skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why would that matter? Everyone who's interested in Hacker School is a hacker and understands the true meaning of the word.

No, not everyone who is a hacker (in the clever programmer sense) understands the word primarily in that sense. And, furthermore, not everyone who would be interested in what Hacker School offers is already a hacker (in the sense at issue), though presumably going to Hacker School would make it more likely that they would be.
This just doesn't sound right. They should have looked good with Valve. Facebook is just trying to not-die and acquiring whatever they are getting there hands on while they have money.
Seriously don't sweat it. The important part of Oculus is already done. The fact that you feel this way is the proof. Sometimes the most important part of a technology is just letting everyone know its possible. Before Oculus it was kind of a given that there was just too much lag for anything like it to be possible for the foreseeable future. It took a master of the 3d world-building craft to step up and say that this was untrue.

Now we know what we want and that its completely possible. If facebook is unwilling to to give us immersive 3d minecraft, someone else will step up. Because they know that they can.
Maybe he'll go work for SpaceX next.
This + the Nest acquisition by Google feel like some sort of weird VC payback scheme. Its the only way I can explain them.
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Ah yes, HN. Where Facebook ads are both highly ignorable and therefore worthless, and at the same time incredibly intrusive and everywhere.
/r/oculus isn't happy: http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/21cvry/facebook_acqu...
I think the main purpose it serves for Nvidia is branding. This gets plastered all over the tech news and everyone knows Nvidia makes the fastest GPU. People then associate them with better technology (for better or worse).

Why someone would buy it? There are a lot of people who want the very best. It's the same reason people buy an Aston Martin over a Toyota.

From a more practical perspective though, there's also future proofing. This card will be able to deliver high frame rates for a few generations of games. People who don't want to regularly rebuild their rigs might prefer this card.
Well I went from bring really excited to own an oculus one day to not being real sure if I'll ever buy one. I just don't think facebook is the right company to be behind the his device. Really interested to hear what Carmack has to say.
Except that hardware has very slim margins, & all the woes associated with shipping a physical product. Ad revenue is cheap & easy.
I wonder if Microsoft considered Oculus but figured they had the Research heft to build their own independently and for less than $2b? Oculus have been pretty public about what they've learnt along the way, so that information might give pursuers handy shortcuts.
I'll just shut down my computer and be a goat farmer if that happens.
Never imagined I'd be writing the words "facebook" and "John Carmack" in the same sentence.
What? Define it yourself, it's a google search away.

And I suppose that's subjective, but claiming it is the absolute end of the world for Oculus seems just a tad premature.
A taxpayer has to be internally consistent in picking their pricing source. It does not follow that the pricing source must be consistent between tax payers. Different situations could merit different pricing sources. It is not wrong to advise different people in different situations on how their differing needs may merit different pricing sources.
AngelScript seems relevant to my interests, I'll have to check it out.

I'm sure Lua is "good enough" for a lot of tasks in most games on most hardware, I was just trying to hint at scenarios where the GC overhead could be painful enough to warrant a custom approach.

>but that hasn't been a serious use case in games on popular platforms for a while now.

The DS with its 4 megabytes of RAM was still a relevant platform not that long ago. The 3DS doesn't have a whole lot of breathing room either; 128 megabytes of RAM, who knows how much of which is available to the game and not reserved for the OS.

>Which is why I'm confused why it's in a book that seems to basically be for novices, at least without some "you should rethink doing this unless" asterisks.

I haven't read too much of this book, but I got the impression that it was for programmers of other disciplines that wanted the skinny on game development practices, not for total novices. Somewhere between "Game Programming for Teens" and "Game Engine Architecture." This chapter doesn't seem that out of place to me.
I could be wrong, and I even think this might be an unpopular opinion (I'm not a huge FB fan, FWIW), but I think this is pretty good for Oculus. It's exposure writ large. Also funding, but from a Marketing perspective this can open some serious doors for them.

That said, I'm saddened. A possible greater exposure could have happened from another company purchasing it, Apple for instance, or even (some will shudder), Google.

I'm not going to give up on Oculus just yet though, but I'm somewhat disapointed. Even if Facebook doesn't ruin it, it's... well, it's still Facebook.
How much of this is a symptom of VC funding?

They stand to make lots of money getting in early and selling to Facebook.

Bit of a poisoned chalice from our perspective, but is this something the VC would have been working towards since day 1?
Because it introduces and relies upon far too many other mathematical concepts. Angular frequencies, complex numbers, integrations and a lots of formulas. It was a '...for dummies' question and you can explain FTs with much simpler means.

The example that worked best for me is with audio sampling. A demonstration of how you can build up a 'wiggly line' to match an audio sample by adding together multiple waves of different frequencies. This then leads into talking about a real world example - mp3 encoding.
Sorry, did I miss the part where Luckey and Carmack left Oculus?
Microsoft have history dealing in-depth with education, business and gaming, plus hardware, operating systems, mobile and so on. Facebook's core appears to be social and a little more superfluous.
Gosh. I’m really upset not by the news about Eich as the new CEO, but about learning that such an idol in my life is anti-LGTB. I really hate this kind of situations.
Amen. Where are the SCIENTIFIC studies that show TDD to be any better than going without TDD?
Facebook has built ThreatData, a framework for web security
Well, that was quick and well stated. I agree with notch, here. I trust Carmack and I'm sure he can pull off something great, but I personally have regretted every tech interaction with FB that I've ever had to build. I'm not sure I would want to work with Facebook either.

And that's a shame.
And ridiculous.
If you said you had your wallet in your pocket no one would ask you to back it up. If you said you had invented a perpetual motion machine, people would.

Claiming that the C-level executives of a company don't have final say in or control of projects and budgets falls into the second category.
Notch hasn't had a shortage of offers for Minecraft.

Oculus took roughly as much in VC as Notch made in 2012, and they didn't even get to the point of selling a real product before they sold to Facebook.
This time is even more different than the last time!
I can see the avalanche of negativity coming, and I understand why. However, I don't think we should automatically assume it's a negative thing like Notch did.

Facebook can try to ensure that the games are geared towards social interactivity that benefits their platform, but in the end, the developers truly pick the direction. Anyone can buy a dev kit and see what they can build with it.

Maybe Facebook wants Oculus Rift to operate as a completely separate entity outside their core business. Maybe it's something they believe in and want to expand into a new genre. Mark has some interesting insights on where to take it: https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/1010131905052397.

Think about when Microsoft got into gaming and created Xbox. Now imagine if they didn't.
Understanding Online Threats with ThreatData
Even though Rift might not be locked to a hardware platform it will likely be tightly tied to the Facebook platform. Welcome to the Metaverse, please login using your Facebook account to proceed.
> Which is a proprietary addon for their playstation. Not interesting at all.

Yes, Sony products can never be rooted. Kinnect was a proprietary addon for XBox and look what happened there.
It suggests (but certainly does not, as described, certainly establish) that the associating the term with a particular kind of affection for a vocation may be tied to gender, and therefore that suggesting that identifying with the use of that term in that relation as a qualification for a program like Hacker School may be an unintentional gender filter.

Interestingly, I'd never thought about that previously but as soon as I saw a reference to it I realized that I'd much less frequently seen women use the term in that context (with regard to vocational activities) compared to men, so, while I don't know that different word usage by gender is really the issue, I see that it certainly could be, and that it makes sense to avoid that usage in the context Hacker School was using it.
The similarities are they are legendary & forward thinking technologists given a large amount of capital to pursue their passion and scale their vision.

Corporate title & organizition wise, they are different. Though I doubt Kurzweil worries too much about the current Ads, Search, Email, & Android platform. I would expect his role to be more forward thinking. I get the impression Carmack has a forward thinking role as well.
Facebook is modern times AOL, negatively contaminating everything they buy.
There is a huge difference between a politician having an affair with someone and a person actively trying to oppress you.
>> Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who sits on Facebook’s board of directors, recused himself from the negotiations.

I would really like to understand how these sort of conflicts of interest are dealt with and if they are investigated by the SEC/other government body...
Okay, when people want to be #ironic or don't care about reaching beyond their followers, we probably don't have much for them. Still, if they want to track hashtags associated with a topic, product, event, brand or hashtag they know, our Alerts are a must.

But for those actually making money or waves in Twitter, people actually want to stop guessing, and go with our grading.
Java has a laughable type system. Type erasure is everywhere.
Doesn't that potentially raise the salaries of all non-American engineers who might get jobs?
I don't think that's actually a contradiction as you imply.

The better people get at ignoring ads, the more effort you have to put into getting people to see them if your business is built around them. You can get into a bad feedback cycle where people try ever-harder to ignore your ads as you try ever-harder to make them un-ignorable.
> Often its like there are 9-10 hierarchy of classes each doing something very simple and passing the burden of implementation to things below and down there you see more and more verbosity, boiler plate, getters/setter and pages of exception handling.

Totally agree.

Dijkstra wrote "a case against the goto statement" (which was renamed "Goto considered harmful" by the editor of the journal) when he saw these things happening to flow control because of GOTO.

These days Java (and C++, to a lesser but similar extent) has just as much "class spaghetti" as the "goto spaghetti" of the old days - and many programmers have no idea that it can actually be better.
> Thinking at Google has changed since you left.

I hope so! :-) this is a pretty fast moving space and its been 4 years. My original question was around jedberg's understanding was that Google "...created their infrastructure businesses as separate entities..." which was different than my experience. I saw it as Google sort of backing into the business rather than creating a new business entity for it (like for example Enterprise was a separate business entity).
For a guy who is otherwise rather easy going, Notch can be incredibly pragmatic and strident. Here, he has cut to heart of the issue.

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

> Don’t get me wrong, VR is not bad for social.

He is right - "social", especially in the way Facebook is doing it at the moment, is terrible for VR. Terrible for any technology that has such an incredible potential to change the world.

This acquisition makes one thing very clear: VR does not need social. Social needs VR.
Meh. Prop 8 passed the people's vote with 7,001,084 Californians voting in favor of it and 6,401,482 voting against. Are we to start boycotting every company that employs one of those 7 million people?

I'm glad it was made right in the end and I hope at least some of those 7 million people have changed their opinion... but I don't think we need to keep dwelling on it.
You're neglecting the fact that not every "poaching" attempt is successful and the fact that companies like Google have an incentive to keep salaries high in order to prevent poaching.
But there is only one guy who created Doom :)

That game entertained and inspired (arguably) an entire generation of future geeks like most of us.
So the backlash seems to be:

* Because the Oculus guys are seen to have sold out.

* Because Facebook is seen to be a ruthless exploiter of personal information.

I, for one, was actually days away from buying an Oculus device but I'm going to hold off for now. It's a combination of the negativity from here being infectious and the fact that if Facebook decided to buy now, maybe there's something much bigger on the horizon (apart from the DK2).
The Android version of Minecraft is very nice. Looking forward to more and better. (My son would love more raising sheep/pugs/cattle game options--he's a rancher at heart)
It's almost as if different people have different opinions, and HN is a place we can come to discuss them. Or something.
Try applying it to yourself.

It may be more emotional than logical, but I personally would find it very difficult to work for someone who would deny me the right to marriage because I'm an atheist.
Not enough of a brogrammer for their standards.
I wouldn't call the word itself gendered. The problem is it appeals disproportionately to men (for a variety of cultural reasons described in the study).

It's not in Hacker School's interest to skew their appeal toward certain groups of people for no reason.
If this were any other company I don't think this would turn any heads. However, much of Mozilla's ethos and community support is built on ethical rather than capitalistic foundations. It's hard to reconcile thoughts on a company that seems to so value freedom in some areas but not in others [1].

[1] Inferring what Mozilla values based on the opinions of its CEO is not particularly fair, but then again I'm not sure it's unfair either.
I won't disagree, but I realized that even before I got a computer, Haskell was officially born. It baffles me that this very advanced gem was already there, yet so few knew.

http://file.vintageadbrowser.com/l-veh5m82f5jultw.jpg
Like Content-addressable memory (CAM)? I've heard routers have used the stuff to do fast table lookups since forever, but I don't know if anyone has tried implementing a data cache with it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-addressable_memory
So many posters here do not have a clue. Can I use it as a media server? So its similar to parellela! Xyz is better, cheaper, faster... People - This is the beginning of an epic shift in focus. We are at beginning of an exciting new period for computing. The focus is shifting to function - out there in the real world. The goal behind this nvidia drive is no less than the creation of useful real world robotics. This marks the very beginning of a curve that will take us all the way to west world. As long as the semiconductor industry keeps cranking out the production nodes, this story will remove humanity from the process of production -forever. You are here at the beginning, you are here to bear witness, don't let the gravity of this moment escape you.
Publicly held companies often do things that lack vision and do not serve their best interest.
Mysterious coded notes at Western's Weldon library
Oh, they're cashing in right now. Look for them to exit in 6-12 months with millions.
The Dangers Of Going Free-to-Play
Is there any record of Facebook acquiring and then completely destroying a product?
if it's never as bad as it seems: does this make a case for optimism or realism on a team?

regardless, that's precisely why you need a cofounder who balances you. whether it's a different perspective, questioning some of your choices, or holding you accountable (and holding you up): you need it. you'll make an order of magnitude more poor choices on your own.
"And I did not chip in ten grand to seed a first investment round to build value for a Facebook acquisition."

I'm guessing that pretty much sums up the reaction of everyone who backed the initial kickstarter. Sounds like a serious lapse of "dance with the one who brung ya" to me.
Bitcoins earned through mining are considered compensation for providing resources to the Bitcoin network to compute hashes verifying transactions.

IOW, it's not at all analogous to building 3 chairs yourself.
It's official: There is no limit to Facebook's ambitions.
"you do not fuck up a crowd-funded project"

Oculus raised $75M after their Kickstarter. Crowd-funding was a stepping stone.

And it remains to be seen whether Facebook "fucks it up" or turns it into something amazing look Google did with Android.
A CastAR version of Minecraft seems more fun to me anyway.
I'm not entirely sure (because it was our professor who had the initial contact over Twitter) if it was clear that it was for research even though our prof. said "two of my students" in his original tweet. Once he cleared that up, someone hirer up got back to us with an apology for whoever wrote to my prof. initially. Still pretty crappy, but I think the person from the initial contact wasn't representative of Google's attitude about it.
> "And I did not chip in ten grand to seed a first investment round to build value for a Facebook acquisition."[0]

I'm beginning to feel the same way about participating in Kickstarter.

[0] http://notch.net/2014/03/virtual-reality-is-going-to-change-...
Usually I'd say you might be right. But I really have this sweet spot for mozilla. They're an NPO and Firefox 1.0 basically fixed the web.

I don't know, it's hard.

I clearly disagree with his political opinion. But then again, is using chrome any better? Thats Google after all, which I hate to love and love to hate. (And at the end of the day, Google is still just an Ad company!)

I don't know it just sucks. Maybe we can try to seek a dialogue with him?

I mean if he works for Mozilla he can't be that dumb.
What is is a specific likely worst-case
you have in mind with Facebook?

That they realise there's no overlap between their products, so they discontinue the VR products and transfer the employees to web ad targeting.

More precisely they make a play for the "VR socialisation" arena but it's a half-hearted attempt because VR socialisation is some manager's pet project rather than their core business, facebook vr socialisation goes the way of Second Life, and the consequence is the same.
Luckily, the tech exists and the market is proven such that if Facebook fucks this up, someone else will come in and replace them.

If Facebook stays hands off and just infuses them with billions of dollars and massive resources, we could see something amazing come out of this. I'm still cheering for Oculus, and I trust the team and John Carmack to create an awesome product, regardless.
I don't really understand this decision. From an experiential standpoint, the Rift seems like a pretty obvious platform to have a release of Minecraft available. Within a short time it will likely have a solid user base which makes it a good business decision as well. Now support for that platform is being pulled, not because of any technical, financial, or licensing issues, but because Notch thinks the new owner is creepy? That seems like a knee-jerk reaction drawn more from emotion than logic.
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The future is being swallowed by big companies that only care about spying on us
As an engineer at Facebook, I will say that couldn't be further from the truth. Every reaction I've seen has been overwhelmingly positive, full of amazement and excitement at the chance to meet or work with one of our greatest idols.
Thanks for the shout-out, OP. Great to see our work starting a conversation!
Although a different kind of situation here's a link for those cases:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/boy-ive-really-put-you-in-a...
And free publicity, now everyone is gonna hear about Oculus. This is truly a good news, I don't see why people are so eager to hate on this acquisition.
I hope that this illustrates for some that the distaste over this deal is more than a few "irrational" / cynical malcontents on Hacker News. A lot of people have a serious problem with Facebook the service, the cultural shift, and the company.

On another note, I was so looking forward to Minecraft on Oculus. I sincerely hope that Valve picks up the torch here.
then the question is whether there are really no others want the product as bad as you do, or just simply you have not found a superfan yet. I don't know which one is your situation, but I found it work to go to your niche group (say you are developing product for lisp, then you probably. want to go to lisp meetup). For my experience one or two superfan is enough to at least push your product to moderate userbase. Idk if it helps.
> The viewpoint espoused by burntsushi requires it.

I don't hold that viewpoint. I was merely demonstrating that one can be against gay marriage without being anti-gay.

> "nah, fuck those people"

Uh, no. I'm not doing it to those people. Government is.

Virtually every law regulating social behaviors (whether it's created or repealed) requires oppressing some class of people. In the case of State privileged marriage, it oppresses everyone who can't or won't marry but still want benefits only available to married persons.
Even though Notch writes that he wants to utilize VR for games and not 'social', I'm open to all the experiences that VR can provide, gaming or otherwise.

But I think the bigger issue here is I just don't want Facebook involved at all. Because all roads for Facebook lead to ads, and that is the last thing I want tagged to my eyeballs when I'm trying to enjoy my VR experience.

Even on the desktop/mobile side, I'd gladly pay the $1.05 (or whatever my LTV as a customer is) to Facebook so that I'd never have to seen another ad from them ever again.

A sad day indeed.
I read the following

'allows us to execute on some of our most creative ideas and take risks that were otherwise impossible. Most importantly, it means a better Oculus Rift with fewer compromises even faster than we anticipated'

and that for me sums up why Oculus took the offer.
He joined less than a year ago. Assuming he received a standard options package, I doubt his options vested.
I shuddered at the Apple suggestion, not the Google one.

With Google there would still be a very excellent chance the device would run across PCs (Windows/Linux and Macs) and maybe even iOS devices (if Apple allowed it) along with Android. With Apple, obviously not, it would be Mac/iOS only and fuck everyone else.
Facebook to Acquire Oculus VR for $2 Billion
Especially considering how much armadillo must have burnt.
I think it's perfectly reasonable for developers to "keep dwelling" on someone telling them they should have less rights because of who they've chosen to love.