skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is why I loved Instagram and Twitter, it wasn't Facebook... where people I don't even know anymore are all my best friends.
What are the exact numbers?

A quote from: http://wiki.nginx.org/Main :

> I currently have Nginx doing reverse proxy of over tens of millions of HTTP requests per day (thats a few hundred per second) on a single server. At peak load it uses about 15MB RAM and 10% CPU on my particular configuration (FreeBSD 6).
Zuck's announcement seems really thoughtful and authentic. He hit on a bunch of things people would be worried about -- whether things would automatically post, whether you can maintain a separate follower list from your FB list. He showed respect and humility towards Instagram's follower model, and interest in bringing it into other products. I'm impressed.
Random "fact" 1. Random "fact" 2. Priorities.
Regarding "Is Node Better?"
Congratulations to the team and founders. I like that Mark Zuckerberg is planning on keeping sharing with other social networks and keeping the Instagram product separate from the Facebook product.
Instagram would have too when they needed to make some money.
Driving Google Chrome via WebSocket API
should we have a funeral for it?
One of the Lua authors responded to your Lua bug request now:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.lua.general/90101

The response gives me faith that the problems you discuss do not plague all projects :).

It may be that other responders, not being directly involved in development, were trying to help you find a workaround to unblock you. For other end-users trying to be helpful, the most helpful thing they can often do is post a workaround, given that they don't maintain the project either. Perhaps these responses could be worded more eloquently (admitting you might have found a bug), but that doesn't necessarily mean they're malicious.
> I would tell the couples that I am going to choose A, but instead choose B.

Which makes you a bad with respect to most varieties of deontological and virtue ethics.
google was willing to buy path for 100 million very early, which would of been primarily a talent acquisition. With Instagram's community, install base, along with a bidding war .. I don't see it as just a talent acquisition, but primarily the motivating factor. Plus it was for money and stock without really knowing what the percentages are.. facebook stock is valued pretty high these days.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/02/google-tried-to-buy-path-fo...
Some years before 9/11 I was doing a fair amount of international travel for work. On one return trip from Germany I was bringing back a small, 12" replica crossbow. I had it in my checked luggage but still made the point to declare it was there to avoid the hassle of an untimely search later. They took my bag to a spot off to the side to open it up. They glanced at the crossbow for about 5 sec. However, they were much more interested in the alarm clock I also had. (With as much travel as I did to Europe, I had purchased one there that had the correct electrical plug) They spent a good 15 minutes scanning and weighing it to determine that it was just a standard alarm clock. But I don't even want to think about what that same bag I had back then would do to security today.

Also, the rules are not followed with any sort of consistency. I've forgotten to take that Ziploc baggie of liquids out of my carry-on so many times and not been questioned about it that I hardly even try to remember any more.
This seems ominous for Google, which spent $12.5bn for Motorola to stake a shaky claim in mobile and lord knows how much on G+; after this, what's left for them to do to stake a claim on social mobile? Buy Twitter? What else do people do socially with their phones?

Totally possible for Google to sink tens of billions into mobile and still wind up on the bottom of the value chain, commoditized along one axis by Facebook and utterly outmarketed by Apple (with its extraordinary profit margins and increasing domination of supply chains) on another.

Or maybe GOOG/Twitter is in the air, and Facebook is reacting defensively?
<rant type="likely-naive"/>

We can never "cure" cancer. We might be able to save most individuals from dying from it some day but cancer is just a mutation that makes a cell's behavior damaging/lethal to the host body. The only way to prevent "bad" mutation (because there is no sure way to discern 'bad' from any other mutation) is to stop mutation all together, and even if there way a way to do this (removal of radiation does not stop transcription errors) stopping mutation is a nice kindly way to ensure the extinction of the species (no chance for future biological adaptation, because there are no mutations). So, as evil and painful as cancer is, it is a symptom of a good thing, biological mutation and variation in our species, and any through and final "cure to all cancer everywhere" will have to stop the cause of cancer, mutation, which we as a society and species should not allow.

</rant>
Maybe there are some ways to make it more entertaining? http://eterna.cmu.edu/ , google image labelling and other "gamified work" projects come to mind.

Or a slightly more weird way to put it... we make a big show of music auditions where millions of people get super-excited and spend money to vote on a person they will most likely never see again in their lives. How do we get people that excited about science?
How IO is trying to build modular data centers for the rest of us
Instagram raised $50M right before acquisition
Its odd. I was quite curious to float this opinion in this crowd. It is of course, wildly unpopular among the non-geeks in my "regular" life. I wondered if it would also be so here. Affirmative.

It always seemed to me that we should "take care of our business" first, and then play later. To see these numbers backwards (IMHO) struck me as a childish "play first" attitude. I wouldn't go so far as to say "cancel sports until we get our health problems sorted out" but a shift in priorities would be refreshing.

Football is fun, finally cracking our genome to make disease obsolete (and I think nothing less than 100% of this cures cancer)... now that would be something to cheer about.
Now that they own it, there is no good reason to kill it. The only possible reaction to killing Instagram is ill-will with potential and current FB users, and bad press.

Not only would he be going against his word - while the internal metrics of the company are going strong - but he would be killing an asset and destroying shareholder value.

Even Zuck isn't crazy enough to pay $1B for a growing company and just kill it. That would be totally irrational.

I suspect this may very well be the best tech acquisition since Google bought YouTube.

Good luck for both of them - even though I am wary of FB's growing clout and I don't use Instagram, it's nice to see a good service find a good home that can support it over the long term.

I am SOOOO happy that Google bought YouTube. Can you imagine a world without YouTube?

I sure can't. Not a good world anyway.
30,000,000 people using anything has got to be worth at least 9 figures.
So, did Myspace have to make a stand and really do this? I mean today Facebook buys Instagram and now Myspace buys Photobucket? Hmmm....not sure about that move Myspace!
It's not. It's just a simple Ruby server script. Works just fine on *nix machines.
This is wildly off-topic, but here goes.

We really can’t; you’re going to have to accept one day that your position is untenable. Where languages evolve, we’re powerless to prevent their inexorable transformation. They’re like species—there’s no such thing as “devolution”. Some would that it were different—they say “we could’ve won, if only”. Try though we might, the globalising power of the Internet, and its effect on communication, mean that it’s ultimately futile to fight change—even when it makes us uncomfortable.

We really cant, your gonna hafta accept one day that your position is untenable. Were languages evolve, were powerless to prevent there inexorable transformation. There like species, theres no such thing as “devolution”. Some would that it were different—they say “we could of won, if only”. Try tho we might, the globalising power of the internet, and its effect on communication, mean that its ultimately futile to fight change, even when it makes us uncomfterble.
Why no internet, Boston?
Goodbye Yahoo, Hello Bootstrap and Backbone.
Call me cynical, but this looks like a thinly veiled split test.
Unlike Instagram and Facebook, people on pinterest don't take their own pictures.
Facebook Buys Instagram for $1 Billion
As a side note a lot of codes ported to C for running on HPC clusters will end up re-implemented in Fortran (I'm talking about Fortran 95/2003/2008 ... ).
Definitely, much better. I visit my parents each weekend anyway so no need for me to sign up, however it looks like a handy service :-)

I wonder how many mums have received phonecalls today alone because of you guys.
Definitely agree. The notion that they are lying so bare-faced is misguided.
I would expect open source projects to have a bias toward languages inside the open source ecosystem. Specifically, languages that are open source themselves, or are historically popular within open source operating systems. I would not expect a survey of languages on the proprietary side to match very well.

That said, you wrote "a better metric" and I agree.
Is there really a market for selling 20,000 copies of a landscape photo calendar? If so, maybe photographers should get into the business of creating these themselves, and keeping all of the money rather than a tiny fee?
Facebook currently has very limited editing for their pictures. By acquiring a well-known and talented company, Facebook can roll this into their current offerings. I would be very skeptical that this was a user-driven move. I can't imagine a large percentage of Instagram users who are not also Facebook users, even if people posted a lot of Instagrams to Twitter.
More like $30/user, I should note. They have 30 million on iOS and some number > 1 million on android.
Personally, I wouldn't touch anything Facebook with a long pole.
Wow - Facebook Acquires Instagram
Your emacs guide looks awesome. I didn't realize just how powerful emacs can be for this version control browsing. I'm going to go through it in its entirety.

I've tried to put some tools together several times (trying to integrate with vim) without success. Mostly my approach boils down to being more aware of the commit history as I navigate. When I find myself in a new codebase I start with browsing the initial commits. Then as I go over the codebase I aggressively use git log <path>, and might drill down to look at specific, tantalizing commits.

One of my project ideas is a 'wikipedia for open source' where anybody can browse the code for open source projects both in space and in time (like emacs seems to allow), and add annotations to specific revisions. While reading, annotations from previous revisions are rendered as well, but every annotation would give some indication of age (like '350 days ago' on HN) which would help the reader gauge if it might be out of date. This would allow readers to collaboratively say, "read this snapshot first if you're new to the project" and so on.

I also try to make the logs in my projects easier to read. Here's how I got started with that: http://akkartik.name/codelog.html

IMO the big reason lots of great hackers mistrust code comments is that when you add a comment it hangs around forever by default, unless someone takes the time to decide to delete it. Attaching comments to the commit log or to annotations on a specific revision helps with this.

---

"I wrote a blog post where all the code samples in the article reflect files tracked in a version-control system, evolutions in the code samples are different commits, and the text of the article itself is taken from specially-annotated text in the commit messages."

Compare http://akkartik.name/countPaths.html :)

You can make your approach more maintainable if you give up on keeping the prose coherent. The biggest problem with documentation is that it doesn't get written most of the time. I focus on mechanisms that make it more likely I will provide that one key sentence for future readers. And -- like in wikipedia -- I assume the reader is reading critically enough to be able to handle glitches.
Active users are worth this much. Whatever you do that attracts and retains users will become valuable.
Show HN: Dropdock, From Startup Weekend Winner to a Real Project
Hey everyone!

Last weekend I participated in a Startup Weekend (Paris, France) with a friend where we pitched a simple idea. We wanted to create a cross platform application with the easiest file-sharing experience. Drag and drop the files on the avatar of the person you want to send them to. and voila, the files are sent.

During the weekend I posted on HN to get some feedback on our project and was happy to see we got some awesome feedback ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3780777 ). The testing page ( http://dl.dropbox.com/u/149780/Dropsend%20beta.jpg ) got more than 1200 Unique Visitors in 8h with a CTR of 21% ! By the end of the weekend we had a working prototype that was able to send files both locally and through the web.

Since we were just there to have fun and took SW more like a hackathon, we were really surprised when we were announced as the Winners of the weekend ( Ze winning pitch deck: http://speakerdeck.com/u/dropdock/p/dropdock-startup-weekend-winning-pitch )

After a lot of thinking, we decided to take the projet further and really launch the service, thus creating Dopdock!

We are currently refactoring the code, redesigning the prototype and adding some features ( Encrypted transfers, Send to non Dropdock users, etc ). The plan is to launch Dropdock by the end of April. That's where you come in, we need tech oriented / startup enthusiasts to give us feedback on our beta because we think you guys will be the ones benefiting the most from our service.

So take a look at http://getdropdock.com to watch a demo of Dropdock and why not signup for the beta if you like it! Any feedback is more than welcome, either on the landing page or the application.

If you have read up to this point, you get an extra thank you!

TL;DR: Took Startup Weekend as a hackaton, pitched a simple idea, won the competition to our surprise, decided to continue the project. Need beta tester! http://getdropdock.com/

Cheers,
Syl

PS: My Tech co-founder blogged about the experience, you can read it @ http://maximebf.com/2012/04/startup-weekend/
why is it called dave?
Free jQuery Photo Gallery ( Tutorial )
In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to create a minimalistic jQuery photo gallery. You can use it to present your latest works or as a photo album.
Yes, but unless they have a very strong attachment to one or both of the couples our hypothetical utilitarian judge is going to be a very small part of the equation. For the record, I'm not a pure utilitarian myself.
Maybe YouTube could have done it on their own too, but a big reason why Google was able to keep YT afloat was its widespread peering agreements. So even though it bled cash for years, it didn't bleed near as much cash as it could have because they paid very little for their actual bandwidth.
Show HN: My weekend project Hot Or Not...for bread
What I really wanted to say was that its quite likely that society spends more (much more) on sports entertainment than medical research. Perhaps not wrong. Interesting though.
Funny, I had a similar reaction. I was really late to the Instagram party but the biggest thing I liked about it was that it was an alternative way to keep a circle of friends. For whatever reason, I quickly re-connected with some quality people that I had lost track of over the years, but was happy to find on Instagram. Fittingly, a bunch of us had actually taken photo classes together over a decade ago.
I just want diffs at method scope. Show me the methods that have been added, changed, or deleted. Use line diffs for things external to methods.
Investors literally doubled their money overnight. Wow.
I don't know, but I wouldn't jump to that conclusion. The Instagram team was still growing its user base by leaps and bounds. I would guess they're in no hurry to sell. FB's "competition" for the deal could've just been Instagram's continued organic growth.
One obvious reason would be if the input to your expression is relatively large or complex (e.g. a file).
I disagree that we should not allow such a thing if it existed. I think humans are a bit past the need for biological evolution. Technology can provide us with the ability to adapt to new challenges and environments, and can do so much more quickly.
Ok, that makes sense, thanks!
I strongly disagree, for entertainment is not the only reason I read things.
Do Important Things
Getting 12 year olds to learn assembly programming
Social sites like Facebook are mostly about photo sharing. This acquisition is all about controlling the main reason people use a social site like FB (or one that competes for it).
This sort of reminded me that code is the new currency, not all currency is equal and blogging and social media is only marketing. Now matter how you want to play it. If you play your hand just right you might hit the jackpot.
Vehement whining about how I didn't get to be dhh is beyond this point. Game of making money does not depend on your feelings but your actions and in long view strategy - everyone is unique and no one should be DHH. Yes DHH was in the right place and right time. He played both hands, rails his brain child however was quite a mess for some time. Documentation was missing, errors led you to wrong places and still do.

Perhaps you can look at his and learn something, from afar not too close - not to see who he dines with and maybe get some of his own philosophy and make it your own...
Some Qt APIs are inherently asynchronous (like QHttp) but the graphics-related ones I'm binding to are not (like QPainter).

So the situation is analogous to the DOM in web browsers. The calls are synchronous and run in the main thread. As the web has taught us though, single-threads and blocking graphics calls can go a long way :)
Facebook acquires photo sharing app Instagram for $1 billion
While this workaround has merit, it doesn't actually solve the underlying problem. I guess even Amazon will eventually pick up the phone and ask you to stop sending them weekly bandwidth spikes when the figures involved get large enough (I've personally seen this with another well known PaaS provider).
I think tptacek might have designed their current website.
They're buying a competitor (Yahoo and Excite had a change to buy a tiny Google) so why take the chance?

And they're buying part of it with stock. It just doesn't feel like it's real money so FB doesn't see it as a $1 Billion.

Lastly, Google doesn't buy it and add lots of activity to G+ almost immediately.
Studies on using it on real code written without thought on parallelism always discover that "normal" code simply isn't parallelizable even in theory beyond single-digit factors.

If you assume "normal code" is traditional imperative code with destructive state update, that is probably correct (although I'd be curious to see which studies you're referring to). But there are important examples of domain-specific languages that are relatively simple to automatically parallelize. For example, mere mortals can easily write SQL that can be efficiently executed on thousands of machines (given a sufficiently large data set, of course) -- the database system takes care of data partitioning, replication, and fault tolerance automatically.

Another example is the work of Pat Hanrahan and others on DSLs for solving PDEs over meshes: http://liszt.stanford.edu/liszt_sc2011.pdf

Obviously, whether these techniques can be extended to tackle more general-purpose programming tasks is open to question.
According to TechCrunch, the round did close and the money was wired to Instagram last Thursday.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/09/right-before-acquisition-in...
This is a silly weekend project I put out last Wednesday night. I presented it at a lightning talk at Minnebar (Barcamp in Minneapolis) and it got a surprisingly warm reception. So thought I'd share it here.

Platform is: Bootstrap, Django, Pinax. Hosting it on webfaction.

And if there are any bakers out there or you are interested, I highly recommend this book by authors here in Minneapolis:

http://www.amazon.com/Artisan-Bread-Five-Minutes-Revolutioni...

They have a no-knead bread method that is appeals to the hacker mindset; heavily optimized and efficient.
This Oscar guy doesnt sound like too much of a nerd........
Lightbox seems to be gaining some traction, and it has a web interface too. I am considering it.
And we don't really know what they had to do to make it work. The <audio> api is not known for its robustness and accuracy.

Our hack from October was really simple (two small python modules), but we spent all day compiling midi libraries to use with python. That was definitely not easy work.
What about hacking tools that have been installed on your machine without your knowledge, i.e. malware that runs DDoS attacks?
Correct - I don't believe them. I think they will merge the products to some degree and then let what's left of Instagram rot.
$1 billion for a 13-person team? Is this the highest per-employee price tag?
Web apps are the hype. Native apps have always been the standard.

Your labeling of Office and Adobe CS as "legacy" is just wishful thinking.
Google also missed buying Flickr back then. I think Instagram would've been a smart buy for them, too, at least from a social network point of view. I don't want Facebook to gobble up all rising social networks. Maybe Google was looking to buy Pinterest instead?
IMO Instagram had a huge potential to be the next big social network. I think Mark noticed it too and bought before it became too big.
Gene Pool Engineering For Entrepreneurs
Why pick on patents? I can't think of any employer who rewards workers "proportionately" unless they are on direct commission.

I was one of a small group of engineers that developed a product that has earned the company many millions of revenue. "All" I get is a salary.

I single handedly coded something that had a direct saving to the company of $3 million. "All" I got was a salary.

At least if I'm awarded a patent, I get a few hundred $$$ out of it.
It's for the users, to prevent a competitor from 'owning' them - Facebook could block the API, otherwise all of their competitors can still gain access to them. If Facebook does start to screw around with the API then they're destroying value to the consumer.

It's really too bad Instagram sold so soon. I hope they took mostly money.
> 'C'

Why the quotes?
Even Mall-Wart stocks fair-trade products. I don't think they are doing it to be nice.
If you want performance on a low end VPS you could use a static website generator like Jekyll, Hyde, nanoc etc ...
BlingBoard brings Gmail, Facebook, Twitter and SMS in one Android widget
I don't think we can cure cancer until nanotechnology tools can be used in many hospitals. Send some nanorobots to eradicate all cancer cells in the body, and that's it. But we're probably at least 20-30 years away from that.