skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let's not forget that other application area that has historically proven very helpful at driving early adoption of new media. From the Gutenberg press, through celluloid, CDs, GIFs, to the Internet. Hint: starts with 'p', ends with 'orn.'
nobody anywhere (in the US) is forcing any religious institution to do anything. where did you get that idea?
Basic Packet Capture Sanitization using TraceWrangler
> First Oculus gave out the perks they promised to deliver, haven't they? That's the whole deal with backers. You back a project and you should receive the promised perk in return.

You don't back a project just to get the perks though most of the time, you back a project to support a company grow and thrive.

IMO they clearly broke the social contract between them and the backers.
I'm sorry. Since you were claiming that the "all republicans should be fired" line was such a straw man, I thought you were also offering a reason that the common Republican partisan should be exempted.

Given the absence of that as a reason, though, I'm even less certain where you think the line should be, and what makes the straw man so straw-y. Also, plenty of other people here have talked about why his being a CEO is special and what-not, so all readers should please substitute the opinion of speakers up-thread and down-thread for those of ryguytilidie.

Finally: as far as "victimhood" contests go, perhaps eventually we will look back on these days as we look back on the likes of the Reformation, when Protestants went to war with Catholics (over matters of no less import to the thinkers of the day), and pretty much both sides were pretty atrocious all around. Raid the monasteries for their gold? Sure, why not, they're a bunch of Papists! Spanish Inquisition? Don't mind if I do! Execution! Civil war! Fact: until last year, 2013, it was still illegal for someone married to a Roman Catholic to hold the throne of England.

The reason that we today are better than those backwards folks and haven't descended into outright civil war over this issue, like many nations did in the Reformation, is that we have some level of pluralism in our society. I would go so far as to hold that this is more important than correctly deciding today the issue of slavery, of civil rights, of women voting, of gay rights, or any other movement of that sort: because it is the principle which gives society the freedom to raise the questions which these rights movements addressed. As such I am distressed that it is so glibly dismissed in favor of a totalitarian approach and calls for boycotts of people who have been accused of doing nothing but supporting the wrong cause.
Thing is, Google is pursuing wearables as pursuant to its core competency: data mining. What does VR have to do with Facebook's core competency?
That's exactly where I'm at right now, bootstrapped and solo-founder. It's an interesting beast. I have a tendency to want to do harder sprints because I want to clear out my backlog, clean-up docs, fix some bugs, and then continue on my way, but that's never going to be the reality of the situation for quite a while ... it's all on me. Every bug, email, social-media thing, log entry, bill, server, etc., is on me ... that shit is overwhelming. So I decided to adopt a more "go as you please" policy... only work on things I was interested in or was a blocking issue. I found my burn-outs reduced quite a bit, and now I can see them coming on a lot sooner. On top of that, I get to take breaks from bug fixes to tinker with R&D stuff to remind myself why I'm doing this, what I'm working toward ... which turns into longer working hours with fewer burnouts and more progress ... which is good because it's all on me. So that means my schedule is usually up by 8:30am, showering and coding by 9am and working and taking breaks as I feel like it to be honest. And if something comes up, I try to do that unless I have something that really gets done (like a blocking issue). So a lot of time it can be writing docs at 3:30am because I can't sleep, working 18 hours straight, or taking a weekend to read or visit friends because I've been burning out on a bug. The freedom to build it and enjoy life at the same time, all while working on my pet-project. It's gotten me this far, maybe it can get me farther, shrug, I've never done this before, haha.
I was trying to make the argument that Facebook probably DIDN'T buy them for games (ie Farmville).

I'm saying that it's a longer bet. Maybe they see it as a new interface for general computing. It certainly has that intimate, only-I-know-what-I'm-doing quality that voice commands (Siri and Google Now for example) don't have.
>So you are suggesting that most people will strap on a headset to consume social information of the type they currently consume on Facebook

Why do you think it would look anything like what we currently consider social networking? Why are people so painfully short-sighted?

I have said many times that facebook won the social network wars long before google even released google+. Anything that comes along to kill facebook will look nothing like what we consider social networking today. It looks like facebook may be the one to invent its own killer.
Yep, I'd have to see waveforms.

My instinct is that the phase is causing some distortion somewhere along the audio path, between the signal (the ideal) and the analog. Between that is the DAC, the amplifier, the wiring, and the transducers, all of which can induce distortion of varying degrees based on various properties of the input.

But your experiment validates the simple concept that small, seemingly insignificant differences in audio can cause unexpected and perceptible effects! Awesome.
I just realized what this means...."free to play" VR games with a credit card slot right on the headset.
John Carmack briefly tweets about Facebook
I predict something similar to the Modern Warfare 2 boycott: http://dbzer0.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Boycott-Modern-...
codrops is one of my favourites: http://tympanus.net/codrops/
I guess the online cloud computing space is getting more and more competitive.
Has anyone used digital ocean before?
https://www.digitalocean.com
The deal was made in 5 days, it does not mean they were not in touch before.
Space elevator – Wikipedia
Minecraft dev halts talks with Oculus following Facebook acquisition
Traveling through JP, SK, HK; any HNers want to meet?
I'm traveling to Toyko first week of April, then Seoul for two weeks, and finally spending the last week of April in Hong Kong.

If any HNers out there are interested in meeting up, I'll happily take the detour to have a drink with them. Feel free to shoot me an email (in profile) if you're interested in meeting up.
If anyone reading this wants to see what a basic "guess the number"-style game looks like in Haskell, I wrote one with the same basic logic, but a ton of different coding styles as well as java code that implements the same logic. https://gist.github.com/cleichner/6086604

Note: As you go farther down the page, the techniques become increasingly overkill for a program this small. For this sort of program, I actually like RandomProblem2.hs the most.
To think that he actually believes any of what he just wrote is... difficult. I dunno what Facebook pushed in front of him, but to me Occulus is now nothing more than a footnote in the quest for immersive VR. How disappointing.
This is true, he never argued against simple preference.

His bedside manner in most discussions left a lot to be desired, is all.
I think--not sure, I haven't tried--that I'd be a lot less worried about that RAM budget on that phone, actually. That phone almost certainly doesn't have the GPU for a game rolling with nontrivial models/textures. Like, just as an example, I don't think you're running even a downscaled, super-optimized, everything-in-C++ version of the Angry Bots demo that comes with Unity (it's on Google Play if you want to check it out) without stripping out actual functionality to the point where I think you sort of miss the point of the game because I think the GPU would give up the ghost. So I feel like on this low-end hardware you're basically talking about fairly lightweight 2D games because it can't push better, so I'm not sure I'd really worry about big honkin' meshes or textures. Is that unfair? (My own libgdx game doesn't use more than 60MB of textures at its peak, and I'm doing a lot more stuff in my JRPG than I'd think almost anybody would try to do on that sort of bottom-of-the-barrel hardware.)

Also, yeah, maybe I'm overshooting the average programmer.
Oculus VR Order Cancellation and Refund Policy
I think a recording light could be defeated by a tiny dot of suitably-colored opaque pigment dabbed onto the recording light. I prefer the earlier poster's thought of a sliding, readily visible lens cover.
Yeah, that would be a nasty mess for us too... the change would replicate to all our databases and we'd have to stop the world, restore from the previous day's backups, re-run all the database binlogs up until the point where the disaster happened. It would be a couple of hours of total downtime - not a happy place.

But we do have daily backups and binlogs in multiple places, so it wouldn't actually lead to data loss. It really sounds like you were lucky NOT to be there!
Well either the government is separate from religion in which case it's legal definition on the rights of marriage theoretically has no bearing on the religious component or it is part of the religion in which case it can decide how it wants it's religion to develop. I can't speak to civil unions in the UK but in New Zealand there were definite rights that were excluded from civil unions (adoption being one) so the argument to have it be recognized as one entity so that distinctions can't be made is a fair one.

As to forcing a church to marry two people I'm torn. I put it in the ball park of refusing to marry those of a different race or have mixed race weddings. I think you can make the argument that any religion that has a form of tax exemption could be required to not discriminate and hold basic human rights. Ofcourse it's a bit of a mire as you could argue back and forth all day between the "state opression of religion" to the "no they can't make human sacrifices" extremes.

As to the mosque/synagogues stuff I'd assume any law that was created would hopefully lead to a lawsuit (from the muslim/jewish/XXX couple or human rights group) which would show that the law did apply to those institutions. But I agree political discussion is generally avoided out of either the fact that they're a smaller part of UK culture or fear of inciting violence(even if this fear is unjustified) or being called a racist(or the theological equivalent (I for one wouldn't like to be called a theist ;) ). I think the "and they are lynching negroes" point is going to be a particularly useful one for the catholics/christians to argue.
Speaking generally, it one big factor is mitigating risk. Doing so does two nice things: (1) Allows you to go after really big ideas, using your own money makes you more conservative and (2) prevents personal disaster.
Wrote one of those many years ago, yes - for medical data. It's the right solution to just about every problem actually, and I'm surprised that it isn't more commonly taught.
The camera is the most worrisome thing about Glass, and it can potentially force me into participating without my knowledge much more easily than a phone or camera. It's an issue.

I'm not at all interested in Glass, but this issue has caused me to think about how I'll react and interact with a Glass user. I never had to think about that with phones or cameras.

And by the way, this conversation has me thinking about those unfortunate retail workers who have to wear those earbud/microphones, so that they can be re-purposed at a moment's notice. If they wore Glass there would be a backlash.

But it wouldn't be obvious at all if their mics were recording you, and you could easily be simultaneously video recorded by "security" cams in the store. With enough AI and FR, the cameras could automatically focus on whoever the employee was talking to, or even record ambient conversations and connect that to travel so far within the store. "For training purposes."
One other important take away from MoD, Carmack gives zero fucks about what he says publicly. I'm excited to hear his take on this whole deal, especially since I imagine it comes as a bit of a shock to most of the Oculus team.
...because it confuses presenting the basis [groan] of the Fourier transform via already-understood concepts with showing a gee-whiz incidental property of the Fourier transform.

The thing that bothers me about the epicycle example in particular is that it's not clear (from the example) what the domain of the function we're trying to approximate is, and what, if any, restrictions need to be placed on the function. For example, is it OK for the function cross itself? Can I represent an arbitrary shape in 2D with this method? What happens if the line has to jump? Is that OK or not? Is it accidental, or on purpose, that the line comes back to meet itself at the end? Why is the function we're representing (in the epicycle example) in 2D but we usually take the Fourier transform of 1D functions? Where did complex numbers come in? What is complex exponentiation? What's an integral?

The square wave example does better. You can just use pure sines or cosines, so you don't have to introduce complex numbers. You don't have the 2D vs. 1D issue. You don't need an integral. So with less folderol, you get to about the same level of understanding as in the given example.

On the other hand, I really like the epicycle example as a machine learning or sparse basis example. That is, explaining that you can fit anything if you have enough degrees of freedom. After the Fourier transform is already understood by other means.
Pretty clearly in communication for at least a month.
IMO it's not just the deeper pocket and preexisting fanbase, it's Sony's great relationship with the gaming industry (not to mention its high quality first party studios) that is almost impossible for Oculus to compete with. The founder then probably realized that gaming is no longer the main path Oculus should focus on. If the new strategy is to pursue a more broader application of VR then working with FB makes more sense than it looks.

As a gamer, though, I can hardly see any other application of VR having more potential to become mainstream than VR in gaming.
Search engine that uses facial recognition to search pictures
Where do people get off commenting about how someone should have turned down $2BN? Do you have an authoritative source that shows he had solid offers for hundreds of millions? Otherwise where do you decide that he's being a "greedy bastard"?

Even this article says they got "freedom to operate independently" - who knows, maybe it's true.
INTERNAL FACEBOOK CONFERENCE CALL ABOUT ACQUIRING OCULUS
The Commonwealth has different restrictions on interference with churches. There is no constitutional guarantee in the UK. Similar to how common law countries generally limit freedom of expression to not include hate speech.
In the middle of this: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/magazine/y-combinator-sili...
Reddit is going a bit crazy atm http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/21d4jp/how_do_i_canc...
Full Disclosure Mailing List: A Fresh Start
The tv show Lost was really good at using the commercial breaks for tension building.
I think we do not share the same opinion about the significance of those differences. But that is ok. I promise not to boycott your company because you have a different belief than me.
They were almost certainly in touch before, but the deal being done in 5 days means that the sony announcement could have been the event that pressed the oculus team at look at an acquisition more seriously.
Oculus' Canaries in the Coalmine
Of course it doesn't equal correct. That's the whole point of pluralism! There are some people out there who are on the wrong side of every issue, and maybe it would be nice if we could interact with them anyway instead of declaring their existence anathema, and punishing anyone who associates with their ideological impurities by boycotting them at every conceivable juncture. (Which was what was suggested, no?)
Some of our other work:
http://www.gopheracademy.com
http://blog.gopheracademy.com
http://www.gophercon.com
AlJazeera, I am disappointed.
You'd be surprised, some people think non-profits shouldn't be allowed to follow their beliefs (if those beliefs discriminate against whatever the cause célèbre is).
I hear you. When the bet is so far out that you can't even guess at it - either we're just too dim (likely), or the theory is pretty shaky. the mouse is a good parallel - just a way to interface with content. many people have figured out how to build one. the star of the show (and the revenue) remains the content we use it to point at.
Following up on something I said further down in this thread, I think the OP meant to use "gendered" in a gender studies sense and not in a linguistic sense. I don't fully understand the meaning of "gendered" in the gender studies sense, but I think the OP meant something like "systematically associated with gender in some way".

I think the intended meaning is basically that there are cultural differences around whether people tend to express their enthusiasm for programming as "love" or not, and so Hacker School now doubts this term is the best indicator of whether a prospective participant has the kind of enthusiasm they're looking for.

It's true that "gendered word" has a totally separate meaning in linguistics, where it refers to the phenomenon where a noun attracts or requires agreement according to a class that the noun is in. In many languages these words need not refer to animate beings' gender at all, and in some languages the noun classes are totally abstract and unrelated to masculinity or femininity, although there's some disagreement about this terminology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_classes#Noun_classes_vers...

Anyway, I suggest reading the OP as saying "cultural differences, often along gender lines, in whether people commonly describe their relationship with programming as love".
"Reality" itself is virtual reality - with a carbon-based sensory system that outperforms what we've been able to do with silicon to date.
The trick is that "social gaming" does not mean what many seem to think it means.

Watch a live stream of Scott Manley having some beers and flying some kerbals to the Mun? Sure, I'm on board with that.

Receive a notification that my mother has topped her previous high score in [who cares]Ville? No. No not at all.

I've seen absolutely no indication that Facebook understands that "social gaming" should not mean "annoying your friends".
Wow that was amazing. What are your other top videos?
As the post mentions, we stopped using the word "love" for both reasons -- gender was part of but not the entire reason we switched.

In fact, the alum we quote as an example of the trouble with the word love is male:

We used to say applicants must "love" programming, but we've learned that was a mistake. While it sounds good, it doesn't actually describe what we care about, and it was dissuading qualified people from applying.

In fact, many of our best students have said they almost didn't apply because they worried they didn't love programming enough. Hacker School alum David Peter expressed this fear perfectly:

One of the questions in the interview was, "Do you love programming?"
I said yes, because I loved it more than most people I knew.
But was it love? I enjoyed writing and drawing equally, if not more.
After Hacker School, I'm revisiting these hobbies. Programming wasn't my first love."*
Is this the equivalent of a fan hating an indy band for "selling out"?
Ditto.. The only Miami Go meetups that I'm aware of are headed by William. http://www.meetup.com/Go-Miami/
I was referring more to the differences in Google vs some other solution tracking your behavior on websites.
Note that the linked-to article explicitly says he's willing to discuss this in private, and Brendan _does_ answer his mail. You're obviously under no obligation to do so, but you if you care to find out what he was thinking you could contact him and ask.

I _do_ wish he were willing to discuss this in public, though. People talking to him one on one obviously doesn't scale.
If Occulus didn't do this deal, they:

- Would have had access to unlimited VC money by being one of Kickstarter's hardware darlings, having John Carmack, and putting out an series of critically acclaimed products in the form of dev-kits

- Would have been able to grow their open platform, which allows direct access to developers from all markets, not just FB/Sony/Valve or other closed systems

- Would have the power and autonomy to guarantee developers that they were all equally important, and that their needs would be the company's top priority

- Would have the potential to create an ecosystem leading to an entirely new industry, not unlike Tesla Roadster, the iPod/iPhone/iPad, etc.

Now? They've destroyed their reputation with developers by guaranteeing they'll be second class citizens to FB's financial interests, by sacrificing all of their autonomy. They've exchanged all of the future potential of their company for $2B.

Look at it this way, Snapchat declined $4B for their trivial messaging app. Yet Occulus, which has so much potential, folded at a measly $2B?

It's just a damn shame.
The real shame is not that the backers didn't a get a financial payout ('tho they should). The real shame is how Oculus' most passionate enthusiasts got burnt. They were in it for the shared vision but got a tough lesson in capitalism instead.
Is he pragmatic enough that he'll eat his words and release Minecraft on the Oculus Rift if it gets popular and Facebook doesn't actually ruin it?
I suspect Facebook's acquisition will cause VR to happen sooner. Other companies will build or double down on VR tech, if they haven't already.
Some Haskell essentials...

Easy to parse online book:
http://learnyouahaskell.com/chapters

Rapid search engine of the Haskell lang and libs:
http://www.haskell.org/hoogle/

Common f*ckups, useful if you're coming from an imperative world especially:
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Common_Misunderstandings

Cheat sheet of operators and notation:
http://www.imada.sdu.dk/~rolf/Edu/DM22/F06/haskell-operatore...
An effective FTC and more widespread use of the Sherman act would be nice in the US.
Wow, you just missed the entire point of his post.
In that situation, I would assume the value to be zero for the purpose of decision-making.

@sjg007 email me if you want to discuss in more detail (address in profile).
I was instantly delighted with the name, it strikes me as open and responsible, which is exactly how security researchers should appear.
You sound like Oculus owns some really valuable technology (they clearly don't own a 2B user base yet). But did sony spend $2B for R&D in their VR project? I doubt so.
When you hear it that way, it sounds like the spawn of the VR world called Society seen in the movie Gamer.
Why would you need a powerful GPU in a home server?
I wouldn't admit to that publicly, if I was you.
Prototypal Inheritance With Stamps
When gays are forced to sit at the back of the bus, or not allowed to go to the same schools, or vote, then you can argue your equality angle...