skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> This confirms that they had no contracts

This is a misconception - a contract does not need to be written to be enforceable. A contract consists of an "offer" and "acceptance"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract#Offer_and_acceptance

Techcrunch looks like it made an offer to work with someone to build a device, and Fusion looks like it accepted in some capacity by announcing they were working with them, tentatively branding it the Crunchpad, etc.

After that, the question is - did Techcrunch provide "consideration" to Fusion? That is, did they work to fulfill the agreement the two companies had?

Here, it looks pretty clear that TC did provide some consideration. Courts will look at what was agreed, and whether the parties provided that. Techcrunch might be exaggerating their role in the project, but they did clearly bring some consideration to the table - they put time, effort, money into the project because they believed they had a deal. Fusion accepted this consideration.

Importantly, consideration doesn't look at abstract value. It looks at whether you delivered on the contract. This is important, here's Wik on the subject:

"Consideration must be "sufficient" (i.e., recognizable by the law), but need not be "adequate" (i.e., the consideration need not be a fair and reasonable exchange for the benefit of the promise). For instance, agreeing to buy a car for a penny may constitute a binding contract."

The car for a penny example is extreme, and it might not be a binding contract, but it might too - there's been some famous cases of pranksters getting sued. But the key is, even if what TC provided wasn't important, if Fusion agreed to partner/pay royalties/give them a percent/something in exchange for what TC brought to the table, then they had a deal and TC delivered on their end of it.

Also from Wik -

"Contrary to common wisdom, an exchange of promises can still be binding and legally as valid as a written contract."

A clear, well written contract goes a long way. In absence of one, though, if you can still show there was an offer, acceptance, and consideration, then you've got a contract. I'm still going through the lawsuit reading, I'll come back when I see what TC is asking for because that's an interesting detail.

Edit: On page 10 of the lawsuit. TC is saying they paid vendors and paid Fusion's debts. That'd be pretty clear consideration if true. Still reading.

Edit2: Alright, page 21 has what TC is asking for. They're asking for all profits from sale of the product to be put into a trust and that Fusion is permanently forbidden from selling or distributing the Joojoo product, and must destroy it. Earlier in the suit they mentioned TC and Fusion are now permanently competitors, which implied TC is going to build their own pad. It'll be interesting to see if they have their own set of IP and specs to do that, or if it's just bluffing for leverage.
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When I read this article to my wife (a physician) she was not the least bit surprised. She asked me why it was even news. She has spent the last several months trying to convince patients that Tamiflu isn't indicated for people who are otherwise healthy because the benefit vs. risk is not really favorable. Many become very irate when presented with this information and demand the medicine anyway, on the grounds that "other doctors" are giving it out to everyone.
The author focuses on document stores, but the same argument can be made to key/value stores.

It is time for NoSQL community to come up with a standard key/value API. Is anyone working on it?

As one commented said "JDBC came out ~25 years after SQL was created.". By today's standards 2.5 years should be about right time to expect a standard :)
Are you saying Turing didn't invent the hourglass notation? j/k
I did work in banking for a few years. The article is accurate, especially about the detective work involved in tracking down data problems.

But there is yet another underlying problem behind the IT systems. The leadership of the banks I've worked with considered IT just a "cost center". They recognized the problems with the systems, but rather than investing in improvements, they threw blame towards IT, approving budgets only grudgingly.

The leaders in the industry need to start to respect technology and the people behind it before anything will change.
I've known this for a year or so and thought everyone else did, too. Only recently did I see stories about this again and was quite surprised.
Seeing the scene transition from a pure demonstration of technical prowess to a more art themed scene has been fascinating. Lots of old timers don't really like the direction, but modern hardware is so over the top powerful, that it's just simply not necessary to squeeze an extra 3 fps out of an algorithm by hacking a new video mode or some such. So the result has been that the "computer art" part of the scene is now being heavily emphasized.

That being said, there's almost no other modern art-form that I know of that looks and feels like demos outside of a few music videos that used to play on MTV's amp. Knowing that most of the work is produced by essentially teenagers and folks in their early 20's makes it all the more amazing to see such talent.
First, bundling the browser with the OS was absolutely the right thing to do, there's no greater indication of this than that every single modern operating system comes with a bundled web browser.

The difference you're missing is the difference between "the browser" and "a web browser". Best scenario: operating system comes with more than one, and the operating system doesn't try to force the user to default to any particular one.

What Microsoft did that was (in a sense) "evil genius" was that it managed to brainwash 85 percent of its users into thinking that "Internet Explorer" was the only way to get onto the Internet.

I was teaching a PHP primer class (primer, since it was composed mostly of non-technical people) at Hacker Dojo, and one of the students was like "what do you mean by web browser?". Seems we still have a little bit of ignorance to overcome.
I'm wondering how you know Cloudera is doing well? I noticed you work for Smarkets now (and Last.fm before). I'm just curious to know how much money can you realistically expect to make for a pure consulting business like Cloudera.
Chrome, safari, opera, and firefox are also bundled browsers. Each are bundled with various OSes.
Apple Beat Google To Purchase Lala
I'm a fan of the big magazine-layout blog posts that seem to be coming into fashion. It's very engaging and effective at communication, more so than an article would be on the same topic in the same medium.
Data Problems in Banks are especially acute because the same "thing" is called by different names in different systems, no one can agree on its definition or its characteristics.

Added to that, the amount of time it takes for I.T to come up with a solution - due to the silo mentality - the Front-Office comes up with a patchwork mostly Excel-based solution "just for now" and well we all know how that goes.
From the first page of the filing:

Plaintiffs

INTERSERVE, INC. dba TECHCRUNCH, a Delaware Corporation, and CRUNCHPAD, INC., a Delaware Corp.

Seems like they are incorporated
In a strictly lawful perspective, a contract is a legally binding written agreement between two or more parties.
I've used Firefox since the very early days (Phoenix 0.3) and I can honestly say it could never be described as a "fast browser" - before Firefox I was using Opera which was much faster and much more lightweight. If anything, I would say Firefox is faster now than it used to be, but perhaps now the difference is it's easier to make an unfavourable comparison to the WebKit browsers which didn't exist back then.

The audio/video tag situation is messy, but I hardly think solely blaming Mozilla for it is fair. Apple won't support Ogg because of submarine patent concerns (although I doubt them already having a license and having millions of devices with H.264 hardware support hurt) and Mozilla won't support H.264 due to known patent concerns. It's hardly the overdramatic "abuse of market position" that you make it out to be, especially given that their intentions are also somewhat altruistic.

I also don't see what a Firefox fork would achieve. I doubt anyone is going to magically be able to make Firefox faster if Mozilla's full-time staff is unable to, and I doubt ignoring patents or doing messy hacks to integrate OS codec support is going to win widespread favour given the current position of the video/audio tag.
one here please -> ngsayjoe at gmail dot com
What do you mean "TC is none of these"? AFAIK, TC is a corporation with a more-than-decent revenue stream, employees, and everything that goes with that.
Anyone wishing to write an article called "Learn To Fucking Spell" really ought to understand the subject better.

For example: contra the article's claims, "affect" can be a noun, and "effect" can be a verb.
Mibbit supports WebSocket, some initial numbers.
Ok so it seems a lot of people are eager to call out Arrington for being foolish here.. Hindsight is 20/20 and while it's clear TC and friends made some key mistakes let's not burn them at the cross like so many in this forum are doing..

I'm working in a startup with a Neurologist who has an appointment at Harvard and an MBA - no doubt he's a smart guy. Nevertheless that didn't really matter a few years ago when our startup was taken to the cleaners by cons.. With the best of intentions we planned a strategic partnership with a medical device company only to find out that several months later we were deliberately being led on and lied to by the CEO of said company while they worked on stealing and implementing our ideas and cutting us out of the deal..

We thought about a lawsuit but we just didn't have the funds to go through with it.. In the end it worked out for us because we had already had some successful partnerships with other device companies which kept us afloat. Also, the company who stole our ideas failed miserably..

Is it really too much to ask that everyone pointing/shaking their finger at TC and Arrington to give them the benefit of the doubt..? It's pretty obvious if you believe what he's saying about Fusion Garage and Chandra that these guys are accomplished liars.. It's a tough lesson to learn and I for one applaud Arrington for being open and transparent in this whole ordeal.. I'm sure this has been embarrassing enough for him and the TC team..
Calling the "blue print" of an electronic device "just what it needs to do/look" (sic) is like saying google is just an <input> box.
Yes, but Pfizer isn't engaging in large-scale deception that costs billions of dollars and risks millions of lives when they show a car smashing through a billboard that says "Erectile Dysfunction" on it.
Wikipedia:
"the halting problem is a decision problem which can be stated as follows: given a description of a program, decide whether the program finishes running or will run forever"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem
Affiliate Marketing Defined For The Beginner Affiliate Marketer
Affiliate marketing is an increasingly popular way to promote businesses on the internet. An affiliate is rewarded for each visitor or subscriber found through their efforts. Essentially, this is the modern version the finder’s fee.
Pretty cool to see this in Chrome, I thought Firefox would be first to implement it.

If you wade through the thread, you'll see that someone posted that Firefox/Mozilla had it in trunk for nearly/over a year. Didn't check myself though.
Drawing fractals with Git
has this got to the point where we can start using "crunchpad" to mean "a godawful mess" or similar?

as in "i wanted to grow organically; he wanted a big marketing push: it ended in a total crunchpad". or "someone didn't tighten the nuts; front driverside wheel came off on a mountain road: complete crunchpad". or "flock of birds triggered a false alarm; first strike; automated response: crunchpad".

it happened with cuil, i'm sensing the same promise here....
Yes, Mark Pilgrim had an interesting blog post about that:

Recently, someone did the unthinkable: they published their own version of Dive Into Python and got it listed on Amazon.com. This apparently caused a small firestorm within Apress, the exact details of which I am not privy to, but which (I am told) became a somewhat larger firestorm after the Apress executives realized they had no legal recourse, and asked my opinion on the matter. You see, the book is published under the GNU Free Documentation License, which explicitly gives anyone and everyone the right to publish it themselves. (I was about to write “gives third parties the right,” until I realized that there are no third parties because there are no second parties. That’s kind of the point.)

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/10/19/the-point
It is time for NoSQL community to come up with a standard key/value API. Is anyone working on it?

I think if people want a standard API, it's going to be the memcached API.
That's a useful perspective, but I often get the sense from 'revere' (at Effect Measure) that he's shading his analysis to promote "the message" he thinks the public needs to hear.

For example, in the link you provided he impugns the motives of the publishers of this latest analysis, and says about the their acceptance of the paper: "I don't think it served the public purpose or the public health."

A couple places, he emphasizes "during a pandemic, no less" or "here we are in the middle of a pandemic" as factors that should weigh against raising doubts about Tamiflu's effectiveness at this time.

That kind of political calculation applied to scientific or medical results creeps me out -- and often backfires on the officials who try it.
did nickb throw in the towel?
The rocket/missile explanation was the first thing I thought of. It looks pretty much the same as some U.S. military missile tests I saw in southern California. (Those ones didn't malfunction and spiral, but they left the same sort of glowing trails in the evening sky.)
Why can’t I hide my list of Facebook friends?
Dude. TC and its network do $2M+ revenue a year. You don't think they are incorporated? Lol.
As with almost all projects like this, I really really want to see the UI. Are there mockups somewhere?
It might depend on your country/jurisdiction. In the United States, oral and implied contracts are contracts, and are legal and binding.

Some contracts, though, fall under what's called the "statute of frauds" - that means they must be written to become contracts.

http://www.expertlaw.com/library/business/statute_of_frauds....

> A "statute of frauds" requires that certain contracts be in writing, and that they be signed by all parties to be bound by the contract.

Contracts under statute of frauds include land sales and transfers, guaranteeing another person's debts, and contracts that can't be completed in a year.

It can be hard to prove an oral contract, but if you can prove it has all the elements of a contract, it's a contract, legal, and enforceable at least under the standard United States common law.
What comes naturally
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Keep in mind that the major growth of the internet occurred after the browser war was over. Fully half of the people using the internet in the US today started to do so after IE had become the dominant browser. Personally I don't think it's too far fetched to expect that MS should have a right to put their own browser on their own OS (as with Apple, Palm, etc.) Especially so given that once one has A browser it is trivial to switch to another.

Again, I think bundling is a side note, people concentrate on it because of quirks of the law which made it a cornerstone of the anti-trust case against MS. The real reason MS won the browser war was because they pushed when Netscape was most vulnerable. The simple fact is that the change in marketshare from NS to IE during the browser war is too great to be accounted for entirely by anything that doesn't include lots and lots of active NS users consciously switching to IE. That doesn't fit the narrative of the unjustly wronged spunky little david (coughAOLcough) going up against the evil goliath, but that's the way it happened.

MS has plenty to answer for but the extended period of IE browser dominance is as much due to Netscape/AOL's massive mistakes as it is to Microsoft's cunning.
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Always? I don't know anything about US law, but German law doesn't require contracts to be written by default. If you buy something the contract between you and the shop owner doesn't have to be written down. You don't even have to say anything, just show what you want to buy and hand over the money. Unpolite but legal. There are requirements for certain kinds of contracts, but not for all of them.
Don't be sad. It's just points.
1993 and Second Reality/Future Crew
They have at least one (as shown on the FG video). They probably have 10s or 100s built as a pre-production run (used to proof out the manufacturing process, given to developers to finish the coding and testing). I'm sure they don't have production quantities.

The pre-sale is to get enough cash in hand to pay the manufacturing outfit enough to do a production run in order to fulfill the pre-sale orders. If you send money to FG for a pre-sale, you are gambling that they will use your money to actually make a device and deliver it to you.

That is Arrington's warning in point 5, and it is a valid warning. Even if they don't use the pre-sale money to hire lawyers, there is no guarantee they will get enough money to do a production run, there is no guarantee they won't take your money and disappear.

Pre-sales is based on trust (buyer) and reputation (seller), not goods already manufactured.
www.anonib.com/BOOKCHAN/
The "waterfall" method is comforting because it can be made to reflect a company's existing physical/organizational structure: work passes down the assembly line from Department A to Department Z and then it's done. And of course we'll meet our deadlines, because look, here they are right on the Gantt chart!

So the illusion of control I think is convincing, more so than any Royce diagram.
I try to use other search engines out of fear that Google will get too powerful. Unfortunately, when I need a deep dig search Google is often best.
How to fail… gloriously
I've worked in financial software - this is spot on. It seems to be one of those unfortunate industries where nobody's interests are aligned with designing decent software:

Programmers don't use their software, users (often back office admin staff) don't have a say in the design, and the majority of programmer effort is spent on firefighting.

Due to the heavy regulation you can't really get in there with a lean, easy to use product. Even if you could, the data is often stored in impermeable proprietary mainframe systems and is garbled to the extent that importing and exporting data is handled by an army of consultants.

There's an enormous fortune awaiting companies who can create intuitive, well designed software for financial corporations. I, however, left because there more interesting things I'd rather be doing, and I guess most programmers feel the same.
The "best scenario" isn't really the best scenario. You will confuse a whole bunch of non-technical users by including more than one web browser. Then Microsoft or Apple end up having to support whatever browsers they ship so it becomes their problem as well. And it doesn't and won't happen in real life - not just Windows but Mac OS X, Ubuntu, iPhone, WebOS or Android. And there's also advantages to including a consistent rendering engine with an OS as anyone who has used Steam can tell you.

It's also interesting you say that Microsoft managed to rename the web "Internet Explorer" because in Tim Berners-Lee's book he says that after Mosaic was launched and was beginning to become popular the people behind Netscape were trying to rename the web themselves and he wasn't very happy about that.
It's the technogeek equivalent of Page Three girls. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_Three

Must. click. link.
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While I agree banking and other financial regulations are onerous (and usually tacked on in reaction to a disaster rather than before to help prevent it), I don't agree with transferring blame because of it. If you chose to engage in a system, financial or otherwise, than you tacitly accept it's rules and regulations. Creating and maintaining solid systems around complex requirements is where the real skill comes in.
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I agree, the thought of the entire end-to-end internet experience (OS, browser, ISP, DNS, search, hosting, etc.) all within the smothering confines of a single company is something I don't look forward to, regardless of whether that company is MS or IBM or Google or Apple or anyone.

To Google's credit, they've open sourced some of the work they've done (GWT, Chrome, Chrome OS, etc.) so in theory there's a pressure relief valve there. One of the great boons of open source is that it does provide that pressure valve so that people have alternatives if mainstream software becomes too oppressive (though this is a side benefit, a lot of OSS is as good as or better than the commercial alternatives).

It's really a shame that nobody has yet figured out how to compete fully with Google. There have been a lot of attempts, but there is still such a huge gap that's it's somewhat disheartening. Google revolutionized server management, data center management, and web application development nearly a decade ago and nobody has really caught up to them on all counts yet. I'm not sure whether that's a testament to their genius or to the sad state of the rest of the industry, but it looks like it's likely to be a controlling factor in the nature of the internet for some time to come.
Arrington fan here, so this is very tongue in cheek but.. Arrington didn't comply with UK libel law when Sethi filed his ridiculous lawsuit saying that the UK's laws didn't affect him, so I wonder if these other guys will try and claim US lawsuits don't apply to them over in Singapore? :-)

I guess even if they did that, it'd be the nail in the coffin for ever getting the device sold in the US though.
This is the 3rd time someone has posted something like this (once by the same submitter http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=880575).

It's a fairly useless metric to look at second hand reports of twitter's website traffic. If you have a bump in new users they would naturally use the website, as some of them left and the users who stuck around learned how to use 3rd party clients you would see a drop in website traffic.

Now does it signify that twitter isn't picking up new users at the same pace, perhaps. But when you think about the last 12 months I am not sure how they could sustain that pace (between Obama, Oprah, etc).
Mozilla Guy to Users: Leave Google, Switch to Bing
When AAPL was Undervalued
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I'm sure this is more about the browser wars than it is about privacy.
Applying Moore’s Law to User Experience
Using CO2 to Extract Geothermal Energy
Are Microsoft Users More Gullible When It Comes To Online Advertising?