skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with you completely.

That said, it doesn't matter what is and is not "fair" when dealing with the IRS. Choice A is to do what they tell you to do. Choice B is to fight them in court.

This thread assumes you want to go with Choice A and that you want to limit your liability if something goes wrong. Like most risk-management techniques, it does decrease your returns.

(Tax lawyers might have some better advice. Perhaps you can mine into a blind trust, and pay income taxes in 5 years on the current value of the coins? Dunno, not a tax expert or a laywer. I would consult with one if I was mining a lot of Bitcoin.)
For the sake of kicking off a discussion...

"Facebook [...] a company focused on connecting people, investing in internet access for the world and pushing an open computing platform."

Can anyone put facts or numbers to those last two statements? Is Facebook putting any concerted effort beyond PR/vanity projects into those goals?
Facebook is today what Microsoft was in the '90s. With a soaring stock price and a solid, if somewhat staid, core product that enjoys a near monopoly in crucial markets, the company looks for nebulous long-term innovation by buying interesting startups in various fields and promising them near-term independence.

Microsoft's shopping spree included companies like WebTV, Hotmail, Softimage and Bungie. Maybe Facebook will also splurge on a game studio soon.
It's one of the greatest visionary companies around being bought out by by Facebook who hasn't launched anything relevant but more ads for the last 5 years.
And also how you don't even get the tiniest little sliver of equity for that early proof of concept funding....
It's in Google's wheelhouse now, it wouldn't have been six or seven years ago.

Give it a chance, the overreactions in this thread and in general are ridiculous.
I haven't deleted it, but for me the problem lies somewhere else:

The tech-sector is slowly growing into an oligopoly or at least that's my impression. I expect it to be diversified but deals like this leave me questioning and yes, they make me a bit sad. Perhaps the Oculus guys can use the resources Facebook will flow into them but...I have a bad feeling about this. Really.
I have just glanced over the comments on the FB post, am i the only one who is amazed at the "thumbs up" comments and general elation by the 45,000+ people liking the 'news' ?
It's incredibly bold to make a public statement like this.
Well just think of Facebook's next product. They make everyone wear VR headsets, then sell "in your face" ads.

They will make billions :(
Don't sell algorithms
> I have no idea why Oculus would sell at this point.

Money?

> It feels to me like this is just the beginning of their story and of this technology.

That's probably the point, for any technology firm, where the "work done" to "money received" for selling out is the highest.

When it feels like the end of their story and technology, they've missed the ideal time to sell.
Facebook has gotta start somewhere. I suspect they'll keep the Oculus team in charge.
...so avoid them and move as far away as possible?
"Tracking All The Things" at Groupon
And how many of those countless projects are going to open up new forms of experience, and how many are going to be the equivalent of shoehorning more ads into the facebook feed?
No kidding. Their name is Oculus. They are, literally, eyeballs.
FB gets a lot of hate on HN, but I think this is a really important strategic deal for them.

Consider:

* No one really knows how wearables will play out yet

* It is within the realm of possibility that as headsets get better (end goal: stylish), they will enter the mainstream. This means more content will be consumed there (cellphones are an obvious analogy)

* FB pays to play in this space with a world class team which has shown an ability to produce and iterate on hardware in relatively short time.

* This also gives FB more consumer h/w chops, something it will need as FB integrates with devices that are ever more personal in nature.

It shows that FB is playing offense, working to invent the future, not just resting on its laurels.
Mozilla as a company and a movement has made the technical world immeasurably better. Back before Firefox was released IE6 had taken over the world and there had been no attempts to fix the terribleness that it inflicted on the nascent web dev world. Firefox changed all that. It re-ignited the browser wars and caused so many good things to happen.

This is obviously counterbalanced by the personal beliefs held by the now-CEO of the company. Where do you draw the line? Does the decade of browsers-now-use-web-standards get lost because Eich has questionable politics? To wit: Chik Fil-et had the same issue but I still eat there. Why? Because the company is full of good, hard-working people and I like the food. The CEO may not share my beliefs but does that automatically destroy everything else that might be good about that company?

These are all rhetorical questions.
As soon as this whole shebang turns out to be good or bad I'm going to point to your comment, reitzensteinm, as having called the result first. People will extol your prescience from misty dale to cloud-tipped mountain top.

Three cheers for the ambivalent future of Facereality and Oculusbook!
Where did you see the amount?
Gay Firefox developers boycott Mozilla to protest CEO hire
Resources, existing userbase of billions that are already familiar with the parent.
"We're really sorry, but your browser is not supported.
Please use the latest Chrome for Desktop or Android or Opera.
Firefox support is coming soon!"

What could possibly be the reason they wouldn't support webkit based browsers?

Safari 7.0.2 OS 10.9.2
Looks like Facebook is preparing for the next battle. Google's got Glass and Nest, Facebook has Oculus, and Twitter, Apple and Microsoft have nothing announced yet.

Assuming that this is the reason, that's a shockingly strong and forward looking move.
It's not ridiculous - at all. Facebook is the kind of company that wants to control their market and their platform. The Oculus Rift was an exciting piece of tech that was untied to any platform, giving an open opportunity for software developers to explore VRUI. Now, it gives Facebook the opportunity to explore VRUI.

Of course, I'm afraid they're going to tie the hardware to their awful, invasive Web platform. I'd be upset if it were Google, but Facebook is about as bottom-of-the-ethical-barrel as it gets.
Sounds like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Palms waiting to happen.
> By the same token, are the don't-redefine-marriage people who live in Vegas trying to shut down the Elvis Chapel?

I don't know. Are they? I'm not really abreast of Las Vegas politics.

> I've given up trying to convince people like chc's friends and family.

What are you hoping to achieve with this conversation, then? Moral high ground?
A cross-platform (but not web-based) open-source LAN file-transfer tool that I've used in the past is dukto:

https://code.google.com/p/dukto/
Same here, I've already sent an email regarding a refund. I had big dreams for this company, it just feels wrong. I'm not happy to see theses conglomerates grow uncontrolled, sucking up the spirit of innovation and openness that are so critical to our future.
Why do they still teach Java if everyone hates it so much?
I'm currently a high school senior and in my school's AP Computer Science class. I started programming in Java a few years ago and I have loved programming ever since. Sure I'm not doing anything very important with it in school, but I haven't found much to dislike about Java.

From what I usually read on the internet it seems that people like to criticize Java in different ways. So why is Java the language taught in College Board's AP Computer Science program to high school students?
Windows and XBox have a strong crossover in DirectX
He doesn't seem like the type who would be wanting for money.
wow... i had no idea that there was so little sense of humor here. well, i guess i've learned my lesson.
>Facebook could stay hands off

No, they could have made a sizable investment without having a controlling stake in it. No, they Acquired it. You don't do that unless you want to change something there. My best hope is that the Zuck sees something cool going on with the Oculus and wants to try his hand at something new. My worst fear is that they will develop the 'Oculus API' as a wrapper around the original API and Facebook. Now Facebook can ad ads featuring your friend's faces in games... and free 3d games if you just watch a 15 second ad for every five minutes that you play...
Facebook is rapidly becoming a seriously dominant technology player. I used to think of them as a "flavour of the year" play, but I'm having to readjust that perspective pretty hard.

It looks like they really are driving a long term strategy of being at the core on human -> human communication.
IMHO, what matters most is not if the VR actually helps learning, but that a company such Facebook is putting a spotlight on Education. Zuckerberg could have mentioned a hundred different things where VR would be applicable.

The press release [1] from Oculus also mentions Education:

Mark and his team share our vision for virtual reality’s
potential to transform the way we learn, share, play, and
communicate

[1] http://www.oculusvr.com/blog/oculus-joins-facebook/
Pushbullet is super cool and useful. Once you get used to Hangouts syncing messages on your computer/smartphone/tablet, you really wish SMS would do the same. While it would be nice to have the ability to reply, at least knowing when I have a message without needing to check my phone is nice.
Einstein's 'spooky' theory may lead to ultra-secure Internet
"At the same time, I think you could extract 99% of the performance benefits of the bytecode approach if your language had a well-defined heapless, stackless "tasklet/microthread" subset that centered around mutating existing objects"

Oh hey, I think you just described asm.js
That's because people here are less likely to actively avoid Google. We use it for our search engine, and some of us for App Engine and Google Drive, or for our phones. More people avoid Facebook for privacy reasons, etc.
2048 in QBASIC
Thats not true, I'd be worried they would piggyback it into some crappy google glass hybrid.
Because it uses webrtc.

http://caniuse.com/#feat=rtcpeerconnection
I expect Carmack is the sort of guy to say "fuck your golden handcuffs, I'd rather work on interesting problems". If it turns bad he'd go.
Wait, what? What the hell are they doing? WhatsApp I got. Oculus I don't got. This seems weird to me.
Maybe this is my personal bias showing, but surely Google is more of a general technology company than Facebook could hope to be.

Google has a long-term, sustainable business that continually makes huge strides in new markets - from revolutionising search, to speeding up the evolution of the internet through projects like Chrome, smashing up the smartphone market with Android, and so on. Facebook on the other hand is a pretty good social network that seems to have hit its peak and is difficult to monetise, where the only strides that are taken appear to be buying companies with overlapping userbases in order to cling on to relevance.

Okay, that's definitely my personal bias showing.
There's no way they could be wanting for investors. There's likely to be more to this deal than meets the eye.
Posterous got bought by Twitter, I believe
awesome ... super cool !
Can you explain Shamzidat more? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_Jest doesn't have much. Thanks!
I think the point is you don't generally need something with the extreme power and flexibility of lua to simulate comments like yours. A simple bytecode with 5 or 6 instructions should do. And it'll be performant enough to run on a casio calculator watch at full speed!
Well...that's unfortunate.
Glass is part of the battle. Oculus is a different war entirely.
This is pretty saddening news and happened before Oculus Rift went mainstream. It really had the potential to take off but I now think that the main players will jump ship once options vest.
The future of VR : oculus – Palmer Luckey's statement about the acquisition
My prediction about further buys Facebook will do: 1) Mind control tech (like those headsets that control Betawaves) 2) They will buy some big cloud-music provider (Spotify maybe even) 3) They will buy Tesla 4) They will buy an OS startup and rebrand to FaceOS-1 6) They buy something like Ripple for currency tech.

Then they have all the stuff covered.
After the shock from this announcement I'm starting to drum up how and what Facebook are going to be doing with VR. Secondlife-esque world hub for all your freemium games; experience a "friend's life" through interactive media generated based on user data; a step above video-conferences by use of VR - challenging Skype, Google Hangout, et al., with a killer feature?

I think this may for the best for the future of VR. We know the gaming industry will use VR at some point and we know how they'll use it for the most part. It's a discussion well established in our popular culture. The potential innovation of VR as a medium would more likely happen with a company like Facebook rather than one like Valve.
Angry Birds is not a terribly involved or demanding game, and the hard part, 2D physics simulation, is handled in C by the Box2D library anyway. It requires no real-time control, you just aim the bird and watch the reaction. You could half or quarter the framerate and add enormous interframe jitter and the game would play exactly the same. If you tried to do the same thing with an demanding twitch action game, it would quickly become unplayable.
I am shattered right now. I was SO happy for Oculus VR, I wanted it to become big, I wanted it to become something truly special.

You might be a bit premature with that comment. Mark Zuckerberg is not an idiot. He's probably smart enough to realise that Oculus need to truly remain independent for real innovation to continue.

This is probably a long-term bet on VR tech by Facebook, that they know would be too expensive to do in another 3-5 years. My bet: this is not going to kill Oculus, rather the opposite.
Oculus wasn't exactly starving for cash, and even if they were investors would have beaten each other to death for a chance to pour some cash into it.
I'm really in a clinch now. Because I boycott Sony over the geohot incident[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Computer_Entertainment_Am...
THAT IS EXACTLY THE ISSUE.

NO IT ISN'T. Most companies in most industries can hold onto key staff without breaking the law because there are legal mechanisms to keep these staff.

This is about trying to keep an entire category of employees (the ones not currently seeking new opportunities) in the dark about market wages and conditions in an effort to hold down general employee wages.

Keeping your eye on the market takes time and effort; time and effort that I personally would rather spend with my family. So if somebody is willing to actively search the market for employers paying less than market rates and offer those people a job it is a good thing.

But just like real estate agents would get real pissed off if rival agents hang around their showings and try to poach their clients, the same is true of companies.

And while they might get pissed this is basic competition and is good for the market. It helps make sure real estate agents do not price/service gouge their clients. After all if the rival cannot offer a better deal then no harm done.

Actually, although you say that marriage is completely different, actually the same mechanisms that lead to jealousy and guarding from 3rd parties are in effect

You are trying to suggest that because something applies to marriage that it should somehow be ethical in an employer-employee relationship. The leap simply put does not make sense.

Or at the very least it's not clear that they benefit enough to make a law banning agreements to scale back poaching key people.

It is clear that it distorts the market and holds down wages for employees. There are many legal mechanisms to keep key staff. The fact that these companies resorted to illegal means suggests that they were in fact trying to stop the poaching of normal employees and not just "key staff". Again this behavior is bad for the market.
I think I get it. What you're saying is that YCombinator's target audience is highly intelligent individuals, savvy enough to spot untapped market opportunities and capable enough to have a chance at exploiting them, but who are either too lazy to look at the IPO and M&A data or aren't very good at statistics?

Personally, I find it hard to believe that every YCombinator-backed founder believes he's chasing a billion-dollar opportunity, but maybe I'm delusional.
I actually had the opposite impression of stock investors, that they vastly preferred the "just getting better at what you do" than "pie-in-the-sky", but that's just an impression.

Tightly-coupled Facebook-OVR would shock me, definitely.
Chrome doesn't use Webkit anymore. Safari does and it's not supported by this website.
http://nooooooooooooooo.com/
Yep, I will take those out today
Or, to phrase it differently, maybe they cared most about VR technologies going mainstream, and were only doing it themselves because nobody else seemed to be.
I'm currently reading MoD, and I agree with this analysis. I'm not thrilled about the purchase, but it does make sense given the ambitions of the players involved.
This was my first reaction as well, however we have to remember Carmack is there. I am confident that he will not let original spirit of Rift die. I am sure you will be able to use Rift without Facebook account and device will be quite hackable.

In any case, I think we should wait and see what Facebook does before crying foul.
I think a lot of people misunderstand what is being proposed here. He's not saying to write a whole new language, he's saying to write a byte code interpreter. You can implement one of those in about an hour.
Ouch, no thanks. Talk about dashed hopes and dreams.
Hi Larry,

Thanks for crapping on my IPO plans.

-Aaron
Is anyone else reminded of this passage from the prolog to Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age?

> You could get a phantoscopic system planted directly on your retinas...You could even get telaesthetics patched into your spinal column at key vertebrae. But this was said to have its drawbacks ... it was rumored that hackers for big media companies had figured out a way to get through the defenses that were built into such systems, and run junk advertisements in your peripheral vision (or even spang in the ... middle all the time - even when your eyes were closed. Bud knew a guy like that who's somehow gotten infected with a meme that ran advertisements for roach motels, in Hindi, superimposed on the bottom right-hand corner of his visual field, twenty-four hours a day, until the guy whacked himself.
I wish they joined valve. Or even Msft for that matter, we'd atleast get integration with xbox.
This is a good move by Facebook. VR is going to be huge, huge huge. It might even be as big as Bitcoin. :)

I think what Oculus did was massively de-risk their next ten years. In their business plans, there were undoubtedly very large gray circles with things like "gain overwhelming market share (how?)" and lists of competitors that included, well, everyone in tech.

If you had to pick a tech company to leverage your disruptive new consumer technology, and make sure it kept the 'awesome', and was hacker friendly, who would you go to?

In exchange, they probably lopped another 10-50x of potential value off the top of their company. Not that they won't see some of that realized in Facebook if this is succesful -- they will. But, they will be sharing the gain around in exchange for getting access to that giant global customer base and being able to tap the considerable resources available at FB.
>"Oh come on -- this is just ridiculous. They (Oculus) now have many many more times the resources at their disposal than before to make countless imaginative projects."

Honest question, do you have anything to base this idea that of "many many more times the resources" on? Have any companies been acquired by FB and immediately gone about pushing the envelope in ways that don't strictly line up the existing business of FB?

I think the concern here is entirely justified.

The Rift is a breakthrough product made possible by people who believed enough to back it via Kickstarter. Once delivered the community set about creating a whole range of wild stuff and general made those creations freely available.

Nobody wants to see their creativity hindered by some new corporate developer standards or restricted to distribution through something that sits behind a Facebook login.

Personally, I want the Rift to let me walk on the surface of the sun not allow me the privilege of paying a Facbook/NBA partnership for artificially scarce virtual "courtside" seats to a game.
Looks like I am buying a "Project Morpheus" :)
What's your market? Is it the U.S. or… India?
if you put the population of each next to each other, which would you describe as "most people" ?
I'm thrilled. This is a brilliant move designed to bring world-shattering high-quality VR to the entire planet.

Consider:

Facebook has one of the largest user bases on the planet. Facebook has vast amounts of capital. Facebook has just demonstrated how important they believe VR to be.

With Facebook's users, money, and engineering talent, VR is about to arrive earlier, faster, and better than anyone could imagine.

I plan on buying Facebook stock immediately.
> If you had to pick a tech company to leverage your disruptive new consumer technology, and make sure it kept the 'awesome', and was hacker friendly, who would you go to?

google
Do you have a link or some info about the languages they are adding? We're very curious over here--would love to know if they plan to add support for something we already have.
Thanks!

Ironically, most of my file emailing does in fact take place within the same network.
This is the first thing I've read about it that makes sense. Thanks very much for sharing it.
How about a Snow Crash-style Metaverse?
Hey Github peeps! Hubot apparently occasionally looses his brain. Yes, it _looses_ its brain occasionally. That is all.
There isn't a crossover today. There will be, if/when Oculus-like devices replace television viewing, and other shared vicarious experiences.
Yeah - it seems like Facebook thinks their stock is currently overvalued. Compare that to Warren Buffet's strategy of preferring to never use Berkshire stock in acquisitions but rather pay cash.
I don't want a "general-purpose VR headset". There are already many devices described that way (that work well enough for that purpose.) I wanted something built exclusively for the extreme requirements of gaming, and I feel this acquisition is going to distract the Oculus team from that. Facebook has no experience whatsoever in that domain, and the only way I see Oculus benefiting from this is the huge cash reserves they'll have access to once acquired. Truth be told, I was really hoping they'd get acquired by Valve - that'd strengthen their existing partnership (which I'm sure will cease to exist post acquisition), give them a good team to work with wrt. videogames and VR in general, and put them in an environment where their core focus is the same as that of their parent company. In this case, if the "experiment" fails, Facebook will almost certainly dump the project. Every time someone says "... we're going to make X a platform" before they actually have X, a kitten dies somewhere. There are still technical issues with the Oculus headset, and I'm afraid Facebook's "platform" focus is going to draw attention away from that. In short, I don't see this working. If fact, if Oculus fails, it might set the entire VR industry back several years. Luckily, we still have some hope in the form of Valve.

What a waste. I hate Facebook for doing this. And I'm not too happy with Oculus for accepting this either.