Instagram co-founder on search, and co-engineering inside the Facebook empire

>>>>> The example we like to play with internally is Halloween. It would be interesting if you were to see who are all the people posting Halloween costumes, and what’s the most popular costume. That would be an interesting use case if we had really great neural networks and machine learning. But right now we’re mostly using the textual content of people’s captions and their accounts.

Machine learning's most brilliant application to date

Articles like this make me think of a long lost period where everyone would listen with baited breath about the technical wisdom of Digg. Digg had a compelling product, and succeeded in spite of profound technical issues and ignorance, but invariably they became "leaders" of technology because of the position of the product (the Digg engineering team had front page after front page on here). Instagram -- and they are hardly alone -- falls in the same camp as Digg to me: This article details the most banal achievements, and would never, in a million years, be on HN if it weren't from a lauded product.

But here it is, in a long line of "Instagram did pretty basic things" articles.

As an aside, I've always carried a chip since Instagram did as so many Valley companies do and waved their hands claiming things weren't possible on Android. Since then I discovered Gallus, which is a vastly superior product than Instagram's offering, and makes none of the same excuses. A single guy did what Instagram wasted so many words claiming impossible.