skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm pretty much of the same mind here. A huge part of the backlash (and a large number of the comments here) seems to revolve around gaming (hardcore or otherwise). Valve, for instance, would have been okay, but EA, Sony and even Microsoft have been mentioned as better/more suitable. And I firmly believe that, while I get the appeal of gaming VR, it rather misses the larger picture. I no more want to see this sort of tech tied to gaming, even philosophically, than I want to see it become a dongle for Autodesk software (which, by the way, would be a much more meaningful application than gaming). I want holonovels and walkthroughs and avatar space for those whose meatspace experience isn't great. Many of the dreams we dreamed when ubiquitous computing meant that you got a punchcard with your bill and a handful of people owned something like a TRS-80 or an Apple ][ are on the verge of becoming very real (and not in quite the same way that strong AI has always been "almost here"). FB has an intrinsic interest in the avatar space part of that, but they're also as good a bet as anyone to diversify into the other realms.
2013 Honda CBR500R, Saturday Ride Part 1
Yeah, that will do it.
Maybe because it's the wrong thing to do regardless of who's doing it?
Jesus. When I lived in India as a kid, I'd never have been able to afford that. What a horrific idea!

You live in some rich-country-bubble.
We need "Crowd-Investing" kick-starter
The article clearly says "In the February 2014 Web Server survey Netcraft found 27,000 web-facing computers (both Windows and Linux) using the cloud computing platform."
Automatic spam filters and search engines are going to down rank them heavily. It's hard to automatically evaluate domain names such as xkcd but anything under .ecom is probably trash.
I'm not embedding account credentials for Flurry and UA in my app. I embedding app keys and while those don't allow someone to take over my account they could certainly wreak havoc with push notifications.
Because Zuckeberg is in charge. I just don't think he could thing of anything interesting. FB was just a landgrab. The product has a/ stagnated b/ gone worse depending on why you ask.
> It wouldn't bother anybody that owns a few domains for business or even personal use.

I think roughly an order of magnitude increase of price is going to bother a lot of people who have domains for other than profit-earning businesses. (OTOH, people who have a profitable business model, including spammers, might well not be all that bothered. So I think you've got the impacts basically backwards.)
> Does Google create self-driving cars to show ads on the windshields?

What do you think people will be doing on the boring non-interactive self-driven commute? The same thing they do on long bus or train rides. Surf the internet. That's always been Google's goal.

The intersection of people with cars and people with internet connected smartphones is huge. Get people's eyes off the road and onto a Google product is the idea.
Clever and pretty. Is it possible to add an "absorb" slider to the walls? I'm having trouble making some of the effects I'm trying for.
> The reason people don't get this -- or at least, why I don't get it -- and thus responded negatively, is because VR should have nothing to do with Facebook's vision, and Facebook -- or social gaming in general -- should have nothing to do with Oculus' vision.

Honest question: why shouldn't VR be in Facebook's vision?

_Someone_ is going to create a Google Hangouts-style product that incorporates VR. I'm not excited that it is FB, per say, but I can see how a company built on social interactions is going to want a piece of that pie.

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...
MeowBit: all-browser Anti-Censorship Dot-Bit Free Software for Windows
There are no .com's left really.

e: Let me just take the opportunity to say the ones left are either very bizarre and hard to brand market or remember or they're being squatted.
Would you like to explain how e.g. Excel is a clone of 123, but 123 is not a clone of Visicalc?

I mean, everything ever done with digital computers is an extension of Charles Babbage's work on the difference engine, which was cloned from Pascal's calculator of the 1640s, maybe with a couple of enhancements here and there. See how you sound?
But the Facebook news feed has never been a reliable delivery mechanism for updates you actually want to receive, because there's always been a huge volume of content with imperfect filters in place; if you really want to check on a brand you either go direct to their Facebook page which is entirely unaffected by filter algorithms or follow them on Twitter or by email. Users who only ever saw a fraction of the brand communications in their main feed anyway aren't particularly upset by changes in the filter that mean they see an even smaller percentage (if they get more friend updates instead they might even see it as a net win). Brands whose free advertising reaches 1-2% of eyeballs rather than 10-20% of the ones upset here, as with the Gmail "promotions" tab.

Eat24's marketing team aren't stupid: they know this which is why you don't get coupon offers on Facebook, you get meme graphics, jokes about food and pictures of pizza. You get coupon offers by email without the jokes or on Twitter with them.

Edit: disagreement by downvoting is particularly lame when it comes without an explanation of why I'm supposedly wrong. You don't see everything that every person or brand has posted in your newsfeed, haven't done for a long time, and in practice wouldn't do without a lot of scrolling even if they didn't filter at all. Whether Facebook's intent in filtering Pages posts to your feed more aggressively than Friend posts to your feed is purely commercial, purely driven by user engagement metrics or something in between, it's hardly a new development or something that only applies to brands.
This doesn't make sense at all.

Imagine the new generation goes purely VR and doesn't use the “old web” for entertainment. What would be the point of “Login with Facebook“ if those kids don't use the web anyway?

This is a very narrow vision.
This article is pretty misinformed. Title III of the JOBS act, which would allow crowdunding-for-equity, is still pending SEC rulemaking [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumpstart_Our_Business_Startups...
Especially considering that MS has a ~1.3% Facebook (preferred) shareholding; that's 32.5 million shares, currently priced at $1.95bn - they won't be attacking FB with a patent suit any time soon.

Interestingly the Oculus buyout has also been viewed negatively by the markets, wiping 7% off the share value since the announcement.
It's not that VR shouldn't be in Facebook's vision. It's that Facebook's vision shouldn't be a primary player in VR.
Have you seen Paper?
> What on the earth makes you think Facebook bought Oculus to show ads

Zuckerberg himself [0].

Quote:

> so that this becomes a network where people can be communicating and buying things and virtual goods, and there might be advertising in the world

"might" is good enough for me in that case, because it means it's clearly an option. I'm not really fond of the idea that the Rift is becoming a VR Habbo Hotel.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7471699
[sarcasm]
Having been enduring this kind of shit for years in mainland China, I am glad to see that it migrated to the (sort of) 'free' world, eventually!
[/sarcasm]

BTW, I have to manoeuvre some IP addresses of the CDNs in /etc/hosts in order to get access to github.com today, and some others for stack overflow.com last week. Interference from those who have power really sucks!

CDNs nowadays are so vulnerable to political issues, and some CDNs seems to be hurt by extended non-specific attacks/blocks to some other sites sharing the same IP addresses, due to some unrelated reasons, which makes me feel nostalgic to the web before CDNs.
Instead of resorting to emotion, can you explain a compelling alternative for how Facebook could actually solve this?

Yes, you have 4000 fans. But I'm 99% sure you're not the only page they like. They probably like many other pages, and also have many other friends (2 numbers that increase over time). Do you not see how it's literally impossible for every post I'm subscribed to reach me?

This is purely a problem of scale. Most of my friends don't see my updates, because they also have many other friends. But my mom sees every single update I have because I'm her only Facebook friend.

Perhaps it's annoying/confusing that Facebook gave you the option to monetarily combat the effects of a growing network. But organic growth also still works.
I tend to agree with the sentiment, but exactly what ill-intent does acquiring patents actually demonstrate?
oh, you already bought a google car? how is it?

no one has a clue what google will do with that tech, least of all google. but ad financed cars would not exactly hurt their company strategy, which is getting eyeballs on ads. same with glass.

and now we're at oculus.

both facebook and google are ad financed companies. and ads ruin any cool product. they cheapen it, are a nuisance and distraction. ads in games? suck. ads in your feed? suck. ads on the radio? suck.

now imagine ads that follow you around, all day. you get up, read the news, an ad for stresspills appears. you get in the car to commute to work, the same ad is sprinkling you. you want to escape by playing halo on your oculus/glass? there is the stress pill again. at the end of the week you buy the pill cause you're so stressed out by the fucking ad.
Mean and standard deviation are [measures] to calculate data, but not [applications].
Application is making that data meaningful and organized, in order to push whatever industry forward. It's just what actually IBM, GE et. all. are doing.

Still, the article doesn't have to be objective and you might be right but a little bit negative.
Facebook have lost 7% share value since the announcement, that's $10bn off the market cap.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/facebook-share-price-continue...
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. These services (and companies) operate around the idea of giving away free candy and locking everyone in with network effects. This is what will happen to VR as well under Facebook's control.
Seriously? I like that, as a teenager, I'm able to afford one or two domains for my personal websites. Jack it up like that, and I'd be able to afford none.
The sibling comment is correct, in that you're always measuring differences. The 'baseline' isn't a canonical one but specific to your experimental design (and research question).

For example, if I were interested in which regions respond to pain and pleasure I have several ways I could design a study. I could have a 'pain' condition (drink something bitter), and a 'pleasure' condition (drink something sweet) and then just do comparisons between them (pain - pleasure, and the inverse). However, I could also include a 'neutral' condition (drink plain water) and now I can compare the emotional conditions against the 'neutral' one and extract the regions that are generally involved in emotion.

Also, your comment highlights another problem when research work is badly disseminated. The concept of logic is not being examined whatsoever, yet you've taken 'cognitively driven' (already a false statement) to mean 'logical'.
Whoever controls the main communications vector in the future will be controlling reality, and no one is planning for it.

Except maybe Facebook, by buying Oculus.
I get this "it was money in exchange for goods" point of view, and I certainly find this article stupid and misleading.

But I'm still a little uneasy about what happened with Oculus, and the trouble that I have is, if you look at the the pledge levels, a lot of that money was nothing near a "cash-for-goods" exchange. 7 people pledged more than $5000 to get to meet the Oculus team. 100 people pledged $75 for a poster and a t-shirt. Those aren't purchases of goods for market prices; those are donations for token rewards, no different than when you give to public radio. Oculus solicited private donations to continue their work, and if the Facebook acquisition results in a dramatic change of direction for Oculus I think that will be a betrayal of donor trust.
I agree with you on the last part man, I feel like once the show - if it's popular will just deliver ignorant opinions from couch potatoes...not to mention the view on the valley
But doesn't it change things slightly if you are subscribing to these advertisements?

The new Facebook algorithm is kind of like signing up (liking) to a newsletter and then only receiving it every 10th edition.
The fact that I liked your page last year does not mean that I stil want a constant stream of your store updates and coupons. The amount of stuff that can be put onto my Facebook news feed is finite, and the number of people who think they have some entitlement to that space because of a single action they convinced me to take in the distant past is constantly growing. You didn't do anything to grow Facebook other than try to use it as a cheap advertising channel and I would rather Facebook try to figure out wha I need/want than to have my news feed cluttered by everyone whose page I ever liked.
How will you do a face to face interaction when you are both wearing VR goggles ?
Yes, but you're assuming those affordable cars are for purchase. If Elon can make them self-driving, you get the benefit of never having all the expenses that go with vehicle ownership, and he makes the spread between an expensive electric transportation appliance and people paying dirt cheap rates to get from A->B (because electric is so much cheaper per mile than petroleum).
I noticed several of your comments criticizing Knewton. Could you expand a bit? I am not related to Knewton at all, but interested in ed tech. If you don't want to say it in public, I'd appreciate if you could email me.
So when you get that Google self-driving car and it drives you past McDonalds when you're hungry, are you going to wonder it McDonalds paid Google for that access?
Might be a good read
http://mrvar.fdv.uni-lj.si/pub/mz/mz1.1/pohar.pdf
Because Facebook is an advertising business. So it's not extortion; it's their business model.
Well remember, for every successful social game, there's a Star Wars Galaxies or Age of Conan. Or if successful, try to play Mario Kart Wii or Mario Kart DS. Suddenly tens of millions of gamers get $0 of value out of their purchase because a company has decided it's time for gamers to move on and make their next purchase.

The problem of course is that most companies don't go the way of Quake3 and let people run their own servers. Because that's hard to monetize after the initial purchase. Valve has found a way to make it work, but outside of some very rare exceptions (WoW, 2nd Life), the age of the short-lived social game is here.

It's hard to imagine, but FarmVille isn't even 5 years old.
Just for context, Google was #1 on their general "most innovative" list. I think it's pretty common to try to have a variety of companies topping different lists, even if one company really should be at the top of them all. That doesn't make this list any more accurate, but it might have been what they were thinking.
I wish you could save a high resolution PNG.
> "Oculus has a clear path to monetization"

"Monetization" is a bastardization of a term that was necessary to describe how non-profitable companies could somehow make money from giving away their product for free -- usually by abusing the userbase they're handing the free product to.

See the second paragraph: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetization

I think what you meant to say is:

"Oculus has a clear product that they will sell for money, because that's how businesses that actually sell products to their customers survive".

This is a major reason why the Facebook buyout is so terrible for a product company. Facebook doesn't know how to make and sell a product that isn't their own users.
Bitdefender Total Security (x86/x64) 2014 Build 17.27.0.1146
Threes: A Tiny Musical Postmortem
Second Heart Surgery baby 1 month
Well the reality of that is that 1 in 1000 start-ups make money.

The odds are, they would lose money.

They traded a 1 in a 1000 shot at big bucks for a guaranteed 100% return, that is the small investors take on risk mitigation.

The wall street take on risk mitigation is to take and hold large chunks of equity, hoping for future growth which only occasionally materializes. They do this with other people's money. Those being people who can afford to take such risks.

The people that "bought" into O have a different risk profile and appetite for loss and acted appropriately.
> _Someone_ is going to create a Google Hangouts-style product that incorporates VR.

Are they? Why is VR inevitable?

We already went through this once in the 90s, and the same truths are still true: nobody wants to put a face-covering headset just to communicate with other people.
A much less click-baity pice on the same site by a differentauthor: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-03-28/crowdfundin...

A valid point is that what a kickstarter is exactly can be a bit ambiguous and Kickstarter arguably makes it more so. It's not an equity investment. OK. It's also not a pre-order. OK. But (according to Kickstarter's terms of service) if you don't deliver on the promised reward you have to refund the money. OK? Well, doesn't that sound a lot like a pre-order. And where's the money coming from if it's already been invested in an idea that just didn't work out?

Now, in practice, things generally work out. Lots of projects fail and most rational people realize that sometimes stuff just doesn't play out like they'd wish. (OTOH, one can certainly find discussion boards filled with unreasonable people talking lawsuits etc. for failed projects.)
You sound like you've never used a mandatory social login for a game. I never go to https://login.live.com but I have an account...one I had to create to play a game. I receive in-game messages and friend requests during game sessions.

Take a look at the Games for Windows - LIVE feature set and tell me that isn't a social network that Facebook would want a part of:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_for_Windows_%E2%80%93_Liv...

I'm not limiting the vision of Oculus...the sky is the limit. But I think the play for Facebook's immediate involvement will be similar to Games for Windows. Social gaming data is actionable to the Facebook business.
Hmmm, I just looked up Cygwin to see what it is and what I learned is that the barrier to using GNU APL is too high for me with the time and knowledge I have available. I'll bet that's true for a whole lot of other people that would otherwise benefit from APL.

I just hope that someone outside of GNU APL with the ability to make a normal Windows install package isn't as enamored with Windows barriers and would like to see APL proceed. And I hope the GNU license restrictions allow for that.
> There is no such thing as a "transfer degree". You either transfer or you do not.

The name may be different at different places, but transfer-guaranteed programs do exist. For instance in California community colleges, the "Associate Degree for Transfer" [0], the University of California Transfer Admission Guarantee program [1], and California State University Transfer Admission Agreements and Transfer Admission Guarantees [2].

[0] http://adegreewithaguarantee.com/
[1] http://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/counselors/files...
[2] https://www.calstate.edu/transfer/apply/priority-agreements....
There are ad-less video sharing websites, yet youtube is #1. Same will happen with Oculus, targeted ads in vr.
That's supposed to be a reason for forbidding it?

Anybody could have any number of reasons for wanting a particular domain. Maybe someone will make the next del.icio.us? Maybe a TLD you don't like completes a word or phrase that makes a good brand, or is part of the next big viral trend that goes on to shape our culture in ways we wouldn't have anticipated.

Maybe people are just okay with being penalized by search engines because that's counterbalanced by other objectives. etc.
"Greed is good"?

That isn't an argument for the moral low ground. It wasn't like the alternative was "or you get nothing".

The alternative was "or you get to pursue the vision you built the company on and potentially have a few more commas in front of you".
The size of Africa, in perspective (photo)
fMRI is a tool. Just like every other tool it can be wielded skilfully or incompetently and in the case of fMRI you must do your stats properly (c.f. the Multiple Comparisons problem [1]). There's nothing out there that 'debunks' fMRI as a tool.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_comparisons_problem

Edit: Indeed fMRI allows us to do things we had no hope of doing before, e.g. communication with those who are otherwise in permanent vegetative states [2,3] (that guy was my co-supervisor).

[2] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/313/5792/1402.abstract

[3] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8497148.stm
The RDF scene is much more mature nowadays. You could simply get an RDF dataset and start analyzing using a large variety of tools. No need to configure/fix/tune anything. It would be as simple as doing the tables JOIN of your example.

I guess if you're more comfortable with that, then perhaps yes, a CSV dataset would be better for you and it would make no difference for your use case. But for me, I could say the same: that with CSV I'd have to learn how to import it into an SQL database and figure out exactly what to JOIN because it's not a graph but a relation db made of tables.

So it really depends on what you're used to. But RDF adds more to the table really. Things like URIs for identifying things which could be directly deferenceable (if HTTP URIs). So you know what your columns actually mean and they're not simply a string of letters. And you'd know what it's in your cells and exactly what type of data it's in the cells.

These are important features that make data integration a lot simpler imho. But if you're used to CSVs and don't care to make your workflow more efficient with the features RDF offers, then I guess you're better off?

Also please check out this interesting answer by Jarven: http://answers.semanticweb.com/questions/19183/advantages-of...
No, it does my mean they want to see a constant stream of every promotion and sale you offer. It means that they liked _one thing_ and your page is no different than the thousand other things I have liked last month. You don't have some entitlement to space on my feed. If I am interested then a constant stream of likes to your content will keep you in view. If you convinced me and ten thousand others to like a single cat picture that does not mean I want to see anything else you post. I may like your television advertisement, but that is not why I turn on the tv or select a particular channel.
I'd sell out in a heart beat. However, I also wouldn't be shocked at the outrage.
To be fair, Google wasn't the first at search, email, or smartphones but they do very well in each of those areas.
How is House of Cards an example of fronting production costs yourself then selling DRM-free copies direct to fans? HoC filming costs were ~$60 million per season, which is several million per episode, and were paid up front by Netflix when it outbid HBO/Showtime/AMC for the rights. The only novel thing about that show's production was releasing the whole series at once rather than one episode per week.
> Oculus solicited private donations to continue their work, and if the Facebook acquisition results in a dramatic change of direction for Oculus I think that will be a betrayal of donor trust.

That's what I think is the issue, not the equity. If Facebook's software is attached to the device, it's a different device (more like Google Glass) and I don't want to use it.