skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really doubt anything would change. Look beyond the brand-name of Facebook, or the current social-network connotations.

I doubt someone smart enough to build a company like Oculus VR would've forgotten to plan how to run inside Facebook and continue delivering the vision of VR.

After all, aren't we all here to support the vision of mainstream VR, and not just one company?
New website and free extension
2 scenarios:

If all they care about it money (doubtful), they just locked down a vast amount of money in 2 years time vs the long hard fight in the marketplace against several serious competitors (Sony etc). A bird in the hand is worth more than in the bush.

If they care about the technology, and bringing their vision to reality, then they now have Facebook's resources to make their dream come true, which is important given the size of their competitors' budgets.
Maybe this will push Valve to reconsider turning their internal VR headset into a consumer product.
A long time ago I wrote a Firefox plugin to get an XPath:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/xpath-checker...

It's open source, so perhaps you could reuse the code from WebDriver:

https://code.google.com/p/xpathchecker/
> When Facebook first approached us about partnering, I was skeptical.

Translation: I hadn't heard their offer yet.
> They (Oculus) now have many many more times the resources at their disposal than before to make countless imaginative projects.

An acquisition into a company like Facebook is not quite carte blanche to chase "countless imaginative projects". There are VPs and PMs, budgets and headcount, inter-departmental politics and of course final approval from Sheryl Sandberg, David Ebersman and Zuck. No matter what the press releases say, autonomy will be lost to a degree, progress will be slower and more considered, and your imagination will have limits.
> bottom-of-the-ethical-barrel

Again, this is silly sensationalist thinking -- companies aren't people capable of "good" or "evil" choices. If they were, I'd note that Facebook was one of the only companies NOT conspiring to deflate the wages of half of the people that visit this site.

(Note: I don't work for FB -- I just rail against silly hyperbolic thinking.)
Not sure why you are surprised. Joe-sixpack thinks facebook is A-OK.
Facebook needs to move to Oculus, not try to tie Oculus to what Facebook currently is. If they're thinking more that way, there's hope. I have very little faith in them allowing anything remotely awesome to come out of this, though.
Add another person that was formerly excited about Oculus and is now walking away from it. Yes, I dislike facebook and their business practices enough that I'll turn my back on a very promising bit of technology I was looking forward to. I'm also looking into canceling my devkit2 pre-order.
The New Science of Email Subject Lines
Is big data dating the key to long-lasting romance?
Unfinished AngularJS Track on Code Academy
I wonder: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_(mascot)

(For a minute I thought it was a Firefox dinosaur, in which case the derivation would have been far more obvious.)
carmack doesn't need golden handcuffs. he earned fuck you money back then in the '90s.
All this has given me a thought. If in the video game based economy for TF2 you receive a hat that can be traded on the marketplace or traded to others, do you have to consider that a taxable event? If you have something rare and it's potential value goes up, is it a capital gain? Is the depreciation similarly a loss?
If you've used oculus you learned that it's probably the most anti-social thing (at least to those in the room with you). So the "Social company acquires Anti-social product" dichotomy is humorous to me right now (yeah I know it's short sighted, it's just what popped into my head)...
Yep, those would be the two companies you'd have bidding. Except, Carmack is too heavy metal to go to Google. I only partly jest.
It's up there with the price of my enthusiast RIVB, 4930k, 2x GTX 780 Ti, 64GB 2133 RAM, 256GB Samsung 840 PRO...

Seems silly.
I think what he meant to say is that YC accepts applications from companies at all stages. Once accepted to YC, all companies are given the exact same funding deal.
I was super excited for the Rift.

Now, I'm torn.

As a tech company, and a social platform, I like Facebook, a lot.

As a gamer, I do not want my gaming tech force integrated into my social network. Not sure that's in their roadmap, or what that would even look like, but there is that risk.
Because he knows its a smart buy and cash is worth less than the stock after acquisition. This is why Yahoo! bought Tumblr! for cash - or at least to signal this.
My goodness all of that sounds so depressing. Exactly what kind of handcuffs are you going for here? Either way, you end up f$&#ed.
but if Google was the buyer, there would be much more positive comments here.

Not from me. Google has a history of acquiring stuff just for the talent and then shutting it down or (worse) letting it rot away. FB seems to have better luck with its high profile acquisitions (though not so much the smaller ones) staying alive: Instagram, Whatsapp (so far), Parse, Friendfeed.
Hmmm that's not quite how Facebook works -- not everything needs final approval from the C-level suite (hell, that's their selling point to new hires.) And having some structure isn't always a bad thing - as long as it's the right kind. And I think it is in this case.
Does anybody know why they didn't go sidekiq instead of resque?
Mistakes we've made
Yeah, I see this as a big move for FB, much bigger than for Oculus.

Someone I know had already identified FB as one of the Big Four several years ago, analogizing to the Big Four during the robber baron days of steel and rail. The other three are Apple, Amazon, and Google.

All four have some sort of machine learning / AI race going on. They are not the only ones around (Twitter, for example).

But this is pretty big. Google has the Glasses project. Apple probably has something cooking somewhere. And I have no idea about Amazon.

I also wonder if FB will keep the team together. It'd be a shame for John Caramak to skip out after the acquisition.
Who doesn't have the money yet?
Oh I rained on some ones parade there :-)
The Verge [0] claims the deal is for $2B (cash + stock)

[0] http://www.theverge.com/2014/3/25/5547456/facebook-buying-oc...
Oculus needs money. Facebook has money.
Yes - for those curious, more on MOD from coding horror here:
http://blog.codinghorror.com/you-dont-need-millions-of-dolla...
Is there any way to stop this? Can we start a petition in change.org or something like that? :(
Ask HN: How much did John Carmack make?
John joined Oculus Rift in August last year in what seems to have been a very smart financial move. Does anyone know how much equity he had in the company?
I'm very interested to see what Carmack does. I hope the whole team moves to Valve or something, and this doesn't set back VR another 10 years.
Well, this is the mentality that's allowing somebody have 2B in cash now…
It's Facebook.

Every 'like' is probably someone who:

- likes Oculus Rift

- likes Sony VR

- likes Google Glass

- likes 'I hate VR'

- likes 'luddites'

- and likes 'Lawnmower man'
Me too. I feel somehow Facebook with be obtaining troves of data from this.
> not everything needs final approval from the C-level suite (hell, that's their selling point to new hires.)

Would you care to back that up with anything (not the part in parentheses)?
Ian Cooper says it better than I can: http://vimeo.com/68375232

If you've not seen that before, it's seriously good. My top video of 2013
Their PE ratio is ~106, they'd be crazy not to take advantage of that.
Terrible decision. I thought they "weren't in this for the money", and it's not like they were lacking money or relationships or hype. Why the hell did they agree to this?
I don't work for FB so I don't know the full details of all their acquisitions, but I would look to the success of a company like, say, Parse for what potential could lie here.
Yeah, you are right. I do continue to make things I want; it's just that so far they are yet to turn into something I (or anyone else) has a burning need for. In other words, the idea turns out to have less steam when it becomes reality.

Thanks for the advice though.
Gonna have to disagree with you there.

Institutions put out messages and public relations at odds with their own interests all the time. It's never very strongly at odds with the institutional interest of course. Just a sop put forward which gets back as much in extra public credulity as much as it costs in development, in opportunity cost to the raw, core profit machine, and in the seemingly cross-purposed promotion.

In this case, one is better off presuming that Marky Mark "My Users Are Dumb Fucks" Zucker-Borg's company does indeed consider privacy a thing extinct and is happier if the public thinks of it that way too, until we start to see an overwhelming trend in the other direction. Until then, the trend is clearly that Facebook wants to cultivate the "privacy + dinosaur = go together" association in the public's mind, and they even callowly do it right alongside a pseudo "we CARE that you should be able to protect your privacy".

The "caring" is simply out of a wish to create a legally plausible image of taking reasonable steps to give dumbfucks the opportunity to not have their privacy butchered wholesale, so that they can butcher privacy wholesale.

Bonus 1:
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wofs8ZpcXlM&t=78s
> Subliminal Messages Caught Red-Handed

Bonus 2:
> http://blogs.computerworld.com/privacy/20698/privacy-postmor...
> "Privacy: A Post-Mortem" by Steven Rambam. (Search for it on YouTube as well if desired.)
Nice use of words. Define overreaction. How about I be specific: most of the comments in this thread seem entirely justified to me.
I don't understand this.

I sure hope that this is because I lack the information, insight, or imagination to understand what's going on here, and not because this is a terrible outcome for Oculus technology.
Not sure how the relation with investors is in the US, but I can’t imagine them even considering that in any company that I joined. In hindsight, it was a red flag, but I assume there is a cultural gap there.
This is a great paper, but I really wonder how much difference it made.
The conclusion says

The greatest probability of being destroyed is .534, and occurs
when a plane is hit by a 20-mm cannon shell in the engine area.
The next most vulnerable event is a hit by a 7.9-mm machine gun
bullet on the cockpit.

I think most people would suggest that these are the parts worth protecting the most.

Another thing, I'm not sure that the method is unobvious. This is not the fault of the author but of the fairly breathless retellings that sound like an episode of 'Numb3rs'
http://www.opencompute.org/

https://code.facebook.com/projects/
I expect he will have a similar situation that Ray Kurzweil has at Google.
The thing is java isn't universally hated. Hating Java is cool. Like hating FORTRAN 30 years ago. It works, it works, very well in most cases. Its performance is comparable to compiled languages.

Its just, hating java is currently 'in'. Why? Because its popular, and everywhere. So not being java, is currently considered a boost to your language, because after you work in java all day, who wants to go home and write... more java?
This is the exact reason I still use eclipse too. Another point you didn't mention is that there are a lot of other products built on eclipse. For example, in high school, when I did FIRST robotics, the IDE we used for programming the microcontrollers, WindRiver, was/is built on eclipse. Knowing eclipse before I got to that stage was incredibly useful and really helped my productivity. Eclipse is also "vulnerable" to the fact that nearly everyone has at least tried it and has some idea of how to use it, which when choosing an IDE for group projects tends to swing the balance in its favor since fewer people have to learn a new environment.
This is an ideal time for introspection. Here on one side you have the company you hate the most - Facebook. On other, one of the hacker culture produces - Oculus Rift.

And Facebook buying Oculus makes you mad to the point of blood boil.

Think it through. See what angers you. Analyze it. Then destroy it and move on.
No. It looks better initially, but it misses the point.

When you move your mouse normal to the axis marked "capacity", all your data points should have the same... capacity. So they should all be 32G, 128G, whatever.

If you decide you want to spread them out, sure. But I shouldn't move my mouse down from a 128G drive, and find I'm on a 32G drive.
Groups of people are capable of collectively "good" or "evil" choices, and we often regard collective decisions in moral terms.

I'd argue that Facebook has made a lot of decisions that exploit users in pursuit of making more money and acquiring more personal data -- and that we don't have to be happy a technology platform with a lot of promise is now tied to a company with a record of making such decisions.

I won't welcome a Facebook platform in to my life the same way I would a standalone piece of technology, precisely because of the kind of decisions made by Facebook.
>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?

Valve.
I'm unsure what FB is thinking here. Do they plan to make Facebook a VR site? Do their games need more immersion to be addictive?

Google acquiring Nest has obvious plan. Make Android based devices with highly usable GUI.
Spoken like an investor who knows nothing about the audience. Sorry, VR was intended for PC gamers. They're not casual mobile gamers. They loathe casual games. They now loathe VR for wedding with Facebook.
There's a live call right about this right now:

http://www.shareholder.com/visitors/event/build3/stage/stage...
Amen, and I don't really know why. I was on the fence about ordering one of the new Crystal Cove based devkits. Now I certainly won't. I'll wait to see how it shakes out; to see if low latency panels now take a backseat to an onboard camera for that special "social experience".

I guess it's because I was excited about the gaming and "new experience" potential, and the hope that a young company full of smart people would excel in that space. Unfortunately, the only association I can muster between gaming and Facebook is the spamfest Farmville. The biggest experience I can think of is the data mining.

VR is one of the few upcoming tech changes I can actually see adding "delight" to my computing experience. Alas, I've never experienced any delight with Facebook; at best, I've managed grudging tolerance. I think I'm sad at the loss of what might have been.
> What possible reason could Facebook have to purchase a company so far removed from its core competency?

yeah, what's next? zuck buying spacex so you can visit friends on the moon?
Wow, I thought the real-life James Halliday was going to be Palmer Luckey, Gabe Newell, or John Carmack. I didn't pick that it could be Mark Zuckerberg!
They already had almost $100 million in funding, and I'm sure they would've gotten $1 billion if they needed it later on, and with a product already on the market. This is an extremely poor decision on their part. I wonder how Carmack (truly) feels about this, because he just switched from one corporation that wouldn't let him do what he wants for another.
I'm not a huge fan of FB either, but IMO, actually looking at it that way is kind of exciting. Imagine Oculus VR + Project Tango = "experience" physical places you otherwise might not. Or if it could be used to shop Amazon Fresh as a regular grocery store (sometimes I don't know exactly what I need/want, and I like just walking through the aisles to see)? There's a lot that this could potentially open up if used as a connectivity/communication hardware; but I agree, that they should nail down their core competency first before pursuing other use-cases.
Jeez.... Why being so religious about technology ? It's only "stuff"
> More people avoid Facebook for privacy reasons, etc.

The fact that you admit deep deep use of Google and trust them with all your data tells me that there's a bit of naïveté in terms of Google & privacy (as if you're getting more privacy in one vs. the other.)
I think that given the speed at which bitcoin mining hardware is obsoleted, it is perfectly reasonable that most ASICs would have an expected useful life of under a year.
The fact that this was released to the "Computer History Museum" was apparently missed or not understood by the majority of the audience.
This is a god damned tragedy. (And the smartest move Zuck has ever made.)

VR was supposed to be a new frontier, I have been so excited to see finally the Next Thing was coming and it feels so much like the early days of the web and computing. But now it's owned by the worst company on the planet when it comes to choosing inspired thinking and pushing humanity forward instead of just trying to get inside of our lives (and now our heads.) I am frankly terrified.

Thank God for Valve, I hope they hit the gas and leapfrog these guys now on the tech and poach as many of them as they can. Thank goodness there is still plenty of work left to do and Facebook doesn't own all the VR patents. I am so fucking scared of a world where Facebook has a monopoly on VR. I really hope it doesn't happen.
Facebook does have the Internet.org[0] initiative which focuses on getting internet connections to more people in the world. I can't speak to its effectiveness or how serious they are about it though.

0 - http://internet.org/ (kinda funny that I use a cliff note link for this)
How to Focus: Why Being Aware of Distractions Can Help You
Totally, You can actually see other wazers with you in the traffic jam. And globally: "According to Yahoo! there were nearly 50 million Waze users as of June 2013"
Per the notice mining is subject to income tax always, and to self-employment tax only if it done by the taxpayer as part of a "trade or business".
I'm still confused why anyone would be using the tab system - a good set of filters will do the same thing, be more customizable, and won't take up another 30px of vertical screen real estate.

I'm also not sure why anyone would knowingly tab over to a big page of ads. (Even with the "Categories" view disabled, Google continues to label my messages for these tabs. For me, though, 90% of the messages under "Promotions" are IEEE bulletins, and the rest are from mailing lists from which I unsubscribe as soon as I see them.) I find the idea of encouraging users to embrace advertising through e-mail to be just kind of gross.
Instagram has been allowed to go at their own pace since they've been acquired. Parse, also, has essentially gone on it's own and created things at it's own pace. It seems they're having the same attitude with Whatsapp. I assume, especially with Carmack coming over, that FB will be extremely hands-off with the base technology behind the rift.

Facebook is an engineering company; in the way it's run and with what it pushes out to consumers. It's a flat organization essentially run by engineers I mean shit, the CEO built the original product. The Rift under Facebook, I guarantee you, will be the best VR product in the market in five years; which would be much faster than the decade and half it would've taken on their own. Speculation I know, but again with the way Facebook is run, it seems that this acquisition will only expedite the awesomeness-that-is-to-come.
That was my thought as well. Just like Microsoft long ago diversified into hardware and services, and Google is doing Calico, self-driving cars, etc. FB sees value in the diversification strategy. I'm doubting they'll be doing Facebook logins or "post to your timeline" stuff with this anytime soon, if ever. Facebook is trying to get more fingers in more pies, which makes perfect sense.

As far as Oculus goes, this probably takes a whole heap of pressure off of them. Now they can act like one of the units of Bell, and just work on the thing, rather than worrying about pleasing investors or turning a profit anytime soon. Assuming FB doesn't do anything crazy, this will only help them and the tech.

Edit: the thing that should be worrying both companies is the potential developer backlash. Not everyone loves FB, as the comments here attest. Perhaps an investment rather than an acquisition would have stirred up less vitriol.
I hope someone makes a top-notch open source/open hardware VR platform.
I normally agree with you, but I really believe Facebook's model - hosting people's personal life in a corporate database - is wrong, flatly wrong. It'd be wrong for anybody, but they're the most active pushers. Friend lists, personal photos, relationships, messages, even though users gave them up freely, it was wrong to take them.

IT ethics means that you use your expertise to actively protect sensitive information. They don't do that, and there can be / will be / are consequences. If anybody could have pushed an effective self-hosting platform, it's them, but they haven't.

They are at the bottom of the ethical barrel.
FB buying Oculus was on the cards. This'll change everything.
I agree that it is a good move, but not because of takes away risk. It's because Facebook has a great deal of users, money, and apparently vision. I had no idea Zuck was this smart (although building Facebook into a giant ought to have been a good clue).

Oculus isn't being conservative here. They're shooting for the moon.
Facebook To Buy Oculus VR,For Around $2B In Cash And Stock
Thanks for posting this. I spent an entire hour looking for this site the other day but couldn't find it at all. This is the finest description of Fourier transforms that I've ever seen.
Oops, sorry, didn't mean to downvote
Seems like a good opportunity to revive Armadillo, no?
I mean … he has not been with Oculus for too long, officially at least, despite giving them the praise that earned them $2bn.

All in all, a fair deal for Oculus, I think. Now the question is, will Facebook be able to get a ROI? To me, this looks like a lucky day for Sony, but maybe that's my geek-glasses fooling me.
What does facebook have to do with Oculus?