skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I doubt the sincerity of your apology.

But if you really desire more convincing, all of those companies have large existing business units devoted to selling consumer devices or licensing things to people selling consumer devices. Those business units have executives, budgets, reporting structures, etc. It is very unlikely any of those companies would buy Oculus to run it as an autonomous unit, like Facebook is saying they will do with Oculus for now.
Google is reportedly talking to Warby Parker.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/20/google-reportedly-in-talk-w...
Ah yes, I'm sure designers will just love to write their scripts in raw bytecode.

This section is somewhat important: http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/bytecode.html#how-is-the-...

While you're at it, you'll probably want to write some debugging tools since your designers are bound to dream up some complicated scripts you never imagined your system needing to handle...
Some people predict that the instant we have complete VR, all human progress will cease. We will have no reason to seek new experiences in the real world because we can simulate any experience we want in the virtual world.
From the actual complaint:

As early as 2007, Dr. Neal Krawetz of Hacker Factor Solutions published a white paper entitled "Point-of-Sale Vulnerabilities" (the "White Paper"). According to the White Paper, POS systems "provide virtually no security" and few POS systems "implement best practices for handling sensitive information, such as the Visa standards for credit card management."6

and

Thereafter, at least 17 copies of the White Paper were downloaded to a domain owned by Target, the most recent download occurring in May 2013. Target personnel used the search term "POS vulnerability" to locate and download the White Paper. As is now apparent, Target did not heed the White Paper or implement its suggestions.

[edit] link to the Dr. Krawetz paper: http://www.hackerfactor.com/papers/cc-pos-20.pdf
I feel like they have to stop at some point but I agree this would make much more sense than something like Oculus Rift. I can imagine lots of great ways to integrate this into Facebook.
My side project http://assembleyourpc.net/ (pc builder tool) is now generating around 200-300 USD per month from adsense and affiliate programs. I started this an year ago. I've made few improvements (added new features, improved UI etc) over the year (0-6 hours of work per month) and I'm going to add some new features this week, automate few backends works or so.
I meant "another company".
It doesn't need to be time- and frequency- based. For example in quantum mechanics you transform from position to momentum space. I think the complaint was that the word "signal" excludes this later case while "function" is more general.
Regardless of the license, I definitely like the direction Microsoft seems to be going in. First they make Microsoft office online free to the public, there's talk about windows mobile one day being free, and now this. All within a rather short amount of time. I don't see myself switching from GNU/Linux any time soon however, but I hope Microsoft will soon realize the potential of Open Source. One company I really appreciate is Adobe, they put a surprising amount of effort into Open Source, and also released Photoshop v1.0.1 source. On a side note; I wonder when Windows' will post their first project on Github.
Seriously, thank you for your service.

>>I don't think anybody had any illusions that we were "protected" by the Scuds [...]

Maybe servicemen were in the know, but non-military US expats drank the kool-aid. Alternatively, maybe they were encouraged by the military personnel watching the fireworks and extrapolated their own conclusions from there.
I didn't neglect that. How do these facts rule out that successful poaching imposes an additional cost per employee on companies? Paying employees a larger salary doesn't prevent poaching if your opponent can do the same. People are more likely to fail upwards and projects are more likely to cost more and be finished later because of successful poaching. Who bears this cost and how?
When will notch delete this page https://www.facebook.com/minecraft. Or is it more do as I say not as I do.
the headline should really be: "politicians willing to do or say anything to get a few middle class jobs"
I love PushBullet, didn't know they were doing YC. I don't know if they can ever grow into making enough money to show up on the YC ROI charts but they have a great solution to a common problem and have been developer-friendly since day 1.
Well Second Life is instructive here, I felt they ran into scaling problems. You could also consider Eve's non-sharded world - OK Eve is a game, but a sufficiently complex and elaborate one as to be a good proxy for an immersive virtual environment.

I don't know exactly what Oculus's plan was but it'd be foolish to ignore this obvious application, and that certainly seems to be where Mark Zuckerberg sees the value in it, if we are to take his speech on the conference call at face value.
It wasn't a "paltry token" of appreciation in this case. It was the actual VR headset, unlike anything else you could purchase commercially, for $300. I am glad I got mine and knew what I was getting when I backed the project — a really fun toy I could mess around with.
Google makes substantial revenue from Calendar, Gmail, and Android?

Yes, yes, I know. Adwords. They better hope licensing for self-driving cars takes off.
Scientists breathe life into a moss that was is more than 1500 years old
It's a worthwhile question. The referenced study ("Unlocking the Clubhouse") explores part of the issue and is a very interesting read. Take a look!

Unfortunately, the lead time for solving the root cause is at least 1 generation. We will have to use stopgap solutions until then.
We are far? Really?

15 years ago, how far were we from having a 6 inch super computer in my pocket that can communicate immediately with anyone in the world? A choice of a million apps? Music on demand? Movies? All in a touch screen device?

And Palm/BB/MS are bit players?

If we get there? not if... when. Maybe not next year, but you have to be BLIND if you can't see how far CELL PHONES have come in 5, 10, 15, 20 years.

Not a far stretch to say that we'll have mass market VR within 5-10 years.
Is it? I listened to about 10 minutes and couldn't figure out why I would listen to that. This isn't a scandal. I'm not sure why we're reviewing the tapes now.
Asked to detail the pros of Tesla selling direct to consumers, Governor Perry answered without hesitation, "Commerce, Education and Energy."
I personally find it absurd that there are such laws protecting car dealerships, but then again given the history of the industry, there does need to be some regulation. Where it seems to go wrong is the idea that a company couldn't sell their product direct to consumer. It's sort of like saying that Apple stores can't exist and Apple has to sell everything via Best Buy, Target, and Wal-Mart. Somehow, it seems that is how the car dealership racket has been legislated.

There is probably some kind of middle ground where Tesla should be able to sell direct, while there should probably be a possibility of dealerships trying to cut a deal with Tesla.

The real quagmire of unintended consequences here seems to be in how trading 6500 factory jobs for however many thousand dealership jobs. I don't know how it shakes out on either the jobs or tax income end for Texas, but whenever you are talking large change like this, the unintended consequences are usually worse than predicted in one direction or another.
A few?!
This is beyond useful.
https://lobste.rs/about
I doubt the upvoters of this actually listened to it. It seems like when there is a big acquisition, people make it a point to cover the front page with relevant information, even when it's something with very little substance like an internal conference call.
The right to criticize programming languages (2007)
Whenever I see a "In Action" title, I read it "Inaction" and feel like it's a title that much closer reflects the realty of programming on a daily basis. :-)
Once again I am not saying what these companies did was legal. Google for example had an internal email instructing people to TURN AWAY APPLICANTS from Apple. That's completely different than agreeing not to target them for solicitation.

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.

No it's not. It's easy to find the market salaries today, on glassdoor and other means. You have a very unrealistic opinion of workers if you think that they are "in thee dark" about publicly available information that's easily obtainable until a recruiter finally calls them and informs them that they can get a slightly bigger salary (in fact taking 20% for themselves).

The way I see it is - you can instruct your HR to work only with recruiters, you can instruct the recruiters to not advertise on porn sites because you don't want the reputation cost, and you can ask recruiters not to cold call a rival's employees because you don't want to bear the reprisal cost. This isn't a cartel. A cartel is when you REFUSE TO OFFER a better deal than your competitors thanks to internal agreements. Here you offer whatever you want! You simply are judicious where you advertise it. That is not a cartel sorry. There is no price fixing.

You know if we're going to take this to its logical conclusion, it should be illegal for companies to collude with recruiters and all applicants should be able to bypass a recruiter and apply directly to the company, asking for a 20% greater salary. But somehow many companies I know don't accept such applications. Please tell me why they can collude and not compete with recruiters. Isn't that a REAL cartel since their HR dept will NOT OFFER you a job unless you are referred through a middleman. The HR dept refuses to compete with the recruiter even if you did the work for them and applied! And even if you don't agree this a cartel, it certainly imposes a 20% tax on the salaries of applicants.

It is clear that it distorts the market and holds down wages for employees.

No, regula market operation doesn't distort a market, outside regulation distorts markets. Government regulation distorts markets.

It is also not clear that more successful poaching will drive up wages for employees. It is clear it drives up COSTS of hiring and training employees since poached employees make you start over, delay and cancel projects etc. This may very well lead companies to hire contractors instead or pass on the costs to their OTHER employees - the majority who werent poached successfully - in other ways.

So no it's not clear what companies will do, this isn't basic supply and demand.
I'll just say it: Kickstarter is for suckers. When you give money to a project, you're doing one of two things:

1. Making a donation to a company. [1]

2. Preordering something that hasn't been built yet.

Doing 1 is silly, since you don't really get anything in return. "But it makes it more likely that this thing I want will happen!" In some tiny marginal way, sure, but mostly it's going to happen because other people donate (or fails to happen because they don't). Don't be the fool who tries to personally take on the collective action problem. And stop trying to make other people rich out of the goodness of your heart.

Of course, as the WSJ fails to make clear, most of Oculus's Kickstarter money wasn't straight-up donations; it was preorders of the Rift. That's obviously not a donation, but it's not a good idea either. As the buyer, you bear the risk that it never ships at all. "But I'm compensated with a discount!" Essentially, you're making an investment in which your returns come in the form of future discounts on a product. Forget that you like the Oculus Rift for a second; is this a wise investment structure? If someone set up a VC company that did that instead of buying parts of companies, would you think that was smart? Did you do any kind of analysis that suggests this is actually works out to be a good investment? Do the potential returns even justify that analysis? Do you think of other consumer products this way, or only shiny electronic things?

Or to think about it a different way: imagine if someone set up a store that worked like this: you take your item to the counter, where they don't actually let you buy the item. Instead what you can do is pay the price minus n% and then they roll this big roulette to decide whether you get the product (m% success rate). If you win you get to keep the product and if you lose it goes back on the shelf and they keep your money. To spice things up, they don't tell you what n and m are either, just the price to play and whether you get the item. Now, it's possible--though unknown--that m and n work out that you're EV positive here. But would you really shop at that store? Especially when there's another store next door that just sells you the same stuff at a known price (i.e. just buy the Rift when it comes out).

The fact of the matter is that you're aren't pre-buying the Rift on a rational basis. You've been convinced by clever marketing to shoulder risk for a company because it seems cool and feels good. Total sucker move. That probably explains why it tastes bitter when the company whose capital requirements you fronted rolls that into a $2 billion dollar acquisition.

[1] Maybe it's not a company. Maybe it's a cause you support like improving CoffeeScript or something. For those cases, I withdraw my objections.
Sound like an announcement to the shareholders via a large conference call, not an internal discussion.
This is not an internal conference call - this is a public investor conference call. Also available on the investor relations site.
The most interesting part of the article to me was the second to last paragraph.

We've been down this road with VR technology before in the mid-90s. Our enthusiasm is way ahead of anything that's ever been delivered on.

Just to salt the wound a little more, I'll leave this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fXK8LYrF2k
Yeah, this is a recording of the shareholder call earlier today (mentioned on the press release), not an internal call.
Is this for processing USB webcam data? I'd like to use industrial or broadcast-level cameras but the board seems to be lacking support for these kinds of inputs. Also, in both of those domains cameras can deliver true 10 to 12 bits per color channel uncompressed performance. Webcams don't come close, as far as I know.

Am I wrong?
Spotify’s $4.99/Month Student Premium Is a Plus For Music Industry
In my experience, math.stackexchange likes mathematical rigour and presupposes some mathematical maturity. There are a fair number of professional mathematicians using the site.

Sure, if you just want a "for dummies" understanding, a hand-wavy example like the second highest voted answer suffices. But if you want to learn it properly (prove theorems, etc), you need to know concepts like complex numbers and integration.
Yep http://www.shareholder.com/visitors/event/build3/stage/stage...

Best quote from Zuck: "We're clearly not a hardware company. We're not gonna try to make a profit off of the devices long term. We view this as a software and services thing, where if we can make it so that this becomes a network where people can be communicating and buying things and virtual goods, and there might be advertising in the world, but we need to figure that out down the line."
Maybe it's just me, but if someone had told me that a VR company is bought by facebook, I'd say it was an acquhire for an augmented reality appliance to compete with google-glass .

I don't buy into PR announcements.
They should send back the 50k in $10 donations from kickstarter.
Is it not possible for Tesla to somehow create a non-profit(?) they have no stake in that just goes around these states setting up Tesla friendly dealerships that basically mimic Tesla's own showrooms?
Surprising how many companies Yahoo has been gobbling up... and shutting down. What exactly _are_ they doing with all the new hires?
This isn't actually an internal call. Sounds like a standard investor conference call.[1]

[1]: http://investor.fb.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=835447
How about people that donate to fight the existence of polyamorous marriage licenses? Do you want to get them fired?

> there are no good rational reasons to do that

If you lived in the south bay area like I do, you'd suffer far more oppression from people with houses that oppose any and all kinds of development, than you would from the government not recognizing gay marriage (if you were gay). These people cost me thousands of dollars per year, and they make poorer people even worse off, driving them out of high-rent communities into far more dangerous areas and making them spend time and energy commuting. If some home-owner from west of El Camino that donated to the "Residents First" candidate's campaign in the Mountain View city elections became the CEO of Mozilla, how should I feel then? His cause is based in purely wicked selfishness, not some arbitrary nonsensical moral axioms or reasoning that you might call irrational.

At least Eich donated against Prop. 8 because he thought it was the right thing to do. He didn't gain any personal benefit from that donation -- it was at quite direct harm to himself (to the tune of $1000). That donation is actually a positive sign of moral character, relative to most people's bland non-contributing apathy. He just has bad moral axioms or couldn't think about this matter rationally.

> Again, they can't be trusted to treat homosexuals well in other contexts where they might have power.

I don't think you have an accurate model of how the average pious Christian that lives in California would behave (assuming that's the root cause of Eich's choices). You've come to false conclusions about what donating to anti-gay-marriage causes implies about one's personal attitude towards gay people. I'm sure there's some form of hypothetical marriage license that you wouldn't be in favor of, but that doesn't mean you're bigoted against those people. The state doesn't approve of anything but nuclear family marriage and its same-sex facsimile. I don't think that you'd be evil or couldn't be reasoned with if you believed that the state should encourage this social structure, it's just that your moral axioms or your views on what marriage is for are (probably) different than mine.

Actually, I'm just trying to be persuasive. The real reason you're wrong is that your opinion is built on your delusion that you and other people have free will, specifically, that of Eich having it. Going from the free will to no-free-will perspective, your attitude towards Eich maps to an attitude towards the universe being imperfect. So it happens to be imperfect in a way visible at the top of Mozilla. Big whoop.
This is just a bit too awesome, yet simple.

Think of it as the "git" for debugging. Take a snapshot, keep going etc ... and then backtrack back to the point where it all started going wrong.

Just very hard to automate easily, yet this uses gdb and all the other macro/command goodness (well, for power users) that gdb comes with.
Headphones were a niche product for a certain sort of music lover until the invention of the Walkman, now everyone has a pair. Obviously VR goggles are a bit different since you can't (safely) walk around wearing a pair, but imagine them in a Google Glass like package or with optical nerve transducers. Today's hardcore gamer is tomorrow's prosumer, is the day after's average consumer.
I am happy that Mozilla seems to be very diverse and that the staff are openly expressing their feelings that it is a non-issue, but publishing something like this seems pretty weird, like they are overcompensating. I also wonder about all the people who aren't in the public eye who wouldn't write big long blog posts, does everyone at Mozilla feel that it's just swell?
Google Counsel to Arrington Allegation: We Don’t Snoop on Gmail to Find Leakers
Is there a fundamental reason why Person A can't get both? Equity costs nothing to give out (excluding legal / accounting overhead) and could serve as a great incentive.

Effectively, a project would say "Hey! Give us $300 dollars. We might get you this product we're trying to build, but we also might fail at delivering. Here's some equity too, to help compensate for your risk."
"Facebook is an engineering company"

Keep telling yourself that. They've released some interesting tech, yes, but an engineering company? No. Neither is google.
sorry, not well-phrased: i meant to say that, taken together, clojure's datatypes and protocols look somewhat similar to haskell's typeclasses, not that datatypes and protocols are similar.
It is. I wanted to use that as the submission title, but I had to use the uploader's title instead due to HN title guidelines.
And this means progress stops ... because...?

I could see making this argument for true AI, maybe, but even then I doubt it's true. When in human history has allowing people's minds greater degrees of freedom resulted in progress slowing down, let alone stopping?

This just sounds like "Kids these days..." kind of nonsense to me.
MongoHQ is hiring customer advocates – help at the top of the funnel
MongoHQ is a database as a service company hosting ~100,000 databases for thousands of developers. We have serious revenue, a large A-round in the bank, and an amazing set of customers that love our product. Our rate of free signups is growing quickly, and we want your combination of tech and people skills to help our customers through the funnel.

If you have a technical background, and are good at communicating with developers, we want to talk to you. You will be most effective if you genuinely want to help developers do well, can understand what problems they face (even if they aren't overtly telling you!), and know how to advocate on their behalf.

You will generally be serving as the very first human interaction our customers have with the company. This means answering pre-sales questions and helping us identify unnecessary points of friction in our customer acquisition process. If you are good at these things, want to experiment with ways of improving our conversion rate, and have an inquisitive mind, you will have an enormous impact here. This is a good chance to grow with a company and make a real difference for many developers.

Hopefully this sounds like you. If you want to talk to us about how we convert customers, send an email to jobs+advocate@mongohq.com with an introduction.

We are a company of 24, mostly developers, with offices in San Mateo, CA and Birmingham, AL. We're also remote friendly ... half of us work from home.
thanks!

edit: you broke it :(
Thanks for the gracious reply! I'm sure that you and everyone working with you at Joyent is a fantastic individual.

And yeah, just illustrating how even the best-laid plans of the best of us can't always work out great for all customers.
mbrubeck mentioned that the staff asked for a public statement of some sort in yesterday's weekly project meeting, I assume this is in response to that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7460581
NOOO.
It makes me genuinely sad.
Oculus has the potential to be a giant. Now it will be limited by what facebook has to offer.
Also i am not a really a fan of acquisitions because the parent/acquiring company has a habit of shutting down these smaller companies :(.
How Many Bossless Companies Exist Today?
Do you want to live in a country where other people can do equivalently stupid things and you have to deal with the consequences? No man is an island - some people are better making a burden of themselves than others.
You can't buy lottery tickets with a credit card which seems like a rather sensible limit for most people.
This is why "Patent Pending" exists. :)