skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
tolerance is a two way street. would it be OK for conservative muslims to protest a gay CEO? no. in a democracy and in a world with many differing points of view at some point you just have to tolerate each others beliefs, regardless of how much you oppose them, and just get along.

edit: and now my words are being twisted. I never said being gay was a belief. what one person thinks of a proposed law is a belief.

edit edit: tolerance is not "I am OK with the gays but will never freely associate with one of them" nor is "I am tolerant of his views on gay marriage but I hate him and will never have anything to do with him".

tolerance is" I hate what you think/belive/lifestyle/god/wear but I won't hold it against you". my sister frequently nurses racists who are very rude to her. she tolerates then as gives them as good care as she gives anyone else. that is tolerance.

welcome to democracy. people have different opinion. they have different religious beliefs and different upbringing. just get along people.
Capital gains varies a little depending on the asset (currencies, precious metals, real estate, etc have special rules), but generally it's 15% for long-term capital gains (1 year, not 2 years) and your regular income tax rate for short term capital gains.

It was recently raised to 20% for people in the highest income tax bracket. AMT of 28% may be used instead in certain circumstances.
This seems to be an unpopular opinion, but I don't believe all the hype about VR. You are never going to be able to get sufficiently passable virtual reality to make up for the hardware hassle. If I want to have a conversation with a friend, I just want to see his/her face, I don't need the whole room simulated for me. Oculus will be a flash in the pan, and it's purchase by Facebook is just another example of the company stretching itself thin in order to grab a larger user base.
There's been a flurry of threads, and I've not seen this discussed. As a huge fan of Carmack and a believer in VR, the acquisition is interesting, in that:

- John Carmack's OR work was not just on the mechanism of VR in terms of the screens, latency, but also on an embedded operating system to best drive the experience. The fact that Zuckerberg in the investment call mentioned this as a 'new device platform' (not desktop, not mobile) could be taken somewhat literally. This could be an interesting way for FB to become part of a new embedded platform, written to drive these displays. This Facebook Display OS could be next years press froth that was the Facebook Phone OS. While AR / Glass is not much like OR, the platform might be Mark's play here, just as much as a 'seems like a good long bet'.

- John fairly recently discussed how Armadillo was really not something he could put much more money in. Fairly quickly he has got into a situation that (post golden handcuffs) he could seriously restart this. While it's funny to imagine Zuckerberg/Carmack in code review meetings :) the reality if the situation might be that this OR adventure is big-picture just John's way back home to Armadillo in a few years. Needs must and all that.

I'm still internalizing the news (as a dev/purchaser of both DK1 and preorder DK2) but some things do seem apparent today:

- This is probably a good time for one of the VR also-rans to do a 'Oculus Rift kickerstarter V2' on this news. Rightly or wrongly there's now a huge need for a new white knight in VR that could be tapped.

- What JC does/says now is a barometer for a lot of people in the OR community.

- OR's biggest pitfall will now be loss of focus. There are now so many distractions, from metaverses to HR noise.

Personally I think FB will be hands-off, and this is not a disaster but then my main excitement is really just on getting to CV1 as soon as possible, regardless of who owns the most stock, and today's news helps that.
I really appreciate that Notch seems to always communicate his opinions, whether I agree with them or not, in such an intelligent and fair way. I think he hit all the right points with this post especially about his initial investment in their kickstarter.

As of now I am looking at this acquisition with intense skepticism. I am interested in the Rift from a pure gaming perspective, and facebook hasn't proven themselves in that field yet, or at least not in the way that I agree with.

With that said I do look forward to seeing what happens with this. Good or bad I believe that this is something that will be talked about for a long time.
I doubt that vehement hatred of 7 million people's views will sway them to the cause either. It's just a bit hard to convince people to respect your beliefs while dancing atop their own--narrow-minded or otherwise.
Sunglasses YEEEEAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!
1. There is a difference between voting for something and funding it.

2. There is a difference between being employed by a company and being its CEO.

3. These differences are significant.
> euro style 50%

As a European, I wonder what you're referring to. My aggregate total tax, including VAT (I'm in the UK, so the VAT rate is 20% for standard rated goods, but like in your case there's lots of zero rated goods; I believe the top VAT rate in the EU is 25%) is ~36% on a salary that puts me well into the "1%".

(VAT accounts for "only" about 4 percentage points of that, as the amount of my post-income-tax income that goes towards non-zero-rated products is not all that high).

Marginal tax rates in many European countries can be around or exceeding 50%, but you'd have to be ludicrously wealthy with a useless accountant to actually pay anywhere near that, even including VAT, unless you spend all your money on drinking and driving.
I am very sorry that some people are upset with the political opinions of other people.

Now can somebody get this political bullshit off the front page of HN? Please? Nothing productive can come from a logical and reasonable conversation with people who are, by definition, very upset. Half the posts here are "hell yeah!" and the other half are baiting arguments from others who feel impassioned by the issue. Not a good topic.
FoolFonts: An easy way to celebrate April Fools' Day
Incredibly immature.

Disappointed in Notch. I guess he's just a game designer at the end of the day, not an activist, so I guess meh.

Oculus is hardware, hopefully Facebooks billions will bring forward adoption, reduce hardware dev times and create some crappy software that people can chose not to use.

How this can been seen as a bad thing, boggles my mind.

I want VR decades ago. At least Facebooks billions might make the current timeline somewhat bearable.
What. the. fuck.
Eh, if people wanted control, they shouldn't back a Kickstarter, which doesn't offer any control. You back a Kickstarter, and you get (if you're lucky) the rewards offered for your contribution level.
Indeed! Great website and the groups that congregate there are good people. :)
It is not; like @segphault just tweeted:

"Tragic that all of the great ideas of our time get swallowed by soulless web companies that lack vision and only care about spying on us."
Frankly, it wasn't "made right", nor is it "the end" and we damned sure need to keep "dwelling on it".
Exactly, everybody is trashing the acquisition for no reasons. I feel like I'm the only one actually happy for Oculus that facebook bought them. Now people around me are gonna hear about Oculus, VR was going to be something big, but with facebook to back them? It's going to be the next big thing.
This reminds me of how awfully behind IE is in HTML5 development. If even Firefox doesn't have this feature, IE might not get it for at least another 2 years. I don't think Microsoft has even announced support for WebRTC in any future IE version yet.
Trying to point out the silliness of the "redefine marriage" argument, I guess. Feel free to ignore me.
To a not-so-knowledgeable person like myself, this seems like a bubble. Is it so hard to wire up some displays, optics and gyros? 2 billion? What could you do in-house or with a new team with, say 20 million?

Maybe it is so hard.
Maybe it would be appropriate to ask him why he was against it before deciding he's anti-LGTB. I'd imagine that, being an intelligent and capable human being, he deserves the consideration of hearing his case before you knock him off the pedestal.
Likewise. I have, in my naivety, believed that the people I admire for their skill are also fair. For me, I just felt a bit sad to hear that he held these views.
Can someone please explain to me how you can just go on a spending spree and spend $21 Billion in under a month with no one going:

'Hey, umm guys, I know we really like the company, but lets have things cool down a bit after spend 19 billion.'

In the Whatsapp acquisition thread someone made a comment about FB thinking their stock valuation is overpriced. I'm curious to hear what the split (cash/stock) is. If it's stock heavy, I'm almost certain that person was right.
>Diversification

Conglomerates have some of the thinnest margins across many industries.

Jumping into the electronic devices industry with a product that hasn't even hit market yet is a bad gamble, especially since a dedicated electronics manufacturer (Sony) is going to release the same product but with an already dedicated market (Playstation).

It would have been better to wait until OR released, because then early adopters would have demonstrated if it is a viable product.
How A College Dropout Built The Company Facebook Bought For $2 Billion
Leave the Past Behind: How to Stop Self-Sabotaging Your Entrepreneurial Dreams
Huge impact? Most Definitely.
Huge positive impact? Unless you feel the need to keep tabs on everyone you've ever met, probably not.
It has nothing to do with speed. It has to do with ability to get it done.

When faced with clear wrongdoing and public disapproval, nothing happened. It took almost a full year of constant news, almost universal disapproval from people whose opinions matter, and the changing opinion of Congressional leaders before any concessions at all were proposed.

What that says to me is that there is a very unlikely conjunction of things that needs to happen before the infosec agencies can be held to account. That unlikely conjunction is probably so unlikely that it will not happen again for decades. Now may be the only chance we (meaning you, me, Congress, and the Executive) have to change practices for a long time. Given that the infosec agencies, no matter how much we roll their power back, will struggle to regain that power and more, we better roll them back at least a few decades worth while we have the chance.
Prop 8 was ruled unconstitutional and same sex marriages have resumed in California. Is that not right? Is that not the end of it?
I don't think people should be too harsh on Palmer. He's still very young. To me it feels like Facebook bought this insanely cheap. It's $17bn cheaper than Whatsapp.

I'm sure there was some smooth talking involved in the deal. I couldn't help but think of the billion dollars scene from The Social Network[1] when I heard about the deal.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4e0n7vTLz1U
"I think social could become one of the biggest applications of VR. Being able to sit in a virtual living room and see your friend’s avatar?" -- But that was Second Life! I'm trying to imagine what 2L would have been like with convincing VR.

First, probably not anywhere near technical feasibility for at least several years. Remember the lag when a bunch of avatars were in one place? Or how long it took for a scene to fill in after you teleported? And the bandwidth, good lord...

But then I imagine what it would be like if the bandwidth and server performance issues were magically solved. And I realize that it was all imagined before decades ago, in Snow Crash[1].

[1]http://www.amazon.com/Snow-Crash-Neal-Stephenson/dp/05535626...
@ hack_edu

Contracts can be broken. I really doubt John Carmack has to do anything he doesn't want to do. It will be the canary in the coalmine as far as whether I purchase an Oculus HMD when they release.

I do hate this "winner-take-all" situation where a few tech companies in the US acquire every single cutting edge company.
And one advantage to this is that it anything that can view a web page can reach it. I don't have to ask my grandma to install an app on her phone to get a picture on her desktop computer from me : )
An Acquisition Destroyed My Business. Why?
Microsoft has a history with gaming because they built the Xbox. Facebook will have a history with gaming, hardware, and more because they will build the Oculus.
His last public comment on this issue was in 2012, where he basically didn't actually comment.

And quite honestly, as a gay man, I would rather use Chrome and have Google profit over my personal data, VS touching Firefox now. The Mozilla Board clearly knew about this issue (it was quite a big deal when the news first broke), and this should have something they considered. If Eich changed his views, then he should have clarified before them formally announcing this. Mozilla making this choice yells to me that they don't give a crap about me and others like me. Even if logically that doesn't make sense, there's this visceral emotional disgust and pain.
And it uses Firebase, my favorite real-time service! Awesome stuff gents.
I'm not sure Eich is particularly involved with Rust (anymore?) beyond having his name on some recent related press release.
If you severely underreport your income, the period of time for which the IRS can go after you never ends. That means, theoretically, they could go after you when you're 90 for income you didn't report in 2013/2014.
Facebook has already proven to be a huge antagonist in many many ways. We can, however, give Oculus the benefit of the doubt; they might have ended up doing nasty things even if they hadn't gotten acquired by Facebook, sure, but Carmack's past actions were never even close to the nastyness of Zuck's actions. It's just a matter of analyzing the past and making a hypothesis on the future based on that. I don't see what's so difficult to understand.
How about instead of the discredited history of epicycles "Fourier transforms are a way to translate from the frequency domain to the time domain and back"?
It's not just about the grade. Some Ways For College Students To Get Great Work
I can't comprehend that John Carmack is now working for facebook.
And look at the thriving ecosystem of 3rd party, unlicensed kinect apps
Notch Says He's Canceled Oculus Rift Minecraft Because Of Facebook
I've recently joined RiteTag on their PR/Marketing team, and I understand where you're coming from. Many users on Twitter use it primarily to connect with friends, however, there are also countless users that work in PR/Marketing and other sectors that would have a need to connect with their customers as well as reaching to a larger audience. Since you can also search hashtags now on Google, keeping track of hashtags related to your topic of interest can be helpful!
I agree it's tough, but who you choose to lead you says a lot about who you want to be. I don't personally want to support a company that wants a dude with the morals of Eich pointing the way.

(I don't care for Larry Page much, either, but there's less active attacking of other folks' rights up in the Googleplex. Google's actions with regard to ads and my data don't really bug me, so that isn't a factor to me.)
They have a new audience now: the world.
Didn't his space company run out of cash? This could help re-fund that.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=771339
Ironically, gathered from reading the initial reactions of early adopters, I think they just destroyed the chances of Oculus succeeding.
Match Made in Hell: 7 Worst Tech Mergers and Acquisitions
Filthy Casuals. Yeah that demographic was basically given the finger by this move, if I were Sony, I'd capitalize.
Best of luck getting your signal through in all this noise :-)
I think that people would have been happier if it had been acquired by North Korea. I was seriously excited by OR, but for me personally its now DOA. It says a lot about a company that Sony is now the preferred alternative.

Everyone expecting an instant turn to the dark side are naive. This is going only one way:

1. Facebook will say "We're hands off".

2. They'll persuade Carmack to stay and they'll burn cash to make it dominant and in no way corrupted by FB or data capture.

3. Once dominant they'll slowly remove privacy from it and other things geeks and people who care hold important. Carmack will quietly move on to something interesting, and few will notice.

4. The rest of the population will stay with it as they don't know/care, and geeks and everyone else will need to use it even though they really would prefer not to.

Classic frog boiling situation.
He spent his own money to try to make me a second class citizen. Am I supposed to "tolerate" it when someone has actively tried to take away my rights?
Are you even listening to yourself arguing with nothing but a baseless ad hominem AND still having the gall to ask someone if he's listening to himself?
I'm assuming that Facebook, given its size, has at least some leverage over the W3 standards committee. Imagine VR integration inside the browser (at least for positional tracking and latency mitigation).
Even if Mozilla started actively discriminating against people and campaigning against minority rights I would have no problem taking the code and starting a forked version. IMO that's what's so great about FLOSS, if you disagree with how something is managed you can ignore the people who created it and start your own version along with other people who agree.

So I wouldn't really be worried about the current state of affairs. If people want to boycott then they can do that, but I doubt it will have much effect unless Eich starts going insane, in which case Google will probably cut their funding. In that case we can all start hacking on Iceweasel and forget about it. Yay for free libre open source software!
Brochures I saw years ago indicated that least some portable Inmarsat terminals are also directed beams. Taliban/AQ was known to use directional antennas for communications security, at least later in the war. So possibly we could say the same thing about Bin Laden's satphone, and we know how that turned out.
Come Sell Pickaxes and Blue Jeans With Me. Best Gems From Y Combinator Pitch Day
I'll give you some Gold... Oh wait wrong site.
Google did fuck up Android (privacy wise).

(1) Requirement of a Google account (i.e. forced correlation of your phone with youtube, google searches, google analytics, google ... ), (2) Ever checked those privileges on the default applications - that you can't disable or remove? Why are those closed-source by the way?, (3) Search the web for more examples.

Either way, I agree that I made an assumption - but - this is kinda related: http://bgr.com/2014/03/06/facebook-android-app-permissions/

Crowd funding is not only about money. Your funders also invest emotions into the project. I am mad, I think others will be as well. To quote Notch[1]: "And I did not chip in ten grand to seed a first investment round to build value for a Facebook acquisition."

[1] http://notch.net/2014/03/virtual-reality-is-going-to-change-...
https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/thisworl...
I think it's because FB is basically a modern day white pages, whose core mission is mine user data and deliver ads to people who don't want to see them. I think much of the disdain is in the fact that a company like this can manage to gain so much valuation in the first place.

Not saying I necessarily agree with that, but I can at least understand how it does leave one with the impression that priorities in the tech industry and wall street are completely out of whack. Instead of solving 'real' problems (energy, medicine, education, etc.) we disproportionately value some rather inane activities.
I know. I was demonstrating why it wouldn't be a 5v supply rather a 20v one.
Liquidity event clause would be normal here and he'll be vested all in, especially as he's not a regular employee. As a C-level they'll be handcuffs on the FB stock part for sure as well.
I think people would be much more serene if they stopped idolizing certain programmers, computer scientists and tech people in general as demigods. As influential, intelligent and wise as they may be, they are quite fallible, and their political views are very likely to be a volatile mess, like most other people.

If it's any consolation, there has yet to be a cult tech figure who is a neo-Nazi/white nationalist or anything of the sort. Or am I wrong?

The world would be a much better place if we could learn to separate the artist's work from the artist's personal deeds and opinions. Otherwise you'd probably be unable to enjoy anything made before the 20th century.
Isn't that what they exactly did? They got all the PC gamers on fire, got Carmac, got bought by facebook. Now they're reaching for the moon, they became so big that people started hating, you can't avoid that.
VR will be like the web. Eventually it will belong to all of us. Once it gets off the ground, no single company will be able to ruin it.

Just like touchscreen smartphones, initially we had the iPhone which is relatively locked down and controlled by a single vendor, but now we have cheap, commoditised hardware of acceptable quality.

More importantly, the real 'platform' for smartphones is the web, which is as open as any we've ever had. Eventually, VR will have something of the same.

I'm glad to see that at least Notch gets it.
Brazilian House of Representatives passes Marco Civil with net neutrality
Oh cuil, it's apparently time for the entitled mob to direct its groupthink towards tearing down one of the rare worthwhile software companies.
Clustrix Assists Early-Stage Startups with Incentive Pricing and Support
I apologize for the inconvenience, and thank you for the feedback.
I'll link you to two of our blogposts that explain a lot of the RiteTag functions.

Pink is "overused", Blue is "good" and Green is "Great". The blogposts will explain more of our functionality!

http://ritetag.com/hashtag-academy/workshop-2
http://ritetag.com/hashtag-academy/hashtag-virality-measurem...
never

You take the long view, I see.
Because he wants to create a new procedure for what collection they remain allowed to do, and the President can't just create new legal processes.
Facebook is not the most hatred company in the world, especially after Instagram, Whatsapp and Oculus' acquisitions.
Federal Reserve survey provides information on mobile financial services
Ask HN: Looking for examples of personal wallboards
I know that I have seen examples of personal wallboards here on HN, but my searching is failing me. Can you come up with examples of wallboards specifically targeting data about a single person such as unread email count, today's calendar, current account balances (possibly), etc?
"Think about when Microsoft got into gaming and created Xbox. Now imagine if they didn't."

All of Halo series would be on PC.