skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why do you think it would look anything like what we currently consider social networking? Why are people so painfully short-sighted?

Even if it's the same as putting on a pair of sunglasses, it's still too much for me.

If it's a matter of me just closing my eyes and experiencing what I want, then I agree with you. But I don't think that's even the same direction as the VR we are discussing.

Edit: I misunderstood, I thought you were talking about improvements to VR hardware.

However, seeing social networking and VR mesh together — even some hypothetical social networking of the future — seems an odd direction to me. VR is very inhuman in terms of the physical experience, social networking is very brief and notification oriented. I can't see the two a match.

VR is great, I use it and love playing with it. I don't want it to be involved in my social experiences unless it's the following: inviting people around to try cool VR demos while watching what they are experiencing on a large screen, that is fun.
Any idea who pays (or loses) that 50%?
There are ORMs like SQLAlchemy (Python) and Sequel (Ruby) which try to expose as much as possible of the features of all supported databases. It is common for Sequel to add support for new PostgreSQL features while the new PostgreSQL version is still in beta testing.
I've seen driverless cars driving, without human input, on city streets and highways in the Bay Area for over a year. You can't possibly call it vaporware just because it's not being sold immediately -- with the risks involved, they'll probably need 10-20 years of validation before they hit the market. We need more companies thinking that far out, not fewer.
I think you're exactly right. Look at 3d television: they aren't selling. People don't want to wear glasses just to watch a movie.

Which is why Google is focusing on AR not VR. The use cases for AR seem more immediately obvious and valuable to a mainstream audience.

VR's killer use case is gaming. This is why I'm sad about this acquisition. Zuck's post about VR being the future of social seemed way off base. First, get gaming right, then broaden your vision.

With Sony now in the space, I'm positive we'll get an announcement from Microsoft sooner than later. I'm not a huge MS guy, but to me, they are the company to look toward for getting VR gaming right.
I'm very impressed by this post. Concise. Insightful. Practical. Honest.
Why is what you want the only thing that is worth doing? What about the people who do care that their mom topped their previous score in [they care]Ville?
How about representing a company as its CTO? Like he was for the past eight years?
I don't dispute they want the final product in the end. They agree with Oculus' vision so they back them up. But why are people feel upset?

Two reasons:

1. Some people feel they are entitled to share the acquisition because without their early support (via KS crowdfunding) Oculus may never get that $2B acquisition, or/and

2. They dislike the acquisition and they feel entitled to have a voice. Like public trading companies shared holders should have a say in the company's direction and the company is responsible to maximize shareholders' profit

Either one or combined.

If the deal is clear from day one, which is that you, the backer, will only receive the perk as promised, and any penny you give to the project will be used to keep the project growing. But you don't have any say in the project, because, they never said they will let you be a shareholder. They are not going to discuss acquisition with you, because, this is a private company. Fan support is essential to keep a project like this growing. But business is business. If you think you are better off with some extra $$ in your pocket and getting a powerful parent looking after your project at the same time, you probably should take the acquisition.
Excellent analysis. So many companies are promising until they get swamped by far larger competitors, and all their fans are caught off guard. Then they disappear and become "remember when" stories. Oculus surely saw the writing on the wall.
On the topic of 'Love', related:

"Results showed that women (but not men) exposed to cues related to romantic goals reported less positive attitudes toward STEM and less preference for majoring in math or science fields compared to other disciplines. This did not occur when they were exposed to cues associated with intelligence goals or friendship goals...

Park says, "When the goal to be romantically desirable is activated, even by subtle situational cues, women report less interest in math and science. One reason why this might be is that pursuing intelligence goals in masculine fields, such as STEM, conflicts with pursuing romantic goals associated with traditional romantic scripts and gender norms."

Park notes that women, in particular, are socialized from a young age to be romantically desirable, and that traditional romantic scripts in Western cultures are highly gendered, prescribing how men and women ought to think, feel and behave in romantic settings."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110815101540.ht...
>What if the doctors were all linked in a group through Facebook

Fortunately, other professions hold privacy in high enough regard not to sell their clients' information to the highest bidder. And this is precisely why this announcement is so disappointin; this scenario explicitly will not happen via the Oculus product. It will require yet another round of innovation in the VR space because no doctor worth their salt would use a facebook product with their patients' privacy at stake.
> He is right - "social", especially in the way Facebook is doing it at the moment, is terrible for VR. Terrible for any technology that has such an incredible potential to change the world.

It's not just that. VR is not going to be a product that appeals to masses. I don't think it will change the world. It could impact the world of gaming, potentially, and only CERTAIN areas of gaming only.

There are several reasons for that. First, it's a peripheral. You'll need to convince people to buy another 300-400 USD of gear on top of a powerful computer OR a PS4. The PS4 may be winning on the market, but peripherals have a bad History of not selling very well on consoles. Even the Kinect, which sold relatively quite a lot on Xbox360, failed to deliver anything really revolutionary.

For PC gamers, you'll probably need a very powerful graphics card to make full use of it, and we already know that this kind of market is already a small minority in terms of PC users.

There are several issues with VR as well: it's not something you can use to replace the screen completely. You'll probably feel dizzy, nauseous, tired after some time with it. Your eyes will end up hurting. It will work well with cockpit-like simulators (and there aren't many of them left anymore...) but not so well with FPS where camera movements have to be extremely fast. There are other games (3rd person view ones, top view games) where using an Occulus won't really make sense anyway.

As for social applications, I don't know. It's already possible to do videoconference in pretty good quality but few companies actually use it, and still fly people all over the world because they find it works better to have face to face contact to solve issues and discuss projects. I'm not too sure the benefits of VR will outweigh its disadvantages in the everyday world.

And this is coming from someone who badly wants a consumer Rift for gaming.
> consulting with a doctor face-to-face

Isn't that physically impossible with current technology? To use the set you have to cover the upper part of your face with the screens, so there's no way to record your whole facial expression.

It feels like this is going to be a disappointment to all involved.
I pretty much agree with everything you've said but I think most of the worries are rendered harmless if keybase are clear and up front about the trade offs. If you have a need for cast iron privacy and security, don't use them. If, on the other hand, you just want a semi-secure solution that prevents run of the mill third parties from intercepting reasonably benign day to day communication then maybe the risk is worth the convenience. You could also maintain a second keypair unconnected to keybase for things that need to be really secure and private.

For me, the interest is solely with their approach to trust anchoring. I like that it simultaneously provides a place to post a brief bio, a public key and a way to tie the key holder to github and/or twitter accounts. I'm using that part of their offering now but I have no intention of ever giving them my private key.
Why? There are so many great resources online these days, it wouldn't surprise that many programmers have never bought a programming book.

Also, libraries. I read a lot of technical books when I was a kid, but I certainly couldn't have afforded to shell out the $80-100 for each of them.
Damn. If only they released Word 2.0. Then I could hack it to work on newer versions of Windows. It's still the single best word processing package in the history of this universe.
Just like computers in every home.

And certainly not multiple Cray 2 supercomputers with dozen-megabit/s multi-mile wireless networking accessing darn near the sum of human knowledge - in your pocket, costing a mere few days' pay.

Sometimes the "will never happen" is just waiting for someone credible and insightful to pull together off-the-shelf technology, commoditize some magic stuck in a lab, lead a team to weave it all together, and present the world with something everyone wants but nobody is willing to buy into until everyone else does.

A couple decades ago I had a Virtual iGlasses HMD. (Still have it. Anyone want it?) Sure it had its limitations, but the capability was phenomenal for the time ... alas, between the state of technology and nobody including support in suitable software, it went nowhere. Now we have the off-the-shelf technology to leverage (current dev kit is a mere $350), $2B to commoditize the magic needed, and Carmack to validate the implementation for universal buy-in and support.

The only thing missing is normalization of strapping opaque goggles to your face for prolonged periods while thrashing around on the couch.
If I spend $10 buying a disposable planter and herbs, and over the course of the year, I harvest $20 FMV of herbs, I have made a profit. Profits from a hobby activity must be reported as income. Time permitting, I will ask my CPA/EA when we go over my taxes. (I'm quite certain that I spent more gardening than the value of the food I extracted, and hobby losses are not deductible, so I'm quite sure I'm clean...)

I'm not suggesting that BTC should have special rules because it's digital, but rather questioning whether mining BTC should be treated as compensation for personal labor (ordinary, active income), treated similarly to a dividend or interest payment, or treated as an outcome of a business activity (like raising beef cattle, food crops, or extracting energy from wind/solar). To my mind, the activity seems more closely aligned with the last group, and pretty far removed from compensation for personal efforts.

(None of this applies to me personally, as I've never owned a BTC, but these topics strike
All you need for lenses is SPJ's talk https://www.mediafire.com/?ra37c2948pw2ye6
I think it's the other way around. Because of Sony's involvment, I'd say investors from probably many large companies were pressed to buy stake in Occulus Rift ASAP to make a dent in the VR market should it become big. Facebook probably had the biggest offer on the table and that's the end of the story.
Android vulnerability puts one billion devices at privilege escalation attack
In a similar capacity, the B&MGF/IV have a laser that blasts mosquitoes out of the air. However despite it actually existing, it would be perfectly reasonable to refer to it as vapor ware at this point. You'd even be excused for asserting that it was just a PR stunt and funding sink.
> Should KS Backers at least get a small return for making a $2 Billion exit possible?

No. You know exactly what you buy (or try to buy) when you support a Kickstarter project. There's no equity in the companies you support. Not at all.
I think the kickstarter backers are really both investors and customers. They are investors because they do take a risk by paying for a product that doesn't yet exist. This leap of faith from these "customers" allowed Oculus to create a 2 billion dollar product.

People are mad because funding the project through kickstarter created some expectations that were not met. Funding through kickstarter feels like you're investing in grassroots human projects, but this made people realize that it's really just business as usual.
TheSquatRack.com - workout tracking, analysis, as well as ( macros, body measurements, workout-journals, data-export options, import options, etc.). Current features being deployed include workout routines that span weeks and months, with progressions and deloads of weights, macronutrients adjust up or down (you can have customizable targets like <=10g carbs or >= 1.5g/lb bw protein, etc), adding/removing sets or reps, etc. Also allowing you to schedule workout repetition patterns or meta routines, where you're routine responds to the data logged (use case: your FitBit logged less than 5 hrs of sleep, today's workout should be pushed back a day), and you automatically see that in your dashboard. Of course, all the routines are in a database anyone can review and rate. And since the workout schedule is known, it can log it for you, or just keep it scheduled. more info - https://thesquatrack.com/soon . I've taken it from idea to approaching-sustainable living income on my own. Started in August 2012 as a shits-n-giggles side project, got a bit more serious in October, did a lot from Jan-May, took a couple months off, started back up, decided to go all in, and quit my job at Intel doing preboot storage drivers. Now I'm getting a decent subscription rate considering private-beta (I'm sure that'll change once it's public), but I have no true idea how it's going to scale ... so that'll be fun.

The hard part has been managing burnout, stress, backlog stuff, and generally just everything ... there's so much non-programming stuff that goes into a business. Once I can get someone to manage all that stuff, it'll be interesting to see what I can do with all that extra time, haha. That and revenue/funding. I'm completely bootstrapped and solo on this, no cofounder, nothing ... what a pain in the ass, why can't someone just manage the business stuff and marketing stuff.

As far as revenue, I've gone with a subscription model. I tried to split the features so that as a free user, you have no ads and you can manually everything. Subscribers get power-user-esq tools like slice-n-dice analytics, soon the routines and auto-logging, etc. As far as managing the users, I just try to be honest and transparent with them, and actually take their feature requests into consideration. A lot of times it's userA wants feature ABC and userB wants XYZ, clearly not the same, but if you step back you realize the just want special-use cases of '123', see if there's a couple other cases for it, and build it if it fits with the direction of the site. Sometimes features take a long long time to get implemented, but I get to them because I have several more pre-reqs to do first, I just try to weave them into the pipeline as logically as I can because it'll be a different problem to solve and help the users so why not.

How's that for a response? Any questions or anything? I try to be open and honest about myself and TSR because I want to be proud of what I made, it's like digital legos.
Can technology change the way building is designed
Except if I'm a major contributor on an open source project, I A) get to shape software that I (generally speaking) am a consumer of, and B) can put that on my resume.

Donating to a Kickstarter may give you some superficial "control" over project direction, but it's a far cry from open source, and it doesn't have the future career impact.
The "scale" JC is referring to is not hardware production. It's the virtual reality. Millions of people interacting in real time in a virtual universe in which they are actually present.

Think of it as similar to the scaling challenges of MMORPGs. Only much worse.
tbh, of all companies, i would never say "carmack is going to facebook".
I am happy to vouch for Manning Publications in general. I've read a couple of Manning books and have found that their content quality is high.
Everything about the game changer: Android Wear
Another gem from Mozilla - I am astounded at how much good stuff is coming out of Mozilla in such a short timespan. Keep it up folks. Between this, rust, servo, asm.js and emscripten - you have my attention.
The problem with grokking Facebook's involvement is the lack of any apparent connection between VR and FB's core competencies. Google at least can use Glass for ever-more data mining. VR? FB? Carmack can sure put the $2B to good use, but how it benefits FB nobody seems to know.
> I agree with your reasoning ... (some stuff) ...

Awesome.

Let's boycott and protest everyone who doesn't!
Valve maybe? Lack of output aside, they know how to "get it right" the first time, whenever that time may come.
Normally yes. But wasn't the Instagram deal done very quickly too?
wow finally someone who gets it
Finding a Way Out [video]
I suppose Facebook can now be officially declared as a hedge fund in the disguise of a tech company.
Leadership positions... like, say, someone who's the CTO / Senior VP of Engineering? Like Brendan Eich was for the past eight years?
I don't think that's true. There is no scaling involved with virtual reality except the hardware, because the hardware enables the platform. "Virtual reality" isn't a single application, it's a bunch of applications created by developers.
I think the idea is to pass your SEO juice to your other pages rather than external pages.
I have no problems going on record with this: I did not (and continue to not) support Prop 8. I do not support Eich's decision to fund the prop. I do support his right to fund the prop. I do not support a boycott of Mozilla solely because Eich was appointed CEO. My opinion of Firefox remains unchanged and I will continue to use it with the same (low) frequency I have for the past few years.
> It sounds a little off right now, but imagine if the VR set becomes more mobile and easier to put on and take off... or why even take it off.

It will take a long time to get there. Even gamers who have eyes moving faster than normal people have had nauseous sensations after using the Rift for extended periods of time. Stuff like that will make it a big hurdle for VR to go mainstream in the short-mid term.
Your characterization of VR applications seems limited to near-term applications of current or immediate-term technologies.

What about when the device is $20 instead of $400? When it doesn't make you nauseous? When it's so close to face-to-face contact that you can replace 10 or 20 percent of your business travel?
Palmer Luckey's comments on Oculus' acquisition by Facebook
Outbound bandwidth is still expensive.
You have to keep in mind that spending a billion is also publicity. People are going to talk about it and see this is a crazy investment.
I'd like to think Berkshire Hathaway would have been a good fit. They could expand into an entirely new technology sector, Buffett seems like an insanely smart guy who would get along with Carmack, and BH seems to be focused on making companies succeed in their own fields instead of folding them into existing lines of business.
Because it makes it seem like he's just another peon, rather than the CTO of a subsidiary. I know that Facebook requires a very diverse set of skils/positions in order to run, it just seems kind of hilarious to say John Carmack is now a Facebook employee :)
Three cheers for fyodor!
Malaysia Flight 370 Sent Final 'Partial Ping' That Could Aid Investigation
It makes "real" social interaction live in the virtual world.
Technology can help architects design more energy efficient buildings.
Augmented reality and Virtual design will transform the way we build.
Green building not just for the sake of certification but a technology that helps architects from the conceptual phase- which direction the building should face, orientation/size of windows.
You wont need to switch on your light, AC .
Your blinds are automated with the daylighting.
But how many patents does Oculus have that are going to make it difficult to impossible for a competitor to deliver the same experience?
And all it took to fork mariaDB was the support of several large corporations.
I think you mean it needs a "No acquisition by Facebook" clause.
That's a great point. I'd happily pay full price for a technical book if it meant the authors received more. Technical authors hardly receive fair compensation for the hours they put in already.
Good to hear! I was thinking of doing something similar, but no reason to duplicate effort
> With access to Google

Why the heck would you need Google

> and the library documentation

It's an online quiz.

> sure, but I don't use those APIs often enough to be worth keeping in memory.

You don't worry about it, but it tends to accumulate in one's mind anyway.

Here's the thing though. People are posting solutions on HN... and getting it wrong.
> You can prevent archiving (at least for Seclists) by specifying the X-No-Archive mail header in your post, but you might reconsider whether to post such a sensitive message to a public list in the first place.
Full Disclosure List Lives Under New Operator
Read the first chapter and bought the eBook.
> patents get extensions and expand in scope

Yeah, but usually you cannot get extensions THAT easily, and extensions are limited in time. I don't think you can expect extensions to last too long either (at most you can add a couple of years of exclusivity).
Does Valve have $2billion dollars lying around to acquire companies with?
Nooooooooooooooooooooo!

I wanted Oculus VR to stay independent. Now all our VR habits and our minds will be read by the NSA.

"I'm gonna make him an offer he won't refuse"
- Don Corleone
I'm patiently waiting to see if Rust can solve two of the three points in the "when to use it" section without sacrificing significant performance.