skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"And I did not chip in ten grand to seed a first investment round to build value for a Facebook acquisition."

The community raised $2.5 million, which (in part) enabled Oculus to build the first round of prototypes. That's great. I'm sure that the Kickstarter money was burned through a long, long time ago. And as far as I know, Oculus has delivered on every backer reward it offered. So backers got to do two things: they got the rewards they were promised, and they got to support Oculus' growth -- as far as I know, that is exactly the premise of Kickstarter.

So now Oculus has grown, and as Notch himself says:

"They had fixed all the major issues, and all that remained was huge design and software implementation challenges."

Huge challenges. Including scaling up from building limited quantities of developer kits to trying to mass produce consumer hardware. Oculus was helped to get to this point by Kickstarter money, but that money wasn't going to get them any further, and there's still a very large gap between where Oculus is now and where they (and their backers) want them to be.

Do I trust Facebook? No. Would I trust Microsoft or Google or Amazon or Apple? Not really. But I don't need to trust; I can simply wait and see what Oculus does with the money Facebook is giving it, and see what Facebook expects of Oculus in return. It COULD be bad. Or it COULD help Oculus grow. But the feeling of betrayal by the Kickstarter backers seems to me misplaced; you paid money to help Oculus grow and succeed, and they have.
He doesn't even believe in free and open marriages...
> 128 megabytes of RAM, who knows how much of which is available to the game and not reserved for the OS

The OS reserves 32MB for itself, which leaves you with a bigger working set than a bottom-shelf Android phone. =) I get what you're saying, but I don't think anybody's going back to the halcyon days of fewer megabytes than I've got fingers.

> I got the impression that it was for programmers of other disciplines

It felt like something I'd recommend to a CS student, tbh. Maybe that's just me.
I don't care if the man's a nazi.

I think it's fair to say you're probably in the minority there.
I think its about the fact that very few software companies can simply birth a hardware engineering division like Google. Its arguable that even Google struggles with it at times.

For a software-oriented company such as Facebook and a fairly new one and not the greatest on the balance sheet, its undoubtedly much harder for them to enter the hardware space than Google.
Thanks for the tip. I solved the problem forever by deleting the open source code from the Internet.

Bang up job by MS legal on this one. I'm confident this will prevent other distributions of this software.
I am not surprised at all a study found that less women say they "love" programming. In my career I have worked with many women, and none of them would I consider less than well-rounded as a person. But I have met many, many males who are heavily skewed toward the "hacking is life" mindset. Nevertheless, the two best programmers I have ever known are women, and they did not identify as "hackers."

Hacking is a culture, not a job description, and in my experience, singleminded dedication to programming is not an indicator of ability. So I guess the real problem with "Hacker School" is that it's a programming school not a hacker school. A hacker (programming) school could never say anything like "you don't have to love programming" because being a hacker is pretty much defined by loving it.
That's like saying whatsapp is a fancied-up text messaging app..wait, it is.
Is MS-DOS even patented ? As far as I remember, software patents were not granted until fairly recently in History (usually from the 90s).
Indeed, I don't see anywhere else that Americans accept a "wealth test" to exercise a basic economic right (ownership of production).

Note, the accredited-investor rules are not an "ability-to-pay" test. That would be fair: if you can write the check, you're in.

The rules also are not a creditworthiness test: they don't evaluate reliability, and investors want to give money, not take it from others.

And they're not a competence test: you can be credentialed to professionally handle others' investments and businesses (through things like passing the bar or "Series 7" or CPA exams), or otherwise have degrees in law, technology, and business... and still not pass the same "accredited investor" wealth standard that any dolt who inherits a million dollars does, automatically.

The distinction ought to be abolished as a matter of basic fairness.
Why Facebook’s Purchase of Oculus Will Kill the Rift and Hurt Consumer VR
>Facebook is the only competitor to Google at this point

I wouldn't discount some of the recent moves my Microsoft and its new CEO -- they seem like they're moving fast and trying to become the old MSFT we used to love (or at least I used to.)

Never count Bing out of the fight =)
I agree that a "recording" light would be a great idea, but that will really only protect against malware, not against people who are intentionally trying to surreptitiously take pictures. The reason being that anyone with direct hardware access to the device can find a way to disable the light.
Right, I see. Carmack sold out so he can fulfill his adolescent fantasies of being the programmer behind Snow Crash's metaverse.

Unfortunately, all it's going to be is a lame Facebook-branded knockoff of Second Life.
I could also see it used as a "more compact" 2lbs laptop where you could have that portable 50" screen you always wanted, with cameras embedded in the headset so your not blinded. It would also allow you to not be hunched over in a portable situation, not require a desk per say and be outdoors without screen brightness issues, which are all issues with laptops.
I mean, we're going to disagree on this:

> There are no non-legal aspects of financial transactions. When you give someone money they're going to try to retain that money and not give it back to you to the best of their legal ability. There really isn't a non-legal aspect involved in it unless you're a sucker who's willing to get screwed over.

This isn't really true, if you plan on doing business for more than one transaction. If you put a poison pill in a contract, guess what, you are blacklisted and can't do any deals in the future because nobody trusts you.

A similar thing is here. People chipped in money with the general expectation that Oculus was not going to sell out on the drop of a hat. It wasn't in the terms obviously but that was the expectation for many people. As such it's pretty much guaranteed for example that Palmer will never be able to do a kickstarter ever again (not that he cares at this point.) But it's a very real consequence, and so even though it was not in the deal in terms of legal consequences it is a very real outcome.

If you look at negotiations and transactions as if they are strictly independent events completely detached from human relationships you're probably a terrible negotiator slash businessperson. It's the difference between law and politics. I'll happily do a deal that isn't exactly a home run for me if I want to be sure I'll have a good relationship with that person for future opportunities.
Google wouldn't be any better, and I might argue worse. They are more likely than not to just shut it down. Microsoft or Apple would be better though IMO. Alternately Valve might have been nice.
I know women, programmers, who are in love with programming. Hell they're more in love with programming even maybe than I am. We have wonderful arguments about SOLID, and CQRS and event-sourcing and queues, and pipes, and job servers.

Loving your job isn't exclusive to men.

Anti-sexism is reaching a different type of extreme, where certainly we should be hiring women who don't love their job, just so we're not sexist?

I know where to draw the line. And I'm drawing it before that.
> People have been trying to get VR right for decades,

Because display technology wasn't there yet. The thing that made Oculus possible wasn't some miraculous development at Oculus VR, but the fact that smartphones created a massive market of low-cost high-quality super-high-pixel-density tiny screens.
>>I believe Palmer Luckey will regret this decision.

Absolutely. He has lost all credibility he had gained with such a cult following. I don't think he would be able to repeat it with the gamers and supporters again.
> Put on a headset and get teleported to a room in a virtual world where you can talk to your friends' avatars. Skype and Google+ Hangouts suddenly seem very 20th century.

I'd rather talk to my friends' faces, albeit on a computer screen, rather than their avatars in a virtual room. Face to face communication isn't practical when both parties are wearing something over their eyes.
I don't know if I agree with taxing them as compensation but at least this view makes the IRS guidance appear logical. Thanks for the explanation.
I wonder what happens when John Carmack hangs out with Mike Matas.
Kickstarter specifically prohibits equity deals with backers, as allowing them would place them in the crosshairs of the SEC.

FYI.
Loyalty lost is rarely regained. Now they’ll have to work twice as hard to remain credible in the industry

This happened to the OLPC. It was the darling of open-source fans who were scrambling over each other to write free software for it, who would nearly fight each other to play with it at conferences, attracted by its open-to-all ethos. Then they did the deal with MS ("for the children") and the buzz almost literally disappeared overnight. The army of developers willing to create content for free for the machine disappeared.

And when the buzz disappeared, the tech blogs stopped reporting on it, because no-one in the tech space was interested in it anymore. And the mainstream press was no longer interested because the tech blogs weren't. It was quite educational to watch the nosedive of the OLPC. There were other criticisms causing issues for the OLPC, it wasn't just the loss of tech buzz, but buzz is a major contributor to saleability, as is an active and expansive dev community.
His ultimate goal is to make the holodeck.
The problem that techies don't seem to realize...is that the system has always been about trust from the very beginning.

It was only within the past decade and a half that the IRS even acquired the ability to to spot discrepancies in returns based on filings from different taxpayers (due to the increase in e-filed return. Before that, enforcement relied almost entirely on random audits and tip-based investigations.
People who have had the opportunity to see both the DK2 and the Morpheus have almost all thought the Morpheus a better device. I think Luckey et. al. saw the handwriting on the wall and sold for the best deal they could while they still could into a market where they won't need to compete with Sony, MS, and Google directly.

They have no magic and they know it. Sony will trounce them technologically. Not getting to market before Sony is a fatal shortfall. I think they knew all along that they'd fall short going toe to toe with the big guns. There is something about Luckey that has always said huckster to me.

On the other hand, games are but the miniscule tip of the tip of the VR iceberg and the new placement with respect to the larger market could benefit grownups like me why could give a rat's a about games and social but see endless passive entertainment possibilities. Of course, Sony is there to beat in those domains as well.
Here is John Carmack's response from twitter:

> 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.

> I can't follow the volume of tweets today, so if you want a real answer to something, try in a couple days after things die down.

> I have a deep respect for the technical scale that FB operates at. The cyberspace we want for VR will be at this scale.

> I suppose I will get a FB account now, so that may lead to some writing a little longer than tweet length...
Don't like!
Could someone speak to the various credentials of the authors here?

I think this landing page would be substantially improved if there was further detail about the professional history of each of the authors. Perhaps a few words about any notable Go related projects that they've been a part of.
my complaint is mainly with the headline. if the word "kickstarter" was anywhere in the title I would not have clicked. d'oh.
Incidentally, this is why I recommend rewriting URLs to hide UTM strings on load: http://esd.io/blog/stripping-utm-strings.html This way they 1) look cleaner to the user (of a modern browser) and 2) if they are reshared it doens't come with a inaccurate tracking code.
I wasn't aware working for a different company implies "selling out".

Get some perspective, please.
What he did is support the disagreement that what is now considered a "right" by an increasingly liberal society was indeed a "right". What is wrong with this? Liberals and gays need to realize that they are often bigots against religion. Those believing the Bible's teachings have a different set of moral standards. I find it ironic that this man is called immoral by liberals and that gays are dubbed the immoral ones by believers in God.

Can't Liberals see that Believers hold themselves to a different set of standards? It is not often personal (though unfortunately for some religious extremists it is). The only hate that is being displayed here is by the anti-religious groups and individuals.

Think of it like this. A girl is invited to a friend's birthday party. She does not attend because her father forbids her to go and won't driver her there either. She tries to explain it to her friend, but here friend hates her now because can not come. Is this fair to the girl?

Some of you will say that this case is more like the girl paying someone to disrupt the party. Again, if the girl's father was responsible as God is for believer's convictions, then should the girl be hated anyway? I suppose if you think that the girl's father only existed in her own mind (was a phantasy) then you would think this.

Still does not seem fair? Well what if it came out later that the girl planning the party was going to do something harmful to the guests. By disrupting the party, the girl who looked cruel now in hindsight looks like a hero. This knowledge of the devious girl's plan is akin to the belief and knowledge that religious people have in God.

God cannot be proven or dis-proven via science. So how do atheists know they are really correct? how do religious people? At least the religious people have a basis that does not rely on unexplained things. A God and a creation are certainly a more plausible and simple explanation to our existence then any offered by atheists.

So who are the real bigots here? From each side's perspective, it is the other. My hope is that each side will respect (not agree with) the others reasons and not show hatred toward the other. If a gay person donates to a fund pushing gay marriage, don't show hate toward them, if a religious person donates to the opposition, the same applies. This is almost sportsmanship in a way. Play hard against the opposition, but when they fall down (when they are in need of help), show them kindness, help them up and continue the competition.
Energy Drinks Effect
The top-rated answer is actually very interesting (I had never considered Fourier space in terms of circles before) but it's less visually intuitive to me, and less obviously related to the most common applications of FT, than the way I was taught (and the way I presume it is most commonly taught), which can be seen at the top of this Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_series

Understanding that the square wave (and any other wave) can be represented as a superposition of sine waves at various frequencies seems like a better place to start because it illustrates the most common use case of FTs (alternating between time and frequency domain for a signal).
Uri wasn't full-time at Waze for a while now.. he co-founded Feex almost 2 years ago, and he's also not full time there. He does a lot of angel investments. I don't think that him joining Google was every a possibility.
One of these days, Mark is going to realize that not every acquisition has to be in the billions. And then he'll realize he could have acquired 3 or 4 times as many companies.
>"People who have had the opportunity to see both the DK2 and the Morpheus have almost all thought the Morpheus a better device."

Do you have any reputable links to support this?
Have we got non-NVidia benchmarks yet?
s/known inputs/desired outputs/ ?
>Virtual Reality is going to change the world

Just like 3D televisions/displays did? I have heard this for over a decade and I am still not convinced.
Why do you care? Seriously. This sort of question has all the intellectual gravitas of the vi v. emacs wars.
The rumour was the Sandberg wasn't consulted when Instagram was acquired. I wonder if she was consulted for these recent acquisitions.
Google would buy Oculus to integrate it with existing product lines, either Android or wearables. Microsoft would buy it for the Xbox. Apple would buy it to make it part of the iOS line. Facebook by far seems like the weirdest of the possible major buyers, because they have by far the fewest obvious complements to Oculus, but by the same token, that makes them the most likely company to be buying Oculus to expand into an entirely new space, in other words to let Oculus set their strategy rather than their strategy dictate the future of Oculus. It's a double-edged sword.
Does anybody actually like seeing ads when they are browsing around Facebook? Who thinks to themselves 'I feel like buying something, let's log in to Facebook and maybe a random ad will come up for something that I want'. If people want to spend money, don't they just search for it or hit up Amazon? I wonder, if given the option to show adverts when you first sign up - how many people would select it?
Not doing something and making an active, affirmative, financially-backed choice are miles apart.
Conspiracy Theory, Up Close and Personal (Bitcoin)
Not at all. That is the way I was seeing it but	gamblor956 explained the reasoning behind the IRS guidance in a response to one of my comments below:

"Bitcoins earned through mining are considered compensation for providing resources to the Bitcoin network to compute hashes verifying transactions."

When viewed as compensation then the treatment seems consistent with NSOs or barter transactions.
I think you miss the point. I am trying to get a discussion on where we draw the line on how we assert our political beliefs in everyday life.

For instance there has been talk here on the freedom of association. I support that to a degree. But not to the degree where I would want society to allow a shop keeper to only serve straight white males. But I would want a society that allows a church/temple/(name your religious building) to discriminate on not marrying people from outside of that faith.

This article got me thinking why have I drawn these lines. And wanted to open a discussion on how we decide when is it okay to limit someone's freedoms. I think the majority are saying lets try to prevent this guys ability to work for this company. Because he wants to limit who can marry who. But why is one okay and not the other? I'm not trying to take either side I'm just trying to ask why.
I wasn't going by the house prices specifically as an indicator, I was really trying to point out that Census data says that there are more millionaires per capita. In California. I used to be able to find it by county but the 9 bay area counties are well represented. All those millionaires are not "just the founders and a few MBAs"
I think this would be the idea. If there was even an option for equity, the entire sentiment of a quick flip changes. It becomes less about the company exploiting you and more about you not having enough faith to buy a few shares in addition to the prototype.

People right now currently feel akin to a benefactor who put a kid through college only to have the kid turn their back on them down the road once they're successful.
>but if Google was the buyer, there would be much more positive comments here.

I don't see a fundamental difference between the two. Both have the same model of scraping your data in order to further monetize their ad space.

The bummer for me here is the business model of the purchasing company. It isn't that it's Facebook per se, but it's how Facebook makes its money. It simply has a large chance of taking the product to a place I'd rather it didn't go.
Did you intend to just put 'giving women the vote' in a list of bad ideas alongside slavery and Japanese internment camps?
Link to the said comment please. I'm unable to find it.
That's pretty cool. I was under the impression that it was validating that the twitter/github/etc are owned by the same person, but using twitter/github/etc to validate that the keybase key is correct is much cooler.

However, it's not foolproof. If your attacker (e.g. the NSA) can compromise some of the proof sources, they can return only the compromised proof sources to the client so the client doesn't see anything that contradicts their malicious key. And if the user doesn't know offhand what twitter/github belong to the person their contacting, the attacker could even simply substitute their own sources that claim to be the same person without actually requiring any compromise of the proof site at all.

For example, if I don't know already that maria's Twitter is maria_h20, then the attacker who has compromised keybase can instead return maria_g20, a Twitter account under their control that has posted a proof of the malicious key.

I get that tracking a user will mitigate this, but that only helps if I've already interacted with the user before and chosen to track them.
From Notch:

"And I did not chip in ten grand to seed a first investment round to build value for a Facebook acquisition."

http://notch.net/2014/03/virtual-reality-is-going-to-change-...
I don't support gay-marriage either ... I've said it before and I'll repeat it again (if necessary). My religious beliefs hold that marriage is between a man and a woman, and I choose to follow my religion because it's something I feel deeply about. Asking me to compromise my religious beliefs or be called homophobic (I'm not), full of hatred (I'm not) or even biased (I'm not) just isn't fair.

I've got friends that live an alternative life-style, and I can discuss this sanely with them. We don't have to agree on everything to be friends and we certainly don't agree on whether their lifestyle can be aligned with my religious beliefs, but we also don't make it the focal point of our relationship.

I've never said I was against the various domestic partnership rules that allow equal insurance, tax breaks and other benefits to committed partners. I'm simply not willing to use the word marriage to describe the relationship.

So when I see all the commotion about a measly $1000 donation to support proposition 8 in CA, I wonder why anyone is actually wasting their time on a protest. I don't think that Eich is filled with hatred ... I suspect he barely thinks about it at all. But why is it okay when the hatred is directed at him? Why are people so consumed by the issue that they give up vast amounts of their time and energy?

I can live without hating ... can you?

P.S. I'll admit that there are probably things and people in the world that are worth hating.