skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Building a processor that can compete with the x86 juggernaut is expensive. Look at Intel's budget -- they have the production capacity and engineering resources to do pretty much whatever they feel like doing.

For Apple to attempt to compete with Intel, it would need to be willing to invest billions of dollars just in fab technology with a minimum of 3-5 years before seeing any return on that investment.

And Apple doesn't have the volume... so it wouldn't get the return on investment.

So Apple worked with IBM and Moto, but weren't buying enough CPU's from either one to make much of a difference, so after Jobs ended the clone program, the PPC consortium focussed primarily on embedded computing, in particular networking. Apple wasn't big enough to merit a custom chip, so it had to make do with a chip designed for a network router.

And so on...

What they're doing with this in-house design probably differs in several ways.

One is that it's probably aimed at a hand-held device, or something in a similar form factor. As such, it doesn't need to be able to compete with Intel's flagship x86, so Intel's technology edge isn't a factor.

Two is that being aimed at a hand-held, it's going to be small -- which means a lower cost for manufacture. So it doesn't have to have Intel's manufacturing capacity to gain from economies of scale.

Three is that it doesn't require that Apple builds its own fab; it can develop a design in-house and bid it out for fabrication to any of the big fabrication shops out there, like Chartered, UMC, TSMC, Samsung, etc. The fab process won't offer the same performance (i.e. clock speed ramping) as those of AMD and Intel, but in the hand-held market, that's a lot less important than minimizing power consumption.

And if the first fab partner can't keep up, owning the design means that Apple can follow Microsoft's example and hire a 2nd fab partner to boost production.

I guess that's a long winded way of agreeing with you, but there you go :)
I use Firefox at work and Chrome at home. There's no way I could use Chrome for my job, it just doesn't have anywhere near the developer capabilities I need.

But Chrome really is beautiful. And lightning fast. Unfortunately, I regularly bump into things I can't do, like block those god-forsaken flash ads, email a link to the page I'm viewing or Ctrl-Tab to switch back and forth between tabs (as opposed to cycling through all of them), just to name a few. And these things make Chrome not quite "feel right" to me.

Chrome has some things to learn from Firefox, and Firefox has some things to learn from Chrome. And competition is healthy. So I'm sure interesting things are coming.
From the first sentence of the article: "hackers sent them screenshots"
Hacking is everywhere
Time’s 100 Most Influential People Includes 4chan And Twitter Creators
Half-Life inspired short film with incredible special effects, cost: $150
Only Google Would Do This With Their iPhone App Update: Ninja (Screenshot)
I do tend to advocate the opposite of the "harder to build than break" argument, and that argument is, I suppose, just as faulty. I agree with your last paragraph. It is, in the end, just a stupid argument.

However, my side of this argument is just disingenuous, while Winkler's side is a pernicious industry fallacy that genuinely has set us back: it's embedded into several of the bullshit certifications that gate some high-paying jobs, and it's a consistent excuse for practitioners to avoid keeping technically sharp for for implementors to avoid responsibility for the code they ship.

So while recognizing that you are right about the merits of the argument, I am unlikely to stop making it.
Leadership is important, but how a leader derives his power differs greatly by context. In the case of a football coach, it's basically positional power - you "take it or leave it", because as a subordinate, you can't change it. The military, corporations, and other forms of hierarchical organizations operate this way.

As you alluded to, open source leadership is derived by a different sort of power - it's earned. Leaders rise to the top by the respect they earn. In this context, who the top leader is varies, and there's not a clear cut designation of "leadership". What usually tends to happen is that leaders in this "open" context will try to switch to a "positional" context (eg, by issuing a decree that designates titles). Fortunately, we don't see much of that in the open source world and the Rails leadership has shown tremendous vision by focusing on what matters to Rails developers: code. If you take a quick glance across the Rails landscape, the "leaders" are there because of technical excellence; nothing else. DHH will always have a special place in the Rails landscape as the originator, but the true technical leadership has been people like Yehuda Katz, Jeremy Kemper, Josh Peek, etc. (others mentioned in the article).

The other wonderful thing about Rails is that it's based on Ruby, and Ruby is anchored by some wise old men whose leadership is second to none.

Despite some ugliness here and there, I still feel the Ruby and Rails communities are wonderful communities to participate in and its leadership is in good hands.
I think you're doing the "what aboutery" discussed some time ago. These people are not traditional comedians dealing with their own pains using humour, and making life brighter. It's a couple kids here and there selling "funny" t-shirts.

It's not a therapeutical way for them to deal with the problem. It's for a quick buck.
Conficker worm hits hospital devices
I think thats a good reason for web frameworks to consider adding admin interface as a part of the framework.
Nobody cares to change much.
Nah, just trying to give you the right jargon. =)
Ask HN: Share your thoughts on this startup idea 
An editorial blog for startups (i.e. TechCrunch) specifically focused on early, early stage startups (i.e. YC companies).
You do seem to read a lot of TechCrunch then ;)
I just used RubyCocoa, but I haven't done much of the UI stuff yet. My contact info's in my profile, though.
You're claiming that (a) Java is better at multicore than C++; and (b) Java has been displacing C++; and (c) that the former is due to the latter. I haven't heard this idea before. Can you elaborate please?

Threading the locks have been integrated into Java from the beginning, with every object having a monitor and functions like wait() and notify(), and a synchronized keyword. These are nice, and do help, but they don't solve the problem. I've heard that Java fixed up some problems with these in version 1.5 or 1.6, but haven't looked at the details.

My understanding is that none of the imperative languages are very good at multicore. Erlang is said to be effective at it (because of pure message passing); and some people claim FP will help because it overcomes the problem of shared state by making it immutable (while this is true, I'm not convinced it's particularly helpful in large projects, in practice).

So I'm interested in your reasoning.
Why Apple needs Microsoft to survive the coming OS battle
Because the VC is not paying you at a market rate for what your time could be. They are funding you because they think you will be successful. If you are successful, your ultimate outcome will be a multiple of your "market rate" over three years. Therefore, your hourly rate should be reduced.
Disney to Buy 30% of Hulu
I know this is a minor point, but I found it striking.

"Some people will contend that this is all a misunderstanding, because "hackers" are not computer criminals by definition. Criminals are "crackers," they will point out."

I know the point he's trying to make (the old boring semantic argument of what "hacker" means) but that is so clumsily phrased that you get the distinct feeling he doesn't even understand the point himself. You also begin to wonder how that kind of crap can get published by the New York Times.
If you exit before your Series A, you're probably pretty happy anyway. I dunno about you, but for me I don't care if I get $5M or $4.7M, I'd just be freaking glad to have a few million.
I don't know why someone would mod this comment down. It paraphrases pretty accurately points made by professional cryptographers.

Percival's response is also accurate. He's saying, there's a baseline for secure hash functions: those that adapt block cipher constructions. But that's just the baseline. Nobody does that, because hash functions need to be fast. And making that tradeoff of speed versus proven constructions seems to put us into the weeds.
I was about to say the same thing. The entire book is available online, for free:

http://mail.saigon.com/~anson/ebud/mfneng/mind0.htm
That book is amazingly clear and concise. Its all about algorithms. Buddhism is truly the religion of computation.
A sad yet realistic summary of representative democracy.

Also his cyberspace and seasteading ideas are far too optimistic. High tax governments are currently going after tax heavens, even as old and diplomatic strong ones as Switzerland. What changes does your sea outpost have against the world?

But he's missed out on two important things. First democracies tend to follow a long term cycle of government boom and bust. See Sweden and Great Britain. The general patter is the government grows until it's too big to be effective and then it collapses.

The other example is direct democracy like Switzerland, that's also worth examining.
I mean, "something as good".
How To Add Java Applets To Your Web Page With The Object & Param Tags
Ok, maybe I'm using the wrong term, but what I mean by "DRM" is anything that inhibits piracy. This can include stuff like when the music industry put those mangled mp3s on Kazaa. Anything that makes piracy less convenient will lead to more people paying for the product.

Even if piracy can't be completely prevented, it can still be significantly mitigated, it's just a question of engineering.
With the kind of sluggishness we are adopted to these days with firefox and network responses; I think Emacs is definitely is not sluggish.
Contracts allow for civil penalties including "specific performance" as ordered by a court -- this might mean "give the customer his data back." One would hope anyone hosting something of significance would have a contract in place with his hosting provider.
just do it and see if you get any traffic
BioScapes - microscope images of life science subjects
"Google is to privacy... what the Taliban are to women’s rights..."
Poor PerezHilton every celeb blocks him :( I guess to make his work harder
Brad Feld videos on entrepreneurial communities and dynamics between VCs and entrepreneurs
I program in Common Lisp every day and almost never read cll. It's like walking through a bad neighborhood. I do agree with you about the archives being valuable.
Videojuicer, moves out of startup mode, looks for another ruby app developer
agree. interesting, though, to see at number 10 a company that will give you lung cancer...
Project Postmortem: Square Enix's The World Ends With You
Promotional manicure sets 
The beauty of using manicure sets and other promotional products for marketing is the ability to imprint your company or product name, logo, or other message on the piece.
How To Add Flash To Your Web Pages With The Nonstandard Embed Tag
then I am ahead

Your conclusion is your assumption.
I guess that the firefox addon isn't really a product either; it was a late night.

Here are a few names off the top of my head:

* Stylee

* EaseSS (Easy Style Sheets? :))

* Flair ease

* Stylify (Style-ify, Styleify)

* Chic Sheets

Good luck and happy coding!
CSS resets are extremely useful and there is little need to reinvent them every time you make a page. A lot of people will eventually come up with their own base typography rules at some point as well. And grids are extremely helpful in eliminating some headaches and speeding up development. These are all components of most frameworks.

None of these "frameworks" do much of anything besides some routine stuff that saves your some start up time. Telling everyone that they don't need them is a bit ridiculous. If it saves you time, makes your life easier, or have some other benefit to you, they are worth your time. For example, 960 isn't a "framework" in the same magnitude that RoR or JQuery is a framework. The problems that a CSS framework solves are much smaller than most other frameworks. 960 took all of 10 seconds to figure out and has been helpful in quickly tossing page layouts together. It has shown itself to be very reliable across browsers and certainly beats having to test your CSS layouts on IE, Firefox and Safari. The constant edit-save-refresh CSS testing cycle is a lot easier with a CSS reset and manageable grid system. Also, with 960, you aren't running away from CSS. You still need to know CSS to do anything useful with it, it just solves a few immediate issues with CSS and then gets out of your way.
2009 Time 100: The Twitter guys
So YC's principal value is the advice?
Ask HN: Can I write a recommendation engine for HN?
Simple item-based (hackers who upvoted this article also upvoted...) and/or user-based (hackers who upvoted similar articles to you, upvoted ... ) recommendations would be cool to see on HN, possibly as a way to access (relatively) older content that one might have missed. this assumes people are actually away from the site long enough to miss something -- unlikely. addicts!

I think as the user base of HN continues to grow this can help keep things from approaching the LCD.
I agree with a lot of what he says, but not with his extremely pessimistic conclusion. It's not time to just give up on all existing countries!

Separate issue: Karl Popper (a friend of freedom) argued that democracy is good because it allows for non-violent changes in Government. I think Thiel should be careful in attacking democracy itself: what non-violent alternatives are there? Suppose we form a libertarian sea steading or outer space colony. What system of Government does Thiel imagine libertarians would use if not democracy?
As limited as the threading model of synchronization is, it can be used to fairly easily write programs that scale up to some reasonable number of threads (10-100). This is less to do with the convenience of having keywords like 'synchronized' and more to with the fact that modern Java has a proper memory model. The C++ people are trying to put together a memory model, but it's not here yet and there's some doubt about the ability to integrate it successfully with existing (pthreads etc.) code.

Without a memory model you're going to be writing more code that is less correct at a substantially higher cost. If you're interested in this google for a Google Tech Talk by Josh Bloch on 'Java Memory Model'. This basically comes down to my ability to get at architecture specific stuff (CAS, fencing) in a platform independent way and have it work. Cliff Click has a really neat tech talk on writing a lock-free hash table in Java, don't bother trying to write it in C++.

Ultimately we will need a better model for concurrency, which will be some combination of functional programming and lightweight processes (actors). Erlang/Scala/Clojure/Haskell are in the right neighborhood (maybe Gambit Scheme, don't know much about it), but Erlang and Haskell are really hard to teach to mere mortals like myself. I don't know enough category theory to understand 'hello world' in Haskell, but I can write Scala and Clojure programs that work (and leverage my existing investment in the JVM).

edit: i left off something imporant. if anything saves imperative programming it will be transactional memory, which is exremely hard. hardware TM and code written for TM are in a chicken-and-egg situation. the answer is hybrid hardware/software TM and the sun guys are way ahead on this too.
Content businesses suck because 1. it's hard, and 2. everyone thinks they can do it. Which explains all the bad content out there, a lot of people are unwilling to pay for professional production values out of ignorance.

But if you can find a way to stand out from the cruft you can charge quite the premium.
Peter Kofler's Applet test pages have been an invaluable resource in the past when I had to debug client issues with Java Plug-in (Java Web Start fixes many of the client issues)

http://kofler.dot.at/browsersupport/applet.html
Someone there claimed it becomes resolved at about message 255. I found it tediously slow to get to that screen (BTW: is there a way to jump ahead in google groups, or do you really have to click "next" 10 times (jumps 25 each time)? The URL is a hashkey that doesn't have explicit parameters.)

So here's the URL for messages 251- 275: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/browse_thread/...
Did Google just sneakily launch a Facebook killer?
It's in my reader, the headlines are good but that's about it.
This resonates with me pretty strongly, as does “Why Nerds Are Unpopular”. Both match my experience as a teen (back in the 1970s) and my observation since. While I’ve written a little about some of the same phenomena, these two essays do an astounding job of documenting and explaining what I had not processed as thoroughly.

One thing struck me, though. Several motivations for lying to teens about sex are cited, and I certainly agree that those motivations are important. However, I was surprised that an important one was overlooked, since it figures so prominently in “Why Nerds Are Unpopular”.

In that essay, the argument is made that teens are penned up in school because they no longer have a place in a modern economy. Since a teen can’t support a family, preventing sex, the biological purpose of which is to, well, start a family, becomes a priority. So there may be a pragmatic reason as well as sentimental ones for lying about sex.

NB: I’m not one of those “abstinence-only” types; I’m a firm believer in the old military adage that one should never give orders that will not be obeyed and cannot be enforced. (I agree with the prescription given in the essay, to give teens the straight dope, but to impress on them that their judgment may not always be trustworthy.) Abstinence certainly is effective at preventing conception, though, and when loaded with cultural and sentimental baggage to give it more power, the development of such a fundamental dissonance between society and biology makes perfect sense.
I don't mean to snark, but with this, and IBM's developer community site making the front page, is someone gaming the system here? Correct usage of HTML tags to embed java applets? Seriously? :-/
Create Python GUIs using HTML (And Webkit and GTK)
They could use overlapping corporate jurisdictions. If you don't like how things are being run, you pay someone else to enforce your contracts. You might have different service providers for, say, IP versus personal safety versus family law. And since they'd compete, it would allow people to coexist with wildly different legal regimes. You could have a drug-prohibiting regime (or even one that fines you for alcohol consumption) -- but your neighbors might not.
I like the thought of this, but you can't see who upvoted a particular article, so it'd be difficult to make any sort of recommendation.
Another alternative is tiny, Singapore/Dubai-type states, which accomplish the same thing, but by having very low costs of physically moving somewhere.
Smut on Rails
Who are you quoting? I'm not exceedingly well-versed on the subject, but I've read Kurzweil's books and I don't recall either of those ideas being assumed.
I have the un-updated-and-expanded edition, and it is excellent. So is Buddhism Plain and Simple
http://www.amazon.com/Buddhism-Plain-Simple-Steve-Hagen/dp/0...
The Six Hour Startup [YouTube]
Librarians Support Communities of Users (or, are librarians useful in social media?)
might be able to make some sort of greasemonkey script to make that happen.
Death, Doom, and Disaster - and why that's not the state of the economy
agreed, though i am bored of code design patterns.
Startup Fund-Raising Talk
Lightning talk I did recently on angel/vc funding at #svnewtech meetup.
RWW Writeup of Duck Duck Go
I'd recommend http://www.amazon.com/Zen-Mind-Beginners-Shambhala-Library/d... (begginer's mind there are many possibilities, on the expert's, few)
And this for creativity and zen: http://www.amazon.com/Zen-Creativity-Cultivating-Your-Artist...
Ok, great. Now. For Mozilla's own sake I really hope this lovely feature comes disabled by default.

PS. To get an idea of what it is have a look here - http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2009/04/google-locat...
If you are starting a project from scratch, and need GC, I would imagine it would be less of a pain (on a non-trivial bit of code) to abide by the restrictions than to have to find and plug memory leaks by hand all the time.
YC terms are a price.

A price is set by a market.

Asserting that "YC terms are poor" is like saying that YC's price is too expensive.

If the price were too expensive, YC wouldn't have enough applicants.

YC does, indeed, have applicants beating down the doors.

So I would argue that their terms are actually a bit rich.
Awesome! I remember when I was first learning how to program and I wanted to make a gui for a simple m3u playlist manager I had written, but tkinter was too much for me at the time. I explicitly remember thinking "I wish I could just use html and css instead of this crazy stuff" since I already knew how to make static web sites. (I got in to programming by making personal webpages, then started with javascript, and from there moved to python. I expect this is how most young people start programming now.)

This is awesome. I am going to have to try this out later tonight.
Actually around 300 people know, because that is about the number of founders we've funded. So if people (e.g. those applying for funding) want to know if YC is worth it, we usually suggest they contact some and ask them individually.

I could never talk about conversations I'd had with specific startups, because the more useful the advice was, the more precisely you'd be able to identify the startup.
Considering the fact that GUI used to be MS's core competency, this is a sad state of affairs. I surprised be just how un-intuitive this looks.
Few would sign up for a regime that prevented only their use of drugs. One would either sign up for a regime that didn't care about drugs, or one that punished others for using drugs, as a moral crusade.
if anything saves imperative programming it will be transactional memory, which is exremely hard. hardware TM and code written for TM are in a chicken-and-egg situation. the answer is hybrid hardware/software TM and the sun guys are way ahead on this too.

What's interesting is STM is only hard in imperative languages. It's relatively straightforward in Clojure and Haskell. See http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/posts/the-problem-with-stm-...
I don't know enough about numpy or the Java attempts, but have you seen
Incanter? (http://github.com/liebke/incanter/tree/6ef7e36c285e9c50c89fd...) rhickey has also expressed interest in integrating fast numerical processing into clojure.
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The direct democracy is something I've toying around with. The Republic arose because it was not feasible to have thousands of people vote on every decision a government needed to make, obviously. However as technology advances there is a very real possibility that we'll see more direct democracies arise as technology simplifies those voting procedures (assuming we ever reach a satisfactory security level on digital voting.)
A new type of database where the schema is open and flexibly restructures depending on the data you put in. The change allows anyone, from 8 to 80, to structure their data without knowing that's what they're doing.
It would make us sloppy about who we accepted. While $20,000 is much smaller than a series A round, it is still a lot of money. It makes us think hard about who we want to fund. Plus there are some groups that really do need the money. Half at least.
"Impersonated by admin."

Ah, good ol' Darth Vader complex.