Parsing JSON with a single regex - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.perl.org/users/brian_d_foy/2013/10/parsing-json-with-a-single-regex.html <comment><USER2> To whomever is thinking "but JSON is not regular!", note that that regex is not a regular expression (Perl has a very liberal definition of regexes).

Perl regexes can be recursive: the operator $^R means "match here the whole regex itself", making the matching algorithm a full recursive descent parser. I suspect that parsing speed wouldn't be too bad because JSON is LL(1), so the parser shouldn't backtrack.

I don't think that the author is suggesting to use this in any useful code, he's just showing a cool hack. It kind of resonates well with the Perl aesthetics of short, "clever" code with as little as possible dependencies (and a fascination for regexes).

<comment><USER3> The original Randal Schwartz post ([http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=995856](http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=995856)) says it was infact code for a customer app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Running code in the regex with (?{ ... code ... }) is cheating, because you can just put a whole Perl program in there. It's also one of the many badly implemented features of Perl that could be more useful if the implementation was any good. Using it will cause subtle bugs when you use regexps in the code called from there (even if you just call a sub/function), because the context (of regexp processing) isn't saved.

<comment><AUTHOR> >>Running code in the regex with (?{ ... code ... }) is cheating, because you can just put a whole Perl program in there.

Would you like to call eval, recursion, macros, closures and many such things cheating?

Sorry but doing things without understanding or knowing the true consequences of what you are actually writing, _always_ causes bugs. And that's true with any programming language.

Perl has many features which are designed to make the language powerful enough, to express solutions to very complex problems that other wise demands piles and piles of code in other languages. That's the whole point of the Perl language as a whole, you should take a really hard problem on a Friday night which you would find very difficult to code up in a weekend and then go to a finished script by Sunday evening.

<comment><USER4> > Would you like to call eval, recursion, macros, closures and many such > things cheating?

Yes, in the context of "I did this with just a regexp".

> _Sorry but doing things without understanding or knowing the true > consequences of what you are actually writing, always causes bugs. And that > 's true with any programming language._

That's a cheap excuse for implementing this in a way that is just plain wrong, or too limited to be useful, when it could have been implemented correctly (at least if enough capable programmers still understood Perl's source code to work on it).

> _Perl has many features which are designed to make the language powerful > enough_

I never disputed that. I used Perl almost exclusively in the past 14 years or so, so I know what I'm talking about. These broken language features are the biggest PITA about the language. They are useful for some very specific tasks, but useless for others where they could be used if they had been implemented correctly. Adding a feature with more gotchas than useful use cases is _not_ the way to making a language more useful and enjoyale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A great example of why you shouldn't, in fact, ever try doing this for JSON parsing within something important.

<comment><USER6> or this: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/827557/how-do-you- validat...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/827557/how-do-you-validate-a- url-with-a-regular-expression-in-python)

<comment><USER7> Or for that matter this: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex- match-open-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open- tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454)

(which is what I was expecting yeukhon's link to go to; it comes up in every discussion of abusing regular expressions to parse very non-regular languages, for good reason).

<comment><USER6> What did I just read lol. I don't want to spoil my own fun... those fonts...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is the original thread on which this talk is based upon : [http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=995856](http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=995856)

</comment><comment><USER8> Here's the video for this presentation: [http://perltv.org/v/parsing-json- with-a-regex](http://perltv.org/v/parsing-json-with-a-regex)

</comment><comment><USER9> save disabled by author @ [http://www.slideshare.net/brian_d_foy/json- regex](http://www.slideshare.net/brian_d_foy/json-regex)

</comment><comment><USER10> .. but... JSON isn't regular. And neither is HTML :(

<comment><USER11> Did you look at the regex? Perl regexes are also not regular; they're basically grammars.

<comment><USER6> I might be off on this one, but regular expressions are and can be defined by regular grammar. No?

<comment><USER12> If you use the strict term, yes. If you're looking at what Perl calls Regexp, then no. Perls regular expressions are a superset that can parse (at least some) context free languages.

<comment><USER6> What about Python's _re_? How do you determine whether an implementation of "regex" is context free or regular expression as we know it? It has been a long time since I have to deal with CFG and formal CS. Thanks.

<comment><USER12> I don't know about python, but a lot of languages support PCRE (perl compatible regexp) or at least a large subset of it. PCRE is sometimes less than what current Perl supports but in any case a superset of "traditional" regular expressions. For example there's support for recursive subpatterns [1] which clearly places it into context free territory[2]. Other regular expression engines support similar features, so I'd say that most real world implementations are not regular expressions in the formal sense.

[1] PHP manual for PCRE recursive patterns [http://www.php.net/manual/en/regexp.reference.recursive.php](http://www.php.net/manual/en/regexp.reference.recursive.php)

[2] Recursive subpatterns allow matching a language of the form (a * n)b(a * n) which is not regular.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually PCRE is a wrong term to describe Perl like regular expressions in other languages. Because, when you talk of PCRE you are ideally talking of compatibility with Perl regexps circa 1995.

Current day Perl regular expressions are far more powerful, and totally a very different beast.

<comment><USER12> PCRE is what the library is called and it claims to offer full support for what perl5 does, both syntax and feature-wise: [http://www.pcre.org/](http://www.pcre.org/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Somebody show this guy a parser combinator library.

</comment><comment><USER14> notice you can _match_ json with systems based on oniguruma/onigmo (ruby, sublime text, textmate, julia etc), and the syntax is quite readable.

Sadly, I couldn't find a way to access the nested matches, so it's quite pointless :)

</comment><comment><USER15> Right, now parse HTML :D

<comment><USER16> Oh that has already been done too, using perl :) [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4231382/regular- expressio...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4231382/regular-expression- pattern-not-matching-anywhere-in-string) (Check the answer from tchrist)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> ..because you can!!

</comment><comment><USER18> very ugly presentation....</comment>


Ask HN: How to proceed with a new idea in an emerging tech field? - <AUTHOR> Hello,
I've been working in Tech industry for 5-7 years now. In the past I've been associated with one of the major tech giants and filed for patents with them.
Now, I work in an infant-stage startup and I have a substantially disruptive idea for an emerging tech vertical. This vertical is completely different from my current work and also has nothing to do with my startup.
I would like to understand from smart folks here, that given, I am able to establish the value of the idea and understand potential use cases. How should I go ahead?
Possible courses of action: 1.) Get a patent and then license it to corporates 2.) Directly engage with corporates regarding the idea (do we have any NDA for idea sharing? what if they say we are already working on this?) 3.) your suggestions please...
Responses are really appreciated. <comment><USER2> Implement it yourself is another option.

<comment><AUTHOR> This would be almost impossible as the cost is pretty high to get into this vertical.</comment></comment>


Dogecoin Reaches ATH Trading Above $0.008768 per Coin - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@dogecoin/dogecoin-reaches-ath-trading-above-0-008768-per-coin-4e4bbe0711b8 <comment><USER2> Not doing so well in Satoshi terms. I'll never forget the 25->100+ pump of 2013. Wild times in IRC. I forget the name of that Chinese whale now though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, hard to measure it against satoshis when bitcoin went up.</comment></comment>


Ask YC: Mobile application developers- use GetJar? - <AUTHOR>

I'm trying to better understand the mobile application distribution ecosystem, which GetJar.com and other sites play in. It seems to me like GetJar is the leader of this space (any opinions about that?) and I'm hoping to find some more information about it.
Do any mobile application developers on the Java, Flash Lite, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Symbian, or Palm platforms have experience using this site to distribute and test beta versions of your application?
If so, what type of experience have you had with this site, and have you paid for premium spots or  used their Pay Per Download program? How valuable is the beta testing community, and is the feedback they offer any good?
Are there any other mobile app distribution sites you would recommend, that have either similar or superior download rates to GetJar?
Thanks a lot, I've been digging but haven't been able to find too much information about this topic. <comment><USER2> To be honest, the only mobile application distribution site which will likely matter in a year will be the iPhone AppStore. Its likely to go live this month. Google has mentioned they will come out with their own app distribution site for Android but it is unclear when this will be or how much impact it will have.

The iPhone is going global and with the carrier subsidies, it will be cheap. My suggestion is to focus your efforts there.

<comment><USER3> _To be honest, the only mobile application distribution site which will likely matter in a year will be the iPhone AppStore._

That doesn't seem likely to me. As popular as the iPhone is and will be, the millions of Blackberries and Palms and WindowsCE units out there aren't simply going to disappear, and in the aggregate will account for greater market share than the iPhone.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, as impressive as the iPhone's early showing has been, and despite the fact that it IS steadily gaining market share, the fact remains that it still holds only a small percentage of overall smartphone market share, in the US and even more so worldwide. The same is likely to hold true with Android- the fact that the mobile industry is so heavily controlled by the carriers who are resistant to change and proliferation of handsets is going to make it hard for any one platform or phone to completely dominate the market.

The fact remains that mobile developers need to concentrate their efforts on a variety of platforms, so my question is- once they build their apps, where do they go to get mass distribution? After doing some more reading, it seems like GetJar mostly occupies a niche as a mass beta-testing service-- what other places are useful for developers to get distribution and gain traction?

<comment><USER3> Maybe this is an opportunity for a startup :-)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Anyone know of a coding equivalent to crowdspring.com? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for some small coding gigs to supplement my (lack of) income. Does something like crowdspring.com actually exist for coding projects?<p>So far I've just perused the gig board at 37signals and the stuff on Joel, but thought that maybe someone here would have some pointers for finding small projects to fill a weekend with. <comment><USER2> There are several- <http://www.rentacoder.com/RentACoder/DotNet/Default.aspx>

<http://www.bizreef.com/Programming>

I'll try to remember the other ones later, good luck!</comment>


Coronavirus: Prime Minister Boris Johnson tests positive - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-52060791 <comment><USER2> "I'm shaking hands continuously. I was at a hospital the other night where I think there were actually a few coronavirus patients and I shook hands with everybody, you'll be pleased to know. I continue to shake hands."

Guess who said that a couple of weeks ago.

<comment><USER3> Guess that is what they call a super spreader.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Possibly completely unrelated: PM chief advisor Dominic Cummings seen running out of Downing Street in the last hour

[https://twitter.com/AllieHBNews/status/1243520576007872513](https://twitter.com/AllieHBNews/status/1243520576007872513)

</comment><comment><USER5> 'We are going to lose loved ones'

</comment><comment><USER6> He claimed to be going to see his mother on Mothers' day (5 days ago in the UK). He may well have killed his own mother out of sheer self-righteousness and ego.

<comment><USER7> Do you have reason to believe his mother is dead?

Do you have reason to believe that he didn't just mean "seeing his mother" literally?

I saw my mother on Mothers' Day. I stayed 200+ miles away from her while doing so. Facetime is a wonderful thing.

I'd be tempted to ascribe the self-righteousness moniker differently.</comment></comment>


Steve Wozniak: 'I do not believe in auto driving cars' – it's not possible yet - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/13/apple-co-founder-steve-wozniak-does-not-believe-in-auto-driving-cars.html <comment><USER2> I'm probably closer to agreeing with Woz than not, despite all the apparent progress self-driving cars have made. Remember the old saw about how "getting to 90% is easy, it's the second 90% that gets you"? I expect this is going to be the case for self-driving cars, in spades.

Building a self-driving car that can drive on limited access highways, or low- speed city streets, mostly in daylight, in good weather conditions, on mostly flat terrain is clearly doable. Making that car drive on snow and ice, in mountains, at night, in a blizzard? My hunch is that this is going to take a lot longer.

We'll almost certainly get there eventually, but at least w/r/t a fully autonomous self-driving car, I'm not expecting one anytime soon.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm with you guys, I do not think this is something to rush into. I really like Nuro's approach [1] , start with smaller things running around.

[1] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2018/06/28/grocery-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2018/06/28/grocery- kroger-nuro-with-tech-startup-nuro-for-robo-delivery-service)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> From what I've seen a shuttle type autopiloting function is possible. That's where companies need to focus as the first step. I can see where a city can replace all their bus drivers and subway operators. Or a service that picks up people given a fixed route at city street speed. Highway speed is not here yet. Wozniak is right, not yet. But given the speed of progress, it will be here within our lifetime.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have respect for Steve Wozniak's historical contributions to computing, but they need to be put into perspective. He was an adept tinkerer and hacker, an oldschool geek like many of us. He was never a great technologist and hasn't been actively involved in computing innovation in decades. While I'm personally interested in what he has to say on any number of subjects, his opinion on the state of self-driving cars carries no weight whatsoever. Any number of tech bloggers are more informed than he is on this subject.</comment>


Square wants to be a bank but not be taxed like one - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/square-wants-to-be-a-bank-but-doesnt-want-to-be-taxed-like-one-11568288012?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> See the earliest filing in CGC19579061 for Square's complaint ([https://webapps.sftc.org/ci/CaseInfo.dll?CaseNum=CGC19579061](https://webapps.sftc.org/ci/CaseInfo.dll?CaseNum=CGC19579061)).

The headline is a bit misleading because I don't think there are any banks in a similar situation to Square: a bank that receives most of their revenue from transaction processing fees and whose employees are almost all in San Francisco (San Francisco apparently apportions company revenue according to where the employees are).

Note: In California, local governments use relatively unfair gross receipts taxes instead of more efficient taxes because Proposition 13 (1978) forbids fair property taxes, and RTC 17041.5 (1963) forbids local income taxes ([https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=RTC&sectionNum=17041.5.)). So we tax gross receipts of large companies, with 7 different rate schedules based on different industries in order to sort of approximate income.

<comment><USER3> The CEO and Founder of Square lobbied in favor of those gross receipt taxes when it benefited his previous company (Twitter) but has changed his tune since then.

<comment><USER4> Shocking how people go after their own self interests.

<comment><USER5> Surely: shocking how some people go after their own self interest, without giving a damn about anyone else.

Tech bro and his pockets smashing up his society while the world burns.

<comment><USER6> Much of the "disruption" that came over the past decade can be attributed to someone wanting to be [something] while being treated like [something else], trying to write their own rules, fill their pockets, with little regard to what anyone else thinks or does.

The blanket excuse is always "We are a tech company". No, you are a company who brought _more_ tech to the field but still very much in the same field.

<comment><USER7> I for one am grateful for all that "disruption." The much needed improvement in the areas of transportation, accommodation, payment, etc. might never have happened if all these companies stuck by the old rules.

<comment><USER6> > might never have happened if all these companies stuck by the old rules.

Then change the rules. Breaking them and pretending you are better is not the way. This is the most common excuse when people break the law.

There are hundreds of examples where you'd feel less than grateful if someone "disrupted" the sector by breaking the law and I'm sure you can think of a few. Off the top of my head, law enforcement agencies are "disrupting" the justice system by bypassing due process and warrants, just to optimize and make things better of course. Just because it suits you once in a while doesn't make it acceptable.

<comment><USER7> You could have used this line of reasoning on civil disobedience in the 60s. Sometimes it just has to be done that way. I don't particularly care that uber or airbnb broke some laws I didn't strongly agree with in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Square SQ 1.65% Inc. has lent $5 billion to small businesses and consumers > and applied for a banking license.

"Applied for a banking license". That application was rejected. Square doesn't have a banking license. Square asked to become a bank and the government said, "No."

Square should either be a bank and be taxed like a bank, or it should be a not-bank and taxed like a not-bank. If I were to make $50,000 this year and the government puts me in the $500,000 tax bracket I'd be a little miffed too.

IMHO this is dishonest reporting.

</comment><comment> enahs-sf Prop C put a few companies into this quagmire. Stripe is another prime target for this gross receipts tax. As written, I wouldn't be surprised if these types of companies that handle consumer payments or transactions moved HQ to Oakland in a few years as they seek to avoid the taxes.

<comment><USER9> Is there anything specific in Prop C to financial services companies? I thought the only criteria was making over $50M in revenue, and GMV would not be relevant to the calculation.

<comment><USER10> Financial services companies often have low margins against their revenues, so the tax disproportionately hits them relative to earnings.

<comment><USER11> I would have thought the opposite. Margins tend to be high in financial services, revenue tends to be tiny. The value of payments / GTV is huge, but the taxable component is the fees themselves?

<comment><USER12> Yeah but Stripe doesn't get to keep most of those fees - it's mostly interchange which goes to Visa which is then distributed to the issuing bank of the credit card

<comment><USER11> Yeah but you don't book other peoples fees as your own revenue. VISA has a profit margin of 54%. Surely they are not counting the entire interchange cost (of which they receive a v. small percentage) as revenue.

<comment><USER13> AFAIK they count the entire processing fee as revenue. It sort of makes sense. If I were to make a service on top of Twilio and charge you 1% more than Twilio, then I have to count the whole amount you're paying me as revenue and the whole amount I'm paying Twilio as a cost.

That's just as logical as if I were to build a value-added service on top of AWS, or if I bought things on Alibaba and then sold them in America.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Curious if anyone else has put any thought in comparing companies like Square and Stripe to the early goals of American Express (AMEX)?

Opinion (don't read on if you are looking for hard facts):

The way I look at it, AMEX designed a closed loop payment system to easily ensure payments between customers and merchants.

Square and Stripe seem to be trying to accomplish the same goal, but in the 21st century.

Strictly calling Square a tech company, would be like calling 20th century AMEX a paper processing company--or maybe I am misinterpreting the founder's point.

<comment><USER15> Financial services (as opposed to actual investing) is a form of information technology, albeit one that is older than electronic IT. It is probably no coincidence that they really took with the arrival of paper and decimal notation.

But then as now, the actual IT rapidly becomes the boring part of the operation and the real business becomes, well the business. That of finding clients and tailoring your services to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Square absolutely has a point about being taxed on money that they pay out to vendors, but that unfortunately seems to be built into Prop C. The discussion about tech company building products in the X space being X companies or tech companies is a separate, more thorny one.

<comment><USER17> Yes, and note that the tax is .5% -- that's more of a pittance than a serious boundary.

<comment><USER18> On the Gross which is kind of the point

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Discussion of this article and the article itself are mixing issues: 1) differing taxes in SF between tech and banks. This is a difference of a few basis points in taxes. Square doesn't want to be taxed as a bank here. This will cost them a few tens of millions.

2) A new gross receipts tax which disproportionately impacts Square and Stripe [1]. It's more than a matter of "low margins" in this business, it's the very core of how revenue works[2] for Square/Stripe. Those companies take their 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction ([https://stripe.com/pricing](https://stripe.com/pricing)) and call that revenue. Most of that flows _immediately_ back to Visa/MC/Amex/Discover and the card issuing banks.

Treating all of that that as revenue for taxation purposes puts Stripe/Square in a very challenging position. A more "fair" approach would be to tax the portion of their fees that they kept before any other expenses.

As Yonran points out, this whole relatively unfair situation is one of many many unfair symptoms of CA tax law. As a young person who doesn't own property but earns a relatively high income in California, I am a provider of massive and permanent subsidies to people lucky enough to have bought property before Prop 13 was passed in 1978. The real issue here is Prop 13.

Libertarians love to argue that people vote to give themselves subsidies. Mostly I hate this argument, because of course people vote to give themselves services from governments they want. What I find abhorrent is that a group of Californians receive different treatment from the government based solely on when they bought their property. It's time to end prop 13. This article is just one tiny example of where bad policy has bad results.

[1]Disclosure: former Stripe employee[3] [2]This simplifies things quite a bit, but the distinctions underneath don't super matter. [3]You can tell by the use of footnotes in plaintext

<comment><USER20> How is this accounting different from, say grocery stores or gas stations? Doesn't most of their revenue flow immediately back to their suppliers?

0.5% of 2.9% is incredibly small; if Stripe/Square raised prices to 2.91% it would more than cover the tax (somebody check my math).

<comment><USER21> Yes, it's the same for grocery stores. Stripe and Square are trying to have their cake and eat it too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If your new startup wants to disrupt local markets by ignoring their laws and regulations, employee #2 needs to be a lawyer.

</comment><comment><USER23> Hasn't PayPal been doing this for decades?

</comment><comment><USER24> Me too

</comment><comment><USER25> This is the story of every startup ever "we'll walk like a duck, talk like a duck, but quietly avoid being regulated like a duck for as long as possible to disrupt all the other ducks".

<comment><USER26> I mean, government regulations are designed for large companies. By themselves, they act as a moat to protect monopolies and oligopolies. Of course smaller companies need to essentially break the law. Every time we see success only at the cost of breaking laws, we should really start to re- examine our laws instead of continuously blaming those who succeeded. In this case square not only succeeded but literally makes life better / possible for many many people.

If there were regulations in the way that would have prevented them from doing so, we should probably self-reflect a bit and have a sense of shame.

<comment><USER27> You make it sound like all regulation is bad. There's surely some unnecessary and bad individual regulations, but overall, I prefer a world where a startup can't have success dumping toxic chemicals into a river.

<comment><USER28> Regulation can be both beneficial and serve as a barrier to entry that protects the incumbents. In fact, that's probably the common case. It's worth recognizing that there are these two competing interests, that every regulation bears this hidden cost, and that the benefit had better be enough to justify that cost. I think often this is not true. Regulations could often be much less burdensome while still achieving most of the benefits.

<comment><USER29> I think most regs were driven by events or behaviors at the time of their creation.

To revert them I'd hope there'd be a compelling case as to why the catalyst that brought the regs into existence no longer applies or will not reappear in the future.

I'm not sure that it's an easy process.

<comment><USER28> Easy, no. Necessary, yes. Imagine a world where regulations only grow on the whole. How far out do you have to extrapolate that system for it to implode under its own weight? That can happen to nation states too...

<comment><USER30> > Imagine a world where regulations only grow on the whole.

This is the world in which we currently live.

<comment><USER26> Right and it leads to several negative externalities, such as high income inequality: [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2869155](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2869155)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The Uber of fintech and e-payments.

</comment><comment><USER32> Great

</comment><comment><USER33> Everything after Bank is redundant in the title.

</comment><comment><USER34> > San Francisco voters approved Proposition C last November. A month later, > Square announced plans to open a large new office across the Bay Bridge in > Oakland.

When you increase taxes, you drive away people that pay those taxes.

<comment><USER35> Why no Wyoming Silicon Valley?

<comment><USER36> There are tech companies in Wyoming but due to the relative lower population density it will be less. But people are fleeing sv so tech bastions are sprouting up throughout the country and have been for the last ten years.

Sv isn't the end all be all of tech.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I get that the vast majority of Square's employees are engineers, etc, but literally the entirety of its earnings come from financial services.

I don't think it is remotely reasonable to claim that your company is <business type A> when the bulk of its income comes from <business type B>.

That would be like companies like apple claiming to be retail companies, amazon being a warehouse company, etc. Hell many companies might be able to claim that they are janitorial businesses.

<comment><USER38> Amazon isn't a warehouse company, it's a retail company. Actually it's an IAAS company. Soon it may be an advertising company.

And that's exactly why this isn't as cut and dry as it seems. Fintech is definitely more tech than fin. They are just taking the big tech models, and applying them to finance. They are tech companies that _happen_ to sell financial products. Taxing that differently than a tech company that _happens_ to sell database products makes little sense.

<comment><USER37> [ed: I reread this and it came off meaner than I intended. Reworded a bit to reduce any sense of personal attack as that isn't my intent]

You're missing the point I was trying to make: square is arguing that they aren't a financial services company because the majority of their employees are engineers, not accounting or sales type folk.

The equivalent would be amazon to say the majority of their employees are warehouse workers so therefore they are a warehouse company.

That's the nonsense. What matters is how a company makes its money: Facebook and google are advertising companies, Apple is a consumer product company, amazon is a retail company, etc.</comment></comment></comment>


How Intel missed the smartphone market - <AUTHOR> https://mondaynote.com/intel-culture-just-ate-12-000-jobs-305674fb1274#.8xjcs7g8b <comment><USER2> Expect the same fate for many more tech companies.

Although not many people realize, tech is a _mature_ sector of the U.S. economy now - it grows at about 3% a year, pretty much in line with GDP. But the perception is different - just ask your friends - and the reason for this is that there are highly visible _pockets of growth_, like Uber/SpaceX/name- your-favorite-unicorn, and people often extrapolate their growth to the rest of the industry.

Now what happens with many tech companies is that they often have a product with exceptional margins and double-digit growth rate, and it makes sense to invest all the available resources into it - better from ROIC perspective - ignoring all the alternatives which either lack volume or high margin to look attractive. This inevitably leads to problems once your exceptional product stops growing, and you realize you have barely invested in anything else.

Just much like Intel with x86 and ARM chips, or Qualcomm, or EMC, or RIM, ... - the list goes on and on.

Even when you look at Google, most of their resources are invested into search/ad business, so when that's stops growing - or, rather, they got all the share from the TV and start growing at a GDP rate - they will be in the same boat.

Edit: typos.

<comment><USER3> That's not entirely true.

Intel has invested in plenty of things that haven't worked out, for instance, Itanic, Ultrabooks, Realsense, etc.

Also companies like Intel and Microsoft have bought into the Clayton Christensen theory of "disruption" to the point where they really are throwing their existing customers under the bus. That is, Windows 8 was perceived as a tablet operating system, Intel only sells high-end chips under the Xeon brand, etc.

Had Intel stuck more piggishly to making better PC's, we might have mainstream water-cooled desktops running at 5Ghz+ and more reasons for people to upgrade.

<comment><USER4> > Had Intel stuck more piggishly to making better PC's, we might have > mainstream water-cooled desktops running at 5Ghz+ and more reasons for > people to upgrade.

Can you think of what those reasons might be? I can't. My office computer is an i5-3570 and it sits idle most of the time because it's just not that hard to have Outlook and Firefox open. A/V work and AAA gaming drive upgrades now like they always have, what other reasons would there be for Intel to push beyond their current efforts like you suggest?

<comment><USER5> >> we might have mainstream water-cooled desktops running at 5Ghz+ and more reasons for people to upgrade.

> Can you think of what those reasons might be?

Some applications that I would want that might need to wait for high-cpu (some high-memory and/or high-disk) to become more mainstream, since I want them all to run locally until FTTH reaches my part of the boonies:

A scanner I can literally wave a piece of paper at, have it process all of the ultra-high speed video frame grabs into a high-dpi scan, then reconstitute the scan into an appropriate LibreOffice document or PDF, with better OCR and better vectorization of raster pictures. Then I auto-file all my invoices, bills, statements, receipts, _etc._

A personal digital assistant that transcribes, annotates, indexes and categorizes all of my conversations across all mediums (voice, text, chat, social, _etc._ ). This doesn't need to be ML-fancy at first (except for the voice recognition piece), just lots of memory+cpu+disk to drive intensive, continuous indexing.

A millimeter-accurate 3D positioning system, using differential GPS off of a geodetic mark on my property, with relays of signals to indoors. This would drive my robotic chicken tractor, curb edger, and vacuum cleaner. I could keep a detailed inventory of household items with this, then query the house computer over a voice link the next time I forgot where I set down $thing (some RFID and 3D positioning integration needed here). Outside, it keeps track of exactly where various pipes, outlets, irrigation heads, _etc._ are located.

A software-defined radio that scans for chatter on interesting bands like police and fire, performs voice recognition on them, and pings me when it hears keywords about my neighborhood, street, nearby streets, or region when combined with other keywords (like "tornado").

A house computer that can tell whether or not I'm in the house or not, if I'm asleep, getting ready to sleep, or still undergoing my morning routine, at my computer, at my tablet, on my phone, _etc._ And do this for all occupants and visitors. Lots of visual recognition from lots of camera input. For myself, I want this information to drive what information is presented to me, when, and in what context. Bloomberg Radio after I've been up for 10 minutes, and after I've put on my headset, before my first call (incoming or outgoing).

A process that continuously combs through my Emacs Org agenda, and compares against my current "state". If I'm driving away from the house, and confirm a query from the computer that I'm going out to buy groceries and run errands for the day (the query is launched by continuously-computed probability cones narrowing possible agenda matches against my GPS position until a threshhold is met), and no one else is in the house, then automatically put the house HVAC system into energy-conserving mode.

A dumb robotic mechanics driven by updateable software in my desktop computer to fold my laundry, turn over my compost bed, rotate stop valves monthly/quarterly (otherwise they freeze in place, the primary challenge the automatic flood sensors face today), change HVAC filters, open and file incoming snail mail, _etc._

Intensive AR to turn nearly all parts of my house into smart surfaces. "What's inside that drawer?" "What's behind that wall?" "What's inside that freezer?"

If we are talking only about pure desktop applications constrained to the physical desktop/laptop computer itself, then yes, you may have a point. However, when we include extending the reach of those systems to our environment, and there is an explosion of data to crunch, then today's typical consumer desktop computer (4-8 GB RAM, 2-3 GHz x86_64, 2-4 TB at the top end) doesn't have the capacity to manage all of those demands simultaneously.

<comment><USER6> I love this. This is all great. But with the exception of the scanner, all this _can_ be done across an internet connection, and so therefore all of this _will_ be done across an internet connection. For entrepreneurs building an ANI (or AGI), it makes little sense to let anyone else get their hands on the code, even in binary form, and then to have to support that code running on arbitrary PC configurations.

<comment><USER5> I hear you, and I hope to see these applications arrive in _both_ cloud and on-prem versions, perhaps from different origins/vendors. That signals the software ecosystem is strong, vigorous and robustly healthy enough to support many different solution angles. Let users choose what best fits their needs, and let the diversity seed further innovation in a virtuous spiral.

I sometimes muse if on-prem will get a second look as containerization, self- hosted AWS Lambda-like microservices, and similar advances become more mainstream on servers, and we'll see more hybrid solution ecosystems evolve. I strongly suspect we will look back in decades hence and lament that governments are Why We Can't Have Nice Things In The Cloud; while the US has been particularly egregiously public, we shouldn't be surprised at other nation state actor reveals in the future, either. If I'm on point about that, then we'll probably see hybrid cloud+on-prem (COP?) instead of an overwhelming dominance of one or the other for the near future at least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will.

Intentionally limiting Atom performance, selling of their ARM division, etc. was all done in order to not harm their main cash cow. By the time they woke up and really tried to push for x86 on Android it was too little too late.

Just from an engineering perspective it was always going to be a monumental task. Because guess what, that small dev shop with the hit-of-the-month mobile game is not going to bother cross-compiling or testing on the 1% of non-ARM devices. And if "Ridiculous Fishing" or whatever doesn't work flawlessly, your device is broken from the consumer perspective.

But what should really have Intel pissing their pants is the recent AMD x86 license deal with Chinese manufacturer's to pump out x86 server class chips. I'l love to hear if they're taking it seriously at all, or dismissing it as usual.

<comment><USER8> Paul Otellini came up on the x86 marketing side. He fully believed that Intel Architecture was the ultimate, therefore everything else was no better than 2nd place.

BK came up through the fabs, and therefore is more open to fabbing others' designs (Intel Custom Foundry) because it drives volume. However, he has overseen one hell of an awkward reduction in force (I'm ex-Intel, but still have many friends there). Small offices were told they were closing, and a few weeks later they were told where they should relocate to keep their jobs, and a few weeks later they might learn about the relocation package. It's almost as if they drew a line on a spreadsheet filled with numbers and now they're struggling to figure out how it affects the stuff they still want to keep. Odd.

<comment><USER9> I wish it was odd, if anything it sounds pretty normal when companies change top line strategy in a broad scale, and then have to spend the next year figuring out what the hell that even means, and how to do it.

<comment><USER10> I think this is more symptomatic of larger, more conglomerated organizations. I doubt this would apply to say, Apple or Google which have, respectively, 95% & 50%+ of their revenues coming from one product line.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looks like the article just got deleted? Here's a cache [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?strip=1&q=cache...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?strip=1&q=cache:https%3A%2F%2Fmondaynote.com%2Fintel- culture-just-ate-12-000-jobs-305674fb1274) (It's not available in the Internet Archive because of robots.txt, which makes me wonder how Google justifies caching it but whatever)

<comment><USER12> Deletion was accidental according to Jean-Louis Gassée (author) Twitter feed...

<comment><USER13> link for context: [https://twitter.com/gassee/status/732280308049936384](https://twitter.com/gassee/status/732280308049936384)

> @sebbrochet @fdevillamil Embarrassing mistake, don't know what to do other > than grovel and hope Medium can undo.

<comment><USER14> Happy followup: [https://twitter.com/gassee/status/732368830190620673](https://twitter.com/gassee/status/732368830190620673)

> Big Thanks to @Medium. My fat fingers killed 9 yrs of Monday Notes this am. > Awful feeling. They fixed it quickly. Much appreciated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Lets look at QCT which I think is the biggest if not the biggest ARM company out there.

[http://marketrealist.com/2016/04/qualcomms-chipset-margin- hi...](http://marketrealist.com/2016/04/qualcomms-chipset-margin-higher-end- guidance/)

QCT's operating margin fell from 16.9% in fiscal 1Q16 to 5% in fiscal 2Q16. The margin was on the higher end of the low- to mid-single-digit guidance as the ASP (average selling price) of 3G and 4G handsets equipped with Qualcomm chipsets rose by 6% YoY to $205–$211. The price rose due to a favorable product mix and higher content per device.

The Margins on cell phone chips are terrible. QCT made 2.5 bil on 17bil in revenue.

[http://investor.qualcomm.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1234452-...](http://investor.qualcomm.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1234452-15-271&CIK=804328)

Would it really make sense to invest in Cellphone business when every dollar you put in gets you less ROI compared to what you have now. From a finance perspective it would make more sense to return it to the shareholders and let them invest in QCOM if they want to.

<comment><USER16> The existing ARM fabrication market is very balkanized. Presumably if Intel had dived in with both feet, they would have been able to dominate it using their incredible aptitude for iterating process technology.

There is certainly that third path though, where Intel embraced fabrication, then regretted it.

<comment><USER17> I'm not sure if Intel's process lead is what it once was. For the last year or so Samsung have been shipping phones that use their own 14nm FinFET process, very similar on paper to Intel's best. It's entirely possible that Samsung will actually beat Intel to 10nm.

<comment><USER18> A point that's been made is that Samsung's 14nm process isn't really equivalent to Intel's- many gate feature on Samsung's 14nm process are much larger than 14nm.

Still, just the fact that anyone is in a race with Intel at all would have been unthinkable 10 years ago.

<comment><USER19> On the one hand it's true, but on the other hand, Intel opened it's fabs to others but nobody accepted, so intel's process might be more expensive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Take any company that once rode atop a huge market and then suffered through declines as that market changed and you could filter back through the history of their decision making and say the exact same thing Gassee is saying here about Intel. So I'm not sure what point he is trying to make when he says their "culture ate 12,000 jobs." Does he mean their culture of focusing on the market they were currently very successful in, and their culture of not seeing huge paradigm shifts happening just under the surface of it? I suspect he just had a dull axe, and decided the time was finally ripe to sharpen it.

<comment><USER21> I'm not sure they even made the wrong decision, take a look at Kodak who were pioneers in early digital photography. You could argue that it was a distraction for them and they should have concentrated on milking film as long as possible.

<comment><USER22> No. Any shareholder would have wanted (in retrospect) Kodak to lead any technology that had the potential of killing their primary business.

<comment> mark-r Kodak is the perfect example. They managed to collect for every single _picture_ you took, between the film, processing, and printing. There's no revenue stream in digital that had the potential to replace it, so they were doomed from the start. They certainly did see it coming.

<comment><USER22> With that kind of money, they could've been investing in consumer storage (e.g., NAS and even flash for phones) and point & shoot digital camera components. With perfect hindsight, of course.

<comment><USER23> >they could've been investing in consumer storage

Which has also been a razor-thin margin commodity business. Fujifilm does provide some insights into how Kodak could have moved forward but they struggled too and were a smaller company.

The high-end camera makers have done OK in digital photography (although there's been churn in that space as well) but Kodak had long ceded that market to the Japanese by the time digital photography was much more than a glimmer.

The print consumables market was also pretty good for a while but that ended up being relatively ephemeral.

Even with the advantage of 20-20 hindsight, Kodak was in a tough position to directly leverage either their existing tech or their channels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I found this quote to be one of particular interest.

"I couldn't see it. It wasn't one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought."

…and, perhaps more importantly:

"The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut. My gut told me to say yes."

I personally love data,facts,hard science, but I find too often many can ignore gut feelings. I almost always follow my gut instinct, It has proven itself to me over and over again even while taking what is often perceived as long shots but somehow my gut tells me "you got this".

In particular I would say gather your own data on how often or not your gut instinct is correct and use that as a data point in addition to the hard science, facts etc.

Instinct evolved to keep you alive, it is often wise to not ignore it.

<comment><USER25> Thinking that your gut makes more optimal decisions than a random process might just be feeding one's ego.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias)

<comment><USER26> And regardless, while instincts _are_ useful, I would rather analyze them and extract the underlying reasons for my instinctual reactions, rather than blindly acting on them at the emotional level. And at that point, I'm back to acting on data (though potentially drawing it from more sources, now).

In any case, to believe that your [survival] instincts are equally applicable to making sound business decisions is a bit silly, as that's pretty far removed from what they've been optimized to do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Many are focussing on the 12,000 number. Many forget Intel has acquired a whole bunch of companies over the past few years including McAfee, Altera etc. Now mix in a change in strategy, you find yourself with a bunch of people you no longer need. Redundancy of services like HR, IT, test, design, management etc along with another class of engineers whose skill set you no longer need in your new direction.

Organizations continue to evolve and change direction. I am not saying leadership has not failed spectacularly in mobile, but some of the 12,000 jobs are a natural progression of acquisitions.

<comment><USER28> >Many forget Intel has acquired a whole bunch of companies over the past few years including McAfee,

They should just fire everyone from that acquisition and close down the whole division. It's nothing more than a huge stain on the rest of the company. It's really sad that the world's largest chipmaker reduced itself to being a malware purveyor.

<comment><USER29> Don't know, but I'd assume Intel's McAfee idea was more for the enterprise market vs selling junk to consumers. At the enterprise level it's somewhat more defensible, plus it opens up paths to desktop management capabilities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Intel's problems are long time coming. They lost track of real customer needs and have been operating in their own x86 centric world. It was always "let me build it first and then try to look for a good usage". I am ex-Intel and used to do software things. None of the leadership had a real sense of what customers really wanted and the h/w architects just built things that they are really good at. And they justified it in unnatural ways ("You know why you need such a fast processor ? You can run this flash game at 10K fps").

Things have been getting very efficient both on the client and the server side. With Cloud, they will have some momentum behind - but long term, I think the glory days are gone where they can just produce chips and someone would take it.

</comment><comment><USER31> This goes back farther than 2005!

At one point at the height of the bubble, Intel was involved in mobile devices.

I worked for a company that developed secure, efficient wireless communication middleware for that space. Our client hardware was mainly Pocket PC and Windows CE at that time.

We partnered with Intel to port our stack to the Linux device they were developing (codenamed "PAWS"). This was around 2000-2001, if I recall.

Thing were going very well, when practically overnight, Intel decided to pull out of this market entirely. They shut down the project and that was that.

It didn't bode very well for that little company; we gambled on this Intel partnership and put a lot of resource into that project in hopes that there would be revenue, of course. Oops!

</comment><comment><USER32> The post was deleted.

Here is the google cache link for quick access : [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://mondaynote.com/intel- culture-just-ate-12-000-jobs-305674fb1274)

And here is the raw text(without any links) : [http://pastebin.com/e10Yw0zi](http://pastebin.com/e10Yw0zi)

</comment><comment><USER33> I hate this piece. I hate that in 2016, people still believe in Magical ARM ISA Performance Elves. I hate that this is like my sixth or seventh post-Ars comment on HN in as many years debunking the ARM Performance Elves theory.

Back when the PPro was launched there was a low double-digits percentage of the die taken up with the x86 translation hardware (for turning x86 instructions into internal, RISC-like micro-ops). Now that number is some small fraction of a percent. It kills me that I still read this nonsense.

The reason that Intel didn't get into cell phone chips is because margins were (and are) crap, and Intel is addicted to margins. The reason everyone else went ARM is because a) licenses are dirt cheap, and b) everyone knows that Intel is addicted to margins, and they know about all of Intel's dirty tricks and the way Intel leveraged Windows to keep its margins up in the PC space and screw other component vendors, so everyone has seen what happens when you tie yourself to x86 and was like "no thanks".

Of course Intel didn't want to make ARM chips for Apple (or anyone else), because even if they had correctly forecast the volume they'd have no control over the margins because ARM gives them no leverage the way x86 does. If Intel decides it wants to make more money per chip and it starts trying to squeeze Apple, Apple can just bail and go to another ARM vendor. But if Apple went x86 in the iPhone, then Intel could start ratcheting up the unit cost per CPU and all of the other ICs in that phone would have to get cheaper (i.e. shrink their margins) for Apple to keep its own overall unit cost the same (either that or give up its own margin to Intel). Again, this is what Intel did with the PC and how they screwed Nvidia, ATI, etc. -- they just ask for a bigger share of the overall PC unit cost by jacking up their CPU price, and they get it because while you can always pit GPU vendors against each other to see who will take less money, you're stuck with Intel.

(What about AMD? Hahaha... Intel would actually share some of that money back with you via a little kickback scheme called the "Intel Inside" program. So Intel gives up a little margin back to the PC vendor, but they still get to starve their competitors anyway while keeping AMD locked out. So the game was, "jack up the cost of the CPU, all the other PC components take a hit, and then share some of the loot back with the PC vendor in exchange for exclusivity.")

Anyway, the mobile guys had seen this whole movie before, and weren't eager to see the sequel play out in the phone space. So, ARM it was.

The only mystery to me was why Intel never just sucked it up and made a low- margin x86 chip to compete directly with ARM. I assure you there was no technical or ISA-related reason that this didn't happen, because as I said above that is flat-earth nonsense. More likely Intel didn't just didn't want to get into a low-margin business at all (Wall St. would clobber them, and low-margin x86 would cannibalize high-margin x86), and by the time it was clear that they had missed the smartphone boat ARM was so entrenched that there was no clear route to enough volume to make it worthwhile, again, especially given that any phone maker that Intel approaches with a x86 phone chip is going to run the other way because they don't want x86 lock-in.

<comment><USER34> > The only mystery to me was why Intel never just sucked it up and made a low- > margin x86 chip to compete directly with ARM.

Culture. Some companies are willing to sacrifice today's revenue for tomorrow's growth. Intel isn't.

A low-end, low-power, low-margin x86 system would cut a _huge_ swath thru Intel's margins. The trend of "upgrade to newer! better! faster!" CPUs would be hard-hit.

Even Apple is seeing that now with slowing iPhone sales. The phones are powerful enough that upgrading doesn't get a lot of benefit. So people aren't.

<comment><USER35> > A low-end, low-power, low-margin x86 system

AMD A-Series?

<comment><USER10> Intel was complicit for a decade or longer for essentially undercutting AMD by bribing the manufacturers like Dell. There were quarters where Intel's "marketing budget" were all that kept Dell and other manufacturers in the black. [1]

AMD has no impact on the overall market because it's not a serious option for the big box manufacturers.

[1] [http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/07/dells-...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/07/dells- shame-intel-payola-propped-up-companys-earnings-sec-says/60447/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The main issue here is: Intel doesn't want to work on stuff with lower margin(even though it can make money and it's strategically valuable). That's common to many businesses.

Isn't there any financial engineering trick to enable companies to solve this dillema that often leads to their death?

<comment><USER36> Every innovation eventually becomes commoditized. So if you want to remain high-margin you have to continually innovate.

(But to be fair to Intel they did, and do - they keep producing better and better CPUs. It's just that demand for that whole category has shifted)

<comment><USER37> Exactly. Intel invests ginormous amounts into R&D. If they had adopted ARM earlier, they could have captured the mobile market and .... then who knows what? Innovation is unpredictable, especially in tech.

They started our making DRAM's then moved to making microprocessors...I wonder why they didn't realize they couldn't rely on the same business model forever.

<comment><USER28> They _did_ adopt ARM. Did you forget about StrongARM? (I believe they acquired it from their DEC acquisition.) They ran with that for a while, made an updated version called "XScale", made a bunch of mobile processors with it, and then sold it all off to Marvell when they decided to refocus and shed a lot of other things that weren't core to the business.

<comment><USER38> History is not the strong suit of this site's readers. Yes, Intel was selling ARM CPUs into the mobile market (Compaq IPAQ, Sharp Zaurus, etc) when Apple was still making pink iMacs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Intel also bet big on Wimax. Which (mostly) ended up going nowhere. That was another multi-billion dollar mistake. And one which cost thousands of jobs at Intel.

</comment><comment><USER39> FWIW, AMD also struck out HARD in the mobile market. When I interviewed there (just before release of iPhone 3G), I was jazzed about the "imminent" opportunity for mobile CPUs. I expected AMD to scale right down and into the phone, tablet and CPU market. We watched the world tumble around us as if on a ferry boat.

When I voiced the words, "mobile CPU" to anyone there, people were oblivious and silent. The company was just out of touch, thinking everyone was going to keep buying tower PCs and laptops. It seemed the only variable they thought customers cared about was performance. People would buy AMD if it was just a little faster. They didn't realize it was simply the wrong product/market. Performance wasn't nearly as important, sigh.

<comment><USER40> one manufacturer that did anticipate the 'death of desktop' was nVidia, as powering the "iPad killer", Pixel C.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> It is sad. Because in comparison with sickening ARM scene, Intel actually put effort into making open GPU drivers.

</comment><comment><USER42> I was shocked the other day the Intel discontinued Intel Atom. So if one needs a cheap SoC board, there are now only ARM like Raspberry Pi, and no cheap ($50) x84/x64 compatible boards with Windows drivers. The Intel Atom 230 (1.6GHz dual core with HT) of 2008 was cheap ($50) and fast (Pentium M based). And on the high-end side there is still no 5GHz and there is little single- core improvement since 2004, since the Pentium 4 3GHz. We need more competition with x84/x64 to get lower prices and faster cores.

<comment><USER38> What do you mean discontinued? What about the Atom that was just introduced earlier in 2016? e.g. [http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138429&cm_re=j3060-_-13-138-429-_-Product) ?

<comment><USER42> It's not an Intel Atom, but a low spec low power Celeron. The J3060 has no hyperthreading and without the boost it's as slow as the Atom 330 (which has HT). So after 8 years, there is no Atom brand anymore, and the next best option is as slow as back then and costs about the same.

[http://www.cpu- world.com/Compare/979/Intel_Atom_330_vs_Intel...](http://www.cpu- world.com/Compare/979/Intel_Atom_330_vs_Intel_Celeron_J3060.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'm not sure the "Just You Wait" is without merit, just taken longer than thought... I'm not sure why... given the transitions that have happened through process advancements the past 6 years or so, we now have CPUs that burst to higher speeds very transparently, and at really low power compared to a decade ago. While not suitable for phones, Intel is a pretty great choice for laptops and tablets (OS concerns aside).

I do think that ChromeOS (or whatever it's called) offers a distinct difference to most users from what Windows is. That changes things up a lot.

I feel that within 4 years, Intel will have some competative x86 offerings compared to ARM... On the flip side, by then, ARM will be competitive in the server/desktop space much more than today. It's kind of weird, but it will be another round of competition between different vendors all around. I'm not sure what other competitors will come around again.

That's not even mentioning AMD's work at their hybrid CPUs... also, some more competition in the GPU space would be nice.

It really reminds me of the mid-late 90's when you had half a dozen choices for server/workstation architectures to target. These days, thanks to Linux's dominance on the server, and flexibility and even MS's Windows refactoring, it's easy to target different platforms in higher-level languages.

There will be some very interesting times in the next few years.

</comment><comment><USER44> I do wonder what would have happened if Intel had concentrated on being a custom chip maker. With a continuing of advancement in a low-powered x86 core and custom options, it would have been interesting. I guess when both game machine manufactures skip Intel to get AMD you really have to wonder where they thought things were going. A company so against customization that it closed its bus from third-parties probably isn't going to do well in a custom world.

</comment><comment><USER45> The mobile space was aready hotting up. Nokia, alone in 2005 was already selling over 250M devices at around 35-40% market share. They were already using ARM chips. Forecast for smartphones was already high, since the whole mobile industry was posiioning itself to upgrade. It was always a question of getting the telcos to improve their 2G networks to 3G before the smartphone explosion was expected. Intel should have known this.

</comment><comment><USER46> Article error: "In 1985, fresh from moving the Macintosh to the x86 processor family, Steve Jobs asked Intel to fabricate the processor that would inspirit the future iPhone. The catch: This wouldn't be an Intel design, but a smaller, less expensive variant of the emerging ARM architecture, with the moderate power appetite required for a phone."

That should be 2005.

</comment><comment><USER47> Intel didn't _miss_ the smartphone market. It simply made no sense (and still makes no sense) to go after a less profitable market.

When the margins on x86 cross below that of ARM chips, Intel will come in and destroy all the ARM manufacturers.

<comment><USER48> It did. Even Otellini said so:

[http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/paul-o...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/paul- otellinis-intel-can-the-company-that-built-the-future-survive-it/275825/)

And I'm not so sure they'll be able to go into ARM fabbing that easily. Margins of X86 are high, but they are selling less of them, so expanding to new market would have been a wise move.

To their credit, they tried twice and couldn't make it work. Not sure if things could have been different considering ARM is a licensable architecture other people can use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> They made several attempts ([http://www.cnet.com/news/intel-sells-off- communications-chip...](http://www.cnet.com/news/intel-sells-off- communications-chip-unit/)) but I think Intel has a huge cultural problem that does not allow for true innovation outside of core competencies. I worked for the Marvell group and while Intel did not know how to be nimble Marvell had there own issues which is in part (IMHO) why blackberry lost its leadership position. But the biggest problem with Intel is the culture as you are truly just a cog in the wheel there. Just my $.02

</comment><comment><USER50> I'd love help understanding how Intel's failure in the smartphone market didn't also doom the IoT market. The x86 chips never took off because they were expensive and took too much energy. If IoT is to be ubiquitous, those barriers seem even more important.

Intel's comment about IoT makes me wonder: do they think they just lost the first mover advantage for mobile & the industry got hooked on ARM ISAs? Do they still believe the story that their chips will become cheaper and more powerful than ARM if they change nothing?

<comment><USER17> I reckon it already has doomed Intel in the IoT market, investors just haven't realized it yet. Their answer to the IoT involved buggy shrunk-down 486s with poor performance and power consumption and very limited onboard peripherals compared to their ARM competitors. (I can't even find power consumption or instruction set information for the newest ones, which is worrying.) They've put a lot of money into high-profile publicity stunts like an Intel-funded TV series ("America's Greatest Makers"), BMX bikers, Arduino boards, etc but apparently if anyone wants to integrate their chips into the kind of IoT product they're being promoted for, they can't actually get them unless they're a big-name brand. They mostly seem to be relying on the press regurgitating their PR and not looking into the details.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Article gone?

Well, I'd guess fundamentally it was about tying yourself to the Microsoft sociopath mothership.

Intel could have taken Linux by the reigns and made an OSX-equivalent and certainly windows-beating decades ago.

But they didn't.

So they missed the boat.

<comment><USER52> > Intel could have taken Linux by the reigns and made an OSX-equivalent and > certainly windows-beating decades ago.

I disagree. Hardware companies have a long history of trying and failing to make good software. It's not in their core business, so the company culture and talent pool isn't right. The same is true the other way around, just look at how rough Microsoft's entry into the console market was.

On top of that, the "last mile" of usability between the current state of Linux and something that can realistically compete with Windows requires experienced UX designers and an infusion of design knowledge into the software engineering team. This isn't realistic for most companies.

Just to be clear, not saying it would have been impossible, but I would bet against it.

<comment><USER51> I'd be really interested to know what the team size of the original OSX people was. Granted they were probably all NextSTEPpers that really knew the OSX core inside and out to begin with. But still, Apple at the time had 1/100 the resources of Microsoft and Intel. Intel could have bought BeOS after Apple passed.

Think about that: BeOS with real backing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Intel has some amazing research. I was at an internal fair back in 1999 when I was doing an internship there in the Product Dev group that did the Itanium chipset.

They has this handheld touch screen device that resembled a modern smart phone that was driven by voice recognition. This was 1999 way before the iphone came around.

In my opinion, it is the internal politics and the leadership that has caused them to lose out.

Chip design books in academia were already moving in the direction of low power designs during the late 90s. They just did not take any action.

<comment><USER54> Just saying, working touch screens have been around on devices for 30 years or more. Most 'PDA's, including < $100 phonebooks had decent resistive touch screens as far back as the mid-90s. Also, as such, speech recognition too has been around for at least 25 years. What's new in today's smartphones is the cloud+deep learning driven high-accuracy. You could probably have easily found a handheld with touchscreen and speech recognition at Circuit City in 1999.

<comment><USER55> Working touch screens are useless without usable touch UIs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I guess the point of the article is that this is a failure of some sort but it never really makes a strong enough case. The closest it comes is trying to make some sort of assertion that the executives at Intel should have been able to predict the future. If I were inclined to hate the company for some reason, I would find this emotionally satisfying, but I'm not, so I just find it to be a recap of things everyone already knew, expressed with an unjustified tone of smug finger-wagging

</comment><comment><USER57> I wonder if Intel saying "no" to Apple re: ARM will go down as the same scale decision as Digital Research saying "no" to IBM for an operating system.

</comment><comment><USER58> Time to get out my Maemo (RIP Nokia) and Meego (too bad, Intel) merchandise and go cry in a corner.

      Maemo/Meego
      WebOS
      Firefox OS

All of these were interesting, all failed. I'm still convinced that there's a market for a non Android/iOS solution.

</comment><comment><USER59> Article is back up. He accidentally deleted his 9 years' worth of posts. [https://twitter.com/gassee/status/732368830190620673](https://twitter.com/gassee/status/732368830190620673)

</comment><comment><USER60> _"The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut. My gut told me to say yes."_

Killer, for us fans of rational strategy.

</comment><comment><USER61> This case is a real problem for the "data-driven thinking" set. Or rather, the problem with that idea is you have no way to tell which data you should be looking at. Just because you have numbers doesn't make them the right ones.

</comment><comment><USER62> A friend of mine at Intel told me that Intel doesn't care that much about not owning this market because the size of the profit pool around server chips is orders of magnitude greater and they have monopolistic control of that market.

<comment><USER63> That is the same thing that the mainframe vendors said about minicomputers and the same thing that the minicomputer vendors said about microprocessing. Intel's failure to recognize itself as the next link in the cycle was a colossal mistake. They should have gone to Steve Jobs and offered to rectify their mistake the moment they realized how popular the iPhone was. Instead, they tried the Itanium strategy of promising things they could not deliver. What made them think that would work after the first failure?

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> they just forgot that only the paranoid survive.

</comment><comment><USER65> OT but somehow related:

The article contains the sentence "Jobs asked Intel to fabricate the processor" and "Intel styled itself as a designer of microprocessors, not mere fabricator".

Question: according to your own experience, is it common in English to use "fabricate" and "fabricator" as synonyms of "manufacture" and "maker"?

I am much more familiar with the negative meaning (e.g. "fabricated lies") but since I'm not a native speaker my vocabulary might be limited.

<comment><USER66> Specifically in the case of chips, "fabricate" seems to be fairly common.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Why was the title editorialized by mods?

</comment><comment><USER68> Unable to read the story. Seems delete from medium.

</comment><comment><USER69> > The author deleted this Medium story

</comment><comment><USER70> The author deleted this Medium story.

</comment><comment><USER71> ...what?

Intel didn't miss anything, they sell the hardware that powers the infrastructure behind these new, always-connected devices.

<comment><USER72> They were in that even before smartphones were the norm. Considering that they had to compete a lot more in the server space (SPARC comes to mind) and then won that market doesn't mean they won the smartphone market.

AFAIK, Paul Otellini also made the same argument about servers however, the point is really about processors that run inside consumer products and not server infrastructure. Intel Inside just isn't the case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> He just deleted the post :/

<comment><USER74> Why would he do that?

<comment><USER75> ALL of his posts are gone from MondayNote now strangely.

<comment><USER76> And his entire Medium account is gone, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> Hey, it's the BeOS guy!

</comment><comment><USER78> ... and also the GPU market.

</comment><comment><USER79> The analogy is [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_ceiling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_ceiling)</comment>


Ask HN: Are there laptops with batteries that last a week? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> [I am not an electrical engineer]

As a practical matter, laptop batteries are limited by FAA regulations: no more than 12v and no more than 100 watt-hours. [1] A laptop that runs off of battery power for a week probably must be engineered backward from the 100 watt-hour limitation. A week has 168 hours so a processor running continuously at one watt uses the entire battery budget in about four days without powering a screen or a network chip. [2]

Good luck.

[1]: [https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/as...](https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/ash/ash_programs/hazmat/passenger_info/media/Airline_passengers_and_batteries.pdf)

[2]: None of which means the idea isn't a viable Kickstarter.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have this thing and it is a beast. Doesn't exactly answer your question, but might help you anyway.

Might run your laptop for a week: [https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06W9FWFXD/ref=oh_aui_sear...](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06W9FWFXD/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1)

</comment><comment><USER4> In continuous use? Or just sleeping?

<comment><AUTHOR> I was thinking of typical daily use

<comment><USER4> Some laptops take two battery packs, you can change one while it runs on the other. You can then have as many spares as you need.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What is the purpose of something like this? Camping?</comment>


(Unconfirmed) Twitter hacked, accounts leaked. - <AUTHOR> http://www.techworm.in/2013/08/twitter-hacked-thousand-of-account.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Apologies for the shortened title. I don't very much like either this or the original title ("Twitter Hacked, Thousand of account leaked, millions compromised by Mauritania Attacker"), but there's that no-editorialised-titles rule.

I don't know if this leak is legitimate. Has this been covered by other sources, or has anyone downloaded the dump to see?

<comment><USER2> Reported here: [http://www.firstpost.com/tech/mauritania-hacker-claims-to- ha...](http://www.firstpost.com/tech/mauritania-hacker-claims-to-have- compromised-millions-of-twitter-accounts-1046529.html)

Examples include suspended accounts, [https://twitter.com/gotosleepbitch1](https://twitter.com/gotosleepbitch1) and [https://twitter.com/Bayansogukkahve](https://twitter.com/Bayansogukkahve)</comment></comment>


Baby's First Garbage Collector (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2013/12/08/babys-first-garbage-collector/ <comment><USER2> This is awesome. I'm working my way through The Garbage Collection Handbook and it's always nice to see a GC link on HN.

"What does "low on memory" even mean, especially on modern computers with near-infinite virtual memory?" is a question that I've been wondering about for a while.

<comment><USER3> If you mean the jones/lins book, it's excellent[0]. Fully recommended to all.

[0] [https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0471941484](https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0471941484) I think there's a 2nd edition but I can't find it.

<comment><USER4> > 2nd edition but I can't find it

Perhaps you're referring to this one [1]?

[1] [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Garbage-Collection-Handbook- Managem...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Garbage-Collection-Handbook-Management- Algorithms/dp/1420082795/)

<comment><USER3> Thanks, I think I was confusing that with the 2nd ed, which doesn't seem to exist (in fact there is a 1999 2nd _printing_ of the 1996 book with a different cover but with the same ISBN, just to make things worse, [https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/rej/gc.html](https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/rej/gc.html), so if you want to buy the later one which incorporate the errata from the first printing, check his website first. Publishers do make a mess of things sometimes).

Jones' website [https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/rej/gc.html](https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/rej/gc.html) is excellent too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From the same guy: [https://craftinginterpreters.com](https://craftinginterpreters.com) great stuff

</comment><comment><USER6> Reach-ability in graphs is quite an interesting topic in applied sciences.

For example, recently I had to figure out (nontrivial) investment proportions in funds and realised two things:

1\. You can use a weighted DAG [1] and sum the products of paths from each leaf to the root to get to the investment proportions; the total of all such paths from leaves to the root should be 100% of the underlying investing entities.

2\. Tax offices should use weighted DAGs to figure out cases where there is suspected fraud. Whenever you sum and don't get to 100%, then you know that people are doing fishy things with their investment vehicles and shell companies. [2]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daw](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daw)

[2] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CumEx- Files](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CumEx-Files)

<comment><USER6> Sloppy, really.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_acyclic_graph](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_acyclic_graph)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Discussion from 2013: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6871202](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6871202)

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm no great programmer, so my stupid question of the day is: why do people depend on GC so much? Garbage collection is one of those weird things that everyone seems to accept must be necessary in higher level languages, and end up being quite a burden in operation. The more people depend on dynamic memory, the more likely GC problems are. Meanwhile, the simplest fix in the world - restart the process frequently - prevents memory leaks from accumulating, and requires no complicated tuning.

<comment><USER9> > Meanwhile, the simplest fix in the world - restart the process frequently - > prevents memory leaks from accumulating, and requires no complicated tuning.

This is just a degenerate case of garbage collection, really.

<comment><USER3> A novel and valid perspective.

I have simply relied on leaking wildly before, knowing it's a small program that will end soon. It's an acceptable solution in some cases.

<comment><USER10> The JVM now has the epsilon GC, which does basically that, it just never GC's. It's unfortunate though that there's no explicit way to tell java to free up a certain reference, if so, in combination with epsilon, you could write real time programs. Maybe you already can do something like that in the embedded java version though? Not sure.

<comment><USER3> Interesting. First I've heard of it. Well I guess if you can ensure bounded space by limited allocaton, then simply shove manually 'freed' stuff back on a free list, you could do that, sure.

But a quick google gets [https://openjdk.java.net/jeps/318](https://openjdk.java.net/jeps/318) which does say

      Non-Goals
      It is not a goal to introduce manual memory
      management features to Java language and/or JVM...

but it doesn't say you can't or shouldn't. Game on then.

<comment><USER10> Sure, if all your objects are mutable, then that can work, but a lot of stuff in core libraries are not, and you can't control those allocations, short of not using them. There is also sun.misc.Unsafe, which has freeMemory, but first of all, I don't know if that works for arbitrary addresses, or just ones previously allocated from the allocateMemory method, and anyways, I don't think there's a reliable way to get the address of an arbitrary object in the first place. But to add both of those pieces of functionality should be a pretty small patch to the jvm code anyways, so if someone were really motivated, it may not be all that much work anyways.

<comment><USER3> > and you can't control those allocations

You're totally right. Rather stupidly I hadn't thought of that.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


No more pi day, create ml day - <AUTHOR> 3/14 is py day. If math is to be dedicated a day, I think it should be a day to show or think about concepts that can shape our future. Pi is a beautiful number but nothing more, Euler number is a better option in my opinion, but I think we should replace pi day with something more interesting, a day in which you can show some wonderful things about maths and science, a day to celebrate. <comment><USER2> Like π-day, this can obviously only be used in countries that use month/day notation for dates:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country)</comment>


Developers give games for free, ask for a donation to Juegaterapia.org - <AUTHOR> http://topigames.com/navidad/index_en.php

<comment><USER2> Probably won't end up checking out all of these games, but the charity sounds great so I've made a small donation. Really hope you reach your goal and raise awareness.

<comment><USER3> Same. Luckily had just about that amount as a Paypal leftover. Downloading Iron Jack now, seems cool!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What a great idea !!! Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER5> Great initiative from Miquel Camps.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> thanks to anyone! the games are available for free during all the week :)

</comment><comment><USER6> Good initiative

</comment><comment><USER7> please, help us to expand this news! It's for a good reason..</comment>


Lambdas & Closures in PHP 5.3 alpha1  - <AUTHOR> http://www.php.net/archive/2008.php#id2008-08-01-1

<comment><USER2> It's hard to reply with out profanity but I just hope this gets pushed out onto dreamhost soonish.

<comment><USER3> An alpha of PHP doesn't belong anywhere near something like Dreamhost. Install it locally, hack around and report the bugs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Now all I need is a proper How-To on how to recompile this on my personal dev machine.

</comment><comment><USER5> I can't wait to find out the problems this creates -- more fodder for "Why PHP sucks" lists, I'm sure. Maybe they'll fix the documentation for the create_function function and remove the implication that it creates lambdas.

<comment><USER5> Oh, did I get downvoted because the create_function function actually does create lambdas?

<comment><USER6> Well, create_function() does create a new, randomly-named function in the global scope, meaning that it will not fall out scope at any point, so that you can use it as a real lambda. And because of the way that create_function() uses a string to build the function contents, by generating a new function everytime you call it, in effect you get "real" closures too. It could most certainly be improved to be more "natural" and complete, but that's probably going to break backward-compati.... oh wait, this is PHP.

<comment><USER5> Except that without scope inheritance, the "closures" created with create_function are kind of useless, and since functions are created in the global scope and thus are not garbage collected, creating new ones each time it is called ends up eating a lot of memory. This makes create_function largely useless, I don't know anyone who uses it; it's often better to just define the function globally yourself anyway and avoid the cost of run-time parser invocation, which is the same cost as using eval. In fact, create_function is implemented in terms of eval.

So you get a bunch of drawbacks and none of the real benefits, plus misrepresentation in the documentation.

Which necessitates this patch, which includes syntax changes, of course. This can only, ahem, be better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> First C++ and now PHP. What will be the next language to get functional closures?

Visual Basic?

<comment><USER8> Uh, Visual Basic 20008/9.0 has lambda expressions built right in.

        Dim mapped = New Integer() {1, 2, 3, 4}.Select(Function(n) n * 2)
        Dim myFunc = Function(x) mapped.ToList.IndexOf(x)
        Console.WriteLine(myFunc(4)) ' prints 1 (i.e. second element, since mapped == {2,4,6,8}

.NET (and therefore Visual Basic) has had delegates, which are basically typesafe function pointers, since 2005.

If you want real functional programming on the CLR, there's always F#, which is firmly in the ML family.

AFAIK on the CLR closures are converted into classes with a single randomly named method (and since invoking a method on a class is designed to be quite efficient, that means you shoulodn't pay much of a performance penalty). In other words, it mechanically, automatically does what Java programmers would do by hand.</comment></comment>


Saying No Is Hard - <AUTHOR> https://newhive.com/schlaf/saying-no?q=%23All

<comment><USER2> Warning: sound plays automatically and there's no way to turn it off.

</comment><comment><USER3> A pain to read on a mobile device. Reminds me of the early 2000's.

</comment><comment><USER4> making websites without sounds - isn't :E</comment>


Scenery – Showcase your designs with premium mockup templates - <AUTHOR> https://www.getscenery.com/

<comment><USER2> Designs always look different in context. This looks like a cool service</comment>


19 days later, Apple still hasn't approved the Opera Mini app - <AUTHOR> http://my.opera.com/community/countup/?

<comment><USER2> I wouldn't be terribly surprised if their plan was to get rejected and then sue Apple (in Europe, where they would stand some chance at winning).

<comment><USER3> Sue them for what?

<comment><USER4> Anticompetitive actions? Microsoft got in trouble for _bundling_ IE. Why wouldn't Apple get in trouble for actively prohibiting competing browsers?

This is Europe, after all, not the US. The average consumer actually has some rights over there. (In the US, we basically have "if it blows up and ruins your face, Apple has to buy you a band-aid" and "you have the right to not buy it".)

<comment><USER5> _Microsoft got in trouble for bundling IE. Why wouldn't Apple get in trouble for actively prohibiting competing browsers?_

Microsoft got in trouble for using IE to strengthen their Windows monopoly - it wasn't too long ago that if you want to online banking, etc, you _had_ to use IE and ActiveX which meant you had to use Windows.

Apple has no such monopoly, even in the smartphone space where Finland's Nokia has several times the marketshare of the iPhone.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure how you can be so confident that the regulators will conclude that Apple doesn't have a monopoly if investigated by regulators.

This can be far from obvious. In the Microsoft case, it was decided that the operating system market is distinct from the web browser market. This conclusion is decidedly non-intuitive, since what does and does not make up a modern operating system is largely arbitrary, as anyone who has used a modular system knows.

What's to stop the EC deciding that the iTunes Store is distinct from the phone and MP3 player market? To me, it seems that the distinction between hardware and retail being different markets is much more clear than the line between where an OS ends and where software starts.

<comment><USER7> Isn't it intuitive that browsers, which for the most part are available for several different operating systems, is a separate market from the operating system itself? Seem like two different markets to me. Of course, on the iPhone there is so far no browser market, but that would be the exception, no?

<comment><USER6> X.Org is available on several different operating systems too, but I assume you don't think that Microsoft should have been prevented from shipping a GUI with their OS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have developer friends who have submitted their apps on the App Store and had it approved within a week.

It may be just because this is a way more complicated app or Apple is set to reject it but just trying to figure out how to defend themselves against whatever outrage that will happen.

I wonder how much resources (time and money) Opera spent on this. This is why I think the App Store is such a risky bet if your app takes months to make or it's something that has never been done before.

<comment><USER9> I've had an (iPad) app approved in hours & then an iPad update fixing critical bugs for the same app blocked for one week. It's still a crapshoot. If you go into 'extended review', I suggest retracting the binary & submitting again, hoping that you get a different reviewer. Joy!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Even if you installed this Opera app, you'd still be seeing Safari/Webkit a lot - since, unlike a standard computer, you won't be able to set a new default browser.

</comment><comment><USER11> I thought they rejected apps that replicated core functionality of the native apps a la google voice.

<comment><USER12> And yet there are plenty of third-party browsers in the app store...

(The major difference is that the browsers in the store today use the included WebKit, while Opera Mini has its own rendering engine that relies on Opera's server-side proxy.)

<comment><USER13> Well, here on HN I often hear that open is better and wins ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I highly doubt this will be approved. There is no way Apple is letting a third party come and play on their turf in the mobile browser market. Not to mention this would mean Apple would not have full control of who the default search provider is.

<comment><USER15> Users having to download Opera Mini from the App Store is hardly competition for the phone's _default_ search provider.

<comment><USER14> What if Opera gains significant share on the iPhone? Now Apple doesn't have as much leverage against Google.

That's really what I meant to say.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Interesting preview video on that site. I'm amazed that with Safari to copy from they still made the mistake of keeping a bar at the top with the current page to waste my precious screen real estate.

</comment><comment><USER17> A web browser is probably one of the more complicated apps you could write, though. If Apple insists on thoroughly examining what an app is doing, this ought to take awhile.

<comment><USER18> Unfortunately for Opera, some of what their "browser" does is within their own servers. So, Apple can never have complete visibility into what the application (service) does.

<comment><USER19> Aren't a huge number of apps just like that. What does a twitter app do except communicate with a server outside their control? Even the Google maps application is just a viewer for some server-side data.

<comment><USER18> The difference is that a huge portion of the smarts that goes into rendering the page happens off-device. Opera isn't a typical web browser. My understanding is that its more like webex or something that pushes most of the work to a server.

<comment><USER19> That's absolutely true, I just wonder where Apple would draw the line. How much server-side processing is too much?

<comment><USER20> There are plenty of apps that are just a bunch of web views on tabs. Thats pretty much %100 server side processing ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think this might be dead in the water to begin with. Apples new TOS state that their new OS is only allowed to run C/C++/Objective C and _Javascript as interpreted by Safari_.

So it would seem that Opera won't be allowed to interpret Javascript, making it pretty useless as a general purpose browser.

<comment><USER22> But then again, wouldn't that prevent PHP from being run as well, since it is server-side?

<comment><USER21> No... server side would be fine. But there's no way Opera could be running page Javascript on the server. Javascript is too tightly integrated with the browser. For example, you can't implement a page element "hover" event via server-side code.

<comment><USER23> This isn't related to the grandparent's post but on other platforms Opera Mini does only support a limited amount of Javascript and it runs on their servers.

From <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Mini#JavaScript_support>:

 _Opera Mini has limited support for JavaScript. Before the page is sent to the mobile device, its onLoad events are fired and all scripts are allowed a maximum of two seconds to execute. The setInterval and setTimeout functions are disabled, so scripts designed to wait a certain amount of time before executing will not execute at all. After the scripts have finished or the timeout is reached, all scripts are stopped and the page is compressed and sent to the mobile device. Once on the device, only a handful of events are allowed to trigger scripts: onUnload, onSubmit, onChange, onClick_

<comment><USER21> Well! I wasn't aware of that. So it sounds like the TOS issue is not a problem for them.

Unfortunately, it also means it's a completely crippled browser. Why anyone would WANT to use it instead of something fully functional (like Safari) is beyond me. The days of squinting at tiny mobile versions of websites on a 2x1 cell phone screen are behind us, and good riddance. It would appear that Opera Mini is already obsolete on the iPhone due to its very architecture.

<comment><USER24> Obviously you haven't used it! It is definitely meant for content consumption, not general interactivity with more complex web apps. What it does it does very well and does it blazingly fast!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is there an option to guess never?

</comment><comment><USER26> Bear in mind that it took weeks for Spotify to be approved too, and they are a significant competitor to Apple's music store.

</comment><comment><USER27> Is this supposed to be a shocker? My submitted prediction is still 66 days out, even though I think an answer of never is still very likely. Though I'm just betting on Opera cutting features to get an approved app.

</comment><comment><USER28> That very page has been updated, saying Opera Mini has been approved.

"Status update: Opera Mini for iPhone was officially approved by Apple on April 12 at 20:56:00 UTC"

</comment><comment><USER29> There were complaints before that approval of apps seemed forever so that might be one of the reasons but considering they made revisions to their OS policy then they might not approve it at all.

</comment><comment><USER30> in related news, the newest version of opera desktop definitely took a note from chrome and is pretty minimal\awesome.</comment>