What I've Learned From Female Founders So Far - <AUTHOR> http://blog.samaltman.com/what-ive-learned-from-female-founders-so-far <comment><USER2> _We want to fund more women because it 's the right thing to do, but we're not doing this for diversity's sake alone. We want to fund more women because we are greedy in the good way--we want to fund the most successful startups, and many of those are going to be founded by women._

This is a huge thing that people seem to ignore when arguing "against diversity" (I put that in quotes because I don't think anyone actually argues against diversity -- they couch it in terms of meritocracy and egalitarianism, saying that the best people should succeed regardless of race and gender, it just so happens that the best people are overwhelmingly white and male.) I think Sam does a great job of presenting this as a thing of 'greed' \-- or, more charitably, economic rationality.

In my mind, there are only two real possibilities (or, perhaps more realistically, two ends of a spectrum):

1\. The VC ecosystem, as it stands, is almost completely unbiased and fair- minded with regards to gender and race. The massive disparities in terms of funding and founder backgrounds reflect that.

2\. The VC ecosystem has some pretty systemic biases and prejudices (this is not to say that startup people or programmers or anyone is particularly evil; in fact, almost everything has systemic biases and prejudices), and as a result the current landscape does not reflect the best possible set of founders, startups, and opportunities.

<comment><USER3> "...it just so happens that the best people are overwhelmingly white and male."

So then why not also include some initiatives to encourage more Asian, Hispanic, and Black men?

<comment><USER4> Perhaps because woman are the fastest "big" gain they can do? There are lots of woman in the world (far more than any minority group), yet very few doing startups.

It's the biggest market inefficiency.

edit: You could also argue that the diversity in thinking and approach you'll get from woman could be very high. So perhaps they'll be more likely to start new kinds of companies in untapped markets.

<comment><USER5> There are more women in the world than pacific islanders, but if we only address the women aspect, are we not going to end up recruiting primarily white women? If the field is currently friendly to white men, and we make it more friendly to women, we wind up with white men & white women, not white men & all races of women. Right?

<comment><USER6> Do something about it then. The author of this article is seeing a way to help change the status for women. You could do something to help change the status for pacific islanders.

<comment><USER5> I'm not Sam. I haven't _anywhere near_ his clout, nor am I even in that field. Nor are there more than even a tiny, tiny handful of pacific islanders in my town. I may have met two?

<comment><USER7> Sam didn't start this in a vacuum. He started it after women in the tech community laid a lot of groundwork educating the community about gender diversity problems.

Are there specific things the technology community could do to open the doors to the Pacific Islanders community? I'm sorry to say, I don't actually know the answer to that. If you do, write blog posts and meet with people and try to organize other people like yourself online and work to educate the rest of us on what we can do. I absolutely think there would be plenty of people who would be more than happy to help tackle these problems if someone led the way.

But if there's no one out there already leading the way on a cause that's important to you, the absolute best thing you could do is to try to do it yourself. There's an old slogan, "Be the change you want to see in the world." It makes a pretty good point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This topic is a landmine but I applaud YC for being willing to tackle it anyway. There's almost nothing that can be said on the topic without upsetting a large number of people.

Before switching to CS, I spent a couple years in nursing school. Upon switching to CS, my dad told me "good, I didn't want a son that wiped asses for a living". I don't claim my experience had any equivalency to what females in tech go through, but I can attest firsthand that gender biases in choice of profession can be really hard to overcome even in the minds of the people you love.

<comment><USER9> This seems to confuse social stigma and gender bias. Garbage (Bin) men are overwhelmingly male, so too are plumbers, and pest control, sewer-workers and the like. A comment like "good, I didn't want a son that wiped [shit] for a living" would apply to any of these fields, it seems without reference to gender. Quite the opposite, as dealing with such filth actually is something women quite avoid.

<comment><USER8> Fair enough, that specific statement could indicate a social stigma unrelated to gender. It was, however, common to encounter plenty of skepticism that nursing was a proper profession for a male.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _Another message was that we should do more to make women feel welcome.

As we do more events, we'll continue to reach out to women._

This sort of thing really, seriously annoys me. HN is a funnel for applying to YC. You do not need to "reach out to women." You need to _stop shutting out the ones who are ALREADY here_ and trying like hell to participate in spite of frequently being stonewalled, being unable to get anyone to hold a private conversation with them, etc ad nauseum.

In some sense, I will probably rant a bit more about this on my personal blog today because I was already steaming mad about this _before_ I logged in to HN to read this article showing how badly the people at the top are simply blind.

<comment><USER11> > being unable to get anyone to hold a private conversation with them

Are you really surprised, right after that "Glass wall" story was posted here about one woman's terrible tragedy of having to deal with a male executive who briefly talked to her in an office stairwell? Convincing herself the entire office was about to think they were having an affair?

And you're surprised men are less eager to approach women than men in tech?

<comment><USER10> Are you merely being funny/sarcastic/something else I can't quite parse? Or is it lost on you that I wrote that piece?

FYI: I wrote some follow-up yesterday explaining more of the context: [http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/03/my- personal-...](http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/03/my-personal- gray-zone.html)

I had my reasons for my conclusion. I do not believe they were an overreaction at all.

<comment><USER12> I also think you're overreacting, honestly.

I don't think I've ever in my professional career observed someone being feverish and flushed and assume that it had something to do with sexual tension. Men just aren't that observant.

More likely, I would assume you were either sick or anxious because of some work-related conversation. Neither of which is a reason to be concerned vis-à- vis office politics.

Also, can I offer a suggestion to your problem? Couldn't you make up a little white lie and tell your coworkers that you had a very minor medical condition that resulted in being feverish and flushed often but that there were no other serious effects? No need to name anything, but that should take care of your worry about getting an email every time you sneeze and also deal with your concern about constantly having your obvious symptoms be misunderstood.

<comment><USER13> I rewrote this from a rather snide to a bit more neutral comment; but are you aware that just because you don't that doesn't mean that others don't?

Or that even if _all_ men really aren't observant enough, which is also a rather daring statement if I may say so, that still leaves room for women noticing it and communicating this more explicitly.

<comment><USER12> Of course I'm aware of that.

It's exactly the point I'm trying to make. I've never heard of anything like this happening, anywhere, ever. Even in casual settings. Nor have I observed that a normal response to sexual arousal is to be feverish and flushed.

To draw the type of conclusions that she is claiming, her coworkers would have to (1) be incredibly observant (2) reject all of the most plausible explanations for a very unlikely explanation and (3) care.

This is Ockham's razor.

I have a friend that is abnormally paranoid. He thinks everybody is out to get him and sees devious plotting from the most innocuous of situations. "those two guys at the water cooler are plotting to make me look bad at the meeting today" \- type stuff.

Chances are they are not.

All I'm saying is that it sounds like fear of taking a wrong social step at work seems to be affecting her performance, not to mention increasing her anxiety.

It could perhaps be healthy to reconsider whether her assumptions are reasonable or not.

<comment><USER13> The thing is that she never said the thoughts were reasonable; it's perfectly possible that she acknowledges she's a bit over-sensitive about it just like you might do something out of fear that you'll be thought of as incompetent or unsuccessful.

On the other hand; thinking that this kind of thing is never discussed is rather naive. There's plenty of people who _are_ very observant about these kinds of things and will happily discuss them when the opportunity arises. We even invented a word for it: gossiping.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> One big learning from my time @msft was that the gender gap in STEM really starts in middle school. Everything else (YC included) is largely downstream. If you want to help get involved at the grade school level. For those who are interested here's one of the better resources they produced: [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/collaboration/focus/wome...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/collaboration/focus/womenincomputing/womenintechbrochure.pdf)

<comment><USER15> Sounds like puberty. Maybe it STEMs all the way down to genetics. Evolution. Can't we just accept that females and males have evolved differently?

<comment><USER16> The problem with the evolution/genetics argument is that people can use it as an excuse for deplorable behavior.

Genetics isn't destiny. We're more sophisticated than that.

<comment><USER15> Yes. Both Men and Women. And I think one gender is having a harder time understanding our differences and how we can suppress our natural urges and grow away from them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > _And we 're working on something to improve the quality of Hacker News > comments._

Excellent. Can't wait to see what it is.

<comment><USER18> Maybe replacing the moderator hell/slowban system with a feedback system to improve commenter behavior instead of infuriating commenters and scaring away controversial people.

I've been banned a few times simply for strongly expressing an opinion contrary to HN ideology. I probably will be again for even bringing it up.

<comment><USER16> _strongly expressing an opinion contrary to HN ideology_

Is it merely contrary to HN ideology or something that's considered outside the realm of legitimate controversy in this community?

Some positions aren't going to be well-received no matter how well they are phrased, which is generally considered a good thing. We shouldn't have to continuously debate the idea that the universe is more than 10,000 years old, or that women should be first-class citizens in our society, for example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> As a female founder I hope these types of thoughts are promoted but the resulting actions are not obvious. I wouldn't want to be a female founder accepted into ycombinator and then have myself or others wonder if I am part of some kind of quota. I really want my acceptance to be based on my merits.

<comment><USER20> >I wouldn't want to be a female founder accepted into ycombinator and then have myself or others wonder if I am part of some kind of quota

I'm far removed from YC and the startup scene, but as an exceptionally intelligent black man I do have experience with scenarios that might lead one to feel that way. My advice is simply: don't feel that way. Be completely confident in yourself and abilities and ignore what others _might_ be thinking. YC should not be seen as validation in any way, but as a stepping stone for your personal goals. In that light, the exact reasons you were funded are of no concern to your future success. Besides, I'm sure many a founder has been accepted for superficial reasons (being from the right school, having the right look, etc). If certain of your traits happen to match the current funding trends then so be it; consider it a stroke of luck and nothing else. I guarantee you the next white kid from Stanford that gets funded will not be sitting around wondering if he really belongs there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's telling of the environment we're in that the author has to make such a heavy disclaimer about not doing things for diversity's sake. What would be so bad about admitting one cares about diversity? I think there's room in business to pursue one's values.

<comment><USER22> I said "we're not doing this for diversity's sake alone." It'd be terribly unfair to the super qualified people we work with to imply that we were working with them just because we wanted diversity.

<comment><USER21> That's a good point, that it _is_ about diversity but that it's only part of the entire picture.

I think people will complain about fairness even when they're not affected, because the tech community tends to have a strong knee-jerk reaction to this sort of thing. But it would be foolish to not consider diversity as one of many metrics to gauge how effectively one is avoiding costly biases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Thanks for bringing reason and sanity to such a politically-charged issue. The insults on Twitter when you asked for advice were pretty depressing even to a bystander, but it looks like you found the signal in the noise :)

</comment><comment><USER24> "because it's the right thing to do"

The right thing to do is fund the best concepts that exist. I don't care if they're all women founded or all men founded.

The reason there aren't more women founders is the real problem at hand. It might be that women are more risk averse. It might be that there's a stigma against girls who program. It might be that there's a large enough population of women who are more focused on finding Mr. Right than founding the right company.

I'm making up some numbers here, but if 1 in 5 companies are founded by women, then it wouldn't make sense to seek a 50/50 founding member gender breakdown in a YC class. That said, my guess is that more than 20% of companies you choose would be founded by women, because the women that did make it to the company founding stage are that much more likely to have the skill sets and the drive to be successful.

</comment><comment><USER25> For reference, here's a chart I made a few months ago of female and male YC founders accepted into Y Combinator by year: [http://i.imgur.com/MCLqUm3.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/MCLqUm3.jpg) (from [https://medium.com/p/2613f58e5082](https://medium.com/p/2613f58e5082) )

EDIT: The percentages in chart are # female founders accepted into YC / # founders accepted into YC. The 24% statistic in the article is number of startups with at least 1 female founder, so the chart may be biased lower than that statistic.

<comment><USER26> It's not 24% female founders btw. 24% of the companies have one or more female founders.

<comment><USER25> Ah, stupid mistake on my part. Clarified.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> "We funded a guy once who looked like Mark but ended up doing badly, and when PG was asked by a reporter how to fool him, he said that apparently this was one way. His real point was that looking like Zuckerberg means nothing--that you can look remarkably like him and still fail miserably. "

To me the entire "look like Zuck" is more than the physical look. It's the harvard attendance, of a certain age, and having certain interests and mannerisms as well as background.

Truth is if you go to an Ivy or top school and view the student body you will see a certain look and feel. Doesn't mean that people with the same look don't attend a state school or community college, doesn't mean there aren't exceptions at the Ivy, but the look and feel is definitely there. Perhaps they end up looking that way after the first week as they get assimilated.

There is no doubt that people respond to visual cues and assign halo to them rightly or wrongly. Or stereotypes whatever you want to call it.

Go ahead in and try to pitch YC looking like a guy who runs a wholesale company and is 58 from the lower east side in NYC and doesn't look the part. It would almost certainly be, for lack of a super clear winning idea, an uphill battle.

</comment><comment><USER28> It would be great for YC's outreach efforts to make a difference in getting more great female founders to apply. There are other groups where outreach could help get some quality underrepresented founders too, which might help with the big ambitious science RFS: going after mid-career people in the sciences and engineering a few years in advance of founding a startup and seeding them with the idea of doing so. I know NSF has some outreach efforts like that, but it would be great for YC if YC's name were known by PIs thinking of going commercial.

<comment><USER29> Shouldn't a desirable attribute from a founder be that they seek out whatever is necessary for survival?

To me, regardless of gender, YC would only want those that were proactive and dedicated to join a YC batch. It seems pointless to encourage specific demographics that would not apply, to do so.

<comment><USER28> YC is clearly not necessary for survival, especially for someone who has already had an exit (and thus has some capital and contacts), or someone who is 50 and has run a 30 person lab, with some savings and other personal contacts. YC can probably help in both of those cases, but the company is capable of being successful without it.

I'd sure rather have an Elon Musk or a Mara Aspinall in YC than a randomly- selected person who already believes YC is the best (or only) way to do a startup.

There are two parts to this -- making YC as useful as possible to the best founders, and making sure the best founders know that and apply.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Good reads on Rose Blumkin, one of the most hardcore founders Warren Buffet has ever bet on:

\- [http://www.buffettsecrets.com/rose-blumkin-nebraska- furnitur...](http://www.buffettsecrets.com/rose-blumkin-nebraska-furniture- mart.htm)

\- [http://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/13/business/rose-blumkin- reta...](http://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/13/business/rose-blumkin-retail-queen- dies-at-104.html)

</comment><comment><USER31> Did I miss something? The only thing he states he's actually learned from female founders so far is that women and men express confidence differently. I was hoping for more substance.

<comment><USER32> He literately can't say anything of substance on a topic like this or else his words will show up all over the news as an attack by YC on some party or other.

<comment><USER31> He didn't even talk about _how_ men and women express confidence differently. IMO the article was a waste.

<comment> atom-morgan Men tend to exaggerate their skills. Women understate theirs.

See: [http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2014/03/19/women-hiring- ma...](http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2014/03/19/women-hiring-math-jobs/)

<comment><USER33> my observation is that we also apologize more, speak up less, and negotiate less effectively (if at all).

i teach 8 year-old girls how to code in my free time and one of the biggest challenges to their success is re-wiring them to believe in themselves, in their critical-thinking skills, in their ability to solve problems. it seems they don't need a few mentor-role models: they need a _chorus_ of people encouraging them and reminding them of their innate abilities. which leads me to believe—i can only extrapolate—that this must be what many boys (and men) experience on a quotidien basis.

i will never know, but i can help create that for myself and other women, particularly the wee ones. :>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Why not just fund the best startups regardless of whom their founder is?

<comment><USER26> You can't fund people who don't apply, and people can't apply if they don't decide to start startups. The goal of the Female Founders Conference was to encourage more women to do both, and as Sam points out, there is more YC can do in that department.

<comment><USER35> I think I have a different perspective on this topic than most here. My wife has founded multiple companies. I also have two daughters (and a son). One of which is very interested in programming. I'm older, but back in college and early professional life I worked with a number of women. Myself and my colleagues treat them the same as the rest of the team. There certainly weren't a lot of women, but we didn't treat them any different.

But the current generation of young techies seem to be outright hostile towards women. All you have to do is read some of the comments on HN whenever a topic in this area arises. From some of the things I read in comments I seriously give pause on whether I should push my daughter in programming/tech. Some women can tolerate this hostility better than others, but I don't see it going away anytime soon. I really think the problem is with the attitude of the modern young techy towards females. I don't know where it comes from or how to fix it. But it worries me.

<comment><USER36> >But the current generation of young techies seem to be outright hostile towards women.

To the extent that this is true, I think it could be backlash in response to pushing for more women in tech.

My youngest brother's high school has a girls only programming club, and a girls only robotics team (with no male equivalents). There was also a program where kids from his engineering class got selected for a summer electrical engineering program, with preferential selection for girls. He really wanted to do it and he definitely had the grades and ability, but all 3 kids who were selected were girls (who had lower GPAs and lower scores in the engineering class.)

He lives in a pretty rural area, so there aren't really a lot of options for him to get involved in something like a robotics team outside of school. I would have probably been upset if something I was really interested in was off limits because of my gender, and I can't really say how something like this would have affected me when when I was 14.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I was kind of disappointed by this article, I was expecting some information about things that women stereotypically do better than men in regards to starting a company. (If you've found something like this I'd be really interested to hear it!) Some traits that men, stereotypically, can learn from (or even vice versa). Instead it's just outreach drivel, (which is not what the title implies)

</comment><comment><USER38> Unrelated to article: I'm not sure how this post made it to the front page so fast. It's been up for ~ 5 mins and it's already #7 on my list with 7 pts. Did you people who upvoted even read the article? Doesn't look like it.

<comment><USER25> The domain where the article was posted is very important. It's a good indicator of article quality.

<comment><USER39> After doing some experimentation with Bayesian classification of HN articles (for selecting articles that interest me) I've actually found that titles, rather than URLs, domains, or even article text, is one of the best indications of how good an article (and the accompanying discussion) will be.

 _(This is one of the reasons that I hate the moderators reverting article titles to less descriptive ones.)_

<comment><USER40> Share that somewhere?

<comment><USER39> I haven't, but I can if you're interested. "Best results" in this case is pretty subjective so I didn't perform any rigorous experiments about the relative quality of each method, that was just a general observation that I had.

The program itself is just a quick HN scrapper combined with a naive bayes classifier which periodically runs and sends selected article titles to an IRC channel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Gotta say, Sam, I'm finding hope in my cynical old heart.

What I liked:

Listening, and acknowledging there is a problem, is an excellent first start. That's progress for YC, which up until now seemed to have its head in the sand.

The quick roll up of what you've heard most recently, also good, shows it's more than lip service.

*Acknowledging publicly that confidence shows differently for women than for men is enormous. I've had people try to claim I'm not confident in my product. Outrageous!

Some other thoughts:

Female founder events are nice, but let's see PG and the Old VC boys show up there too, so it isn't a pink ghetto.

Earmark your startup founders conference to be 50/50 male/female. Or some such realistic but achievable number.

Understand that women need special help fundraising. The signals, games, and rules are male created, and male oriented. Women are at a distinct disadvantage in the fundraising process as a result. I have found most women cannot give good fundraising advice, because they have not raised money, or have they invested money. Would love to see YC write about this, specifically for women. A rule book, if you will.

There's probably more, but as you keep engaging us, I'll keep thinking.

To those who might still be angry/cynical: This is a start. I believe we have to allow room for organizations and people to evolve and change their minds, lest we all freeze into pre-arranged points of view. I hope that doesn't happen, because the world needs all of us right now to tackle the challenges we face. Let's see what happens. This is more than we've seen out of the valley in quite some time.

<comment><USER41> downvoted? awesome. care to share why?

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I like to look at it this way. Y-Combinator is only getting bigger because startups are the future. Accepting more women does not mean accepting less men. Wealth and opportunity are not finite. The faster Y-Combinator can grow the more likely it is I might get in (I am also greedy in a good way). Bringing in more talented women can make Y-Combinator a more dominant force; I say great.

</comment><comment><USER43> Female founders can be great with out coding. There seems to be this belief that founders need to write code. If you are doing a "hack" maybe, but a good startup is often as much about the business model and the User Experience as it is about the code.

Sarah Austin, is a co-founder at my company, Plexi, and she is invaluable to us from the standpoint of knowing what features are important and how to extract money from those features. Sarah doesn't write code. She looks at it from time to time, and she provides large data sets in spreadsheets that get codified later, but she doesn't speak Python which is what we run.

Sarah has one dozens of hackathons, and was SAP's Hacker of the Year last year. Again with out writing a single line of code.

To be honest the Author comments show how much more he has to learn about female founders, because I disagree with almost every assertion he makes.

And yes, I think PlexiNLP is a multi-billion dollar potential company.

-Brandon Wirtz CTO PlexiNLP [http://plexinlp.com/](http://plexinlp.com/)

</comment><comment><USER44> While I believe in all of YC's efforts to integrate women, I feel like one of the hurdles that they are ignoring is convincing the men. What do I mean by this? I mean that statements like "We want to fund more women because we are greedy in the good way," I believe in 100%, but not because I have some facts to back it up. YC, on the other hand, should have numbers and facts to back this up and I think it would make their statements that much stronger. Now, you might ask, why is this important if the goal is to attract more women to startups? The answer is that you want the women who do come to be playing on an even playing field: the VC's in the industry are still largely dominated by men. If you can convince them with numbers that they are doing the right thing by not having a bias against women, the women who try to raise money will do it more successfully and then encourage more women to try.

<comment><USER28> The best way to convince people is through examples (the total number of companies YC has funded is small enough that a few females who are highly successful would be statistically significant).

None are at the AirBnB/Dropbox/Stripe/Heroku/Reddit/Parse/Polvi stage yet, but everyone in YC knows of a few female YC participants who seem to be on the same trajectory.

</comment></comment><comment> vezzy-fnord _And we 're working on something to improve the quality of Hacker News comments._

Wait, is this implying that we're actually getting an upstream change in the HN codebase for the first time in $amount_of_time_I_am_not_aware_of_exactly?

Or perhaps some sort of cultural shift, like increased moderation and less tolerance for certain views? I can't see the latter going very well, but it's too early to tell anything.

Otherwise this is good news. However, when I read this...

 _Many emails pointed out that our website shows nearly all men; we 'll fix that._

I was reminded of the following: [http://www.snopes.com/college/admin/uwmadison.asp](http://www.snopes.com/college/admin/uwmadison.asp). Hopefully this won't just be a clumsy doctoring for PR purposes.

<comment><USER22> software!

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> "we don't do this for the sake of diversity. We do it because we want to get the best people, whatever they're like."

But we would prefer women?

What the hell is up with YC and positive discrimination?

<comment><USER21> Correcting biases is actually the opposite of discrimination.

<comment><USER45> How very 1984!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I was hoping this would be something like "lessons learned" on how to build a better startup, perhaps some that just happened to be from female founders, and perhaps others that come from the different perspective/approaches. It hints at this, with the example of women expressing confidence differently from men. It also mentions diversity - but as something to not prevent finding the best founders, rather than as a resource of new perspectives/approaches.

</comment><comment><USER47> Thanks for the nudge to get my application submitted already! ;-)

</comment><comment><USER48> I've never quite understood this messaging. Popular opinion regarding startups is that a founder needs to be persevering through countless rejections and believe in themselves through it all. And yet now we're saying people may be put off by insufficient pictures of women on a homepage. Wat?

Why would you want someone so easily broken? You know how many Asian founders I've seen marketed in aus startups? Very few. Doesn't bother me.

</comment><comment><USER49> a propos: [http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2014/study-says-attractive- men...](http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2014/study-says-attractive-men-fare- best-in-gaining-venture-capital.html)

, in a controlled experiment the researchers conducted, identical business- plan videos were narrated by either male or female voices; respondents chose the plans presented by males 68 percent of the time.

</comment><comment><USER50> Same problems: 1) Some men already starting startups aren't interested in doing Y Combinator.

2) Some men who could be great founders don't start startups.

</comment><comment><USER33> 1\. the best argument for funding talented women, is its inevitability. the smartest men understand this. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQnDDKDiSy8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQnDDKDiSy8)

2\. part of being a good entrepreneur is managing your own psychology. women—and i anticipate raising ire when i say this—have much to learn in this regard. not simply because we are relatively new to worlds men have long- accessed and enjoyed (with the corresponding body of wisdom and experience that accompanies such things, including the management of one's own psychology, which is nothing more than self-mastery), but also because we sometimes lose focus along the way. we stop building and start arguing. this is a natural process and i believe an important one for us to collectively go through: the debating, the feeling-out of collective boundaries and external asks. but we are not organized, we sometimes get emotional to the point where we become unintelligible, uncommunicative or irrational, and lose credibility along the way. if you are to wage a war then you must find a way to unite around a common purpose, set your sights on victory and then take intelligent action, individual or otherwise. (coincidentally, we also need role models who are both vocal AND able to organize women.) alas, in our early stages we seem to spend a lot of time arguing. so: less bicker, more build. whether your own projects or community, every hour matters.

3\. on YC-ness: how many female founders have worked very closely alongside a VC-funded YC-alum (who happens to be a white male)? i am a minority female founder who has experienced this, and was astounded. _temporarily laying aside the argument of how to actually get in if you do fit that stereotype_ : the intrinsically, deeply supportive nature of this network is such that many of you, if exposed to it, would be tempted to apply. many of you _would_ apply. it wasn't the contacts, or the advice, or the credibility it conferred (those things helped with everything from recruiting to raising $, of course—not to mention the comparative ease of getting meetings): what impressed me was this battle-hardened community offering the gift of time and emotional support to one another...generosity on a scale one rarely sees in any business context (qualities which i believe will only improve in the years to come, particularly as YC evolves to include more women). my conclusion? apply to YC. and i would suggest, if a group of mostly-white male geeks does not interest you, and i understand if that is the case, then apply to a female-oriented accelerator or better yet: assemble a group of kickass female founders, mentors and investors and start your own. (remember, the genesis of a good product is building something you need.)

4\. food for thought: if there were a female version of YC, would you apply? would i? i am not sure i would. i do not live in a vacuum; the world i seek to conquer is a male-dominated world (at present); and part of self-mastery includes mastering one's environment, not creating a bubble within it. but it is an interesting thought-experiment and useful to ponder.

*btw, not making this about white vs non-white. that alone would be the subject of a 1k post thread.

</comment><comment><USER51> is sam altman over rated?

</comment><comment><USER52> I think it's great for YC to improve and help women but I hope YC doesn't start accepting female funded companies just for the sake of having more female founders instead on looking at the quality of the startups.

<comment><USER22> Read the article carefully; we won't. We'll accept female-founded companies because some of them will be extremely successful. Everyone is subject to the same bar (this is addressed in the middle of the post).

<comment><USER52> I've read it and I believe a lot in you but I'm afraid external pressures might make you do it

<comment><USER28> How can YC be pressured? They sure don't have an LP problem. In terms of hiring for YC itself, it's already quite diverse.

The only thing YC really needs to care about is 1) getting the best possible startups to apply and then 2) for those companies to be successful.

#2 is pretty much immune to pressure-on-YC; YC has no control of YC startups, with only 2-10% common equity. #1 is explicitly the thing they are working on, so it seems unlikely "we will pressure you to accept more female founders if you don't accept more female founders by convincing female founders not to apply" would be a realistic threat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Be very careful what you wish for; you might get it.

I've seen far too many women working very hard, initially quite successfully, to be "more like men" but too soon encounter agonies of the damned, failure, and even death. Be careful. Be very careful.

Suspect: Mother Nature long ago filtered out from the tree any women so easily distracted from being strong limbs on the tree. Motherhood is not inferior; the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world; good parenting is the crucial, most rewarding, and most important job in the world; what men do at work is not superior to what women, and essentially only women, can do with motherhood; everyone on HN had a mother who did a lot of important, hard work quite different from success in the world of work; what men do at work is to bring home money for what is really important, motherhood, family, home, etc. For a woman to concentrate on a startup is to neglect motherhood and, thus, to confuse means and ends.

Darwin will have the last word here: Currently in Western Civilization, the average number of children born to one women is less than 2.1 which means Western Civilization is voluntarily going extinct. In Finland the average is 1.5 which means that in 10 generations about 30 Finns will become 1\. Finland did well fighting off the Swedes, Russians, and Germans but now is losing out to 'new' ideas on what women should do.

Some science is quite clear: Starting in the crib, the girls pay attention to people and the boys, to things. That difference continues. Girls pay attention to people because that is crucial for motherhood. Boys pay attention to things because that is crucial to the world of work. Don't confuse the two.

<comment><USER53> Gee, some people don't like the advice to be careful.

When it's your sister, wife, or daughter who gets seriously injured for life or gets killed, say, from suicide from clinical depression from stress from being pushed away from motherhood and into the world of startups, then you will understand why it is crucial to be careful.

Sure, at one time she told me "Women don't have to just be cared for. Women can do things, too. I want a career.". I believed her. I was naive.

Her mother was pushing her hard away from motherhood and into something challenging.

Although I didn't yet see the role of her mother, I had good reasons to believe in her: So, she was Valedictorian, PBK, Woodrow Wilson, 'Summa Cum Laude', Ph.D. And in many ways, in academics and also daily life, she was just hands down, flatly brilliant. She had the endurance of an ultra athlete and could go with so little sleep that so little for me would have me asleep standing up, literally.

Still, by the time she finished her Ph.D., she was in a clinical depression from the stress, never recovered, and died. Her sisters had similar struggles. It's tough to separate nature and nurture here: She got the nurture from her mother who had the nature but also got the nature from her mother. She likely got another dose of the nature from her father, a guy who for some years worked 20 hours a day except cut back to 10 on Sundays.

Solid evidence is that such vulnerability to stress is four times more likely for women than men.

There is a good reason for the expression "Nervous Nellie" because, from an expert, "women are much more emotional than men" and one way they are more emotional is that they are more nervous, more easily made afraid. Such nervousness and fear leads to stress leads to depression, clinical depression, serious problems, and sometimes death.

For a women in a challenging situation, have to exercise special care watching for signs of low self-esteem, stress, 'burn out', and depression. Some women can meet such challenges; too many can't; even some that very much look like they can, can't; these problems are much more likely for women; it's a very challenging situation.

My advice I repeat: Be careful. Be very careful.

Some people just flatly want to believe that "Women don't have to just be cared for. Women can do things, too." and want to and, then, do hate any suggestion of anything else and pass off any suggestion as some sexism. No, the caution I urge is based on hard experience. Be careful. I didn't say stop; I just said be careful.

"Careful"? Yes, for a women, have to watch for symptoms and problems that mostly would not have to watch for for men.

Be careful.

Sorry about your dream, largely unfounded, that women are just the same in startups as men and have just been held down and now need to be 'unleashed'. It's not just a dream, too easily it's a nightmare. Sorry about your dream. But if the woman is your sister, wife, or daughter, your dream can become a nightmare for you. You've been warned. Let the pop media have their fun pushing 'lean in', etc., but for your sister, wife, and daughter, be careful, be very careful.

If you want an explanation, then notice that Darwin's forces were there and having their effects for many tens of thousands of years before startups. and we don't know just what those forces were or just how they worked. Since we can't understand what those forces were, for making big changes now we are walking out on thin ice. Be careful.

Or, the world of work, and startups were created by men in ways convenient for men. And we should just assume that women will be comfortable in that world? Why assume? Or how many men would be comfortable in and fit in at a baby shower? How many men can do well at gossip? For 'social connections', men don't gossip; instead they communicate information (D. Tannen,'You Just Don't Understand: Men and Women in Conversation'), and women communicate feelings and the rest of gossip. Men are from Mars, women from Venus, that is, they are so different they seem to be from different planets. They deserve equal respect as persons but are not the same (E. Fromm, 'The Art of Loving').

Did I mention, be careful?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Freelancers, how do you track your time? - <AUTHOR>

Dear HN,
I've been on quite a journey finding a proper time tracking solution. I'm looking for a simple 'tool' (can be web based, but preferably with OSX client) which allows me to track time for several clients. Some kind of timesheet export would be good. But I don't need a whole business management software with it.
https://www.toggl.com
doesn't look too bad, but recurring $5 for a start/stop button? I'm not sure. Maybe if the interface would be awesome.
http://www.flamebrain.com/download-watchme/
is a great little (!) windows app which I have been using a few years back. something like that with timesheets, and for OSX would be it.
http://www.getklok.com/ is horrible UI wise. the features are quite interesting though, but I don't wanna use it.
Aren't there some nice, contemporary open source projects out there? I couldn't find any...
What are you using? <comment><USER2> I like [http://freshbooks.com](http://freshbooks.com) it can also track business expenses, invoice, etc. It's nothing ground breaking but I believe they are a strong company and will be around for a long time.

<comment><USER3> +1 for freshbooks, I use it for all my time tracking and invoicing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love Harvest because it takes that recorded time and pops it into an invoice. I wouldn't call it "a whole business management" solution, but it does a great job.

[http://www.getharvest.com/](http://www.getharvest.com/) [http://try.hrv.st/1nxt](http://try.hrv.st/1nxt) (ref link, $10 off first month)

<comment><USER5> I also use Harvest. The interface is a little clunky and unintuitive at times, but it's the best out there by far.

It'd be great if we could style our invoices with CSS though.

</comment></comment><comment> 97-109-107 It's not web based and has the xls export feature as a premium feature, but it's pretty flexible and unobstrusive. [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rauscha.ap...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rauscha.apps.timesheet)

</comment><comment><USER6> We implemented [http://www.paymo.biz](http://www.paymo.biz) in our company and we're happy with it. They have mobile apps and desktop apps for Win and Mac.

The design is a little out dated, but they're launching a new version so that's sorted.

</comment><comment><USER7> I like Freckle - [http://letsfreckle.com/](http://letsfreckle.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I wonder about their site's conversion rate. They don't show much, at least not visually, before a credit card trial gate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> 'On the job' for OSX. Create clients, jobs for client and easily create invoices. Love it.

</comment><comment><USER9> Billings from Market Circle - timekeeping and invoicing all in one. Has a companion iPhone app too.

</comment><comment><USER10> Google selfspy on GitHub - tracks literally everything</comment>


Mobile ads dont go on the phone - <AUTHOR> http://digitalscientists.com/blog/mobile-ads-dont-go-on-the-phone-they-go-everywhere-else

<comment><USER2> Link seems incorrect - Pasting it here didn't work either (HN eats the ' in don't)</comment>


Final Fantasy VII is available on Steam - <AUTHOR> http://store.steampowered.com/app/39140/

<comment><USER2> I still have my original discs but it's such a pain getting it to run on anything newer than WinME that I'd given up trying to play it.

Is the rendering performance OK? Are the movies intact? Do you get the choral music that was only accessible to people who had a creative card with soundfont support?

Also, this reminds me of several video gaming magazine jokes:

        Character Booster – Find yourself stuck on a difficult section or lacking the funds to buy that vital Phoenix Down? With the Character Booster you can increase your HP, MP and Gil levels to their maximum, all with the simple click of a button, leaving you to enjoy your adventure.

<comment><USER3> The music is the same as Enix's old version, i.e. MIDI and not nearly as good as the original PSX music. There's a mod for that though - google Ficedula's music patch

<comment><USER4> Did Enix do the original PC port? That would be kinda weird since, Square and Enix were competitors at the time.

Guess the use of MIDI is what you do when the hardware doesn't for sure come with support for redbook audio.

<comment><USER5> Actually, the PSX version of FFVII is /sampled and sequenced/ (like a surprising chunk of PSX music) from a Roland SC-88 MIDI module and part of the reason why a lot of video game music enthusiasts found the PC port of it interesting was because of the Yamaha XG support, an extension of General MIDI that was competing against Roland's GS extensions.

It had nothing to do with a 'lack of redbook', especially given the PC port shipped on disc and no one was releasing stuff on floppies anymore. It simply was common for Japanese computer games to support MIDI modules, even into the late 90s. They kept at it longer than Sierra!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> FYI: The Steam version of the game still has a phone-home, always-online DRM which requires you to maintain connectivity in order to play. This is not the standard Steam DRM.

<comment><USER7> I was about to buy Chrono Trigger for my Android the other day but luckily I read through reviews before. It too requires an online authentication at least at every start. I passed.

<comment><USER8> And, in an attempt to secure their software, they push people into the arms of emulation and easy to find, DRM-free, ROMs. Bafflingly short sighted, as usual.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Still waiting for a proper HD rerelease - fans have already hacked the game to load high-res character models / sprites / menus / etc; but it looks silly with 1080p characters wandering round a 320p world :(

How hard can it be to re-render an already-created CG scene with a few more pixels?

<comment><USER10> > How hard can it be to re-render an already-created CG scene with a few more > pixels?

Quite tricky, seeing that Square-Enix no longer has the original source files to re-render these. A proper re-release would require artists to remake the environments from scratch (based on concept art or the original game).

<comment><USER4> Even if they did have it, there's a good chance their systems aren't compatible with whatever they used to render them.

The game is nearly 20 years old, a millennia in video game time. Oh my goodness... 20 years!

<comment><USER11> Actually that works in their favor. It's been long enough that they can probably run the original system and software on an emulator with a faster CPU setting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My all-time favorite game. Got it for PC in 1997, and it changed my life.

<comment><USER13> Yep. I'm perpetually waiting for square to get their shit together and just give us what we want: A frame-by-frame remake with PS4 generation graphics.

<comment><USER10> But is it really what you want? What you want is to relive that experience; a full-on PS4-style graphics remake will change the whole experience. It'll be a game with the same characters, environments, story and basic gameplay, but the feel of it will be completely different.

I run a FFVII-based fansite (thelifestream.net, [/plug]), and the general consensus of the community there is that while a full FFVII remake would be nice, it would generally be criticized by the original fanbase, no matter how awesome they make it, simply because it's not the same game anymore.

For an example of the only full-on remake Square ever did of one of their older titles, you could look at FFIII on the DS, remaking a 2d, sprite-based game into a 3D one. Of course, FFIII doesn't have nearly the fanbase of VII so there were less tears on the internet over it.

<comment><USER8> I would love a full remake. While they're at it they can remake Chrono Trigger (my all-time favorite) and FFIII (VI) as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does this still use Square's DRM, or is it all handled by Steam now? I was playing the re-release through Wine on Linux last year, but the DRM workarounds made it activate as a new PC each time it started. Since it has an activation limit, I got locked out after a few launches.

<comment><USER9> Relatedly, does it use Square's "Cloud Saves" (ho ho ho)? I've got the square version, but it was largely unplayable because you when the cloud servers are down / timing out (as was the case 9 times out of 10), the load / save functionality would be disabled (can't even load or save local files :-/). And then after playing for ~20 hours, the game decided to overwrite my save file with a cloud backup from ~19 hours ago...

<comment><USER15> It does, but you can turn it on/off. Its off by default.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Remember how the original PC version always crashed at the chocobo races if you tried running it on Windows XP? I remember being so bummed about that until someone released a patch for it on the internet. What did we do before automatic game patches?

</comment><comment><USER17> I remember when the demo for FF7 was released alongside Brave Fencer; I think I played that demo alone 50+ times. Completely changed my expectations on how immersive/cinematic/emotive games could be.

<comment><USER8> The demo was released with Tobal No.1, not Musashi. I also played the crap out of that demo. It was amazing for its time having just come from the SNES.

<comment><USER2> It's funny how we remember the games from the early years of a console over the more polished final ones, even when trying to choose "best of all time". Perfect Dark improved on Goldeneye in every way, but rarely makes such lists (and similarly with Majora's Mask). FF6 and Chrono Trigger were stunning, pushing the SNES far further than one would have imagined possible - but it's FF4 you hear people rave about. And sacrilegious as it may seem, I think FF9 actually improved on 7 - but it's far less remembered than that first, stumbling foray into 3D, FMV and all the rest of it.

<comment><USER17> I think is a pretty common psychological tendency, no?

It's like more about the derivative (delta/improvement) of quality, the velocity of the game relative to previous efforts not its actual position in space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> PC only? Really square? I guess it would be really difficult to port those amazing, cut-edge graphics to opengl...

<comment><USER19> I guess the business plan was something like "let's make this old win32 code run on win7 and ship the fucker", rather than any well-thought-out long-term effort...

<comment><USER20> "and print money!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Ow c'mon Steam, you were on your way to support Linux so well -- windows only :(

<comment><USER22> Valve had literally zero input into this decision, so direct your frustration at Square Enix instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Why are they charging so much for such an old game?

<comment><USER10> Simple: because people are willing to pay for it. People pay fortunes for vintage toys because their parents got rid of them two+ decades ago and they want to relive their youth and have expendable income. Similarly, people want to relive their youth from 15-20 years ago with video games, and are willing to re-buy a version of the game that runs on modern-day systems.

Re-releases of old / 'vintage' video games are quite popular on Steam, allowing the owners of the rights of said games to sell them again with relatively small investments. This also happens on modern consoles (PSN on the PS3, etc), which no longer have backwards compatibility, so that the game manufacturers port the game to modern systems (at minimal investment) and sell them again. Optionally rendering the game at a higher resolution and calling it a HD re-release.</comment></comment>


David Pogue Is Only Competent to Review Gadgets - <AUTHOR> http://mikedaisey.blogspot.com/2012/02/david-pogue-is-only-competent-to-review.html

<comment><USER2> David Pogue just got lucky and landed a job at the Times. He really isn't special in any significant way</comment>


Working with different filesystems - <AUTHOR> https://nodejs.org/en/docs/guides/working-with-different-filesystems <comment><USER2> The sheer scale of things you apparently need to account for seems pretty unreasonable to me. Shouldn't some subset of this be abstracted, maybe optionally or with a module?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think Node provides objective access to the filesystem, representing it as it is, without getting in the way. From there, I use a module to test filesystem behavior, and use several comparison functions depending on the behavior of the filesystem.

Much also depends on the nature of your application, this determines how you would want to probe or work with the filesystem. For example, do you create a test filename to see the exact NFD form that HFS+ uses or estimate it if this is not critical to the task at hand.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any good JavaScript books? - <AUTHOR>

I've seen the cool things that developers are doing with JavaScript. Especially http://sonspring.com/journal/jquery-desktop.
I'm wondering what the best book on the subject is. Just two things:
- It has to be freely downloadable online - It has to have assignments at the end of the chapter
As for the assignments thing, I think it's really great. It's the best way to show yourself that you learned what you read.
Oh, and if it matters, I know Java and Python.
Edit: formatting <comment><USER2> After you figure out that your criteria are too exclusive you should go buy a copy of Crockford's _Javascript: The Good Parts_. ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> But I only have two criteria. ;)

Does it atleast have the assignments?

<comment><USER3> no assignments

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> not too many freely downloadable:

[http://www.free-emagazine.com/the-javascript- anthology-101-e...](http://www.free-emagazine.com/the-javascript- anthology-101-essential-tips-tricks-hacks/)

<http://ajaxian.com/archives/eloquent-javascript>

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

<http://fecklessmind.com/2009/02/09/top-5-javascript-books/>

[http://www.reddit.com/comments/6y1km/ask_reddit_good_javascr...](http://www.reddit.com/comments/6y1km/ask_reddit_good_javascript_books_what_do_you/)

usual suspects: Resig. Crockford,

</comment><comment><USER5> <http://ejohn.org/apps/learn/>

</comment><comment><USER6> I am sorry, that was "JavaScript: The Good Parts", <http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517748>

</comment><comment><USER6> If you want to learn correct JavaScript the only choice is "JavaScript: The Best Parts" by Douglas Crockford on O'Reilly.

</comment><comment><USER7> I found these immensely useful a) PPK on JavaScript b)JavaScript the good parts c) JavaScript: the definitive guide.

</comment><comment><USER8> Pro Javascript by John Resig.

jQuery, it's better than some mainstream languages; use it and love it.</comment>


Fred Wilson's Investment Themes for 2010 - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/01/areas-of-interest.html

<comment><USER2> Not taking Fred seriously until we hear an explanation from him of how much he knew about Zynga's shady offers business. He has been disturbingly quiet about this.

<comment><USER3> > i've tried hard to stay out of that debate because it is a false debate

> zynga makes almost all of its revenue on virtual goods

> i said in my etsy/san telmo post the other day that more tractors are sold > every day in farmville than are sold in the US every year

> that's where the money is in social gaming

> the "scammy ads" thing is total red herring that everyone got excited about > but is almost entirely irrelevant

in the comments to that post: [http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/01/areas-of- interest.html#comme...](http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/01/areas-of- interest.html#comment-27834334)

<comment><USER4> > i said in my etsy/san telmo post the other day that more tractors are sold > every day in farmville than are sold in the US every year

The supply of real tractors is limited by a large number of things that cost real money including raw materials, labor, and so on. The supply of virtual tractors is not really limited by anything (marginal cost is pretty much 0), so the cost ought to be 0 or awfully close. Granted, there are costs to 'develop' virtual tractors, but those don't limit the production of them once they've been created.

<comment><USER5> Virtual tractors in fv only have one supplier. Therefore the pricing will be monopolistic and would not trend to zero.

<comment><USER4> They _ought to be_ zero were it in any way a sensible market, but it's not. I think people buying that stuff are a bit batty.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


LinkedIn Answers: Can you recommend an Angel Investor? - <AUTHOR> http://www.linkedin.com/answers/startups-small-businesses/starting-up/STR_STP/42039-1186227?browseIdx=3&sik=1178888754826&goback=%2Eahp <comment><USER2> Wow that is amazing. I've never seen anything like this. He even had people giving him their telephone numbers.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting. I asked the same question a month ago and got zero replies. Maybe my network just sucks.</comment>


How One Soup Startup Is Changing the Entertainment Industry from the Inside - <AUTHOR> https://fancysoups.com/news/2-soup-is-back <comment><USER2> I love soup!</comment>


Links 2013 - <AUTHOR> http://worrydream.com/Links2013/

<comment><USER2> Don't miss the fractal ants at the bottom! A wonderful visual analogy that shows Bret practices the ideas he's encountering in this research.

I started taking research notes this year in a similar way to the linked article: a document of quotes from books and blogs clipped with my comments. It is sort of magical the result, you reveal big ideas that talk to each other across the divisions of books. You can see it on this site, it really seems the ideas fit together into parts of a coherent overall image.

One difference in my method to Bret's is that I print my notes and put them in a binder. The physical result seems to make the ideas "more real" than when they are buried in text files.

Highly recommend this practice. Everyone has their own big ideas,perhaps only sub consciously voiced and this sort of activity helps bring them to life.

Thanks for the great link!

</comment><comment><USER3> I appreciate that the level of detail makes this list something to bookmark and revisit a few times. Huge fan of Bret!

</comment><comment><USER4> Fogus did a similar list of his 2013 bests : [http://blog.fogus.me/2013/12/27/the-best-things-and-stuff- of...](http://blog.fogus.me/2013/12/27/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2013/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Two books on the way down to my Kindle and three more on my wish queue. Fine taste.

<comment><USER6> Truly... this was some fine shit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fills my head with awe. Best thing on HN since ever.

</comment><comment><USER8> Haven't found many books that piqued my interest, but I must say this web page is so simple and beautifully designed. Well done.</comment>


Ask HN: How many ideas do you have? - <AUTHOR> How many ideas [0] do you guys get on a regular basis [1], and do you wish you could protect [2] these ideas? How much would you pay per idea for such a service [3]?<p>[0] For our purposes, an idea is something that includes intellectual property, that can turn into a business (software, hardware, any technology), a side project, a product, etc.<p>[1] "regular basis", e.g. never, once per year, once per month, once per day, non-stop-stream-of-ideas, etc. Try to be realistic.<p>[2] "protect" is a loose term and does not necessarily mean protect using traditional legal methods.<p>[3] Please provide a guess-timate of what you think is reasonable... on a per idea basis... from zero dollars to $10 per idea to $100 per idea, etc. <comment><USER2> I am a self-diagnosed idea addict. I have whole notebooks lying around full of ideas spanning the last 13 or so years. Of all of those ideas, I've never fully seen any of them through. I have a few I am trying to whittle down to turn into a functional side project. If I were to guess ideas that I have written down, I'd say maybe close to 500 or so, spanning notebooks I still am in possession of. Over the years I've probably come up with thousands, many don't get written down.

I used to come up with ideas on a daily basis, multiple times. These days I probably come up with one or two per month. I would never pay for an idea, an idea is worth nothing. As always, the execution is what matters. Before Google, there were already search engines and they came along and did it better. Before Facebook was popular, MySpace was what everyone used and then Facebook came out with a better product.</comment>


Magic 3D Clock - <AUTHOR> http://www.technoblogy.com/show?2KGV <comment><USER2> > _Here 's what my random texture looks like without any hidden image:_

It's weird to call that random. There is clearly hexagonal clustering with full symmetry across the 45 degree diagonal and shape symmetry across the opposing diagonal. I wish there were more information about how that background was chosen, because the shown image does not appear to correspond in any way with the phrase "2x2 randomly coloured squares".</comment>


Ask HN: Why does your team time track - <AUTHOR> Hello fellow comrades!
In the middle of tons of team time tracking software out there I'm wondering what's the reason behind it all. Why does your team time track?
Thanks for the honesty! :bow:
 transparency disclaimer: I'm part of a team which develops a bot for automated time tracking :) That's why I'm curious about the time tracking industry <comment><USER2> 1\. Billing 2\. Having a factual summary, every month/semester/year, of time spent on what (to inform what to start, change, stop, delegate, etc.)</comment>


Remembering the Creator of Steve Jobs, Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/commitlog/in-memory-of-dennis-ritchie-f8e4118bb19b <comment><USER2> That subtitle - "The Creator of Steve Jobs ... and Bill Gates" \- doesn't seem to make historical sense.

Unix had very little influence in the early part of Jobs' and Gates' careers, and the article doesn't give any substance to that connection.

The original Apple and Apple2 didn't have anything Unix-like. I think the earliest connection to Unix would have been with the Apple Lisa.

Microsoft's Altair BASIC also had no basis in Unix. It was developed on a PDP-10, and the BASIC language predates Unix.

The MS-DOS heritage through CP/M might include some Unix, but that wasn't part of the creation of Gates, and as Wikipedia notes:

> CP/M's command-line interface was patterned after the operating systems from > Digital Equipment, such as RT-11 for the PDP-11 and OS/8 for the PDP-8.

Unix was written first for the PDP-7 then for the PDP-11, so has a shared heritage.

<comment><USER3> Good point. Linus also learned programming with BASIC. So that's really the thing in common between Steve, Bill and Linus.</comment></comment>


ZedRipper: A 16-core Z80 laptop - <AUTHOR> http://www.chrisfenton.com/the-zedripper-part-1/ <comment><USER2> Sounds like 1/16th of a ZMOB! ("The computer of the future, using the processor of the past.")

[https://www.ijcai.org/Proceedings/81-2/Papers/071.pdf](https://www.ijcai.org/Proceedings/81-2/Papers/071.pdf)

>ZMOB: A NEW COMPUTING ENGINE FOR AI. Chuck Rieger, Randy Trigg, Bob Bane

>ABSTRACT: A new research multiprocessor named ZMOB is described, and its significance to AI research is surveyed and characterized. ZMOB, under current construction and scheduled for completion late Fall 1981, is a 256 processor machine with a high speed, interprocessor communications system called the "conveyor belt", a non-blocking, 20 megabyte/second message switcher. Because of its large number of processors, high computational throughput (100 million instructions/sec), large cumulative high speed memory (16 megabytes), high interprocessor communications bandwidth, and external communications and sensing channels, ZMOB opens some new areas of exploration in object-oriented modeling, knowledge-based and domain expert systems, intelligent sensing and robotics, and distributed perceptual and cognitive modeling. The paper attempts to blend a description of ZMOB's hardware with ideas about where and how it fits into various types of AI research.

[https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/5080/fast...](https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/5080/fastest- cp-m-z80-based-computer-ever-built)

>The fastest Z80 computer ever designed and built was almost certainly ZMOB, a 256 node Z80A cluster designed and built at University of Maryland as part of NASA NSG-7253. That's a total of 1GHz of Z80 power.

<comment><USER3> I had never heard of that machine until I posted this and someone sent me a link to it. The architecture of the ZedRipper is actually incredibly similar - each CPU has its own dedicated 64KB of memory and then an I/O mapped high- speed synchronous ring bus connects them all. On a MHz * CPUs basis, mine should actually be slightly faster =)

<comment><USER4> That was probably me, I posted a link in the Hackaday comment section. Don, I forgot about the colored LEDs. I need to find a picture!

<comment><USER2> Sorry, the only photo I have is monochrome (linked above). Maybe Bob Bane has some color photos! It ran a "Dining Philosophers" simulation that did a lot of cool blinking, and I ported FIG-FORTH to it, which was great for writing LED blinking programs.

[https://www.cs.umd.edu/sites/default/files/zelkowitz- report....](https://www.cs.umd.edu/sites/default/files/zelkowitz-report.pdf)

Laboratory for Parallel Computation and Z-MOB Around 1980, Dr. Charles (Chuck) Rieger (Figure 3.12) designed a computing system to run as a network of processors. The initial design consisted of 256 Z80A processors. Each contained 64K memory, linked together on a "conveyor belt" (a 48-bit wide slotted ring architecture), as packets of information were passed from one processor (or "moblet") to another. This "mob of Z80s" soon became known as Zmob. The system was programmed and controlled by a host VAX 11/780 computer. An Air Force Office of Scientific Research grant was obtained for building the basic Zmob hardware.

It was apparent to both Minker and Basili (after addressing the crush of student majors) that to be a top department, we needed more equipment. Minker was behind the acquisition of the VAX 11/780 (Mimsy) in 1980, which was a good start, but was insufficient. We needed terminals on every desk, additional machines like Mimsy, and a laboratory under our own control. Computers were our technology and if we couldn't have and control our own machines, our research in this area would always be hampered.

In 1982 Basili organized a proposal team, consisting of Agrawala, Minker, Rosenfeld, Stewart, and Weiser. They met and came up with the idea of a parallel computation laboratory, using some of the ideas in Zmob as a starting point. A Coordinated Experimental Research (CER) proposal was written to NSF, and in 1983 it was funded as a 5-year $4.3M grant. This grant greatly expanded the departmental laboratory, purchasing machines tove, gyre and gymble, as discussed earlier.

PRISM, under the direction of Minker, was the core of the CER project. It was conceived as the software system designed to run on Zmob, and was run as a simulator on the VAX. It used Horn clause logic (similar to the design of Prolog) to implement AND/OR parallelism. Users could specify the number of problem solving machines (i.e., moblets) to use, the number of database machines to use, and the number of machines to handle executable procedures. Statistics were collected to determine how effective the search strategy was. Users could also run PRISM in a sequential Prolog-like manner.

Continued Zmob research was funded by this grant and a version consisting of 128 moblets was built and installed in the Department laboratory (Figure 3.13). Moblets were accessed by physical address or by pattern matching. Programming in Prolog like languages was seen as the mechanism for using Zmob. Mobix was the operating system designed to run on Zmob, which would hide many of the complexities of the Zmob hardware.

Due to inexperience in hardware design, Zmob ran, but not as reliably as desired. The Z80s were 8-bit processors and became obsolete too soon. 16 bit and 32 bit versions of Zmob were designed, and a 16 node ring of 16-bit processors using the Motorola 68010 processor, called McMob, was built and used for several years. Initial design work for a further advancement, called Chessie, was started, but a prototype Chessie was never built. Work continued for several years, but after the NSF grant that suppported most of the development ended, work slowly stopped on that activity.

Mark Weiser's foot "mole" of 1986 was another interesting idea that grew out of the CER grant. Instead of using a mouse controlled by the hand, a foot pedal was developed, eliminating the need to move the hands off the keyboard in order to control the screen. Several variations were built and tested on Sun workstations, but the concept never became fully operational. Unfortunately for the Department, Weiser soon left for a research position at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and this activity also ended.

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

<comment><USER5> Funny story, in my undergrad I worked at UMIACS and we had to install a set of foot pedal mice buttons in an office next to Minker's. The user would move the mouse on their desk, but click with their feet.

<comment><USER6> I used to joke that in the future, EMACS would require foot pedals to handle all the different modifier keys it would want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love the Z80 too, and Turbo Pascal! In 1980 I was writing custom comm software for TRS-80 then Kaypro and Vector Graphic model 3. I wrote in assembly a CP/M TSR that loaded, hooked BDOS and allowed any existing program to transparently "encrypt" to and from disk by opening files matching a selectable mask (like !???????.???) so you could save "encrypted" docs from any app like WordStar. I use "encrypt" in scare quotes because it was only a snake oil XOR proof of concept... I had DES flowcharted out but saw right away that proper implementation would murder the TSR's size and throughput with 4MHz Z80 would be dismal.

Too bad, lost interest. Only a few years later with 16bit and MSDOS and faster CPU it became practical and I could have been the first such product to market but I was stupid.

I also had written a Turbo Pascal TSR program (using a 3rd party TSR toolkit) that was like strace on linux, writing system calls to disk in the background. I used it to troubleshoot many application program mysteries.

<comment><USER8> Get an Amstrad CPC6128, rig it out with an SD card, and experience the joy of 2019's releases for what is, arguably, one of the greater Z80 systems of the era.

<comment><USER9> Back in the 80s I had a TRS80 with 5 inch floppy drive, and an Amstrad CPC464 with built in cassette tape.

Having no patience to wait for games to load, I linked the two together via the parallel printer interfaces and wrote some Z80 code on either end to allow the TRS80 to store CPC464 programs.

I seem to remember only being able to use 6 of the bits for data, and using a couple of the others to signal as "clear to send" between them. The transfer was very quick, much faster than tape, but wasn't very reliable due to the dodgy connectors on the TRS80.

Using an SD card with the old micros would be miles better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As a lover of the Z80 and "what if" scenarios, I think this project is fantastic. Hacking in the purest form, for no other reason than you could. Someday I'd like to do something similar, but until then I'm just happy to know it's possible and live vicariously through updates.

</comment><comment><USER11> Disclaimer: Not a hardware engineer, nor a CP/M aficionado (though I definitely remember Gary Kildall), but a former AST Research (later AST Computer) employee. AST was an "expansion board" manufacturer turned systems OEM. During the transition from memory and connectivity boards to desktops, the company's top hardware engineers explored an architecture they based on an "intelligent, arbitrated, multi-master bus." The notion was to speed up operations and increase power by designing a bus that accommodated multiple processors (on boards, of course) operating independently - arbitrated by a central CPU. It never flew - but I always thought it an elegant model. This was in the 1986 timeframe, long before GPU's became popular.

<comment><USER12> Funnily enough, I just saw an old Computer Chronicles episode the other day which talked about how slow the bus was and they had Dell showing off a 486 + graphics board blowing away the same 486 and an ISA? graphics card.

If you haven't seen it already, the 8 Bit Guy has a fun video about working in AST's tech support in the 90's:

[https://youtu.be/2hdazA-VUf0](https://youtu.be/2hdazA-VUf0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Tangentially related question: how does one learn "computer architecture" or "computer engineering" as a _hobbyist_? I'm actually not even sure what those terms really mean.

I'm amazed that people can build homebrew computers using Z80, MOS 6502/6510, or Motorola 68k series microprocessors.

I could buy one of those homebrew Z80 kits and assemble it, but I don't think I'll gain much real _understanding_ just from the act of assembling the kit.

I have long wondered how things work down to the bare-metal level. What does it take to be able to design (and program?) a homebrew computer? Let's say I leave out the FPGA route and only focus on using real, off-the-shelf ICs.

I'm mostly just a software guy (I write Python, I've learned automata theory at University) but I haven't learned any real electronics beyond things like Ohm's law, KCL, KVL, capacitance, impedance as a complex number. I don't even know my transistors or diodes.

<comment><USER14> This book starts you off with NAND gates and then has you build an ALU, CPU, assembler, and finally a Java-like-language compiler.

The Elements of Computing Systems / From NAND to Tetris [https://www.nand2tetris.org/](https://www.nand2tetris.org/)

The first six textbook chapters (all the hardware stuff) are available on the website in the 'Projects' tab, you should buy the book for the other six. All 12 chapter assignments are available on the website. The Software section has a hardware simulator to test your designs.

<comment><USER15> I'd like to second this -- I'm slowly making my way through Nand2Tetris (currently building a VM -> assembly transpiler, and if you'd asked me to do that a few months ago, I'd have had no idea what you were talking about), and it's been really fun, taught me a lot about low-level computing, and given me the opportunity to learn a new language (I'm building everything in C). I highly recommend it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm pretty sure you don't need that beefy of an FPGA board to accomplish this; there are cheap chinese Artix A7 100T boards with 100,000LUTs, almost 512k of block RAM, and 256MB of DDR3 RAM available for under $100 USD; I doubt a Z80 core would take more than a couple thousand LUTs.

For my own project I have a PicoRV32 RISC-V core running at 150mhz, with HDMI output, character set generator, sprite graphics generator, bitmap graphics output, and a UART all in under 8000 LUTs...

<comment><USER17> From the article:

        > As I've mentioned before, all of the logic so far is
        > pretty lightweight, occupying a mere 7% of on-chip
        > logic resources

The author is well aware the board is overkill. He also mentions elsewhere he used it because he happened to have it on hand, not because it's a particularly good fit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> The lovely plywood case reminds me of the luxurious Z80 based NorthStar Horizon! (Nee "Kentucky Fried Computers".)

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

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

<comment><USER18> Nothing says "the 1970s" quite like wood paneling :-D

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This _really_ reminds me of TIS-100 which is a game by Zachtronics where you inherit a weird computer with a bunch of minimalistic cores that you have to program in assembly language. I really enjoyed playing it for a while until it started feeling too much like real work.

</comment><comment><USER20> A small part of me was hoping this would contain 16x physical through-hole Z80 chips. Alas, 'tis FPGA.

<comment><USER21> As far as I know, the fastest production Z-80 chip (the Z-80H) ran at 8MHz. This one runs at 84MHz per CPU!

I switched from 8-bit (Z-80B) hardware to 16-bit (i386) hardware once the 16-bit PC could emulate the Z-80 faster than any physical Z-80 processor could run. I feel fortunate to have skipped the 8088 and 80286 PCs which all ran slower than my Z-80B for most things.

I kept one of my old CP/M machines in my parent's garage for 10 years, and then tried to resurrect it. It was an IMSAI 8080 with CompuPro hardware that I had modified to allow the front panel to work while allowing the system to run at 4MHz. I had also implemented software configurable baud rate and start/stop/parity selection by hacking the hardware and customizing the BIOS.

Unfortunately when I resurrected it, it booted and ran for only a short time before the ST851 hard drives scraped the oxide coating from the system disks. (I destroyed all of the backups while troubleshooting.)

I gave the whole system away before I discovered that they are actually still quite valuable, but I have no regrets. I much prefer a more modern computer.

<comment><USER22> If you expand that to Z80 _compatible_ chips, the fastest was (is, possibly, as I think it's still being made) the Zilog eZ280 at 50 MHz -- which, given that it runs at about three times as fast as the Z80 at the same clock frequency, is like having a 150 MHz Z80.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zilog_eZ80](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zilog_eZ80)

My TRS-80 Model 4 back in the day (circa 1988, I think) had been upgraded with a HD64180 CPU, which apparently could run at least at 10 MHz -- although I'm pretty sure the third-party expansion board I was using ran it at 6.144 MHz.

<comment><USER23> You may be aware, but to add to your comment...

Good ol' Z80s are still in active production as well, and you can buy a 20MHz chip in a DIP, LQFP, or PLCC package.

Anyone who is interested should check out the RC2014 and retrocomp google groups. Lots of discussion there, and there are a few people selling Z80 and Z180 computer kits.

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/rc2014-z80](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/rc2014-z80) [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/retro- comp](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/retro-comp)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Nice - I've always wanted to run all Scott Adams adventure games at exactly the same time.

<comment><USER21> I think you meant Douglas Adams. Also, AFAIK he never released any for CP/M. Those began in the PC era.

<comment><USER22> No, he meant Scott Adams. Not the Dilbert guy.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams_(game_designer)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams_\(game_designer\))

The Scott Adams adventure game series was published around 1978-83, and started on the TRS-80 Model I. I don't know if there were ever official CP/M ports, but they were certainly of that era.

<comment><USER21> Thanks for the clarification! I hacked TRS-80 Model I hardware (for a friend), but I never cared much for TRSDOS or Lifeboat so I have missed out on that software experience.

I guess this was a port of the classic Adventure game to Tandy. I had the CP/M version (550 point Colossal Cave Adventure). I had played it even earlier on RT-11 where it took about half an hour to load from two 8" floppies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> That is not a cheap FPGA --- I couldn't find the exact model but other Stratix IV GX are in the $10k range.

<comment><USER26> Definitely, although they're using basically none of the logic resources. You could probably get the bulk of the result with an Artix 7 and a memory controller (instead of using all those large BRAMs). Or just an Artix 7 and not allocating 64kB of BRAM for each core.

$129 for an Artix 7 development board is a steal [1].

[1] [https://store.digilentinc.com/arty-a7-artix-7-fpga- developme...](https://store.digilentinc.com/arty-a7-artix-7-fpga-development- board-for-makers-and-hobbyists/)

<comment><USER3> Yeah, if you just replaced the 64KB of RAM with a 4KB cache backed by DRAM, you could probably fit 64 cores in one of those no problem, but 1) the performance wouldn't be quite as good, and 2) this project was mostly an exercise in excess since I was trying to find something to do with my giant FPGA board.

<comment><USER27> I'm guessing that simple one-way ring IPC mechanism is going to be a bottleneck in a hurry as you add more processors.

<comment><USER3> It's current manifestation is very much a 'good enough' solution. I just wanted a scheme for simple all-to-all connectivity to map the serial ports to, and the only traffic it carries at the moment is either terminal traffic or disk data from the SD card, so it's not even close to being taxed. The obvious improvements are to add deep buffers to hide the latency of credit return, crank up the clock and to make the bus wider. This board could probably handle a 200-bit wide bus at 100 MHz+ speeds with no problems. Computer architecture is a fun hobby =)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Interesting. The original Intel 8086/8088 (iAPX 86) manuals discussed multiple processors too. Can't wait for a Concurrent CP/M-86 "NET" version done with 74ALS/ALVT/LVT/LVX glue. ;) Or get really fancy by shoving all the glue into an FPGA.

[https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_inteldataBrsManual_570...](https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_inteldataBrsManual_57011881)

Awesome 74xx/40xx series logic quick reference

[https://www.mouser.com/catalog/supplier/library/pdf/STLogic....](https://www.mouser.com/catalog/supplier/library/pdf/STLogic.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm just amazed at how many people dig the Z80 as much as I do. It's so cool seeing all these projects on my favourite CPU.

I mean this stuff would have seemed absolutely incredible to my 18 year old self. And so very cool to see a reference to MP/M. Though I seem to recall needing to use 8080 mnemonics to work on MP/M?

<comment><USER30> I bet a lot of us got our start doing low-level programming for the Z80. I remember learning to program assembly from the manual for a TI calculator. I'm pretty sure those things are still ubiquitous. It's probably the easiest way to learn assembly programming on real hardware anymore.

<comment><USER31> Having no other resources, as a kid I sent Zilog a letter asking for a copy of their Z80 docs. Probably wrote it in crayon.

Bless them, they sent it, and that's how I got started learning microprocessor architecture.

<comment><USER32> This makes me smile!

<comment><USER31> Me too. It was essentially this, albeit a very early version: [http://www.z80.info/zip/z80cpu_um.pdf](http://www.z80.info/zip/z80cpu_um.pdf)

May the gods help any kid that tries to learn Intel CPU architecture that way these days. :-)

<comment><USER10> "Well Johnny, the first thing to understand is how time travel works. You see, our CPUs guess at what you wanted to do next and start executing the pipeline before they know for sure, and sometimes it's wrong, and..."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Only slightly related but I did a test of my emulator front end awhile ago running several hundred ZX Spectrums [https://youtu.be/BjeVzEQW4C8](https://youtu.be/BjeVzEQW4C8)

<comment><USER34> That is pretty amazing! I managed to get four emulator instances running CP/M inside of Unreal Engine. Could have added more but I'd have needed to build a bigger spaceship.

[https://imgur.com/Cv8HGIz](https://imgur.com/Cv8HGIz)

Close up of disk drives and an instance running Wordstar:

[https://i.imgur.com/rIY1he8.png](https://i.imgur.com/rIY1he8.png)

<comment><USER33> Is your project inspired by 0x10c? The graphics look amazing. I ended up using Irrlicht which .. does not look amazing.. but it has support for dynamically loading arbitrary 3D models which was more important to me for now since I am focused on Lua scripting for it.

I added a physics engine and started working on a demo with a jet/ship thing controlled with a C64 assembler program but it had a lot of work left and I will have to go back to it after I get more basic stuff going.

<comment><USER34> Yes partially inspired by 0x10c, I used to post my updates on that subreddit a year or two back. Thank you for the compliment.

I integrated color VT100/ANSI support into the terminal emulator and had basic TCP/IP network working with a simple telnet+zmodem client as well. So you could log into BBS's on the Internet and download files to the CP/M systems:

[https://i.imgur.com/6V97v57.png](https://i.imgur.com/6V97v57.png)

[https://i.imgur.com/fhqef4c.png](https://i.imgur.com/fhqef4c.png)

[https://i.imgur.com/K44GT1W.png](https://i.imgur.com/K44GT1W.png)

Mine was really a prototype, since then I've been working on a 68000 based emulator and an OS for it which I might integrate back into UE4 day. The other issue I ran into was how to go about simulating the spaceflight part of it. Somebody gave me a pointer about that though earlier today so I might have to get back into it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This thread should be summarized and reposted as an article by itself. So much interesting stuff here.

</comment><comment><USER36> How does the speed measure up to theoretically emulating 16 Z80 cores on a Raspberry Pi?

<comment><USER37> [https://floooh.github.io/2017/12/10/z80-emu- evolution.html](https://floooh.github.io/2017/12/10/z80-emu-evolution.html) Based on this article I think RPi will not handle cycle accurate emulation at this level of performance, but it could easily do instruction level emulation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Loved the Z80 on my Amstrad CPC 464! I used an assembler typed in by hand from a magazine.

Geekiest accomplishment: A disk loader for Spindizzy. The game was too large for the main memory with the disk driver loaded.

Had to use the video buffer to load the game in two parts and splice them together (overwriting the disk driver). Fun times!

</comment><comment><USER39> I would love to have a computer based on Z80. One of my happiest times were with ZX Spectrum. If I had a laptop with reasonable screen and keyboard, and text mode, some kind of linux Arch or something. It would be perfect.

I would not pay $1000 for experience, but some more reasonable amount, totally.

<comment><USER40> This is kind of what you are after... But it is 6502 not Z80.

[https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Commander_X16](https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Commander_X16)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Someone needs to recompile zork to make use of this, just image the time assisted speed run you could get ;)

Zork TAS [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIXUSyC9dpM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIXUSyC9dpM)

</comment><comment><USER42> "Future Plans (...) Joystick-like pointing device" \- oh man, laptop with joystick instead of trackpad would be so weirdly cool - like a gadget from Kung Fury, awesome.

<comment><USER43> TrackPoint is basically a joystick.

<comment><USER2> Ted Selker, who developed the Trackpoint at IBM Almaden Research Lab, always calls it the "Joy Button", but IBM just wouldn't go with that. But at least they made it red (thanks to industrial designer Richard Sapper)!

TrackPoint (2011) (microsoft.com) [Buxton Collection]:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9437780](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9437780)

[https://www.microsoft.com/buxtoncollection/detail.aspx?id=60](https://www.microsoft.com/buxtoncollection/detail.aspx?id=60)

Some stuff I wrote about the Trackpoint and relative input devices in general:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18340403](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18340403)

>Input devices should allow users to configure a velocity mapping curve (which could be negative to reverse the motion). X-Widows had a crude threshold-based mouse acceleration scheme, but it's better to have an arbitrary curve, like the TrackPoint uses, that can be optimized for the particular user, input device, screen size, and scrolling or pointing task at hand.

>[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Mouse_acceleration](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Mouse_acceleration)

>One of the patented (but probably expired by now) aspects of the Trackpoint is that it has a very highly refined pressure=>cursor speed transfer function, that has a couple of plateaus in it that map a wide range of pressures to one slow or fast but constant speed. The slow speed notch is good for precise predictable fine positioning, and the fast speed notch is tuned to be just below eye tracking speed, so you don't lose sight of the cursor. But you can push even harder than the fast plateau to go above the eye tracking plateau and flick the cursor really fast if you want, or push even lighter than the slow plateau, for super fine positioning. (The TrackPoint sensor is outrageously more sensitive than it needs to be, so it can sense very soft touches, or even your breath blowing on it.)

Ted Selker demonstrated an early version of the "pointing stick" in 1991:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hhnlaUxsL8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hhnlaUxsL8)

Ted always reminds me of another distinguished "Button Man": Mr. Lossoff from Nero Wolfe's "Mother Hunt". Those Button Men can be pretty intense!

[https://youtu.be/UBOG5556_0g?t=12m5s](https://youtu.be/UBOG5556_0g?t=12m5s)

<comment><USER43> > _it 's better to have an arbitrary curve, like the TrackPoint uses, that can > be optimized for the particular user_

Maybe you could even learn the curve by counting pointing error (measure the overshoot before clicking), and maybe make it two dimensional (i.e. the sensitivity and acceleration are different based on the direction).

I use a program called BrightML to do automatic screen brightness control. It's innovative in that it accounts not only for time of day, location, and ALS if you have it; but also considers which application is focused when you set the brightness. If there is an application which you always turn down the brightness for when it's focused, it'll turn it down in anticipation.

A similar thing could probably be done for the TrackPoint acceleration.

<comment><USER2> That's a great idea, especially since the ideal profile would differ between different apps (or different parts of the same app, like drawing area -vs- toolbar -vs- text editor).

Ted wrote some amazing stuff about adaptive curves and other cool ideas he tried, at the end of his whirlwind exposition to Bill Buxton:

[https://www.microsoft.com/buxtoncollection/detail.aspx?id=60](https://www.microsoft.com/buxtoncollection/detail.aspx?id=60)

>The ones that got away are more poignant. I designed adaptive algorithms we were exploring- we were able to raise the tracking plateau by 50% for some people, and if we had had the go ahead we could have made that stable and increased performance tremendously. It seems some people used tendon flex to improve pointing- we found this looked like overshoot and we had trouble making the adaptive algorithms stable in the time box we gave it. We made a special application that was a game people played to improve their pointing –as their game play improved the transfer function improved too! We made a surgical tool that used a Trackpoint to allow tremor-free use of a camera from a laparoscope. We made a selector for the FAA to do ground traffic control that saved a multihundred million dollar contract for IBM with the government. I would have loved the product to change cursor movement approach for form filling, text editing and graphical applications; again that could probably double performance. Yes, I s till want to do it NOW. We built a gesture language into the Trackpoint that can be accessed in the firmware; the only aspect the driver exposes is Press to Magnify or Press to Select. We created probably two dozen haptic feedback Trackpoint designs. They improved novice performance and were loved by the special needs community. I did a preliminary study that showed how novices selected faster with it; the product group saw no need to spend the money for that. We made a science experimental test bed to teach physics that never shipped; we made many versions of multi-Trackpoint keyboards that never shipped. We made many other things too- a versatile pointing device for the table called Russian tea mouse allowed for full hand, thumb, finger, or in-the-palm use. We made pen like stalks that allowed selection without taking hands off the keyboard. We made devices that used one set of sensors to run two input devices. We made an electormechanical design used by one special user. We found that brushing th e top instead of pressing it could give amazing dynamic range, at the expense of having to cycle the finger for long selections. The joystick for this had no deadband, it had an exquisite sensitivity and control … we never made an inkeyboard device that shipped with this alternative set of algorithms and scenario. I designed better grippy top ideas that never made it; also better sensitivity solutions that never made it too. And I hate to say it but there are many other improvements that I made or would like to make that I could elaborate further on but will stop here…..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Supercool.. I like how basic the setup is for multiple cores, and how it can show you how accessing shared memory can work. It's very concrete, and visible.

</comment><comment><USER45> Wish I had US$5000 FPGAs to just have fun with like this!

<comment><USER46> you can have one by buying Chinese dev boards from aliexpres [https://www.eevblog.com/forum/fpga/a-xilinx- kintex-7-board-o...](https://www.eevblog.com/forum/fpga/a-xilinx- kintex-7-board-on-aliexpress/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Would be nice on the Pano G2 (100k/150k Spartan 6), which is a lot more affordable than this board ;-)

 _Mentally adds the ZedRipper right after Leon and RiscV_

</comment><comment><USER48> well that sounds like tons of fun. The ring bus sounds a bit like the communication channel in some disk channel controllers where each disk would get the instruction and pass it on to the next one on the chain if it wasn't for it.

I definitely want to see if I can bring something like this up on one of the many FPGA boards I have in my junk drawer!

<comment><USER35> There is a Smalltalk derived machine by one Jecel Assumpcao that uses this architecture as well.

[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309254446_Adaptive_...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309254446_Adaptive_compilation_for_an_object- oriented_and_reconfigurable_architecture)

<comment><USER49> My design used a 2D mesh built from register insertion ring networks. But that is a small implementation detail - the general idea is the same.

<comment><USER35> Hah! Thank you for the correction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> This is a new art form. I love it.

</comment><comment><USER51> Like. Want.

</comment><comment><USER52> A. Wow B. I don't want to put the creator in any way down, but always feel a little bit cheated by FPGA use.</comment>