skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Whatever brings us closer to the (hopefully not as dangerous) reality from this book:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Deadliest-Game-Net-Force/dp/042516...

I understand the frustration I'm seeing in a lot of the comments here, and I don't know how things will play out (I was definitely surprised when I saw this announcement just now), but let's hope that good things will come out of it because Oculus has a good team and Facebook sees the possibilities such a platform could bring to the world...eventually.

In the Matrix, I'm not quite sure if they ever showed whether or not time was 1:1 inside/out of the Matrix.

If it was, then it makes me think of all of the things that happen within our dreams and how much we seem to be able to do within those sleeping hours. Maybe in the future we'll figure out a way to go into a virtual world that fully mimics the rules in the "real" world and be able to accomplish the same amount of work in a fraction of the time because time will be slower (or our ability to process information will be faster in this virtual world, however you want to look at it) so we can spend part of the time in there and more time out in the real world :-).

Anyhow, I'll try and be positive that Facebook will be able to do the right thing here and be able to earn the trust again of those that currently "creeped" out by the acquisition (plus, I sort of have to be anyway...I still have quite a bit of IPO stock I purchased and been holding onto :-).
Wouldn't it be better if we simply started farming IRL then?

Don't even get me started on the silliness that is Farmville - no more than a glorified Skinner box.
It's entertaining the way Palmer Luckey calls it a partnership and Zuck calls it an acquisition.
The thing that gets people is that, as backers of the Kickstarter / customers of the developer kit, you ARE an investor. Sure - not an investor in the sense that you own a piece of the company. But you are investing your time and money into the potential consumer success of the product, by buying the hardware and developing a game for that. You are right to feel betrayed, it you feel this disrupts the potential consumer success.
If Carmack obtained any sort of options or shares in Oculus stock prior to this deal, this is likely to be quite a hefty payday for him, no?

Just goes to show that his business sense was dead on, and he aligned his position with an organization he instinctively perceived as valuable before it's value exploded. It's probably safe to say, though, that his participation in the company also augmented the perception of its value, by his association acting as a defacto endorsement.
CoinSummit 2014 Live
Valve or Google definitely. Valve because of the gaming expertise, Google for the existing experience and culture of innovation.
The reason for this is that if you're doing IO in Java you'll usually use some kind of buffered input reader rather than stdio. I've written a command line in Java that reads commands, runs native commands, streams output to the console and even that doesn't need to read stdio as a stream. It's not that Java can't do that, it's that there are better idioms for most problems.
My gut reaction is that Facebook wants to create the VR platform and infrastructure that will enable applications like wearables/3d printing/etc. Google Glass takes the existing world and contextualizes it with the necessary info. FB approach might be to take the same approach to the VR world.
Assuming the barter trade was even, the income and expense would cancel out thereby no taxes would be owed.
Tell us what you want hackers to build and we'll offer a $500 bounty for it
> There doesn't appear to be any obvious motivation for Facebook to use this tech for its intended purpose

Facebook gets their hands in the less-casual game industry and also gains control over a platform for virtual experiences, I can see many reasons why Facebook would support continuing to build the Oculus for its originally intended purpose.

At least it's not Microsoft.
They don't need to lock out other headsets, that's kind of the opposite of their service model and philosphy. But they would have the advantage of controlling the distrobution platform, their in-house software/engine, and their hardware. Lots of advantages there, similar to Apple.

Theirs will likely become the superior product, organically.
I can't imagine many negative comments if Valve bought Oculus.
This is a growing anti-web trend -- the tendency of web properties to only self-link. I assume someone somewhere has actual metrics justifying this, but it's the antithesis of what the web is about, but it's exactly why the only links in this article are to other Bloomberg Business Week articles.
What other acquisitions by Facebook resulted in that product falling apart? Instagram is still doing its own thing, also Parse as well.

People need to get over whatever negative emotions they have towards Facebook. It's like they hate Facebook for reminding them of a bad breakup.

Congratulations to entire Oculus team, that's an exciting acquisition and I look forward to what this infusion of cash will do to the future of an already incredible product.
His twitter is silent. Not something that shows overjoy of the big exit.
I don't see it, they're completely different products
Hmm. At first I thought this would be a waste, because you couldn't use all of its fast compute capabilities on doing key-value lookups. But these things also have much, much more memory bandwidth than regular CPUs (I can't remember if it's 10x or 100x, but that ballpark), and that might work well for these applications.

But I don't know how the GPU's memory caching infrastructure works. If the bandwidth is only for serial reads, that could be a problem.
True. But the best strategy for widespread adoption is to get the hardcore enthusiasts first, who in this case are the PC gamers.

For example, see how well that's worked out for Tesla.
I opened HN after a long day today and I see this news. Sigh.

Now I wish I open HN tomorrow and see a post, maybe something like - "John Carmack quits Oculus and starts his own VR company".
> It's nice to compete with friends and show to your network what you and your friends are up to.

I've never understood this mindset in gaming. Maybe I'm just showing myself as an introverted curmudgeon, but I only game when I'm not programming, and I just game to try to unwind. Being forced to do something 'social' when I just want to relax is just annoying to me personally.

I'm not saying I hate other people (I do), or that I don't want to ever be social (I don't), but social situations -- while often fun -- do require more mental energy than just shooting bad guys, or scoring goals, or whatever else the game has you doing.

Maybe I'm very unrepresentative of the gaming market at large, but I don't understand why numerous gaming companies (Sony and Microsoft have both headed down this path) want to cram social aspects into games. I'm not sure what they think the business case for that decision is. I assume they think it'll make games something more essential to day-to-day life than they currently are, by connecting games to the people you love, but that just makes me want to play games less.
Yeah. Thanks. Until then I can't :/ do you have the bug number?
Hackers fighting proxy war over Crimea
Yes, Jeb seems to be the technical lead on Minecraft these days.

But I believe that Notch and his partners still make all the calls for the company at large. While his declaration seems a bit brusque, I think the Mojang guys have quite a bit of pride in being an independent company that has done well and may wish to clearly make their corporate philosophy known.
Consider that id Software sold to Bethesda about four years before he left it. He's a proponent of openness, yes. But he's been as much employee as employer since 2009.
A week too soon. Oh how I wish it was April 1st.
"One day I'd go out and buy all the pants in the world -- every pair of pants -- and just... burn them. Fuck everybody. No more pants. Start over with making pants."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gO9PwbtlOIU#t=39
Interestingly, John Cash, another Quake programmer, went on to lead the development of World of Warcraft, something much closer to a shared VR universe.
That acquisition just doesn't make any sense, even when reading facebook's reasons:

- Who are going to use the Oculus outside of gamers? Just selling a smartwatch is already a tough sell for anyone but technologists, I just can't imagine my dad or my mom putting on a VR headset or anyone not a hardcore geek.

- And even if they would (which is dubious) the move to mobile mean it's just impossible technical wise for a long time (considering they said VR would bring a high end PC to its knee quickly)

- On top of that Facebook brings what? Money? They could already get that with investors, having a lot of users doesn't bring that much to the table.

No really I don't understand.
Has there been any talk of getting some of the holes in google's cloud offering filled? I would switch to google in a heart beat but I am using route53, SQS, cloudfront, glacier and VPC. That is a lot to be giving up. I also didn't see anything about any sort of health/service checking/alerting support, but I probably just missed it.
Are you US only? When I looked at your site last time I think it was all implicitly US specific. Have you thought about expanding to the UK/Australia/NZ? The tools I've seen in schools (I don't have wide experience) don't seem very good.
so if you mined gold you get taxed at the moment you caught sight of it and not when you take it to market?

And if you knew how mining pools worked it takes it on a totally different course with shelved shares, etc
All I know about Carmack is that he likes the 'metaverse'. It's quite possible that he thinks he has a better chance of building it with Facebook than without.
The backlash is phenomenal. And completely predictable.
Curious to see HN's negative reaction to this announcement. The sentiment appears to originate with gamers.

Gamers, particularly PC gamers, are a minority of computing end users. Minorities get less attention than the mainstream. Oculus VR chose gamers, particularly PC gamers, as its beachhead. The dedicated attention from such a world-changing technology must have been special. The backlash against losing that special status is understandable.

But VR's potential isn't limited to gamers. That is what Facebook recognised and is capitalising on with this acquisition. Oculus, as a (perhaps the) leader in the consumer VR space, is well positioned to shape the future of VR and with it consumer computing. They had a choice between a niche and the market, and they are reaching for the moon.

The expanded mandate means gamers will become a minority of Oculus's customer base. It does not follow that their experience nor expectations should degrade. Preëmptively burning Facebook and Oculus for thinking big seems petty.

I am open-minded about Oculus's future at Facebook. It is possible that Facebook will mis-manage Oculus and squander its lead. It's also possible that an independent Oculus would have missed the forest for the trees. That by going 100% for gaming, it would have forsaken a greater destiny. Barring back-seat driving by Facebook management, Oculus has more options at Facebook. More options are good for a young company at the beginning of a open-ended road.
How Complexity Affects Your Software
The linked book (Unlocking the Clubhouse[1]) is based off a multi-year study of Carnegie Mellon CS majors. They found it was common for the male CS majors to describe themselves as "in love" with programming but much less common for female CS majors to do so.

(That's obviously greatly simplified, but that's the gist of it.)

[1] http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/unlocking-clubhouse
Could you add more to that citation. I'd love to see the source
>Facebook gets their hands in the less-casual game industry

Yeah, but I think this is what people like Notch fear, because it's not going to be of any use to just have their logo emblazoned on the device: they're going to want something more from it.

Given the way that they and Zynga worked together to drive casual gaming into the dirt, I'd actually rather Microsoft bought the device than them, because at least Microsoft have a major games wing which would benefit solely from using this device for its intended purpose (albeit by locking the device to Windows and Xbox exclusively).
... because...
Here's the thing, if FB really wanted to do the 'courtside seats' thing, they should have licensed being able to stream the feeds through the FB web site - In terms of revenue stream, they'd make a boatload more $$ off of charging for that than they will by attaching it to a $1500 piece of headgear that you're not going get away with slipping on in your office to sneak a quick game.
Hi lads,

We have created uptime monitoring service - up-time.io.

Our main design principle was to ask users for as little as possible (page URL) and then build a service which based on user input (page URL) returns as much as possible.

At the moment when URL is provided we do DNS resolve and add all found hosts to the monitoring group with 80/tcp and 443/tcp rules. After that URL is being scanned every minute and each host every five minutes. When website (URL) is down for 5 minutes service sends notification.

We monitor from Amsterdam but tomorrow (we move really fast) we shall have a bit more complex solution and will add monitoring from Germany and New York.

We were wondering what path shall we go and what should we add as a next feature?

On our list:

- Twilio integration

- PhantomJS/YSlow HAR archives with alerts when sth is not going well

- PhantomJS - screen grabbing (inspired a bit by post I found on HN about pagesnap.io)

- More complex monitors, for instance HTTP content check, ICMP/ping, certificate verification, etc..

- Improve UI - add help, tutorial, introduction, so that my Mom can use it.

Any feedback would be great.

Thanks guys,
Damn I just bought DK2 2 days ago, what do I do now?
I wonder if something (or somebody) forced this.
Presidential elections have been a "looks good on TV" contest since the first televised debate in 1960, when Nixon lost. 54 years later, there is no sign of that changing. Humans are humans - the soap opera is more important than the policies.
"Zuckerberg explained that he felt that Oculus represented an entirely new post-PC and post-mobile platform."

He's probably right. While Google and others are focusing on half-baked wearables as their key to the future, facebook just bought a huge chunk of the most likely successor.
Sidekiq wasn't around when they made resque.
> its intended purpose

Which is what, exactly? I always thought the "killer app" of true VR would be socialization and collaboration: a "virtual world" in the sense of Second Life, OpenCobalt, or Neal Stephenson's metaverse.

Facebook itself is the "casual" version of a socialization system. Facebook's biggest uncaptured market right now is people who prefer to socialize in a more "hardcore" fashion: in virtual worlds (e.g. MMO game-worlds) rather than on websites.

Facebook could probably capture some of this market by putting out the world's first massively-multiuser VR world. It wouldn't necessarily have to be a game, per se, although games could be built on top of it. Just a place, like Facebook itself is a place.
Probably more that they could help Oculus accelerate their vision, give them more resources, and of course $. But I highly doubt it was just money
If you can point me towards a smartphone, with significant market share and usage numbers in 2014, that doesn't have 128MB of RAM and, like, an 800MHz Adreno or something, I would really like to see it. Because that's my defnition of "low end" and I've literally never seen crappier than that. (I'm targeting phones with at least two cores and 768MB of RAM and up, because I'm lazy and I don't think anybody with lower would be buying my game because it doesn't fit the profile of titles that make money on such devices, but I do have a couple paperweights around for idle testing.)

My market research has shown that when you get below those specs you start getting into dumbphone/J2ME platforms, where you have other constraining factors.
Android dominates global mobile web browsing but ios owns key western countries
Minecraft cancels Oculus VR version of game after Facebook acquisition
The negative reaction isn't because of any of that, it's because it's Facebook.

Microsoft, Apple, Google, Valve, hell even Dell would have all been acceptable acquirers for most PC gamers backing the Oculus Rift.
Wrong. Google knows that there's immense potential in VR. It's just too early for them to get into it yet. The pushback from privacy advocates would kill any potential project.
Wow, down voted into oblivion..
Rather the opposite - Facebook want to show adverts only to the people who want to see them. Anything else is just stupid, why on earth would anyone pay to advertise to people who don't want to see my adverts?
We had a hard working Taiwanese family that the locals would disparage as, "taking our jobs" because they all worked, saved their money and bought a restaurant together.
Redditor saw Zuckerberg at Oculus office 1 month ago
If you look at the size of Twitch.tv and lots of game-related subreddits, it's obvious that "social gaming" is a very big market with a lot of potential money to be made.
I think so too. This 3d world environment would completely get rid of computers as we know it, and tablets too, if you could just put on the helmet and go to the internet/facebook, see all your friends, etc...

I am sure the advertizers would love to create 3d models of their products in this environment. Maybe watch some Ford trucks rumble up the mountain while you watch?
Because you don't want to disable caching of every other sites when you are not wearing your developer hat, just a "regular user surfing internet" hat.
> Basically they want to have everyone share virtual experiences together within your network.

Over proprietary facebook-only protocols, on their proprietary software, using proprietary device drivers, with systemic data collection, and virtual reality advertising.

Yeah, no thanks. Occulus was poised to be revolutionary because it was going to be bigger than one headset, it was going to be an open platform for an entire generation of VR tech. Now, it is only facebook tech, and that is a shame.
Virtual Reality is going to change the world
You can spray n pray capital...

Its a bad strategy for your life, tho

The 'tortured artist' is a romantic notion

It's that meme that is being co-opted by VCs here

The 'entrepreneur as tortured artiste'

Since the 'starving artist' basically sums up

the ideal sucker for a major label record deal

(ie, weak negotiating leverage)

Its worth being critical of over-adopting the analogy.

(at least, if your the starving artist).

That being said, nothing clears the mind

like no food on the plate.

And a clear mind is what you need to succeed.
I distinctly remember Oculus's hiring page once touting "Help us build the Metaverse!"

Then they turn around and blatantly disregard one of Stephenson's most fundamental virtues/warnings from the novel (don't want to spoil it for anyone, but yea, eerily similar to joining L. Bob Rife). Straight PR garbage. And a slap to the face for anyone who actually believed them.

I can't remember the last piece of tech news that made me so disappointed.
Notch isn't developing, but it's ultimately his IP. He's made over $100M in licensing deals on the brand alone. I'm sure he's going to be the shotcaller (if not just a providing a massive influence) for any large-scale potential deals involving it.

Even with that aside, he's a massive figure in the game development community. A lot of people respect him and look up to him for making out huge in the Indie game in industry pretty much of his own accord. His opinion is pivotal.
No. It is inexperienced programmers that add abstraction everywhere.

Abstraction has a huge mental cost (I ignore the execution speed cost, because it is mostly irrelevant these days for most projects).

You need more than one case to abstract over. Abstracting "just in case" is, much more often than not, very leaky - that is, requiring you to keep in mind the details of both the abstraction and the abstracted - and requires revision when you actually need it.

Abstraction is not magic, not cost free, although Java culture is to assume that it is both. (Same criticism for C++, BTW; C culture tends to err the other way -- which, in my experience, is the better error to make)
Notch's thoughts at length: http://notch.net/2014/03/virtual-reality-is-going-to-change-...
> It's also quite the mystery how this culture happened,

(I assume that you are not being sarcastic - my sarcasm detector did not go off. In case I missed the sarcasm, apologies).

It is not at all a mystery, if you had been there in the late '90s / early 2000s : Java was actively marketed to management as a language that's usable by mediocre programmers to produce usable results ; "See, unlike C/C++, there are no buffer overflows, no dangling pointers, no undefined behavior, no platform dependencies, no memory leaks - your projects now are in bad shape because of these, but when you switch to Java, all of these problems will be a thing of the past". And those same people who bought the marketing hype, were also mostly believers in the "programmer is a replaceable cog" religion, which is still prevalent today in many places (not just Java), and during the .com days was actually somewhat truthy in the sense that people switched jobs so fast that you had to build your culture in such a way that people are replaceable, because programmer turnover at many companies was exceeding 20%/year.

Today's Java culture is rooted in those days, and it has an underlying "make it painful to not be stupid-simple" directive, and "make it easy to replace the programmer" requirement. Though these are often satisfied, my impression is that overall, it does not make projects more likely to deliver (on time or at all), or higher quality. But it is what it is.
http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/21d1u2/we_were_in_ta...
I'm hoping he made out handsomely and turns his attention (and money) to Armadillo Aerospace again.
You have a valid point there, but you certainly can play by yourself and hopefully there is a way to opt-out or silent game update after integration.

make games something more essential to day-to-day life than they currently are, by connecting games to the people you love

Certainly. For example, friend quizzes on Facebook.

I don't know what game makes sense to people. I try to be open-minded and play as many type genres as possible, whether it is FPS, MMRPG or puzzles. Disclaimer: I love minecraft.

I imagine they might push social VR games similar to Google's Ingress (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingress_%28game%29) further. This seems to be an increasing trend. I just read about NYC's Easter Egg hunt last week (http://www.easteregghuntsandevents.org/NY_Easter.php). Similar to Verizon's finding smartphone around the country and Ingress. Scavenger hunt, basically.

The only problem with my social network is that most people in my FB circle don't play games. Even if they do they don't play the games I play... That's always an unsolvable problem. Another problem is I don't want to download a 10GB game. We'd have to wait for super-awesome-cloud-gaming-infrastructure to deliver that to us. We are still early in that direction.
"I did a midnight mind dump on the situation. I'm jetlagged and tired, so it might not make sense: http://notch.net/2014/03/virtual-reality-is-going-to-change-... "

-@notch on twitter.
Candy Crush Maker Prices I.P.O. at $22.50 a Share
Microsoft/Apple would have been bad because that would lock the Rift to a single platform.
What kind of problems? Have those problems been fixed on GAE now?
And browser plugins can inject code to the webpage as well.