skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the future, both will be important and will likely merge. If someone can make goggles which can switch between immersive VR and AR, they will do well. I think approaching this from the VR side rather than AR could be tougher and best in the long run.

Oculus has will be the thing that teenagers use to hang out online in the future. Something like Second Life will replace Instagram which replaced Facebook which replaced tying up the landline talking for hours each evening with the BFF.
Depends on stage of company, but for my company (Series A, Bay Area, ~25 employees), we'd be happy to connect anyone with a job offer with our lead investor.
I don't doubt that it's a great experience - but that guy seemed to be playing things up for the sake of the camera IMO.
Palmer could have made far more money by waiting. Maybe he was tired of Oculus.
Significant, but apparently inarticulable?

Here's a couple of other differences that might be worth reflecting on:

1. What support Eich provided for proposed law vs actions he's likely to support as CEO -- in other words, what you can actually tell about Eich by the fact that he provided financial support for the law, and what you might know about him by considering a larger totality of his actions.

If you want a parallel, consider what Janis Ian has said about Orson Scott Card:

http://www.janisian.com/forum/showthread.php?7952-Orson-Scot...

2. Now vs then. In 2008, the then president of the united states supported prop 8. The current president of the US was on record as not sure about it (and against gay marriage). If we're talking about the height of the profile of a position -- and you seem to be in making a distinction between an employee and CEO -- then I'd say leadership of Mozilla is pretty pale by comparison.

3. While Mozilla is arguably a "values" organization (presumably an important distinction), it's working in a sphere that's pretty orthogonal from identity-minority rights. If you'd argue that doesn't matter, I suppose that's one approach, but if so, I presume that you'd also decide that GLAAD should also be generally boycotted because of their 2011 support of the T-Mobile/AT&T merger and opposition to Net Neutrality principles.
Thoughts on Tyler Cowen’s "Average Is Over"
TBH, what made me understand the whole "frequency domain to time domain, and back again" thing was actually the F transform. When I hear that expression, I go "oh yeah, Fourier transform".

Honestly, for me, the sine curve + sine curve + sine curve + ... explanation was perfectly good even on an intuitive level. Perhaps that's because I've spent some of my adolescence in front of a computer doing tons of visualizations and graph plots, and because at the same time I was doing quite a bit of electronics (radio frequency and so on) and audio synthesis. At some point, you just go "yeah, I see it".

Fun anecdote: A square wave is made entirely of odd harmonics (3, 5, 7, ...). There are no even harmonics in it. When you can see why intuitively, you've understood Fourier.
How many people here work with Google technologies and yet are quite able to criticize Google for not providing easy tools for end-to-end encryption and/or for taking part in anti-poaching collusion?
This article is littered with half baked, border line conspiracy theories. Worse, it's on the front page of HN. This is probably the reason I frequent other sites a lot more than here now.

It's okay to be against an acquisition, but try to back it up with facts and critical thought.
Most likely will be firmware-level integration. Social media companies, and Facebook most of all, are about engagement, which means making it easy to use Facebook from every platform possible. Having your head inside an immersive virtual reality just put people too far from Facebook I'm guessing, so the new FB Oculus will have a stream from your newsfeed that the firmware kindly muxes into your display at all times. :)

Google does this same thing with Android and other pervasive Google platforms and services. Why is Google making a phone? So that you use Google services a lot more than you otherwise would, which gives them the opportunity not only to drive up their search and traffic numbers, but collect a lot of data that is useful in targeting advertisements.

I agree that it's hard to think of any product tie-in with FB's extant line that wouldn't be disgusting. The only safe way to think of it is as a portfolio piece -- Facebook just wants to be associated with the next revolutionary name in computer input technology. It's hard to believe that it is so innocuous, though, and Zuck seems to put that idea to bed in his announcement.
Their new audience isn't quite as easily convinced to invest hundreds of dollars on a piece of dedicated hardware.
Gay marriage isn't a 'basic human right'. It's subscribing to a governmental institution.
I was recently laid off, but it was one of the best things that happened to me. I had become involved with so many projects and was being constantly interrupted, that I could not hardly get anything done anymore. I tried putting in 60 hour weeks to catch up, but I would come in and just stare at the computer screen for an hour or two each day before I could get any work done. Now in my unemployment I've been working out consistently and feel like I'm emerging from a deep fog. It occurred to me the other day "Oh yeah, this is what real life feels like."
I'm not sure this is really all that big of a deal. Mostly because I don't really see hard evidence from the oculus guys that they have solved the two main problems with VR headsets. Resolution and latency. Sure, they talk about it a lot. http://www.oculusvr.com/blog/the-latent-power-of-prediction/ but the resolution is still low, and the frame rate numbers don't appear any better than what I remember from my days at the university in the 1990's playing around with high end SGI's driving simulation systems.

Back then people talked about those problems too, even with systems getting 60FPS @ 640x480. I was a test subject for a number of studies being conducted and overwhelmingly it was an unpleasant experience. It was impossible to suspend disbelief because even tiny (I don't have the figures handy) frame lags, especially during rapid head movements were extremely noticeable, and gag inducing.

Mostly, I think people shelved the systems because the technology wasn't ready, the estimates back then IIRC was it would take a 4x resolution and 4x frame rate bump before it was worthwhile.

Both are probably possible, but the latency numbers are harder than it seems because of the fact that framerate != frame latency due to pipelining in the sensor and graphics systems. The resolution numbers are probably a matter of cost. LCD's providing 1080p in a couple inches are also probably significantly more expensive than the cost target needed to make these things mainstream.
Zuckerberg: "After WhatsApp, I'm done for a while"
Simply "taking a view we don't agree with" isn't the same thing as actively funding an effort to take away the rights of others, including ones who work in the company you're managing.
I wonder how the lag problems could be prevented. Even if 1 or 10 Gbps links were in every home, that isn't really going to help with latency if someone in Korea is trying to do something in true real time with someone in the US.

It's a big problem even for much less ambitious "VR"-esque worlds like MMORPG games. Usually they'll have to locate one server in Asia, one or more in Europe, one or two in America, etc. to accomodate for lag.
YC W14 Demo Day: Companies From Today's Y Combinator Demo Day
It's like Zuckerburg read "Ready Player One"
The all new HTC One (2014) Unveiled [The best, gets even better]
> Next steps include: calling for the resignation of anyone who voted Republican in a recent election.

I'm actually surprised this isn't a thing...
Notch is an irrational / cynical malcontent, exactly the same as the people on HN. I wouldn't be surprised if he frequents here.
I think I agree.

When it comes to video games, for people who are really into getting immersed it could see major usage. But for every day activities, I think that video conferencing and other forms of communication we already have basically cover those niches.
>The dedicated attention from such a world-changing technology must have been special. The backlash against losing that special status is understandable.

While I agree with most of what you (eloquently) said, I take issue with the idea that gamers' reactions are a result of feeling less special.
I'm at most an occasional gamer myself so I can't speak for "gamers," but do give them a little credit. Facebook doesn't have the best track record dealing with gaming companies and, as Notch noted, their motives are inherently different than the motives of the sole Oculus Team. This isn't necessarily bad, but it is a change. And change, particularly for something that appears to be on such a good path, introduces risk. And risk is scary for people who are emotionally invested.
I have no doubt about a tenfold variance across different people, but I'm highly skeptical of any claims that a particular language will make you 10 times more productive over the long haul.
What about any DB? MySQL, or Postgres? Is it all Elastic Search?
That's a terrible example. It would only be a career killer among people with a propensity toward intolerance. And there are plenty of places, some of which are represented by politicians with unconventional relationships, that don't care.
> "... people are going to be even less tolerant of trying to force things on them because the experience is much more intimate."

Perhaps not if that's how you 'grew up with it' (so to speak). If you're clever enough and insert yourself into the system early enough then you get to shape all the 'norms' that will eventually emerge.
You'll still need steam ;)

http://www.goat-simulator.com/
Should I file a Schedule F (income from farming) for my herb garden? I actually looked through the instructions for schedule F and I don't find any clear basis to allow me to not file it.

In practical terms, I'm not worried, as I suspect that I'd have a net loss, but assuming a net gain (that the fair market value of the parsley and sage I got from the herb garden exceeded my out-of-pocket costs to run the garden), I think I have to file a Schedule F per the regs.

For the record, it seems perfectly consistent to treat BTC as capital property; it doesn't seem reasonable to treat them as ordinary income.
> facebook isn't going away in the next few years, they are a microsoft

That was kind of my point. To quote a message I've posted before: Facebook is the new Microsoft, basically. Low on creativity and innovation, high on cash, riding to success a huge wave of demand that would have carried anybody else who just happened to be there at the right time.

So now you're the Oculus guys, and you're thinking "do I really want to be bought by this kind of entity?" The cash sure is nice, as you pointed out, but the nature of the puppet master is also important.
What about folks who think substantial U.S. carbon emission restrictions aren't a smart or effective policy and politically donate to that effect? There are likely a lot of people here who believe passionately that such inaction will lead to an uninhabitable planet. Serious, life-and-death stuff. Worth trying to get someone fired from their tech job?
In my imagination, computers will fade away to become as invisible as ubiquitous.
I'm curious how you feel about open source, then. Specifically, node.js. Donating hours of your time working on something that eventually got sold for lots of money that you won't see a dime of. Sounds similar.
The thing about the future is that it has a funny way of proving you wrong.

I think the vision outlined above is entirely possible. An integrated microphone with surround sound headphones was going to change gamedev forever. Who knows how that would bleed into other types of scenarios than gaming?

I'd watch a movie with someone using an Oculus. It'd be a fun experience.
I agree regarding the every day activities thing: FaceTime and Skype are sufficient and will probably remain dominant (maybe in different forms) for decades.

But I could see a serious paradigm shift for video games, especially future massively multiplayer games.
Pretty funny that all the comments on the linked article are tied to Facebook
Uh, yeah, that's why it's called "Mozilla" with a "Zilla" and the end...
Come now, your facts clearly have no place in this discussion.
How do we know they're not already working on it as a covert project?
To explain very quickly and generally - a lot of men in CS (and probably in general) tend towards overconfidence, where women with the same skills will be underconfident in themselves. When you're surrounded by people who are ultra confident and professing their love for the subject matter, it's easy to feel that you don't love the topic as much as the people around you, and that you must not be as into it as everyone else. Probably best to read the referenced materials if you need to see these things quantified, and there's likely also other aspects that I'm missing, but that's the gist of it.
Andreessen skewers Buffett for doubting Bitcoin
Now's your chance Sony. Do to Facebook what you did to Microsoft: Nothing.
People have been trying to get VR right for decades, and Oculus's developer units were probably the first remotely accessible devices to let you experience something that approximates good VR.

Reportedly the second-generation oculus devices are even better.

The criteria for 'good' here are things like low latency, good position tracking, low display persistence, etc. Getting those things wrong causes headaches, nausea...
The "time and energy" was a big factor for me as well. One day I realized that I was spending too much time learning about code editors and hardly anything about frameworks and languages. Since most code tutorials that use an IDE are using Eclipse, I decided to focus on Eclipse as my primary IDE.
Bundler-Inspired Dependency Management for Ansible
I don't think that's true, especially since the internet's already facilitated most of "virtual reality". I can skype with people across the world, order anything I want and have it show up in days. I contest that "virtual reality" is basically already a reality.

But sure, if you keep moving the goalposts then I guess VR won't be a reality :|
Worst news I've heard all year. I am extremely disappointed.
I agree it's pretty bad, but not being able to marry is not as severe as segregation and discrimination in almost everything (and against a much larger portion of the population.)
Hunger Games / Vikings Star Talks About His Favorite Apps
That's a shame, because Minecrift[1] is the most astonishing Oculus experience I've had so far. Just being inside a world I had created, surrounded by peaceful ambience, floating above the treetops (fly mod, heh) - I can't express just how beautiful that experience was.

[1] https://share.oculusvr.com/app/minecrift
> AWS services do not have a trust issue

Somewhat mysteriously, perhaps, given a history that has included a series of fairly high profile outages.
Yes, just as every CEO of every big company that has just acquired a smaller company has ever said, back unto the dawning of the world.

Nothing is ever going to change, until suddenly it all does.
I think you all need to check this informative link out: https://medium.com/technology-and-society/cb596ce5f27

["Everyone Is Getting Turkey’s Twitter Block Wrong
Turkey isn’t trying to be North Korea, China or Iran; it’s trying to be Azerbaijan" by Zeynep Tufekci]
This is silly, almost fascist.

What next?

If a person doesn't donate to a campaign supporting gay marriage, does that mean the person is a bigot and homophobic?
Google has been around for 6 years more than Facebook. Facebook will become more of a general technology company.

Expect more acquisitions like this. It only makes sense to diversify.
You are not listening to the person you are responding to. Nobody is going to argue that kickstarter backers are entitled to equity in the company, or that they have legal rights beyond what is guaranteed in the kickstarter.

What the person is trying to get across is that in any financial transaction there are non-legal aspects involved. There are human relationships. The world runs on favors as much as it runs on contracts. No single transaction stands alone: you have a personal reputation based on your actions and ethics dictate what other people are going to think of you. If someone gives you a deal on favorable terms, it's generally understood that you will remember that and act accordingly in the future.

It's not specifically outlined and it's not a hard rule, but in general, when people donate to a kickstarter they are doing so under the assumption that the person receiving that money is going to act in a way that doesn't undermine their trust. Turning around and selling your company to Facebook leaves a bad taste in peoples' mouths, since the company was built on the money they donated to make it possible. Do they have a legal right to compensation? Of course not. Do they have a right to be emotionally hurt by this? Sure, and it's not unjustified.
YC-Backed CareMessage Is On A Mission To Improve Health Literacy
Currently focused on the US (sorry that isn't more explicit on our site!). We hear a lot of requests for Clever abroad, and we're listening!
I can't speak for everyone else, but I'm going to hate on both.

Coming soon to an immersive 3D VR headset near you: a lame Facebook-branded knockoff of Second Life.

Filed under: #metaverse
Social seems like a more mainstream use, honestly. 73% of adults are on a social network. Only 49% of homes have a game console. Owning a game console is a choice. Owning something like a webcam and a way to browse Facebook is almost a default by now. While what happened is bad for the gaming focus, it is much more likely to end up with broad stream VR adoption just like how webcams are built into most phones and laptops nowadays.
One word - metaverse. That is all.
Carmack: For the record, I am coding right now, just like I was last week.
"ponder over your character"

What?
I would tend to agree. The "now strap this big, heavy thing to your head" part, especially, seems like a big hurdle standing in the way of VR becoming an everyday kind of thing.

Of course, technology gets smaller, so I wouldn't say "never."
You have never heard of Google's research on self-driving cars? http://www.google.com/about/careers/lifatgoogle/self-driving...
Thinking of http://xkcd.com/1235/ , this will be an interesting future for sure...
This is the real shame in the Oculus acquisition. If Oculus had been able to give away just 10% equity, every single Kickstarter backer would be $20,000 richer today. The sentiment would be completely different. The SEC needs to get in gear and start allowing equity crowdfunding pronto.

The SEC's classification of millionaires as "accredited investors" who get first crack at all the best investment opportunities is exactly the kind of "rich get richer" policy that people ought to be furious about. I think not enough people understand it.
Read the comment you're replying to: it specifically mentioned a series of beliefs that the commenter would not go to the lengths of boycotting over.
Android's dominance in sell-in in handsets is not new, so you won't find a large lag between sell-in and the installed base.
Heh, from Carmack's twitter 1m ago: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/448629403740692481

For the record, I am coding right now, just like I was last week. I expect the FB deal will avoid several embarrassing scaling crisis for VR.

Glad to see Carmack is still being Carmack.

EDIT: By the way, if anyone is wondering why people are having a negative reaction to this Facebook deal, I think one way to understand it is to watch this video fullscreen and try to imagine any way that Facebook could add to the experience, or at least not detract from it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DGZc0Dd9Hc#t=5s

It's hard to.
I agree; the top answer sounded simple, but it wasn't simple at all to understand. I think there's more to the FT than you get from a working knowledge of how it's applied to audio, though. In other words, there's understanding the FT, and then there's understanding the FT. I admit that I'm not in the second group.
What company isn't creepy these days? Google, Facebook and Amazon are a few companies of many that come to mind when I think of all the user data they hold, what they know and what they could use it for. Thems the breaks unfortunately.

I admire Notch standing up for what he believes in, but I just can't see how Facebook is creepier than anything else or affects the acquisition of Oculus. It's not like the gaming device is going to give Facebook any extra information it most likely doesn't already have on you.

It is also a known fact that Amazon are trying to move into the gaming space, as are others and what better way to move into a space that is largely undominated than buying the Oculus? If Facebook didn't buy Oculus, someone else would have, maybe Google or Amazon.

People keep iterating the statement, "But Facebook aren't a games company" which reminds me of a few years ago when people (especially Steve Balmer) were saying that Apple isn't a phone company and won't gain any market share.

Facebook have the funds, talent and workforce to go into any area they choose. Look at Google, what did they know about clean energy, driver-less car tech, cloud infrastructure hosting when they started? Nothing. And now look at them, through various acquisitions and talent hires, Google have become an empire and this is what Facebook are doing: building an empire.

Through previous acquisitions Facebook have proven that they leave them mostly untouched. Besides tighter integration with Facebook, what has changed in Instagram since it was acquired by Facebook? Nothing.

If anything, this is great for Oculus, because it means they won't have to repeatedly seek VC capital every time they want to iterate and improve the product: we the consumer win out of this.

The backlash is unwarranted and ridiculous in my opinion. People complaining over nothing.
Oculusbook is the future of profitable mind-reading and by extension, mass behavioral control.

I have no doubt that once someone figures out a way to miniaturize and mass-produce even half-effective neuroimaging or even transcranial magnetic stimulation rigs, the first applications will be advertising (read: mass corporate surveillance at an unprecedented depth) and VR.
Using that logic, an oil company shouldn't bother building a pipeline, they should just load the oil into barrels and walk it out on mule's backs.
You can purchase put options or employ other strategies to hedge against risk when one owns a large position in a single stock.
Candy Crush maker King Digital valued at more than $7 billion in IPO
Yes, I think we'll have to see how the next few decades pan out to see whether the future holds more overt computing (VR, stuff stuck to your face) or more subtle computing (in your pocket, information when you need it). My money is on the latter for mainstream, with the former being reserved for a subset entertainment and niche uses.

I'd watch a movie with someone using an Oculus, sounds fun. But I can't see it beating the experience I have now: once a month I invite family and friends, we cook food, sit around and use the projector to watch a good movie on a large screen. If VR can beat that experience, I could see it going mainstream for entertainment.

My argument isn't that VR has no use, it most definitely does. It's that I can't see VR fundamentally changing how we use computers (like mobile has done).