dstein

from reddit:

  SR&ED is [reorganized.]

Whew, so it's not completely axed. If anything Canada needs significantly more investment and tax programs like this. Brain drain has always been a problem for Canada because of the lack of investment from the government and the lack of tech-oriented VC.

They have $4.2 billion in revenue per quarter, that's huge, and they still have a lot of users. They could easily scale back their ambitions and become very profitable, abandon the playbook, reduce their workforce, move focus to East Asia, and keep milking every cent out of the old-fashioned phones they kept pumping out long after Apple ate their lunch.

There's also http://yclist.com

If you want to compare that Java-ish syntax to some of the super-slick stuff you can do in NodeJS check out http://www.jaxcore.com/jxss/ which is a JavaScript/CSS hybrid stylesheet format I came up with recently.

It's important to get what you've built into the hands of someone else. You cannot rely on your own experience with what you've built as a basis for decision making.

Self-promotion: at http://www.jaxcore.com I've built a really neat NodeJS application server. And I experiment with ways to use it, including building a new mobile advertising platform.

My Macbook Pro should be powerful enough to run the Siri software. But Apple doesn't let me use it because they only put it on a particular, expensive, smartphone.

Your comparison isn't valid.

What really bothers me about Siri, is how Apple makes it tied to specific hardware. Technologically, there should be no reason why Siri-style actions are not available to every PC, and every smartphone.

Native platforms have been, and still are (thanks to Apple's success), the major roadblock to innovation.

They didn't actually want to buy Motorola Mobility either. But they did.

Intel already bought and then sold an ARM licensee:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XScale

It's receiving hourly replays on CBC news in Canada.

I wouldn't take YC's decision to heart. They have no crystal ball and cannot know if you will ultimately be successful. You should be willing to persue a good idea regardless of your YC application, which I think is largely a crapshoot anyways.

I've been experimenting with using QR codes just to copy/paste text and bookmarks between computers. It's something that sounds simple, but really there aren't any good ways to do that, especially not once you add mobile devices and computers other than your own.

I'd like to apply for this position. Are they still accepting resumes or is it too late?

Selling expensive products to rich people is a lot easier than selling affordable products to poor people.

Shouldn't it be named batman.coffee?

Coffeescript is adding an abstraction level, but all the complexity of JavaScript remains, so while you write Coffeescript, you have to sort of compile it in your head. I could maybe get on board if it went one whole level of abstraction further.

The problem with Coffeescript is if you already know JavaScript, it's completely unreadable. Looking at code like this, I have absolutely no idea what it does:

  class ItemView extends Backbone.View
    render: ->
      @options.items.each(@renderItem)
    renderItem: (item) =>
      @el.append item.get("title")

It doesn't make sense because there are magic variables appearing out of nowhere - @options, @el, append -- what are these? I'd have to study the resulting JavaScript to understand what it's really going to do.

It's really cool. There is no documentation or examples, and I wish it didn't require jQuery, but it appears the code is open source:

http://vintagejs.com/js/vintage.js

Perhaps, but you'd be stretching the definition of "legal".

One guy with a machine gun could conquer this country in 10 minutes. And if it's truly sovereign then it would be completely legal.

That was really the only interesting part of the article. They should have done a whole article on quick exit tutoring rather than the same old fluff we've all heard before because it's more insightful of where things are headed. Just wait until we see a high profile implosion like Groupon probably will.

(+ 3 3) is really how arithmetic is performed in Clojure? Okay, I'm done with learning Clojure.

Funding isn't a problem, there has never been a better time to raise money than right now. If WebOS could become the premier development platform (develop on WebOS, deploy to the web and others platforms via Phonegap) you could gain a following.

Open souce isn't the only possibility.

I think HP should skunkworks it. Round up all the engineers who developed the platform, form an independent LLC, retain an equity stake, and let them proceed with full autonomy.

Tablet and smartphone hardware is going to get so dirt cheap in just a few years, that they'll probably be able to outsource all the hardware and run the operation like a scrappy startup.

An open operating system without any sort of central authority is pointless. That's a 100% guaranteed way to kill the platform.

They should skunkworks it. Instead of punting, they should round up the HP employees who built it, form a LLC, retain an ownership stake, but give the group full autonomy to continue on in whatever fashion they think they can survive with.

Take a good hard look at the graph on this article:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/16/asay_on_goole_patent...

There are some cold realities that Microsoft is up against here. A half decent "me too" effort that's 4 years late is not going to win a lot of marketshare.

Who cares what validators say. You should use UTF. We're long past the point where web browsers don't support it.

It's surreal when I think back to between 2001 and 2005 I honestly thought the iPaq running Windows Mobile was going to be the future of computing. Microsoft and HP looked poised to dominate forever.

... and then nothing happened. Both HP and Microsoft turned out to have ZERO vision, and just decided to stop innovating, kicked back, and collect their big fat dividend checks. And now Apple is eating their lunch with two fists.

I meant I see Microsoft's Windows Phone platform ending up in the same place the WebOS platform is in. Certainly Microsoft may stay in business selling refreshed versions of Office and Exchange. But I don't see how that will translate into success in an all-mobile + all-cloud computing world where Microsoft has no strength.