount spent on purchasing the patents? The most costly lawsuit loss I can recall was Microsoft's antitrust loss, which cost it 9 figures. But even so, that's a case where patents would not have helped. And if it costs more to buy the patents than they recoup with when they win, or do not lose, the suits, how does it make economic sense to buy them?

Then again, maybe they're considering it an investment in their ongoing campaign to extort the android ecosystem.
Facebook acquired Instagram
I can't believe this either...
Posted a blog that (partly) talks about how Instagram poses a massive threat to Facebook TWO MINUTES before this broke. Needless to say, everyone's going to be reading Zuck and ignoring http://blog.thecityswig.com but it's a cool coincidence
> it's literally the Lego Mindstorms language [1] that outranks Erlang, MATLAB, ActionScript, Scheme, Groovy, R, Scala, and so Forth.

I'm not sure why you're so surprised. I can see that it's quite likely that Lego Mindstorms is more popular and has more users than many of those languages. I don't yet have a Mindstorms set, but I've been considering it for a while -- I can't say the same for Clojure, Groovy, Scheme, or R.
Have you ever taken a look at Higher Order Perl? It's an introduction to Functional Programming in Perl.

http://hop.perl.plover.com/

This interview with the author covers the point of the book (which is to help Perl programmers to learn non-procedural programming):

http://www.theperlreview.com/Interviews/mjd-hop-20050407.htm...
Facebook To Acquire Instagram For $1 Billion
Well done to the guys at Instagram, they've accomplished a lot in 2 years I think.
@BCM43 how do I reach you? I'm @dotemacs on twitter.
Congrats to Instagram! Can't say I am not bit disappointed though with all the startups getting gobbled up by much larger companies. What's next? Pinterest?
According to WSJ price is $1B

source: http://allthingsd.com/20120409/breaking-facebook-to-acquire-...

Edit: Direct Source: http://newsroom.fb.com/Announcements/Facebook-to-Acquire-Ins...

The total consideration for San Francisco-based Instagram is approximately $1 billion in a combination of cash and shares of Facebook. The transaction, which is subject to customary closing conditions, is expected to close later this quarter.
I had been wondering how a product like Instagram would ever make money. Now we'll never find out. I guess traction really does trump all other business metrics.
This is a smart move by Facebook.
I'm almost surprised to see them acknowledge in the initial announcement that they'll retain the ability for Instagram to interact with other social networks, although I'll be interested to see how thoroughly those features are supported as Facebook takes the reigns.
'GNU' is not a project. At least not like the others in your list.
It doesn't say but any wild guess on how much did Facebook pay?
"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"
The UN Secretary-General Comes To Google+ Hangouts
Why did Facebook buy Instagram if they aren't going to require FB integration and allow you to post to other networks? Is it purely about traffic now?
How many photo-related startups has Facebook acquired now?

And what do they gain from Instagram?

A user base? Most of them are probably already on Facebook?

Technology for handling photos? Doesn't Facebook already do this as well as anyone else?

Design and UI talent for mobile apps? Don't they already have Mike Matas?
I get more out of paper reference books than electronic reference materials. When I need a reference book it's usually because I can't remember something exactly, but do know the idea I'm trying to find. For me, it's much easier to skim through a paper reference manual, than to try to do the same in electronic documentation.
You might be interested to know that trivial metalworking can construct a piece of metal (known as a sear) that becomes legally classified as not just any firearm, but a heavily regulated machinegun -- because when placed in the corresponding firearm, replacing its original sear, it can make the firearm capable of full-auto fire.

The ATF also considers soda bottles to be suppressors, aka silencers, if there are any suspicious circumstances. Same for any metal tube that's threaded or otherwise easily attached to a firearm barrel. ("Silencer" is a misnomer; they are not silent; they generally reduce noise by roughly 20-30 dB.) Even possession of (1) a gun, (2) a soda bottle, and (3) duct tape, in close proximity, would motivate the ATF to charge you with a firearms crime. Unlike many european countries where such devices are sold without a license and it's considered rude to hunt without one, in the U.S., hysteria over organized and gang crime caused many things to be irrationally banned or strictly regulated, including suppressors and switchblades. [2]

There's also the "rifle" vs "short barreled rifle" classification. The term AR15 is a category of firearms that can range from stockless (nothing to rest against the shoulder) and very short barreled (circa 5-8"), to long range variants that have shoulder stocks and barrels 22" or more. If you buy a rifle variant of an AR15 and buy a short barrel, you've committed a crime. The receiver (the central metal piece that accepts the ammo magazine), because it was originally part of a rifle, is forever classified as a rifle receiver. By converting it into a handgun-like firearm, legally speaking you have converted it into a SBR, or short-barreled rifle, which requires beaucoup paperwork in order to be legal.

In contrast, if you start with a handgun-classified variant of the AR15 [1], no special paperwork is required.

tl;dr : there are some absurd classifications of objects as firearms, or firearms as more heavily regulated types of firearms, that a reasonable person would not understand or comprehend.

[1] http://www.bushmaster.com/catalog_carbon15_AZ-C15P97.asp

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switchblade#Postwar_knives_and_...
How to Meditate Daily
Sure it's not not as different from C like Lisp is, but there are many differences. First of all: everything outside "<?php ?>" is treated as argument for print. Second, PHP is dynamicaly typed and support many functional language stuff like closures. In my opinion it's much more difference between C and PHP and between C and C#/Java.
According to Crunchbase and Techcrunch, they raised $40M just a month ago at a $500M valuation. Something doesn't add up here. A billion dollar deal like this had to take more than a couple of weeks to close...

http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/08/no-filter-required-instagra...
Some of you might find this useful:

https://instagram.com/accounts/remove/request/
Instagram is such a great experience for a number of reasons, but one of them is the separate network it provides from Facebook. Maybe I'm in the minority, but my Facebook network is substantially different from my Instagram network. /:

I hope Facebook is careful with this one…
Anyone else think that the proximity of the announcement of Instagram for Android last week to today's acquisition was not a coincidence?
Absolutely. It'll be interesting to see how Facebook take Instagram forward, and how features from Instagram will make there way into Facebook's photo product.
I'm not very clear on the main driving factor of this acquisition: is it a talent grab, a technology acquisition or did they acquire Instagram mainly for the customer base.

FB really wanted Instagram. They've been in talks since August 2011: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/08/24/facebook-couldnt-ac...
So I implore you to think twice about your actions the next time you are approached with a similar deal. Don’t help to erode the market for high-quality artwork just because you’re not relying on that market to feed yourself.

Just because someone chooses to make a fun activity in to a job does not mean that person deserves to get paid for it. If they are not delivering economic value, they don't get paid. I cannot go in to my office and decide that I would rather sit around talking to people than putting in real work which adds value and expect to make my salary.

There are types of photography that do pay OK, mainly wedding and event photography. The reason they pay more is because the photographer needs to be contracted to capture a specific image at a specific time. If you decide to be a landscape artist you are competing with every image made ever. This is not a good competitive position to be in and why people will give away their work for free.
hehe. the load time is more like the stunned expression you get when you realize people picked up on something you said. :-P (I should have an upgraded amt of RAM in a matter of minutes, and hopefully it'll be up again.)

Interesting recommendation for Java programmers. I've noticed a lot of people smiling instinctively when they see the Seesaw project. Seesaw turns Java Swing GUI programming from a horror into a pleasure, so that's another idea.

About Seesaw, the GUI for the Clojure namespace browser was whipped up by Frank in the course of 1 week (https://github.com/franks42/clj-ns-browser). As Frank puts it, it's a testament to Seesaw, since he had no real experience in Java Swing, and he got the GUI working from the couple of hours a night he got each day after he put his kids to sleep in that one week.
$1b according to WSJ
Most of Instagram's "technology for handing photos" uses S3, as described in previous Instagram tech blog posts. Instagram however has a massive big data structure which would lead to any big company getting high value out of them. Why use the tools they open sourced last week to improve your reliability if you can just acquire the entire team?
Zuck's post gives a few clues.

"We will try to learn from Instagram's experience to build similar features into our other products. At the same time, we will try to help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook's strong engineering team and infrastructure."
I feel like I can safely declare that there is no such thing as a one billion dollar talent acquisition.
Quite a jump from the $500 million valuation they were shooting for last week[1].

[1]http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/08/no-filter-required-instagra...
Replace "the government" with "large bureaucratic organization" and it rings more true. There are too many huge, ossified organizations out there that have barely come to terms with such innovations as the fax machine.
They can kill off a photo service that rivals their own. (I can't judge which one's better, because I use neither.)

Edit: I know Zuck says they will continue to build Instragram. I'm skeptical.
It looks like you guys use Redis for a lot of different functionality. It would be great to see an article on how you guys use Redis.
I have to say: it's nice to see an acquisition where the product is valued enough to not be summarily taken out back and shot. I'm curious how it fits into Facebook's product strategy though. It doesn't seem to be their style to keep a brand around that doesn't help their main brand somehow.
>So a better metric would be to aggregate the projects from

> all popular project hosting services and count them, with

> some kind of weight attached.

Great idea. Do you think you might run with this idea? I like it as a corrective to TIOBE.

On another topic: I know that TIOBE sometimes lumps several related languages together. Does anyone know if they are doing that with "Lisp"? What does "Lisp" measure? Common Lisp? Scheme? Emacs lisp? Does it measure Clojure?
Welcome to the media revolution. Competing with talented amateur photographers who will work for free or very little money -- as well as publishers who are working on crazy-thin margins -- is only the tip of the iceberg for professional photographers. There's also the issue of empowered consumers who demand choice (whether it be custom calendars or altering the artwork in some way that suits them) and the rise of photorealistic computer-generated imagery.

It sucks that the professional media industry (including film studios, journalists, record labels, broadcasters, photographers, magazine publishers, etc.) no longer have the control and fat margins of yesteryear. It's a new world. Evolve with it, find a niche, or move on.
Congratulations to the Instagram team.

With all the news of talent acquisition and subsequent shutdown news, my first reaction was "oh god! yet another shutdown!".

Thankfully there are some very good statements in the announcement. "...we're committed to building and growing Instagram independently. "

Hope this is true especially for the sake of all the startups that are betting on Instagram and building associated products on top.
I have no words. That is incredible.
Haven't you heard, that's the cool thing for startup founders to say while trying their best to get acquired behind closed doors.

It used to be a better world when they just tried their best to get acquired without making public claims to the contrary.
Instagram has an awesome team and kept stealing eye-balls from facebook. It makes a lot of sense for facebook to get this team AND the product.
JSP, ASP, CFM, Rails ERB, DJango ALL have the same exact thing. The only difference is PHP tutorials typically have a big block at the top of the "page" for business logic, and then intersperse logic throughout the view.

Most of these other frameworks/languages (barring CFM and old ASP) expect you to adhere to some sort of MVC.

Saying PHP smells by default is a little less than fair. :-)
They probably did to protect themselves... instagram was growing like crazy, last thing FB needs is another giant network to share people with.
I had a similar issue with the default configuration of SBCL on a 64-bit vhost; the 64-bit version asks for 8gb of VAS and the vhost had a fairly small limit on VSIZE. Fortunately the heap allocation is configurable in SBCL; perhaps doing something like that on go would be the right thing?
While I agree with this in general, "6) You reduce complexity" seems a little bit optomistic. Frequent deployments don't force developers to refactor their code.
Perhaps they just see Instagram as a threat? If everyone is sharing their photos on Instagram, they are not doing so on Facebook.
Facebook acquires Instagram
Status Update by Mark Zuckerberg:

I'm excited to share the news that we've agreed to acquire Instagram and that their talented team will be joining Facebook.

For years, we've focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now, we'll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests.

We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram's strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.

That's why 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.

We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience. We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks, the ability to not share your Instagrams on Facebook if you want, and the ability to have followers and follow people separately from your friends on Facebook.

These and many other features are important parts of the Instagram experience and we understand that. We will try to learn from Instagram's experience to build similar features into our other products. At the same time, we will try to help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook's strong engineering team and infrastructure.

This is an important milestone for Facebook because it's the first time we've ever acquired a product and company with so many users. We don't plan on doing many more of these, if any at all. But providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together.

We're looking forward to working with the Instagram team and to all of the great new experiences we're going to be able to build together.
Maybe in Zimbabwe, but otherwise, it doesn't seem likely, does it.
As long as they keep instagram intact as the service it is now, then awesome.

If Facebook kills my favorite platform, that would make for a really sad day.
You know, I used to be pretty lax (careless, even) about geotagging all my Instagram photos.

Now, should I continue to use Instagram at all, I'm definitely not going to share my location.
That's my thought too. Instagram has a plausible claim on all mobile photo sharing, and there's a strain of thought that suggests that 80% of the value of Facebook is photo sharing. Instagram might be a bit too much of a free radical for Facebook to let float around the market.
Wonder if there was a bidding war between FB and Google that caused it to double off of that.
Wow, this is great. I recently spent a bunch of time integrating Lua and ObjC for a project; I'll have to see if I can replace all that glue with this library, or if I have something I can contribute to it.

EDIT: What's the license on this? There's no indication at the top of the source, or anywhere that I can see. It turns out not to be the same as what I'm doing -- I'm calling from ObjC into Lua and back -- but there are still bits I'd love to reuse, if I could.
I would say customer base is the strongest point, and that indirectly means technology. Instagram is huge. Now many people's default photo app will automatically upload to facebook, as a google+ instant upload competitor.
Maybe you are in a real anomaly, but whenever we leave the city, once we get pass commuting distance the number of For Sale signs is astounding (sometimes like 10% of a town or hamlet) while in the city housing is booming.
Does anyone else think this valuation is insane? It's like $300/registered user. The company doesn't have a business model. No way the handful of employees are worth $1B. My mind is blown.
wait - you think this is actually true?
It doesn't, mostly. I'm an (agnostic) atheist, and so are my parents. The rest of the family is either atheist, apatheist or just very "soft" Catholics (my grandmother, for example, doesn't believe in the afterlife!).

While I'm not religious, I mostly like religion as it's practiced here in Portugal and Spain - people seem to focus mostly on what I consider the good parts (community reunions, solidarity, processions) and less on the enforcement of Christians morals.
Is it against some regulation to do negotiations concurrently?
+1. It really is nice and the news coming from acquirer than the acquired makes it sound better. That just makes it that much more difficult for them to say "it is no longer a service that interacts with other social networks" without a public backlash among user community. Good to see the commitment coming from Zuckerberg.
I do not think this follows. Linus Torvalds got well-paying work because of his free work on Linux. Of course, Torvalds is an outlier, but Cory Doctorow also does this.

It makes sense that the best way to get work in certain fields is to have a reputation. Sometimes the best way to get that reputation is to give away a certain portion of your work.
More and more I feel like this the most important truth I can teach to my 5 year old son. I think the earlier you grasp the concept of the journey being the reward the better. It changes your perception about so many life events. School being one of them. I want my son to realize that learning is the goal, living and doing what you love.
I'm not entirely convinced that Facebook can benefit from Instagram's infrastructure more than the Instagram can benefit from Facebook's.
That's an awful lot of money for a business that had no revenue and had no business model of any kind.

http://windonaleaf.net/post/20464525754/instagram-perform-ad...
Well, it certainly wouldn't happen if your company employs anyone other than Turing, Einstein, Dijkstra, and Knuth. That said, that doesn't mean that the talent isn't inflating the price at least a little bit.
Even serving a static file is a burden on the server when you have millions of requests.
I wonder what sort of people putting photos on Instagram weren't also sending them to Facebook. Wouldn't it likely be people who don't/won't use Facebook anyway?
For $1 billion? Definitely not only a talent acquisition.
Facebook Buys Instagram For $1 Billion
Anyone got some bad news about their startup that they need to release? Get that press release out, stat.
A one billion dollar talent acquisition.
If that is what they are trying to do, I applaud it... however, Google probably have their own reasons. They want to be seen as the good guys on the web, even though they are tracking all of us along with Facebook and the others.

By the way, CISPA is the next retarded idea to kill the internet... I guess it will never stop.
I can't wait. I've been working with a bunch of XML files (TEI corpora, actually), and using document stores to build out indexes. One of the things that I've found is that what I want to do with reduce functions (build complex dictionaries, for instance with the key being a word stem and value being another dict with key=word form and value=list of locations or related words or whatever) is not the kind of thing Mongo/Couch DB reduce functions are designed for (i.e. scalars).

I learned what a 'reduce' is from learning Clojure (which was my intro to functional programming), not from databases. And so I got really used to the idea of reducing into nested dictionaries, because Clojure is good at that. Which meant that when I came to using MapReduce in DB environments (particularly CouchDB, but also a lil' Hadoop), I was a little disappointed.

Which is to say that a solid Clojuric abstraction layer that emphasizes a bucket approach on top of a variety of different stores sounds like my dream library.
Facebook buys Instagram for $1B
"poised to pick up another round of funding" doesn't mean that the funding round has actually closed. Sounds to me like they were keeping their options open, using the threat of raising another VC round to get Facebook to hurry up with an offer.
Just curious, but why the change of heart?
Having Turing, Einstein, Dijkstra and Knuth on your team seems like the kiss of death.
I just used founders as an example. Ideas can make it hard to raise money too. Any music startup will also find it hard to raise money, for example.
Twitter open sources its MySQL fork
I was under the impression that while a lot of people think CL is a better plan, the work is actually under way for Guile (I guess more by the Guile team than the Emacs team). But, I feel like you would know better than I do.
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incredible!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Now before you all wonder about that valuation and technology, consider that Zuckerberg is actually buying the users and their data.

Anyone recall this back in the day?
Yahoo! buying BCST.com
http://money.cnn.com/1999/04/01/deals/yahoo/
Is your question about the acquisition itself or that service will be continued?
Congrats to Instagram, Django-powered projects making it big.
It was announced then, could have been raised in 2011 or earlier this year.