skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Quantum entanglement and long distance communication
http://www.google.com/patents/US8630897
What the salmon study did was make some points about statistics in a funny way, but the authors were not trying to discredit fMRI as a whole.

If you look at most studies that came out before it did, they were already using statistical approaches that were robust to this sort of problem.

These include Bonferroni correction, cluster correction for spatial distributions, and Monte Carlo simulations and permutation testing.

These techniques analyze what you would expect to happen if there were no signal but a lot of random noise. You can then look for signals that are still significantly stronger than predicted by the null hypothesis. This is what most fMRI studies do, and this is not done (intentionally) in the dead salmon study. If you use 'em, you find nothing in the salmon.
There are IMO two angles to this that I identify with (to different degrees):

1 - People wanted Oculus to be a driving force in gaming, and based on recent post-acquisition statement it looks like the company is much more interested in the Metaverse than they are in gaming.

This is certainly a more ambitious goal and a harder problem overall to tackle than gaming, but a lot of Oculus fans don't give two hoots about the Metaverse and just want to fly airplanes, shoot monsters, explore dungeons, or what have you.

There is (IMO a justifiable) fear that the company is going to abandon, or at least scale back, their efforts in promoting Oculus for gaming, in favor of its own goals creating the Metaverse. Like you said, Google Hangouts in VR.

2 - People are excited that the Metaverse a la Snow Crash is actually going to happen, but do not believe Facebook to the be right people to bring this about. The reasoning for this varies, but mostly comes down to privacy protections, prevalence of advertising, and Facebook's seemingly infinite capacity for nickel and diming their users.

In this case people understand perfectly well why VR would be part of Facebook's vision - it just scares the bejeezus out of them.

The perceived bad move for VR in general is that Oculus is going to become a Facebook product, rather than a well-supported, well-evangelized platform on which a whole VR ecosystem can be built (i.e., the original vision). The chief fear is that eventually people are going to by the Oculus purely to access Facebook Presents the Metaverse instead of to access a wide ecosystem of VR products.
I have http://have.tips/ and I have no idea what to do with it. Any tips? (see what I did there?)
It's not "extortion" - Facebook is under no obligation to provide businesses with 100% reach (or indeed any reach) for free. Facebook is not a non-profit or some government service - they are a business. And just like you want to make money for your business, they want to make money for theirs. [And if they don't make money they go out of business and that certainly won't increase your reach]

IMO Facebook should have never offered any free reach for businesses - if the only option was pay for reach nobody would be complaining. Because there has always been some amount of free reach there's an odd sense of entitlement.
Maybe it's harder to be #1 without being free but there are many video sites competing with YouTube that do pretty well. Vimeo, Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, etc- they're not FREE but they're still very popular. There's no reason to believe that Facebook's VR network will be the only one.

Also, none of the products you listed had first mover advantage. They're all excellent examples of things that upset a formerly dominant major player.
aka Flipboard by Facebook?
Same. And I also would go do an interview claiming that I was.
A good friend saw the SXSW screening of the first two episodes and loved it. He's founded a failed company, founded a successful small company, coded for a failed company, and is currently in SF coding for a startup.

A lot of the jokes are tech-hilarious and well-informed about the tech culture here. Mike Judge's long-time residence, Austin, has plenty of tech and some startups, but of course not as much as the Bay Area.

It's a comedy so I expect it to poke fun at our culture.
This is stunningly wonderful, and deserves to be here, and I hope it provokes discussion. In case it doesn't, you may wonder why. It might be because a few people have seen it before. Here are some of the previous submissions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=204042 : A few comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=451923

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=451951

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=944431

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1041500 : 31 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1499630

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1601472

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2210070

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2547655 : 22 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2889115

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3279927

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3289795

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3602025

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3840273

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4611015

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4642628

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6823190
Ask HN:how was it when you first got paid for your hacks?
How was the experience? Getting paid real money for your piece of software/code/hack.how did that experience affect you?when did you earn your first programming $?
The author of this piece is pretty naive on what average people actually "Contributed" to Oculus. $25 - $5000 for actual material goods is akin to pre-orders, at market prices.

Everyone sees risk differently, the "contributors" for Oculus, saw paying $300 for a dev kit as a risk they were willing to take vs. $10K for a .01% of the company that may never produce a return.

The sale to facebook (of all places) was not reasonably foreseen and especially at the price paid.

If the author would have looked at contributions thru the lens of risk mitigation, he would see that the "contributors" actually made a very sound financial decision.
My sincere apologies for the sarcasm, but you mean to tell me that your previously free source of massive one click fan reach is no longer free?! There is no possible way that this was intentional ...
House of Cards pitched HBO too. HBO could have had the show if they wanted it. Mike Judge and Kevin Spacey want to get paid to create the stories that they want to tell. They could care less about the business model and will move to new models when/if it makes sense. It's not their job to change how media is consumed. It's their job to make a great show. Louis doesn't release his show DRM free. He partnered with a network. For his standup special it made sense to release it through his website so he did. The creators have enough on their plate just to make something good. They are going to go where the money is now.
You realize that at the same time as the occulus rift purchase they announced one billion mobile users, right? No one is moving away from facebook. Everyone has anecdotes but the financial filings have real numbers. They may not be growing at the rates they were in the past, but that was inevitable.
The algorithm they describe is apparently called "EdgeRank." All I can find via Google are really bad infographics and worse layman explanations (ones that make it clear the writer doesn't understand basic graph theory, or is adulterating their understanding for whatever reason).

Can anyone post a link to a research-level paper explaining the algorithm? The name EdgeRank makes me think it's a ripoff of PageRank, so are they solving some sort of eigensystem for, what, an incidence matrix instead of an adjacency matrix?
He's not saying “stick it in your games”, is he? He is talking different kinds of applications. Also, I wouldn't mind ads on the streets in a game city because I'm sort of used to them in the real world. Ads actually look better in a 3D world than on web pages.
Facebook started to throttle response just over a year ago, well after most people already had all of their friends in their feed, and well after most people had joined most of the pages they like.

It's no coincidence that Facebook told me I could get more views by spending money to reach the same people I had been reaching organically just a few weeks before.

The solution is to stop trying to extort money from the businesses that helped them build their business and let the users decide what they want to see.
Is it? Because I don't buy that. You're trying to apply a consumer product strategy like this was a business decision. This is clearly a pet interest from Brin or Page or both. And besides, it seems far more lucrative to monetize the tech itself. If we sold 5 million self driving cars a year (just a fraction of the total domestic market) and Google sold the whole rig to automakers at $5k, that's $25bn in sales. Worldwide the market for cars is 10x that so it's $25bn w/ room to grow.
It's just that I don't intend to stay with this project after the MVP stage, and don't want further commitment. Insisting on equity will make things complicated.
I don't think FB is dumb, but I do fear that they are highly amoral with respect to personal privacy... And a VR screen glued to your face is getting pretty damn personal. I feel uneasy about a guy who calls his users "dumb fucks" for trusting him to be in charge of that.
> I don't understand why most people think Facebook is so dumb in this thread.

Because Facebook is dumb. For all the talk of vision, FB is nothing more than organic growth around Zuck's desire to get lists of fellow students on his campus into a directory.

FB in 2006 is barely a different experience than FB in 2014. And none of the changes made so far can be charitably described as "smart".

For all the wealth of information they have on people, they aren't even that good at placing relevant ads or getting clicks. The main innovations FB is credited with is finding more and more ways to mine and exploit user's data.

More importantly, the things that Facebook is good at doing have little to nothing to do with building a persistent on-line world (and decades of experience have shown that in general these are not things that the bulk of people want to inhabit as a replacement for the real world. Walking around a virtual art gallery sucks in comparison to just flipping through a bunch of photos).

Facebook and innovation almost never appear positively in the same sentence.
It's a comedy so I expect it to poke fun at our culture.

And after living in the Bay area for six years, I realize that there is much to poke fun at.
> I get the frustration about the short-term impact on gaming, but I don't (yet?) understand why this is a bad move for VR in general...

That's just it. Fans of Oculus and the Rift were (mostly) interested in the gaming of VR. You have a point, that Facebook can certainly leverage VR to expand their product. But I think it's not in the direction previous/current fans (or even followers) of Oculus were/are interested in.

I'm not necessarily questioning whether this move is in the best interest of Facebook or Oculus. I think both companies will benefit from this long-term.

My point is that this isn't in the interest of the fans/followers of Oculus, and there's no explanation as to how Oculus would be surprised by the negative reaction of those outside the core community.

In fact, the only ones I can think of that would not react to this move negatively are fans of Facebook, and those invested in Facebook and Oculus.
Execution is king.
How can you cite 2nd Life as an example when they have barely kept 50,000 concurrent users online at their peak?

How can you forget to cite the father of modern day MMO's, EverQuest, which is on expansion 20? The best MMO ever created (vanilla through velious). The only damn reason WoW is around is because of the greatness of EQ.
A few billion dollars can lead you to believe most anything.
>Do you not see how it's literally impossible for every post I'm subscribed to reach me?

And requiring people to pay to reach fans somehow magically fixes this? Does the payment requirement somehow supercede the best algorithms in perfectly balancing post activity? And, do brands with deeper pockets somehow automatically have the most compelling content?

Do you sincerely believe that this is all about solving that problem and it just happens to have a very positive impact on Facebook's bottom line?

>But organic growth also still works.

This statement is obviously and mathematically less true than it once was. Reaching one fan organically does not mean organic "works". Degree matters here and a much smaller percentage of posts organically reach fans than at a previous time. Somewhere between zero and 100, the degree of organic efficacy becomes a non-starter for companies who previously answered Facebook's call to engage with fans for free, and are now required to pay an untenable amount to reach them.
This. Types are the hardest thing about translating mathematics into programming. And it's really the fault mathematics (or a feature of it, depending on your viewpoint).
Actually not all port 53 as there are some DNS servers still accessible and actually resolves stuff fine.
That's cool.
Is it live?
I've been watching shows about "The South" written by ignorant Californians my whole life. I'm perfectly alright with one instance of a Texan telling a Cali story. It'll be fine and at the very least should be fresh. :)
That's a fair question, and maybe I am jumping the gun with this particular set of patents. But my interpretation is in context with other patent licensing news (March 26th, 2014):

http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSBREA2P1VC20140326?irpc...

So I was primed to read this as opening a new front in an ongoing, contemporary effort to use patents aggressively. Maybe the downvotes are a clear signal that I'm destined to be proven wrong in this regard. I guess we'll see.
For movie distribution, network lock in doesn't matter so much. But for video sharing they do, and for VR they really will. Competing with Netflix is a lot easier than competing with Facebook or YouTube for that reason.
Well, in fact domains used to cost $100 per year. This was back when Network Solutions was the sole registrar. Some of my older domains date back to then.

It really didn't stop speculation at all, in fact Robert Grant (well known domain speculator) made most of his money back in the days when domains were priced at $100.

However, I do believe that the current cheap domains have made the "register expired page-ranked domains" SEO scheme work, and it probably wouldn't be going on if it wasn't for cheap domains.
> You can't compete with 'without ads' business model. Look around: Google search, Youtube, Facebook etc. They all had first mover advantage and there's no way someone can compete with these.

Nonsense, there are dozens of very expensive data providers and search companies out there who do very well for themselves thank you very much.
Auroracoin – Forked and Game Over
Financial engineering could cure cancer
> More importantly, why does NVidia, who contribute practically nothing to Free graphics development (drivers or the rest of the graphics stack) think that the Wayland developers have any obligation to make Wayland work well with their secretly-developed blobs?

NVidia could also just not support Linux at all, which would certainly create even more of an uphill battle for Free graphics development and Linux.
Tesla Motors news banned from Reddit technology
From the application: "Women think about fashion more than men think about sex". Wow! I had no idea!

I wonder if the study had a selection bias (eg. if it was a poll conducted on the parent website very.co.uk)
Anand wins candidates tournament 2014
Rethinkdbdash – A Node driver for RethinkDB with promises and a connection pool
You'll have to wait and see.
tl;dr: People who react negatively are dumb and ignorant, and need to be "eductated".

Suddenly I understand much clearer how Facebook and Oculus are a good cultural match.
Other businesses that are about monetizing human interaction: telephony (pay us to talk to people), restaurants (pay us for a venue to have a conversation/date, show off your wealth), clothing (pay us to increase your apparent status/attractiveness), theater and movies (pay us to have an activity with your friends/date), beyond-low-end housing (pay us so you can entertain and impress and be in a city with lots of humans to interact with).

You say this like it's a dirty, disgusting thing to do, but is Facebook really that different from all of these industries in terms of wanting to monetize human interaction?
I dont understand what's going on ...
> Why is VR inevitable?

Good point, I agree that I am making a big assumption.

That said, I don't think the argument that "it didn't work before" is valid. I don't think people want face-covering headsets that _suck_.

If I can wear an _awesome_ headset and have a virtual conversation with my family across the country, I'd purchase one in a heartbeat.
Why Google doesn't have a research lab
Possibly you were only looking at FB last week. If you widen your gaze you'll see the entire tech sector took a correction -- especially "momo" momentum-driven high p/e stocks. You simply can't view what happened to FB share price as a market reaction to Oculus.
Liking your ad/page does not mean I want a constant stream of your ads. Under what circumstances would you believe that just because I said that I liked something you posted once or twice you now have some claim on my attention in the future and under what circumstances would that claim end?
> And besides, it seems far more lucrative to monetize the tech itself. If we sold 5 million self driving cars a year (just a fraction of the total domestic market) and Google sold the whole rig to automakers at $5k, that's $25bn in sales. Worldwide the market for cars is 10x that so it's $25bn w/ room to grow.

Either way, doesn't matter. People won't just stare off into space for their hour commute while the car does the driving. They'll want to do something. Hell people who are in the act of driving can barely keep their attention on task for more than 10 minutes.

What's better, licensing the tech to get people's faces looking at screens, or building your own cars to get people's faces looking at screens?
I don't say this to counter your views, but I think there is a threshold limit in everyday life.

Think about boiling water. You boil it till 100 Celsius scale. You keep heating it, but it won't attain more temperature, without turning it into steam. Now think about it, we do not need steam but we need liquid water for survival.
Martin Gardner – The Best Friend Mathematics Ever Had
You and I can be in different locations. But, with the goggles on, we can be face to face inside VR.
>FB is nothing more than organic growth

You seem to be underestimating how difficult organic growth is. (In terms of product design, not engineering. And yes, Facebook circa 2006 is great product design because it was what people wanted.)
I'll bet you just don't understand why the tech crowd is becoming vilified in San Francisco, too.
Does anybody use Paper?
Building a sophisticated billing solution on Stripe
As part of the industry, I can see an awful lot of irrational exuberance and shallow cargo culting that would benefit from a sharp, witty, cynical eye.

You don't think some of those stereotypes and presumptions are well deserved?
Some AR is already present in some vehicles. My mother has a "HUD" that reflects off the glass that displays speed, and gas consumption in the direct LOS while driving, but not intrusive enough to distract, mid 2000's car.

But if I abstract what you are saying a bit, I would have to agree that AR is going to be an "easier" sell in b2b than b2c, it has been for a while. I think the cross over will happen when consumers are more exposed to the ways businesses leverage it.

Here's a scenario I can see before mainstream adoption: Imagine a sales clerk or rep with it as you walk into the store to pull in data from across the web about you from facial recog and be able to automatically point you to where you might be interested, maybe even using google's/microsoft's/facebook's/yelp's/some startup's "intent" api that pulls in your latest queries that may be relevant to the store you just we're identified in.

Then some people see such things used, and then want the same capabilities as they navigate their cities around them seeing that it could be useful in their life.
oldie but goodie. For those who are new to map-making, the reason Africa does not look nearly as big as it really is (and why Greenland looks so big) is because of something called "map projections", i.e. the choices that were made as to the formula for projecting a spherical earth onto a flat piece of paper. The most popular projection in use "mercator" favored an accurate representation of western europe and distorted other regions, the smaller size of Africa being one casualty. Here is more reading for those who are interested: http://www.petersmap.com/page3.html
So many things wrong with this post. Firstly, the system before was fine: For four years people voluntarily chose to engage with my fan page and receive posts from my business. If fans didn't like my posts they could block them or leave the page. Facebook never said at any time they would throttle fans' access to my content, so yes, it was a cheap advertising channel. That's why we used Facebook instead of some other social network.

If you are happy to let your newsfeed be determined not by what you want but by who pays the most then good luck to you. It's bad for the fans and bad for us, and ultimately -- as you can see by the increasing number of anti-Facebook posts -- it's bad for Facebook.
As pointed out by slazaro, this is incorrect. A decrease in usage and/or a change in the market size potentially lowers penetration as a percentage, which could enable it to double again.

As stated, it's either ambiguous or false. If it actually means penetration will never again double from the peak percentage it reached which was >=50%, it's trivial and uninteresting... if it doesn't imply that, then yeah, it's just incorrect.
> he knows little or nothing about Silicon Valley

"Everything is so different here, an outsider couldn't possibly know anything."

...

Get over yourself. Quite frankly people starting to think California is some sort of promised land would be a good thing.
Bigquery analysis costs 5x posted price
Facebook has been taking their product to market for the last 8 years. What would you have them do? Change their product for the sake of it when it's still growing -- worldwide?

Innovation in tech is still laudable innovation. Cassandra. Scribe. Thrift. React. Tech that is widely used.

I don't think FB is as important to our industry as some other companies, but no, they're not dumb.
This reminds me of "Herbert Stein's Law" which he expressed as "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop".
Why do people think Facebook has a problem making money ? They had over $7 billion in revenue in 2013.

And should they ever decide to compete with Google's AdSense they would be able to make a significant amount more.
Take a look at the field of neuromarketing.