skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ars Technica (http://bit.ly/rxK9jR) has much clearer coverage of this article than TheNextWeb does:

"Motorola approached Apple in 2007, after the launch of the original iPhone, to license this and other standards essential patents for FRAND terms. "We have been negotiating with Apple and offering them reasonable licensing terms and conditions since 2007," Scott Offer, senior vice president and general counsel of Motorola Mobility, said in a statement e-mailed to Ars.

Apple apparently didn't consider the terms very fair...Apple apparently made an offer to license the patent on FRAND terms going forward. But the matter was complicated by the fact that Apple's agreement included a clause that would allow it to try and have the patent invalidated if Motorola tried to seek damages for past infringement over and above the agreed FRAND rate."

Basically, Motorola offered it on FRAND terms, Apple rejected it, and came back with a new offer that was on FRAND terms but with the corollary that if Motorola tried to sue Apple for any infringement they had already done their patent would be invalid.
"Specifically, the President has called for increasing limits on “miniofferings,” allowing “crowdfunding,” and phasing in some requirements for small firms as they go public."

They are going to ruin a good thing.
Absolutely... IIRC, the IEEE standard was ambiguous, and each vendor implemented things differently. I think the standard was "fixed" in 1999... This situation happened in 2009!

But the technical problem wasn't the problem -- the issue was that they created an inquisition that had outlived its purpose.
It hasn't since the days of the translucent frame with white keys.
> I've still no clue why humans procastrinate

http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mkwf2/why_do_hum...
This is an amazingly insightful comment.

Everyone here should read this a few times through.
Facebook also has some unique traffic problems that almost no other startup is going to experience.
Yeah, it's exactly because of the mentality of "ideas are worthless" that has dominated Silicon Valley that there's such a profound lack of imagination in today's technology world. It's perfectly fine to build things because they're "cool," and it's equally OK to follow the herd with some social analytics bullshit startup or an Instagram meets Path for Video type of thing, but know that when you want to do those things the idea is worthless not because ideas are worthless, but because that idea is worthless - and you can still be successful without a worthy idea.
4. Lobby for self-serving, anti-competitive regulations.
If you have a good setup, you shouldn't need to backup the database before every destructive operation. If I went in and accidentally deleted every user record in my database right now -- the site would crash -- but I would be able to restore the site to the point judt before I screwed it up. This recovery would come from the last full backup and the transaction logs.

If my server crashes, the hot replicated backup server will take over. If a hacker destroys both servers and all local backups then I have my last full offsite backup and my nightly off-site transaction log backups so, at most, I'd lose one day.

And I'm not much of a sysadmin -- I've a sole developer and I usually sysadmin by Googling everything and using some common sense and yet I still managed to throw this setup together. You would think a site as big and important as jQuery would put have some common-sense backup procedures in place.
Is Bill Gates mulling a return to Microsoft throne?
Blender comes to mind. It was opensourced (ransomware) around 2001 IIRC, and it's still a quite healthy project. I'm sure there are other good examples. You might also count open source games relying on id's engines.
It's going to be interesting to see how companies themselves deal with the concept of having a slew of shareholders (fiduciary duty, reporting, etc.)
sheldon wonders why a lazy few lines post "hey, my day today was a lazy day, why is it so? I dunno, lol" is considered valuable enough to be upvoted, and submitted in the first place. how is it insightful in any way?
Shouldn't the title read "Facebook speeds PHP execution..."?
No. I haven’t used Windows 7, but I always switched XP/Vista to the classic theme because it takes up less space (fits a lot more minimized windows in the task bar, etc.), is less distracting, and makes it easier to judge colors in images or graphics (the big areas of blue really messes with fine color judgement). I also reverted to the “classic” start menu, switched the control panel wizard off, cut out all the auto helper doodads in MS Office, etc.

Speaking as someone who has always hated everything Windows stands for, I assure you there was no nostalgia involved
2012: The Year of the Personal Cloud
I think you mean the Lion animations. Disable them with:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool no

Other tweaks:

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -bool yes # disable 3D dock
defaults write com.apple.dock no-bouncing -bool yes # disable bouncing dock icons
defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool yes # disable window shadows on screenshots
Poll: Should we rename Amber.js?
Yesterday, we announced that we were officially releasing what we had been calling SproutCore 2.0 as "Amber.js".

We did this because we had been using the name Amber as a public codename for over a year (see http://bit.ly/amber-announced), and had used it publicly for a while this year (see an update at http://bit.ly/amber-update and again when we announced TemplateView at http://bit.ly/amber-templateview).

Around the same time (March 2011), we also purchased the domain amberjs.com in anticipation of a rename later this year. During the summer, we internally came to the conclusion that we were going to stick with SproutCore 2.0 as the official name once we released, mostly leaving behind the name Amber as a codename for the project.

In September, JTalk, a Smalltalk implementation written in JavaScript, decided to rename and use the name Amber for their project. As we are not Smalltalk enthusiasts, we did not notice this change (even though it was featured on Hacker News, which we frequent[1]).

Last month, we realized that our goals had diverged sufficiently from the original SproutCore that the similarity of the names was causing mass confusion. We decided to go ahead with the original plan to rename "SproutCore 2.0" to "Amber". It was made especially problematic when a number of existing SproutCore users wanted to continue developing the SproutCore 1.x branch, which only caused additional confusion.

Because we had been casually using the name Amber in public for so long, we didn't do the thorough research we would normally have done while naming a project. Once we launched, a number of people brought Amber Smalltalk to our attention, and we frankly feel sheepish about the whole thing.

We are still planning on launching the website and docs this weekend, so we'd like to make a decision and get this behind us as soon as we can.

So what should we do?

If you think we should rename, we would love some suggestions. Please post your ideas in the comments.

[1] It's possible we missed it because Tom decided to try and improve his "productivity" by messing with his /etc/hosts file to ban Hacker News. It didn't last long.
Go back to "SproutCore 2.0"
Stick with "Amber.js" with a prominent link to Amber Smalltalk
Come up with a different name
China's Entrepreneurship Problem
Update: http://sd.localwiki.org
Alternately, go the Steve Yegge way and rebind meta to C-x-C-m and C-c-C-m:

(global-set-key "\C-x\C-m" 'execute-extended-command)
(global-set-key "\C-c\C-m" 'execute-extended-command)
I've got a bone to pick with people that have a bone to pick with waterfall, especially when they don't realize that whatever competing newer workflow they swear by is actually waterfall in disguise.

Let's just ignore for a second that a waterfall process sent men to the moon and continues to build skyscrapers, with each project having a set of stakeholders the size of a small city and all while adjusting to a shifting landscape of nearly infinite variables. Especially the first few moon missions, when no one had done it before. It's why all of the original astronauts were test pilots - not just because of their bravado but also their experience in co-designing unfinished machines along with the engineers to bring it to a workable finished state. The roots of the modern HCI and human factors industries comes from analyzing and optimizing the usability of cockpits. The astronauts even had their own usability jokes about a model of training jet that was so user-unfriendly that the emergency instructions for ejection were printed on the side of the canopy, which is nuts because step one was to blow the canopy (along with the rest of the instructions) up off into the sky.

These weren't dumb monkeys strapped to a giant tin can and blown into space, and neither were the engineers that sent them there. With waterfall.

So you use agile/xp/scrum/whatever and swear software is way different than building bridges. I've worked on and with several of those teams, with varying levels of strictness, and guess what? It's still basically waterfall. But instead of PMs owning the process and spec'ing things out in advance, engineers own the process and the spec is written and re-written during development on a bunch of index cards with sharpies like a grade school art project (or the digital equivalent), designers get barely a week ahead of each sprint or run around like caffeinated janitors cleaning up after each sprint, and documentation gets written last or not at all.

And before anyone does ad hominem attacks on whether my teams were doing agile correctly, this is the same dynamic I witnessed at the most famous agile and rails development shop you can think of. You probably only need one guess to figure out who it is.

What matters then, if it's not process? It's called expertise - a broad collection of various techniques and the context-specific awareness of when to use each one. Instead of blindly following a process and trying to hammer it into every situation, take a tools-instead-of-rules approach to using whatever techniques are appropriate for each project.

For anyone interested in this kind of flexible thinking instead of linear GTD productivity tools that leave you stuck in robot mode, there's an excellent book called Pragmatic Thinking And Learning that goes into a lot more detail and pulls inspiration from how the nursing industry overhauled their education system in the 70's.

http://pragprog.com/book/ahptl/pragmatic-thinking-and-learni...

I know, from the book publisher that sells the pickaxe Rails book and stuff on agile. Oh the irony!
I'd rather see them push WebOS than WP7, which hasn't proven very successful for them anyway.
Point three is very much about deregulation in industries enjoying regulatory capture.

Wall Street is quick to decry regulations that bar it from doing what it wants. But it's just as quick to protect those regulations that keep competitors out. The regulatory problem really is just one of capture.

"Business-crippling regulations" are up there with Reagan's Welfare Queen, Ohio's voter fraud and Tax Cuts' job-creating stimulus credentials. That is: long accepted as political fact despite a complete lack of evidence of their existence and a continually growing pile of evidence against.
It's all about hedging your bets. Until today, android was the only open source platform these companies could use. This gave Google an advantage to define the rules. For example, they could actually start closing parts of the source or giving Motorola preferential treatment.

Google had the sole power to define what an "open" platform was and the rules in using it. Developers, telcos and HW companies now have a second option.

HP may not make a dime from this move, but if the move is cheap and it can cost the competition more to respond, then it is a move is well played.

Lastly, HP is a hardware/software/services company so this move will give it some leverage when dealing with large players in those areas.
My (California) high school stopped reciting the Pledge of Allegiance around 1990. I didn't know schools still made people do this.
My founding business partner Ryan McMinn spoke at an open source conference in Toronto a few years ago. In the talk he explained how and why we built Unspace the way that we did.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIQIZ0NIkxk

He talks extensively about the need to work directly with the end users of the system, instead of the management. The realization that specifications are usually nothing more than mutually assured destruction.

Pretty much the only thing that's changed in five years is that the scale of our company has grown, and now we do indeed have contracts with our clients to protect us from bad things.

Anyhow, I highly recommend the video if you're looking for an in-the-trenches perspective.
Campaign to flag Rick Perry ad as inappropriate
I don't mean to be overly critical but letting this go for 3 months is a bit much, in my opinion. If I were in the same situation after a week or two of my doing a lot of work with him doing nothing I would have had a talk with him, maybe just something to consider going forward, maybe I'm more cynical than I should be but you always have to be looking out for your best interest when it comes to startups and small companies. I'm not saying trying to screw others over but these situations tend to have issues like this arise fairly often it seems.
Tech stocks party like it's 1999
One thing to keep in mind regaring stall is that it's 100% dependent on angle of attack, not speed...

While the degree of stall with respect to the wing is independent of airspeed, the effects of stalling on the aircraft are very much dependent on speed. Even with the wing in the process of stalling, it can still generate enough lift to keep flying if you're going fast enough.
sleep() in javascript. just feel it's absence.
Well, then you should actually use Windows 7 and report back. It’s awesome.
A little too late to reply but: CrunchPad was 2 years before iPad.
Then all we'll need is WebP support.
Yeah, one is an accounting trick that penalizes everyone who saved money and the other has a serious chance of working.

If startups were important they could have just cancelled the V-22 Osprey program which eats $2.8 billion per year, or ballistic missile defense at $9.9 billion, or DHS at $60 billion.

$1 billion dollars over three years is probably less money than the gov't spends on toilet cleaning. It's equivalent to withdrawing from Iraq a week early. Sorry, if I'm unimpressed it doesn't look like effort, it looks like a PR campaign.
Lot of posts about procrastination past days here on HN. This confirms my feeling that this is a real and widespread issue. Even for startuppers.

[On topic shameless plug] This is why I'm building asaclock (http://www.asaclock.com), an anti-procrastination web community for startup single founders and people working on side projects.
When it comes to cancer, sharing can be the best medicine
Nope, sorry. When I download software install packages, I tend to back them up myself. First it was to CDs, then DVDs and now on my Drobo and Dropbox.

The activation keys generally do not expire as long as the activation servers exists. Older software that never activated online works so long as you have the correct key.

I've been in a no-clutter kick for the last few years. In fact, I just moved & emptied out my storage unit into my new garage. I'll be spending the next few months selling off a wall of boxes of books, CDs and movies. The less physical media around the better.
I'd rather see them a more open alternative like WebOS than WP7, which hasn't been successful for them so far anyway. I love Android, but a strong WebOS alternative would be great.
so we have an Apple supporter argueing that millimeter is enough of a difference to maintain originality, while several comments below another Apple supporter

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3334437

suggests that the home button was copied even though " They changed white square into a white rectangle and that's about it." So change of shape isn't enough to maintain originality.

In Russian we have a saying for such cases - "one's desire to climb up the pine without getting the one's ass poked/scratched by the needles".
Obama should've done this on the first year of his presidency. And I agree, $2B seems like a low number compared to the bank bailout.
Facebook Is Making Us Miserable
Is money really the limiting factor for startup growth right now? I feel like it's skill and experience. Maybe if students or recent grads could get apply for student loan sized-stipend (~$6K at a time, renewable every 6 months, up to 3x total for $18K)? $1T would cover 50M students (or $1B would fund 50K students) and people would get a chance to work on something, learn, make stupid but risk-free mistakes, and either get something successful, learn that entrepreneurship isn't for them, make connections that would help them in a career, or who knows what. Wouldn't be the worst way the govt ever spent $1B.
Silverlight 5 released today: Anyone interested?
Huge Company [Atos, 70k+] Plans to Ban Internal Email for IM
Having to wash socks is incredibly depressing. Not sure what can be done about it - perhaps move to a country where you wouldn't need socks, which would probably also have more sunshine :-/

Or get floor heating, or a household hand? Maybe some bearable solution could be found.
IPen: the first active stylus for iPad by Cregle Inc. — Kickstarter
Talk to a doctor, it seems like you suffer from something along the lines of ADD. I have a friend that drastically improved his condition through medication.
change the name: hammer.js is my suggestion.
Ah, no biggie. Go Ahead and run with Amber.js, launch your site and updates your namespaces. I doubt they'll be any toe-trampling confusion. At most there'd be one or two feathers ruffled, but we're all intelligent adults, and its totally cool to share the name. Sharing /is/ caring after all.
Rule 110: a Turing complete elementary cellular automaton
If they want to help entrepreneurs then they should give contractors more tax relief. 1099 tax payers get shafted.
Local retailers should be arguing that they don't want to be the tax collectors, so their prices would look lower too.

That seems to me to be what they are arguing.

However you want to look at it, the government is forcing them to force their customers to pay more, and not forcing Amazon to do the same, for no justifiable reason.
Shortest Code for a Simple Calculator on Android
Apple is consistently the most innovative company

What does that even mean? You've got three unprovable terms in there: consistently (What does it mean to be consistently innovative? Wouldn't Apple's copying of Android's notifications system contradict this?), most (What metric are you using to measure innovation that gives the highest number to Apple?), and innovative (How do you define innovation in this context? Patents filed (bogus)? Profit margins (not correlated)? Intensity of reality distortion? Lines of code?).
It'll be fine as long as you keep the beer vs gemstone distinction. ;)
If you were to pick a different name to avoid overlap with Amber Smalltalk, I'd recommend substrate.js. It conveys a fundamental organizing principle in the same way "backbone" does, and best of all it starts with 's' so all the SCs all over the place will still halfway make sense.
The biggest iOS 5 bug you've never heard of
I would sunset SproutCore 1.0, and let the community members who want to continue development fork it & rename the fork. Then use SproutCore 2.0 for the new codebase.
I just searched for "Amber" on Google, and the first 5 (!) pages didn't show me anything even remotely Smalltalk-related. I didn't looked any further. Stick with Amber.js.
Laissez faire, telle devrait être la devise de toute puissance publique, depuis que le monde est civilisé ... Détestable principe que celui de ne vouloir grandir que par l'abaissement de nos voisins! Il n'y a que la méchanceté et la malignité du coeur de satisfaites dans ce principe, et l’intérêt y est opposé. Laissez faire, morbleu! Laissez faire!!

(Trans: "Leave it be, that should be the motto of all public powers, as the world is civilized ... That we cannot grow except by lowering our neighbors is a detestable notion! Only malice and malignity of heart is satisfied with such a principle and our (national) interest is opposed to it. Leave it be, for heaven's sake! Leave it be!")
"Will we build ever more high-tech fortresses...?"
Where do you get the "$1 trillion for banks" number? The xkcd "money" diagram has a good illustration of this:

http://xkcd.com/980/huge/#x=-10540&y=-4650&z=6

$700 billion was made available. "Only" $400 billion of this was actually spent. It was used to buy so-called toxic assets. Many of those assets were later converted back into cash: half of the $400 billion has already been repaid. Based on the value of the remaining assets, after they get sold and the money returned to the pot, it looks like the cost of TARP will be about $42 billion. That's a lot of money, but far from $1 trillion.
Where do you draw the line when it comes to distracting details in UI? Is the level of detail in current Apple products perfect? Should they move towards more skeuomorphic designs or more typographical designs?
Fixing the immigration and patent systems would be infinitely more helpful (i.e. stop getting in the way).
I think an idea might be worthless, but a good idea holds tremendous value. Maybe not monetarily, but in the sense that one good idea can rally other people around you to join the cause and spend their precious time and money (along side you--as others have pointed out, an ideas man work is not done after he merely lays an idea egg on the carpet like some golden idea laying goose) working towards making this thing trapped in the aether of space a reality. I think everyone is aware that startups and businesses and everything in life takes a lot of sweat, blood, and tears, but as cliche as it sounds, it all starts with that one good idea.
Call it Jamboree.js !
No, it couldn't.

If by "Android kernel" you mean the full richness of the existing APIs, the UI framework, UI conventions etc., then no, you can't just mash up two full-featured OS who both need exclusive access to hardware, have their own UI conventions, APIs, different ways of doing the same things (like showing notifications, switching between applications) etc.

If by "Android kernel" you mean "slightly modified Linux kernel that Android uses" then technically yes but it's a meaningless statement. WebOS already uses (possibly slightly modified) Linux kernel, the kernel changes constitute about 0.1% of their code and they are not what defines Android or WebOS.
Not sure what HP's decision-making process was here, but sure looks like the team wasn't ready (or may not have even known if this was in play ahead of time). See comment by Dave Balmer (Senior Software Engineer, webOS Developer Relations):

https://github.com/hpwebos/webos/issues/1#issuecomment-30868...

> Meg's announcement was news to us in the webOS team as well. The HP executive team has been weighing a lot of options of late, but thanks for assuming all us in the trenches are that deeply "in the know", makes me feel warm and/or fuzzy. :)
The PlayBook ships with a recent version of WebKit and all Blackberry 7.X phones contain a WebKit based browser. Starting with the Torch last summer most BB phones shipped with WebKit. The days of the Java based browser on BlackBerry's are over.

Disclaimer: I am part of the WebKit team at RIM.
Helping Implement America Invents Act
Ideas are worthless: the definitive list
Fighting for your Digital Rights in D.C.
Sometimes Side Projects Fail
WebOS: A Thousand Devices Will Bloom
A very sad post. Even sadder when to know it represents my exact thoughts... most of the time.
Actually actionable useful advice for people like us. I like it. Going to try it.