skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's still a $300 visor. Ads would be ridiculous unless he can find some crazy scheme to make it count as a mobile phone for Verizon.

Oculus is still predominately a relatively small hardware and low-level software centric company. I wouldn't be surprised if he were trying to leverage his company's app-making experience to create a suite of new functionality for it outside the realm of video games and gimmicky proofs of concept.

Also, Facebook uses video. Facebook will need 3D integration once the first 3D video feeds start coming down for this thing. Is 2 billion worth it to have early access to the most important emerging technology in Zuck's new favorite space? Yes. Yes it is.

That said, I have no idea how 3D video chat will work with a giant screen strapped on top of my face.
The Perils of Naming Your Company
What has "too long, didn't read" come to mean nowadays? Your dl:dr version is not significantly shorter than the 2 lines above and it is also not a summary.
Any invites left ?
Write a "guess the number" game

There are plenty of learning materials to get to that point. There are probably a few papers on writing GTA5 and World of Warcraft too. Unfortunately, almost no-one is writing about how to do Tetris, Mario or Wolfenstein 3D.

I suspect one of the biggest barriers to adoption that Haskell specifically has is the gaping void in intermediate-level material. When the concepts are so alien to what most programmers work with, even those with some basic knowledge of functional programming ideas more generally, you really need the books or websites that come after things like RWH or LYAHFGG -- things that show how to build non-trivial software, scaling up the toy examples to something more realistic.

It's great to see sites like the one that started this discussion trying to bridge that gap, but I suggest that understanding relatively obscure things like heavyweight parsing frameworks or lenses isn't the most important goal. While they are certainly interesting ideas, this feels like trying to teach people how to write a chess AI with an 1800 rating. When you're just trying out a new language to get a feel for how it works, writing Tetris is probably a better bet.
You could dispense an EIC on a paycheck-by-paycheck basis.
Just to make it clear what gnaritas is saying:

As long as you hold your bitcoins and do nothing with them, you're not subject to tax. You are taxed on your bitcoin gains when you transact in them (or, correspondingly, may take a loss) because that is when your increased wealth is actually treated ("recognize") as income.
this time is different
The same features that make lots of people dislike working with Java, in terms of strictness, etc. (in addition to being things other people like about Java for large projects) can be useful in some teaching models in a pedagogical language (its worth noting that, while the particular features are somewhat difference, they are the same kind of things lots of people thought made Pascal -- an older popular-for-teaching language -- less than ideal for pragmatic work.)
> Now that is the mentality that's killing companies.

So Paul Graham selling Viaweb to Yahoo and starting Y Combinator is an example of "killing companies"?
https://code.facebook.com/projects/
I'm (pretty)sure Facebook will leave Oculus alone; it would be dumb if they didn't, especially with all the anti-Facebook sentiment in our current zeitgeit. This is definitely a long term play towards becoming a major technology company. It's interesting to see what Facebook will become when "Facebook the website" is gone.
Sony won before even fighting a battle.
You must pay taxes on all income, however earned. However, you are not entitled to deduct all expenses. Expenses related to criminal endeavors cannot be deducted.

IOW...you are taxed on your gross criminal income.
I still remember the backlash from when they were going to require IE10 for VS2013.
This is the one that made it click for me...even after learning them 4 or 5 times is assorted calc classes. I actually came to the comments here hoping that someone had posted the link because I lost it.
> Oculus is not a service, just a technology; one that has no relation (nor clear route to one) to any Facebook-held product.

Exactly. This is what diversification is all about.

At it's core, Facebook is now a public technology company, which means that creating value for its shareholders is it's primary focus.

Buying something that looks like it might be a big deal before it becomes a big deal is doing that. Killing it before it has a chance to become big, especially since it has no "relation to any Facebook-held product" (thus it's not competing) is definitely not in their best interest.
I don't blame him.
Winamp's audio visualiser really helped me to understand the idea of time and frequency domains.

It was pretty crude, but is was a nice way to see how a piece of music looked in the frequency domain. I kept that mental model in my head all the way through engineering.
They should be protesting the fact that he's the person responsible for JavaScript. (Hey, don't forget to tip your waitress and try the veal!)

More seriously, there's the open question as to whether a career technologist is the right person for the CEO slot, especially since he appears to still be in the trenches when it comes to projects like Rust.

Beyond that, this is a cautionary tale for potential CEOs -- within reason, you can give money to politicians and money to foundations, but once you start giving money to specific political causes you're risking a firestorm, and rightfully so. While MoCo isn't exactly a Chik-Fil-A or Hobby Lobby, this is the sort of the thing that causes PR flacks to either wake up in a cold sweat (if they're employees) or start planning the color of their new Aventador (if on agency contract).
We've named a number of companies/groups over the years. A couple of weeks back, when 53 was frustrated by Facebook's use of the name Paper, I thought I should post some notes on the topic.

This is by no means a definitive post on naming companies. That said, I think a lot of the notions presented are useful ones to consider. (And I know that a lot of the folks on HN have likely wrestled with some of these challenges as well.)

I hope some of you here find the article useful. :-)
Oh come on. I can think of a hundred applications Facebook could use the technology for and I am not a smart man. Just because Facebook does a few things well doesn't mean they can't... you know... grow and adapt with new technology. Facebook as a whole is probably a lot smarter than you and wouldn't spend 2 billion dollars on something without a "clear" route.
> We were in talks about maybe bringing a version of Minecraft to Oculus. I just cancelled that deal. Facebook creeps me out.

https://twitter.com/notch/status/448586381565390848
How many Elon Musks are there? Most billionaires seem to spend their money on fancy yachts and high-profile charity projects that make them look superior to their peers. Few are deploying their resources to push the technological envelope.
> "Facebook creeps me out."

Whether or not you agree with his decision, having Notch pull away from talks with you creates an instant credibility "situation".

It's also noteable that Notch had been meeting with the Oculus team just two weeks ago[0], was tweeting about them in rather gushing terms[1] and seemed incredibly inspired to work on VR ideas[2].

He is now the personification of the a near universal feeling of betrayal in the community. Will be interesting to see how this develops.

[0] https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/443541395543162880

[1] https://twitter.com/notch/status/443461570195378177

[2] https://twitter.com/notch/status/446312677745254400
I've been playing around with the idea of doing a couple of these posts - for example, I could do one with multiple datacenters. This would be a good scenario too.
Facebook’s $2B Oculus deal happened over the last five days
Document Freedom Day: March 26th 2014
> reproduced without further comment

Maybe you should add a comment? What's the problem?

Only thing I can think of is the jet in the ocean and a picture of the ocean, but that's a stretch.
Yes this is exactly what's happening. They are turning into a holding company, this is just even more diversified than WhatsApp. FB's business model cannot justify the FB stock price, they are effectively using money people thought (wrongly) they were investing in social media and deploying it to better use because they know FB's revenue model is not going to live up to investors expectations long term. I can see the Bloomberg tomorrow stirring up excitement for FB's retail investors so they won't take a hard look at the numbers they actually invested in.
Notch is a founder and owner of Mojang, the company that owns and produces Minecraft.

And his space game has apparently been on hold for months.
It's not as though the doctor and classroom ideas weren't already in Oculus's plans.

I too am wary of Facebook handling all of this data, but they also have an nearly unparalleled ability to make it happen.
Data Modeling – Moving or Rolling Aggregates in SQL
Why does everything on this site need to be backed up? Am I supposed to take a personal interest in your epistemic state as a matter of charity?
As a comment on the site says - this is almost certainly not programmatic advertising but a premium placement paid for by Apple at least a few days ago.

Also, I don't see how this is intellectually stimulating, of interest to a Hacker, or anything other than a mildly amusing picture. Amusing pictures have a place, but this doesn't seem to belong here.
Tax fraud has always been easy, why do you think restaurants/barbers/plumbers/etc. prefer cash so strongly?

The official line is that credit and debit cards have high transaction fees, and that's true (especially for very low and very high prices), but cash isn't free to accept (security, counting, counterfeit risk, etc.), and yet service industries universally prefer cash over any other payment method. Why? Tax fraud.
"A few months ago, Mark, Chris, and Cory from the Facebook team came down to visit our office..."

Anyone know if that Cory is Cory Ondrejka, previously CTO of Linden Lab (Second Life)?
I'm trying to calculate the valuation of Oculus VR. Obviously I don't know anything about calculating valuation :)

They have 70 employees [1], funding of $91 million [2], headset sales of 50K for DK1 [3] (although claims sales of 75K). Unknown IP, unknown partnership deals, unknown real-estate cost, unknown inventory, molds, and hardware assets.

I suspect that the valuation isn't entirely for their assets, but I cannot arrive at the 2 billion number. Do my 'unknowns' listed above complete the 2 billion mark?

[1] http://www.oculusvr.com/company/people/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oculus_VR, 2.5m kickstarter + 75 series B + 13.5 m unknown
[3] http://www.gamespot.com/articles/oculus-rift-suspends-shipme...
This was more a recent development and not covered in MoD and is the reason he left id. He wanted id to focus on VR but he couldn't get bethesada to buy in to the idea.
Good point on seeing what Carmack will do.

Although they announced Carmack joining Oculus in August last year. Any idea how long the negotiations for this acquisition would likely take?

I too am disappointed the tech has gone into Facebook, I wonder what those game developers that currently support it are thinking, and how much integration there will be with Facebook login etc.
This isn't just a simple unidirectional converter. Power must flow in both directions.

We are also using ultra high efficiency parts and may also increase the power to over 100 watts if we can get it approved/ make it safe.
I'm pretty sure they did demo. Sama posted a picture of their sensor on Twitter yesterday.
This speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding of the two products. Oculus Rift is about bringing hyper-immersive 3D to the wearer, Google Glass is about moving the Google interface to the eyeball. It's like comparing a 4k TV to a Chromebook. Both are outstanding products, but there's little actual value-proposition overlap. I would hate to think that the Facebook board was equally ignorant of the differences and didn't just buy into "Google has a thing for the face, we need a thing for the face! We're Facebook after all!"

I'm less worried about folks being turned off of VR - That Oculus has such great traction means that other big tech manufacturers won't be too far behind emulating their display technology and coming out with competing products at lower pricing than the VR. At least one of them will actually be decent enough to sell well.
What next? "Ebay acquires Skype"?
I've worked with Apple on homepage advertising and believe the likelihood of that placement being programmatic is very low.
I think it worked since 32. The current stable Chrome version is 33.
What I heard was that the display is on-par with the second dev kit. (My mistake calling it their current kit; that was misleading.) 1080p, smooth head tracking, no noticeable lag.
Some would argue that a Lisp like Clojure means you don't need 10 people...
Founder of RiteTag here, and always available @osakasaul in Twitter (Saul Fleischman). FWIW, in regards to 7K users not being a high number, it took us 25 months to get to 7K users. Many signed up well over a year ago. Asking them all to remove permission in Twitter settings and then auth in again, we'd lose so many people who are not used to going into Twitter settings, and would simply go away. But thank you very much for the feedback - and also, a worthwhile opinion on the problem with Twitter permissions.
I believe the people of Qatar will have an issue with this because they all use a single public IP address. So any Qatari could send a another Qatari a file if they were all to log on.
'Within the last hour EVERY friend I know was developing a rift game has canceled. That's around 11 projects just gone.'

from a Reddit comment
Third party mods will likely make it happen.
> Lagrange interpolations are only distantly related to Legendre/Hermite/etc polynomials

Actually ... take an nth degree polynomial from your favorite orthogonal set. For each of its n+1 zeros, construct by Lagrange interpolation the polynomial which is 1 at that zero and 0 at the others. Then that set of n+1 interpolating polynomials has the same relation to the orthogonal polynomials of degree 0 through n that (periodized) sincs have to sinusoids, i.e. you can decompose an n degree or lower polynomial in either basis, and the two representations are related by something like a Fourier transform.
What's Viaweb?
I agree and you misunderstand. I was saying that, as far as the tax code is concerned, complexity can be treated as orthogonal to progressivity.

I also think that complexity is a justice issue since it favors those with inside knowledge, lobbyists, and the resources to have full-time tax specialists at the expense of everyone else.

This second point is a big deal. It's why we see headlines about how multinationals are legally paying ridiculously low tax rates. It's a headline because it's not fair on its face, despite how legal it is.
I'm certainly willing to be wrong - I'm not an expert in the space beyond having been an enthusiast gamer for 20 years (and I recognize that doesn't give me domain authority) - but I've been waiting for VR to be a thing for a long time now, and while it's had some neat demos, it's almost never something that I look at and decide that prefer over more traditional interfaces.

Carmack is a ridiculously smart guy who is damned good at squeezing things out of hardware that shouldn't be possible, and if there's anyone that I think could work out the how-to of VR, I think it'd be him, but I'm not sure that I trust his read on what the markets want.

The question isn't so much "will VR take off?" as it is "what could VR possibly do beyond FPS games that could make it take off?" and I just don't have any answer to that at all.
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened...
If they would only stop hating OpenCL (read: Actually support it) I'd purchase one in a heartbeat as a testing rig and experimentation rig.

Having a board which works only with a certain vendor specific API is not really that useful unless I'd specifically want to develop a full fledged product using exactly that particular board.
What The Oculus VR Folks Told Me About Non-Game Uses Of Their Headset
They already do:
https://share.oculusvr.com/app/minecrift
I believe it is the public IP address and not the local IP address that brings everyone to the same page.
Ray Kurzweil was hired by Google's current management to work at Google. How is this in any way analogous to Carmack's situation at Oculus, now Facebook?
> My girlfriend never charges her iPad until it reaches 0%.

Also notice this phrase:
there are numerous examples in the wild that have been regularly fully discharged (to 2.8 to 3.0 volts), stored at around 20 °C and kept fully charged in between times. These batteries are over 12 years old and are fully functional.
Good point, edited the post.
Yeah I've heard this explanation as well. It calls to mind Schneier's admonition against "movie plot threats". The reason to have firearms is not to counter any specific threat. We arm ourselves, rather, in order to respond effectively to a wide variety of potential situations. Among those, the "rogue federal government" threat isn't more than a rounding error, in the USA, for the foreseeable future.
Sorry to have to ask, but which was the GAE thread? I tried searching for it and havent found it. A link or the rough title regarding it would be helpful - thanks!
I can't honestly blame him here.

I doubt the issue is Facebook 'creeping [him] out', so much as it is that it's uncertain what exactly Facebook is going to want out of the deal. Facebook isn't primarily a games company, and it's even less a 3D/desktop games company. There doesn't appear to be any obvious motivation for Facebook to use this tech for its intended purpose, so the question becomes what exactly they do want Oculus Rift for.

I assume Notch is worried about those implications. Will Facebook start demanding that every Oculus Rift game have tight Facebook integration? Will Facebook do something strange, like have Facebook wall updates appear in the game world irrespective of whether it fits into the game? If I were a game developer, this'd creep me out too.
Other Half of Turtle Fossil Discovered after 163 Years
Gaby Pictue
relevant> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godzilla
That's a distinction without a difference.

1) How do you count "expressions"? is (b+sqrt(b * b - 4 * a * c))/(2 * a) one expression or 14?

2) Assuming reasonable coding style and reasonable definition for what an "expression" is, the variance of the measurement "expressions per line" will be very small - thus, "number of expressions" and "number of lines" are statistically equivalent as far as descriptive power goes.

I don't have a citation, although I do remember this conclusion mentioned in PeopleWare - specifically, that "number of bugs per line" tends to be a low variance statistic per person, with the programming language playing a minor role. I might be wrong though.

But I can offer my personal related experience ("anecdata"?) - when you ask multiple people to estimate project complexity using a "time to complete" measure, you get widely varying results that are hard to reason about. However, when you ask them to estimate "lines of code", you get much more consistent results, and meaningful arguments when two people try to reach an agreement. YMMV.
Can't say I'm surprised. Mentioning "Facebook" and "open" twice.... champions even!
MHRadialProgressView – iOS drop-in-class radial animated progress view
This is one of those cases where humans are so good at seeing patterns they'll intuit the presence of an intelligence (artificial or otherwise) where none exists. The only algorithm here is "Apple paid for a placement on this date", rather than anything content-aware.

(With regards to how actual content-aware ads treats this sort of case: My recollection is that waaaaay back in the day AdSense shipped with a "death and tragedy filter" such that if it detected the page was about them it would turn ads off. The Google which made that decision is no longer - these days it's an unchecked-by-default setting controlled by advertisers. Somewhat surprisingly for Google, the filter was really unsophisticated - on the order of a simple keyword blacklist. Some of my SEO buddies had CMSes which would flag words thought to be problematic for writers, so that an innocuous phrase like "Getting your taxes done doesn't have to be a Greek tragedy" didn't end up killing ad revenue from the page.)
I believe this acquisition was also a play to acquire more engineering talent. Through this acquisition they acquired John Carmack which is a fairly famous engineer amongst the tech community. That component alone strikes me as an incredibly awesome PR move in terms of recruitment.

As far as I'm concerned Facebook is the only competitor to Google at this point. Facebook is just trying to keep pace. I assume they're going to do many awesome things in the near future that aren't necessarily aligned with their current business model in order to keep up that pace.
On the subject of those huge cash reserves, just how much of their IPO is left at this point? Zuckerberg is definitely spending way more than FB is earning, and it's mostly on assets that are bringing in additional costs, with few near-term revenues.
Could you be a bit more descriptive? I've updated my post to be more clear as to what kind of responses I'm hoping for.
I believe that what will make it work is that boring old concept called insurance. Insurance on unproven concepts will be quite expensive - at least as long as our unlimited tort attitude exists in the US. However, if encouragement can be given to lawmakers to recognize that if any concept should allow limitations on damages then it should be where a machine is autonomously performing the activity.
right, that's why pure software companies now need to get into hardware, just like, erm, who exactly? do they want to be the next apple?

hardware is such a different skill and mindset than software, it's not even funny.
I would rather have a Microsoft camera in my living room than a Facebook one. And yes, I imagine that the consumer version of Oculus VR will have a forward facing camera.

I won't have either but one is worse than the other.
Not being able to use an Occulus Rift without a Facebook account.
How does this have 91 points and get to the front page of HN? I suspect that you know the answer to this already. Hacker News is home to a bunch of elitist language bigots who think that if you don't code in their own coolest-language-ever you are some kind of second class citizen.

There's no surprise that this is the culture here. Need I mention the term "blub programmer"? Could anything be more elitist and offensive?
I don't know. I think popular opinion is against having closed shops, though perhaps not uniformly.

And at first blush, people might react negatively to at-will employment states, but the devil is in the details on proposals to replace at-will employment.
>> With patents it doesn't matter whether you read their code or not: you're screwed in any case.

> Okay, forget the rest and focus on this: you need to familiarize yourself with the concepts of willful infringement and treble damages.

> [...]

> Whether the code you've read is patented or not is actually trivia. Whether you knew it was covered by a specific patent is important.

So we're in agreement then? :) Yes, good point about knowingly infringing a patent, but, as I said (or meant to say), reading or not reading the source code has no effect on the patent situation. (But I'm not a lawyer either, so what do I know.)