skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The difference between something like the Rift or the Vive and mobile-based stuff like Gear are huge when you get down to actually using it. Even discounting the differences between Rift and Vive regarding how they track motion, the Gear doesn't even have positional head tracking, just orientation.

In use, this makes a huge difference if you're looking to put someone in a virtual environment. It's not even restricted to gaming applications. All of the software I've tried on my Rift dev unit and someone else's Gear made this abundantly clear to me. Not being able to lean forward/back/around things takes away a huge part of the "immersion" factor leaving you with more of a souped-up 3d screen.

In terms of cost, for the Gear, don't you also need one of a few specific, expensive Samsung phones? I admit I haven't followed it as much lately so I don't know if they are selling something more affordable with the phone-stuff integrated or allowing the use of other phones. When I looked last, you needed a ~$700 phone plus the Gear. Not too big a price difference between $800 for phone+Gear and $1000 for a good video card+Rift. Personally, when I'm even considering something this expensive, new, and unnecessary, $800+ versus $1000 isn't a huge difference since I'm already spending a lot on something I don't really need.

The other huge thing I've noticed is that all of the best new and in-development VR stuff just isn't gonna be something you can run on a phone or a Playstation. It's gonna be beta software (if you're lucky) and require a powerful, flexible platform like a computer. Down the line it will even out but right now, none of the really impressive stuff I've seen for VR will run on Gear and I doubt it will be in the Sony Playstation store anytime soon. That same console-level polish and ease comes with a flip-side: no access to anything that isn't seamless or marketable just yet.
The code is literally millions of LoC, all of which needs to be audited for stuff we can't release for whatever reasons. All that code is built upon layer after layer of Google internal stuff. Open-sourcing Borg means open-sourcing Chubby, internal form of gRPC (older), hundreds of libs, monitoring infrastructure, etc. Net result is O(50M) LoC. And when someone sends us a patch - then what? The cost of doing it is simply prohibitive. I'd love to do it, it's just not practical and has no RoI.
> What was VMWare trying to do, and which parts of this mess were unintentional?

It appears that they were trying to build an ad-hoc connection-forwarding faux-NAT for the guest's IPv6 connection to the host's, to approximately mirror the NAT they can do for IPv4.

IPv6 really doesn't want to be NATed, though, and they've done a poor approximation of it.
I'm looking forward to when this exists for every almost language. Go added "c-archive" build mode in 1.5. There is no reason gobind couldn't support any language which can work with c libraries (ruby, node, etc).
Given that Linux gaming is perpetually 3-5 years behind Windows/console gaming, I'd say 3-5 years is probably a good bet for it running in any sort of usable capacity (i.e. more than a tech demo someone reverse engineered to prove it's possible).

Before you down vote; I'm really not being snarky here -- games on Windows typically run 30-40% faster on the same hardware than they do on Linux [1] because there just isn't the market there to make it worth doing the optimization.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/11/ars-benchmarks-show-si...
Your opinion is valid but it is largely not the opinion of the majority.
The Chromebooks replaced a bunch of Ubuntu-powered machines, and they are significantly inferior in all and every aspects, unless you're using Crouton or Gallium. File management is abysmal, and the OS is overall pretty buggy, in the last week I've met: impossible to clear browsing history, Chromecast extension keeps disappearing between reboots, problems with volume or brightness settings, Wifi woes...

Chrome OS feels really unpolished and a bit forgotten.
They can compete in the back-end space, but they are good at different things.

Node:

- Great for keeping one language in both back-end and front-end (if you're making a web app).
- Has package managers that are battle proof, like npm (which is taking a lot of heat recently due to politics and implementation "issues" that broke peoples builds for 1-2 days).
- Is asynchronous by default. Making it a good choice for certain use cases.

Go:

- Great concurrency model
- Small language spec, easy to learn and become productive with (this is my opinion)
- Single binary build
- Great standard library

The fact that Go is getting lots of references in HN might be that it is simply picking up attention, which is normal for any good technology.

Node is also very popular (much more than Go).

Anyways, choosing one over the other seems to be more of a choice on which language you prefer to write in. Unless your use case rules out one of the two.
WTAF, Am I reading this right? Booking.com was sending a 2.3MB file to every user, but only usable to iOS users?
Well of course. Danegeld worked as well, for a few years.
You underestimate the bias caused by our initial language. If you're an imperative programmer who has seen some OO, you can learn what map and closures are, but still have no idea what design patterns fit with them. And will be taken aback the first time you encounter them.

The first time I encountered a program that used them in an interesting way, I spent 20 minutes of utter confusion trying to figure out where anything HAPPENED. When I finally found the magic line, I went to the person who wrote it and said, "Why didn't you at least leave a comment!??" He looked at me, slightly puzzled, and said, "What comment would have helped?"

Today these are much more widely understood than they used to be. Mostly because JavaScript forced people to learn it. Though at one point I did have a role in popularizing the concepts in the Perl community with http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=34786.
We have multi-scheduler support in v1.2 :)
That's where the "ridiculously expensive" part kicks in: the only modems that mention Linux support are 40+ USD. (Zoom 3095 etc)
He once famously quipped that if he was diagnosed with something fatal the only thing he'd do is write faster.
My understanding is that Vulkan does NOT deprecate OpenGL, at least not for most use cases. Vulkan is a lower-level API that OpenGL can be implemented on top of, much like Gallium3D. As such, much development will continue in OGL, and only lower-level tuning will require the use of Vulkan.

Here's a lengthier discussion about it: https://forums.khronos.org/showthread.php/9717-Will-Vulkan-e...
Fine, you're okay with old bugs. You're pretending that that's the main issue though. What's your excuse for punting on security updates?
Almost every one of these devices has 3 connectors I'd never use. One PCIe connector would be smaller, especially at X1, and X4 is probably a wash.

Maybe not the same 3 you wouldn't use, but that's part of the 'be all things to all people' problem.
Sundar Pichai
This is an old mod. I think there was several companies doing this mod back in the late 1990s.
His complaint seems just plain wrong... are these VR systems incapable of mirroring the image to a TV?
Necessity is a needed evil he seems to say.

Did they thought of stopping to provide archive on the web, but just send the whole collection of paper that requires 0$ / months to just keep them alive and just require lenses and light to read?

Well it will require an index. But old style librarian have method for this. You can make incremental archive, keep up to date indexes on a separate plan ... This would in turn help countries with bad internet/energy access.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microform

And maybe libraries are a great invention. Maybe universities should be opened to every one in the world to access ALL scientific papers. Maybe it is not executive at PLOS that are the most useful agent for spreading the knowledge but librarians.

As a great librarian once said: Oook! Ook, OOk, Oook!
FEARCE: Twitter Uncensored
Twitter is awesome, but censorship sucks.

For the past few weeks, I've been tracking trends which Twitter manually removes. I also wrote a script to guestimate users being blacklisted by Twitter.

FEARCE show censored trends plus gives you the tweets of hundreds of blacklisted activists, artists, authors, hackers, historians, scientists, trolls and politicos.

Cheers,
Kyle Duck
VR itself isn't ready for mainstream period. The problem isn't Oculus Rift but the tech itself. Who can really spend an hour with a VR headset on ? very few people.
It's not quite that simple. Oculus devices require a server process, which is closed source and Windows-only. Games talk to the server process, which talks to the hardware. OpenVR abstracts the hardware access APIs so games can be platform-agnostic, but it's still built on top of the server process. It's possible someone could build an open source reimplementation of the Oculus server process to run on Mac/Linux, but I think that's unrealistic.

A more likely option is to run the Oculus server process in Wine, and this is something we're actively looking at. (If you're a game/VR dev and interested in doing Real Work to support the Rift or Vive on Linux through Wine, send me a mail.)
Considering the blatant similarities between the GitBucket and Github UI, I'm really not surprised they were getting upset about it. Surely GitBucket can not be surprised either?
Why Slashdot?
In some ways the oculus store could be that differentiator, but then that would lead to vendor lock / device wars which would be a shame more generally.
Oh the Irony! I bet they wish they took the 45 billion 8 years ago.
> Typically once you have a down round the common stock holders are wiped out if there have been a significant numbers of preference share issued.

That all depends on several unknowns at that time. It definitely increases the chances of the holders of common stock to be left without compensation if and when the company sells or there is some other 'liquidity event', but it definitely is not a given.

A down round is simply the issuing of new shares at a different valuation than the previous shares. There could very well be a round at a higher valuation later on, the difference between the previous share issue and the current one could be small, the number of shares issued could be small to the number of shares already outstanding and so on.
Hallo Stanislav,
Thanks a lot for the time you spent for us and for the comment you gave us. We do appreciate that!

Regarding improving English grammar - Hmm… it sounds a bit strange for us. Currently we have a lot of customers already using our service. Many of them are from “native english” countries and we can’t remember any single remark. But anyway, thanks again for the comment - we definitely will take a closer look at this!!!

In general we are extremely interested in all kind of feedback which could help us improve GrabDuck and knowing that you see our idea as part of “...building smth of worldwide importance...” really motivates us and moves us forward to build proper solution which brings some real value to our customers!
Once more thank you for that!

Ps. Yeah, btw “Hallo” ist auf Deutsch :-) And I guess if it is more or less understandable everywhere ;-)
Great article!

> Be Aware of What You Break

I work at Rollbar (www.rollbar.com), and that point is probably the key to our existence. You can't afford not to know what's going wrong. And the best way to know what's going on is to get a full stack trace with all the information you need to reproduce into a platform that will notify the appropriate people of the breakage.
Coming from a background with thousands of hours of hardcore multiplayer gaming, I'm very dis-interested in VR as a gaming platform, most specifically Oculus due to cost. The competitive field sounds like it needs some time to work through which device(s) get the best market traction (flashbacks to HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray). I think the author of the article knows his audience pretty well and meets the review expectations as stated - what is the 'mainstream' use case?

I think one of the most relevant parallells - for now, at this stage of development - is with a projetor. Relatively high cost of entry, takes effort and space for setup, and for basic day-to-day entertainment, kind of overkill. Sure it's great from time to time to take a projector and game rig outside and play Forza on a two-car garage door with a screen so big landing planes can probably see it, no doubt. It's actually nice to have one when other people are over, so it's a more engaging device, unlike putting on a headset.

Honestly I think about the time VR will be considered 'mainstream' is when the more customary (and accessible) entertainment forms start generating in-demand content. Think major motion picture studios, TV networks, and concert-type footage (Rolling Stones in Cuba probably in development as I type this). Or, as one more comparison, once the VR platform is as dynamic and simple as the iPhone environment (games, communication, media) then more people will adopt in turn and the market will diversify in beneficial ways (serious vs. casual gamers, etc).

I'm really excited to see what the 'traditional' creative platforms like music and storytelling are going to do in the environment over time.
For sure! I definitely believe people can make up their own minds, and hopefully most will. All I'm saying is we all don't have time to learn about every scientific advance and the surrounding laws and implications. We entrust a lot of that to others. And sometimes, through lack of knowledge, we can be swung by fear. My fear, since I don't know much about how law enforcement operates, is that law enforcement already feels disrespected by the public, and they will blame technologists for failing to catch terrorists instead of doing the best they can at their jobs.

The rise in portable social media has amplified situations where they make mistakes. They need to quickly improve the quality of their service in order to maintain our trust. On top of that, if Apple builds a more secure device, they may soon find that they no longer have access to as much information as they had for the last 5 years.

Like any boss, the President is supposedly the best suited and most informed. In this case he is the most informed on security issues balanced with civil liberties, and so he holds some convincing power over those who may not be as informed as he is, which includes all levels of the DOJ and the general public. It'd be nice if he knew a few more details about encryption and could either share those facts with the world so we can all understand a little bit more about the future, or at least stop acting like there is something tech companies can do to help the government catch terrorists who use encryption to hide their communications. On an ad hoc basis there may be something tech companies could do with the NSA, like having a special forces tech group, but forcing all encryption software to do key escrow just isn't feasible when you consider open source and free software. Obama's rhetoric sounds like he wants some permanent solution in place via legislation. That isn't possible and he is misleading the public by implying it is.
> * its extremely useful as money (if you live in Argentina or Zimbabwe, etc.)*

You mean, it could be useful as money in theory, but in practice it is not. It is not practical to meet one's needs transacting in bitcoin even in affluent regions where computers, internet access and general computer literacy are ubiquitous, so those economically strained regions where citizens are struggling just to meet their basics needs are places where bitcoin is a complete non-starter; it is not at all viable.
Poem Codes – WWII Crypto Techniques
Off the top of my head I don't think you can with the gear vr (doesn't the USB port get taken up by the headset?), but even if you can, one of the authors key complaints leading into that statement was that the rift was not wireless. If you told him to wire up his gear vr, he wouldn't be impressed.
There's no indication I'm aware of that Oculus/Facebook is interested in supporting Linux. Your best bet will be using Wine, but that requires both the Rift games and the Oculus display server to work in Wine, which is a tall order. But it's something we're looking at.
>You raise good points. I think one of the reasons why the conversations surrounding cryptocurrencies are disproportionally emotional is that everybody is long something and inevitably biased because of it.

These tokens ruin a lot of the incentives that makes open source software work. They attract non-technical people and ideologues. The whole thing is a mess.
> games on Windows typically run 30-40% faster on the same hardware than they do on Linux

Typically many game developers have no clue about Linux programming either. So poor performance doesn't surprise me. When developers know what they are doing, performance is good (example: http://knockoutgames.co).

Also, OpenGL is a major mess for several reasons (barely compatible implementations not complying to the standard and so on).

Now there is Vulkan however, so VR developers should have easier time with it.
Are the order numbers serial? They can't have received 2.6 mil orders, right? :O
Uber trying to recruit engineers by sending a coding game to play during rides
Show HN: TaxiRouter SG – realtime taxi locations in Singapore
Implementing Lambda Architecture to Track Real-Time Updates
Thanks! Just tried it with the C64 font on a curved ultrawide monitor:

http://matracas.org/tmp/cool-retro-term-C64-font-Dell-U3415W...
> I've always believed that 100% of all dependencies should be included in projects.

Including libc, Mesa, and libX11?

It's pretty untenable to do this in the limit. Eventually you're forced into using a good package manager, and once you have one you might as well use it for the rest of your dependencies too.
> professionals that rely on sound logic regardless of rhetoric

There's plenty of rhetoric employed on all sides of this debate.
There are more than 10x as many active Steam accounts (125m) vs active WoW accounts at it's peak (12m) in 2010.

Sure, a mid to low end PC could play WoW in 2004, but it only broke 2.5 million subscribers in late 2005. http://cdn2.ubergizmo.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/wow-sub... And 10m in 2008.

Give it 4 years and a GTX 970 will be a very low end graphics card.
No, this file is part of the iOS app.
I think you're right, the compiler can follow IEEE-754 rules in general, but as written it couldn't do so for constant expressions.

I find that rule to be really weird in general. Does that mean that, for example, if you try to use "1 << 32" in a constant expression, then whether it's actually a constant expression will depend on the target architecture? I wonder what the rationale is there.
I want to applaud GitHub for doing this in a peaceful manner. They have every right to ask this. I think having all project develop their own UI style will allow for more innovation to happen. At GitLab we are greatly inspired by GitHub but over time the GitLab became more distinctive. And that allowed a trickle of innovation to flow back, for example protected branches.
Oculus Rift review: High-end VR is here
On quite a few of these devices, some of the 'on board' connectors are running over USB as well, so they'll never perform even though they're soldered.
I would buy one just so I could have virtually unlimited monitors for work: http://store.steampowered.com/app/382110/
Adoption of segwit in Bitcoin will pave the way for use of Schnorr signatures, offering comparable efficiency gains.
Most often you won't need to use pip, and `conda install ...` is preferable (for example, pretty much everything on PyPI is mirrored to anaconda.org, and if you ask them to support a well-known package that's not already available, it will be available extremely quickly, and chances are it's already available on some other anaconda.org channel anyway).

You can use pip from within conda as well if you want to, and you can refer to environment-specific pips directly, such as `~/anaconda/envs/my_env_name/bin/pip install ...` to install for the environment my_env_name.

conda can work with pip-styled requirements.txt files as well, and it's easy to either upload your own packages to anaconda.org, or create the conda build metadata (metadata.yaml) with instructions for how to get the package from PyPI if you prefer to only upload to PyPI.

There is an abundance of well-written tutorials and documentation for these things.
The Oculus Rift Review
~aside: A bit unfair to put a Revolutionary Tyranny caption under the pic of Lafayette. In fact, in that day at Champ de Mars, General Lafayette swore a loyalty oat that included the King. Wouldn't a pic of (imo rabid) Marat [1] be more appropriate? Or possibly David's Tennis Court or just the handsome mug of Maximilian or Danton?

Lafayette did not betray his stated ideals. RIP.

[1]: https://rosswolfe.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/jacques-louis-...
Damn, losing holiday pay for taking PTO the day before or after holidays? That's just uncouth..
They almost certainly aren't serial, for example, there seems to be a chunk of zeroes that are fixed removing at least a few digits.
Put together the packages, request a fixed port, disable the health checks (unless I had a file in the Apache root with the right name), start it up?

I don't think Borg imposes all that many requirements on jobs, really, and the few it does can be disabled. Or at least could.

But I guess we're probably wandering out of the area covered by the papers now.
After reading the article and looking at the screenshots I can only say: No shit Sherlock!
>created:	49 minutes ago

>educational purposes

Hmmm
> Has anyone announced plans for a VR-capable Steam Machine?

This is basically a non-starter until the video driver situation on Linux gets resolved.

The core of the problem is that AMD/Nvidia only produce optimized drivers for their cards for Windows (and presumably the consoles who source from them). Those optimizations provide such a significant speed boost (~30-40% in real-world usage) that trying to do VR without them is going to be difficult, at least until the first few generations of VR drive demand for exponentially more powerful video cards. Of course, the drivers are optimized over the course of years by tweaking them to work with specific games, so until there are more games being released on Linux, they won't get the opportunity to optimize the drivers.

So it's a chicken-and-egg problem: the drivers aren't optimized because there aren't any games, there aren't any games because there is no demand, and there's no demand because the performance sucks and the driver situation is hella confusing. Valve is trying to work on the demand/supply side with SteamOS, but everyone on both sides is kinda hesitant unless the driver situation gets resolved.

Right now, Steam Machines are just a convenient way to order a gaming PC without a Windows license. Everyone I know who has bought one ended up installing Windows on it within the first week and just running it in Big Picture mode.
> There's no indication I'm aware of that Oculus/Facebook is interested in supporting Linux.

They said explicitly that they plan it[1][2]. But I saw no ETA.

[1]: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/oculus-rift-vr-headse...

[2]: https://twitter.com/PalmerLuckey/status/674311865023918080
I want it (an HTC vive actually but it doesn't change the point of my comment), but my big problem is the price.

The thing is almost $1k (we still don't know the price for Oculus Touch), then you need to add the desktop that can run games on it, so let's say $2k now. Then since I had laptops for years now I need to buy a monitor, a keyboard, a mouse, etc... That adds up.

I wonder how much I need to pour into the setup to be able to run VR.
It IS the iPhone of VR. The first iPhone didn't have over-the-air updates, over-the-air app installs, over-the-air music downloads. The screen was crap (compared to today).