I ordered a box of boxes from The Packaging Wholesalers via Amazon.ca - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/meslin/status/1225834920611848192 <comment><USER3> At one point, my parents bought a toilet from Amazon, and got along with it a _12-foot long balance beam_.

Trying to return it was a bit of an ordeal:

[https://kkeeter.wordpress.com/2014/06/02/dear_amazon/](https://kkeeter.wordpress.com/2014/06/02/dear_amazon/)

<comment><USER4> There's actually laws regarding stuff sent to you in error. Basically, they can't ask you to return it unless you offer. Hence why there's probably no formalized process for it.

<comment><USER5> It should also not come as a surprise that a company whose process is highly optimised to move product in one direction has problems dealing with unusual situations in the other direction.

<comment><USER6> This article is also from 2014. I wonder if the return process is smoother now.

<comment><USER7> normal returns are pretty painless - I order thing, I get exactly that thing, I return thing.

I imagine there's still no formal process in place for "oops we sent you a thing, keep it or throw it out or whatever"

<comment><USER8> Returns are super painless now. You just click a few times on a webpage and then go to your local UPS store (or whatever you picked) show them your phone so they can scan the QR code you got sent, and then hand them the item.

<comment><USER9> Returns of things they know they sent are painless. In the linked article there was no tracking showing the balance beam and that caused most of the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > 8\. Today I figured out the problem. The granola company and the coaster > company buy THEIR boxes from the same people I'm trying to by mine from. And > the barcode scanners at @amazonca are picking up the old sticker - from the > box company!

So the granola company, coaster company, etc. forgot to remove the old bar codes from the outermost box before packing it full of their own product and sending it out. One could tell them this, but there will probably always be more small companies making this mistake.

Probably what should happen is for Amazon to mark this item (the box of boxes) as requiring special handling when scanning on entry into the warehouse, verifying that it actually is a box of boxes (right weight, no other barcode, etc), and explaining why. And audit all the ones currently in the warehouse.

I have no idea how to convince Amazon to do this. Like the author, I'd give up and start buying my boxes elsewhere.

<comment><USER11> > I have no idea how to convince Amazon to do this

Funny enough, I do. I know and work with a lot of the people who would be involved in that. My org in Amazon is all about ensuring everything is ready to be used for customer orders. (We're hiring; Toronto, Seattle and Nashville).

We call this the "multiple scannable barcodes" problem. In terms of inventory tracking, we trust that there's only one barcode on the item that maps to a valid product because that's nearly always the case. It's also really hard to notice/catch when it happens.

I'm going to send this to a few friends today. I definitely know someone on the operations side who would know what to do about it (and would laugh at the absurdity).

<comment><USER12> Couldn't you add your own barcode on the boxes? It can even be a new barcode standard to make sure it never mistaken with another one.

<comment><USER13> If someone reuses one of these boxes to sell their items back to Amazon, Amazon will now have two Amazon barcodes on the box. We're back to square one here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Something similar happened to me about ... 10 years ago. This was back when everyone was going on and on about how good Amazon's customer support was, but what I noticed is that they don't actually listen to the customer, they're just robots that give you money for talking to them. The customer only comes out ahead if their Internet connection is free and their time is worth $0/hour. But people love it!

In my case, I ordered road bike tires. They shipped me mountain bike tires from the same manufacturer. This was hilarious because the road tires were "folding" (they have a kevlar bead instead of a wire bead, so don't take up as much space in shipping) but the mountain bike tires weren't, so the set of 2 tires arrived in a refrigerator-sized box. I opened a ticket with Amazon. "Oh sorry, we'll send you the right item." Same mountain bike tires arrive. "Oh sorry, we'll refund you for both." This was about 2 weeks later and I checked the product page... everyone in the reviews section was complaining, but Amazon took no action to fix it. Like the author of this Twitter thread, I finally ventured to a bike shop that I heard was really good, and they were really good. I never bought another bike part from Amazon.

If I were Amazon, I would be super alarmed that people "in the field" don't have the ability to talk to people in the back office. Every one of these incidents should be a ticket for the supply chain management team. But instead the customer service team looks at CSAT scores, the warehouse team probably looks at "average time to pack an item", and the investors look for growth. Nobody cares if the business runs well, just that each individual department set an arbitrary metric and met it. If you want to eat a big company's lunch, this is how you do it: look at the business as a whole, not as a million parts that don't work together. (See also: Google and 5 chat apps, Google WiFi vs. Google Fiber WiFi, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER15> Hilariously, there's no way anymore to get help from any "real" person over at Amazon anymore, even for Prime members. I've gotten all kinds of weird stuff shipped to me, including a $12,000 server motherboard once, which Amazon told me I was free to keep as they would ship out the $124 SSD I ordered. I insisted that I return it, and after much hassle over several weeks, I was finally able get ahold of a non-chatbot, non-foreign service rep that finally took the time to listen and sent me a return label. Since I finally got ahold of someone real, I remarked this is the last time I go through such a hassle to return their property because of the way they treated me when I was trying to do them a favor.

<comment><USER16> Why did you insist on retuning it?

<comment><USER15> The right thing to do. But my time and sanity is valuable too.

<comment><USER16> Yeah maybe take the company that does $283,000 in sales per minute at their word when they say don't bother returning it.

They told you not to do it. You did it. Now you're pissed that doing it wasn't a smooth process. Ok.

<comment><USER17> He's the customer (or she). If he doesn't want the wrong item that was shipped, amazon should accept the return. I know this is HN but now this dudes gotta figure out what to do with a 12K server does he use it? Does he toss it? How much does it cost to dispose of a server like that. Maybe he donates it. I don't know but he didn't ask for it the trouble. It's not like he won the lottery for $12K.

The customer asked for one thing but the company delivered something else. Don't make your customers deal with your mistake.

<comment><USER16> I think we agree that Amazon should do the thing that makes the least trouble for the consumer. The wrong item is there. Return or disposal or charity or resale. One way or the other your customer is going to deal with your mistake.

You seem to have some concerns that being left with a $12K server to dispose of any way she pleases would be a burden.

I believe and her actual experience suggests that the rerun will be more trouble.

Ok same values, different views on likely outcomes, we disagree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > 11\. I responded, with honesty: "The error has been fixed? It wasn't fixed > the first three times.. so I'm skeptical!"

> @amazonca responded: "You will get the correct item. I do not want any more > hassles for you. Please do not worry. "

> So I re-ordered the @PkgWholesalers boxes...

... and got packages of granola again in 1 PkgWholesalers boxes.

I hate how frustrating it can be do convince a multijillion dollar company that, No, they are wrong, and I am right.

It's like we need an "No, I actually need you to _help_ because they problem is unsolvable from my Point-of-View phone number" that's kept a secret from anyone.

Had a similar issue with my credit union where they referred to a payment number entry field the wrong way.

I managed to schedule a call with someone, and they didn't understand the problem. They said: "So you want us to change this _just_ for you?". My answer of "No, I want you to change it for everybody." didn't go over well...

<comment><USER19> Used to be that getahuman[1] was a thing, but like all good things on the Internet it seems to have not been able to hold up to the sheer volume of bad actors.

[1] [https://gethuman.com/](https://gethuman.com/)

<comment><USER20> Except for the miracle of Wikipedia

<comment><USER21> Kind of, but I wonder about niche articles with nobody keeping an eye on them. I have notifications for a small page that contains some empirical formulas which contain arbitrary constants. Every now and then, somebody will modify one of them so it looks similar but is completely wrong. What if I wasn't keeping an eye on it? Readers would never know they were seeing wrong information.

<comment><USER22> I'd be curious to hear more about this. No need to link the page, but:

\- is Wikipedia's reputation system useful for preventing this sort of abuse? I thought most changes have to be approved?

\- how would one go about establishing the validity of a page from first glance? One thought I had is a browser extension which colors text according to its age on the page; relative to other text

<comment><USER23> No, in general, changes to Wikipedia do not have to be approved. Anyone can edit and their changes go live immediately.

You don't even need an account! But if you edit without an account, your IP address is recorded in the edit history. Accounts are recommended both for that reason and because an account gives you a contribution history and a "talk page" where other Wikipedians can communicate with you.

Why don't you try it and see? Find a page where you can make a minor and non- controversial improvement: clarify some wording without changing the meaning, fix a grammar or punctuation error, etc.

Create an account, make the change, and watch it go live!

The check and balance here isn't that you need approval, but that others with an interest in the page will be watching for changes, and you may find your change reverted if some other editor doesn't like it.

Of course if no one is watching the page, then you may have the problem lopmotr referred to.

<comment><USER24> The weird thing to me is that IP bans supersede being logged-in to an account.

So even if you're logged in, you can't edit from a large corporate/etc. network or commercial VPN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Once bought spark plugs for my car from Amazon. I got three new ones and three from the Amazon Warehouse since those were about 30% cheaper and I figured what could be wrong with spark plugs? Got the right box, wrong spark plugs. Returned them. Re-ordered. Got the same spark plugs. This time I marked the boxes with and plugs with a permanent marker. Returned them and reordered. Got the exact same ones. Finally returned and ordered new ones. I am sure those same plugs are still in the mail going back and forth between Amazon and frustrated customers years later.

<comment><USER26> Minor plug for a vendor I've used with great success for a long time: Rock Auto, don't even try to deal with Amazon for specific parts. Their website is a nice throw back to actual usability too.

<comment><USER25> Yes! I have ordered parts from them before and they are fantastic both on selection and price. 10/10.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A little bit of a non-standard sort of HN post, but it illustrates an interesting sort of system failure.

My speculation, never having set foot in an Amazon warehouse:

1) Amazon stockers are told to put the incoming inventory in a spot, and scan all visible barcodes on the product, which are all associated with that product in Amazon's DB henceforth. Normally extraneous barcodes are no problem because they aren't SKUs, so no one ever tries to pick them by the extra codes. Easier to tell the stockers to scan everything than to try to get them to pick the right one.

2) Company X, Y, Z ship their products to Amazon with their own barcodes and fail to remove the box company codes. Dozens of different random products around the warehouse end up with a secondary, identical barcode associated with them.

3) Someone orders boxes. Inventory system probably automatically sends pickers to the closest source of SKU 12345, of which there are - unusually - <USER2> scattered around the warehouse. So the product received is essentially random, out of whoever uses these boxes. Product roulette!

4) Customer service can't solve this problem. Maybe there's someone in Amazon's inventory team that can go in and fix it, but it occurred for good reasons! Everyone was behaving rationally. There are probably other similar problems in the database as well.

<comment><USER27> Just a thought, could this be engineered to work in one's favour? For example, order a box of something expensive, receive it, attach a barcode for something cheap which is low in stock / rarely ordered, then send it back. Now order the thing you labelled it as, and see what turns up. Perhaps you'll get a box of Epyc CPUs for the price of a box of out of season kwanza decorations.

<comment><USER28> That sounds like mail fraud - and you could get prosecuted by the feds for that. Not something I recommend trying, especially in the US.

<comment><USER29> If you don't use USPS (use say fedex) can you still be prosecuted under those statutes? I though the USPS jealously guards whatever remaining prerogatives they retain.

It's still regular old fraud, and still wrong and you deserve to get trouble for it. Just curious about who will finger your collar.

<comment><USER28> The statute on mail fraud (18 U.S.C. § 1341: [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1341](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1341)) clearly states:

> places in any post office or authorized depository for mail matter, any > matter or thing whatever to be sent or delivered by the Postal Service, or > deposits or causes to be deposited any matter or thing whatever to be sent > or delivered by any _private or commercial interstate carrier_

(Emphasis mine). It is clear from this that committing fraud via FedEx and UPS would be treated the same as USPS.

The one difference, AIUI, is that the USPS is protected by the US Postal Inspection Service (who are, as you say, quite zealous), whereas I'm not sure the same extends to UPS/FedEx (where you'd probably be looking at an FBI investigation instead).

However if you (or Amazon) mailed e.g. the return labels over USPS the USPIS could still get involved.

<comment><USER29> Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > "You will get the correct item. I do not want any more hassles for you. > Please do not worry. "

Said by someone who did not understand the problem at all.

<comment><USER31> That's the same situation when we shipped code with "I swear this time it works correctly with all new excessive to-the-point tests we wrote after analyzing the last failure in detail" label. Understanding the problem in a complex automated system doesn't always make it disappear overnight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Guess, you just saved them >$10M of wrong orders ?

8\. Today I figured out the problem. The granola company and the coaster company buy THEIR boxes from the same people I'm trying to by mine from. And the barcode scanners at @amazonca are picking up the old sticker - from the box company!

<comment><USER33> you would think the granola and coaster companies would have caught on when they started receiving their own products instead of more boxes.

<comment><USER34> Unless a box of boxes costs less than they can sell a box of granola or coasters for, in which case this is the ultimate free money machine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The way to get Amazon to fix this (at least on this particular item) is just that- publish an article that you get granola (which I assume costs more) for the price of empty boxes.

Nature (i.e. the internet) will fix the problem for you by creating a large loss for Amazon/stock discrepancy.

</comment><comment><USER36> Order from Uline instead. Those guys are probably just reselling Uline.

Compare the Uline box ordering page [1]. Looks rather similar to Packaging Wholesalers, doesn't it? Order direct from Uline, and you'll probably get a better price. It's hard to tell, because "Packaging Wholesalers" won't show prices until you log in, while Uline has theirs visible.

Uline only sells shipping and warehouse products. They're #1 in North America in a dull, boring, and essential business. No way will you get granola. If you're ordering in industrial quantities, order from an industrial supplier.

[1] [https://www.uline.com/product/GuidedNav?t=184360](https://www.uline.com/product/GuidedNav?t=184360)

<comment><USER37> Just a heads up. The Uline management has made significant donations to political organizations against equality of marriage, universal health care, worker's rights, and cannabis legalization.

Regardless of your stance, I would consider the consequences of supporting their lobbying efforts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> now just have to figure out what box company Amazon's fine jewelry vendors use...

</comment><comment><USER39> I don't get the theory why?

So the Granola company buys boxes, puts in the product, sends it back to Amazon, then Amazon accidentally puts it into the boxes pile?

Except wouldn't it be a boxes of boxes pile?

Is the Granola company recycling the outer box?

<comment><USER40> I believe the way it works is the warehouse worker is given a number/barcode which they scan, which tells them where the item is. As the barcode has been reused by accident, the worker is pointed towards the box of granola which has the same barcode as the box of boxes!

<comment><USER41> My further dystopian riff is that the reason for the scan-bar reuse is:

They have a robot cycling around the warehouse, automatically indexing the items for sale by scanning all codes in sight, uploading to a database...that is used by other automated pickers.

On average, you still make a profit even if the wrong thing happens sometimes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I wonder i you could exploit this 'bug'. Offer some cheap bought products for way to much money via Amazon. Boxed in wholesale boxes with clearly visible original barcode.

No one ever will buy your product, but it will be sent out in error, customers can keep it and Amazon reimburses you for it.

Repeat for profit.

</comment><comment><USER43> Last year my son ordered a Nerf gun. It came but so did an $800 portable refrigerator. I tried three times to do the right thing and send it back but they told me to keep it. Ended up selling it on eBay.

</comment><comment><USER44> My wife had an interesting issue in the UK with Amazon very recently. I order a lot from Amazon. A lot. 99% of all packages turn up same or next day no issues.

My wife started ordering some things and they kept going missing. We compared addresses and they were identical. Order tracking kept showing a delivery date, then the date came and the item was just returned to warehouse. Repeat 5x times and after many 40 min phone calls she just cancelled the order for a refund.

Repeat 7 or 8 times. Phoning up the Indian based call centre helped not at all. Hours wasted

She tried one last time and got a call back from a manager in the UK who looked into it. After a week or was resolved.

I still don't have a technical explanation, but apparently some special routing meta data had been added to that address where the package was always routed through another logistics centre or something.

Total nightmare getting it sorted out

</comment><comment><USER45> I reuse Amazon boxes, and now I feel vindicated that I always fully obscure the old bar codes.

<comment><USER46> Don't need to fully obscure them, just draw a single vertical line through them to make them unscannable!

<comment><USER47> If your line isn't big enough, it might not make a difference due to error correction

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I once ordered a 20' cable on Amazon, a 10' was delivered. I double checked my order to make sure I wasn't the one who had made a mistake, then returned my 10' in exchange for a 20'. They sent me another 10' cable. I contacted customer service and told them something in their process must be wrong, to please carefully ensure that they understand I want a 20' cable, and ensure that a 20' cable is sent to me. This probably went unread. They sent me a 10' cable, then asked for a nice review. I returned the cable for a refund and took my business elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER49> Just today this happened to me! I ordered a 6 pack of batteries and got a box of 6 packs of batteries. Now I've got enough for the rest of my life!

I had already read this thread, and first thing I check is the barcodes. The box of packs of batteries has the same barcode as the package of batteries itself.

[https://twitter.com/blaines/status/1227430981134516224?s=20](https://twitter.com/blaines/status/1227430981134516224?s=20)

</comment><comment><USER50> Tune in for next week's installment: how I threw out a garbage can!

<comment><USER51> My brother once told me a story about an auto plant in Ontario and their industrial-sized bins. They had a huge metal recycling bin, big enough to fit a few cars inside, and a smaller garbage bin, maybe two-thirds that size.

One day, after emptying the trash bin, the garbage truck driver stacked it inside the recycling bin.

The next day, the truck came and recycled the trash bin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I don't often get to use the word kafkaesque...

This is kafkaesque.

</comment><comment><USER53> I got a box with several items I ordered (damaged), but _also_ a bunch of metal piping (bent), two lsat training books (damaged), and a bunch of other crap I can't remember. IIRC the stuff I ordered was a filing cabinet or something of that sort - heavy. It was quite hard to convince them that no, I don't just want to throw it all in the trash. Multiple calls etc.

I can kinda get how you one ends up reading the wrong labels, but throwing in additional stuff requiring considerably larger packaging?

</comment><comment><USER54> This reminds me of some self-checkout experiences where the scanner wouldn't pick the barcode on the pack (4-pack) but it would pick the barcode of the product inside the pack (which are not usually sold separately but oh well...).

Cue having to call the assistance to back on that purchase and scan the right one. Happened a couple of times. I think I just actively started covering the wrong barcodes or got a different product.

</comment><comment><USER55> I once ordered some sheet music. I don't remrber exactly how many pages it was, maybe 10 or 20. It came in the biggest box I think I've ever received, from anyone. Literally there was a thin booklet floating around in a - approx. 3ftx2ftx2ft box. (Sadly, no packing peanuts! :-) I should have taken a picture.

<comment><USER56> There used to be a team at Amazon whose mission was to prevent this situation. The technical term was "grotesque packaging". I assume they eventually gave up trying to solve the problem.

<comment><USER57> Well, in the last couple of years they seem to have shifted from shipping books in a box with padding to shipping them in tight-fitting envelopes that damage the corners. So I guess that's a victory for the grotesque packaging team, at the same time it's a big loss for people who want to buy books on Amazon. :/

<comment><USER58> I usually get them wrapped in a thick piece of cardboard, a few inches longer than the book so an impact to the corners of the package doesn't damage the book. It works pretty well.

<comment><USER57> I know the style you're referring to; that works fine. But I've been getting books delivered in bubble-padded manila envelopes. In one case, I set up a return for the damaged book, explicitly noted that the packaging was inappropriate, was assured the problem would be fixed, and the next three (!) replacement deliveries were also shipped in the stupid manila envelope and, of course, damaged.

They never shipped me an undamaged copy; I gave up after their messaging went from "return the earlier book" to "don't bother; just keep everything".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Not removing old labels before entering something into (partially) automated systems is just asking for trouble.

A friend of mine once returned an item to amazon but forgot to remove the original shipping label. The shipping company picked it up and promptly shipped it back to him instead of returning it to Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER60> Welcome to the future indeed :) This sort of thing is somehow going to end up getting someone killed.

</comment><comment><USER61> Remember when a someone ordered a TV from Amazon and received a Assault Rifle?

[https://gizmodo.com/guy-orders-tv-from-amazon-gets-giant- ass...](https://gizmodo.com/guy-orders-tv-from-amazon-gets-giant-assault- rifle-ins-5933021)

</comment><comment><USER62> It would appear that whilst Amazon have saved on Thrift overheads, they have in essence, automated it upon themselves as so many items they send by mistake and they don't collect appear to be more common than isolated instances.

</comment><comment><USER63> According to amazon.ca, the granola costs $63 and the box of boxes only costs $29. I really hope the granola company is buying as many boxes of boxes from Amazon as they can! Free money!

</comment><comment><USER64> Might be related to what is described by the scam here,

[https://youtu.be/2IT2oAzTcvU](https://youtu.be/2IT2oAzTcvU)

<comment><USER65> The eighth tweet in the story explains the cause

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> I applaud your patience

</comment><comment><USER67> Reminds me a little of a recent experience I had.

My gf wanted a little Japanese plushie so I bought it for her. I don't recall the exact amount, but I bought 2 of them for roughly $100.

A few weeks later we get a large box FULL of varying types of these plushies. After doing some research we find out there was some issue with a new shipping company and they were sending orders to the wrong addresses and so forth. The plushie company basically just said "if you receive it, keep it", and they're currently taking this shipping company to court over it.

Well.... for the next several months every once in a while we'd receive boxes of varying sizes full of different types of plushies. Some of them are recognizable, such as Dragon Quest slime plushies, other's are little food based plushies. I don't know what they are, but like anthropomorphized bread and so forth.

At one point my girlfried tallied it up and I think we received over $3k (retail) worth of these plushies.

<comment><USER68> Wow. Did you try to sell them on?

<comment><USER67> She's planning on it, we've sold a few but put it on hiatus while she visits friends.

edit: family, not friends... brainfart.</comment></comment></comment>


TinyGo: New Go Compiler Based on LLVM - <AUTHOR> https://tinygo.org/ <comment><USER2> > Garbage collection is currently only supported on ARM microcontrollers > (Cortex-M). For this platform, a simple conservative mark-sweep collector > has been implemented. Other platforms will just allocate memory without ever > freeing it.

Conservative garbage collection has serious problems on 32-bit. Stuck pointers happen quite often. The usual culprit is floats, which thankfully don't usually appear in embedded code, but by no means is the problem limited to floats.

<comment><USER3> I have some trouble seeing the point of a Go compiler/implementation _without_ any working GC, or with the only GC being a problematic mark+sweep implementation. Is this just a proof-of-concept effort, or do they expect to add workable GC down the line?

<comment><USER4> While I have no insight to their plans, perhaps a non-GC toolchain could still be used for short-lived programs (such as command line tools)? Don't even need to free anything if it's short enough, the OS can deal with it when the process exits

<comment><USER5> >a non-GC toolchain could still be used for short-lived programs (such as command line tools)

Or missile firmware: [https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=comp.lang.ad...](https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=comp.lang.ada/E9bNCvDQ12k/1tezW24ZxdAJ)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How is this different than gollvm? And how does it combat the problems from the Go FAQ:

> At the beginning of the project we considered using LLVM for gc but decided > it was too large and slow to meet our performance goals. More important in > retrospect, starting with LLVM would have made it harder to introduce some > of the ABI and related changes, such as stack management, that Go requires > but not are not part of the standard C setup. A new LLVM implementation is > starting to come together now, however.

<comment><USER7> There are 3 LLVM-based Go compilers that I'm aware of: gollvm, llgo, and tinygo. Of those, only TinyGo reimplements the runtime that causes lots of (code size) overhead in the other compilers.

There is more to a toolchain than translating source code to machine code. I'm sure the others do that job just as well, but only TinyGo combines that with a reimplemented runtime that optimizes size over speed and allows it to be used directly on bare metal hardware: binaries of just a few kB are not uncommon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Congratulations on this new project. It's compelling, your website is informative and easy to read, and the mission statement is very clear. Plus, it just looks like a lot of fun. Well done!

In my opinion, this feels very much in the hallowed traditions of Tiny Basic and Tiny C, but with modern tool chains.

<comment><USER9> I disagree that this is in the tradition of projects like TinyC; I wouldn't call this project "tiny" in the same way I would call TinyC "tiny" because this project uses LLVM, which is quite large and complex.

<comment><USER7> Hehe, LLVM takes about an hour to compile on my laptop. The compiler itself is not tiny in any way. It really refers to the size of the binaries produced which is usually very small. For example, for WebAssembly, reductions to 3% of the original size are not uncommon.

<comment><USER10> 3% seems common (in my testing), with 2% occasionally happening as well. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I would be interested to see some more complex examples for this than the ones provided[1], specifically around interrupts and DMA, both are somewhat "concurrent" resources that in C need to be managed manually, with careful use of the volatile keyword and similar.

For instance, UART transmit looks to be implemented using blocking IO[2]. I don't know Go very well, but it would be interesting if this could be implemented as a buffered channel [3], which would provide a nice abstraction for the hardware FIFO buffer used by the UART, and allow the CPU to be doing other things. The same could also be used for the I2S support I think, which will often be used to send much more data (streaming audio) than the UART.

On closer inspection, looking at the issue tracker, it appears this is already in planning, which is great [4].

[1] [https://github.com/tinygo- org/tinygo/tree/master/src/example...](https://github.com/tinygo- org/tinygo/tree/master/src/examples) [2] [https://github.com/tinygo- org/tinygo/blob/515daa7d3c9af18c78...](https://github.com/tinygo- org/tinygo/blob/515daa7d3c9af18c78fd97d43cafda7e4dec6290/src/machine/machine_stm32f103xx.go#L156-L163) [3] [https://gobyexample.com/channel- buffering](https://gobyexample.com/channel-buffering) [4] [https://github.com/tinygo- org/tinygo/issues/9#issuecomment-5...](https://github.com/tinygo- org/tinygo/issues/9#issuecomment-502468619)

</comment><comment><USER12> LLVM has a lot of optimizations. Does anyone have information about performance of applications built by each complier? I'd especially be curious about apps well tuned to reduce usage on the naive GC that TinyGo uses.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'd love to see this targeted towards PICs. Really I'd like to just see any modern language targeting low power microcontrollers allowing for optimization of code size or performance. 8-bit processors using a banked memory model are hard for languages with modern (flat) memory models to adapt to.

<comment><USER14> Zig lets you bring your own allocator. [https://ziglang.org/](https://ziglang.org/)

<comment><USER15> I don't think LLVM (which Zig uses) can currently target PIC.

<comment><USER16> Basic and Pascal might not be modern, but they surely are alternatives to C for targeting PIC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> golang compiler on a raspberry pi 3 compiles applications really slowly, think minutes, but there's a workaround which is to cross compile on x86, think seconds plus sftp transfer. i assume the primary use case is to speed up compilation and create smaller binary sizes? this could be helpful as binary sizes for golang compiled binaries are pretty large, my apps typically are around 2-20MB, but i understand they include all dependencies.

<comment><USER18> > i assume the primary use case is to speed up compilation and create smaller > binary sizes?

LLVM is going to be much slower than the Go toolchain. It may produce smaller binaries, but mainly through dropping the bulk of the runtime on the floor. The main thing that LLVM does is (apparently) reduce the stack usage.

But it does support the CPUs that the author wants to target out of the box.

<comment> nappy-doo I believe LLVM toolchains also (by default) exclude debug information, which gc (go compiler) would need to be told to explicitly exclude.

<comment><USER18> You generally need to run the code through some rewriters that, as far as I recall, drop those symbols anyways -- these CPUs can't execute an elf binary directly from flash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder if this could be adapted to bootstrap the standard Go compiler on new architectures. Big if true.

<comment><USER20> Is that a problem the Go team has with their current compiler?

<comment><USER12> Maybe? They wouldn't be able to do the current bootstrap of each Go version being built with the previous but they could go back to the first release. There's a canonical version where Go bootstrapping starts, so it might be possible to avoid fixing unportable C in the early days.</comment></comment></comment>


One Bitcoin Transaction Now Uses as Much Energy as Your House in a Week - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining-electricity-consumption-ethereum-energy-climate-change <comment><USER2> In an era where we try to curb global warming, this is not very ecological

</comment><comment><USER3> When the price of a bitcoin rises so does the energy consumption by the same percentage. I just hope that the block reward shrinks fast enough to counteract the price increase.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have an impression that we are more wasteful every year and even the development of tech supposed to limit the environmental damage contributes to it in a great way. Better just not do anything than give money to guys burning fuels and cash in pursuit of some bullshit</comment>


Valve Software developing for linux - <AUTHOR> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA3OTY

<comment><USER2> When I was using Windows, I used to play lot of time-killing games. After switching to Ubuntu, I could not find those games. Some of those linux games were not as good as those windows games. I could try playing via Wine, but didn't.

So, my productivity has increased now. Most of time is devoted to fixing bugs, trying to increase passive income, trying to get some certifications etc.,

Still, I miss those games... AoE, Thief Series, HL, Diablo...

</comment><comment><USER3> Steam and Adobe are the only reasons I don't use Linux. I would love to make the switch otherwise.</comment>


John McCarthy: Challenges to Machine Learning (2007) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/appearance/appearance.pdf <comment><USER2> I had McCarthy as a professor in the 1980s, just about when it was clear that logic-based AI had hit a wall. McCarthy was determined to put mathematical logic as a formalism under the real world, and it just wasn't working.

He once described the "missionary and cannibals problem" in class. Then he wrote it up in his notation for "circumscription", cranked the notation, and the answer came out. I thought at the time, as he converted the problem to his notation, "here's where the miracle occurs". That's the problem. Hammering the real world into a formalism is very hard. Cranking the formalism is not difficult to automate.

Mathematical logic works fine where the problem space can be formalized, such as in software proofs of correctness. But trying to get to "common sense reasoning" that way, which was McCarthy's goal, just didn't work. It was a great disappointment to him.

AI as a field has suffered from a repeated problem - believing that the next big development will lead to strong AI. Graph search, the General Problem Solver, expert systems, and big databases of knowledge have all been touted as the solution. In each case, the ceiling of what could be done rose a bit. Machine learning isn't a panacea, but it, too, has raised the ceiling of what can be done.

(It's personally frustrating that much of my career was during the "AI winter", from about 1985 to 2005. Expert systems had failed, and machine learning didn't work yet. I spent a lot of time trying to find AI in control theory. Combining machine learning and control theory is at last working out, which is why autonomous drones are now so agile. But it happened 15 years later than I'd hoped.)

<comment><USER3> > as he converted the problem to his notation, "here's where the miracle > occurs"

Exactly what I see to be the future of all types of engineering, computer control, and interaction - e.g. programming languages, circuit engineering, database query languages, all types of problem solving.

The future of all of these is just to very directly describe to the computer the problem you want to solve, in a way that is a very direct representation of the way you think through the problem, with nearly zero translation between the way we approach the problem and the way we communicate the problem to the computer.

To me, this perfectly describes the evolution from C/Java to Perl to Python. The shift from highly relational SQL to Document-based noSQL databases. The shift from bladed weapons, to point & shoot guns. The way you interact with a doctor or future doctor AI, and it will infer from your layman description what you're really communicating and then synthesizes that into a possibly multi-iteration search strategy for solving the problem.

Today, the ability of tech to achieve this still holds us back substantially. Over time though, we'll continue to converge to a way of communicating our creations and desires to computers, using some kind of language or interaction that requires us to do no intermediate translation. In many places, I think we're not actually that far off from this, for some tasks. Over time, our interaction methods won't get more strange and hard to learn, but strangely more familiar and natural.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It gets to properly be something worth calling "artificial intelligence" only when you do _causal_ reasoning from data. And that's actually fairly new.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's well known that machine learning is currently useful for solving some problems and irrelevant to others. As is the case with all existing ai algorithms. ML is not strong ai and nobody has ever claimed it was, so it seems to be an odd criticism.

</comment><comment><USER6> Of course the name in the title should be 'McCarthy'. Also, I think that the rest of the title is misleading; the paper seems to be about what McCarthy sees as the challenges _to_ the subject, rather than about his personally challenging the subject.

<comment><USER7> Fixed. Thanks.</comment></comment>


Software Engineering lessons I learned playing The Legend of Zelda - <AUTHOR> http://www.front2backdev.com/2012/01/08/software-engineering-lessons-i-learned-playing-the-legend-of-zelda/

<comment><USER2> _"What other engineering lessons have you learned from playing your favorite games?"_

Back...your work...UP.

I spent weeks playing Zelda. Mapping things out on graph paper. Trying over and over and over. Finally got 80% through the _very last_ dungeon...and the battery gave out. No idea why. Lost everything.

I put the NES down and never played it again.

</comment><comment><USER3> These "Programming is like $game" where game is almost always Legend of Zelda is getting tiring.

Might as well have a "Software Manager training from The Belmont Family: Crack that Whip"... (Belmont is from the Castlevania Series games).

Really, there isn't that much of a takeaway from this article. All of Dave's points are pretty much common sense in terms of programming and 'getting things done'. The only new content is a new critique about TLOZ.</comment>


UK: TV should switch to internet, a parliamentary inquiry suggests - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jul/31/digital-television-internet-revolution

<comment><USER2> There was something in the far off front page news about some people are worried the physical network is too easily attacked. There's a lot to secure even before you call it a human right surely?

I plan to visit Telehouse Docklands and see how much I can see.</comment>


Ask YC: How do you post a job on News.YCombinator.com/jobs - <AUTHOR>

I have a few jobs to post can anyone please help. <comment><AUTHOR> Considering the economic climate, it seems like a waste not allow users to post jobs in the jobs section. I understand that users/admin do not want this to turn into a Monster.com, but if the admin only allow users with a certain amount of karma to post specifically to News.YCombinator.com/jobs this would significantly reduce spam. That is just one suggestion.

It just seems like a waste for one of the most trusted resources on the web to not allow its users to connect for one of the most important aspects of our lives--Jobs.

</comment><comment><USER2> You can't post it on that page unless you are funded by YCombinator. You can however submit as usual and will show up with the rest of the submissions.

<comment><USER3> Don't encourage job submissions. I would hate to have the dice/monster/craigslist crowd flooding HN.</comment></comment>


Hack the Law - <AUTHOR> http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Hack_the_Law

<comment><AUTHOR> Article about regaining the power that was intended for the People.</comment>


I'll never bring my phone on an international flight again. Neither should you - <AUTHOR> https://medium.freecodecamp.com/ill-never-bring-my-phone-on-an-international-flight-again-neither-should-you-e9289cde0e5f#.llbetjchp <comment><USER2> Burner phones are pretty good for this but I've seen another solution to it, at least for apple devices (though it should work on anything).

Run an OS X VM and connect your phone to it. Run a full backup of the phone and then wipe your phone and transfer the VM to networked storage such as dropbox. Wipe the VM from your computer and then go on your flight, hand over your blank phone and computer (or load dummy data) and leave the airport. Download the VM and restore your phone.

You can also use this to secure work files from search and seizure by working from the VM at all times (though this naturally is inefficient and can be troublesome for some developers)

</comment><comment><USER3> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13659864](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13659864)</comment>


Ask HN: Is it ethically right to build product that might end up as a rip off - <AUTHOR> Two weeks ago we launched a product on Product hunt that went on to #1. There were a lot of new users coming in and asking for new features/feedback, we were trying hard to keep up with the requests (used Notion for a while to track). Then I found Canny (one amazing tool) and a few others. But all of them were a little expensive for us and decided to make one for ourselves to track and manage feature requests from customers. http://featurequests.com/ is the landing page.<p>Is it ethically right to build a product that I know might end up as a rip-off, especially because these products already influence my design and thinking? <comment><USER2> You can reimplement the features of other business/webpage if it's clear that it is a different page. (Just don't sneak in the server room at night to steal the source code. :) )

It's like Coca Cola and Pepsi. Just keep the look and feel / label different to avoid confusions. If you want an example in software, think about MS Office vs Open/Libre Office.

<comment><AUTHOR> :) Thanks for the feedback. Will keep in mind! I was not planning to build an exact rip-off but rather thinking how existing products that we know would influence our thinking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is it ethically right for there to be competition in any given industry?

</comment><comment><USER4> A lot of large companies have ripped off or been accused of ripping off other companies and made millions if not billions e.g. Xero and Apple UI, Microsoft & Apple UI, Facebook & MySpace, MySpace & Friendster, etc. It is common but this doesn't exactly speak to the ethics, which is what you are asking.

I am a similar situation as you also working on a similar product. Here is what I would ask myself:

\- Are you intending to copy them?

\- Is their product particularly novel?

\- What are you doing differently? Price, UX, features I require, integrating into different API's, etc.

I would highly focus in on differentiation, what makes you different from them? Are they too expensive, so you are disrupting their market with a comparable lower cost option. This is how a free market is supposed to work in a capitalist society.

Edit: Formatting

<comment><AUTHOR> Got it. My idea is to simplify pricing and just offer the core functionality and not too much distraction. Pricing is one reason I decided to build this. Agree about the free market. I was also more concerned about how existing products we know would influence our thinking about the product (even though I could see a few different directions this could go).

<comment><USER4> Oh I see. I think your self-awareness about the fact that other products will influence you is probably a good sign. None of us build products in a vacuum, I think most companies (big & small) keep tabs on their competitors to get ideas. Is it immoral for eCommerce websites to also implement things that Amazon does? Unless it is something that has some protection (i.e. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click)), I don't think there is really a problem. Your competitors are also looking at your site, doing similar things.

This might make you feel a little bit better, instead of focusing on the other products. Focus on your own, what features do YOU need? Build for that and let your customers guide you product. At your lower price point, you might be attracting customers with different pain points than your other higher priced competitors. This way you are solving your problem but your journey might take you on a completely different path. Use their features as inspiration but not necessarily your own road map.</comment></comment></comment>


How mathematical modeling may lead to predictive police work - <AUTHOR> http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/4346435.html

<comment><USER2> spending more time in poor neighborhoods already is predictive police work.</comment>


The Painful Price of Becoming Jackie Chan - <AUTHOR> https://newrepublic.com/article/152848/painful-price-becoming-jackie-chan <comment><USER3> Here's a really cool video breaking down exactly how Jackie sets up his stunt- action-comedy.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1PCtIaM_GQ](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1PCtIaM_GQ)

One thing that was particular interesting to me is how the setup always starts with him at an extreme disadvantage: no shoes, tied to a chair, hanging upside down, etc. I never noticed it before and it's exactly what makes his action so enjoyable to watch.

(The YouTube Channel is called Every Frame a Painting and all the other videos are fascinating and very worth checking out.)

<comment><USER4> The lack of respect Chan gets in the west is a travesty IMO. His fight choreography is rooted in the traditions Chinese opera while being constantly fresh, playful and imaginative. He shows absolute technical mastery, but there is always a sense of child-like joy underpinning that mastery. The fact that his films are often regarded as frivolous and lightweight says something profound about what is valued in our cultural milieu.

<comment><USER5> Doesn't he do a lot of frivolous and light-hearted movies though -- I'm a huge fan.

Take a movie like "Who am I", it's like Johnny English meets Drunken Master.

"Kung Fu" films to me always have a notion of slapstick, even the beautiful ones like House of Flying Daggers; Chan's background in Opera I imagine helps to fulfill that element of slightly ludicrous spectacle (at least if Chinese opera has any similarity to its Western namesake).

I mean Shanghai Noon, great film within its genre, but goofy as anything; actors doing those sorts of movies just aren't treated as serious actors I guess.

<comment><USER4> You can be goofy and fun _and_ make high art. Slapstick spectacle can also be profound. There's a certain po-faced affectation that is necessary to be called an artist. Being good isn't good enough; you also need to convincingly ape the norms of a self-appointed cultural elite.

The disparity in esteem between pop and rock springs to mind. We have an ingrained sense that if a record appeals to 13-year-old girls, then it must on some level be inherently inferior to a record that appeals to middle-aged men, regardless of the actual sophistication of the music in question. A teenage boy learning to play guitar carries an entirely different set of cultural connotations and expectations than a teenage girl learning to sing, regardless of how much effort they each expend. The term "credibility" hides a deep vein of ugly bigotry.

<comment><USER6> > There's a certain po-faced affectation that is necessary to be called an > artist. Being good isn't good enough; you also need to convincingly ape the > norms of a self-appointed cultural elite.

The cultural elite isn't self-appointed. They clawed their way up there the same way as everyone else who has reached some position in some hierarchy. And that includes various hierarchies of artists.

> The disparity in esteem between pop and rock springs to mind. We have an > ingrained sense that if a record appeals to 13-year-old girls, then it must > on some level be inherently inferior to a record that appeals to middle-aged > men, regardless of the actual sophistication of the music in question.

I think the more standard criticism is that some music is made by a committee as a product whereas other music is the result of a group/individual trying to make good music and that, in general, the latter category is better. I don't necessarily accept this argument, but it's different than the one you're proposing.

More generally, I find your attitude perplexing. If you want to think about this subject seriously, then surely there is no objective way to view art. If that's the case, then saying "you can be goofy and make art" is pointless because it's obvious. It's all just people's opinions. "Being goofy" can be art just like anything else.

Where I strongly disagree is where you sneer at "high art" and the "cultural elite". In my opinion, "high art" is art that is appreciated by rich/educated people who have been exposed to different things than less rich/less educated people. "High art" isn't better or worse than "low art". The definition of art is "something from which people derive emotion".

<comment><USER4> >The cultural elite isn't self-appointed.

Charles Saatchi is the most influential man in contemporary visual art. Why? Because he made a bunch of money in advertising and bought a bunch of art. He clawed his way up the hierarchy of advertising, but he bought his status as the kingmaker of contemporary art. Do a broad sample of artists consider Saatchi to have exceptional taste? Does he have unique insights into the creative process? Mu.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The author doesn't want to treat Chan's insistence on his account being an inspirational one and just wants to see it as sad.

I'm reminded of a Quora answer by a guy who loved fighting, one phrase he used stuck out at me. "Great fighters have to kind of like getting hit."

You can't push your body to its very limits without getting injured. Planning and preparing for it is not sad, it's smart. Chan's account should be taken at face value. It is inspirational for all the reasons he thinks it is.

I mean, sure, it would be way better if Hong Kong weren't the colonial hell- hole it was. Chan rose above that and made a noticeable dent in the world. If he could do it in the situation he grew up in, anyone can.

As the Brits like to say, Chan and his story are exactly what it says on the tin. To say it's not demeans Chan and his life and his choices.

<comment><USER8> > "Great fighters have to kind of like getting hit."

I'd generalize it to: "Great craftspeople have to kind of like the part of their craft that is unpleasant to 99% of the population."

Someone who excels at playing violin, writing computer software, public speaking, etc., generally does not find the "unpleasant" part to be "tiring", "boring", or "work". Instead, it's just part of the overall experience, which is a net positive.

When I was younger, I had a classmate who's an excellent violin player. Her practice schedule sounded awful to me, with well over an hour spent even on weekdays. I played musical instruments, too, and I liked a little practice, but rarely more than 30 minutes in a day.

I asked the violin player about this schedule, and the way she answered the question made it clear that practicing didn't seem unpleasant, or like "work," like it would to many other people. It was something she truly enjoyed.

Similar things can be applied to software development and liking the idea of investigating obtuse error messages and things breaking without any clear root cause.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I'm a little skeptical of CS schools that try to shelter their students from suffering. While schools should obviously not attempt to break students, there should be a reasonable crescendo of difficulty within the program. Because, well, software development can be _hard_. Students that don't like the hard parts don't like software development. This doesn't mean insanely hard "weed-out" classes, but simply projects that reflect the difficulty and demand of the real world.

<comment><USER10> At some point I was introduced to "Find The Hard Work You're Willing To Do" \- [http://www.cs.uni.edu/%7Ewallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2018...](http://www.cs.uni.edu/%7Ewallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2018-10.html#e2018-10-21T09_53_29.htm)

I think this is an important bit that a lot of people getting into programming don't realize. Many enjoy the "playing with computers" aspect. Some even enjoy writing new code. But the _real_ test is do you enjoy fixing broken code?

The article ends with:

> Maybe this is what people mean when they tell us to "find our passion", but > that phrase seems pretty abstract to me. Maybe instead we should encourage > people to find the hard problems they like to work on. Which problems do you > want to keep working on, even when they turn out to be harder than you > expected? Which kinds of frustration do you enjoy, or at least are willing > to endure while you figure things out? Answers to these very practical > questions might help you find a place where you can build an interesting and > rewarding life.

> I realize that "Find your passion" makes for a more compelling motivational > poster than "What hard problems do you enjoy working on?" (and even that's a > lot better than "What kind of pain are you willing to endure?"), but it > might give some people a more realistic way to approach finding their life's > work.

\--

Another article that I love is Programming Sucks ( [https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming- sucks](https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks) )

This one starts with:

> Every friend I have with a job that involves picking up something heavier > than a laptop more than twice a week eventually finds a way to slip > something like this into conversation: "Bro, you don't work hard. I just > worked a 4700-hour week digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screwdriver."

> They have a point. Mordor sucks, and it's certainly more physically taxing > to dig a tunnel than poke at a keyboard unless you're an ant. But, for the > sake of the argument, can we agree that stress and insanity are bad things? > Awesome. Welcome to programming.

\--

This "What kinds of frustration do you enjoy" I believe is a stumbling block for many people looking to enter the work force. I've encountered people in the past who love writing code but hate debugging.

<comment><USER11> I didn't realize _anyone_ likes fixing broken code, debugging, or - <USER2> reading HN - what seems like what most professional programmers spend most of their time doing, inheriting a huge broken mess of old software and having to come to understand it and clean it up somewhat. I don't remember reading/hearing anyone say they actually _like_ it.

edit: Nice to hear it!

<comment><USER12> Finding and diagnosing bugs is annoying. Actually fixing them is super satisfying though. Same with cleaning up old crusty code, figuring out wtf it's meant to be doing is painful but turning it into clear clean well- factored efficient code is satisfying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interesting how difficult and rough Jackie Chan's childhood was. He certainly succeeded, but at what cost? This article reviews how Chan downplays the hardships he was forced to endure (e.g. being essentially sold by his parents as an indentured servant when he was seven years old, complete with beatings and dismal living conditions) and instead chooses to focus on the end result, his success as an adult.

<comment><USER14> > He certainly succeeded, but at what cost?

The cost would be paid by Chan regardless of whether he became rich and famous. Specifically, he did not have a choice for being a slave in the Peking Opera house, so I'm not sure what point you and the author are trying to make. Paraphrasing Obama, Chan has embraced the burden of his past without becoming and staying a victim of it. Jackie Chan has taken responsibility for his life and successfully determined his own destiny. What does the author suggest Jackie Chan do instead of rising above his past? Obsess about it and wallow in despair, hopelessness, and depression?

<comment><USER13> > The cost would be paid by Chan regardless of whether he became rich and > famous

I'm not sure. Maybe he wouldn't have had to be sold as an indentured servant, get beaten, be deprived of an education, and sleep on a mattress soiled with piss. Or maybe he would have died of starvation, who knows? Or maybe he would have moved with his parents to Australia, where the article mentions they went. It's definitely worth thinking about.

Please don't conflate my opinion and that of the author. I can't answer what the author's point was.

> What does the author suggest Jackie Chan do instead of rising above his > past? Obsess about it and wallow in despair, hopelessness, and depression?

Again, I can't answer for the author, but I can think of a few things Chan could do: help prevent a similar hard childhood for current kids. Speak out. Join an advocacy group. Maybe raise awareness of how dire the situation for many families was in colonial Hong Kong. Not saying all of these would be helpful (and maybe he already does some of this), but arguing there's only despair and hopelessness seems disingenuous to me.

<comment><USER14> Your opinion seems to echo the author's so it was an obvious question, though I only expected to hear yours

> Maybe he wouldn't have had to be sold as an indentured servant,

Again, that wasn't his choice. There was no choice for Jackie Chan. That was his parents' choice. The only choice Jackie had is to either to focus on attaining his definition of success, while acknowledging the past; or to let the obsession of the past overtake his life and wallow in self pity. Where we disagree is that I feel the former choice is the healthier one.

> Again, I can't answer for the author, but I can think of a few things Chan > could do: help prevent a similar hard childhood for current kids. Speak out. > Join an advocacy group.

Yes like many other celebrities, Jackie Chan has charitable efforts for children and other causes. I don't disagree, but neither you nor the author mentioned this until now which made your argument seem pointless.

> Maybe raise awareness of how dire the situation for many families was in > colonial Hong Kong.

That was probably the point of recounting his hardship while at the peking opera. Colonial HK and the peking opera, at least in its previous form, also do not exist anymore.

> but arguing there's only despair and hopeless seems disingenuous to me

That wasn't my argument. My point was that it seemed that you and the author feel that Jackie Chan did not obsess enough about the sadness and pain of his early life. I felt what both you and the author were advocating was senseless.

<comment><USER13> > Your opinion seems to echo the author's so it was an obvious question

But it doesn't. I wrote a single paragraph, mostly describing what I thought was a key aspect of the article, and calling it "interesting". The author wrote a whole article addressing multiple things. I'm not even the submitter of the article! Your assumptions are unwarranted.

> neither you nor the author mentioned this until now which made your argument > seem pointless.

But I didn't make any argument. Please re-read what I wrote and tell me what my "argument" was that seemed "pointless" to you.

It seems you are arguing with me because you can't with the author? I just wrote something about the actual content of the article, when other replies were "I loved Jackie Chan in Rush Hour!", which is unrelated to the topic.

<comment><USER14> Maybe I am arguing with you because I can't do the same with the author. Does your comment not reiterate the article's core ideas in a nice little package? The size of the content is irrelevant when it resonates with the larger work. Is it not natural to ask "What's the point?" when none was seemingly provided?

<comment><USER13> > Does your comment not reiterate the article's core ideas in a nice little > package?

No?

> Maybe I am arguing with you because I can't do the same with the author.

Indeed.

Because my post was very short, let me quote it here in its entirety, and please tell me how it "resonates" with the article and what point you think I -- along with the author, apparently -- am making, or _should_ be making:

> "Interesting how difficult and rough Jackie Chan's childhood was. He > certainly succeeded, but at what cost? This article reviews how Chan > downplays the hardships he was forced to endure (e.g. being essentially sold > by his parents as an indentured servant when he was seven years old, > complete with beatings and dismal living conditions) and instead chooses to > focus on the end result, his success as an adult."

As you can see, I'm not trying to make any point. I've no idea what the article's author thinks, but you may have surmised I think the cost was too much. You'd be correct: I wouldn't wish this childhood on any kid, from Hong Kong or elsewhere. I'm glad Jackie Chan managed to survive and become successful, because I like him and his movies.

<comment><USER14> Let me dissect it.

> Interesting how difficult and rough Jackie Chan's childhood was. He > certainly succeeded, but at what cost?

You echo the article's conclusion. You agree with its main idea.

> This article reviews how Chan downplays the hardships he was forced to > endure (e.g. being essentially sold by his parents as an indentured servant > when he was seven years old, complete with beatings and dismal living > conditions) and instead chooses to focus on the end result, his success as > an adult."

You now summarize the article. Can you not see how someone would feel that you agreed with the author?

> I've no idea what the article's author thinks, but you may have surmised I > think the cost was too much

The author makes it very clear how he feels. It's pretty disingenuous for anyone who's read the article to say that.

Do you disagree with the article?

<comment><USER13> > You echo the article's conclusion. You agree with its main idea.

No. The article is very long, draws many conclusions and ponders many aspects of Jackie's life and autobiography, and I only mentioned one aspect (a question, not a conclusion by the way). I'm completely silent on other issues raised by the article, such as Jackie Chan's opinions of freedom, his injuries, his relationship with mainland China, etc.

So no, I wouldn't say I "agree with its main idea". I do find the article interesting, which is what I said: no more, no less.

> You now summarize the article.

Yes.

> Can you not see how someone would feel that you agreed with the author?

No.

> The author makes it very clear how he feels.

Then why do you ask me?

> Do you disagree with the article?

I find parts of it I agree with, others uninteresting, others I disagree with. I already explained what I find interesting in my initial post ("how difficult and rough Jackie Chan's childhood was") and in my previous post I mentioned I wouldn't wish such a childhood on any kid.

<comment><USER14> > Then why do you ask me?

Because from my perspective it seems like you had an opinion and then you backed away once I challenged it. You dance around it enough to pretend that the author didn't make a clear opinion.

> I only mentioned one aspect (a question, not a conclusion by the way)

It sounded rhetorical. Like with other religious wars, we can agree to disagree. From my perspective, I still feel that your original point was that you felt Jackie Chan was wrong "to focus on the end result, his success as an adult" instead of contemplating more on his hard childhood. I'm not sure why you'd back away from that opinion. While I disagree with it, it isn't exactly controversial either.

<comment><USER13> > Because from my perspective it seems like you had an opinion and then you > backed away once I challenged it.

From my perspective you made a mistake and now you're too proud to admit it.

What you "feel" I meant is wrong. I didn't even make a point. And I explicitly told you what I meant!

Interesting that you're now framing this as a "religious war". What I think is less interesting is that I have to defend myself against things you think I _might_ have said according to what you "feel".

<comment><USER14> I did not make a mistake. I stand by my opinion as well as the accompanying rationale for making my conclusion.

Here's the anatomy of your initial comment:

1\. Statement and rhetorical question echoing the article's main message

2\. A conclusion using a summary of the article. The article only has one main conclusion.

Was that comment not an opinion or are you making comments that article summary bots make? Forgive me for making an incorrect assumption.

<comment><USER13> Yes, you made a mistake.

No, I do not forgive you for jumping to conclusions, and no, I didn't give any opinion in my initial post or echo the main point of an article with many points. When asked, I told you what I found interesting about the article and whether I found the cost Jackie paid too high (I do).

Did you even wonder whether I've read the autobiography the author of the piece is commenting on? (no, I have not). Then how on earth could I hold his same opinion?

Thinking that an incomplete summary of something means agreeing with it is such a naive assumption it's funny.

Let it go. You're wrong. Or you can pretend my opinion is what you "feel" it must be, whatever.

<comment><USER14> > and whether I found the cost Jackie paid too high (I do).

Then I clearly didn't make a mistake. This is the article's core idea and I disagree with it for reasons that I've already outlined in my previous comments.

<comment><USER13> Yes you did, because that's not the article's core idea (which is more focused on Jackie's refusal to say more about his past hardships, what the article calls his "blindspot" [1]), and it says nothing about whether _I agree with the article_.

Did you wonder why I even felt the need to write a summary? Why would I need to, if one could simply just read TFA? It's because at the time I posted, most people were commenting stuff like "I love Jackie Chan's movies, Rush Hour is cool!", which seemed to me to be entirely off-topic and likely written by people who hadn't bothered to read the article. So I summarized _one_ of the ideas of the article -- the one I thought was worth discussing -- in hopes of getting the discussion back on track.

I succeeded. I just didn't expect your extremely literal and hilariously childlike interpretation of my post.

[1] Please don't debate this point with me as if it was mine. I know it's confusing because the words are there in my post, but that's not magic: it's called "summarizing what someone else said" \-- trust me! If you disagree with it, I don't know, write the author an angry email.

<comment><USER13> @chaostheory

> Unless you're a summary bot, most people inject their opinion when > summarizing an article.

That's not the purpose of a summary. My opinion is that it was "interesting" and wanted to move the conversation back on track, away from Jackie Chan's martial abilities and back on the subject of the submitted article.

> ok, let's pretend you didn't agree with article. It doesn't take away from > the fact that my comments just strongly disagreed with the idea of Jackie > "paying too high a price for success"

I've no problem with that. I can understand your disagreement. As I said, I agreed with parts of the article, disagreed with others, found other parts irrelevant, and found some interesting -- as in "meriting further discussion".

Do you see that I'm upset not about whether we disagree on Jackie Chan's life (why would that bother me?) but because you built a nice strawman, lumping my opinion with that of the author as if we were of a single mind, and proceeded to attack that? It's offensive and it's usually an underhanded debate tactic.

Had you answered "I disagree with the author because <reasons>", I wouldn't have had any problem. Instead, you wrote "I'm not sure what point you and the author are trying to make". I'm willing to believe that was a mistake, if you'll simply say "ok, I made a mistake. I was in disagreement with the author."

<comment><USER14> > nstead, you wrote "I'm not sure what point you and the author are trying to > make". I'm willing to believe that was a mistake, if you'll simply say "ok, > I made a mistake. I was in disagreement with the author."

1\. I am not mistaken. Your opinion of Jackie Chan "paying too high of a price" for his fame is an idea that the author shares. It is literally written throughout the article that you summarized. It's effectively part of your summary.

2\. Even if the first point wasn't true, and you have the unlikely and uncommon habit of quoting things that you have no opinion over; it doesn't matter. I was still arguing against your opinion of Chan paying a high price for fame. Your focus on whether or not the author had the same idea serves as a distraction from you either not being able to come up with an effective counter argument, or maybe even changing your opinion since it seems like you are distancing yourself from it.

"I'm not sure what point you are trying to make"

Happy?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> We have this tendency to look at successful people and think we can imitate them and have their success. I see Bill Gates is always giving a list of his favorite books of the year. Sorry Bill, if I read your books, I won't be a billionaire. Well Jackie Chan as great, talented, funny as he is. No matter what, I will never be him. Survivor bias and luck play a large role beyond what hard work and pain alone do.

<comment><USER16> Right. A large part of success is definitely luck and random opportunity, but I will say that you still have to be prepared for those instances to take advantage of them(unless you have nepotism on your side, then you can coast to your heart's content).

For us in the the lower / middle class, the best we can do is prepare as much as we can for the day we encounter luck or opportunity. No amount of preparation / commitment / training guarantees success, but we can't afford to be fatalistic about it.

I do agree that we need to be more empathetic with those who haven't succeeded though. People tend to assume it's due to some personal fault rather than accounting for the luck / opportunity aspect. Humans tend to think that when they themselves fail it's because of outside forces they couldn't control, but when others fail it's because of internal forces they could have controlled.

<comment><USER17> I think you are correct. I would say there are things that one can do to improve their odds of random opportunity and luck. A good example of that is hanging out with the right people and staying positive & motivated. In a lot of ways it is like dating. You need to be putting yourself out there. It isn't going to magically just happen. You have to make it happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The first paragraph does a great job of summarizing and contextualizing Jackie Chan's career.

But the rest of the article seems to drunkenly wonder around bumping into rhetorical questions that don't lead anywhere other than the reporter believes that Jackie Chan didn't complain or rejoice enough in his hardships or successes.

Ok, sure. I guess that's one opinion. But I'm kind of surprised that the reporter didn't have more to say than that.

<comment><USER19> Yes I thought the article was poorly written. Not really sure what angle the author was coming from

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> When I was kid, before reality, I wanted to be a stuntman. I'd round up my friends to shoot little actions movies with my Grandpa's Sony hi-8. They were structured on flimsy narratives that only served to facilitate fist fights, chase sequences and opportunities for a big fall. To convince my friends to get up at 8:00 on a Saturday to shoot all day around the neighbourhood I always gave away the part of the hero so I was always the bad guy, sometimes several bad guys in different costumes, but I also let me do most the directing. I figured out how to assembly edit all in camera, and then add music and sound effects when transferring to VHS. Anyway, when I discovered Jackie Chan he rocked my world.

</comment><comment><USER21> The sentiment from people from his home country is mixed, esp. regarding his behavior. E.g. [https://www.quora.com/Do-the-Chinese-like-Jackie- Chan](https://www.quora.com/Do-the-Chinese-like-Jackie-Chan)

I'm still a fan though, but only for his movies.

</comment><comment><USER22> Jackie Chan, in addition to being a world famous film star, is also an Honorary Professor of Tourism and a teaching member of the faculty at Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

I know this because he shares an office there with someone I know. I initially didn't believe it when I was told, but Wikipedia backs the story up.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie_Chan#Academic_career](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie_Chan#Academic_career)

</comment><comment><USER23> Jackie Chan, though, is an apologist for the Mainland government, and even suggested that Taiwan, perhaps (as of now) the only Chinese-speaking democracy, has "too much freedom."

<comment><USER24> > is an apologist for the Mainland government

Yes but doesn't any Chinese person have to be if they want to maintain any kind of ability to travel in China? _Especially_ if they are famous.

<comment><USER23> That might be true, but I think HN readers are not commonly aware that he is one. He once said in December 2012, that "Hong Kong is a 'city of protest,' suggesting that demonstrators' rights in Hong Kong should be limited. The same month, in an interview with Phoenix TV, Chan stated that the United States was the 'most corrupt' country in the world." This is a man whose made plenty of his fortune in the US.

Before we heap praise on Jackie Chan, I think it's important to know his full background.

<comment><USER25> i'm all for "exposing" how people really think but China is a country that literally disappears people, high profile internationally famous people like fan bingbing, for not paying their taxes. judicial process is almost a non- entity there if you anger the government.do you think chan has a choice in anything he says?

his choices are to toe the government line or never go back to his homeland. do you also criticize the chinese installed panchen lama for not speaking up against china?

<comment><USER23> He does have a choice—and he lives in Hong Kong. There are those Hong Kong citizens that have expressed their free rights yet are not able to enter the Mainland.

Here's the HK newspaper view on him: [https://m.scmp.com/culture/books/article/2176919/why- hypocri...](https://m.scmp.com/culture/books/article/2176919/why-hypocritical- jackie-chans-empty-confessions-deserve-no-sympathy)

This is about Jackie Chan. I'm afraid you're presenting a strawmam's argument with respect to what else the Mainland Chinese government has done—while you seem to be refuting my argument, you are presenting an argument that I didn't present. I'm obviously fairly critical of the Chinese government.

I'm reminded of this poem:

``First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist. / Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a trade unionist. / Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew. / Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.''

<comment><USER25> haha yeah so jackie chan should risk his life,fame and possessions so westerners he cares nothing about can feel good about lambasting china

<comment><USER26> Couldn't agree more. The whole simplistic idea of just throwing everything that took years to build just because some stranger can feel good shows a lack of understanding the economic hardship it took to get there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> "Chinese people need to be controlled, otherwise they will do whatever they want."

Haha... wow, that circular reasoning is so tight it's almost not even a circle anymore. "Chinese people need to be controlled, otherwise they will not be controlled". I have a theory that all circular reasoning can be reduced down to a (probably faulty) axiom or assertion.

<comment><USER14> For the record, I strongly disagree with Jackie's opinion. It does need more context though. China is a low trust society that doesn't have a strong rule of law. What this translates into is fake medicine, fake food, newly built buildings and bridges that either fall apart or are falling apart, police and low level government officials who need bribes for mundane things and so on. Jackie mainly wants a stronger rule of law. (He's just wrong about accepting a government with unlimited power. eg he thinks protests are bad) Of course, you're not going to get all of this from someone who didn't receive a lot of formal education, speaking in the 3rd language that he learned, in a small sound bite.

<comment><USER28> > China is a low trust society that doesn't have a strong rule of law. What > this translates into is fake medicine, fake food, newly built buildings and > bridges that either fall apart or are falling apart, police and low level > government officials who need bribes for mundane things and so on.

I'm sure this is all true, but I'm curious, have you lived in China? What's your take on the lived experience in China?

I just wanted to see this from different perspectives, because the United States has many parts that are perceived as hellholes in the abstract (like the city of Chicago where I live), but in reality daily life is quite normal and livable.

<comment><USER14> Yes. My perspective is skewed though. I know it as a child who didn't know any better, and now as an adult Americanized outsider with ties that keep weakening with time, exacerbated by differences in culture. While some things have stayed the same, a lot has also changed since I lived there.

Anywhere is livable, if you either don't have a choice or you're ignorant of alternatives. Looking at it as an American, parts are definitely livable as long as you don't mind the pollution. (I remember being so shocked at how clean the US was when I first arrived.) Life in general feels "faster". Kind of like NYC even crazier. I'd say the hardest part will be being accustomed to the culture. It's not as complicated as formal Japanese culture, but there's a lot of subtle formalities you have to learn and adapt to...

Oh - the big thing is plumbing and bathrooms. While it has gotten a lot better, you probably want to bring a roll of toilet paper with you anywhere you go. You may have to get used to squat toilets depending on where you go too. Aside from occasional food poisoning, it's definitely livable

<comment><USER29> > Aside from occasional food poisoning

I swamp my system with probiotics whenever I go there and I haven't had any food poisoning issues. I used these on my last visit: [http://www.jarrow.com/product/662/Jarro- Dophilus_EPS](http://www.jarrow.com/product/662/Jarro-Dophilus_EPS)

YMMV. I haven't been to China without doing the probiotics thing, but I have gotten sick in other places without them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is an incredibly disrespectful article.

> He was, in effect, a walking slab of meat to be trotted out whenever a > Peking opera production needed a singer or dancer or acrobat.

These hyperboles, so full of off-putting judgements are completely unnecessary. It's almost as if the author is hoping to gain, by being as rude and sensationalistic as possible.

Imagine if the author of this article actually met Jackie Chan - he'd crumble in shame if he has an iota of decency left in him/her. This article can be renamed 'the painful price of trying to be a journalist' \- it'd be more accurate.

<comment><USER31> Well Jackie Chan is not the most undeserving target.

In past, he narrowly missed out on 'father of the year' after admitting to throwing his young child across a room (1). He was overlooked a second time when he disowned his illegitimate daughter over her sexuality.

(1) [https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/03/asia/jackie-chan- autobiog...](https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/03/asia/jackie-chan- autobiography-intl/index.html)</comment></comment>


After Moore's Law: how phones are becoming open-source - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2015/08/features/moores-law/viewall <comment><USER2> I was just thinking about the end of Moore's law. People in the industry will tell you they've been overcoming obstacles for decades, but there is a fundamental change going on. Previous obstacles were manufacturing: Reduced wavelength, double patterning, immersion lithography. Some were part manufacturing and part device change: SOI, strained silicon. But now we're seeing changes to the devices themselves: Tri-gate transistors and now IBMs SiGe material for 7nm.

That change to SiGe is to increase electron mobility. The material could have been used all along, but it has been easier to stick to the tried and true Si. The bottom line is that plain silicon is not really viable below 10nm. A material change to effect one parameter isn't likely to be useful for more than a node or two before the same problem arises in that material.

I'd say 14nm FinFET will be a long lived node just like 28 has been. Then 7nm SiGe will be a higher end node with higher cost. Perhaps there will be another at 5nm but that's going to be a long time.

The equipment manufacturers will need to stay in business so they'll start selling stuff cheaper to the lower cost players as development of new nodes stops. This will lead to more capacity at the advanced node. Every micro controller will be made at 28nm and have an FPU (I can finally abandon fixed point math). Every SoC with a GPU will be made at 14nm. And lastly, laptops and desktops will have 7nm parts that are very expensive due to the expense of different materials, light sources, and the number of masks.

That's my guess at the market over the next few years and lasting for at least 10 more years beyond that. It will be very interesting to see how all the players cope with this. Even ARM will suffer as their CPU license cost starts to become a problem in a world of cheap chip production.

<comment><USER3> First , we don't need to wait, there are already microcontorllers for $1 with a floating-point unit.Also sleep current is rising greatly as one moves to new nodes - so some micro-controllers will stay on older nodes. But yes 28nm should be popular for mcu's - especially that now we have tools to package very tiny(sub mm2^2 dies) with lots of pins.

Anyway, today , and much more so in the future, microcontorllers will be commoditized(heck for most purposes today, many companies offer chips with low-enough power) and extremely cheap - and the determining factor will be software - and software ecosystem.

So the company who could come with with a great improvement to productivity and quality of embedded software developmet - and control that tool - would be in a very good place.

<comment><USER4> > _Also sleep current is rising greatly as one moves to new nodes - so some > micro-controllers will stay on older nodes._

How fundamental is this? TSMC has 5 different 28nm processes, so there's obviously some room to adjust things. Can't microcontrollers get effective power gating to keep idle power low when moving to smaller processes?

<comment><USER5> TSMC can tweak it all they like, but a smaller gate leads to higher leakage currents. Plus popular older nodes are still getting tweaked.

That said, you can still attain amazing sleep currents on modern advanced nodes. The catch is just that the best way to do that is with advanced design techniques, which require more design effort.

<comment><USER3> >> amazing sleep currents on modern advanced nodes.

How low sleep current on a 40nm/28nm mcu would be with those advanced techniques ? can youplease estimate ?

<comment><USER5> Well, anywhere from full power to zero, if you design a chip that can flush its state to persistent storage and go dark. x86 chips exemplify this wide range, with many power states all the way from full power to shutting off the entire package.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I agree with Linus Torvalds about Moore's law:

"It's like Moore's law - yeah, it's very impressive when something can (almost) be plotted on an exponential curve for a long time. Very impressive indeed when it's over many decades. But it's _still_ just the beginning of the "S curve". Anybody who thinks any different is just deluding themselves. There are no unending exponentials."

</comment><comment><USER7> So we'll switch to an entirely different basis - as we did from vaccuum tubes, relays, gears - I like Kurzweil's historical argument on this.

It's like Peak Oil - when the straightforward methods are exhausted, the price goes up, making it viable to explore other avenues that were comparatively inefficient before. Think about an intel-killer. Think about VCs thinking about an intel killer. Some tech may turn out to be much better than expected. To change the figure again, those neglected minor veins may lead to greater deposits, as has happened before.

There is _so. much._ demand for this.

eg biological neurons are far superior to our best silicon.

<comment><USER8> This reminds me of Peter Thiel's idea of "indefinite optimism": we've been spoiled by a recent history of frequent cutting-edge innovation, so we assume that it will continue despite having no idea of the shape it will take. The key here is _recent_ history -- humanity has only been advancing at its current breakneck pace for a few generations. Technological stagnation is more the normal mode.

I think we should consider the possibility that growth in processing power will level out at least for a while. There are some interesting research avenues which may yet bear fruit, but there's no guarantee that some miraculous scientific breakthrough will appear just in time to salvage exponential growth. "Moore's Law" is not some fundamental law of the universe.

<comment><USER9> Yes, some people take the approach that because one guy called Malthus was wrong before, things can't turn really bad ever. Never understood that kind of reasoning.

Seems like plenty of people even if they don't believe in Father God, they still have some kind of faith in Mother Nature, or Brother Progress that have our backs covered whatever we do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Reworking the supply and demand equation, Xiaomi limits availability through > online-only flash sales. Tightly controlled and lean, this model allows the > manufacturer to sell phones at near cost to the fortunate few who can catch > a flash sale before supplies run out.

Why does the manufacturer want to sell at near cost?

<comment><USER3> Controlling the OS many people use, selling other services, having a great consumer brands and using it to sell other stuff(it has a plan to partner with 200 startups) ,building an e-commerce store/empire , etc.

Also most consumer brands sell via a retailer(and it;s hard to change that). Xiaomi sells direct-to-consumer. That gives it more options with regards to pricing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> RISC-V is going to win now, it seems.

Just need a similar project for a big wide VLIW or similar part for graphics, then plop them together. When that happens, ARM and intel will change dramatically as companies, I imagine.

<comment><USER12> GPUs have already transitioned away from VLIW to scalar architectures. At least on the desktop front. They may still exist in mobile GPUs.

<comment><USER11> Indeed, looking at GCN, it seems like you could do as well with RISC-V itself(with a fancier SIMD extension) as the shader ISA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Silicon lattice constant (roughly the distance between atoms) is 0.56nm. The 5nm process will have 10 atom transistors. It's hard to imagine a traditional process smaller than that. That means that the end if Moore's law is near.

<comment><USER14> I think quantum computing with quantum states in atoms being transistor states will be final progression of Moore's Law. But we are definitely feeling the effects of the end right now. I think it was Michio Kaku who said that we have about 50 years left until Moore's Law is officially done ushering in the collapse of the industry and global economy.

<comment><USER15> > _I think it was Michio Kaku who said that we have about 50 years left until > Moore 's Law is officially done ushering in the collapse of the industry and > global economy._

Not even sure what he means. The efficiency of processors, especially beyond a certain point, hardly makes any difference to the "global economy".

Heck, there are even notable economists saying that the effect of the whole "www" on the economy wasn't that special compared to things like the first telecommunications, road and planes.

It's difficult to see when ones lives and breath in the IT industry echo chamber, but, you know, diminishing returns.

The fact that despite 50 years of Moore's law we didn't have anything like a 8,589,934,592 [1] times larger global economy, actually not even a 100x larger, should be enough proof that the Moore's law doesn't have a strong influence on it...

[1] 2^((50*12)/18).

<comment><USER13> The effect of the silicon computers was huge however (office productivity, industry automation, embedded systems, numerical modeling of analog systems such as biotech, airfoils, etc)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Oddly timed article given the announcement by IBM of their successful 7 nm test chips.

<comment><USER4> Successfully making a 7nm chip doesn't mean it will ever be cost-competitive with a 28nm or 16nm chip. Per-transistor cost isn't going down anymore, so these new processes are only going to attract customers that are willing to pay more for lower power or higher performance. It's no longer the case that the whole product line will be brought forward when the fab capacity becomes available.

It was only this spring that AMD finally removed 40nm GPUs from the low end of their product line. They'll keep selling 28nm GPUs until the fab equipment breaks.

<comment><USER3> But if you add the energy costs, it makes financial sense to move to newer nodes. Maybe we need some financial innovation that charges a part of the chip in small installments that you won't feel , because of savings ,while also supporting moore's law ?

<comment><USER17> Then you get the option. Today you have a much more pronounced choice between cheaper more power hungry AMD parts or expensive power efficient Intel ones.

In 2020 we will very likely have the choice between 7nm expensive high end CPUs and 14-16nm midrange parts, and budget phones / tablets/ low end cpus will be shipping 20nm. And we will still be using todays 24/28/32/40/45nm plants for various other circuits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is so wrong. They are acting if processors can only get better by increasing chip speeds. If that were the case todays quad core CPUs with 3GHz should match the performance of a Pentium 4 3GHz * cores, which is definitely not the case.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're making an extremely uncharitable reading, especially give the author. The article specifically acknowledges that there are other ways of increasing performance, which is exactly what CPU manufacturers have been concentrating on for the last decade. And where they're getting that extra performance from (e.g more cores or extra IPC through larger cache, better branch prediction, extending the ISA, etc) you're going to need more transistors.

The real point of the article is what happens to the hardware ecosystem once the density scaling stops. Not the exact mechanism by which node advances have been translating to improved performance.

<comment><USER18> Probably I don't really get the point of this article, or the exact changes in the hardware ecosystem when the density scaling stops? Because although scaling became harder recently, I don't think we have reached the point where the processing performance increase per year is slowing down.

I have a problem with that paragraph: _Even if it takes a couple of years and several iterations for a self-taught engineer to reproduce, the resulting product isn 't terribly out of date: the iPhone has only undergone a modest increase in clock rate over the past four years, from 1GHz in the iPhone 4 to 1.4GHz in today's iPhone 6. This relative stagnation is endemic, leaving a large window of opportunity for engineers to learn from and emulate the designs of the best._

The iPhone 6 was released with iOS 8, which doesn't support the iPhone 4 anymore. Also the CPU performance of the A8 in the iPhone 6 has 12x the performance of the iPhone 4. If you still want to use current apps, an iPhone 4 is really outdated.

On the other hand for the Novena laptop of the author the same principles might not hold true, but that has more to do with software than hardware, because especially Linux works very well with not so recent hardware. In my experience Android and iOS software became way more processing power hungry than desktop software did over the last 4 years.

<comment><USER19> Depending on what you mean by processing performance, the increases did slow down, significantly, around 2004-2005. At least for non-numerical single- threaded workloads. Had they continued at the same rate, CPU performance would be anywhere between 5 to 10X higher today.

This is a commonly used motivation for a lot of modern computer architecture research, here's one such plot: [http://liberty.princeton.edu/Projects/AutoPar/](http://liberty.princeton.edu/Projects/AutoPar/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>