skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I share some of your misgivings about companies "existing and operating only to be acquired". I am a true believer in market economies, and the magic of trade being a positive sum game is most obvious with repeated transactions at a consumer level. Company acquisitions, while still (usually) being a trade between willing parties that in theory leaves both better off, have much more of an element of speculation rather than objective assessment of value, and it definitely feels different.

There is a case to be made for being like Valve, and trying to build a new VR ecosystem like Steam from the ground up. This is probably what most of the passionate fans wanted to see. The difference is that, for years, the industry thought Valve was nuts, and they had the field to themselves. Valve deserves all their success for having the vision and perseverance to see it through to the current state.

VR won't be like that. The experience is too obviously powerful, and it makes converts on contact. The fairly rapid involvement of the Titans is inevitable, and the real questions were how deeply to partner, and with who.

Honestly, I wasn't expecting Facebook (or this soon). I have zero personal background with them, and I could think of other companies that would have more obvious synergies. However, I do have reasons to believe that they get the Big Picture as I see it, and will be a powerful force towards making it happen. You don't make a commitment like they just did on a whim.

I wasn't personally involved in any of the negotiations -- I spent an afternoon talking technology with Mark Zuckerberg, and the next week I find out that he bought Oculus.

-------------------------------------------------------------

I did skip the data mining issue, mostly because I just can't get very worked up about it.

I'm not a "privacy is gone, get over it" sort of person, and I fully support people that want remain unobserved, but that means disengaging from many opportunities. The idea that companies are supposed to interact with you and not pay attention has never seemed sane to me.

Being data driven is a GOOD thing for most companies to be. Everyone cheers the novel creative insight and bold leadership that leads to some successes, and tut tuts about companies ending up poorly by blindly following data, but cold analysis of the data is incredibly important, and I tend to think the world will be improved with more and better data analysis.

I have never felt harmed by data mining, and I rather like the recommendations that Amazon gives me on each visit. Educate me. What terrible outcome is expected from this? Be specific.
New Best Encryption?
I'm not sure what you mean by "content changes", but I plan eventually to open-source the software I use to keep track of title and url edits.
Mr. Eich and others are completely free to act according their views on homosexuality, vis a vis their own sexual activities and the way they may choose to raise their families. Restricting the freedom of others is where their freedom to act ends.
Yea, I thought that was bizarre. It makes you wonder what Carmack actually thinks of Facebook buying Oculus.
I don't even have to engage in transactions with myself, but create a small cartel that really love each others' transactions. Think of the good old link farm sites from the early days of Google. You pay, and a bunch of positive feedback is provided between sites.

In your case, you could even do the opposite: Pay me and my friends, or we will dislike every transaction you will ever make. Built-in racketeering
Ze Frank on Running Out of Ideas (2006)
I can't agree more that developing and delivering competitive VR will be resource intensive over many years, but Oculus had already raised on the order of $100 million, and i'm certain they could have either raised capital for manufacturing or negotiated directly with an existing contract manufacturer for production (many of whom must surely have been beating a path to their door). Is a large tech company really that much better of a bank/VC than a bank or VC? ("don't answer that question")

You mention that Facebook brings "scaling infrastructure experience to the table". While FB's datacenter and network expertise might be very helpful for rolling out any hosted or networked VR applications, I would argue that shipping a hardware product requires a radically different culture compared to shipping web applications. Oculus will be, at best, be Facebook's first big risky learning experience in meeting contemporary expectations for consumer electronics logistics. Even Apple is still learning how to do this, and they have the benefit of shipping dozens of products with similar scale and expectations. I think if Oculus had done things on their own, or with a less brand name partner (Flextronics?) customers would have been willing to cut them much more slack regarding schedule and minor roll out woes as long as the core technology/experience delivered.

Another major downside from such tight ties to Facebook will be convincing other large institutions/platforms (Amazon, Microsoft, Nintendo, Google/Android, Apple, hardware vendors) to cooperate or collaborate in building new services. Oculus might be promised autonomy, but would Palmer still be allowed to unilaterally negotiate with Linden Labs, or IBM, or Apple? Seems unlikely.

EDIT TO ADD: The whole acquisition would make a lot more sense if Oculus had suddenly come under direct legal/patent/IP pressure, which could burn through that $100M a lot faster than, eg, the most significant advances in VR in a generation.
I don't think John Carmack, of all people, has to worry much about his salary.
> which declare opinions like cells declare osmotic pressure

I got a good laugh out of this, well put!

Brendan Eich has the right to hold those opinions and whatever other opinions he wishes to hold. He has the right to publicly express them in the form of spoken or written words, campaign donations, or any other number of legal rights guaranteed by the first amendment. Here's some rights he does not have:
1) The right to unconditional employment, or a constitutional right to be the CEO of Mozilla.
2) The right to freedom from criticism of his beliefs.
3) The right to freedom from social consequences of his beliefs.

Remember that criticism is not censorship, those are different things entirely and when they are conflated it's almost always to protect people with those aforementioned pretty fucking stupid opinions. His opinions about homosexuality are offensive and disappointing to a lot of people. Why shouldn't they be able to express that to Mozilla? And if Mozilla feels like enough people are upset with their decision, they have the right to respond to market demands.

Let's veer wildly into strawman territory here. Let's say that instead of Brendan Eich, let's say Mozilla found some other extremely talented technologist to take the reins, but they were coincidentally an active, avowed white supremacist. Would you still think he has the right to hold those opinions without worrying about their effect on his career? What if he believed that non-Muslims should be put to the sword, or that women should be the property of their husbands, or any number of other horrible, backwards beliefs. Still cool with him as the CEO of Mozilla? If not, then we're really just disagreeing over how horrible someone's opinions have to be before they disqualify them from the position as the head of the CEO of a company that prides itself on inclusiveness and equality.
So we're in agreement that it was a trivial amount of money. Materially maybe it could have helped make ~60 protesting signs? Will you edit your original comment to cut the non-trivial bit?

I'm wondering what amount is trivial to you as a "donation to deprive people of the rights that others have"? My prediction: 3d9bfbc7789889002dc71f36cdce8af8fa93be7edb1ef6561c10181cc9c4e7a4
Note the the Mozilla Corporation is controlled by the Mozilla Foundation. So the position of CEO of Mozilla is in fact under that of the chairperson of the foundation. If something is analogous to "president", it would be the latter one (held by Mitchell Baker), not the CEO.
I agree completely. My point was when I looked at the list the first thing that jumped out at me was dig... yeah, I know what dig is, what it's used for, but I just hadn't seen it in a while... that's how often I actually have to use it. There isn't a reason for me to really keep it in my mental dictionary of known commands because of it's overall utility to me. Likewise commiting logrotate flags to memory, pretty much useless, how often do you honestly have to run that by hand or use it in a day in day out situation. If you answer "often" to that, then we'll need to get you up to speed on more core components like crons and shell scripts.

That was my point.
If Mozilla was working to develop marriage laws, this would be totally relevant. But they aren't.

I believe in marriage equality. I think Brendan's support of Prop 8 shows a stunning error of belief, and if he were being given a position of power over marriage laws, I would be part of the picket line against his appointment.

But I do not require that all people in the world share my opinions on all subjects. Holding differing opinions, even those that offend me, and acting in support of those opinions, is not a crime. If he uses his position at Mozilla to oppress, then we should fight that. But he's stated that is not his intention: in much the same way that I respect his right to hold an opinion, he has stated he intends to respect Mozilla's commitment to equality.
We are not in agreement.
I'd disagree with the assertion in your first paragraph. The Unix CLI toolset has evolved in a very similar way to any other software ecosystem. To compare with Python, the GNU coreutils/binutils and friends could be thought of as analagous to the Python core with other toolsets fulfilling a role similar to packages from PyPI. The standards and interface issues for both ecosystems are similar but luckily Python has more leeway to alter compatibility (ref changes in 3k).

There are all sorts of issues with altering the nix toolset, and we mustn't forget the importance of POSIX for compatibility. We can't simply decide to 'replace the UI of *nix' without fundamentally changing how the nix ecosystem and community operate (and I wouldn't want to). OS development is not agile and rarely compat breaking, and for good reason.

I also read the sibling as promoting a fundamental understanding of the underlying platform being developed on, not so much pushing teaching of just CLI usage. Knowing how, e.g., the filesystem works and the caveats involved is something that can lead to much better software design decisions. And knowing how to chain a cheap sed instead of just throwing Python and the re module at a glob.glob listing can be just as useful.
I'd summarize it as there are currently gaping security holes that leave the car immediately vulnerable to a determined hacker. The currently level of security is below what anyone could reasonably consider minimum enterprise level.
That's creatinine levels. Creatinine is a breakdown product of creatine, and its level is a convenient measure of kidney function.
I have to agree with Carmack here. Companies, governments or individuals having lots of data isn't a bad thing in its self. It's what they do with that data that matters, and what they do can be positive as well as negative.

This is not to say that we should blindly trust data-holders to behave responsibly. We should watch them very closely! The recent kerfuffle about Microsoft reading a blogger's mail is a good example: MS took an action many people felt was wrong, it got widely publicized, and MS decided they weren't going to do it again, and made a policy change to codify that decision. What was a grey area became a bright line that they've vowed not to cross.

The existence of big data is new, and our civilization hasn't figured out how to deal with it yet. I'm confident that we will figure it out, and the good that comes from it will be much greater than the evil.
I would say the president of the foundation (/the board) is analogous to the electoral college :)
Great reminder. For me, not worrying about getting a degree freed me to take the classes that interested me the most, and all of them are helping me build my company. I'm looking forward to teaching my boys that if they never fail, they're not doing much at all to challenge themselves.
Needs more Bittorrent.
I want to make clear that I'm not intentionally faulting the OP in this situation, because the decision with regards to message brokers isn't easy in a complex system. Often you have to mix "lossy" messages (pubsub) with simple ack messages (receipt confirmation) as well as full RPC-style messaging (receipt ack, result response) and that is usually a non-trivial endeavor from both an architectural as well as implementation standpoint.
Until 2 years ago the president of the United State opposed gay marriage.

It was OK for him to be President of the United states, while publicly opposing gay marriage.

But it's not OK for the CEO of a browser company to publicly oppose gay marriage?
That is pretty dramatically false. He has the same freedoms you have: to participate in the political process, to express his views, and to obey the laws. He didn't go out and beat up people who he dislikes, he donated money to a political cause that you and I disagree with.
I'm not sure I'm more productive on 8 than 6 hours' sleep - is there any way to verify this? I'd even pay good money to find out the optimal amount of sleep for me.
What you describe isn't what I had in mind. I was thinking of the old-fashioned hard-boiled editor who says things like "over my dead body" and "give my regards to the President, but we won't be changing that story", and who offers his resignation on a regular basis. I'm pretty sure they didn't just exist in movies. Admittedly you probably have to go back to the glory days of print journalism to find them.
You seem to downplay politics.

If both Senate and House pass a bill on gay marriage with absolute majority (say overwhelmingly over 80%), a President who chooses to veto such bill is to seek political suicide. Congress can then veto the President's veto.

If Brendan Eich today discriminate gay employees or volunteers he will be under a public crisis and he will lose his hard work.

Please put down the worry. If you keep on worrying, you will never stop. Anyone who disagree should be ready to answer questions like "what if he's against abortion? against H1B visa? against tax payer money to pay for college tuition, whether people should live with free software only or not?".

You will never be able to find anyone who will agree with you on everything.
They are using an BGP hijack attack: https://twitter.com/TelecomixTurkey/statuses/449924292914839...
Well, it was a diplomatic attempt at saying it's easier to like FaceBook when you get a lot of money from them.

There is a little more to all of it, but that's the nutshell.
Facebook isn't IBM or Oracle. Instagram is still doing fine, it's kept its own identity and I would never have known they were bought by facebook if it wasn't such huge news. To me, on the surface, it's following the exact path same as it was before the purchase, but it would be naive to think that Facebook's infrastructure and experience with scalability has nothing to do with the fact that instagram is always up and always works as its grown.
The whole idea is that it collects the top ten news stories of the day and presents them to the user.
Carmack is the CTO.
Which version of debian? it does not work in latest Ubuntu, the most popular distro.
Cross posting my comment from the original article:

----

Hi John, huge fan of all your work.

I think the biggest issue with the FB acquisition is over one variable: control. The Oculus team has, by definition, relinquished control of their platform to FB. This is not a decision to be brushed aside, as it has some very severe consequences.

Let's for example, consider Oculus' partnership with developers. Prior to the FB deal, Oculus had a direct relationship with developers and would work in tandem with them to guarantee the best user experience. Now, there is a massive Facebook middleman, with all of the decision making power, wedged between Oculus and developers. This is the real reason why Notch and many others have abandoned the platform.

Oculus can give us their word, swear an oath, and cross their hearts. But their destiny is no longer in Palmer's, your's or Michael's hands. It's in Mark Zuckerberg's. And if there is, at any point, any sort of disagreement over the smallest issue, there will be no debate because the Oculus team are now nothing more than employees, and will have to put up or shut up when it comes to crucial decisions.

Of course, as long as there are no problems, and everything is rosy then all is well. But the second rough seas are encountered and tough decisions need to be made, I fear that the Oculus team will understand that they've made a serious mistake by relinquishing control of their destiny to Facebook.

If the Oculus team was short on cash, I'm sure there would have been a great many investors willing to pour additional money into the venture at very generous valuations. This is because Oculus was a darling of the industry, with legends such as yourself on board. The developer community knew that you would not compromise on the experience, and because you answered to no one but the Oculus team and your investors, you were free to make the Oculus experience the best it could possibly be.

Personally, I have watched many interviews with yourself describing the challenges of the Oculus and how you are working on overcoming them. I was sold based on your vision, determination, and most importantly, the freedom and control to deliver the best experience possible. I cannot help but feel that the FB deal has put a sword of Damocles over your heads, as the technical leads will always be the first to have to accept defeat when faced with executive meddling on critical decisions.

I would point to Elon Musk, and how he has maintained control of Tesla and SpaceX, not because it was the correct financial decision, but because as a product company he would have been doomed if non-technical executives began vetoing his critical design decisions. Sadly, this latter scenario is the one I believe Oculus has put itself in. I truly hope you can weather these storms as they arise, but history and experience tell me it will be extremely difficult.

Forever a fan,

FD3SA
SJWs are a tiny, insane minority. You neither represent, nor speak for the community. You certainly do not speak for me.
If you still have that last invite I would really appreciate it. Thanks, travis@pavek.co
It's not that these features exists which is the problem. It's that Tesla has implemented it's security poorly, potentially exposing these features to hackers.
I don't think it has much to do with his salary. My view of him is largely positive as well, but from what I've read (Masters of Doom, a lot of his writing) he is not a man to whom empathy comes easily (which is not to say he isn't a good, moral man).
their intentions are held in as high regards as their technical decisions
> If Brendan Eich today discriminate gay employees or volunteers he will be under a public crisis and he will lose his hard work.

The reason why he is receiving so much criticism right now is that a lot of people don't think the date of the donation makes any difference. He should not be CEO of an "inclusive" organization.
Mastering Dollars...why not?
a senior knows why.
Really? Is the public image of instagram 'destroyed'? You're in the tech bubble. In the consumer world no one cares as long products perform well and cheaply.
It's interesting to see how the language constructs are similar... But this blog post is so anti-climatic! Let's see some graphs and some performance analysis! GC analysis would be great too. jj09, looking forward to seeing part 2!
CTOs rarely sit on boards.
Its all sunshine and roses until "the meeting" in which Carmack says "I've started this awesome feature that I feel defines the future of the product and..." a hand goes up and a suit says "that really doesn't fit with 'our vision' for where we want Oculus to go". Game Over.
It depends on how much better it is than Pivotal/Trello/Asana.

If it's not better along some axis I care about, then unfortunately the answer is probably $0 :/
I find it difficult to believe that there is a problem with an ENTIRE generation rather than a problem with hiring practices at the kind of companies that complain about these things.
Furthermore, while 95% of us on HN (including me) support gay marriage, the fact is that over half the population of California had the same opinion as Eich, back in 2008.

He supported a very mainstream position. Even if it is not mainstream on HN or in silicon valley or on tech news sites, it is mainstream when you look a little outside.

I oppose that position as I said above, but because it is held by about half of the population, we can't just refuse to work with anyone holding that position.
I hate reading on Forbes, it flashes text in the position:fixed headerbar every few seconds, an absolute nightmare to focus on the article while that's happening.(although I do manage to simply remove the headerbar from the page using the dev tools :P)
>>If the moderators are doing things the community doesn't like, exposing a log of moderator actions will hasten course correction.

Not on HN. This place can beat a dead horse so bad that it'd get up and run off. I don't think HN mods should be transparent at all. But hey, let them try it out... I assure you we'll have 2 or 3 front-page articles every week about some mod-action and the threads will get so pedantic/specious that the mods will have to take action on those threads too... which will lead to another story... which will lead to more mod-action.... ∞
I am so bored of seeing this over and over again. There is absolutely no ties between someones professional and personal life. As is, between a foundation/corporation and the views of any of their employees - yes this includes chairman. Give it a rest for crying out loud.
Some political views are unacceptable. If you think that the government should prevent people of different ethnicities from getting married, I don't want to work with you. If you don't think the matter at hand falls in the same bucket, I don't want to work with you.

We're not talking about disagreeing on tax policy here.
Cache it to a json file?
I don't remember any specific examples, but there are different sorts of moderation decisions we make, and it's not uncommon to make more than one of them at once. If you want to discuss specific examples, email me.

Also, I'm going to be the head moderator for a while, but not the only moderator. I'll answer the questions, but not necessarily do everything.
He does. He wants to fund Armadillo. He ran out of money to sink into it.
Where does Tesla call it a "REST" API?

AFAIK the API isn't even publicly documented (officially) and is only known because it was reverse engineered by sniffing traffic from the iOS and/or Android apps. The people who did that work refer to it as a "REST" API, but they aren't Tesla.

As far as whether they should be using GET for these calls regardless of whether they call the API a "REST" one or not -- they are a pragmatic company, and the simpler the software is on an embedded device like a car the better; strict adherence to the intent of various http methods is less important than just keeping things as simple as possible, maybe they didn't even implement post or put, I doubt they are running apache on that thing.