The Collapse of Moore's Law: Physicist Says It's Already Happening - <AUTHOR> http://techland.time.com/2012/05/01/the-collapse-of-moores-law-physicist-says-its-already-happening/ <comment><USER3> People have been predicting the end of Moore's[1] law for years - since at least mid 90s.

Luckily today most people are at the point where they just don't need more power. Most people need enough to run a web browser and do a bit of word processing. They might need enough to open a spreadsheet or a presentation.

Most people would be happy with something like a good tablet and a monitor / keyboard dock.

It would be nice if the churn of "more power" could switch focus to "power efficient" or "better optimisations" or "better architecture" or even "future technology with advanced architectures".

Sure, there are people who need media streaming; or gaming; or compiling; or multicore crunching; or rendering farms; or etc. They'll always have machines. I guess parallelisation needs to improve a bit and clustering needs to get better.

[1] some of these people were using less formal definition of "double the 'power' / 'speed'" rather than more formal "double the number of transistors per IC".

<comment><USER4> There was enough power on the desktop for commercial-grade word processing and spreadsheets, at an affordable price, 30 years ago. Ignoring all the bells and whistles, there's actually not much you can do on a 2Ghz quad-core PC with 8G of RAM that you couldn't do on a 2Mhz 6502 machine with 32k or 64k of RAM.

The failure of the industry is, we have thousands of times more power - and we can't think of anything to do with it. And the keyboard of a Beeb or a C64 was much nicer than most modern keyboards too...

<comment><USER5> The answer is video games.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Two things that really interest me about this:

For a couple of decades we've been trading computational resources for programmer convenience. That worked very well when cores were rocketing up in speed year on year. But since we can't count on that, I think we'll be taking a harder look at our tools.

But I think we're going to have to take an even harder look at how we work. As processors stop getting faster, software won't become obsolete as quickly. We've all left a lot of mistakes behind in code killed in platform shifts. But now there may be no escape. I don't know what will come of that, but I'm sure interested to see.

</comment><comment><USER7> I subscribe to Kurzweil's camp in that I think the halting of Moore's law will pressure a paradigm shift in computing, like the electromechanical, relay- based, vacuum tube, transistor paradigms, the integrated circuit paradigm will cease to be relevant when something like memristors or three-dimensional molecular computing comes into play.

<comment><USER8> > the integrated circuit paradigm will cease to be relevant when something > like memristors or three-dimensional molecular computing comes into play.

What part of "integrated circuit paradigm" doesn't apply to memristors or three-dimensional molecular computing?

I ask because HP's Williams seems to say that memristors are firmly in the "integrated circuit paradigm", but maybe he means something different than you do.

<comment><USER9> Moore's law is very much rooted in photolithography which is a 2D process. And memristors do fit in this. So does the 3d computing that intel is doing now, actually, since it still has a flat product.

but if ever there were truly solid 3d computers then they might scale on a different curve, presumably sharper due to the cubic.

<comment><USER10> photolithography is already limited by heat density's. Going 3D sounds great but it's far less helpful than you might hope and clock speeds are dominated more by how long it takes a transistor to switch than how long it takes electricity to travel though those tiny wires.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Using standard silicon"...in other news, Samsung just had a breakthrough making logic circuits in graphene, and hopes to commercialize 100x faster chips by 2020: [http://www.asiaone.com/News/Latest%2BNews/Science%2Band%2BTe...](http://www.asiaone.com/News/Latest%2BNews/Science%2Band%2BTech/Story/A1Story20120519-346919.html)

And it looks like memristors will hit the market around 2015, giving us much faster storage and nonvolatile RAM. According to HP, "We put the non-volatile memory right on top of the processor chip, and, because you're not shipping data off-chip, that means we get the equivalent of 20 years of Moore's Law performance improvement" [http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/22/05/2012/53718/u...](http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/22/05/2012/53718/ucl- makes-memristors-manufacturable.htm)

Down the road a bit further, memristors could be used for neural-network coprocessors, since they function a lot like synapses.

The smooth progression of Moore's Law will probably get more jumpy, but the long-term trend goes back to mechanical adding machines.

<comment><USER12> Playing devil's advocate, if Moore's Law ends in, say, 2015 then Samsung and other chip makers may not even be in business in 2020.

<comment><USER13> I think it would take a lot longer than 5 years, even if node shrinking stopped dead.

You can always add more functionality to SoCs (eg better video decoding), tweak current cores (Intel gets more performance out of processor redesigns than node shrinks), and optimize your current node (power usage typically drops, and yield increases with time on the same node).

You would also get way more focus on GPGPU computing, with initiates like Intel's QuickSync. Lots of performance/watt to gain there, if there's no alternative.

Plus people making the hardware and software of phones and laptops need to sell units too, so they'll pick up some of the slack. Not every iPhone is a significant upgrade in terms of performance.

And lastly, a whole bunch of chips are being bought for reasons other than the old one is too slow; people are getting multiple computers, more gadgets, and in developing countries people are getting their first computers. Devices are becoming disposable. Laptops die and get replaced, even though even a Pentium M stacks up relatively well these days.

20+ years, though, you may have a point. I have no idea what that would look like. Though with depreciation on fabs slowing way down, even if sales were lower, the margins would look pretty damn good with today's prices. Plus each node shrink wouldn't be a potential disaster; the fab companies still around may even be more financially stable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Since it isn't a physical law, but an observation of average rate of advance of technology, saying that it is 'collapsing' is pretty silly.

Then the article undermines itself by talking about 3d transistors and molecular valves and other possibly ways forward.

In the end, computational density is likely to be limited by heat transfer rates. Having your CPU melt itself is rarely desirable.

<comment><USER11> If someone figures out how to make reversible computing practical, heat won't be an issue either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Moore's law has been redefined several times already. At the beginning it was every 12 months, then 18, and now it's 24. What's being measured has also changed. It used to be frequency scaling that we measured, but that changed after the debacle of the Pentium 4.

But the essence of Moore's law has always remained: the exponential growth in the capability of ICs. The other relatively constant aspect of Moore's law is that people have always predicted it to last another 10 years. When Moore first formulated the law, that's approximately what he believed. So when somebody says that they expect Moore's law to end within 5-10 years, I take that with a big grain of salt.

What will kill Moore's law will be an unwillingness to continue to spend more money to build semiconductor plants. It used to cost only a few hundred thousand dollars to build an IC plant. This cost has increased exponentially to the point where a plant today costs $10 billion dollars. It's reasonable to suppose that a consortium of semiconductor manufacturers could invest $100 billion in a plant, but on current trajectories, a $1 trillion plant may be necessary to continue Moore's law in 10 years. Do you think that will happen?

<comment><USER16> Yes.

The cost of the exotic silicon and post silicon alternatives are dramatically higher than todays costs, which are dramatically higher than yesterdays. Couple that with the fact that the majority of people have far more computing power than is necessary for their day-to-day existence (e.g. emailing, posting on FB and looking at cat pictures and/or pornography.) So costs continue to increase by some super-linear function but benefits follow a sigmoid curve.

The disconnect between marginal cost and marginal demand for computational power is what's going to knock Moore's Law off it's curve IMO, not some hard technical barrier. The futurists are always spending someone else's imaginary money, so they don't have to worry about stuff like that.

<comment><USER17> > The futurists are always spending someone else's imaginary money.

A $35 raspberry pi can outrun what used to be multi-million dollar mainframes. Are you sure that cost factors are relevant when the trend is so strongely toward lower costs? If prices drop, then lower utility uses become feasible.

<comment><USER16> Past returns do not indicate future performance. Technical innovation is slowing down, not speeding up. Raw, usable linear CPU performance at the fingertips of normal humans using personal computers has been essentially flat for half a decade, with the majority of material perf changes coming in the I/O subsystem, and yet still the CPU sits idle for the vast majority of its life.

I'm probably wrong, but it's still a reasonable position: we've seen technical stagnations before. I'm simply (and probably incorrectly) projecting the _current_ trend I see, as an end user of technology: raw straigh-ahead cpu perf is stagnating and, unless I see real progress on AI (which I don't) I'm skeptical that a lot more of it will help most people doing most things, unless we are talking a _lot_ lot more.

If some of the more exotic technologies get practical and cheap, I'm happy to be wrong, but I think it's important to note that Moore's Law was observational: he was describing what he saw happening rather than envisioning it. We no longer are seeing what he saw. A phase change may fix that, but that's very different than what we've been mining for the last half century, and much harder to project out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't know but I've always found it odd to be called a "law", that gives too much scientific credit for something that was clearly derived by simple observation and guesswork and has no underlying science to prove it except that the statement held for some time.

<comment><USER19> They acknowlege in the article it isn't a real scientific law.

<comment><USER20> In danger of being a bit too pedantic, there is no such thing as a 'real scientific law' either. Though I admit there is general understanding of what is implied by 'a scientific law', and I assume that's what you and the article is referring to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> 2 years ago I worked at Intel and they talked about Moore's law and how people always said it would end, but it never does due to continued innovation. I think everyone knows they have a lot of people working on a lot of possible solutions to these physics problems. Intel is like a supercharged academia where hitting objectives matters. They don't want engineers/physicists that say it cannot be done, those people are stuck on the outside writing posts like this one. Those posts come up continually, (do a search for "end of moore's law 200X) and you will see articles written every year.

Here is a recent quote from an interview with Mark Bohr, Intel's senior fellow and director of process architecture and integration.

""The end of Moore's law has always been 10 years away, and it will always be 10 years away," he said. He's been hearing predictions about the end of scaling since he joined the industry 30 years ago, so he isn't worried. He said 14nm is in full development and on track for manufacturing readiness in the second half of next year."

[http://forwardthinking.pcmag.com/show- reports/297801-intel-t...](http://forwardthinking.pcmag.com/show- reports/297801-intel-the-end-of-moore-s-law-is-still-10-years-away)

<comment><USER10> For a while transistor density's doubled every 12 months. That stopped happening, then for a while they doubled every 18 months until that stopped happening. Now, if your willing to accept transistors doubling every 50,000 years as the same exponential growth as doubling every 12 months then sure it will continue for a long time. But, that's not what 'Moore's law' as originally stated.

<comment><USER21> Since 1975 it has been every 24 months. I have never heard the 12 month number until reading it on HN today.

Someone at Intel at some point said 18 months, but it was most likely a 1 off conversation/presentation rather than a restatement of the law and occured well after 1975.

<comment><USER10> 12 months is what he actually said in 1965.

 _The law is named after Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, who described the trend in his 1965 paper.[2][3][4] The paper noted that the number of components in integrated circuits had doubled every year from the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958 until 1965 and predicted that the trend would continue "for at least ten years".[5]_

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moores_law>

<comment><USER21> I wish people would stop citing wiki on HN, especially without reading the entire page. On the exact same wiki page under history it says:

 _Moore slightly altered the formulation of the law over time, in retrospect bolstering the perceived accuracy of his law.[17] Most notably, in 1975, Moore altered his projection to a doubling every two years.[18][19] Despite popular misconception, he is adamant that he did not predict a doubling "every 18 months." However, David House, an Intel colleague, had factored in the increasing performance of transistors to conclude that integrated circuits would double in performance every 18 months.[note 2]_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Moore's Law was about the amount of transistors you can put in a chip cheaply, so it may be coming to an end. But I don't think it will stop machines from getting faster - we are seeing lots of progress in multi-core usage even on desktop and in mobile computing (multicore smartphones), and using dedicated hardware outside the CPU socket/package (GPGPU) is getting normal too - <USER2> look like new ways of making faster personal machines.

<comment><USER23> On the x86 front I'm a bit pessimistic. In 2006, Intel promised 80-cores by 2012 but I haven't seen them anywhere yet [0].

[0] <http://news.cnet.com/2100-1006_3-6119618.html>

(Disclaimer: don't know how the crowd here reacts to CNET articles)

<comment><USER4> Well, there was this: <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/15/larrabee_32_cores/>

<comment><USER23> It was cancelled in 2010.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(microarchitecture)>

<comment><USER4> Ah but [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_Corner_(Intel)#Knights_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_Corner_\(Intel\)#Knights_Corner)

<comment><USER23> Well played, sir.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Moore's Law in Silicon will eventually run out. This is true and is physically provable. And there are already a lot of smart minds (at Intel and at a few other companies and at many universities) developing post-silicon technologies. It is possible that we will one day shrink down to true molecular electronics using organic semiconductors or similar. As Feynman said, there's lots of room at the bottom. 3D molecular electronics are exciting for me---architectures will have to be redesigned from scratch, maybe RISCs too. It's an exciting time.

(I omit talking about quantum computing because that's currently mostly theoretical. But back in the day, Turing, Church, et al were talking about computability, etc when a real computer (von neumann architecture) did not exist yet. So maybe (I would be confident enough to say probably) down the line, we'll have a quantum computer, but it may not be soon.)

</comment><comment><USER25> I don't think we have to worry too much about it until 2030 or so. At least until 2020 it should be a smooth ride, and then they'll probably stacks chips on each other or find some work-around for the next decade or so, until something else comes out.

</comment><comment><USER26> In terms of comparing clock speed with, say, the brain: isn't it more the parallelization that we're lacking, rather than the speed? In other words lets say we _could_ parallelize a computer network as complicated as the brain... with current processor speeds, couldn't we already re-create effective human intelligence?

I guess I mean to suggest it's the parallelization/inter-connectiviy and algorithmic challenge rather than the speed challenge that has so far avoided the singularity.

Curious if others agree?

<comment><USER23> Something you're probably going to be interested in: Whole Brain Emulation. [0]

Human intelligence is IMO something that is referred to in pop culture as "emergent behavior" [1]. Problem is that you risk building the electronic equivalent of a cargo cult [2]. After all, on a cellular level of a nervous system, what's the difference between what happens in the brain of a chimp and that of a human? How detailed do you have to go to build a platform that _can_ house intelligence?

On a philosophical level you kinda end up with a contradiction: is the human brain complex enough to understand/build the complexity of a human brain? Personally I'd be happier if research in this field was a bit more modest. I once read (somewhere in the 90s) that there was a researcher in the U.S. who was mapping every cell's behavior in the fly's "brain". With current tech, it would be feasible to implement that into a simulator and see what pops out. But doing the same for a human brain? Let's first try to come up with a definition for fuzzy meta-sensations such as intelligence and emotions that would translate to computer lingo.

[0] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRB6Qzx9oXs>

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence>

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult>

<comment><USER26> Thanks for this great comment.

I'd suggest it's not a contradiction in so far as... we're not talking about one human brain creating another. We're talking about the collaborative work of countless human brains adding on to each other's work. E.g. parallelization of brains is what enables great human strides, and so far seems quite limitless :)

<comment><USER23> You're welcome.

 _We're talking about the collaborative work of countless human brains adding on to each other's work._

Every bit of progress in humanity is the work of an individual, either working individually or in group. Collaboration still revolves around individual contributions. In a lot of cases (e.g. group discussions and brainstorms) we get the impression that it's the group producing the result, but in reality it's incremental individual work.

You're claiming that collaboration can overcome the issue (complex brain understanding it's own complexity). I claim it can't : the ceiling of what can be achieved depends on what the smartest brain (so to speak) can comprehend and tie together.

An ant doesn't know how its colony functions, it takes a human to capture that. Same for us, it takes a more evolved brain to understand what makes us tick, we'll only sample aspects of it. A system can never be complex enough to understand its own complexity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm not an electrical or thermal engineer, but even if we hit a wall as far as process sizes, couldn't they make bigger dies with more cores?

Like, if we can't get much smaller than a 12-nm process, couldn't we just make the die twice as big and put a big-ol heatsink on it to get to 128 cores or whatever?

It seems like architecture is still a bigger barrier than process size when it comes to getting >16 or >32 cores on the chip. How big will the current ring bus architecture that intel has scale?

<comment><USER15> costs for larger dies do not scale linearly. A chip with twice the area is at least 4x as expensive, if not more, depending on many factors like defect density and die packing. But you're right that this is the direction that the industry will move if process innovation stops. As a process matures, defect rates drop, making larger chips more feasible.

<comment><USER27> Thanks, I appreciate that.

So basically, larger dies == greater chance a given chip has a defect, bigger cost and % of the wafer for each defective chip, and presumably more waste silicon on the wafer as well?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I thought the increases in efficiency counted in place of the increases in clockspeed.

</comment><comment><USER29> Thank god! Finally companies will start optimizing their software again.</comment>


Ask HN: What happened to rules engines? - <AUTHOR> Why are rules engines not more widely used in current software systems? <comment><USER2> You mean beyond what is Drools and OpenRules? I think CEP and to some extent ML took over w/ (IMO) better documentation and better libraries.</comment>


Obamacare Plans Bring Hefty Fees for Certain Drugs - <AUTHOR> http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_HEALTH_OVERHAUL_PRESCRIPTION_COSTS?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

<comment><USER3> Ok so under the ACA she now pays less for her medications (Celebrex does not yet have a generic, i know because i'm on it as well). The headline is link bait: Before the ACA she was paying entirely out of pocket, and now she isn't but it's still expensive. I have very expensive insure and it only brings it down to $50/mo so $85/mo seems reasonable for a cheap plan.

Anyway, to back up what i just said, here's the unabridged 2nd paragraph: "Under the plan, her Celebrex would have cost $648 a month until she met her $1,500 prescription deductible, followed by an $85 monthly co-pay."

followed by the following in the 5th paragraph: "Before the federal health law took effect, Mason paid slightly more for her monthly premium on a plan that didn't cover her arthritis or pain medications and some routine doctor's visits."

A lot of the other examples they have are "patient was trying to get name brand drug rather than the available generic". Now for some meds (birth control for example) the exact brand can be important, but for most it doesn't.

<comment><USER4> You are right that the situation for the first woman is better overall.

I think the point of the article is that for those who were previously insured who are moving to exchanges may find that the benefit design is _very_ different than their old coverage. In order to keep premiums low, insurers are keeping closed formularies and a very limited list of covered medicines.

I think this is one of those "buy beware" stories. Make sure you know what you're paying for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't understand the point of these articles.

The first example in the story is a woman that went from more expensive minimal coverage that didn't include the drugs she was using, to better coverage overall with no mention whatsoever as to how much she used to pay for the drugs before (which is presumably nearly full price or some sort of discount through the manufacturers which isn't cheap either).

The other examples were also of people that have apparently never changed health insurance plans or gotten prescriptions that weren't covered under their previous insurance plans. Or even actually read what their insurance covers.

I've had individual health insurance forever since both my parents and I were and are self employed business owners. Welcome to the world I lived in before Obamacare. Welcome to the world I live in now. I have wasted many days negotiating with insurance companies and doctors' offices in the past for both myself and my parents over drugs that were minimally covered. Think along the lines of $500+ worth of glaucoma prescriptions in a month that insurance only covered $5 of....yes, $5. And then a week without any prescriptions and dangerously high intraocular pressure trying to get the doctor to prescribe something cheaper when they themselves don't know how much anything costs and will just throw the whole medicine cabinet at you in hopes that something sticks. Or how I have a prescription for Adderall and every refill used to be an exercise in explaining to the pharmacist that they should call my insurance company because I already have a pre-authorization filed with them so I pay $20 instead of paying $300 every time.

My silver-level ACA insurance plan isn't the best ever and it's a bit pricey (well, so were my previous insurance plans), but I no longer stress out about losing my insurance coverage, I have a good idea as to what is covered and what isn't, and my insurance company and doctors and pharmacists do the best they can to accommodate my requests. I even keep running into _pharmacy techs_ that ask me with a priceless facial expression if I really, really, really want the specific asthma inhalers and quantity that I'm picking up because they keep experiencing sticker shock - "I can ask the pharmacist and your doctor to get you a different one" naw, they're all expensive, they were always expensive, and nothing will change it. Welcome to my world. 8)

ACA isn't perfect but it's a hell of a lot better than the state of things before and here's to better healthcare reform in the future.

<comment><USER6> The jury is still out on ACA. It relies on young people buying expensive plans instead of paying the relatively small fines. The switchover itself was undeniably a complete disaster and makes the midterms look grim for the Dems. On the plus side, at some point in the future we could have the GOP support single payer just because it would save money.

<comment><USER5> You're right. It also doesn't help that people keep putting out stories like the one above that make ACA sound terrible even though I'll bet that the woman in the example ends up paying less out of pocket over the course of a year than she used to. Like people expect ACA to be some magical cure for expensive and/or chronic illnesses - nope, it just makes it a little bit more bearable.

Like, I still just paid $40 for an office visit and some tests/xrays and another $200 for meds this month where when I had the same problem (bronchitis+asthma exacerbation) in ~2010 I was out like $400 with samples for the same drugs (that would have doubled the cost) and that was without the hour of tests and coaching with a wonderful respiratory therapist last week (which was, I'm convinced, the only reason I wasn't totally fucked up in a bunch of different ways leading up to and during my wedding on Saturday).

Your theoretical sounds hysterical and amazing if it actually happens, but I'm not holding my breath. I don't know what it will take for people to start supporting single payer but I hope it happens soon. Maybe if everyone just gets seriously sick or knows an immediate family member that is sick? Too many people seem to be in denial about the fact that we need serious reform still.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> People pay $800 monthly premiums in America?! And they still say that their system is better than "socialised" health care systems? Madness. Why not just pay our relatively low national insurance (12.5% of your pay check) and get free health care for everything. It would save you all money.

But I know what you are thinking... socialism is evil!

<comment><USER8> You're talking about the UK? It's not 12.5%:

[http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/ni/intro/basics.htm#4](http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/ni/intro/basics.htm#4)

"If you earn more than £149 a week and up to £797 a week, you pay 12 per cent of the amount you earn between £149 and £797. If you earn more than £797 a week, you also pay 2 per cent of all your earnings over £797"

<comment><USER7> Thank you for the correction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is actually a huge issue in the drug industry right now.

Most of the plans on the exchanges, but particularly the lower priced ones, have very large patient cost-sharing obligations. And it makes sense, if you pay a smaller premium each month, you'll have to pay a great share of the costs when the they do occur.

However, I don't think this will work out in the long run. It's one thing to ask a patient to pay 50% of a $300/month prescription (even though that's too much for many patients), but it's another to ask for 50% of a $10,000/month prescription (not uncommon for cancer).

The ACA did put a total cap on patient-cost sharing at $6,350 per individual or $12,700 per family [1]. This is a good thing since many plans prior had no limit on out of pocket costs. However, $6,350 is still a lot to ask lower income patients to pay.

One interesting outcome of this is that most drug companies are stepping up and offer patient assistance with these costs. For example, you might get a debit card that pays anything over $20, which makes it much more affordable. The funny part is that insurance companies typically _hate_ patient co-pay cards since they defeat the purpose of co-payments (drugs the insurance company don't want you to use are more expensive). However, for the really expensive drugs, insurance companies are not complaining at all. In the end, it just results in a discount by the manufacturer, in a roundabout way.

[1][https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/out-of-pocket-maximum- li...](https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/out-of-pocket-maximum-limit/)

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm always amazed at the astronomical prescription prices in the US, even with insurance. Here in the UK it's capped at £7.85 (~$13) per medication per time period, which is usually about a month - with many people on low incomes or lifelong medical conditions receiving them entirely for free.

I'm sure if it routinely cost hundreds or even thousands of pounds per month just to receive the drugs necessary to stay alive and well, I'd have been to a lot more funerals by now.

<comment><USER10> That's because _we 're_ paying the money for the development and approval of these drugs, which for each successful one has historically roughly tracked the cost of a single strategic bomber. In a Tragedy of the Commons method monopsonies like your NHS then dictate prices not far about cost of materials and production, vs., to put it pejoratively, paying your "fair share" for the existence and availability of the drug in the first place.

Don't worry, the way things are going, bit by bit, sooner or later, the US will "fix" this problem and there will be no new drugs (aside from the occasional totally politicized efforts). And people will relearn what it's like to live in a world where bacterial infections are well nigh untreatable.

<comment><USER9> I'd be interested in seeing the data to support your claim.

<comment><USER10> Turn it around: it's well established that bringing a drug to market costs 100s of millions of USD (R&D, Phase 1-3 trials, the long time and limited patent protection from that, all the failures along the way, etc.). Drug companies do not make large profits _compared to other companies_. Where does the money come from? Where _can_ it come from?

<comment><USER9> I understand your argument, but the assumption it's based on - <USER2> pharmaceutical industry income is disproportionally financed by the USA when compared (per treatment) to other developed nations - requires supporting data.

<comment><USER10> Some sure indicates there are price controls, although curiously not in Germany per: [http://www.taylorwessing.com/synapse/regulatory_pricecontrol...](http://www.taylorwessing.com/synapse/regulatory_pricecontrol.html)

NHS price controls are set below (much of?) the rest of the EU, resulting in diversion and shortages. Also, as is not surprising with monopsonies, some companies are ripping off the NHS on generics. You can find items on both with this search: [https://www.google.com/search?q=nhs+drug+price+controls](https://www.google.com/search?q=nhs+drug+price+controls)

<comment><USER9> According to the association that represents the pharmaceutical industry in Britain, the shortages you refer to were due to pharmacies taking advantage of exchange rate differences to sell medicines abroad rather than supply the UK market[1]. This would imply that the costs of medicine are not usually significantly lower than the rest of the EU, at least when the currency markets are not in flux.

There is some information available on the cost of prescription medicines in the UK (see [2]) but I don't know where the equivalent datasets would be for other countries. Would be interesting to do a comparison.

[1] [http://www.abpi.org.uk/our- work/news/2012/Pages/280212.aspx](http://www.abpi.org.uk/our- work/news/2012/Pages/280212.aspx)

[2] [http://www.hscic.gov.uk/searchcatalogue?q=title:"prescriptio...](http://www.hscic.gov.uk/searchcatalogue?q=title:"prescription+cost+analysis")

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> 30 200mg Celebrex (genuine, non generic) capsules cost about $20 in South Africa.

The gov't does control medicine prices. However, unlike some other countries (e.g. the UK), they don't pay anything to the manufacturers, that price is all they get.

I'm pretty sure if Pfizer weren't making a profit they would withdraw the drug from the market.

Celebrex doesn't cure anything, it only relieves the symptoms of joint pain. If you can't afford it you're unlikely to die, so it's a perfect candidate for the extortion racket that is the US healthcare system.</comment>


How do you keep up with all the HN? - <AUTHOR>

I don't understand. Google Reader has reached well over the 1000 news posts, and I can't keep up. Does any one keep up? <comment><USER2> I have the RSS feed in Netvibes that I check during the day/evening. I don't read everything, just skim through the titles trying to find what seems interesting to me. And from this I mark as "to read later" every article that I like but is too long to read now or to be sure to come back for comments later.

Then I also skim through the Ask HN/newest posts depending on the workload.

You don't have to follow everything, read everything, just skim through the topic that interest you. Overtime you'll instinctively dismiss a lot of articles just by their title.

And anyway, just go to the "frontpage" of HN to see which threads are really popular at a given moment.

</comment><comment><USER3> I really like Hacker Newsletter. They send me a e-mail with the biggest stories from HN every friday.

<http://www.hackernewsletter.com/>

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't read HN in reader. Nor do I bother trying to read everything, maybe just 10%. If it's important it'll either stay on the front page for a long time, or it will get reposted sooner or later.

</comment><comment><USER5> I check the "new" section and "popular stories" section once every 3 minutes.

Well, okay, not that often. But close.

</comment><comment><USER6> Well, obviously the solution is to just check it 100 times a day! :)

(that's what I do)</comment>


Researchers carve CPU into plastic foil - <AUTHOR> http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4210958/Researchers-carve-CPU-into-plastic-foil

<comment><USER2> Sweet! Maybe this is a way to create chips for the RepRap, on the RepRap.

<comment><USER3> At 25 microns thick, I doubt the RepRap will be able to complete a similar feat. If the RepRap / MakerBot ever manage to self replicate more than the pcb - electronics wise - I will be shocked.

<comment><USER4> Or at least would represent a drastic shift in how we produce electronics. One step closer to a diamond age like future.

<comment><USER5> A worthy goal to strive for, that much is certain.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What do you think of the IDE from Github – Atom? - <AUTHOR> https://atom.io/releases

<comment><USER2> once it comes to windows i'll have an opinion.</comment>


BitTorrent Sync 7 Times Faster Than Dropbox - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-sync-7-times-faster-than-dropbox-131205/

<comment><USER2> As far as metrics go, I'm not too worried about syncing speed. My main complaint with dropbox is indexing - it slows my computer to a crawl whenever I make lots of changes. Enough so that I disable it the second I'm on battery power. Anyone have any insight in to how BT sync performs in this area?</comment>


Video games kill people? CNN, sensationalism, and how to fix it - <AUTHOR> http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/article/guns-dont-kill-people-video-games-kill-people-cnn-sensationalism-and-how-to <comment><USER2> >The media's treatment of video games has moved from being merely bad to actively shameful.

I would go further and say libelous. The video game companies really need to start suing.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm pro-gun, but guns can be very dangerous. They are also very easy to secure. Buy a gun safe, buy trigger locks, don't leave any of the keys at home. ( hiding them isn't enough ) an 8 year old doesn't need access to their own(or any) gun.

The media loves to eat this stuff up for sure...

<comment><USER4> My dad first had me shoot the shotgun around 7 or 8, instead of trying to hide it or lock it up, which is a horrible idea for kids that age, since they can and will get keys for anything and be even more motivated to do so because it isn't allowed. He showed me how to properly hold and aim the shotgun, and then had me shoot a watermelon if I remember correctly.

He then explained matter-of-factly that it would do the same thing to a human, and that they would be permamently dead, so unless that is REALLY what needed to happen, not to use it. He then told me where it was kept, and that it was kept loaded and was not to be viewed as a toy. I could use it whenever I wanted, but only with adult supervision.

This actually worked rather well for two reasons. It wasn't forbidden, so I didn't feel a need to mess with the guns just to break the rules. He also specifically chose the shotgun, which has some insane kickback even if you are a fully-grown adult male, and it REALLY HURT when I used it.

I think gun locks are a bad idea for kids over about 5 or 6 because they WILL be able to find the key and unlock it. Just like they know where the Christmas presents are hidden and everything else that the parents think they have hidden from them.

At the age of 8 most kids are capable of understanding things like death, unless the parents have let them be too sheltered. They should have had a pet or two die already, perhaps a grandparent or other older relative, and older people they know through church or the like. I was well aware of the idea of death and that it is permament by that age.

On the flipside, I do recall my dad not liking Doom, and I was around 12 or so then, and didn't want me to play it. Games like that can desensitize people to violence in general, which doesn't go well with an unwillingness in American middle-class society to openly talk about death or experience it at a personal level. People try to insulate their kids from it, but they really shouldn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> We would be a lot better off as a society if we just acknowledged bad people do bad things and its their fault. Accidents happen and people aren't born bad[1], but bad people could change their ways.

Sadly, its the nature of politics / media to blame something other than the person who did it. Searching for reasons is good, but don't let that blind you to that one person's decisions.

1) ok, I have heard people say this is a might bit untrue, but I'm not sure how

<comment><USER6> An 8 year old is not a moral agent.

It's also hard to murder your grandmother without easy access to a firearm.

<comment><USER5> I said accidents happen[1]. Sadly, no, it is not hard and it happens without a firearm too. Pools and cars tend to other ways youngsters end up with a lifetime of regret.

1) yes, I classify this as an accident - the responsible party is the fool who left it out and loaded

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Grand Theft Auto IV is rated "M", and they allowed for a kid to play with a gun. Even if there is a link between the game and violence there is also some serious problem of parental responsibility.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think cutting off a key piece of the title counts as editorializing, don't you?

<comment><AUTHOR> In this case, I ran up against the 80 character limit. I do confess that when trimming it down, I went for more the more sensationalist way of editing. I think the mods changing it from "Guns don't kill people, video games kill people" to "Video games kill people? CNN, sensationalism, and how to fix it" is probably right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The beautiful thing about gun people is that as adamant as they are that their fantasy paranoia world exists and that children need to be armed at all times for 'protection' from 'Obummer', they are equally adamant about removing themselves from the gene pool.</comment>


Show HN: Real-time image manipulation with Voronoi/Delaunay - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/MauriceGit/Voronoi_Image_Manipulation <comment><USER2> For those with money to burn on custom flooring, the Voronoi transform of the rhombic Penrose tiling is lovely. From the Penrose tiling, you get that neat non-repeating pattern. From the Voronoi transform, you get something less likely to hurt your feet or get chipped-off corners.

I suggest quartzite or pearly white granite, with pink granite for the pentagons.

The pattern should also work nicely for driveways and showers, likely with different material. The feel in a shower should be almost as nice as hexagon tile, and it is possible to put perfect 5-way symmetry around a pentagonal drain hole.

<comment><USER3> Very nice:

[http://www.josleys.com/show_gallery.php?galid=284](http://www.josleys.com/show_gallery.php?galid=284)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> awesome project and beautiful visual result!

minor semantic quibble: I don't understand the use of the term "real-time" for this project. Can you elaborate on which definition is your project using, and how it applies?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, that means a lot :)

In this case real-time in the sense that one can adjust parameters and (for not too many points) get an instant result instead of an image on disk. Additionally, I used all components to have it displayed with an adjustable fps count (OpenGL based rendering).

But I see, that the meaning of real-time is a bit biased. Any suggestions?

<comment><USER5> > But I see, that the meaning of real-time is a bit biased. Any suggestions?

"Interactive"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right. Must have slipped me, fits a lot better, I agree! Next time..</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Age-related decline in eyesight may be improved by staring at red light LEDs - <AUTHOR> http://www.bioquicknews.com/node/5509 <comment><USER2> Blogspam of

[https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/jun/declining-eyesight- impro...](https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/jun/declining-eyesight-improved- looking-deep-red-light)</comment>


Pingfs: A filesystem where data is stored as ICMP Echo packets (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs <comment><USER2> This is exactly what I needed - not a lot of people are doing eventually inconsistent databases yet. If theres a network partition, shits probably fucked anyways so its best to throw away all your data.

Unfortunately the metadata (list of files) is stored in memory, not network. Not quite as unreliable as I would like.

<comment><USER3> Sounds like your looking for something like MangoDb [https://github.com/dcramer/mangodb](https://github.com/dcramer/mangodb)

Note: joke assumes parent poster was somewhat humorous

<comment><USER4> nsafs might be another good choice: [https://github.com/freedomtools/nsafs](https://github.com/freedomtools/nsafs)

<comment><USER5> I didn't realize there were so many of these jokefs projects.

It's like the software dev equivalent of those silly domain jokes:

[https://helenkellersimulator.org/](https://helenkellersimulator.org/)

[http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/)

[http://thingsididlastnight.com/](http://thingsididlastnight.com/)

<comment><USER6> Another good one: [https://github.com/philipl/pifs](https://github.com/philipl/pifs)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just had a quick look to see the general flow.

Only looked at the read path, which is roughly:

* filesystem receives read

* blocks on a semaphore ([https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs/blob/master/chunk.c#L141](https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs/blob/master/chunk.c#L141))

* network thread wakes up semaphore when ICMP reply containing data is received

* filesystem thread copies data into new buffer to return from syscall

* filesystem relinquishes chunk back to network thread, which wakes up, sends it back to be echoed on the network via ICMP, and frees the in-memory buffer ([https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs/blob/master/chunk.c#L107](https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs/blob/master/chunk.c#L107))

How silly :)

</comment><comment><USER8> This reminds me of delay line memory, storing information in the echo of a sound: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory) . LEO had long tubes of mercury for this, not sure I would have wanted to work in that office.

<comment><USER9> I think very few bits here are actually stored in-flight on the copper/fiber/radio at any time. Most of them are probably stored in various buffers of networking equipment (which are ordinary semiconductor RAM). It would be interesting to see someone do an actual breakdown for, say, a transatlantic link.

My gut feeling says that only geostationary satellite links have any significant number of bits in-flight.

<comment><USER10> Very simplified, but assuming a 5000 km cable and 300 000 km/s speed of light (is slightly slower in fiber), light needs 0.01666... seconds for that. At 10 Gbit/s (fairly slow), that'd mean ~ 166 Mbit or ~ 20 Megabyte in flight. (I hope I didn't forget a factor 1000 somewhere)

<comment><USER9> Your calculation makes sense. However, for those 20 MB in flight, how much data is stored in buffers? I think that could be approximated by comparing ping time with speed of light.

e.g. if a 5000 km long link at 10 Gbit/s has latency of 0.0166 s, then you have zero buffering. If you have latency of 0.2 s, then around 2 Gbit of data must be stored in buffers somewhere, making 20 MB in flight only 1% of all data stored in such a ping filesystem.

<comment><USER11> How about the earth-moon-earth path for 768,000km?

EDIT: For the EME path that's around 3 gigs in flight

<comment><USER12> We've found a viable way to a space elevator: Sell it as a delay-line storage device.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is the perfect transport for GNU Terry Pratchett.

[http://www.gnuterrypratchett.com/](http://www.gnuterrypratchett.com/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Previous discussions: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Pingfs%20points%3E3&sort=byDat...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Pingfs%20points%3E3&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0).

</comment><comment><USER15> Reminds me a little of PingTunnel :) [https://www.cs.uit.no/~daniels/PingTunnel](https://www.cs.uit.no/~daniels/PingTunnel)

<comment><USER16> The author of PingFS is actually the same as iodine (IP over DNS: [http://code.kryo.se/iodine/](http://code.kryo.se/iodine/)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Prior art [https://www.shysecurity.com/post/20120401-PingFS](https://www.shysecurity.com/post/20120401-PingFS)

</comment><comment><USER18> Of course the gut reaction to this is "why?" and the obvious answer is "because I can"... that's fine, but there's been plenty of filesystems built on protocols or things that weren't really supposed to be filesystems.

I remember way back when gmail first announced giving away 1GB of storage, there were a bunch of hacky things to turn SMTP into a real filesystem.

So, I get the answer to "why make this weird filesystem", but I'd really like to know: why is this weird filesystem, weirder or more intriguing than the others that have come before it.

</comment><comment><USER19> This needs IPO.

<comment><USER20> You mean ICO, right?

<comment><USER21> Want to buy some ICMPCoins?

<comment><USER22> Ping Coin or i'm out!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Can't wait for the ICO.

</comment><comment><USER24> redundancy == broadcast ping

</comment><comment><USER25> Cool .. all we need now is a host waaaaay out in space, and we can just use space itself to store all our data (not that we aren't already) ..

</comment><comment><USER26> not exactly new: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=pingfs&sort=byPopularity&prefi...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=pingfs&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

</comment><comment><USER27> _Linux is the only intended target OS, portability is not a goal._

Goodbye then.

<comment><USER28> You can fork it and port it to something like dokany to make it work in Windows.

<comment> Const-me Based on Annatar's profile, he'd like it to work on FreeBSD.

<comment><USER27> illumos and it's the programmer's "Linux only" attitude which irritates me.

<comment><USER29> I get your sentiment in general but... you're upset because a tool for _storing files in IMCP pings_ isn't available on your OS? Poor you, where else are you going to keep your files!

<comment><USER27> No, I'm irritated because of the programmer's attitude, which is quite systemic in programming and has been for a while.

<comment><USER29> Well, it's not merited, and you're being rude. I'm saying this as someone who references the POSIX standard several times a week to ensure portability. This kind of tool is a toy project and is by its nature highly dependent on non- portable interfaces.

<comment><USER27> If you're against GNU and Linux like I am then it is very much merited.

I utterly fail to see how being honest and direct by expressing my irritation is rude and am both insulted and appalled by what I perceive to be the Anglo- Saxon definition of rude hoisted upon me. I could just as easily turn this around and say that your lack of consideration for what is a different value system is just as rude. The entire argument around "rudeness" is nonsense, I'm not at all sorry to write.

<comment><USER29> Buddy, I hate GNU and Linux as much as you do. More, probably. You and I are on the same side here. You can either continue to attempt to extract yourself from me into a special class of person for which your behavior is supposedly acceptable, or take a good look at yourself and decide to be better in the future.

<comment><USER27> I'm not doing anything wrong.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>