skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Low-end mobile devices these days have 80+MB of RAM available to an application and the downsampled assets that I assume you're using on them 'cause you're a pro leave you with a pretty large chunk of RAM to work with.

I sorta doubt there are many games targeting these devices (and, more particularly, the people who still use these devices in 2014) in the first place, but even fewer which are pushing their headroom so hard that, if they decide they need what amounts to a scripting language, they can't fit one in off-the-rack.
The average Java programmer isn't cranking out "ecosystem". They're slapping together a bunch of Spring components to make some dull business app while waiting for 5pm to roll around so they can escape the tedium of that dreadful existence.

Average programmers don't learn Java because they're deeply interested in increasing the quality of their craft. They learn Java because it's what they were taught in school and/or because it will get them a job most easily. The bottom 80% of the programmer bell curve really doesn't give a shit about what kind of tools they use, as long as it keeps them employed.

When you get to programmers who really love programming, who want to write the best code possible and are willing to go out of their way to learn tools with very little chance of landing them that next corporate job, you're most likely in that top 20% already. So anyone who has learned Clojure, or at least can explain rationally why someone would want to learn Clojure (ie understands the benefits of functional programming), is probably not a benchwarmer idiot.

As a hiring founder who has absolutely zero interest in hiring below that top 20% (really, below the top 5%, ideally the top 1%), and has limited time to peruse a thousand basically identical resumes, applying a filter that gets rid of 80% of potential applicants is a Good Thing.
Facebook Acquires Oculus VR for $2B
Hang out with your Facebook friends via Oculus Rift? Seems like this will come to fruition faster than we thought.
But with the tech available today mixed with the behaviors of people online/offline, we can and have been passively invading others (perceived) privacy, even our own.
We have so much regret about that name...
Facebook is really expanding everywhere.
Someone shared this with me with the words "RIP Oculus."

Can the megacorps please stop eating our young? Microsoft has a terrible history of buying up companies and then killing the project for some reason. Posterous got bought (I don't recall by whom) and killed. These big companies tend to not develop this stuff. They just eat it.
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo. Now with the new "Live your friends life timeline feature, you can virtually live anyone elses life being projected right into your own set of VR goggles!"

Ok so that is the dystopian view :-(. I really don't get this move yet, much to process. I suppose 'hang out with your friends in a virtual bar'? concepts?
Nobody is acting like it's a single-purpose surveillance machine. People are claiming that one of its features can be used in a way that they find unsettling. You can argue that it can't be used in that way, or that it shouldn't be unsettling, or that it's so useful that it doesn't matter if it's unsettling, but you shouldn't act like people who disagree with you just aren't thinking straight or aware of what they're talking about.
Sure. WebRTC allows you to send any data, audio and video directly between peers. Though to be honest there are much easier ways to create text chat.
Oculus has been one of the most forward looking companies to hit the scene recently. This acquisition shows that Mark is well able to look far into the future. Personally, I find this as a very good sign, since we now have Google and Facebook as two giants unafraid of taking the lead. The more, the better, because it seemed for a time with Apple out of the game, it would be Google alone at the forefront.
Venture capitalists: We're looking for Bitcoin's killer app
Well I guess that's a GG?
Well, after getting over the shock of this, it seems like a good move by Facebook. Ever since I first heard about Oculus the majority of applications that I'd seen people interested in were gaming alone. Based on Zuck's post it looks like they aren't going to change that at all, and it will be the first thing they ship with it, but they'll get a head start on turning it into a social / communications platform.

People here seem shocked that it sold to Facebook, but really I think this means that everything that was expected of it will still happen, but even more interesting things will be done with it at the same time.
I feel like idealism is Silicon Valley's greatest asset...and it's greatest liability.
Can you edit and save to a local HTML file?
They are going to use VR to build the next Like button.
I don't get Facebook .. they are buying everything these days that is not nailed down ... they are the Ebay of Web 3.0
Pretty sure they're going to ruin it
> Very little changes day-to-day at Oculus, although we’ll have substantially more resources to build the right team.

I think this is a good thing.
I believe they have upgraded to 3, thanks to @tmm1. It was mentioned in some talk, probably by Zach Holman.
Huge mistake from Oculus. They had the potential to become a multibillion company and a true giant of the likes of facebook itself...
I don't even like the concept of associating with Facebook in any way. I don't want to have to justify myself when I go and buy an Oculus Rift ( "The money is going to Facebook, but it's okay because they have really awesome technology, even though I hate everything they stand for in every other market they're in" )
This, absolutely this. I just can't comprehend why anyone with such a great buzz around their fledgling product would get into bed with FB, dooming their work to ad-riddled nonsense.
Cancelling order now.
But how else will you automate the update to your Facebook page about your herpes treatment?
Active users at work: 38% IE7, 8% IE8, and 45% IE9
Hackers Sell Exploits for Bitcoins in Underground Market
I guess the youporn with facebook likes finally makes sense now
vision

I see what you did there.
Agreed it's bizarre from Facebook's perspective.

But completely logical from Oculus' perspective -- if someone offers you $2B to cash out before you've even launched, you'd be silly to say no.
Indeed. I preordered the DK2, but I'm not sure if I should try to get a refund.

I'm not on Facebook, and I don't want to develop for their platform. Although, one of the ideas was to replicate DFW's "samizdat" as an art project. Something tells me Facebook wouldn't look kindly on it pulling all your friend data to entertain you to death.
Suck has a hundre John Carmacks (of various fields) working for him
Virtually anyone else with the pockets to buy them would have been better.

Microsoft for example have to be kicking themselves right now. After last weeks PS4 VR headset announcement I honestly expect them to buy Oculus immediately. I'm shocked they didn't or got out bid.

I wonder if Carmack was in on the talks... he couldn't have possible left ID to cash in like this... he's got to be pissed off.
I'm starting to think that fb thinks their stock is overvalued, and that they should buy as many things as they can before the price drops.
Wow, that was unexpected. Interesting, but unexpected. But not sure if I won't cancel my devkit.

What I find interesting in Oculus' blog post (http://www.oculusvr.com/blog/oculus-joins-facebook/) is that they write about an open connected world, but Facebook is everything but that.
me: mind, stop going down thought-threads about facebook empire building

mind: fu

me: okay, don't panic. facebook sees the potential in the upcoming VR industry

mind: yeah, they also see the VR marketplace wars coming and want to own it

me: marketplace wars? like apps built for VR accessible from within the headset [1]?

mind: yeah, so (c)blocking Steam from exploiting valve's influence with Oculus, and instead push Facebook as the marketplace for VR content

me: interesting.. mind?

mind: yeah?

me: you're just making up shit to explain why Facebook would buy Oculus VR aren't you?

mind: yeah :(

[1] http://www.polygon.com/2014/3/19/5524336/new-oculus-rift-dev...
The fear is that they'll alter the product into something none of us care about, since Facebook does nothing like it.
Ask HN: Is SXSW Interactive still worth it?
Me and a friend have been wanting to attend SXSW for a few years and have decided that 2015 may be the year that we do.

After doing a bit of research and reading a few blog posts, I have noticed that people are suggesting SXSW just isn't what it used to be. That it is losing it's excitement, and becoming more about business and marketing rather than a bunch of people getting together to have a great time, show off amazing new projects/technologies and meeting new people.

Is attending SXSW Interactive still worth it, or has SXSW seen it's best days?
Eh, I'm not convinced it's such a cut and dry story. Landlords, superintendents, porters, elevator operators and doormen can be as sketchy as tenants (like me, ha ha). Disgruntled porters get sick of taking the garbage to the curb and unclogging yet another toilet for someone, quit without notice, and "lose" keys all the time.
I don't know, maybe the same thing that happens to almost every other rising star that gets grabbed up by a behemoth.
well that's a lie.
QuickMSG: new mobile messaging system based on old standards
this probably doesn't bode well for core gamers. At least sony is planning on a competitor.
Assuming the phrase "halo product" derives from "halo effect", I'm confused about how my example isn't the quintessential definition. 1. Buy iPhone. 2. Enjoy iPhone. 3. "Hey, I'll bet Apple's other products are pretty good, too." 4. Profit for Apple.

Disagreement on the definition, or poorly explained personal example?

(EDIT: now that I think about it, our first iPods were the halo product that made me discard old Apple biases that I was carrying from the 90s.)
I'll be surprised if John stays on past his golden handcuff period. The amount of money he stands to make after joining Oculus less than a year ago is certainly large.
At last for me Oculus and Facebook where on opposite ends of the coolness scale. I wanted a Oculus so badly, and avoided facebook like the plague. I have the feeling facebooks spoils this. Instead of Half Life in vr i now expect "skype 3d" and "candycrush vr".

Oh yeah, and i expect facebook to watch me while i game, something that makes me seriously uncomfortable. Zuckerberg babbles something about this "open and connected" i do not want to be part of.
I'm in the same boat, I'm going to wait a couple days, but I'm very tempted to cancel my preorder.
This sounds like what Valve and Sony are working on.
Google Glass shows you an augmented view of reality. Facebook Glass shows you a reflected vision of yourself.
This is really disappointing. I've been thinking about buying the dev kit for the last couple of weeks, I guess this news has made the decision for me :(
I have no idea why Oculus would sell at this point. It feels to me like this is just the beginning of their story and of this technology. Did they just get scared about Sony's Project Morpheus and decide to get out early?
Looks like Oculus VR is going to be the next big platform for developers to make software for.
I have my terms mixed up. I thought GPUs used FPGAs, but I was wrong. Thanks for clearing that up.
What the? Whaaaat?
I just finished reading "Masters of Doom" last night. The book is about id software, the company that made Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake and that pioneered 3D gaming. The book primarily follows John Carmack and John Romero, two of the founders of id. Carmack was responsible for developing almost all of the 3D engine code.

After finishing Quake, (what I believe to be) the first fully 3D PC game, Carmack wanted to work on a 3D virtual world inspired by the Metaverse from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. The book at least makes it sound like Carmack believed that a 3D virtual world was the next big thing. Despite Carmack's wishes, the rest of id decided to stick with making first person shooters and other video games.

Carmack is now the CTO of Oculus VR. Keeping in mind Carmack's virtual reality ambitions and Zuckerberg's mission to "connect the world", this acquisition makes a lot more sense than it does thinking of Oculus VR as purely a gaming company.
This is disappointing to me, I now have lower hopes for the future of the Oculus Rift, particularly as hacker accessible hardware.

My only hope is that John Carmack is coming out of this well enough to bring Armadillo Aerospace back out of 'hibernation mode'.
'We Want No Downtime' – A Brief Conceptual Framework for HA Planning
I think this is what makes me hate this purchase. The most interesting part of Oculus to me was the "open-ness" of the platform. They were seemingly doing an amazing job of getting developers interested in the platform. I'd argue that Facebook does a pretty terrible job on both fronts.
Wow. What an unexpected buy. It's not even Aprils Fool's yet.

This is likely a defensive buy. I would imagine it didn't cost too much either.
Trying to make sense of it in my head I can see where Oculus brings the VR technology Facebook may bring the data to create virtual worlds? Surely they will operate as separate entities like Instagram and/or WhatsApp. It also may be good to have a solid financial backer who is also a company who moves quickly.

So long as the device doesn't turn bright blue and Facebook doesn't hinder the forward progress of Oculus VR we might as well sit back and hope for the best.
GnuPG for e-mail, OTR for IM, RedPhone for calls, TextSecure for, well, texts, SSL for everything. Tails is pretty good for annonymous browsing, supposedly adds "severe misery" to invigilation attempts.

The tools are there. Most people simply don't care.
Is this like an early April 1st joke?
Rigor and Proof in Mathematics: A Historical Perspective
Sony's "Project Morpheus" is supposed to be on par with the current Oculus kit and it's explicitly intended to pair with the PlayStation 4.
pretty bald plan to copy google's "expansive mandate" where you give your company a broader mission and add on these non-core schemes. feels a little hollow.

also, is all company sellers going to completely inflate their price to FB? I get what Oculus is doing, but damn, i would guess that the second highest bidder would pay 10% of that much.
I believe all the negativity here is as though David (Oculus VR) has partnered with Goliath (Facebook). What I don't understand is why HN users are already able to rationalize why Facebook is the antagonist here and why Oculus VR might not have a strategy bigger than gaming.
I was at Sharper Image the other day, and they had a pen that took video. You could clip it in a shirt pocket and nobody would ever notice. Why people are freaking about Glass, I just don't get.
Facebook is obviously making calculated grabs for data, I get it. But the premiums they are paying seem Ludacris and I don't think spending this much on relatively easily replicated tech seems worth it. I'm going to guess that they are going to ruin the brands that these companies have created and there are probably already legitimate opportunities for incumbent companies or not-even-built-yet future companies to displace the things they are buying.
This is probably the most forward-thinking move that Facebook can make. I've personally been kicking around ideas about what society will look like in a post-VR revolution world, and it seems that Zuck et. al. have come to the same conclusion that I have, namely, it will change what it means to interact socially with others.

Imagine a 10 year high school reunion that exists not in the old gymnasium, but in a virtual space where you can catch up with them.

Imagine sitting in the front row of the next presidential debate, where you can see the sweat forming on the candidate's brow under the lights. You can look over and talk to your friend sitting next to you without disturbing the action.

Imagine being able to tour a facebook friend's new apartment without leaving your chair.

This is super duper exciting, but I hope that Facebook doesn't kill it.
This was also my first thought. The value proposition is basically, "Google Glass."
As a game developer that's interested in doing some work with the Oculus, I could see this going one of two ways:

1) Facebook could stay hands off, giving the company the company the breathing room and capital to absolutely revolutionize gaming, and then on to other fields.

2) Oculus as a "communication platform" is attempted too soon and the core team is drawn away working on pet projects resulting in a drastic lack of focus, which would kill the product (momentum is key here).

Given that Facebook is the acquirer, I'd lean much further towards #1. If it were Google, I'd bet money on #2 (see the GAE thread today).

I don't think the privacy stuff is going to be a big deal, by the time this turns from being an interface device to an integrated product like Glass, the market will have matured and there'll be plenty of competitors offering the former.

So, it'll either good or bad. You read it here first, folks.
Farmville 2: The ultimate farming experience.
Same reaction here. I'd say more about my opinion of Facebook and Zuckerberg business capabilities and behaviour, but it would add nothing to a civil discussion...

EDIT: for some laughs have a read of the Kotaku thread on facebook : https://www.facebook.com/kotaku/posts/10102759696153589 people are not happy
It's in one way sad how the stupendous amount of money available to the giants in this business makes them able to acquire any potential competitors. The only ones not being acquired are those who have the ambition to be giants themselves (Dropbox, Snapchat), it seems this was not the goal of Oculus. So now it'll just become another tentacle of the Facebook Empire.

Although I guess this is how most other businesses operate too. Finding a hit product allows you to become a multi-millionaire, but if you want to become a billionaire you have to have conviction as well. (Which has considerable risk as you might be killed. I can certainly imagine myself selling out when a billion-dollar deal is on the table, so I'm not saying it's a bad move to sell out, it's just sort of sad)
Important to remember that this was initially funded via Kickstarter.
Thanks for that - looks like an interesting site for all kinds of math-related subjects.

I found another page that I felt like offers an nice overview of the Fourier transform and various practical uses, without getting into the actual implementation details - http://nautil.us/blog/the-math-trick-behind-mp3s-jpegs-and-h...
I wonder how many pmks it could get through per second in Pyrit. I imagine it's a bit more power efficient than a bunch of GPUs going through pmks.
It's April 1st already?
http://www.polygon.com/2014/3/18/5524058/playstation-vr-ps4-...
This is so disappointing! :(
Can't wait for "Oculus Chafe", their upcoming virtual reality codpiece.
I hope Nvidia throws more support behind this than they did with past Tegra developer kits. I bought a Tegra devkit and perpetually got the feeling that the driver support / dev relations was being done by one person in their spare time.
> What possible reason could Facebook have to purchase a company so far removed from its core competency?

I would imagine Facebook feels under pressure to build up a core hardware engineering team. It's pretty clear that embedded and wearable computing is going to be a huge industry at some point in the future, and Facebook is going to need to get into that industry unless it wants to be indebted to and reliant upon hardware manufacturers.

So really, this acquisition makes sense for the same kind of reasons Google acquiring Nest makes sense - neither company has strong expertise or experience in consumer electronics hardware, and they need it going forward.
Star rising vs star risen.

WhatsApp was already a star. It had millions of users and was the "go to" app for communication in many countries. We forget that here in NA. Oculus, as cool as it is, still doesn't have a huge customer/user database.
"Signal" has always bugged me because it has the connotation of a function of time, whereas historically the Fourier series were first used to represent functions of space.
State of Design: How Design Education Must Change
Facebook to acquire Oculus VR for $2 billion
> Yes, I just really dislike facebook, so I hate to see them aquiring something i was really excited about.

What about Oculus VR ? They could have said no.
Dammit!

This is like the Google acquisition of Nest: something cool, now owned by a large company historically more interested in monetizing my activities than providing me with a quality product.
Facebook has made some good purchases that align with their overall strategy, but I definitely don't see how this fits. And why would Oculus sell to them?! It makes no sense. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Sony... The list of better technology matches is huge.
Nails, Demand and Startups
See main discussion at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7469115
If I recall correctly, Word for Windows 2 had autosave on by default, and would corrupt Word for Windows files with embedded drawings so that they became impossible to edit. (Experienced with several files at the time.)
Except that EEs like to explicitly restrict the word "signal" to mean only the known inputs, and call the rest "noise."
Great stuff! I'm hosting a programming meetup this friday at a coffee shop, seems like a good opportunity to put it through it's paces.
And also the one with the biggest share of pissed off backers.
I understand Fourier transforms, but the top rated answer IMO is a terrible and confusing way of introducing them to someone.
Well, I'm routing for Valve now.
Is this the real Hacker News, or am I being spoofed?

Well, obviously I'm as disappointed as everybody else, but at least there is still Valve's research? Perhaps that could be productized for games in a couple of years.
Ezyang recently posted about "Haskell for Coq Programmers"[1] which I think explains the limitations of type level programming in Haskell pretty well. It made a lot of sense to me because it explains the features coming from a language with a more expressive type system and what capabilities Haskell has.

[1]http://blog.ezyang.com/2014/03/haskell-for-coq-programmers/
Facebook buys Oculus VR for $2 billion
From a startup's perspective (my own), it's not so easy to find Clojure folks. Ever since I founded it I have less time to go to meetups (esp. specialized FP meetups) to recruit people, and most people that I interact with when I mention Clojure just say "What's that?" That's to say, so far I regard it as somewhat of a net loss that our backend is in Clojure.
I just checked my calendar to see if it was April 1st. What a low amount of money for the purposed future of gaming.

I wonder how John Carmack will like his new freedom under Zuck's reign.
I can't say I'm the type of founder to say no but I'm glad they exist. They're the ones who disrupt entire industries.
From Zuckerber's post:

> Imagine [..] studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world

I think his mention to Education is quite relevant here. Days for traditional Education are numbered.
It's rather entertaining to see the difference in comments between the Oculus announcement page and the Facebook page.
There is much more money to be made in 'dystopian' tech than there would be with 'utopian' tech.
He's in the lucky position of being able to pick pretty much any project he wants to work on and be accepted. From what I know about him, the thing he really cares about is pushing the tech forward, and as long as Oculus VR can do that, he'll stay on board. If he gets too stifled there, he'll probably jump ship over to another VR project.

I sincerely hope this is a good thing for Oculus, but it could definitely go badly too...
That's it; Oculus is lost, we need some kind of non-profit working on virtual reality instead of private ventures otherwise this shit is never going to work.