skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i'm not sure why you say patents aren't supposed to encourage innovation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent. they exist to encourage invention by ensuring someone cannot copy your r&d efforts. after all, the purpose of r&d is to innovate and discover. i didn't say patents would be abolished immediately or for all sectors. pharma products, in particular, require hundreds of millions of dollars and cannot get crowdfunded right now. but if we're to ever eliminate patents, crowdfunding will play a central role.
That was my first thought as well... it would be pretty trivial for the app to run a local web/socket service and for your front-end app to interface with it. If the UI isn't too complex your UI could be a simple web frame pointing to the local webserver.
How To Buy A $65 Million Gulfstream G650
A description of Credit Card Roulette can be found here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_roulette
They're just another one of the numerous examples of enterprise software out there. Overgeneralised and overabstracted, promising everything and probably capable of it, but not doing any one thing particularly well while consuming inordinate amounts of both machine and human resources... and they somewhat mirror the bureaucracy of the companies that use them.

Thankfully I don't work in that space, but just reading some of the descriptions of these systems and software (and "platforms", "solutions", etc.) is enough to make my head spin.
This is an interesting economics thought experiment, but I don't see this working simply because it is too complicated.

Virtual currency already has a learning curve that most people haven't gotten used to. Adding strange attractors into the mix certainly isn't going to help.
Ah yes, sorry. I should have been a bit more verbose in my response.

I totally agree with you about the long term health of the product/company itself. I have no doubt that they could have raised capital by other means, and continued to do cool things for VR.

What I don't agree with is the comparison to Elon Musk, because Elon Musk already sold companies for billions of dollars. When someone offers billions of dollars, that changes things for a lot of people. Elon Musk did exactly what Oculus is doing right now. He sold, because that's a hell of a lot of money. In some respects, it has allowed him to do whatever the hell he damn well pleases, to great effect (launching space rockets and making incredible cars).

So I understand why the fan base of VR & Oculus is upset, but I cannot at all fault them for selling, because giant piles of money, holy crap.
SUPINFO / EPITECH / EPITA are bac + 5, you make no sense
I'm honestly curious: What's the good reason? We discriminate based on beliefs all the time. Why exempt religious ones?

I'm fine with my own anti-religious views being cause for not hiring me. (In fact, it's perfectly legal for employers to do so today.)
This is awesome, one of those posts that reminds me why I read HN so much.

I'm an Android developer (they exist!) and I'll definitely try this out in my next app, just for fun. Anyone have any ideas for something I could do with this that I can't do, or do easily anyway, with a regular Java Android app?
How is this argument different from the arguments of people who want to draw the line at hiring transgendered people or hiring women or hiring people who are over 6 feet tall? The only material legal difference, as far as I can tell (IANAL) is in whether you are discriminating against a protected class or not, and what constitutes a protected class seems to be largely a political decision. And religious affiliation is definitely explicitly protected.

These are, of course hard issues. It's _hard_ for all of us to not discriminate against people based on our prejudices. For you it seems to be hard to not discriminate against Scientologists. The right moral response is to realize your prejudices and fight them. The laws actually make that a bit easier in some ways (e.g. it's illegal for you to ask prospective job candidates whether they're Scientologists).

Whether it's a social fit problem depends on two things. The first is whether the person's private beliefs affect their workplace behavior. Obviously in some cases they do and in others they don't. People are pretty good at compartmentalizing.

The second social fit problem is whether the person's co-workers are so outraged by the fact of the beliefs existing (or the person's gender being "wrong" or their hair being red, or whatever these people happen to have personal hangups about) that it affects _their_ behavior. This is pretty common, obviously, and the fault in such cases lies in the co-workers not the hire. There may still not be a good "social fit" as a result, but this situation is cause to look long and hard at the "society" that's not being fit into...

I would like you to also consider a concrete example. You say you won't hire a believer in alien abductions. Would you hire a "tin-foil-hat" type who believes the NSA is spying on everyone? Would you have hired such a person two years ago, or would you have considered them paranoids whose "thought patterns and general mental stability" would preclude a good "social fit"? Clearly your priors have updated since 2 years ago, but it's always worth evaluating whether your priors might be wrong and whether a reasonable person might come up with different priors.
Super-Cheap Paper Microscope Could Save Millions of Lives
Stratics was amazing, thanks for that. I had a lot of fun writing tips and guides for hunting down rare objects [objects that were part of the game world, but would become lootable upon game maintenance periods that occurred weekly].

Ultima Online was my first foray into massively multiplayer gaming. I remember lining up for the T2A expansion. Good times.

I worked on a few UOX shards (the first successful UO emulator) before getting involved with SphereServer. UOX had some rudimentary scripting, but Sphere took it a step further. I wouldn't call its source code elegant at all, and it was often a race to update the server for any major client changes that Origin released. SphereServer's scripting language was certainly -interesting- by language definition. It reminds me a lot of DwarfFortress's RAW formats.

I later moved to RunUO, which is what replaced most SphereServer shards. A full C# backed emulator, where the game logic was written in real .NET code, backed by a rich API. It was like night and day comparing the old UOX system to RunUO. It wasn't really until RunUO that full Origin game clones came about. You can even jump on shards -today- that clone the game rules from 1997/1998.

The early Ultima Online was a brutal game, of which most modern multiplayer games pale (except perhaps Eve). One foolish or accidental mistake could set your character back weeks or months, and there was no game mechanics recourse.

'Vas Ort Flam' or 'Corp Por' or 'Kal Vas Flam' – run, you're about to die.
TL;DR: "I don't have any rational reasons why I don't like this acquisition, but... Facebook!"
> We discriminate based on beliefs all the time.

We do? I certainly hope we don't. Discrimination is wrong regardless of whether its on beliefs or attributes. Maybe you meant another word than "discrimination" here, or I am misunderstanding you somehow?
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https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/450031715017179136
TL;DR: Community felt betrayed and this damaged the ecosystem. Wish I had more advice for how to make acquisitions more successful, but this is a huge challenge every acquirer faces which remains largely unsolved (success rates are not very high).
Threes – The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game
Hey pothibo. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Honestly, I chose not to go with Wordpress for 2 reasons.
First is that it needs a server. Using Jekyll, I am able to leverage Github pages to serve my website for free.
The second reason is that Wordpress is not easy customize (from a programmer's perspective). I tried to learn Wordpress themes but stopped after sensing how much time this would take me. Jekyll's themes were self-explanatory code, allowing me to plug my website's same CSS files and HTML template into the blogging platform. For Wordpress, I had to use PHP and learn theme functions and learn how to package the theme beforehand.

I know Wordpress has wide collection of plugins, but coders like me always prefer to write their own stuff.
Maybe I'm naive but I don't think KS would sell. It's not about the cashola to them and the community (not that I could speak for it) wouldn't be impressed.
> Rather, i suspect there should be some small infrastructural component which pulls messages off a queue and sends them to workers with HTTP, via a load balancer

AWS SNS can deliver a notification to an HTTP/HTTPS end point. If your design permits the use of a hosted notification service then I highly recommend you explore SNS.

And yes, I do agree with all the concerns you have raised! In my company we use Kestrel with a couple of consumers. Load asymmetry and worker health check is a real pain for us.
Hacking a (non-computer) system to your advantage: the two of you can get married.
Well, the point is elon has made his fu money. Its easy for him to say it was a mistake.

You know what. Let,palmer do the same. Let him get his millions here. Maybe he will start another company in the future and call oculus deal a mistake. Fair game?
Could you please elaborate on how people tried to game the system and what was done to try to mitigate that?
Accidental bans are easy to overturn with a short email. Politeness can't hurt. Politeness is not "grovelling"; politeness is the lubrication that makes dealing with day to day life easier.
I have a difficult time stopping thinking; I consider this a big difference between thinking and acting: I would even argue I do not have conscious control over what I am thinking about... it isn't even clear to me I have conscious knowledge that I am thinking about something (hence why sometimes I seem to get more done while asleep than I do while actively thinking: sometimes I purposely go to sleep while working on a hard problem as there is a good chance I will wake up with an answer). So yes: I agree with you that thinking and acting can have similar costs and pains and should somehow be reglated to avoid serious problems, but I haven't figured out how yet: I don't even use email, and while I'm clearly addicted to my phone (I am at a party right now... clearly not ;P), taking my phone away would not allow me to stop thinking about the code I was working on earlier today... I was momentarily distracted while talking to some people, but as indicated by the person you were responding to, that's all I seem to be able to hope for: finding things that are sufficiently distracting to let me reclaim my own brain.
You seem to think that I'm rooting for Wordpress, I'm not. I just used it as everyone knows what Wordpress is. I'm currently using my own blog engine (https://github.com/pothibo/ecrire). What I wanted to say is that as soon as you need some feature for your blog, you'll end up using something that is powered by a database.
Efficiency isn't some absolute value. Efficiency is always relative to the goals we have.
One issue I think is that if there are two articles, one brilliant and one so so but with a catchy title they may both get one or two up votes so there is no way to tell at a glance which is the outstanding one. A possible way around that would be on the new stuff to have some way to vote as to the quality - say a score out of 10 or buttons reading 'so so' 'really interesting' and the like. They could make a tag pop up saying 'interesting' or similar but not actually effect the ranking on the page which would work on vote count as it does at the moment. I just mentioned that because I'm working on building a similar voting system myself as a kind of holiday project.
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Oculus' Kickstarter backers demand refund after Facebook acquisition
And most of retail is probably stuff like clothing and shoes and electronics, not plastic bowls. I just don't see home-printed items having a large impact of on employment the retail sector in the near future.

As far as manufacturing is concerned, most plastic household items haven't been manufactured in the U.S. for a long time.
From the title I thought it would be this one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_the_Theory_of_C...

(It's also a good book so recommended, the part on automata is useful even for those not interested in theory, and being theory-averse myself, I didn't find it to be too dense --- although the later chapters certainly are.)
Online Learning Curriculum for Data Scientists | Shane Lynn
Dart is what is coming to Android with ART eventually - not Go.
You're The Expert, Can You Or Can You Not Do This?
I'll give an example of what I mean by discrimination: If someone is a 9/11 conspiracy theorist, you probably don't want to hang out with them. You might avoid talking to them. If said conspiracy theorist ran a donut shop, maybe you'd go so far as to walk another block to buy donuts. That's the sort of discrimination I'm talking about: simply avoiding interaction with someone.
While I did see at least a dozen threads of people claiming to abandon various Oculus-related projects, you're probably right that they may have been just overreacting or trying to make this seem like a bigger deal. I didn't make the effort to verify their posting history like yourself, makes sense to do that.

Edit: Thanks for adding that. Really useful context. Upvoted!
> but realize it's just because go hasn't been widely used in GUI development

There are a lot more reasons than that.

For one, Go has awful support for any kind of generic programming. The closest thing Go has to proper generic support is the interface{} type, which is awful. It's basically the same type safety as a 100% dynamically typed language (i.e. almost none), but with a much uglier syntax.

A related issue is that Go isn't very extensible. For example, Go's iteration features only work on builtin types. You can't iterate over trees, graphs, sets, or any other non-builtin type.

For me, the only good things that Go offers are decent threading primitives and good standard library support. Nothing else excels, and some things are downright bad.
From what I gather, Musk had aspirations to make advancements in renewable energy and space travel from has early as his time in college, but obviously those industries have rather large barriers to entry. So I believe Zip2 and Paypal were acting as stepping stones so he could build up capital/experience before he could move onto his true passion.

Virtual reality has a low enough barrier to entry that the kickstarter and existing investments had already solved that problem. And as far as I'm aware, VR are some of the highest aspirations held by the Oculus team, take this recent quote from Palmer Luckey for example:

> "I’m obsessed with VR. I spend every day pushing further, and every night dreaming of where we are going. Even in my wildest dreams, I never imagined we’d come so far so fast."

So I personally see the comparison with SpaceX/Tesla as a fairer comparison than Musk's first two businesses.
You are simply offering an opinion with providing any supporting evidence. Where does Go fall short as a language for mobile? Why would it not work well?

People use JavaScript to develop mobile apps, for example. The rapid compile times would be great for iterative development and the fast performance might even be better than Dalvik.
> That service will have the 3d models already made

Someone somewhere is CAD'ing these pieces up. The cost of doing that will be passed on to the consumer. If the manufacturers provide the models the cost of the 3D printed piece will be more expensive than replacing the whole part. If a manufacturer invests the time into making sure their component library can be 3D printed they will make sure 3D printers exist in dealerships. Huge overhead costs are involved here.
Agreed. I am proud to call him a friend.
But that's only to provide a convenient admin interface for people who don't want to write posts in HTML (or markdown or whatever)

I guess what I'm saying is that (except for the comments) blogs are static pages that contain (mostly) unchanging content, not dynamic data that needs to be updated.

If you're curious about the history, you might look into MovableType, which predates WordPress by a couple years, and has always supported static page generation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_Type
Well said. The key point here is autonomy. It is no small matter to relinquish decision making power of your company to an entirely separate set of executives. I would argue that, by definition, you are no longer even the same company. If critical decisions are why executives are so heavily compensated, then doesn't it follow that randomly replacing your entire executive team will change the company irreversibly?

As much as we'd love to believe that the Oculus team will still be there to stop terrible decisions from being made, they will soon realize that autonomy the most important currency in any business, project, or venture. Employees have little to no say in big decisions, which is why they do start-ups.
Would you describe someone who made a single monetary donation to a white supremacist cause 6 years ago and didn't say anything about it to anyone at the time, such that it took 4 years to discover the donation had even been made, an "active, avowed white supremacist"?

I'm not saying there are easy answers here, but I think that your hypothetical assumes someone who lets their horrible backwards beliefs affect their professional actions.

So let's consider the counterfactual that more closely models the current situation: someone who made a single donation to a white supremacist cause 6 years ago, has not publicly expressed any white supremacist views other than making the donation, routinely works with non-white colleagues in a reasonable way, and supports workplace involvement in Black History Month activities is appointed CEO. What should happen? I want to say I'd be OK with this, but it's hard to predict visceral reactions ahead of time. :(

As another interesting counterfactual, say that instead of donating to a white supremacy organization they donated to Nation of Islam. Otherwise, assume it's all the same: works fine with Jews and whites, doesn't speak out on race/religion issues in day-to-day interactions. I want to say I'd be OK with this too, though personally I'd have more skin in the game here than in the other cases, and I suspect people would generally be more OK with this situation than with the person who donated to a white supremacist cause...

(As an aside, would you consider Nation of Islam as an organization that believes "non-Muslims should be put to the sword"?)

Edit: I think at the heart of the issue is that people have a really hard time accepting that someone might make such a donation but be OK working with the sort of people the organization they donated to is against. I know _I_ have a hard time imagining anyone who donates to a "women should be the property of their husbands" organization interacting well with women in a workplace environment. It doesn't help that I don't know any people who would make such a donation, leaving me guessing at the reasons why one would, and Occam's Razor would say be that they hold deep-rooted beliefs about women being inferior. I've tried to come up with some other reasons someone might make such a donation while being OK working with women, but they all seem contrived to me. If faced with an actual example of a person who made such a donation but works well with women, I would be _very_ interested in talking to them to find out where they're coming from.

As a result, people are operating from assumptions which don't actually match reality as well as they should in this case. Your counterfactual of an "active, avowed white supremacist" more closely models how people are perceiving this situation, based on their knowledge about the donation only, and no knowledge about Brendan's day-to-day interactions with LGBTQ colleagues, than do my counterfactuals. But mine more closely model what's really going on...
>I fall asleep most nights writing and rewriting opening lines and first paragraphs in my head. And every morning before I wake, I am somehow still writing sentences in my head, twisted into my sheets while comparing arguments and searching for counter-arguments that could undo a whole story.

While some of the arguments in the rest of the article seemed a bit dubious, this opening segment resonated with me—I find myself dreaming in code fairly often, tossing and turning while my brain works through some non-existent problem, iterating non-functional lines of code. It's bizarre, uncomfortable, I don't feel rested and I wake up tense. Generally I take it as a sign that I need to scale back how much of myself I'm sinking in to my work, as I think it's more likely to happen when I've been working longer or later days. I think if I worked in an environment where I was expected to work so much that I started having dreams like this on a more regular basis, I'd burn out or quit very quickly.
What if they're a 9/11 conspiracy theorist who doesn't ever mention their conspiracy theory unless you explicitly ask them what they think happened on 9/11?

You seem to think that people who have deeply held beliefs spend all their time trying to foist those beliefs on others around them. That's true in some cases, not in others.
I got a little annoyed with the excessive use of "TM" everywhere.
Tell your buddy to take a decade out of his life and become a NASCAR driver. Then take another decade to become a top-flight Bluegrass banjo player. I think those trump whatever life experience he'd get from robbing a bank.
Honestly this all just seems like a bunch on neck beards who dont understand business. I fail to see how this is not a positive for consumers.
Ok, that's not what I think is generally meant by "discrimination". "Discrimination" is usually taken to mean what you earlier said: that you wouldn't hire someone to work for you if they were a biblical literalist. That is illegal, and should be.

Employment has some amount of state regulation - you can't not hire someone because of their religion or the color of their skin. It isn't fair for people of a certain religion or ethnic group to not be hire-able, and beyond that it is also just impractical in a country like the US. If no one hired anyone but their own ethnic group and religion, the economy would be completely stagnant, because the US is so diverse.
Maybe articles could have links to "similar" articles, or if you post a link which is similar, you're asked if you want to comment in the existing thread instead?
> There's little doubt that they promote innovation in pharmaceuticals

Are there studies that back up your claim? Or is this propaganda from the entrenched powers?

There are studies that show patents slow down & harm innovation.

http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/do-patents-encourage-o...

Indeed, patents are good for the lawyers & entrenched players. That doesn't sound innovative to me.
TL;DR: Those who are leaving will not be missed. Others who see legitimate business opportunities in this space will fill the void by those that have departed and reap the rewards.
"We need to know what kind of plans and ideas Facebook has for Oculus before making a final decision," - about what exactly? Facebook surely has control over what they want to do, and they could lie and make the current developers work on the project in good faith that they'll lead to what they want. They'd be promises only I imagine and Facebook as a company could change their mind whenever they want to suite their objectives. Sure they might piss off the core developers, though Facebook will already own the project, etc..

Re: 9/10 still developing for Oculus - They've already invested resources and time, and not sure there's a comparable competitor yet - though I imagine those are coming.