skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This sounds like "plan b". There was lots of talk of "intel partnership", but if Intel won't build what Apple wants, perhaps because they think it is stupid, then enter plan b.

Apple has a long tradition of using custom chips where x86 uses a northbridge through the 68k and PPC eras. I don't know if they hired out the work or did it with an in house team, but the distinction is largely irrelevant now that they brought a chip design team in house.

I believe the rationale was to keep the part count down by integrating as many functions as possible. This is especially important in small consumer devices.

Consider as an example, not Apple but similar issues or how the big chip companies can miss on specific requirements... I need to run a server in a remote location off of solar power and batteries. I am tired of wrestling with the OpenWRT and wrtsl54gs that I use now, but it runs on a couple of watts and that is good. Intel releases their fabulous Atom processor that takes only 2 watts which is great because I can use a standard mini-itx motherboard, regular old debian x86 and be happy... except the northbridge chip on the motherboard takes 15 watts because Intel apparently didn't see a need for a lower power northbridge. I can't afford another 360 watthours/day just for the northbridge. Obviously my volume is wrong for custom silicon, but a system asic that supports just the peripherals I need and memory I need designed with an eye to power dissipation instead of top notch performance would be a big win.
Definitely post it in its own thread if you're looking for feedback! What is more a part of this site than people doing that? It's much more productive than reading 37signals say the same thing a new way.

Here's some comments:

- The take a tour image is pixelated and ugly.

- It needs something more compelling, IMO, as a reason to use it. It is a neat widget, but nothing I'd think of using. Maybe there are some cool use cases that would get people excited about it.

- After just a quick glance, it feels like something that might be good as part of something else.

- Clicking and dragging on a timeline (the blog one, for example) is hard because there is too much 'link space' (even where there are no words) as opposed to 'drag space', if that makes sense.
How to make location-based mobile ads work now: Ignore GPS
I thinks its closed source, also what was the reason Apple came to intel on their computers? - and why would they reverse that on their phones? .... just seems apple is getting more evil - although probably most companies are
Why NoScript? That one seems like it would constantly be getting in the way and interfering with seamless browsing.
A lot of things that applied to Graham in the mid-90s no longer apply. The 37signals lessons are still fresh; they're operating in the current business climate.

If you weren't working in 1996 (unless you graduated early, you were in high school, swombat) I'll say: do not underestimate how silly things were back then.
Iceweasel for the win!
A good example of why interpreters are bad on mobile devices. The article notes that the squeak programs run "at the speed of a 233MHz ppc603e" and that memory is very tight.

Every processor cycle you execute on a mobile device drains your battery. If your interpreter runs 1/10th the speed of native code (a reasonable ballpark figure) then you are going to be burning 10 times the battery in the CPU. (more or less)

Don't disrespect your user. Code native.
1. I can beat keyword density out with a good title tag, 2 related headers (h1 & h2) & some inbound links.

2. True, but see my first point.

3. True, BUT only in a competitive market. In my original comment I said "...can be great for a small business.", I probably should have used the words "local small business".

Because ranking for something like... "Miami Electricians" or "New York City Dog Sitters" would be easy and would be most effective (in my opinion) with a one page site.
IPhone 3G details
My New Instant Karma Plan
Hello HN. Not to boast, but I've devised a foolproof method to get more karma than you. Given that we're all members of the entrepreneurial community, I thought I'd share this method with my fellow colleagues, in hopes that they may derive some inspiration. So here it goes - my new Instant Karma Plan:

1. Subscribe to 37signals company blog via an RSS reader that gives up-to-the-minute updates.

2. Write a simple script that, upon each update, submits that 37signals post as an article on HN, so that I'm the first to post it.

3. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the karma.

Whatdya think?
Apple went to intel for several reasons.

- IBM PPC manufacturer reliability was killing them, there was a certain scandal with the G5's getting past the 2.0Ghz barrier on a scale of 90 nano meters I believe.

- Boot camp, with an intel processor they could influence people on the fence to get a Mac, or people that wanted to (go forbid) run windows on a Mac.

Remember, OS X is a micro kernel architecture and can easily be ported to multiple processors.
Also, this is nice: "Java is an interpreted language. The JVM is the Java interpreter."

Technically this is true. The JVM interprets Java bytecode in the sense that it translates the bytecode into machine language on the fly.
I don't think dishonesty is a responsible strategy. Better dismiss the legitimacy of the EULA than implicitly acknowledge its validity with your false assertions (if you argue that you didn't read it then you're saying it's relevant).
It's called Link Bait.
Brief interactive feature of the commercial space industry:
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/html/science/20060912_...
From the article: what is keeping us tied to having our code in this format?

If your source code wasn't in text then you may not be able to use your favourite text editor.
Sounds good, make sure you keep your stats up though:

http://searchyc.com/user/bporterfield
> A "guess" is all that is.

As is a huge bunch of startup advice purveyed via blogs, articles, books and so on. A lot of it seems to even conflict.

Not that it's necessarily bad, just that after a while I get tired of it and wish that there were more data. I actually think that that's a cool aspect of YC that's perhaps overlooked at times: with all the startups going through there, he's getting the chance to look very closely at a lot of different companies and people.
I'd keep files but use tags instead of folders. I like powershell's object based cli, make sure nothing like the windows registry ever existed, the OS would only run byte code, memory would be transactional and grey would not be the default window background color.
Don't apologize for your curiosities. This is the first of many times people will knock you down. Brush the dirt off and keep going if you don't see a lesson in what people tell you.
Study: naps &gt; coffee, good night's sleep to combat tiredness
I think thats the philosophy 37 Signals' "Getting real" gets to. Start with what it should look like, and work backwards...

Good advice though. Thanks
I thought this would be a problem for me, as well; and compounded by the fact that I am the solo founder. Surprisingly, this turned out not to be the case: I can always get a task or two done every evening. It helps that things come to mind throughout the day about how to best complete a given task; I don't have to think about what to do next when I am ready to work.
> Whatdya think?

I think this represents a violation of the spirit of HN.
You're making the assumption that such a chip would reach market at the same time and in the same condition. The existing chip design companies are, in fact, really good at what they do, and they are rushing these things to market about as fast as can be done. Hardware product cycles are much longer than those for software, especially if you are trying to "innovate" like you posit. You can't just rev a new chipset for ever device release.
Seth's Blog: Ten things programmers might want to know about marketers
Please don't upvote stupid posts like this.
Wow this joke has never been told on any karma-based message board ever. How witty. Did you think about telling it again on Slashdot about Natalie Portman as Padme Amidala? They'll get a kick out of it.
Whatdya think?

What's the point of karma? It's not money, it's not friendship, and it's not interesting; so who cares?
Seriously folks. This is why I rarely visit Reddit these days -- because of posts like this.
I definitely do not discard it. Another solution that sprang to mind is that the softness of the hood makes it possible to put some kind of airbag(s) over the engine. Though this probably has a rather complicated set of problems (when to fire it, how to time the firing, can the required volume be inflated in time, etc.).
Apple doesn't need a chip advantage. They are able to beat the competition just fine without such a thing.

There's no hardware in an iPod that couldn't be duplicated by any other company, easily. Their competitors think "Hey, we can make one of those things far cheaper, with more features." Then they produce a clunky ugly awful piece of junk which quickly fades from view. Yet another "competitor" vanquished.

In the PC realm, Macs have recently become MORE like PCs, not less. Again, a hardware advantage wouldn't help at all.
I am scandinavian, I would just call my fellow countrymen the vikings and they would chop all your heads off, take your money and your women and that would be the end of that.
Ask HN: Should a tech founder look for a non-tech co-founder?
Assume a solo tech founder has all the skills needed to complete a given Web application for a startup. What would be more valuable in a co-founder - additional tech skills to get to a prototype quicker or someone with seasoned startup experience to help seek funding, work on marketing, business plan, recruiting, etc?
John Gruber had a different opinion... http://twitter.com/gruber/statuses/830655964
I agree, that was a weak beat. I consider the surface computer to be like a concept car from Detroit: it's an exercie in puffery. Apple did the same thing with their "Knowledge Navigator" video.

And any ways, stealing from Apple is MSFT's job. I sold my MSFT stock a while back, but if I still had any I would be distressed if they weren't stealing anything. We're talking about Ballmer's job here. His job is to make the stock make money for investors.

Does anyone go long on MSFT because they want to put some R&D in their portfolio? I don't think so. They buy MSFT because they want to invest in a company that executes on monetizing other people's ideas.

(side beat: much as they invest in GOOG because they want to invest in a company that monetizes other people's content.)
He's not saying that anyone can start a successful startup in 10 hours per week. Quite the contrary:

"Odds are you’ll fail. Just as odds are you’ll fail if you take millions of VC money, hire a staff of twenty, and spend 120 hours/week on it."

The take-home point of the essay, ISTM, is that if you only have 10 hours a week for your startup, those 10 hours can still be well spent.
Yes: they'll be able to cover things you aren't as comfortable with, and thus complement your own skills.

No: since you're 'looking', it'll be hard to find someone you trust thoroughly enough to really share the work with. It's easy for non-tech types to dream up lots of hard things to code.
As a new user who hasn't yet contributed much to the community, don't you think your post is rude?

user : bporterfield
created : 30 days ago
karma : 38

8 comments, 1.50 points per comment [searchyc.com]

That said, you may want to use http://www.andrewfarmer.name/2008/04/hn-blacklist-now-with-u... to blacklist the sites you don't want to see.
Your best bet, from my experience, is someone with the startup experience, business connections, marketing knowledge, and general know-how to execute on a completely different side of the business while you concentrate on the prototype.

But for best results, and to avoid the pitfall davidw pointed out, get someone who knows the basics of hacking too so he/she doesn't ask you to build a website that can shoot lasers out of the screen.
> So, instead of asking, "How can I get more time in my week?" I ask, "How can I use what I learn from my clients to cut through the fog on my own software so that I don't need as much time?"

Yeah, setting up CVS tunnelling to my client's site is the best thing I ever did ;-)
Docstoc Poses As File Transfer Service With OneClick
Random Code Generator Based on SPAM e-mail
I'm thinking out loud here, but one can create a special email address, get subscribed to all possible spam there is, and then use it for Random Code Generation.

I'm still wondering whether it would work, but at least someone can benefit from SPAM this way.

No more random keyboard buttons & mouse pressing, just use the SPAM you have to generate a random key.
Yes, if those searches start from the Firefox chrome, absolutely.
"Apple played this closed market approach with the desktop and look where it got them:" It got them in the position of being the ONLY company making consumer computers that still has any margins to speak of. HP, Compaq, Dell, et al are all racing each other to the bottom, trying to eke out a minimal survival on razor-thin margins.

Apple's stumbles in the 80s and 90s weren't because they failed to license MacOS, it was because Jobs was immature and shot himself in the foot, taking his company down with him. These days they couldn't possibly be doing any better, and you can bet your ass Jobs still thinks licensing MacOSX is a terrible idea.
Mac OS X Snow Leopard Drops PowerPC Support?
You're assuming that the code is going to be burning massive amounts of cycles calculating something. That's likely not necessarily the case. The arguments for scripting languages on mobile phones are just as strong as they are for scripting languages elsewhere:

Faster development time: it's important to know if people even like your app, and a quick prototype is often a good idea.

Let more users write apps in the first place. Maybe Joe Schmoe has a neat idea for an app that would be great in his industry, but isn't much of a coder, and would simply get stuck with a more complex language. Keep in mind that this may be something as simple as a user writing code for their own phone, so they know what kind of tradeoff they're making.

If you're using the right kind of languages, you can write the control code in a scripting language, and write speed-critical code in the lower-level language.

Obviously, I'm biased, as I've spent massive quantities of time working on Hecl, and have seen firsthand that I can write small, but useful applications on platforms as limited as Nokia's S40 series (from 5 years ago).
so ideally, find a 'business' person who has dabbled in web dev...
Turning the TV into a 'social-media center'
The JVM doesn't interpret Java, it interprets JVM bytecode. Java isn't interpreted, it's compiled to run on the JVM (or natively).

Basically, I'm in favor of a law that says "If you want to use the word compiled or interpreted in your blog post, you have to write a programming language first." That is the project you need to do to understand compiled vs. interpreted.
There are better ideas out there.
My thinking was to continue to lead the technical vision for the service, with the non-tech co-founder sharing learned experiences and leading other aspects of the company startup.
How to be a wildly successful incompetent blogger
It's so nice to see this kind of thinking on YC News. There seems to be a growing trend that startups have some specific criterion for success (120 hours/week, absolute knowledge of programming, moving to SV). I find that a good amount of the passion I have for startups comes from the fact that there is no set plan for how it needs to be done. Interesting and creative ways of 'hacking' the business world don't have criterion. Just because PG or Google or 37signals did something a certain way does not mean that it is the only way, or even the best.

There is the old saying that there is more than one way to skin a cat. One way it to work ever waking hour of your day, but another and just as viable way is to work for 10 hours/week.

This mentality of absolutes in entrepreneurship can be detrimental to ones success and promoting it only devalues the usefulness of communities like YC News.
Agreed, they weren't ready to scrap the design yet. However, I think they are going to make a very, very big deal of it when they put (another?) camera on the front. A big marketing deal.

I don't know if evolutionary advanced countries (cellulary speaking) like Japan have video-to-video chatting, but I think that a lot of people would be all over this.
WWDC survey suggests 70% of planned iPhone apps may be free
T-Mobile, AT&T, Starbucks Make Nice about Wi-Fi
Facebook Now Endorsing Apps "You May Like"
Totally totally totally depends on what you're building. B2C? B2B? A business with lots of bizdev ops or no? Investment required or not? Is the core problem (or the way you want to attack it) a technology problem or a sales/distribution problem? Heck, or a design problem?

With the general question, I'll give you my best shot at a general answer. Building something people want to use is the first order problem where virtually every startup fails. Select a co-founder who will help you solve that problem. If you don't, funding, marketing, business plans, and recruiting aren't going to help much.
"Assume a solo tech founder has all the skills needed to complete a given Web application for a startup."

A huge assumption.

If you're wrong about that and you get a non-tech co-founder, you're toast.

Personally, I'd hedge my bets with a second tech and worry about the non-tech stuff later.

I have been in the exact same situation twice before and here's what happened both times: I was working 100 hour weeks and my partner was bored. Then he went out and oversold what I could have delivered. A disaster. Twice. (You'd think I'd have learned.)

The problem isn't whether you have the skills for what is needed. It's whether you have the time to do it. I underestimated what it would take and didn't account for all kinds of stuff. It's a very easy trap to fall into, believe me. The stuff that bites you in the butt down the line will be technical; count on it.

I would have traded either non-technical partner for a fellow hacker in a heartbeat. If I had, who knows, you may have been reading this at Eddie News instead while I typed it from my yacht. Don't make the same mistake as me. Get another tech.
Good advice. I had previously focussed my search on finding a fellow hacker, but was passing on some qualified business types. One of them happened to be a VC looking to try something new. I guess I was off track, but better to learn late than never ...
As big of a deal as ... visual voicemail?
You'll need both soon enough, then the question is who becomes the CEO out of the tech founder and the business founder and when. If you can make the business founder a CEO comfortably then that would be a plus.
Okay, so this post may annoy some HN loyalists but it's also a reality that all communities need to deal with eventually. Keep in mind there is a high-probability that someone has already implemented this IKP.

Let's turn this lemon into a shandy and figure out what to do about it.
This might explain some of the recent test posts ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=213701 ).
I was also. I've worked for several startups, and indeed their first mistake was to develop software in crunch mode, and their second was to throw more people at it because it was late.

In every case, the result was software that required a huge amount of effort to do anything with (about as agile as a 16-wheeler with no gas in the tank and 12 flat tires), morale that tailed off as the burnout increased, and failure.

Most of those companies WILL fail, because their product will be poor, even if it's a good idea. Revolution health is a good example; they started out with a good idea and executed badly... now they're going through rounds of layoffs, making very little money, and Google is accomplishing what they've failed to (e.g. online health records).
Isn't the roof on, say, a 1980s Lincoln done like this? Or is that just fabric covering metal?
FWIW, Perl has this:

http://search.cpan.org/~vparseval/Inline-Lua-0.04/lib/Inline...

And it has 500 other Inline:: modules, in case you like something other than Lua:

http://search.cpan.org/search?m=all&q=Inline
But in the end it's all about CPA, not CPC. CPC is sort of just a go between. You base your bottom line decisions around CPA. If it takes 10x the clicks to get the same CPA, then you'll pay 1/10th the CPC (or you'll go out of business).
Yes, I agree with you of course. But I think the intended audience for this blog would be operating on a slightly looser and less academic meaning of the phrase "interpreted language," where the answer to the question, "Does a Java program get interpreted when it runs?" would be affirmative.
I saw this about a minute after it was posted. I hoped at the time it wouldn't get upmodded. We need a downmod.
But who should come in at #2 versus #3? My thinking is that the business co-founder might end up as CEO, but from what I've learned the simple title of "co-founder" for everyone might work best at the early stages.
Would it be possible to detect Markov-generated text?

Perhaps the only way to do it would be to note that the probability of one word following another seems more constant over time in Markov text than in human-generated text? It'd be interesting to know if anyone's done this.
Someone downmodded that - you disagree, or the comment's simply not relevant or it is feeding the troll, who I think is actually quite serious?
But so does any computer program. What do you think non-virtual machines do?
You can do video-to-video chatting in many countries. Most 3G phones outside of the US have a front-facing camera for exactly this purpose. It's not that great though, I can do video chat on my computer and never use it.
We love Ext JS.. We've been using it for about 3 months. Its awesome. Nothing else like it in quality, elegance, and end product.
Simpler, easier, faster always wins out.

Man, do I hope that's true.
The point is ability to INSTALL it. Compiling the bytecode of flash into C or whatever iPhone runs on is not the problem it can be done if necessary, its actually having anything run on the iPhone that is...

The advantage of bytecode is that it can run on any operating system/architecture, the VM will take care of executing it as binary code on whatever system it is installed on. This way you can go to youtube from any OS and if you have flash installed it works. Its not just about compiling into binary and startup times :)...

Now having said that when are the iPhone ruby and python VMs coming out?
"Yeah, setting up CVS tunnelling to my client's site is the best thing I ever did ;-)"

That's not what I meant (although I suspect you said it in jest).

It has nothing whatsoever to do with using anyone else's property (intellectual or otherwise). It has everything to do with what I learned from the gig.

My most common example is so common and has so much common sense that it's easy to overlook. I call it the "suck test". Every time a client has me change something, I ask if it's because their business has changed since this was written or if it was just written poorly. It's often the latter. Every time I look at something that someone else wrote and say, "Who wrote this &#^$%? It sucks," I add it to my suck list and make sure I never do that.

This one thing has saved me thousands of hours. Stuff I never would have imagined unless I had seen it somewhere else. And there are a lot of other examples, too.

I think that this is what DHH meant when he talked about turning "perceived weakenesses into strengths".
Option 2: Karma throttling.

This could also include a karma bank so that once it's determined you're not a bot or a moron, you'd get the karma you deserve.