skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If it is paywalled for anyone:

Facebook Inc. agreed to to pay nearly $2 billion in cash and stock to acquire virtual reality goggle maker Oculus VR Inc.

Facebook agreed to pay $400 million in cash and 23.1 million shares of the company's stock. At Tuesday's close of $64.89, the stock portion would be worth $1.5 billion.

"Mobile is the platform of today, and now we're also getting ready for the platforms of tomorrow," Facebook founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a prepared statement. "Oculus has the chance to create the most social platform ever, and change the way we work, play and communicate."

Facebook's move to acquire Oculus comes roughly a month after the company agreed to pay $19 billion in cash and stock to acquire smartphone-messaging app WhatsApp Inc. The company in 2012 generated headlines when it agreed to pay $1 billion in cash and stock to buy Instagram, a popular app used to help people share photos.

The latest deal, however, isn't for an app but for a hardware maker. Oculus VR is a startup that is trying to popularize virtual reality with its Oculus Rift goggles. Oculus has said it intends to charge $350 for the new version of the headset, which is due to ship to developers in July.

Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported the company began accepting orders for a new development kit. The new device marks an important step toward the eventual launch of consumer products, Oculus said.

Oculus was launched after founder Palmer Luckey raised more than $2.4 million in funding from a Kickstarter campaign to help fund development of the company's first product.

Oculus, in a blog post, said Mr. Zuckerberg and other executives from Facebook visited the startup's office "a few months ago" to discuss how the two companies could work together.

The company said that while it "might not seem obvious" why Oculus agreed to partner with Facebook, the companies "want to contribute to a more open, connected world; and we both see virtual reality as the next step."

On Tuesday, Facebook said Oculus intends to maintain its headquarters in Irvine, Calif., and will continue to develop the Oculus Rift. The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter.

Facebook shares, in after-hours trading, recently slipped 54 cents to $64.35.

—Ian Sherr contributed to this report
> And now I have no hope for American democracy. It is dead.

I know HN has a natural tendency towards wailing and gnashing of teeth, but I don't understand this reaction at all. Why would watching a debate from a virtual auditorium be any worse for democracy than watching it on TV?

Sometimes it feels like comment threads on here are secret competitions to see who can have the most extreme negative reaction.
While this is mostly true in the US (especially if "local store" is Best Buy), things are reasonable compared to when this bug was opened:

- WalMart occasionally sells linux boxes

- When I lived in New York, B&H often had a laptop-with-linux available.

Although I agree that in both cases, the selection, when it is available, is small and often limited to just one model. However

- Outside the US, most stores will sell you a "naked" or "freedos" machine, and not charge you for the windows license. It is, in fact, illegal in many countries to force you into a "hardware+software" bundle. Yay for USA freedom. (For corporations, that is)
I am waiting for people to send Pull Request on that (for \ vs / for instance)
I wonder if something like this could be the start of a decent key-value appliance. Hardware designed to perform the role of memcached on the network or similar.
Facebook to become the new Second Life?
I imagine the investing in internet access for the world is wholly because one way to grow their own user numbers is to get more people connected to the internet - if they can just spend enough money to associate people with that messaging as their advertising budget - then they may start off with a good relationship to those new internet users.
> Have any companies been acquired by FB and immediately gone about pushing the envelope in ways that don't strictly line up the existing business of FB?

I'm not sure how many examples are out there, but I continually have to remind myself that Facebook owns Instagram. The product hasn't really suffered, at least for no reasons I would directly associate with them being bought out by FB.

I say this as someone who is also really disappointed that Oculus is now owned by FB. But I'll give it a chance. If they still produce something awesome that isn't tainted by FB crap, I'll use it.
It's fine if Facebook wants to compete with the PlayStation and XBox, but this does force me to temper my excitement for for the Oculus platform until I see the final devkit terms and costs. Maybe things will be open, or maybe FB wants to roll their own Steam network. The latter certainly wouldn't surprise me.
Well, not sure if bottom of the ethical barrel, necessarily.

It's just that their (creativity, intelligence, innovation, drivers of progress) / (cash they own) ratio is mindblowingly low. And this is due to both the denominator and the numerator sides.

Facebook is the new Microsoft, basically. Low on creativity and innovation, high on cash, riding to success a huge wave of demand that would have carried anybody else who just happened to be there at the right time.
I expected Microsoft to grab them and I'm surprised they didn't. Would've made a smart fit with Xbox and given them easy ways to directly integrate it with their OSs. Would work well with gaming, education, eventually business, mobile and so on. $2b a few months ago would've been a small price to pay to get in early on this, unless they have something comparable up their sleeves from the research division.
I think Notch of Minecraft fame just cemented the folly of this in a Tweet a second ago:

> "We were in talks about maybe bringing a version of Minecraft to Oculus. I just cancelled that deal. Facebook creeps me out."

The guy literally just visited Carmack (whom he admits is his idol) and the Oculus team less than a couple weeks ago, and kept mentioning how excited he was to start working on new VR games. I think this says a mouthful.
Play. Learn. Communicate.

That was and still is the slogan of my previous employer.
http://alelo.com/

I'd love to see this really take shape, I worked on the virtual education problem for a long time, and it badly needs an investment of money. If facebook invests in virtual education, I will be very pleased.
You are misinformed. Goole Compute Engine was announced almost a year ago, and it is none of this.
True. I think the difference would be more obvious with popular files. Say you're at a lecture with 400+ students around you and you want to share some content. Hitting an S3 bucket might make more sense than handling 400+ connections locally.
I've been using them since August 2011 at the very least. They were suggested to me when I started my job as a way to keep my work and personal accounts separate.
> Now Facebook can ad ads featuring your friend's faces in games... and free 3d games if you just watch a 15 second ad for every five minutes that you play...

But that might be fairly easy to compete with, perhaps, and so people would, if the situation you described came to be, just think "this is ridiculous" and maybe not buy an Occulus Rift. Sony's working on something similar.

That said, my interest in the project also just took a severe beating. I'm kind of done with Facebook, I don't want to be a part of it but I should keep an eye on it. Maybe Facebook will allow the product to become what its makers are intending. Or, maybe they'd require you to have, say, a Facebook account for, some reason, in which case I wouldn't really be interested in the product.
Can't say I'm excited about this. I can't see a single positive thing coming out from a non gaming company buying a game focused company (and an extremely promising one at that).
Ok, so the hardware landgrab is in full effect. But... Facebook? Facebook is going to be competing with Sony? How does this line up with their competencies? With the track record they have with phones, I'm not holding my breath here.

On the other hand, would you rather Google had bought them and siphoned off their team and energy into the Googleplex as they have done with other startups?

Or - could Oculus have joined the Xbox team as a foil to Morpheus (http://techwatching.com/tag/morpheus)?
As a GWT maintainer I would be overjoyed if Firefox would simply match Chrome as a solid, fast JavaScript debugger that supports sourcemaps well for large apps. The announced bells and whistles aren't going to help my users if they can't even debug their code.
That's not a good idea, for the record. We dropped IE9 so that core features could drop IE9 support, not to save a little CSS work. In the near future Trello will become quite unstable in IE9.
The reason it's called a private cloud is because it's hosted at the client premises, not in the MS datacenter.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/04/a-sysadmins-view-of-...
Wouldn't world be a better place if these huge, hungry companies did not exist? Their greed makes the world a sadder place. Reckon me a zealot, but I really wish Facebook and alike die out of the hunger that makes them the greedy animals they are. Everything one might get excited about, gets sold to a stupid trust, and die of lack of enthusiasm and nonchalance of those companies. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, this, that and whatever. Just, why would these companies not do their own business, but want to own all the f..king world?

Albeit this comment is accompanied by many other similar ones in this thread, I just could not keep myself from posting it.
Docker 0.9.1 released
With the current Oculus kit? You mean the dev-kit 1? Because I have one of those and aside from playing around developing games on it for when a real version is shipped, I wouldn't pay $25 for it. Now I'm super worried that Sony is going to ruin VR by giving us a shitty version that makes everyone hate VR again.
I have a bit of a feeling that this will be a point that people in 20 years will consider a turning point in the bubble that we're in now; it's too premature to say whether this is good or bad though.

That said, I can't come up with a roadmap for FB and Oculus here that involves the facebook.com and doesn't make me slightly uncomfortable...
Yeah, this one is definitely tough to swallow. Really disappointing.

I wonder how this affects the viability of VR going forward. Especially as everyone starts to associate it with FB.
Something I think people are completely missing is FB's opportunity to gather eye tracking data using the headsets.
Eye tracking is one of the next obvious steps for Oculus to implement in their headsets and it's an extremely valuable prospective source of data for Facebook.

Facebook is all about gathering ever more intimate user data. They can already put together a reasonably complete record of all the sites you are visiting anywhere on the net using their +1 button loads. Now they can go beyond clicks to see things you even thought about, actually even things that you weren't even thinking about yet.

For example, Facebook could easily detect if you were gay by looking at where your eyes went during a session. Maybe you haven't even admitted it to yourself yet, but Facebook already has that information ready for advertisers or whoever has an interest in 10 years.
Definitely. Just put on your holoband and enter the V-Space. Brought to you by Graystone/Facebook Industries.
Facebook purchases VR headset maker Oculus for $2 billion
Long time back I had posed a question on "Ask PG" - that how come PG does not go out and do a startup(after his initial one)? My aim was to ask if doing startup is such a "must to do" thing for certain kind of folks, then he should be doing it again, and again (and not stop after the first one and then start advising only). While I never got a direct answer to that one, he did answer this in another forum the same thing - which basically boiled down to - that doing startup is too much work, and he does not want spend his time doing that. I really do think, that doing startup is not such a sexy thing as it is portrayed it to be. I feel it is another of those things in life, where primary reason for most folks for doing a startup is that you will seem more "important" a person, after you have a successful startup. Otherwise you are just an ordinary dude with 9-5 job. I truly wonder how many folks actually do it because it is more fun and adventure, than pain and stress(most of the time). Or if the real reasons for doing startup are ever examined.
> performs some side effects (I/O for instance),

What you're describing is the IO monad to first approximation, most monads don't perform side-effects at all ( List, Cont, Maybe, ... ) and the bind operations only performs some pure overloaded operation specific to the monad instance. For example the list monad performs the concatMap function which is pure.

instance Monad [] where
m >>= f = concat (map f m)
return x = [x]
Don't take my advice: Forget about it. Don't spend many hours trying to report a relatively small loss the IRS presumably doesn't know about, especially of a new type of property the IRS might be very interested to know (if only via an audit) how much more you have possession of.
Widely reported...
http://techwatching.com/page.php?i=25236
companies aren't people capable of "good" or "evil" choices

Their directors certainly are. A friend's mother works in a high-level consultancy that is known for turning down lucrative-but-unethical projects. I've worked in a company where the CEO would always try to find a win-win, even if it cost the company financially. I've also worked in a company where the CEO/majority owner vociferously abused the directors when he wasn't allowed a vote when they were voting on his own payrise (the directors saying that it was illegal to do so). That company also played a lot of three-card monte with FDA auditors.

Companies can behave ethically; just because they're not an organism doesn't mean that they're not under the control of something that can make those decisions. A car is just a lump of matter. Can't do anything by itself. But stick a human into it, and it can do all sorts of things, from the mundane (collecting groceries) to the charitable (distributing meals) to the unethical (hit-and-run). A company is the same.

Add into this that Facebook has been shown to be openly selling fraudulent products, and it doesn't make it sound like Facebook is the innocent you're implying. Crack open youtube and search for 'veritasium facebook', there are a couple of videos - Facebook is essentially selling advertising with fake impressions.
Oculus Rift hasn't disclosed how much ownership was transfered in its Series A and Series B funding [1]. Also Carmac's Salary, and possible investment isn't disclosed [2]. John Carmac is estimated to be worth ~4 million [3], source seem to agree.

<pure speculation>

His salary wasn't disclosed, but with 75million being spent in Series B funding it seems unlikely he was a major investor. Any equity he had was likely given partially as compensation for his position.

</pure speculation>

[1] http://www.oculusvr.com/press/oculus-vr-raises-75m-in-series...

[2] http://www.oculusvr.com/press/john-carmack-joins-oculus-vr-a...

[3] http://ewallstreeter.com/john-d-carmack-net-worth-2158/
iOS Backup: Create an Archive
If you want to keep a specific version of a backup for your iPhone/iPad

- first backup the device in iTunes

- open Preferences, Devices

- right click on the device and select "Archive"

- your backup will now show a date and won't be overwritten by the next backup

Not sure why this is so hidden but it's quite handy to keep specific versions for testing&debugging.
Whatsapp wasn't a Kickstarted project, was it?
Minecraft for Oculus VR cancelled
Sure, but if you've already got money from a previous exit, why would you care if you're booted out? It's just a job at that point.

Also, you've already done an exit, so it's less likely you'd get the boot; After all, Investors want a return. They should know whether that's your M.O. when they invest. There can be legal/tax ramifications for investing your own money too.

Regardless of how good you are at making a company successful, giving good ROI and everything else. If you treat it as a job (there are far more important things than work), why not use someone else's money?
Or Second Life...
Supporting IE 9-11 is enough of a hassle as it is. I'm tired of hearing about how this is user-hostile or whatever. Get another browser and if you can't get another browser then that is the problem.
It's almost like Steve Jobs died again – have you heard the Oculus news?
>> VR was intended for PC gamers

I'm not familiar with the intimate details of the Ocululs business plan, but their story page says they have a larger view of the potential for VR:

"revolutionize the way people experience interactive content"

and their vision says nothing about games:

"Immersive virtual reality technology that's wearable and affordable."

Perhaps the negative comments here are part of the natural bitterness from insiders that accompanies any technology as it goes mainstream?
Pissed about this? Just wait until MS buys Valve...
Add Texting to the List of Things That Are Killing Us Faster
Boilerplate for static site generation
And for watching FoxNews?
Spoken like a fan with no imagination. Sorry for that, but seriously, come on. PC Gamers are the only audience you can see for VR?

VR is way, way, WAY bigger than some hardcore gaming nerds (of which I am one).
Computer History Museum Releases Source Code for MS-DOS and Word
Gaming is - at its best - a social thing, so this makes _some_ sense. But it only makes sense to me execution-wise if Facebook is lining up an acquisition of someone like Unity, or even (gulp) Valve, to bootstrap an ecosystem.
I imagine the only way they acquire Tesla is over Elon's dead body.
Nah, I like the sound of it. It's like, suddenly all the potential that Oculus Rift had is going to be become (virtual) reality.
Thanks for doing the search.

As for:

> 4,588,074 - Holder for storing and supporting articles ... Yes, if I understand it correctly, Microsoft's first patent

At one point, Microsoft Press was a big player in the publishing market. For example, Peter Norton's book on the IBM PC was published by Microsoft Press.

I imagine they needed a way to store multi-volume sets together.
Are these types of purchases primarily defensive in order to prevent new social networks from appearing that are simpler, more private or somehow more appealing?

I always thought it was inevitable that a solution will eventually evolve that allows individuals to communicate directly with each other and manage their own online social networks without intermediaries like Google or Facebook. Slowing down that evolution seems like a correct strategy for companies that stand to lose from it.
I don't believe for a second you won't buy one. There's always this sort of grousing, and it never matters in the long run.
This valuation feels extremely low for a leader in a growth sector, and that is before we consider the fact that facebook's stock is probably overvalued, and the team at Oculus are smart enough to know that.

Possible reasons for the valuation:

1. Sony's announcement. It really wasn't a big surprise, but I can imagine this spooked some people involved with Oculus

2. Production delays or other unexpected development issues - but what could they have been?

3. Oculus has always seemed more of a PC product, so perhaps there are factors in the PC market we are unaware of that they know better?

4. Valve. I'm not sure how they factor into this, but there are a number of possibilities. Oculus team not liking them? Valve working on a competitor? Facebook trying to position themselves as a buyer?

What are your thoughts?
I would think that as CTO he would have at least 1% equity [1]. If that's the case then he has increased his net worth by about $20m.

<also pure speculation>

[1] http://www.askthevc.com/wp/archives/2007/06/what-are-typical...
Resources... but at what cost?
I completely agree with the sentiment.

However, if FB screws this up, it leaves an even more wide open market for other new start-ups to dive in and make a big dent in virtual reality. The technology is ready, there's absolutely nothing that can stop what's coming, whether FB screws them up or not VR is here and it's primed.
Literally everything on HN is an opportunity for another Haskell advertisement.
I can't believe Carmack is thrilled about being part of Facebook. His twitter feed seems a little sparse today...
Facebook does not really care who you share your posts with. It does care that you stay on Facebook so that it can charge Coke and Nike and other big brands huge dollars to put their posts into your timeline. So, making you feel a little better about Facebook security could mean more money on their bottom line.
You guys need to relax a little bit. Have a little faith in Carmack.
This is way more useful.
I'm so disappointed...
How is Mark a champion of open source?
Instead of battlefield 7 with VR now we are going to meet our FB friends in virtual chat rooms -great.
Not to mention that XBox is powered by a modified version of Windows.
I'll make you a gentleman's bet that Facebook is thinking about eye tracking.

Google acquiring Nest has a plan: collect data on electricity usage, presence in house and have a basis for inferring what people are doing generally all day.
> it’s in Facebook’s interest to get us all to overshare

Could that absurd legend get buried already? It’s their obvious, direct commercial interest to keep your private information reserved for themselves, to improve proprietary targeting. The over-sharing might be Zuckerberg’s openness ideology against his company commercial interest.

> just imagine how worthless Yelp would be if a majority of its users turned their reviews to “private” or “friends-only.”

Well, I don't know about Yelp, but my Facebook NewsFeed has mainly friends’ updates. There are some advertising, but I doubt the advertisers feel their privacy violated by those.
A lot of people don't want to spend the time to set up filters. Not everyone who uses GMail is a HN user.
YES, that would help as currently you can see 256GB drives beneath 64GB ones in the capacity axis (which is terrible).
It is rationale to not trust a company owned by Facebook. Facebook has a horrid record and we have no reason to trust them or anything they own.
Too bad Sony is chucking everything not in their core business model overboard so they don't sink. That includes gaming.
Carmack is definitely too heavy metal for google :)
It might have been interesting to arrange the partition so that both the master and "cluster controller" went to the minority side. Then a new CC would have had to have been elected before the CC could choose a new master.
Looks good.

FWIW, GNU Anubis (an MTA) can do gpg signing.
Of course, there's a big gap between 'can do' and actually does, which is where this (Kinko) comes in.
http://www.gnu.org/software/anubis/manual/anubis.html#SEC64
MongoDB gotchas to watch for
It's an EmberJS app :)
You mean 65-millions-ago gen?
New York Times learns the possible risks of programmatic advertising
This. So many time THIS.

I'm truly saddened by this news. Oculus was THE most exciting piece of consumer tech in many many years.

I can't honestly believe that I'm now pinning my hopes on Sony for VR :(

I was looking forward to all the social aspects that Oculus would bring about, but now seemingly having it shackled to Facebook really makes me lose interest.
I'm actually surprised at how short the list is. Presumably they use a lot more open-source projects than this?!