harnhua

50 minutes each way on the train + 10 minutes by bus, in Singapore. Hence, 50-60 minutes each way is normal to me.

I'm guessing that you drive, and have to focus on traffic, but do you listen to audiobooks and stuff along the way?

Crowded trains aside, I try to make use of the commute time as much as possible - reading, emailing, etc. If there's a comfortable sling of some sort where I can strap my laptop to and work in the train, I'd buy that in a flash!

I work on Tcl, Perl and shell scripting for Windows and Linux environments, to automate semiconductor chip design over networks.

It's part electrical engineering (my background), part OS-level scripting, part data-parsing, and I'm enjoying the cross-domain development very much as it seems to encourage thinking about problems from multiple angles and levels of abstraction.

For (1), from a young company's perspective, I've found it much easier to communicate and steer in the same direction when a teammate on a project is in the same room. As another person pointed out, face-to-face collaboration is vital at the growth stage.

As for (2), I sort of telecommute (work from a cafe or public place) sometimes when I need to work on an individual task that requires some creativity or sustained concentration. Changing my physical environment from time to time also seems to help stimulate creative juices. During those times, the office environment can be detrimental.

Often I need to create user guides and demo videos for products, and the screen capture features help a lot.

To capture:

- the entire desktop: Command-Shift-3. (Automatically saved as a PNG file on your desktop)

- part of the desktop: Command-Shift-4

- specific application window: Command-Shift-4

Add Control to these shortcuts to place the screenshot on the clipboard. Also try the bundled Grab utility for more related features.

For me it was more of seeing an end-user need not being served and slowly mulling over ways to serve that need, progressing to building a prototype on my own time, finding an equally-motivated co-founder, before finally going full-time.

The end-user need wasn't served because of both technological and business reasons. Customers complained without much being done, so I thought that might be an opportunity.

Looking for a junior Software Engineer - Java in Singapore. (Sorry, must be located in Singapore)

The team at Plunify is seeking a talented and enthusiastic Java developer to help build a cloud computing platform. Work with the latest Web technologies to bridge the gap between the desktop and the cloud. Most importantly, be passionate about creating great software, be able to learn quickly and be a team player.

Your role is to develop, maintain and support Java applications that work with our proprietary platform. Refine and enhance security of existing Java applications. You will also be required to learn and understand how to integrate your applications with various hardware and software systems.

Required: - BS/MS CS or related majors. (New graduates welcome) - Strong programming skills in Java - Willingness to learn - Fluency in written and spoken English. Any other languages are a bonus! - Deep interest in cloud computing - Any experience in database/SQL and web scripting technologies, e.g. PHP, Javascript is a plus

Get in touch via recruit at plunify dot com!

Some compiles take a few hours so I have no choice but to jot down whatever state the current project is in and switch context to some other project...

I'm in a similar situation, and am struggling with the same question. From some desktop research and talking to investors/other startups, it seems like "0.1% - 2% of post-Series A stock" is a reasonable range depending on the results an advisor might bring about. (http://venturehacks.com/articles/advisors-part-2)

Are you planning to draft a legal agreement of sorts with this person? If yes, it may be helpful to tie in dollar amounts with milestones to determine equity percentages, I think. Personally I find it hard to quantify how much connections and a couple of hours a week are worth in terms of dollars. If it's possible to put a revenue amount to what s/he is bringing to the table, either in a strategic "$X in the first N years" or "$X from this release within N years" kind of way, that may help to crystallize the equity percentage somewhat.

(Disclaimer: I was born in Singapore, educated in the US and lived in the SF bay area for a while. Among other things, the overseas experience made me question a lot of things about Singapore and the US)

I beg to differ with the article and wonder if I'm a product of the system as the author described or that maybe he just hasn't lived long enough in Singapore. A lot of the content is outdated, in my opinion.

May I respectfully give a personal perspective on some remarks that I feel are rather over-the-top. Please let me know if you agree/disagree:

> A lot of people ask me what I think a free China would look like. I said possibly very similar to Singapore, and the truth is, there is a lot in common with China.

To be frank, I think that could not be further from the truth. As a Singaporean Chinese, I find my way of thinking very different from that of friends and even relatives from mainland China. It has been reported that Deng Xiaoping and other senior members of the Chinese government looked to Singapore for ideas on economic, social and political reform back then, but I think how policies were eventually implemented were very different.

> Don't forget to remember the simple guideline that epitomizes Singapore's reaction to lawbreaking on the back of the disembarkation card on the plane in bold, all-caps red letters: "Welcome to Singapore. Death to drug traffickers under Singapore law."

Like what someone else said, on paper, Singapore looks horrible but in reality, it's just like any other country. I chew gum on the streets, I could leave trash outside of bins if I wanted to, sometimes I forget to flush after using a public restroom... (silly examples but tongue firmly in cheek) all without penalty.

On one hand, some laws like the penalties for drug-trafficking seem draconian by comparison. On the other, I wonder if it is because of these strict laws that one is able to wander around alone almost anywhere at night without fear. Or simply, if you don't want to be arrested, don't bring illegal drugs into the country...

> Also don't get stuck there with out health cover/travel insurance or you will regret it, its not malaysia/thailand.

You're right that on average Malaysia/Thailand heathcare costs are probably cheaper. Currently I have no health insurance and pay less than US$30 every time I go into a public health clinic for a cold, an annual physical or a dental checkup. A lot of people from the region actually come to Singapore for good, reliable health-care, leading to a medical tourism boom in recent decades.

> Challenge the Lee dictatorship and comeback and tell us how little they care.

Well, I question government policies openly in public, and so far, I haven't found myself behind bars. Maybe I'm just not important enough ;)

Speaking about the government... I wish for more transparency on how the government invests money from its sovereign funds(i.e. taxpayers' money). I hope silly election tactics like redrawing of electoral boundaries won't be used anymore, etc.

But I do want the efficient, corruption-free(at certain levels, it still helps if one has the right connections though) bureaucratic processes to continue to flourish.

As a startup founder, I found it a breeze to get incorporated(2 days), rent an office and complete the administrative-type tasks. However, innovation certainly seems to be a problem. The jump from years of mainly being indoctrinated with "trust the government to do the right thing", "study hard and be a good worker" to "come up with your own ideas!", "be unique!"(which ironically, is being promoted by the government!) will take some time, I guess.

Government-supported investment funds may abound, but I get the impression that those guys are terribly risk-averse and want to back certain winners.

> Singapore Airlines is notorious for discriminating age, sex, and lookgs for its flight attendants.

I'm not a fan of Singapore Airlines, but one is certainly free to sue them for discriminatory practices.

Pardon my long, at times sarcastic response. I guess I get somewhat annoyed when binary statements are repeatedly made based on things that I think have obvious shades of gray.

Anyway, come to Singapore and let's have coffee sometime; I'd love to meet up with fellow HNers and chat about this funny island country of mine!

Hmm... I guess I don't see any part of the original sentence that implies what you just wrote.

I'm guessing that the speed, convenience and ease of abstraction that a higher-level language like C++ or Java offers is a pull-factor for CS instructors. Apart from systems-level programming classes, of course.

Someone mentioned "Why C when higher-level languages will suffice?" and I thought that's pretty much spot on. In a data structures class, it seems easier not to have to debug cryptic core dumps and segmentation faults too often, especially since the focus is on algorithms. At least, that's the impression I got when speaking with TAs and professors.

Or perhaps there are less systems-level programming enthusiasts nowadays?

I took the class you TA'd, way back when the textbook was still a draft and absolutely loved it! As an EE guy, it was great to be able to get at the bits and bytes and really understand what it meant to be fetching, executing, branching to, jumping to instructions, allocating memory etc. The transition from assembly language to C was natural and I loved/hated every single core dump / segmentation fault that came with it. That class helped tremendously in getting me my first job, but I guess there are plenty of jobs that don't require working knowledge of C.

Thank you!

I hope my reply was somewhat helpful in terms of answering your questions. Always glad to meet other hardware folks here on HN.

Thank you!

We're in beta and are still figuring out the pricing as we go along. Absolutely agree that cost, among other things, stands in the way of many independent developers.

I'm currently working on an FPGA-related startup, not manufacturing hardware but developing an online FPGA development platform (http://www.plunify.com).

Octopart is a YC-funded search engine for electronic parts.

One reason why I'm listing these indirectly-related examples is that hardware for me seems to involve an ecosystem of different companies, each painting part of the overall picture. To me it's a very inter-connected industry: from the hardware manufacturers to the design houses to the software tool providers to the customers, etc.

As you said, manufacturing and selling a hardware product requires a sizable capital investment, not to mention challenges of maintaining a logistical operation. If the product design is not too complex, one can get it manufactured for cheap in Taiwan or in China... startups based somewhere else will just have to find the nearest board house to do the first prototypes.

Fabless is of course a good way to go as it eliminates a lot of the costs. That also brings with it business-model-related questions: do you sell the IP or do you actually want to make something in the end? Are you thinking about opensourcing your IP? Etc...

There are hardware-as-a-service startups, opensource hardware startups like Arduino(http://www.arduino.cc/), and many such companies coming into the market in recent years. It's definitely a rich playground with decent barriers to entry(hardware expertise, market knowledge, connections) and I feel that there isn't a "killer" business model out there yet for smaller players to capitalize on.

Would be interested to know what other hardware-related startups are doing!

Always challenge yourself and make little, concrete steps towards achieving bigger goals.

I think it also depends on whether your confidence comes from within or without. For example, does one need external praise for something one has done in order to gain confidence? Or is it enough to just personally feel that a goal set has been well-accomplished?

Becoming successful and rich inspires confidence in a spiral, like what other posters have said. Faking it but always have something real--be it facts, good estimates, faith etc. behind to back it up also helps, I think.

Can't say I'm successful and rich, but I am confident and that probably came from doing things and getting positve feedback about them, and from inspiring quotes along the lines of, "Confidence, or the lack of it, is entirely up to you yourself."

We make a design platform for engineers, and as both founders have technical backgrounds, we talked with around 30-40 engineers (presumably our target customers) about our product before starting to code.

Turns out, feedback from friends was almost always positive and encouraging("Great ideas! Go for it!"), but we must have neglected to either ask people who aren't friends and family, or we didn't emphasize enough the question, "Will you pay for it and how much?" :)

Luckily, after spending 6 months making a beta, we got in touch with real customer leads, and found that while our product features are still relevant, we must position and market it differently to stand a chance.

So while there's still a long way to go, market validation is one of the things we should have done better.

A good run in the evening and making a point not to think about code/sales/marketing 1-2 hours before sleep seem to work well for me.

The cold shower trick and its physiological effects sound really interesting. I always take cold showers at night but since temperatures always hover around 26-32C with close to 90% humidity (being 1 degree north of the Equator), that doesn't always help.

Went full-time last August to work on an FPGA test/design tool http://www.plunify.com

Probably sounds very focused ;) but there are so many things that can be done in this space.

Feel free to message me at harnhua (at) gmail (dot) com

As I was trained in Verilog and know little about VHDL, to be honest, I'm not quite sure why "code" is inappropriate.

But thinking about your(blasdel's and gte910h's) comments, I'm beginning to see how error-checking can and should be different for FPGA development.

I haven't had much luck reaching out to developers via cold email either. Face-to-face seems to work best. Even phonecalls result in most people activating their anti-sales shields.

As other posters mentioned, a brief, straight-to-the-point subject followed by at most two paragraphs. Personally, I'm not a fan of flowery language either because it sounds a little insincere. There may be cultural differences here.

To Japanese developers, my emails tend to be wordier and often the only form of response seem to be a visit to our site. That's good enough for me, for now.

Not that it's terribly successful, but I usually try to make a (genuine) reference to something the other party has published / written / made before saying something relevant to it like, "for your product X/task X, would you consider trying out something like Y(our product) to see if <benefits> can be realised?"

Are there industry seminars or travel tradeshows in your area where the airlines come out to interact?

Perhaps small / budget airlines are good targets to start with.

If you can reach out to their customers via a forum, that might indirectly validate your product and bring attention to the airline companies via those customers.

Oooo, an intelligent parser of FPGA code would be lovely. The parallel nature of hardware code presents very interesting challenges for such a parser, I think.

Recently I came across a company called www.sigasi.com that promised lovely things about VHDL development but I haven't really looked into them yet.

Existing FPGA tools spit out a LOT of warnings that are potentially helpful but are too verbose for anyone to remain sane trying to decipher all of them.

Thanks!

Would that diminish the value of our service if it only runs on companies' internal servers and not enjoy benefits in parallelism that we can give them?

I guess if they are too worried about IP, offering the downloadable service is perhaps the best alternative.

No worries, please criticize as much as you like--that's how we can improve.

In fact, you've already convinced us to do the spreadsheet export thing. I see your point there.

The Flash blob :) has a maximum width/height of 2880 pixels, I read.

Thanks again--we'll fix the charting bug and add the gatecount and runtime information.

The VNC interface is a stop-gap that we're trying desperately to get rid of. It's just too slow. Anything that requires installation is avoided as much as possible. (Except for Flash, unfortunately :) )

A recent HN post talked about Smokescreen, an open source Javascript/HTML5 that sounded interesting. Doesn't seem to be ready yet though.

Thanks!

Hmm... seems true, for example, in Japan we found that inter-company relationships also matter a lot in FPGA decisions. Scalable support, alas, would be hard for a startup like us to provide.

We are working on adding dev kit details for hobbyists though. That's something which seems useful, like what you said.

So it seems like convenience rather than chip selection is something that we can possibly get people to pay for? Specifically the convenience of exploring different technical options in an automated design space exploration kind of fashion.

It seems like we have features that people might like, but we have to position it in ways different to what we currently believe would work?

Our webapp is pitching a minimalistic way of doing things, in that what the libraries and TCL scripts that you mentioned do, will be done automatically. Hopefully this will highlight the convenience factor more than the "change-in-working-methods" factor.

Testing and verification definitely is a big market. Figuring out the port and sensitivity list in Verilog/VHDL code doesn't seem hard, but coming up with good test vectors automatically sounds pretty daunting (and interesting).

Before I started working on this webapp, I tried running the FPGA tools on Mac OS X without much success. That was in the days of PowerPC Macs though.

Getting the necessary libraries to play nicely was a great pain.

After Virtualbox came out, running FPGA tools on my Mac became possible.

The IP issue is probably the top question from companies we talk to.

It may very well be the killer for this webapp, and we don't have a good technical solution at the moment. However much we encrypt, the customer's IP is going to sent to our Cloud anyway.

This reminds us of Dropbox in a way.

The non-technical "trust" factor seems to be very important here. Why would one trust a consultant or a design service company with one's IP? Because of a legally-binding contract and because of reputation / past interaction? That probably plays a big part.

Some strategies we came up with:

If users don't trust us with their most important IP, we'll ask for their not-so-important IP.

A support person probably has to meet the customer on a day-to-day basis, which would somewhat defeat the purpose of a webapp, at first.

Yes, we would be selling computing power in a sense. But we're also trying to do more to simplify working with FPGAs.

It's true that cost of parts is very important; that's why we're working on reporting chip cost and availability too. Octopart is very helpful in that respect!

Thanks for your comments!

Thanks, that picture has been updated with a link to the sample report page.

Are you accessing it from an iPhone by any chance? ;)

Thanks for your thoughts!

Yes, I think it's beautiful to try to apply software/computer science/statistical methods to a hardware field.

Making builds faster via parallelism, publishing <a href="http://www.plunify.com/reports.php>statistics</a>; for an application and like you said, having some intelligent ways of indicating errors are things that we're very enthusiastic about. And it's great to read that people actually want such features.

Testing instead of chip selection? I guess I'm too used to the word "testing" being used for actual hardware testing, but I can see how the change in phrasing might appeal more.

I see; instead of greasy marketing talk, we should emphasize technical data in order to win over our target customers--the engineers. Being engineers ourselves, this makes complete sense. I wonder how we can appeal to the "suits" too.

How we're currently presenting results is something like this: Here're all the FPGAs that we've tested your application on. These are the ones who met your frequency, size, power, and this is how much they cost.

For simulators, we're trying to see if providing the open source Icarus Verilog and GHDL with custom libraries might work for people.

Can I ask you about that flasher that you wrote sometime? Not at all familiar with how they work, but a universal USB-JTAG solution would be great.

Really appreciate your comments.

Thank you.

You're right in that we're still confused about what the most important problems we think we're solving are! It seems like there are many problems in this area.

But certainly we're trying to make a standard interface for developers to create their FPGA apps, without worrying about different vendors and different FPGAs.

Although our webapp doesn't handle generic run-time reconfiguration or partial reconfiguration, I think I get your point--that unless the FPGA vendors reveal more about their hardware architectures, it's hard to build a completely generic solution.