skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I give it a little bit of stock because if someone came on HN and claimed "Larry and Sergey lit a pile of Bibles on fire and professed their love for Satan in front of the company," I'd be comfortable within the confines of my nondisclosure agreement saying that never happened even though TGIF is a confidential meeting. It'd have to be that ridiculous for me, but I'm sure the threshold for others is lower.

If "joebar" here completely made up the question and answer I bet one of the numerous lurking Googlers would have called him on it by now, even though it's a confidential meeting because (a) not everybody cares about nondisclosure to the same extent you and I do and (b) it's not like you're divulging corporate secrets, you're just saying that's a made up story. Pretty simple. "That story isn't true." Done. Legal gray area, but Google is pretty lax on social media until you fuck up.

I should clarify that it's probably a safe bet that the Q&A happened (and, honestly, sounds like Larry) but I disagree with the commenter's analysis.
Yes, but Instagram and Parse are services that fall within Facebook's major product area and have teams with related experience to Facebook's daily operations. Oculus is not a service, just a technology; one that has no relation (nor clear route to one) to any Facebook-held product.
Uh, it seems that you forgot to include the source you're referencing...
I've been using the community edition of IntelliJ for years now, primarily for Android work. I can't imagine switching back to Eclipse, and the switch to IntelliJ was not at all difficult. The Android plugin for IntelliJ does a lot for you.
Not being able to rely on the graph being properly sorted makes it a bit useless...
The problem for Facebook is that since there is such a distaste for them in the dev community that they are going to have a hard time attracting developers if a worthy competitor comes along. Devs are going to want to target a more open platform, unless there is a massive advantage to going the Facebook route. On the web, building a Facebook app is enticing because you get access to a massive audience. For VR, your audience are people who have the hardware, so until there is a large number of people who own VR goggles the power really is in the hands of the developers and what platforms they build their killer apps on.
Say that to Elon Musk. Imagine the inventors using this money in the same way Musk did. If they do (or at least try) I'd say humanity comes out on top - even though this killed our dream of VR in the near future.
VR, at least as it stands right now, is squarely in the domain of the enthusiast, which has a very broad overlap with PC gaming crowd. Something like the Oculus Rift has no real potential with mobile gaming (power requirements alone preclude that).

What sorts of applications can you imagine? The idea of virtual presence being a killer app is silly, IMO - I've played with both the Oculus Rift and telepresence robots - they're neat, but for meetings/gatherings, I'll take a plain old webcam any day. I can't imagine what Facebook would do with this that I would be interested in.
"Compensation for positions." Was meant to imply, signing bonus and stock options. Which would include stock options.
have hte y-axis be log2 of the capacity?
Well that's too bad. Deep down I was really hoping that Elon Musk would buy Oculus VR so that one day I could jump into my Tesla, put on an Oculus and enjoy a VR enhanced driving experience on my way to the Space X flight to the Mars colony.

But seriously, of all companies that Oculus could have sold to Facebook is the least innovative, and I'm skeptical that they will be able to pull of anything nearly as interesting as other companies that might have wanted to but Oculus VR, such as Google.
This 28-Year-Old Vows to Launch a New Business Every Week for One Year
This would be far more useful if shipping costs were included. A $6 flash drive with another $6 in shipping isn't really a $6 flash drive now is it?
It seems to me that people here are confusing Facebook with companies that have their games and apps on Facebook. They are acting like Zynga has bought it.

You could argue whether Facebook is ethical by allowing Zynga and similar to use the platform the way they do, but that's a different story.
You've got a pretty damn shallow ethical barrel.
Valve has stopped developing their own VR hardware and gave their prototype to Oculus a few months ago. If I remember correctly, their top VR guy also joined Oculus.

Sony is developing a competitor with project Morpheus, though.
Tera sets up standards for Bitcoin swaps
And this is excellent news for the potential resurrection of Armadillo Aerospace, perhaps..
Unfortunately this has the effect of giving you the impression that you're reliably visualizing the data when it just provides a visualization loosely based on reality.
> VR was supposed to be a new frontier, I have been so excited to see finally the Next Thing was coming and it feels so much like the early days of the web and computing.

VR has been the Next Thing since before there was a World Wide Web, if not the internet itself. Maybe this time is different, maybe not.
When big companies buy small good products, they often turn to poop, because the new masters lack the original vision and the decisions about the product will be made by PMs trying to get a promotion, not by those who actually care. I suspect this will be the case with this acquisition. My opinion is based on the way I see facebook managing their products: whatever they're offering to ordinary users is mediocre and basically stays afloat only because of the network effect, and whatever they are offering to their paying customers is effectively a scam (youtube search for "facebook fraud"). I can't see them possibly making good use of Oculus.
> I know HN has a natural tendency towards wailing and gnashing of teeth, but I don't understand this reaction at all.

That's fair. I didn't bother explaining it since the details of implementing a democracy is a hobby horse of mine and dropping a couple paragraphs seemed... beside the point. But,

> Why would watching a debate from a virtual auditorium be any worse for democracy than watching it on TV?

It's not the act of watching that I'm criticizing here.

It's the fact that it's being venerated as remotely important. The mere suggestion that seeing a sweat drop on a presidential candidate's forehead is even passingly relevant to anyone is profoundly disturbing to me.
But Github is already doing same thing for crypto as it is doing for Git ;) https://github.com/substack/cipherhub
It's really not sensationalist at all.

Facebook is run by a man who got rich on selling private data to advertisers, and then used his billions to buy all the mansions surrounding his own mansion so that he could protect his privacy.

Zuckerberg is scum and this is a sad day for any fan of the Oculus.
Boo. Hiss. Boo.
Let's think about the priority Oculus will now give to supporting random games that aren't connected to Facebook's business interests.
This is why I'm astonished: it also seemed to me that Carmack is that sort of guy, you know, real programmer. idealistic, stubborn. Maker, not businessman. But whatever be all that "Mark and his team share our vision for virtual reality’s potential to transform the way we"… blah blah — I cannot really imagine why he would do so if not only for the sake of business. Well, it might be easier to make stuff when company with infinite resources parents you for sure, but still…

No, I definitely have to reconsider if that idealistic picture of Carmack in my brain is correct. Not that I ever knew him, anyway…
This is a terrible move for Oculus, though. The reaction from their core audiences - hardcore gamers and developers - seems to be largely negative, at a time right after Sony - a company that caters to that audience - announced its competing "Project Morpheus". It's not being taken as a signal of Facebook's innovation, but as Oculus moving toward a casual audience, and their fan base feels abandoned. Do they really feel that whatever plans they have with Facebook are so low-risk and high return that they no longer need that audience?
The Creator of 'Doom' Is Now A Facebook Employee
I wasn't drawing any conclusions; just sharing an anecdote and the impression it left on me.

At Clojure meetups there's a palpable sense of eagerness in everyone I talk with that isn't using it on a daily basis yet though and I would find it hard to believe if that didn't have a significant monetary effect.

As far as recruitment goes, especially in large numbers, I will definitely concede that it will be hard to scale up to large numbers without using traditional hiring channels and that those channels will most certainly fail you when recruiting this specific a skill-set.
Snow Crash – Metaverse
False false false; this is the dead of Oculus for one simple reason: Developers, doesn't matter how much ridiculous amounts of money you have if you scare away developers making it part of one of the spammiest and most hatred companies in the world it will fail.
I think a lot of the problem is that VR as a means of improving the process of "experiencing interactive content" only really works when the content is presented from a first-person view and there is value in that perspective. Right now, that means FPS and FPRPG games. Amnesia through the Oculus Rift is a genuinely amazing (and terrifying) experience that is improved by the headset (it makes you, the player, feel like you can't step back and escape, which adds to the experience); shopping in a virtual shopping mall is just an impediment to getting what I want.

Remember the VR-32 and VRML? Everyone was super excited that we were going to start doing all the things in virtual reality, and then we figured out that it's a really cumbersome way to present most information.
> Despite Carmack's wishes, the rest of id decided to stick with making first person shooters and other video games.

Really? I actually just finished MoD, coincidentally, and it seemed to me that the rest of the team wanted to do things other than the repeated Quake/Doom re-hashing, and Carmack basically refused. He wanted to work on his engine.
The samizdat refers to a film (after which Infinite Jest is named). This film is so entertaining that, once seen, a viewer will want to do nothing but continue watching it, endlessly.

(Also, IJ is a great novel.)
That was done by the state, not a small minority. Those regimes also had pretty strict censorship policies.
> Joyent is worthy of your trust

Anyone remember the "life-time" hosting fiasco?
The difference is that nobody ran their businesses on Google Reader. They won't just shut the service that thousands of people rely on to make a living, especially the one that's cash positive.
Sony is doing that, and Valve should really be doing their own VR headset now. They already have all the research they need.
I opened this with the Hamachi VPN open, and suddenly could share files with my computer on the other side of the world. I have a Mac so usually do this via the built-in sharing but if it were Windows it's certainly easier than messing with Samba.
I agree with this statement. For all intents and purposes, you could replace "Clojure" with "Brainfuck" in the GP's argument and it would make just as much sense.

Sorry, but claiming that a language is "empowering" doesn't somehow magically make anyone who uses it an uber genius.
No need to buy it if the device is free or very low-price and has capabilities.

Free headset, just sign this agreement that gives Facebook all your eye tracking data that shows exactly what you are interested in looking at at millisecond resolution.
Based on all the comments everywhere, i believe the only thing that can save this project now is an official communication from John Carmack to reassure everyone that he received all the guarantees that the project will remain independent from every bad direction FB may want to push it into.

He's the only one that can't be suspected of doing that for the money at this point.
It takes a long time for widespread adoption of a programming language in schools. 15-20 years ago you likely would have seen some mix of Pascal and C++. Pascal came into popularity as it was pushed expressly as a teaching language. For learning basic principles of computer programming, it was fair enough, but its fan base dwindled over time, and never was a great candidate to use outside of the classroom.

C++ was (and is) broadly used in real applications, but is also a mess for beginners to learn.

Java was a reasonably decent choice to move to: it was more beginner-friendly than C++, and, thanks to most excellent marketing from Sun Microsystems, it quickly became entrenched in numerous corporations as a replacement for COBOL and for building web applications, making it useful to learn for programming outside of class.

Looking back on the late 1990s, the Java bandwagon was intense. It was being pushed all over the place, by people both in industry and academia. It was definitely an improvement for many programmers; depending on what kind of software you were writing, Java could have been a huge benefit over C or C++. Much of its praise was well-deserved, but I don't think I've seen a programming platform pushed so hard and so loud since then.

What's in the AP classes today is a direct result of the Java fanfare of ~15 years ago. It will almost certainly change again, but in the meantime, despite numerous criticisms online (many of which are probably true), it's not a bad language. It's just not particularly interesting, and is sometimes annoying, for many people who have come to favor programming in other languages.
> Now Facebook can ad ads featuring your friend's faces in games

Facebook doesn't run ads for the sake of running ads...it requires money to run a social platform that's completely free for a billion+ users. It's unlikely they'll be handing out Rifts for free so they can rely on sales of the devices to generate revenue from the Oculus division.
> Google acquiring Nest has a plan: collect data on electricity usage, presence in house and have a basis for inferring what people are doing generally all day.

OK I'll bite. What does google do with this data? I don't see anyway this helps their ad business.
Thank you for writing that. I'm at a conference and don't have time to correct all the wrongness on the Internet. High house prices are a combination of regulatory corruption ( NIMBY) and extreme price inelasticity.

Disasters that destroy housing actually increase the notional value of housing after the (very short) period of panic wears out, because the price spike more than cancels out the loss of supply. But wealth was destroyed, not created.
I hope Valve releases their own VR headset now, and locks Oculus out of Steam, with only their own VR headset being compatible. Valve has already done all the same research, and are even ahead of Oculus. I could see them turning it into a product by mid-2015, which is probably sooner than Oculus' own consumer version.
Any chance this deal can be called off? Terrible decision.
Projects that power GitHub for Mac
Well, it's pretty formally specified now. (Also pretty fast.)
I only use eclipse for APIs that only have an eclipse release/build/plugin.
Yeah, I've gotten absolutely no where when I've asked.
You may have been the straw that broke the camel's back, but you shouldn't feel bad about that. I recently had a junior sysadmin learn the hard way about BEGIN TRAN/ROLLBACK/COMMIT. But that's all it was, an embarrassing lesson as he explained to a customer why they'd need to wait a little bit longer.

Even a major "DELETE FROM Foo" should just immediately get the DBA switching to read-only mode, and then restoring using the transaction logs. It's annoying, it causes a bit of downtime, but it's not a "Big Deal".
I'm running Chrome version 26.0.1410.63 on Linux, and I'm getting the not supported error message. Is there a minimum Chrome version?
> Oculus will continue operating independently within Facebook to achieve this.
http://i.imgur.com/OpFcp.jpg
Wow. I'd drop AWS like it's hot if I was Dropbox.
Minecraft creator says he’s canceled talks for Oculus Rift version
>an onboard camera for that special "social experience".

see what your friends are seeing, hear, feel... welcome to the hive. Resistance is futile.
WhatsApp was something essentially fungible with things we already had and things which can be built relatively easily. Decent-quality consumer VR was not that.
"The Entertainment" was a video tape in the book that "so entertaining to its viewers that they lose all interest in anything other than viewing it and thus eventually die."

Depending on your scholarly beliefs, it's either just a metaphor for addiction, or in addition, a critique on media and media consumption. I chose to believe the latter, in that it could stand to be a critique on how our pastimes are intentionally becoming more engaging and addicting.

I'm not sure on the visual representation, but the thing would have been a Rauchenberg-ian collage of video, text and audio, layered together and becoming more "recommended" for the user, based on physical cues from the physical input devices, as well as choices. The actual recommendation algorithm would have been relatively primitive, most likely a decision tree, or if I could figure it out, an ensemble algorithm that would have created better media recommendations in real time to show to the viewer from trending topics, imgur, youtube, that type of junk.
Censorship is nothing new at all.
>> Right now, that means FPS and FPRPG games.

Sure, I understand that. My point is that perhaps folks who went to the trouble of dedicating their lives to VR might have a larger vision than this.

In 1992, you could have defined the Internet in similarly limited terms -- after all, using the Internet largely meant text interfaces. I'm just positing that the folks who run Oculus are a) smart and b) have spent a lot of time thinking about how best to spread VR.

If VR takes off, by definition it will mean expanding beyond FPS games, because most people do not play those (you could alternatively get VR to go mainstream by increasing market penetration of FPS and FPRPG games by orders of magnitude, which might be harder than putting VR to other uses).
Also, WhatsApp replaced something that many people hated on several levels - Ridiculously overpriced, phone company sponsored text messaging. Rift combats no such villain.
I am disappointed to see the top comment here criticizes this as "survivorship bias." Maybe the survivors have something useful to communicate that can help others survive what looks "impossible" when you first run into it? Maybe that's the point?

Though this probably shouldn't be exactly a surprise to me given how much shit people give me any time I try to talk about getting well after doctor's basically wrote me off for dead in some sense. No one wants to learn from that either and I honest to god don't get it.
Creating D3.js Charts using AngularJS Directives
Facebook Buys Oculus; Here's What it Might Mean
How much does Notch have to do with Minecraft these days? I thought it he was working on his space game.
> When Facebook first approached us about partnering, I was skeptical. As I learned more about the company and its vision and spoke with Mark, the partnership not only made sense, but became the clear and obvious path to delivering virtual reality to everyone.

I'm sure 2 billion dollars helped this decision along quite nicely.
What do you think of this analysis of the purchase?
At the time of the first contact, did they understand you were researchers? I would certainly hope they went after malware authors in general with guns blazing to protect users in their ecosystem, but threatening legal action against legitimate researchers has a chilling effect.
Project Morpheus – A Virtual Reality System for Sony Playstation 4
Rugged COM runs Linux and Android on Cortex-A15
Yeah, like Instagram has become.
what exactly is the problem? you cant just make up problems and ridicule the code for not solving them when the coder had no idea he was supposed to be solving them.

This solution (and whatever solution you might have in mind) likely both dont solve all sorts of problems. for instance what if there is a power failure and you lose all the output? is it persisting to disk? what if new input methods that arent even thought of it come to exist 5 years from now, is it compatible with that?
Yeah, Chrome user profiles are awesome. I've been using them basically forever; they're the most robust solution I've found for using multiple accounts on a given service (e.g. Google account).
How could wages possibly keep up with the inflation that such a scheme would create? If they don't keep up, the government needs to print more money to provide more benefits to keep people from starving, and you have a pretty vicious circle.
What.. they also bought something from Drone tech?
The USPTO has a patent search for the US Patent and Trademark Office at http://patft.uspto.gov/.

As for MSFT not having any patents in 1983, this is largely the result of the policy of not patenting "abstract ideas" that was argued in the courts at the time. The United States Court of Customs and Patent Appeals and the PTO were in opposing positions regarding the patentability of inventions that were essentially algorithmic.

The key log that stopped discouraging patent applications for software was Diamond v. Diehr in 1981, which involved applying a mathematical formula to a database of information for operating rubber curing machines under computer control.[1]

The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has largely followed this method since this decision. Between the early 70s[2] and Diehr, SCOTUS settled disputes when Customs and Patent Appeals attempted to overrule the PTO and its Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences/Patent Trial and Appeal Board.

[0] I'm lazy, you get wikipedia.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_v._Diehr
[2] Gottschalk v. Benson, 409 U.S. 63 (1972), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottschalk_v._Benson
My side project is thesurge.net. It's not generating much, but it's only 2 months old at this stage.
Thanks for the tip.

I finally found the link to Advanced Search. It's off the Settings menu. I could swear it used to be right there next to the Search button ...

I guess I've just been using memorized operators on Google, and haven't actually looked for the Advanced Search link in quite a while.

It's like what Microsoft does with configuration dialogs. They design a new UI, but it doesn't do 100% of the what old UI did. So they keep the old UI, and shove it one level down. Then in another few years, they'll design yet another new UI, and I'll have to click two levels down ...
Faith in Carmack isn't the issue.

As a gamer, I've always had faith in Carmack when it comes to developing solid software....because that's where his strength lies. Despite that, my skepticism in id Software grew over the years because he was only one member of a team that seemed incapable of doing anything interesting with his work.

Same here. I'm confident that John Carmack wants to build a kick-ass, immersive experience.

I have no confidence that the higher powers at Facebook will let him realize that goal without weighing him down with a dozen other corporate needs, to justify the cost of acquisition.
I think eventually we are going to have both.
"Oculus 'Rift' : An open-source HMD for Kickstarter" (2012)
That's...odd. There doesn't seem to be much synergy there, unless oculus us going to be used to power a facebook-branded answer to Glass. Maybe remote meeting? I guess if Facebook wants to develop some kind of metaversy thing it would make sense...
Wow. He is getting demolished there.