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 Kickstarter angle is interesting.

I'd be peeved as well if I was a supporter and this happened. Aren't KS Projects by implication a "Project for the People" first and foremost? Should KS Backers at least get a small return for making a $2 Billion exit possible?
Sure, discourage me. Come out in the public square and let's have it out. You use your powers of free speech and persuasion and convince me I'm wrong. If I feel strongly about my opinions, I'll do the same to try to persuade you that you're wrong. Democracy at work.

Start poking around to find whatever job I have and then try to get me fired? Really? That counts as "discouragement" in your book?

You realize, of course, that there are some folks with really nasty opinions out there, folks who would do all the things you mention. Folks who would bring back slavery. And so on.

I must have missed the big public outrage over these folks where we try to get them fired and otherwise interfere with their personal and work lives because of their political opinions. I also missed the part where this became acceptable behavior.
Why Can’t Big Brother Find MH370?
So what's the difference then? I need to quote in Lisp, I need to quote in Scala.
So, do Gay Firefox developers boycott Javascript too?
This is an interesting view from an investment perspective. The Internet basically bootstrapped Oculus VR via Kickstarter and the result is that the founders get a huge payout while the real risk takers in the product get an Oculus VR or whatever their Kickstarter reward was.
Just wait a few days and this back lashing will be over.
> Think about when Microsoft got into gaming and created Xbox. Now imagine if they didn't

Call of Duty and the FPS genre would not have been ruined.
What type of person you choose to head your operations obviously reflects your ideals.

It really doesn't matter if Mr. Eich donated 1000 dollars or a million dollars, he opposes basic human rights. And apparently Mozilla is fine with that.
Is this a problem for anyone with money in MTGox?

i.e. would sales inside MTGox have counted towards this tax or isn't only with withdrawl/deposit into their ecosystem. I can imagine that if internal to MTGox interactions are treated this way then there are a lot of people who sustained a capital loss higher than that and had no option to withdrawl the money to pay taxes.
I think this bothers me the most. Us gamers had our shiny new toy and then it got taken away so everybody can play with it now. I bet Facebook will figure out a way to subsidize this to get it in all of their user's hands and then gaming will take a big backseat to the Facebook Experience (TM).
I agree. Posting HackerNews comments in favor of gay rights is going to haunt you 20 years later, because clearly homosexuality is becoming less accepted over time.
I think an affair is a little different than trying to affect political change. What if he was a white supremacist? No big deal because if a white supremacists writes qsorts, it's still O(nlogn)? That may seem a bit extreme but it's essentially like this. A CEO is in some a ways political animal and is certainly a representative of an organization. I think political causes are different from affairs. However, he hasn't done anything against the law here but I don't think it is unreasonable for people to want to boycott.
What a sad example of meandering with the party line I see here.

The desire to have always had the currently approved opinion is bad enough as it is, but the need to have it to comply with political correctness, or face a "liability", is worse.
> I know that Notch wants to develop games with passionate people, but he has to understand that this acquisition was the best thing that could happen to both VR and Oculus.

The two really don't have anything to do with each other. There's no rule saying that if someone comes out winning in business deal, then everyone comes out winning in that business deal.
What on Earth would be the advantage of virtual reality over existing multiplayer games or skype?
This SDK will have fully support of OpenCL 2.0
I don't think the general consensus is perplexed at all.
By the way, could you send me one of these driver-less cars you speak of? Maybe some other vaporware?
How is it a donation if you receive the item you backed? Most people backed Oculus to get their hands on a dev kit (I did). I don't feel like I donated — I feel like I got my money's worth.
You're probably right and it's totally irrelevant in this day and age with cheap memory and cpu power.

I can't help but remember fondly on the idea of the bytecodeVM that "Out of this World" used to draw vector graphics, and think "That. is. neat".

or the power and flexibility the SCUMM vm afforded story writers.

It's fetishistic and unrealistic I suppose, to think it would be cool to do some amazing game on some extremely primitive slow low power cheap machine that anyone could buy for like $10. The whole fantasy usually ends when you realise that the cost of displays is well beyond the cost any actual computer hardware you may consider.
I don't even think they're hating on "social VR" as a concept, so much as they are on the specific involvement of Facebook.

Facebook has accumulated enough ill will over the years -- with its cavalier attitude towards users' privacy, with the multiple times it's screwed over developers who bet the farm on their platform, and so forth -- that people just automatically assume now that if you lie down with Facebook you get up with fleas. "Facebook" means technology that, at its heart, is looking for a way to screw you over. It's a tainted brand.

If it were any other company making this acquisition -- Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, anybody -- you'd see much more willingness to give it the benefit of the doubt. But people see the Facebook logo being slapped on the Rift and assume, from bitter experience, that this means their Rifts will be turned against them, in the same way that Facebook turned their browser and their smartphone and their network of friends against them.
In theory, the oculus team will have more resources at their disposal. However, they are now apart of a publicly traded company with an emphasis on meeting investors' expectations on a quarterly basis. Also, new layers of oversight will necessarily be introduced, potentially limiting their ability to pursue industry related partnerships unless FB management can be made to see the worth of such deals.

I'm withholding judgement until someone respectable like Carmack comes forward with a rationale for why this is ultimately a good thing.
What dirty secrets does Turkish PM fear Twitter will leak?
Sony was about to steam roll them? and Microsoft in the next year as well?

The Sony morpheus system is already better than oculus feature wise, with better position tracking, and accessory tracking as well. And don't under estimate that, I've read some pretty strong "never again" comments from people using VR headsets and loosing grip of the controls and floundering and/or having to take the headset off to get the controls back into there grips again... even just moving your hand on the keyboard is apparently quite annoying.

Essentially without backing they will loose all market capabilities and be relegated to experimental hardware and not a mass market device.

Being brought out by other companies probably wouldn't of been a reality. MS probably have there own tech and wouldn't gain much more than branding... and xbox is a stronger brand anyway... and Valve would no doubt have chosen to partner rather than buy out... so waving $2bil in your face and the guarantee of ongoing funding and launch platform... its a no brainer.
No joke. I hope he's thick-skinned, this kind of verbal abuse from hundreds of disappointed techies would at least leave me feeling very exposed.
It would be OK for Muslims to protest someone who wants to take away their rights. That would be a fair analogy.
Yes, they prefer ECMAscript.
His character? Did you read the post? The author raises some interesting points about the competitiveness of Oculus' latest development hardware in the face of Sony's recent Morpheus product announcement. You have to admit the timing is suspicious.
In that reguard, its the same thing it's always been. A gift. Reciprocity is not required by law, only common decency. The new about kickstarter is it seems we're looking for something more than a gift, less than a regulated investment and not quite a sale. That's novel.
As a practical matter, the less money you have, the less you can fund your attempts to have me killed.
Well this is a bit high and mighty. I think you're ethical standard is a bit naive. As well, marriage being the most "solemn vow," that's sort of a personal thing and subject to many different norms.
Judge Mozilla on the actions of the organization, and the staff while performing their official roles.

What the staff does in other spheres of life, with their own time and money, is their own concern. It's a freer society, and a more pro-freedom organization, that grants individuals the widest range of actions and opinions when away from their official responsibilities.

The CEO position isn't "mascot" or "most popular" or "dear leader". (Those are cult-of-personality failure modes for a professional organization.) It's lead administrator, with specific on-the-job duties which involve essentially no electoral politicking nor meddling in employees' lives.
And so now a business structure incorporating both Danish and US companies is probably possible, such that Bitcoin can be used to avoid taxes on dollar and euro income.
You don't have to take part in this discussion if you don't want to. You don't even have to click on the link.

If you're a public place, and some group of people that you don't otherwise know are having a conversation amongst themselves, do you go up to them and tell them, "I don't care about you are talking about." You probably don't, right? Because it would be weird.

Turns out the same thing applies for the Internet.
I'm not excited about this news either, but let's say Oculus doesn't do this. What if, in two years, Valve have a similar product out there, with more convincing immersion and their existing community and game contacts. And Sony have Morpheus pushed to PS4 fans and their existing developer contacts. And for those two years, Oculus have moved along with their existing community and existing funding.

Maybe they wanted the certainty (from almost anyone) that they could ramp things up and make sure they were strong and first out there?
Well that's also why in some places the cameras must make a noise when they take a picture. (I'm sure there's ways around it, but there are ways to get around pretty much anything)
The creator of Facemash is now a Facebook founder.
I'm sorry, but you made a mistake of projecting your own beliefs and value system onto Mozilla.

Mozilla is simply a technology organization and their mission is to promote a free and open web. It is not human rights, animal rights, or anything else.

If Brendan Eich believes in a free and open web then he is the right person for the job.
Who ever said those people aren't going to get the product? Why do you think the product will get swallowed up?

> "Oculus will continue operating independently within Facebook" --Mark Zuckerberg
Social gaming on Facebook -> Play VR games with Facebook friends.

I bet rules that limited other social games from promoting themselves on Facebook won't be as stringent as for Oculus games.
Checkout this prescient thread on /r/oculus/: http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/1wf6mg/so_no_way_to_...
Virtual reality will never be reality.
Why do you assume the product is no good simply because they sold out?

I prefer to look at as they simply didn't have deep enough pockets to go up against the likes of Sony and no doubt Microsoft and Valve in the near future. Being acquired by a giant like Facebook - as distasteful as it may seem at the outset - gives them the capital they need to execute on their vision and not have to worry so much about being buried by the gaming titans.

This was a strategic play to keep Oculus alive, not to kill it dead.
It is definitely OK for them to protest. It is definitely OK for people who believe in a Flat Earth to protest NSF. No problem there.
Yes that's the fantasy. The reality is you can't just casually fork a project as big as mozilla. The only way that codebase stays even barely maintained with security bug fixes, is with its army of coders. The great thing about FLOSS is that it's POSSIBLE. The not so great thing about it is, in many cases you're probably better off just starting from scratch.
In my personal experience as a gay man it's not a choice. It may or not be genetic but it's definitely innate.
To paraphrase Bert Cooper, who is really making the comment anyway?
43 isn't too old. Will you ever say Python creator Guido van Rossum (who is 58 right now) is too old? Figures like them never get old. But will the younger engineers feel pressure when they are talking to someone far more experience far more well known? Certainly.
I don't think it's about a grace period or an embargo of the tongue but rather that there's very little information out there about how Oculus will actually be run going forward. Instagram, for example, is basically unchanged since the acquisition (for better or for worse).

Making extreme assessments based on a paucity of information is hasty. It's up to OP to decide when the time has come, but I think grandparent is expressing a reasonable suggestion for additional consideration.
Deprived of an employment is a bit silly. Representing a company as its CEO is different than being a regular employee.
I don't get why his personal views have anything to do with the business. This is an absurd non-issue.
> They did so because they wanted the Oculus product.

Let's not forget that a huge part of the pitch was to be part of a developer community that sets out into an as of yet unknown realm.

I don't think people are worried about what Facebook might do to Oculus, the product. They have a hard time seeing Facebook the social engine and Oculus, the developer community coexisting peacefully. In a way, they're already making a rather concrete case against it.
A cool sad short
He opposed basic human rights.

Does Mr. Eich still feel the same now as he did when he made that donation? I haven't done any research on this topic outside of the linked Ars article, but I find it interesting that Eich's own statement[1] about his donation completely avoids talking about his motivations for the donation. He even implied that he does not feel animosity towards gay people (although what he explicitly said was that the donation does not constitute evidence of animosity). So I'm left wondering as to what Mr. Eich actually feels on the topic.

Yes, he donated money to a cause that opposed basic human rights, and that's undeniably an action worthy of condemnation. But in isolation, this 6-year-old action does not prove anything about his feelings on the matter today. What matters right now is how Mr. Eich will lead Mozilla going forward, not personal acts taken 6 years ago that were not on behalf of Mozilla.

[1]: https://brendaneich.com/2012/04/community-and-diversity/
Oh, you're almost certainly correct. Absolutely, there's the right thing to do which involves telling the truth but could cause difficulties, and then there's the easy "political" lie you can tell to try to stay popular and keep your career humming along and your salary rolling in.

But no-one said doing the right thing was easy. And you've still totally failed to convince me that I want the second type of person claiming to represent me in government.
In the hypothetical scenario that Mozilla management decides to start discriminating against gay people I think we can count on the support of many of the people who are familiar with the codebase. Would you agree?
"Ponder over your character?" That's a little harsh, no?

The guy's entitled to his opinion. While I don't agree with a lot of what he's saying here, he's laid out his reasoning in a fairly coherent and straightforward way. The post hardly comes across as a cheap hit piece, a reactionary diatribe, or a tossed-off conspiracy theory. It's a little early to be making the calls he's making, and I question the bases on which making them. He's wildly speculative in most of his positions. But so are a lot of the posts and comments on this topic; so far, nobody really knows all that much about it. I've seen a lot better commentaries over the last few hours, but I've also seen worse.
If it's important, shouldn't people be able to have a conversation, and fund a conversation?

The supreme court has equated financial contribution with speech, and many of us agree with that position.

Therefore, we can only see this as an attempt to ostracize and attack anyone who speaks to the opposite side. This action is chilling on speech, which is exactly what the OP was talking about. Just because you don't see it that way, doesn't mean it isn't, and won't be perceived by others that way.

I think proposition 8 was the wrong thing, promoted for bad reasons and on the wrong side of where society needs to be, but I also happen to feel that this attempt to quash any possibility of opposing free speech by ensuring to mob anyone who rises to the top having once taken a view we don't agree with as far more dangerous and harmful for our society than prop 8 could ever have been. It enforces positions without the liberty of allowing speech, and without the ability to challenge in court, as bad laws do.
Read any startup book or blog: you can have a grand vision but you must start solving one small problem and expanding from there. Winning one niche and then scaling.

When you go after everything at once you go after nothing in particular.
I see a big difference between having an affair, and spending money to whatever the equivalent is (a proposition to end hetero marriages?).

The $1000 was a hateful spend.
Everyone in this thread is being ridiculous. Since Facebook bought Parse the service hasn't been tainted whatsoever. Facebook is just buying promising businesses and startup because - gasp - hitting home runs is hard! You may dislike Facebook the product but hating Facebook the company is short sided.
Nvidia Jetson TK1: most advanced hacker SBC?
From Notch:

> Don’t get me wrong, VR is not bad for social. In fact, I think social could become one of the biggest applications of VR. Being able to sit in a virtual living room and see your friend’s avatar? Business meetings? Virtual cinemas where you feel like you’re actually watching the movie with your friend who is seven time zones away?

Do people really see this as the mainstream use of VR? Do people really see a mainstream use for VR at all?

I can't see it. It's not the future of computing to me.

VR is incredible, it's magical and amazing. I've used the dev kits and the feeling of presence is awesome. The first time I wore the Oculus DK1 was the first time I felt teleported to a different location.

Despite all this, I still don't want to use my Oculus every day — not even once a week. It's a great system but the feeling wears off once you are immersed in the actual experience. It doesn't make my communication or consumption of information any more efficient, not like the way mobile Internet devices have done. Not even like the way my graphics tablet improved my ability to be artistic with my computer.

I see VR as dramatically changing a small but highly focused subset of the entertainment landscape, and being used in many niche areas (such as architectural visualisation). I can't see it replacing the way we use our computers in general. Perhaps I am just shortsighted, and I would be happy to be proven so.
Wait, wait. So a nerd wants to buy his way into the coolest nerd party of all? Sounds like the plot to the next revenge of the nerds movie.

Here's a fact: You can't buy cool.
Can you stop making strawman arguments? No one said he can't work in the tech industry, or anything even close.
He's always been childish like this, this is no different.

He did provide a better explanation to one of the gaming sites, talking about how he doesn't want to put time into a platform that won't be gaming focused, but we have no indication of that happening.
No, he doesn't make any interesting points at all. He says the latest devkit was a disaster. (Was it?) He says that the sale proves that Oculus has failed utterly and can't compete with Morpheus and they failed to solve the motion problem etc etc. (Wow, we're really confident we know everything about something which just got some press and few people have actually tried, and apparently we can't think of any reason the Oculus shareholders might accept a few billion bucks, no, it must be that they are failing hard and are rats scampering off a sinking ship, we've thought of and carefully dismissed all other possibilities...)
Facebook doesn't just do web development and analytics.

Their datacenters alone are big enough to warrant hardware engineers for their custom servers and switches, facilities designers, ex-HVAC employees, et cetera. (http://www.opencompute.org/)

This is obviously a serious acquisition, and Carmack's talent no doubt played a small part in it.

Explain again why "employee" in the title makes this clickbait?
Maybe you're looking for something more than a gift, but are you actually entitled to more than that? Are you a shareholder in these companies than you fund through Kickstarter? I think not.

So why do you think you have any rights beyond someone who's donating money to a cause that may never pan out?

It's perfectly fine to fund something through Kickstarter, but for some reason it seems that some people doing it think they're entering into a deal that isn't really there.

Generally when you give money through Kickstarter you're giving it away without any string attached, only if the company pans out might you actually get some small gift, not a share of the profit.

What's so hard to understand about that? The model's fine. The problem is that for some reason people donating to it think of themselves as shareholders, not donors.
People probably would have said that about MySQL a few years ago
I did not compare the Democratic Party to the KKK, I was saying that it was the Democratic Party that primarily supported the KKK during most of its first two incantations.

Do not twist my words. If having a basic knowledge of U.S. history is being nuts, then so be it.
The other thing is that it's probably going to be quite a long time yet before PC gamers actually become a minority of the Rift customer base. The whisper number for the first consumer version's resolution is 1440. At that resolution it will take not only a maybe-$300 Rift CV1 to play but also a seriously hefty video card to keep it fed with something like a steady 90 frames every second. (No currently-existing Crossfire/SLI setups need apply, as they introduce too much latency.)
This is an important point. If bitcoin had been used more as a currency, rather than investment speculation, the bitcoin community would have a much stronger case to argue that it is a currency.

It probably wouldn't have changed the IRS decision since this is the first regulatory post warning shot, but bit coiners only have themselves to blame.

It needs to be perceived by the outside world as a currency and not like a ponzi scheme that is full of thieves and brigands, because like it or not, that appears to be the general public's and the medias opinion to date.
Will you boycott every company that has an employee that has belief that isn't yours? Isn't that the definition of intolerance? One of those things, I guess, can't tolerate the intolerant =).