skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Money can buy a lot of votes.
Willing to bet he won't do that until about 4 years after the acquisition, to collect his payout.
I can control my Xbox from my Windows PC.
So your suggestion is - don't ask, don't tell? Sorry but I think it's important to discuss these issues out in the open.

If calling out homophobia is a liability, then I'm happy to be guilty as charged.
In a country run by the Republican party based on Christian laws.

The USA is based on Christian laws?

What?

No doubt there's a faction that is working on that goal, but that has never been the case in this country thus far.

Also, it's not like the Democrats (the party of the KKK) are much better in that regard.
How to get started with SVG
New R / data science book
You don't itemize your property on any tax form. If I bought AAPL stock some time in the past, but haven't (yet) sold it, I don't report that position to the IRS.
That also assumes that Islam would have gone unchanged, as well.
Armadillo Aerospace was one of the few websites I visited regularly and was really dismayed when they went dark.

I really hope he returns to it and goes orbital, if Musk can do it JC can do it better IMO
So here's a question for everyone -- if I take a few hunks of wood, say worth 10 bucks, and use it to craft a musical instrument that can be sold for $100, does that count as $90 in income, even if I just leave it on a shelf?
It differs from state to state, basically:

* http://money.howstuffworks.com/personal-finance/personal-inc...
The comments on that reddit are insanely hilarious; The hatred is palpable.
I've just demanded my order for the DK2 cancelled and to be refunded. I cannot, in good conscience, fund Facebook.
How many hours has it been since the announcment. I hope you save this post and review it in a few years. Perhaps it will give you a moment to ponder over your character.

Edit: To qualify, by character I mean its easy to be critical and negative, perhaps that has a negative effect on ones life or outlook.
Believe it. I won't buy one either now, period. I hate Facebook and will absolutely not buy any product they sell, no matter how cool it might otherwise be. Nearly everyone I interact with has a similar loathing of Facebook both as a company and a service, so it's not at all surprising to me that nearly everyone is furious about this acquisition.
I don't think you meant anything bad by this but this statement makes it seem like you are overly concerned with being political or extremely worried about literally voicing your own view. It's not exactly like "When they came for X I did not care because was not X" but its sort of in the ballpark.

Sure, it is a charged issue. But if the zeitgeist changes in twenty years to march further toward theocracy then I think I will be voicing opposition against that. :)
That's a rather immature argument. Instagram, Facebook, and WhatApp are not really used by the same crowd in general. Also, I'd encourage you to do a bit more scratching on the term infamous. Hitler was infamous. Look, I'm not trying to discount your point, which is that this 'was the best thing', but you really don't have that crystal ball. No one does.
The best thing? There is really no other company you could think of who would be a better partner?

Like google? Or Microsoft?
Aug. 1, 2012: When Oculus Asked for Donations
Maybe he gets enough cash out of it to restart Armadillo.
> And I did not chip in ten grand to seed a first investment round to build value for a Facebook acquisition

He really puts his finger on one of the reasons why this deal feels so weird here, I think. Nobody who contributed to the Oculus Kickstarter did so because they were hoping Oculus would get flipped to a mega-corp. They didn't do so because they wanted the Oculus team to have a big, splashy VC-style exit. They did so because they wanted the Oculus product. And the history of products that have been swallowed by mega-corps, after the swallowing, is not encouraging.

It's an outcome that strikes directly at the heart of the Kickstarter ethos. Everybody wins in this deal -- except the people who donated to the Kickstarter. Those folks... well, they kind of end up looking like suckers.
Depends on what you can actually finish I suppose.

I have several game maker projects which are long dead and gone because I got bogged down trying to write nifty engines and crap for them. In one case, I spent probably weeks working on my own custom (and, to be fair, only barely passable) physics engine for a game which can now be accomplished in a few lines now that game maker studio comes with a physics engine.

I can only imagine how deep the rabbithole would go if I ever started to learn game design in C++ or something (which, of course, I plan to) and then added language design on top of that. Would probably be really fun though.
That's like saying the iPhone is just a touch screen with a battery and a CPU.

VR has been nothing more than a pipe dream for decades. But the problem isn't just merely optics and gyros...it also needs to be lightweight and super-responsive in order to prevent headaches, motion sickness, and disorientation. And also I think there are some complicated things they have to do in order to simulate stereo vision.

These challenges are hardly trivial and there's still a lot that needs to be learned in order to refine the technology.

$2 billion is a lot of money, more than it would cost to develop from scratch. But, in the past, others have tried to perfect this technology and failed.

Facebook (or Apple or Google or Microsoft) could spend $2 billion developing their own VR hardware and easily end up with nothing more than vaporware. Occulus Rift has the benefit of being a real product that works...while only being a few iterations away from a consumer-ready product.
So Facebook has a search engine ?
I wonder if Oculus felt threatened enough by Valve and Sony to jump at any solid opportunity to aggressively ramp up their development, hiring and so on?

Sony has the brand name and Valve have a pretty solid community. If either were out there with as-strong or superior technology, Oculus might've been irrelevant within 2-3 years.
I agree. People are hating on social VR here, I think, just because they are upset to see the facebook acquisition and don't know how else to disparage the deal.

Don't get me wrong- I'm extremely upset about it due to facebook's clearly evil history - I don't know how anyone could deny this, given user exploitation and tracking[0] - and the fact that Oculus Rim values the combined ideas of virtual reality and augmented reality (which I don't think should be combined) as 1/10th the value of Whatsapp is beyond me.

However, is souped-up video conferencing really such a terrible idea? I wouldn't go to a 10-year high school reunion on Oculus, but I definitely would reunite with my college buddies every few weeks if we had something less lame than Skype or Google Hangouts to do it on.

[0] http://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2011/11/facebo...
This is extremely disappointing. This technology had the potential to be much bigger than Facebook. The Occulus was poised to create an entirely new industry. They were pioneering a technology never before seen, with a legend like John Carmack pushing the state of the art.
I cannot think of a more colossal mistake to make as a founder. Palmer Luckey has shown he has absolutely no faith in his ability nor that of his team. Occulus had nothing but success in their future. They had investors beating down their doors with money, developers announcing support for the platform before even getting a dev-kit, and consumers itching to grab hold of their product.

Facebook is the antithesis to Occulus. They have never created any technology, they add zero value to the the real world, and have no future potential in the long run. Occulus selling to Facebook would have been like Tesla selling to Proctor and Gamble after they released the Roadster. A company with a technology so radical it can change the industry, succumbing to weakness and cashing out to an old money company that has no expertise in the field for some chump change.

I am filled with sadness and disappointment. I believe Palmer Luckey will regret this decision.
I don't think it's fair to blame the megacorps and not the companies that are selling out. All these startups talk a good game about being cutting edge, disruptive, a passionate place to work etc. but it's all BS. Engineers work their asses off working on something they believe in and the minute some megacorp waves a big check in front of the founders they sell out. They might be passionate about their product but they are still more passionate about giant piles of money.

It's stuff like this that makes me not want to work for a startup. These guys had a great business. Everyone loved their product. Even the people who got physically sick from using it still thought it was cool and wanted them to succeed. They had a perfectly viable company that could have been very profitable on its own. But hey who wants all the responsibility and work of having your own profitable company when you can just sell out...

Let's not even get into how unethical it is to use something like KickStarter to get you started and then turn around and sell out for billions a couple years later before you even ship a consumer product.
Google does, but Facebook? Names?
That's wrong. Simple as that.
No, I think for any major or known company this would turn a lot of heads. Any CEO that has ties to homophobia or whatever you want to call it is going to get talked about. But, I will say given the kind of culture Mozilla seems to support, it is an odd choice.
Whats the point of this website?
Facebook did not pay $400 million per employee
to scrap their product.

If paying a lot makes acquisitions succeed, maybe facebook should have paid more to make the acquisition even more successful :)

This deal reminds me of ebay buying Skype: Two technology companies, both with reasonable products, but nothing to do with each other.
Hardware is how you deliver eyeballs. It's why android was bought. Oculus will be a medium for delivering eyeballs as will Google Glass.

If there was an alternative to google search Apple would default to that search engine. They don't need the billions they make from Google search being in iOS.
And I would argue that fighting against marriage rights (for LGBT) is our version of Jim Crow laws. History will show that people; all people deserve equal rights and protections under the law. Desegregation took decades, and arguably still isn't completely successful, given laws that disproportionately target black communities.

And this isn't about a church refusing to marry someone because of their sexuality. This is about governmental rights and legal rights conferred to married couples.

Or on a more dour note: What happens if a homosexual couple moves to a state that bans that practice, and they choose to divorce?

That's why this stuff is important.
The choice of syllables is irrelevant. The choice of values is what matters.

As Dave says, there are a whole bunch of people selling heavy tools and frameworks and calling them "Agile" where they are anything but. Safety, to pick the obvious example, is not an Agile value, and numerous commentators have called SAFe nothing but RUP in Agile clothing.

Declaring Agile dead seems a bit naff, but obviously the manifesto lacks values and principles to address Dave and Richard's concerns.

So I've kicked off an initiative to do exactly that. Agile: The Next Generation or A:TNG for short, augments but does not replace the Manifesto values with four new ones specific to Agile at scale. It offers pattern languages (not frameworks or methodologies) based on Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai" and the thousand year Iroquois Confederacy.

Most importantly it rebases the whole Agile Alliance shtick on github, where it can be properly open and we can properly self-organise and evolve it without some clique of middle aged white guys dictating to the community at conferences.

Details and some starter patterns are up at http://agiletng.org .

So, yes, Agile is dead. And long live Agile! -- Peter Merel.
Google ? I don't know, they have so many products that they acquire and then shut down. Also, they have so many products that... it wouldn't have been such a big deal to acquire Oculus

Microsoft ? They already have a gaming branch so why not, but for the same reason as Google, people wouldn't have noticed it much.

But Facebook ? Everybody around me is going to talk about it, even non-gamers. You have no idea how huge this is for VR.
Please come up with a different scenario, because you're never going to convince me that it's wrong to try to discourage you from putting me in a concentration camp, or taking any steps to put in power someone who would.
"this ... lays bare the sheer stupidity inherent in kickstarter..."

I'm sorry, but where is the stupidity? Kickstarter is a specific tool available to founders/innovators/creatives that allows us to reach a community of supporters quickly and efficiently.

Like all tools, it has a specific way that it operates, and to keep such a new thing from spinning out of control, it is relatively simple and has few rules. Fortunately, we are all made aware of this going in. Backers generally pledge to receive a product. The creator benefits from early access to cash which allows them to build their product.

This is what happened with Oculus, and they have already delivered vouchers to all backers which they could have redeemed for the original developer version from last year, the current developer version coming in July, or the consumer version still definitely coming towards the end of this year.

I fail to see how Oculus gaining a parent company somehow "lays bare the sheer stupidity" of the system Kickstarter provides. People pledged for a high quality VR device, and Oculus promised to change the world. It seems these things will happen.

One of the most compelling opportunities provided by virtual reality is not just gaming, but it's capability to put us somewhere else, including in a virtual room with our loved ones. Virtual reality enables an interaction that humans have never before been able to experience - the ability to hang out in a virtual space with another person.

Facebook, whose primary goal has generally been to provide a platform for connecting humans to eachother, clearly sees the value in VR's ability to provide this new experience for us. As such, they've used their purchasing power to buy a stake in the VR game and help grow this new technology. Some day, we will be able to hang out with out loved ones, visit the doctor, or join a game with friends all in a shared virtual space.

This is a future made possible by the Kickstarter model, which enabled Oculus to get the start they needed to commercialize Virtual Reality.

Tell me again how that is stupid?

What strikes me as stupid is the huge number of people decrying this move as some kind of perversion of the original Kickstarter promise, or some kind of bait and switch. It seems to be the logical progression of a company creating a ground-breaking new human interface device. Should they stay independent indefinitely just because they were crowd funded? I don't see how that would make any sense, or why such a modification to the Kickstarter model would be any kind of improvement.
Do you think Prop 8 is anything but a Christian law?

Oh wait I just tried to rationalize with a guy who compared the Democratic party to the KKK. Nevermind, good luck with being nuts.
They now have only one place to get funding, before they could go up to pretty much any investor and get funding. Maybe it wouldn't have lasted if the VR turns out not as good as it's hyped to be, but for now I don't see why they need the resources of Facebook. Of course they're readying for a product launch, a product that appears to become popular, so they'll need to invest in production capacity and materials, but is a takeover really necessary and the best way to achieve that?
> Think about when Microsoft got into gaming and created Xbox. Now imagine if they didn't.

Maybe Sega would have released the Dreamcast 2...
You need a bit more to than simple disagreement when the initial statement is that a donation (of $1,000) and a vote are different.
I think the big elephant in the room argument is right. They legislated their debt out of existence, and ... the market didn't care.

So the US can do the same, with the same result. Declare all US debt/treasuries to only have 50% of the nominal value. Immediate result : large drop, followed by recovery. Longer-term result : nothing.

So the Cyprus and Greece crises made this a valid policy option. It doesn't look like it will be necessary any time soon, but it has gone from inconceivable to "will happen at some point in the future".

The market doesn't actually want you to pay back your debt. They care, but not enough for real consequences for the debtor. Why ? Simple : there's no other place to put money if you have very low interest rates everywhere.
I'm not sure how true this is, but I recently watched an anti-google documentary about their book-scanning business and they said sources familiar with Larry Page claim that he had no interest in Google as a business but rather was attempting to achieve advanced AI through Google.
> is it genetic?

Like much in the field, this is something of an open question. You can fill literal libraries with material on this subject and still not get a clear cut, concise answer to this.

However if you honestly believe it is a choice, then I have to ask you when you decided what your sexuality would be. Because chosing your sexuality is an experiance I cannot relate to.
Kickstarter Project: Learn to develop iOS applications
There is no need to wait to question the motivations behind an annoucement. Why should there be a 'mourning period' for news, where it wouldn't be appropriate to criticize?
The original post is using "gendered" in a non-linguistic sense (with a meaning something like '[disproportionately] associated with a particular gender'). There are definitely adjectives and nouns that have such a strong gender connotation that they're used almost exclusively to refer to people of one gender, even though gender isn't necessarily part of their definition. (Common examples in English are "feisty", "perky", "bitchy", and "voluptuous", although there are others.) It seems quite possible to imagine verbs entering this category, so that they'd be used in practice almost exclusively with subjects of one gender, though I don't know of an example in English.

I think the original post's use of "gendered" is actually weaker than this phenomenon because it says that "love (one's activity or profession)" is used much more by men than by women, not necessarily that it's acquired a connotation for listeners that the subject is male. (So the Hacker School administrators' concern is that women tend not to describe themselves as "loving programming", not that a listener hearing that "X loves programming" will assume that X is a man.) I guess I just mean to suggest that it's quite possible to imagine a verb also acquiring such a connotation for listeners, even if this one hasn't in this case.

Getting back to the linguistic question of whether verbs can have gender, I think that duco in the sense of 'take (a wife)' in Latin can only be applied to a man's act of marrying a woman, and not to a woman's act of marrying a man, but that might be more a matter of ancient Roman legal understanding of marriage and so could be closer to your example of "impregnate" than to the original post's sense, which is meant to refer more to connotations than to grammatical possibility or impossibility.

There actually are languages that have genders for verbs, where gender is a feature for which verbs are inflected and where verbs must agree with their subject in gender as well as, say, number. For instance, in Hebrew if a male subject loves something, the verb form is אוֹהֵב ohev, whereas when a female subject loves something, the verb form is אוֹהֵבֵת ohevet. Arabic also has gender-marked verb forms that agree with the grammatical gender of the subject. This has no connection to the way the original post uses the term, though!
"You seem to imply voting for a cause is okay, but donating $1000 to promote that cause crosses a line. I find this distinction curious. Where is the line? Is it the first penny donated? The first dollar? Dollar #999 of 1000? Does the relevancy of the donation last forever, or is it subject to time decay?"

I didn't say that at all. You made that up and then ranted about it. I simply said that one is bad, but the other makes it even more bad. Its like anything else, doing one bad thing is bad, doing two bad things is more bad. This is pretty simple and probably doesn't require such a massive twisting of words...
Let me know when you're going to start boycotting Picasso paintings.
Curious to know if proxymachine is still used, anyone know?
It's kind of hard to reconcile any of those arguments with support of Prop 8.

Prop 8 very specifically changed the law against a very specific group. It wasn't maintaining status quo; it wasn't removing the state from the issue; it was placing certain people at a disadvantage.

Consequently, while there are some possibly reasonable arguments about gay marriage (getting the state out of marriage altogether being the most compelling), supporters for Prop 8 can't hide behind them.
I totally agree that wearable computers like Google Glass aren't ready to replace conventional mobile devices. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that the webcam+screen model of video chat (not the keyboard+mouse model of computing) in the near future will be replaced by something like webcam+Rift+Omni. I think the technology will likely be mature enough within the next few years and that the public is already ready to adopt it.

Before the 1964 World's Fair, the notion of video chat to accompany the telephone was considered science fiction. Even after the technology was demonstrated to the public, it stayed in the realm of science fiction, as seen in the film 2001, until the 21st century. I really think that being able to interact with other people in a digital world a la the Matrix would sell millions of units instantly.
Personally, politicians' affairs only really bother me if they ran on a "family values" platform. Then it's just straight up hypocrisy, especially if they are caught in a gay affair because "family values" is a euphemism for anti-gay.
It is possible to always want more money no matter how much you have.
I don't think people are upset because they "got big", but because they were acquired by a corporation that signals a core shift in their ideals. If they were bought by Valve, or even Microsoft, I don't think there'd be nearly as much backlash -- because it's not that they're BIG, it's that Valve and Microsoft would not be pushing for a different market with their product (not to say they wouldn't later).
I'm guessing the reason they sold was simple: The owner wanted the money.
Is there some sort of HN comment guideline that dissuades this sort of garbage?
I don't think those are very good reasons to refrain from voicing your opinion. If everyone had that mentality I don't think the world would be a very good place. There's certainly a handful of instances where you should keep your opinion to yourself (such as in the workplace), this is not one of them though.

I think it's easy to predict where things are going with this topic: no discrimination and equal rights for all. That has been the steady march of progress for a very long time, and it will continue onward. Of course it doesn't happen without setbacks, but we all know where things will end up eventually, simply because it's the right thing to do.
Really? Because one is a private and one is a public act, and you might hope a potential CEO would understand that difference.
That's right! Facebook is the cause for more divorces and suicides than anything else. Everyone that works for them should hang their heads in shame.
Meanwhile, CastAR is alive and well, and still looking like a better product.