skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There doesn't seem to be that much difference between a good general-purpose VR headset and a good gaming-focussed one though. The refresh rate, positioning accuracy, latency and so on have to hit a certain high standard or you simply have a bad, non-immersive and likely sickness-inducing VR headset. (So the situation is very different from monitors: 60Hz and high latency is "good enough" for general-purpose monitor use but poor for competitive gaming.) If anything non-gaming applications may be more demanding when it comes to resolution: games can manage with 1080p but it's not really sufficient for reading text, viewing photos and so on.
Bill Gates: ‘Techno-Fixing’ Luddite or world savior?
You are quite right, of course. But kickstarter is a brand new animal in the world of products and financing. There aren't any laws or even any concrete social norms around it yet. Perhaps people should "know better' but I'm not sure that's helpful.

In the absence of laws or codified rules we should expect to fall back on manners. What Oculus did feels bad because its rude. At the very least, they should recognize that they are in uncharted territory. A bunch of random strangers gave them gifts because they believed in the vision. If that vision turns into a multi-billion dollar payday, they might consider giving a few gifts back to those kind strangers. Its not like they don't have a list of them all with contact info and everything. It would be polite to do so.
I'm trying to keep this in perspective with all the massively positive things that Mozilla has done over the years. I've used Firefox all the time, proclaimed the value of Mozilla to others, and even donated to Mozilla. Regardless, I'm having a hard time getting past this. I started up Firefox this morning, and almost immediately, I felt dirty. I closed it and switched over to Chromium.

I can't buy the argument that it's just his personal political opinion and that the type of inclusion that Mozilla wants to have requires a large ecosystem of diverse opinions. Perhaps on issues like income inequality, taxation, foreign policy. Hell, if this was about him being a massive gun-rights advocate, I could see myself budging on not letting it bother me like this.

Sorry, but human rights are human rights, and contributing to a effort to deny a group of people a right that everybody else enjoys based simply on their sexual orientation, gender, ethnicity, or culture is as disgusting a human behavioral trait as it comes. It needs to rooted out from our collective human identity.

I don't necessarily want to see Eich removed. His contributions to free and open source software are incredibly significant and deserve praise. However, simply pointing out Mozilla's health care policies isn't going to cut it. Without anything more significant, an apology or something, I'm just going to see Firefox and Mozilla as tarnish under a shade of bigotry. It's not a purposeful perspective, or something I will enjoy, but I can't just let this slide away like it's nothing.
Sorry, can you explain exactly where the bar is set to determine how 'worthwhile' a software company has to be before we turn a blind eye to their having a homophobic CEO?
Because money.
More seriously, VR is the future of a lot of things, if it hadn't been FB, it would have been son either company.
Microsoft and google were probably looking at it too but lost to FB (again),
That's right, Carmack said Armadillo Aerospace would "[...] probably stay in hibernation until there’s another liquidity event where I’m comfortable throwing another million dollars a year into things." ( http://www.newspacejournal.com/2013/08/01/carmack-armadillo-... )
They should buy Time Warner. Or merge with AOL (oops).
Come on. It was just money.
Why would you expect it to change? No one is trying to change it.
Can you name 5 of those 100?
Visualization of YC companies based on Crunchbase data
While a surprising turn to me that he ends up at Facebook... I think a lot of people forget that id Software sold to Bethesda in 2009. He's known as one of the most independent game developers, but he's been "an employee" for some time now.
My bold prediction: Facebook will be broke in five years, gone in ten. Anyone getting into bed with them now is putting the noose around their own neck.

Facebook is a prototype of what "social networking" should be. Anyone who took five minutes out of their day could think up ten ways "social networking" could be better, and probably all of them would be incompatible with facebook's business model.
From my perspective, there have been a few different reasons why we haven't just upgraded:

1. Time spent upgrading Rails is time not spent building awesome things for our customers to use. We're extremely customer focused.

2. Performance is also a huge concern of ours. Over the past few years we've driven response times down dramatically. Upgrading Rails not only presents a slower framework (Rails 3/4 is not faster than 2.3), but a different architecture — changing where our performance chokes are. We'd have to do a ton of work on this front just to keep performance steady. Again, time spent here is time not spent making our existing infrastructure faster.

3. We've spent the past three years working on upgrading the stack. It's not so black and white — we have many of the benefits of newer rails without needing to upgrade everything. There has been a lot of effort here.

In my own personal experience, upgrading frameworks is generally the fastest way to create bugs and work on the opposite of customer impact. I don't think you should feel like you have to be on the bleeding edge.
Sure. I started this in January, but put more time into it starting in February. It's a website that provides news about tech and entertainment. One of the more significant challenges I've faced is finding time to keep up with it, as I'm a full time college student and will soon start working a summer job as well.

Reoccurring income is pretty low, usually less than a dollar a day. All revenue comes via advertisements.
Founder, here. Few ask for bitcoin for payment, but the bigger truth is that when we need to show investors that people see value, we actually can't risk being told "right. people paid you with something that cost them nada to acquire." This is not my stance on bitcoin, but we do need to respect the big wigs' decision-leading standpoints.
Comparing the horrendous and brutal treatment of African Americans during slavery and the civil rights struggle to someone peaceably disagreeing with a person's lifestyle or voting for a proposition is nowhere close to a fitting comparison and is downright disrespectful of the suffering of black people.

It is plastered everywhere as a superficial emotional argument but it is logically baseless and, worse, it is hijacking the compassion people rightfully have for the suffering of black people in order to push a particular agenda. It's shameful.

Of course, I expect to be downvoted because I know that in our current society all opinions and preferences should be held in the highest regard, except those you disagree with and especially those that appeal to an objective morality.
I don't understand your point. Were you railing on Google when they bought Nest?
I know. I have normal minecraft on my PC. I like the Android version better.
It's too boring to make the items in the crafting table on the PC version.
My guess is that when Oculus Rift found out about Sony coming to market, they knew they needed someone with deep pockets to speed up their implementation.

They were probably in talks with a number of other companies, but Facebook jumped the gun and made an offer they couldn't refuse, in order to prevent their "competitor" from getting it.

</speculation>

I wonder if FB is going to use OR to rebirth Facebook games, or maybe make their own foray into the gaming industry.
You apparently need to have at least 1k internet points.
Letter to the team (Oculus VR)
Why shouldn't you? I dunno: some basic concept of pluralism?
What the heck does this have to do with JS?
If it comes down to having to choose between trusting facebook or sony, then we are all in a pretty bad state of affairs.
I was really interested in what Oculus does. I'm a little sad about this; I have to be honest. I worry Facebook will really cheapen what they are doing. We'll see.
And just like that, my company and I are done with the Oculus platform before we could really get going. New Dev Kit orders cancelled.
I understand why people could get offended about this. But as I understand it most who oppose this have a religious reason to do so. Now religion is as deeply person and important to a person as is the right to marry. So where do we draw the line on what we allow others to think, believe or support?

As a for instance my Aunty is vegan and is offended that I or any one else would ever eat meat. And I know eating meat is much less of an issue, but I support her right to oppose the eating of meat. She has would vote against my ability to eat meat. But my response would not be to attack her as a person but simply vote in the opposite direction.

On the other end I can see why a Jewish person living in Nazi Germany would have attached Hitler and the Nazi party at any chance they got.

But is there a middle ground?
Facebook is a company whose revenue is entirely based on advertising spend. They pitch their network's services based on the fine level of control you can have over market segmentation - the more information Facebook has about people, the better they can promote these services.

It's reasonable to speculate on the extent to which Oculus can resist being assimilated into the already-existing business model. It seems less reasonable to speculate that Oculus will become Facebook's flagship product and not just some sidekick to enhance their current revenues if possible (or if that doesn't work, consigned to the dustbin of history).

Since all of this is speculation anyway, what do you think is going to happen?
I think what will be really interesting to see is how Valve will react to this acquisition. Presumably, they've been hoping to make $$$ from selling Oculus VR games via Steam.

With Facebook now owning Oculus they have the resources to completely circumvent Steam and create their own game distribution platform and get a cut of the sales-- they've already started down this path with the App Center.
I dunno, patents + network effects can give one a pretty damn good head start.
I believe it. I'm there with him. I swore off everything sony after the cd rootkit episode. How long has that been, 12, 13 years now? I still don't even consider sony for electronics, even if they offer the best -insert device here-. I don't buy music offered on a sony label. I don't buy or go see movies produced at, or by a sony studio. I would, and do, simply do without their offerings and listen/watch/spend money on offerings from other companies instead.

Facebook is another company I will refuse to do business with, even if that means I do without something I would otherwise want.
I wouldn't be surprised if a sense of awe of Zuck showing interest in the project helped shelve initial doubts about working with/for such a behemoth.
Maybe they see the rift as being a disruptor of the gaming industry, which is increasingly social (which has been very profitable for Facebook), and...oh I don't know. It's confusing.

I don't know how I feel about it, from a personal standpoint, and I don't understand it from a business perspective. Oculus don't really have an idea of how big/small the market is for the product yet, even.

Bah. I still want a DK2, and I still love what Oculus have done for VR.
Oculus and the Rift are (probably) dead
"what the fuck has an affair to do with their political views?"

Uh, integrity? If a politician won't keep probably the most solemn vow they've ever made, to the person they were most committed to in their life, in front of all the other people they care about most, why the fuck do you think they'll keep some fucking campaign promise to you and a bunch of other faceless citizens they've never met to make your lives better, instead of taking a backhander from some lobbyist to fuck you all over instead?

And if they're not going to keep their campaign promises (yeah, yeah, no need to point out the incredible naïvety of that particular "if") then why should you let them stay in a position of power that they can use to better themselves at your expense? Boot them out, get the next one in, and keep doing it until they learn the lesson that we fucking demand better.

I don't know what kind of world you want to live in, but one where we've already given up and don't even try to maintain a pretense of holding our politicians to account for their honesty isn't the one I'm going for.
lol. In a perfect world where bugs never happen, estimates are always perfect, and last-minute top-down requirements changes never occur, I would totally agree with you.
There are already plenty of fps you can try on the Oculus SDK.
mu.
It's like that new guy in the high school, that you teach him around and bring him with your friends so that he is not alone. Then he befriends the popular kid, and stops to join you.

By the way, I just remembered this: http://i.imgur.com/NnXPRks.jpg (video: http://goo.gl/AMgjsC﻿)
Thank you for your answer. I do realise why it was done in the past, I was wondering about the present. Also what you're describing in the last paragraph sounds a bit like Andy Gavin's GOOL - http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/03/12/making-crash-ban...
It's so disappointing that the discussion is in this direction. I was hoping to come in here and find speculation about Facebook's vision, theories about their strategy, etc. Instead it's just a Facebook hate-fest.
Very interesting theory. Anybody have a link to an actual source for Carmack's interest in virtual "worlds" instead of just games? Everything I've found from searching is talking about Oculus' Palmer Luckey, not Carmack, wanting to do that, and it specifically name-checks the Metaverse. (e.g. http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/gaming/oculus-...). There's a lot of Google hits for "Carmack Metaverse" but they're pretty much all “I am thrilled to work with John on building the Metaverse", which is Luckey talking in Oculus' announcement of hiring Carmack. (http://www.oculusvr.com/press/john-carmack-joins-oculus-vr-a...)

This still makes sense as to why Oculus would want to get in bed with Facebook, but it sounds like the motivation is coming from Luckey and not Carmack.
Atm's, from what I know, are generally not connected to wifi. Most are directly wired to either DSL or to a modem making it the end users issue(aka the person who owns the property which the ATM is on).
FWIW, founder here, and let me offer you a personal tour. I'd be happy to screen-share, show you my own RiteTag account, my stats, what I do with RiteTag and hashtags in general. I'm sure our team would benefit from your thoughts. Thanks, in advance.
Welcome to Hacker News, bastion of intellectual freedom, where large number of people will now argue that you should be deprived of employment because you donated money to certain unpopular political campaigns.

Next steps include: calling for the resignation of anyone who voted Republican in a recent election.
It's like I stumbled into r/technology.
Microsoft pushed gaming long before the XBox. The XBox was just the next step.
I'd rather think of it as an indie developer who got lucky and struck it big making a pixelated block pushing game doesn't like that a VR firm is now part of a social networking company. My thought is good for him for standing up for what he believes in, but he is going to be missing out on some possible awesome to come engineering which previously might have taken years to obtain w/o FB's involvement.

It seems to be ignored but the massive pockets, infrastructure, and engineering at FB will allow Occulus to have access to much much more than they could have achieved previously.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_marriage

Just saying...
Making public you're in an open relationship will kill your career as a politican just as fast, wanna bet?
> The world would be a much better place if we could learn to separate the artist's work from the artist's personal deeds and opinions.

In what way does that make the world a better place?

Why should we celebrate an artist who does shitty things when there is almost certainly someone equally as talented who does not?
Fair enough. Obviously pg isn't naive enough to invest in a company that will get sued out of existence by Apple tomorrow. So most likely this product is a proof of concept of the technology and is circumventing the issue by perhaps incorporating Apple's MagSafe2 into their offering.
http://store.apple.com/us/product/MD504ZM/A/magsafe-to-magsa...
The terms of funding on Kickstarter are pretty clear and straightforward. You back a project for a certain amount of money in exchange for a promised reward (this reward is never equity). When the time comes you either get your reward or you get your money back. Simple as that.
If anyone says that to somebody about their phone, they're clearly not actually mystified as to why someone would have their phone with them in that context. They're much more likely just annoyed by that person's lack of phone etiquette and wishing they would've left it behind.

Which is actually a great parallel with Glass- there are no shortage of people with totally legitimate privacy concerns, etc., but I think much of the driving force behind anti-Glass sentiment is humanity collectively sighing, rolling their eyes, and saying, "can we all agree that this is not going to become a thing? Please? Please don't let this become something that is considered socially acceptable because we really don't want to live in that world."

I'm sure we all know people who treat their phone like a pacifier and are always screwing around with it at meetings, social occasions, etc. Do it a little, and that's fine, do it too much and it can quickly become one of the most annoying habits a person can have. Glass, as it is being presented at least, seems like something that would allow That Guy to be even more annoying to deal with, and it would be all the time- not just when he whips out his phone. It might lead to there being many, many more That Guys in the world, and it would grant them the ability to be That Guy 24/7/365.25.
Bay Area Bike Share Open Data Challenge
I totally agree. This is so long overdue!

My only gripe is that I decided to look at OpenCL and CUDA today and felt kind of.. underwhelmed. I have a lot of OpenGL experience and I guess it's not surprising that they are so similar to framebuffers and shaders. But I was really hoping for true general purpose computing, more like a hybrid between VHDL and say MATLAB. Ideally it would work like Go, where you would send a C-style function off to an execution unit or refer to other units by id, and use something like fork/join to tabulate the results, and maybe just give up on the notion of a global memory space. Instead it looked more like image processing kernels for doing convolutions and stuff, and I mean that's great, but didn't exactly wow me.

Maybe I'm missing something fundamental? Does anyone know of a site with more of a computer science approach, say like http://golang.org, instead of so much emphasis on graphics? Or possibly a compiler that would convert Go/MATLAB/Python to OpenCL/CUDA? Am I alone in feeling a little mystified here?
Wow, this is really a great statement. I applaud him for this stance. I didn't really expect this reaction but it is a very pleasant surprise.
Higher Ed is a whole different fish and the competitors in that space have resources. I wish you all the luck in the world. I'd love to help out but nowhere near SF!
Oof. My gut feeling is... this feels like a punch to the gut. (I hope my gut is wrong, but I wouldn't bet on it.)
>> would it be OK for conservative muslims to protest a gay CEO? no.

False equivalence.

A gay CEO would not (necessarily) be actively trying to take conservative muslims' rights away.
Kudo to Notch for taking a moral stance on the Oculus buyout. VR is going to change the world. Let's make it a positive change that respects freedom & autonomy, not a walled garden.
Valve is a gaming company who gets VR so it would make a lot more sense for their core business.

Listening to Palmer Luckey talk about how the headset won't come out before its ready makes you think they have a very specific vision they want to execute, as does reading technical stuff about their technology. God knows what will happen now with Facebook. I was unbelievably excited about what Oculus could do for the state of the art in gaming, executing their vision independently. Who knows what having a corporate owner with unclear ambitions will do. I hope Carmack and the other technical guys jump ship and execute the original vision if Facebook meddles too much.
You know what it's going to happen? It's going to remain free for a while, so that everybody cools down. Then little by little, they will make it their own. And since every time the change will be minimal, everybody will simply adapt and not care, like it ALWAYS happens. And in the end you have exactly the situation that everybody hated, but now everybody accepts it. The bar always moves in the wrong direction..
"Facebook isn't primarily a games company, and it's even less a 3D/desktop games company"

So what? What were you guys thinking back when Google was purely an Internet/search engine company, and tried to foray into other ventures (Android, self-driving cars, etc)?

Companies expand their markets, create new products. It is natural. Why does the Oculus acquisition seem to perplex the HN crowd?
Its scary how people jump to these conclusions once their views are those of the flavor of the month. I'd hate to be unemployable because my views don't confirm to that of the majority.

Imagine saying this to guy who attempted to stand up for civil rights in the 1920s. The world makes you believe that this type of thinking is gone when really its just painted a different color.
Germany treats BTC income the exact same way.
> You are never going to be able to get sufficiently passable virtual reality to make up for the hardware hassle.

Here is a video of a grown man crying like a small girl. If that doesn't convince you, I don't know what will.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl7fz__6B-4
Senior C# Software Developer Wanted (Seattle)
> nice to see Notch take a stand

taking a stand against Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and now Oculus ?

I know that Notch wants to develop games with passionate people, but he has to understand that this acquisition was the best thing that could happen to both VR and Oculus.

Anyway, Notch has been infamously known for his quick rants (see the "youtuber he insulted" issue)
You guys need to watch Black Mirror.
Sadly, he doesn't explain himself at all. He says he has no animosity, but provides no explanation for how such a thing could be done without it.

I imagine he thinks he has a sound, non-hateful reasoning behind his position which will not be taken as such if discussed. In context, I'd guess he's probably wrong about it being sound and non-hateful. Often, being unwilling to discuss one's positions is part of your brain trying to tell the rest of you that you've got it wrong. Not always, obviously, but I'd say it's the way to bet.

In any case, if you're willing to make a public stand on something (and given the political finance laws he donated under, it qualifies as a public stand) then you should be willing to discuss your stand. If he's not willing to discuss it then we don't necessarily have to assume the very best.