skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Companies may be formally structured in such a way that they effectively act in an amoral fashion and merely seek to fulfill the wishes of their shareholders.

But they are also made of some less formal structures. Groups of people that believe privacy is important will be predisposed to assume that disrespecting that tenet will affect profit and the companies operating environment later.
Even if this is not the case perhaps a company gains additional political capital in some area for it's behaviour and no single product is likely to be worth the loss of that clout.

If you take factors like these into account you can judge whether a company is predisposed to create outcomes you'd say are good or bad based on it's previous actions.

As to FB and the wages I do not give them the benefit of the doubt and assumed that it wasn't them acting on some outpouring of principal but purely needing the engineers as they grow more than they needed depressed wages. This may be unfair to them but their past actions do not align well with a more generous interpretation, though give it a few years with similar incidents and I'd reevaluate in their favour(I'd love to see it but I wouldn't hold my breath).
> figure that when I'm ready to start hiring other developers, I'll only be hiring developers sophisticated enough

So basically hire people that think exactly like you. That always works well.
This issue is uncomfortably political for HN, but I feel like I should chime in to say that HN is clearly not split down the middle about support for Eich's political position. I haven't seen a single comment defending it.
I don't know why you're talking to me about divinity and sacred families. Its relevance eludes me.

You still haven't really addressed my central point, which is that one can be against gay marriage without being anti-gay.

> This is a cynical and short-sighted view. It is cynical because it sees civil rights as a zero-sum game.

I'm not talking about civil rights. You are. I've consistently used the phrase State privileged marriage. I use that instead of just "marriage" to specifically mark privileges that are given to some and held back from others. This isn't zero-sum. People who can check all the boxes get a marriage license plus special privileges. Nobody else can.

> In short, if you want to start a singles' rights movement

Now you're taking my comments in bad faith. Singles' rights? What is that? Do singles have special rights that other people don't have?

Sure, singles lose out on State privileged marriage. But so do couples that aren't married. And so do polyamorous cohabitants.

Ah, but that doesn't paint me as a selfish asshole, so it's not as catchy of an insult. I get it now.

> because emotionally it is moving society in the direction you want, even if it is not yet doing that structurally.

No. I would like society to move in the direction where it doesn't have to exude unquantifiable amounts of effort just to get government to permit them to associate in any way they want.

Your direction is just more of the same: "Oh government, can you pretty please let us make decisions for ourselves?"
WhatsApp lost hundreds of thousands of users out of 450 million. Yeah, I bet they're losing sleep every night over that 0.1%.
I wrote about about my views: http://zachinglis.com/posts/oculus-and-facebook-sitting-in-a...

But long story short - As Zuck said, it's a long bet. But one that most gaming companies won't want to be associated with. But they're not going after gaming anyway, gaming was 2 words in the press release. They're going after experiences, of which they have no prerequisites in place (healthcare, sports games, etc.)

I'll be looking forward to whoever shows up in place. It's just such a shame - I felt like they were the awesome people to look forward to seeing help change the gaming landscape.
I'm disappointed for oculus that anyone bought them. They had a chance to lead the next generation of companies in revolutionising media... To BE the next Sony. Kudos to Facebook for snatching them up.
Wouldn't he just have to wait until they vest then? Or does the situation change post-acquisition?
The pricing must be priced at the time of the transaction - so you will need to search based on historical valuation.
Minecraft on raspberry pi
This took almost no time and my kids are hooked.
Nobody's saying Eich can't donate to whatever causes he wants. But free speech has consequences, and one of them is people not associating with you when you do shitty things. He did a shitty thing and Mozilla is endorsing his shitty thing with its own actions and so people don't really want to get chummy with them.

That's not intolerance, that's freedom of association.

But I think you already knew that.

EDIT:

> tolerance is" I hate what you think/belive/lifestyle/god/wear but I won't hold it against you".

This is the nonsensical redefinition of "tolerance" that I notice is increasingly preached by those who realize their regressive opinions are increasingly considered unacceptable by a growing majority. It does not reflect the actual definition. It is dishonest.

Tolerance is respecting your right to have your regressive, hateful opinions. And I would never suggest that Eich does not have the right to have them. Even to donate money to those causes. But that also means I have the right to avoid using products that benefit him because I do not want to give patronage to people who would do as he does. You don't get a get-out-of-jail-free card about being reprehensible just because you really firmly believe something.
Assimilation is death, and another one of our legends has been taken.

Carmack, if there is still hope, please Do The Right Thing!
Find Your Passion, Then Do It On Nights And Weekends...
No limit? More like no direction. It's amazing how grasping at straws can be construed as vision these days. Thankfully, the normal shelf life of a mega-corporation is measured in decades. Someone remind me again how many teens have taken their lives because of being made fun of on faceblock?
You're right. It has noticeably, negatively impacted all of my real world friendships.
Exactly. But this goes further and lays bare the sheer stupidity inherent in kickstarter or any other crowd-sourcing platform.

Just like facebook's Frankensteinian monstrous mish-mash of consumer/content/advertiser/publisher crowd-funding in its current state is a mish-mash that ends up meaning nothing in the end. You are not an equity partner, you really have no say in how decisions are made, you are not a lender, you are and are not a client (depending on whether they actually give you the damn 'thing' or not due to a host of reasons, going bust, running out of money, fraud, etc.)
Slowly?

The waves of patent and copyright attacks unleashed on Google are basically the giants who were born in the 70s and early 80s (Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle) trying their damndest to make sure no-one will ever grow in the shadows they cast.
Amazon's Outsourced Customer Service Making Fraud Easy
When I said that it was silly to simply donate money to a commercial venture without gaining any stake in it, they called me a naysayer. Who's saying nay now?
Well, I was initially pretty against the idea. Then again, maybe I'll write a Facebook app called snowcrash >=) and tear it all down.
Is sad. Just when i was going to learn JS.
It blows my mind how much people will throw their money at Kickstarter projects for the simple feeling of goodwill or novelty knick knacks (bumper stickers, buttons, etc).

$10,000 should have bought some small amount of equity, even if it was only non-voting and non-dilutable.
Could they do eye tracking with a phone's camera easily enough?
According to sources close to the situation, Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg started his quest to buy Oculus VR, the maker of the nifty Rift virtual reality headset, several months ago, before wrapping up the deal this past weekend. It was signed this morning.

http://recode.net/2014/03/25/in-googles-shadow-facebooks-zuc...
If that's the case, I think that limits YC to reasonably early stage (pre-series A) or near-death companies. It's perfectly rational to give 6% to YC of a very early company. It's almost surely plus-EV to do that.

A successful company about to close a series-B? Much, much harder to imagine how YC would be plus-EV at that point.
European Commission to Propose Crowdfunding Cooperation
Have you found the configuration in appengine where you can limit the number of instances? It is highly annoying to us that Google is happy to run unlimited instances (all of which benefit them financially) but provide no way for customers (we are on their Enterprise plan) to limit that. Heck they can't even show us what the various charges are and point to a third party chrome extension.
Does anyone have any insight into Occulus' incentive or motive to do this deal?

Edit: beyond the obvious monetary incentive, which I'm not sure was that much of an incentive since hordes of people seemed ready and willing to throw money at the oculus rift. 2 billion sounds like a bargain right now.
Yes. All of us who hate this development are irrational. That's the only explanation for this groundswell. I can't think of a single reason to be cynical about Facebook or about this deal.
Sure, I'll tolerate his views, he can believe whatever he want. I honestly don't care... except for the fact that he took the first shot by donating money to actively screw people like me over.
I was excited about Oculus even though I wasn't necessarily going to buy one. But this acquisition is like Elon Musk announcing that Tesla will build a small 1 litre diesel car next, or SpaceX's next mission is to Detroit.

I mean, I'm sure Facebook has some amazing PHP and Python on their backend servers but has anyone not checked out the awfulness that is Facebook's web site ? UX is not supposed to be a four letter word.

What do Oculus gain from this that they couldn't have obtained with their $2.4m Kickstarter ? I don't believe Facebook won't be monitoring every penny spent there.

Oculus was not our last hope, there is another: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/avegantglyph/a-mobile-p...
Politics in the tech world is squarely in HN's bailiwick. It's not a pure tech forum. It's a forum about tech and business.
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Y Combinator Winter 2014, Batches 3 And 4
I think people have reasons. I think their hesitance in relation to Facebook is not completely unwarranted. Mostly people are exaggerating anything I'm worried about, but, hardware owned by non-hardware companies is often tied into software platforms in really damn annoying ways.

To me that would be a legitimate concern with any non-hardware company purchase of a hardware company.
Agree. To me, Mozilla is much more than a company. It's more like family. It's purpose is to set a high moral ground and place values over anything else. With that in mind appointing someone whose moral standing is questionable, makes this decision hard to accept.

I guess it was silly of me to imagine mozilla as something larger than life/more than a run of the mill company.
TFA links to his 2012 personal statement: https://brendaneich.com/2012/04/community-and-diversity/
I'll happily defend the man's right to hold all sorts of inappropriate and unpopular opinions. Do we want the tech community to be some kind of PC witch hunt, where people who say or do unpopular things will be banned from employment?

If that's the case, then that's wrong -- and it hurts the tech community at large for it to be that way.

This is a witch hunt. It may be a witch hunt for good reasons, and for a cause I support (which I do), but let's get it clear: people are protesting because somebody has a job that has opinions they don't like. That's not a healthy attitude for any community and any job.

I don't care if the man's a nazi. We live in a free country where diversity of opinion, problem-solving skills, and life experiences are invaluable for creative and productive team performance. This kind of thing is horrible and detestable, no matter what the man thinks in private.

If he's a criminal, fire him. If he proposes some policy that is bad for his company, fire him. If he has some personality defect that is bringing harm to Mozilla's name, fire him.

Otherwise? Leave him alone and let him do his job.
I think the not in "but not in others" is over-qualifying.

Saying that Mozilla does not value gay rights because of 1000 dollars, donated once, indirectly associated with Mozilla is a crazy given how much they actually spend directly on supporting the cause yearly.

I'm not saying that a care package for 1.000 dollars negates Eichs contribution. But you can't say they don't value gay rights either.
We're taking virtual vacations soon.
A word of warning to you edgy startup younguns: if you care a whit about the corporate/enterprise market, you will continue to support old IE versions for at least a couple more years.

It feels good to say "just upgrade dumbass", but in enterprise land this is a very slow and expensive process. I am personally jubilant about XP support being killed off, but don't delude yourself into thinking this means old IE versions will magically disappear overnight.
Think about when Microsoft got into gaming and created Xbox. Now imagine if they didn't.

We might have gotten a non-crappy Myth III.
I'm actually surprised developers using Firefox don't use firebug? It's great that Mozilla are improving the native tools but they are a long way from a moving goal post that is Firebug.
I don't actually know but perhaps success has taught them that one value of successfully pitching to VC's is validating your idea? VC's seem to be much more than just money people. They judge quality of the seed idea. The process of pitching it requires you to think about it. Etc. This seems to be a tough nut to crack for many entrepreneurs -- figuring out how to validate the idea -- and perhaps this is a proven pathway for that.
In barter exchanges, this is almost never the case, and is more suspicious when reported as such.
The internet at its best: a hundred thousand people in a feel-good mob all on a joint rant about somebody who has done something rude and/or unpopular that we can all emote with one another about.
To jump on the pure speculation band wagon, I've herd from 1-5% for CTO's after 8 digit VC investments. Jason Roberts (Co-host of techzing) once said he was offered >1% <10% (but more towards the low side) equity for a CTO position after series A funding in Uber.
Notch sayed that console versions were almost fully reimplementations rather than portages, so some features will probably go missing for quite a long time.
A Simple Guide To Adding Translation Capabilities To Your iOS App
That's exactly how i feel. I couldn't wait till i release, now I just wait for a new OpenGL /Other pc graphic API version with vr support and chinese competitors, that will surely emerge within the next five years.
> *[Facebook] discontinue the VR products and transfer the employees to web ad targeting"

Oculus has 50 employees [1]. Facebook did not pay $40 million per employee to scrap their product.

Oculus is also a bleeding-edge hardware start-up. It was more likely to drop dead all on its own than at the hands of well-capitalised owner.

[1] http://www.crunchbase.com/company/oculus-vr
Don't forget the developer ecosystem. Oh wait.
Digressing a little, but since you are talking about jurisdiction then yes it's a fair point albeit splitting hairs. But from a morality point of view isn't it incompatible with the parent's view that certain values should be universal?

The Fed is not a US Government entity. It operates within rules created by Congress but is not beholden to Congress or any branch of the US Government. The board holds meetings and the Chairman reports to Congress once in a while but they have more or less a free hand in running things.

"As the nation's central bank, the Federal Reserve derives its authority from the Congress of the United States. It is considered an independent central bank because its monetary policy decisions do not have to be approved by the President or anyone else in the executive or legislative branches of government, it does not receive funding appropriated by the Congress, and the terms of the members of the Board of Governors span multiple presidential and congressional terms."

http://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_14986.htm
it's not, unless you're speaking spanish or any language that has genders for nouns.

verbs can't have genders, and frankly i'm insulted that someone would take the verb "love" and make it either feminine or masculine. "love" is human and genderless. is "eat" gendered because men typically eat more than women? no, because that would be ridiculous. no gender can lay claim to any verb unless it is created specifically for that gender, and even then i can't really think of any example (maybe "impregnate"? but even that is based on sex and not gender and has other meanings besides human procreation).
It amazes me how negative people are acting, this is a very logical move by OculusVR with Sony announcing a product competition is going to be fierce in this space. Now they have just as many resources as Sony.
Being gay isn't a belief.
Checkout www.polycount.com. It is mainly a community of 3D game artists, but there are a lot of talented people there who do other game related art.

There is a hiring forum section where you can post the job.
San Diego Hacker News Meetup 50 this Friday (3/28)
Redit Post Predicting FB/Oculus Acquisition
Sure, it's a turn-off. However, people are learning that APIs and social network auth policies confine devs; it's a neccasary evil. We're blessed by a plethora of press that evidences people overlooking the Twitter auth thing and signing up nevertheless.
Why shouldn't we?

If you aren't willing to take the social consequences of your actions, perhaps you should not take those actions, hmmmm?
The power delta between AngelScript or Lua and your own interpreter is gonna be pretty small, though. It's a cost you pay once (in a modern implementation) to interpret into...a bytecode VM. And you totally might be a wizard beyond my ken here, but I strongly doubt it'll be easier to implement a bytecode VM of your own than calling, like, five functions. =) I'm not denying that there are cases where such a thing is valuable, don't get me wrong, but don't reinvent what you don't have to. And probably should not be the first thing you're reaching for in your toolbox. Or second.
What is the wonderland you live in that makes you think an insanely expensive platform (yes for the average person the Oculus is crazy expensive) with expensive to create content and little use outside a static environment would be open forever? Can you name anything massively successful with wide adoption that has those features?

If it wasn't facebook it would have been Google/Msft/etc...

The vitriol to this announcement is really staggering given the whole hacker ethos around here. Both of these two CEOs are by this community's standards the most hacker of the hacker.
It was originally a Mac title!
Why Facebook’s Oculus aquisition makes sense: The future of ingame advertising
Indeed, Palmer tries very hard to make us believe so. He uses the term partnership atleast 4 times. In contrast, zuck makes no mention of it (he uses the term partner but in different contexts).
I don't think so, for two basic reasons:

1. Despite similarity in the fundamental form factor, Glass and the Oculus Rift are trying to solve pretty different engineering problems. Rift is all about trying to be low latency, capture motion accurately, and be sufficiently high resolution to make an experience feel immersive. Glass is about battery life, hardware miniaturization, and a display that you can see in daylight without it obscuring your vision. While, if both products were successful, they might eventually start to converge towards each other, owning one does not really help you solve the challenges of the other.

2. Facebook is threatened by Google Glass now? Glass has really, really failed to take off and become a big thing. It's hard for me to imagine that Facebook felt the need to do a multi-billion dollar acquisition to position themselves defensively against a product whose main accomplishment is coining the term "glassholes." Facebook manufactures its own opprobrium in house, very successfully. They don't need to acquire it.
Actually, I think I stated that kind of backwards. If I sell you a cow for 2 BTC, then I owe taxes based on the cash value of the cow. Same as if I sold a cow for 10 pigs. But, you can't pay taxes in BTC or pigs, so that is one thing that will always keep USD in use.
I work in Azure.

We are happy to talk about the actual location of your data for privacy purposes: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/support/trust-center/priva... I don't know how often this is actually done, but it's not out of the question that a large customer might prefer to run their own fiber to our datacenter(s).
Still, that's hundreds of thousands the competition didn't have.
Worst case with Facebook:

- It would signal a shift toward gimmicky experiences targeting a
casual market that wouldn't spend several hundred dollars on a
piece of esoteric hardware.
- It would spoil an opportunity to partner with a company that has
much more experience in hardware, gaming, dev tools, or anything
else Oculus could use to take off.
- The likely integration with Facebook's authentication and social
services will cause the product to suffer from all the ill will and
distrust Facebook has generated within parts of its userbase and
the developer community. Branding is important, and to these
communities - the ones Oculus likely needs to take off - Facebook's is poison.

An acquisition by Zynga or Gree might've been almost as bad, but any of the other companies mentioned wouldn't have signaled such a shift, and such a betrayal of the intent of the initial kickstarter investors and hopes of its supporters. Oculus appears to gain nothing but money from this deal. I'd say the announcement alone squanders Oculus' only relevant lead over Sony and others.
Sorry to nitpick, but when you write "Imagine going on an epic ski run from your sofa" I have to wonder whether you've actually had an epic ski run. If you had, I think you'd agree that the primary senses that make it so incredibly enjoyable are kinesthetic and touch (feeling and responding to the texture of the snow), not visual or sound or anything that could be captured by a VR device.

This isn't to say that a recording like that would have no value, but it would only be a small step above watching a ski movie. And wheelchair users aren't excluded: paraplegics can use sit-skis to experience the real thing.
Turkish PM: Youtube is behind Twitter
I think it's going the other way. Remember that circa 2000, consumer tech was a monopoly.

Now there are quite a few big players. Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.
In related news, I seem to recall that it's technically against the law for the king or queen of England to be a Catholic. But at least no one in this latest Inquisition / Reformation analogue is being systematically imprisoned or executed for what they believe in and who they've donated to. So the world has made SOME progress.
Link for the lazy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo_Aerospace
The Shift From Low-Wage Worker to Robot Worker