> From that position, the difference between a ten cent part and a one dollar part is not a rounding error and it is not a detail you get to wave past on the way to the interesting discussion about encodings
Yet earlier:
> I pay anywhere from US $60 to US $200 to ship one dollar chips that people everywhere else get free shipping on
Seems to me that the difference between a 10c chip and a $1 chip are a rounding error when the shipping cost dominates so much?
ndiddy 13 minutes ago [-]
I think he's kind of speaking past the original author. The original piece is basically about how the author doesn't think that RISC-V will take off outside embedded, because of some design decisions that lead to poor performance compared to ARM64 and because so much of the ISA being optional means that there's too much fragmentation to make binary distribution feasible. Meanwhile, this piece is mainly about how RISC-V is great for embedded because companies can build it into custom chips with specifically the functionality they need, and because of how cheap it is for low-end use cases since there's no license fees.
The only real point of contention I see between the two is that this piece goes on to talk about how it's a selling point that RISC-V can be used for both low-end 10 cent microcontrollers, and high-end multi-core processors running Linux. Personally I don't see the benefit of this since you're going to have to recompile your software anyway, and since all the RISC-V SBCs I'm aware of have significantly worse performance and efficiency than comparably priced ARM SBCs.
ksec 9 minutes ago [-]
I don't think the Author disagree with what the original article wrote. If anything everything he said seems to reassert what the original article intended to state.
And while things has died down a lot in the past few years, there is a reason why I wrote the line.
"You do not criticise The Rusted Holy Grail and the Riscy Silver Bullet."
HawtAds 2 hours ago [-]
I love the article, it's a breath of fresh air compared to the usual bay area centric takes. However there's just one issue:
> The students I want to teach are in the same position, and so are the ones in Nigeria and Bangladesh
It does not take $60 to ship small sub $1 chips from Asia to Nigeria/Bangladesh. These two countries are all on global trade routes (both supply and demand) and the expensive last mile delivery costs are fairly low there too.
bigcat12345678 32 minutes ago [-]
This is a bay area centric take on a non bay area centric take.
The typical bay area centric take has the following vibe:
1. I am among the group of most open minded people
2. I admit mistakes, but I don't change my view, that means I may make the same mistakes next time on a different concrete cases
3. Morally I am among the least corrupted
4. I work for the moderately morally questionable firms with nice paychecks, but my moral views are not tainted a bit
This one was more self-aware than others. But we all know the demon voice of San Francisco sounds like a shoggoth trained on LessWrong.
TruffleLabs 2 hours ago [-]
Is this comment on shipping costs from Asia to Nigeria/Bangladesh based on your experience? If there is a less expensive way then share the approach to help others :)
notenlish 6 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
em-bee 1 hours ago [-]
i don't know how trustworthy rateships.com is, but according to them shipping costs to nigeria and trinidad are similar. and as for the last mile, the cost probably goes up because local shipping is rather unsafe (higher rate of theft of packages).
gaius_baltar 14 minutes ago [-]
> It does not take $60 to ship small sub $1 chips from Asia to Nigeria/Bangladesh
So don't even try to find how expensive is bring these to Brazil. Even the $5 orders from JLCPCB become infeasible for hobbyists here due to all the roadblocks.
spacechild1 52 minutes ago [-]
> from Asia to Nigeria/Bangladesh.
Bangladesh is a country in Asia...
farlight 17 minutes ago [-]
I am in Asia, this means nothing, it's the largest continent on earth. I don't pay as much for shipping as the author does, but his struggles are nevertheless relatable: most sellers refuse to ship here, most of those who do want dozens and dozens of dollars for it, and some (few, usually Chinese) sellers save the situation from being completely hopeless.
pooper 38 minutes ago [-]
In my experience, people in the United States often (incorrectly) short hand East Asia as Asia just like the people in the city of New York will often (correctly) short hand New York City as New York.
bonoboTP 16 minutes ago [-]
It's an interesting evolution given that Asia as a term started out meaning just the westernmost tip of current-Asia, ie Western Anatolia.
tyre 26 minutes ago [-]
Slight correction, people in NY refer to it as “The City” and people in NYC say the same, but specifically mean Manhattan.
chronic7403 30 minutes ago [-]
> In my experience, people in the United States often (incorrectly) short hand East Asia as Asia just like the people in the city of New York will often (correctly) short hand New York City as New York.
In my experience, the only demographic who complains about “Asia = east Asia” are people from South Asia, aka Indians/desis
andybak 19 minutes ago [-]
Ironically (for my generation in the UK at least) "Asian" meant "South Asian" and for a long time we didn't have a useful shorthand for "all parts of Asia"
Conan_Kudo 20 minutes ago [-]
We aren't the only ones, but we are the loudest about it, because erasure sucks.
stavros 9 minutes ago [-]
Don't get me started about Macedonia.
cyberclimb 39 minutes ago [-]
I don't think they are necessarily asserting otherwise
spacechild1 23 minutes ago [-]
So what does it mean to ship from Asia to Bangladesh? Do you ship from India, Iran or Indonesia? Or just within Bangladesh? :)
Ar-Curunir 37 minutes ago [-]
Shipping from Asia to Asia doesn’t make much sense
cwillu 22 minutes ago [-]
Asia is a pretty big place
k_roy 4 minutes ago [-]
Compared to a banana?
alephnerd 2 hours ago [-]
> it's a breath of fresh air compared to the usual bay area centric takes...
HN hasn't been Bay Area centric in years. Honestly, most comments and usership on the platform seems to now align with DACH and CEE.
Presumed RISC-V hate is a perfect example of that - the UCs and CSUs have been using RISC-V in their curriculum since the 2010s becuase Patterson is faculty at Cal and most CompArch courses in both systems have been using RISC-V as a result because 61a/b/c are often used as the benchmark curricula wise. An entire generation of Californian computer engineers have been RISC-V fluent as a result.
The hivemind assumption that HN's user base is "venture capital", "tech bro", "founders", and "Silicon Valley" is around 5 years out of date.
Anecdotally, the vast majority of younger (below 30) founders, engineers, VCs, and builders in the Bay have either not heard of HN or quit it within weeks due to toxicity.
greyb 2 hours ago [-]
>HN hasn't been Bay Area centric in years. Honestly, most comments and usership on the platform seems to now align with DACH.
I honestly do not get this at all. HN remains very US-centric to me, and especially centric to the mindshare of the Bay Area's IRL conversations, and apart from some takes on tech rights, does not really remind me of my experience in DACH.
weinzierl 40 minutes ago [-]
As someone from the DACH region I very much agree with this. I don't see a shift from typical US opinions to opinions often held in the DACH region. Not at all.
r3trohack3r 48 minutes ago [-]
> HN hasn't been Bay Area centric in years.
>> HN remains very US-centric
Bay Area != US
The Bay Area is its own microcosm of culture and philosophy that diverges significantly from much of the US.
Not making a statement on how prevalent either are on HN, but Bay Area is very much not equivalent to the US.
MBCook 41 minutes ago [-]
As an American, it’s extremely Silicon Valley centric, at least in mindset.
Extremely. The valley/startup lens is absolutely the dominant one.
alephnerd 2 hours ago [-]
> I honestly do not get this at all. HN remains very US-centric to me, and apart from some takes on tech rights, does not really remind me of my experience in DACH.
The majority of HN's usership, posting, and comment activity occurs during peak EU work hours (3am-9am), stylistic patterns that are common for German-native speakers are increasingly prominent, and the fact that IRL conversation topics in the Bay Area tech scene are entirely different from those on HN shows a massive divergence in userbase.
HN "Who wants to get hired" threads are a good example of that as well.
I'd recommend deep diving in the HN scrape dataset on HuggingFace [0]. The site has diverged heavily compared to 2018 or 2012.
How would you say the "IRL conversation topics in the Bay Area tech scene" diverge from HN?
snowpid 31 minutes ago [-]
While I appreciated your source
1.) I doubt 99% of Europeans work during 3am - 9am
2.) At least there can be other reasons:
2a.) EU times and African times are basically the same and Africa has a huge population.
2b.) India is closer timewise to EU/African time zones
2c.) What are about posts afterworks?
" RL conversation topics in the Bay Area tech scene are entirely different from those on HN shows a massive divergence in userbase. "
Any proof?
orangeboats 2 hours ago [-]
Non-American here... what is DACH?
greyb 2 hours ago [-]
It is Germany, Austria, Switzerland.
orangeboats 2 hours ago [-]
Thanks! I must admit this is the first time I have heard of the acronym.
" HN hasn't been Bay Area centric in years. Honestly, most comments and usership on the platform seems to now align with DACH and CEE. "
I like to encounter discussions about German digital health system or the German start up system or neo2. I've never seen them so I doubt it.
Also almost no debates about Polish stuff (Hello neigbours!)
GPerson 27 minutes ago [-]
How is it not tech bro centric when every third thread is about some new feature of a random Anthropic product?
handwarmers 54 minutes ago [-]
the fact that this comment is getting downvoted into oblivion instead of discussed is poignant enough.
fwiw, my experience is similar. hn has not been about startups, vc funding, or anything in that space for quite a while.
to paraphrase a classic, this place is like a memory of the forum we used to love, and the memory is fading.
bigbadfeline 20 minutes ago [-]
> this place is like a memory of the forum we used to love, and the memory is fading.
Well, this place (wherever you are) is like a memory of the world we used to love, and the memory is fading... Definitely true too.
You can't expect a place tightly connected to a changing world to stay the same.
jdw64 33 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
jacquesm 42 minutes ago [-]
So, you are calling the author a liar?
Sha1rholder 2 hours ago [-]
Nice read!
Though it feels a bit strange that "I have exceeded the allowed number of requests. (500 times)" when I first clicked the article and I'm pretty sure I don't share the ip of my self-hosted VPN with anyone.
Is archive.is still a malicious site that DDOS's finnish security bloggers or has that been sorted?
avmich 2 hours ago [-]
To me it feels like the difference in positions is "this could be made better" vs. "but this is already so much better than before". Both are right.
Maybe I'm missing something important so far...
ipdashc 12 minutes ago [-]
I was thinking the same. RISC-V is certainly impressive and I'm glad we have it, but the original article isn't wrong in its complaints either.
It definitely could have gone with a less abrasive tone (as entertaining as it is), so it's no wonder it's getting some pushback.
IshKebab 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah the complaints in the original article are valid, but it's like complaints about Android or iOS. There are plenty of valid complaints against either, but neither is strictly better than the other.
initramfs 20 minutes ago [-]
"Now price the same journey on the other side, forget x86-64 and that duopoly, patent minefield, with multi-thousand dollar debug probes; we'll take a look at ARM."
The 386 and 486 patent should have expired more than 20 years ago. No one tried to open source it. https://github.com/EI2030/Low-power-E-Paper-OS/blob/master/0... There were many companies that had clones in the early 90s, and I wonder whether any of them still have the rights to manufacture them.
" That is a better reason than elegance. and I want to tell Mr Grinberg, that the word priviledge he tosses around in his article also extends beyond the ISA depending on where you are in the world."
Grinberg is an emigre from Ukraine, which isn't the most privileged place in the world. In fact his research articles go deeper than the average software developer in Silicon Valley.
Conan_Kudo 18 minutes ago [-]
There are 386 and 486 reimplementations in Verilog (see z386 and z486). As far as I know, existing commercial 386/486 chips still manufactured (yes they exist!) are descendants of Cyrix work, not Intel or AMD. Consequently, VIA may be contractually holding those back rather than Intel/AMD doing anything there.
initramfs 15 minutes ago [-]
Thanks for that information! I have been interested in getting x86 produced in smaller nanometer (e.g. <32nm). My project: https://ei2030.github.io/FemtoTX/#about
"Intel provided Rosaic access to an unknown Atom-class core, which enables the company to build its own custom processors based on x86 general-purpose cores, according to the report. The renowned chipmaker plans to ship Rosaic register-transfer level (RTL) code for the Atom processor core, which will let the startup build its custom system-on-chip (SoC) both at Intel Foundry and elsewhere."
What's interesting is that a startup with limited funds would most likely seek a 32-bit x86 license if a) they don't need more than 4GB of RAM, and b), if they don't want to pay AMD for the 64 bit license add-on. :)
msephton 45 minutes ago [-]
This is the sort of content I endure this place for. Thanks for posting.
Nah, that's just Internet Archive being Internet Archive.
AlienRobot 30 minutes ago [-]
We'll need an archived copy of the archived copy.
ksec 29 minutes ago [-]
> Request Limit: 500 per minute
I mean that is not even 10 page view per second. We are not living in 2006. Actually even in 2006 Apache with static page would have been able to handle that on a small VPS. And that is excluding CDN.
ckot56 15 minutes ago [-]
I have no idea what's going on here, but the title alone gave me second-hand engineering stress. Solid post.
Some serious stuff he builds on top of those chips.
crvdgc 59 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
pranav_tech26 44 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
Lagoon3384_SWE 47 minutes ago [-]
Just an unlucky spawn point. We need to focus on ourselves. "oh no shipping to some remote island is expensive compared to NYC that has next day free on everything" Well, duh.
MBCook 28 minutes ago [-]
So “you were born somewhere ‘unlucky’, that’s how it goes, sucks to be you”.
Is that really your take?
Lagoon3384_SWE 15 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
soulofmischief 34 minutes ago [-]
Naïve take. We live in a global neoliberal economy, our standards of living are the direct result of introducing scarcity and other forms of exploitation elsewhere while keeping domestic populations largely unaware of how unfair their position is. There is no ethical basis to simply "focus on ourselves" here. We must do the exact opposite.
mohamedkoubaa 4 minutes ago [-]
Appeals to an ethical basis don't work on everyone
roughly 2 minutes ago [-]
Let’s take the rationalist approach, then: does the author of this blog post seem like someone who could contribute reasonably to humanity’s future? Does it seem like we might be doing ourselves a disservice by ignoring them, and those like them?
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
― Stephen Jay Gould
Lagoon3384_SWE 16 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 19:40:57 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
> From that position, the difference between a ten cent part and a one dollar part is not a rounding error and it is not a detail you get to wave past on the way to the interesting discussion about encodings
Yet earlier:
> I pay anywhere from US $60 to US $200 to ship one dollar chips that people everywhere else get free shipping on
Seems to me that the difference between a 10c chip and a $1 chip are a rounding error when the shipping cost dominates so much?
The only real point of contention I see between the two is that this piece goes on to talk about how it's a selling point that RISC-V can be used for both low-end 10 cent microcontrollers, and high-end multi-core processors running Linux. Personally I don't see the benefit of this since you're going to have to recompile your software anyway, and since all the RISC-V SBCs I'm aware of have significantly worse performance and efficiency than comparably priced ARM SBCs.
And while things has died down a lot in the past few years, there is a reason why I wrote the line.
"You do not criticise The Rusted Holy Grail and the Riscy Silver Bullet."
> The students I want to teach are in the same position, and so are the ones in Nigeria and Bangladesh
It does not take $60 to ship small sub $1 chips from Asia to Nigeria/Bangladesh. These two countries are all on global trade routes (both supply and demand) and the expensive last mile delivery costs are fairly low there too.
The typical bay area centric take has the following vibe:
1. I am among the group of most open minded people
2. I admit mistakes, but I don't change my view, that means I may make the same mistakes next time on a different concrete cases
3. Morally I am among the least corrupted
4. I work for the moderately morally questionable firms with nice paychecks, but my moral views are not tainted a bit
5. I never think on the other's perspectives
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-foothills-of-bay-area-h...
So don't even try to find how expensive is bring these to Brazil. Even the $5 orders from JLCPCB become infeasible for hobbyists here due to all the roadblocks.
Bangladesh is a country in Asia...
In my experience, the only demographic who complains about “Asia = east Asia” are people from South Asia, aka Indians/desis
HN hasn't been Bay Area centric in years. Honestly, most comments and usership on the platform seems to now align with DACH and CEE.
Presumed RISC-V hate is a perfect example of that - the UCs and CSUs have been using RISC-V in their curriculum since the 2010s becuase Patterson is faculty at Cal and most CompArch courses in both systems have been using RISC-V as a result because 61a/b/c are often used as the benchmark curricula wise. An entire generation of Californian computer engineers have been RISC-V fluent as a result.
The hivemind assumption that HN's user base is "venture capital", "tech bro", "founders", and "Silicon Valley" is around 5 years out of date.
Anecdotally, the vast majority of younger (below 30) founders, engineers, VCs, and builders in the Bay have either not heard of HN or quit it within weeks due to toxicity.
I honestly do not get this at all. HN remains very US-centric to me, and especially centric to the mindshare of the Bay Area's IRL conversations, and apart from some takes on tech rights, does not really remind me of my experience in DACH.
>> HN remains very US-centric
Bay Area != US
The Bay Area is its own microcosm of culture and philosophy that diverges significantly from much of the US.
Not making a statement on how prevalent either are on HN, but Bay Area is very much not equivalent to the US.
Extremely. The valley/startup lens is absolutely the dominant one.
The majority of HN's usership, posting, and comment activity occurs during peak EU work hours (3am-9am), stylistic patterns that are common for German-native speakers are increasingly prominent, and the fact that IRL conversation topics in the Bay Area tech scene are entirely different from those on HN shows a massive divergence in userbase.
HN "Who wants to get hired" threads are a good example of that as well.
I'd recommend deep diving in the HN scrape dataset on HuggingFace [0]. The site has diverged heavily compared to 2018 or 2012.
[0] - https://huggingface.co/datasets/open-index/hacker-news
" RL conversation topics in the Bay Area tech scene are entirely different from those on HN shows a massive divergence in userbase. " Any proof?
I like to encounter discussions about German digital health system or the German start up system or neo2. I've never seen them so I doubt it.
Also almost no debates about Polish stuff (Hello neigbours!)
fwiw, my experience is similar. hn has not been about startups, vc funding, or anything in that space for quite a while.
to paraphrase a classic, this place is like a memory of the forum we used to love, and the memory is fading.
Well, this place (wherever you are) is like a memory of the world we used to love, and the memory is fading... Definitely true too.
You can't expect a place tightly connected to a changing world to stay the same.
Though it feels a bit strange that "I have exceeded the allowed number of requests. (500 times)" when I first clicked the article and I'm pretty sure I don't share the ip of my self-hosted VPN with anyone.
Maybe I'm missing something important so far...
It definitely could have gone with a less abrasive tone (as entertaining as it is), so it's no wonder it's getting some pushback.
The 386 and 486 patent should have expired more than 20 years ago. No one tried to open source it. https://github.com/EI2030/Low-power-E-Paper-OS/blob/master/0... There were many companies that had clones in the early 90s, and I wonder whether any of them still have the rights to manufacture them.
" That is a better reason than elegance. and I want to tell Mr Grinberg, that the word priviledge he tosses around in his article also extends beyond the ISA depending on where you are in the world."
Grinberg is an emigre from Ukraine, which isn't the most privileged place in the world. In fact his research articles go deeper than the average software developer in Silicon Valley.
Edit: It also appears Nvidia might also have an x86 license: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/uli-m6117c/
Also, https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intel-licens...
"Intel provided Rosaic access to an unknown Atom-class core, which enables the company to build its own custom processors based on x86 general-purpose cores, according to the report. The renowned chipmaker plans to ship Rosaic register-transfer level (RTL) code for the Atom processor core, which will let the startup build its custom system-on-chip (SoC) both at Intel Foundry and elsewhere."
What's interesting is that a startup with limited funds would most likely seek a 32-bit x86 license if a) they don't need more than 4GB of RAM, and b), if they don't want to pay AMD for the 64 bit license add-on. :)
I mean that is not even 10 page view per second. We are not living in 2006. Actually even in 2006 Apache with static page would have been able to handle that on a small VPS. And that is excluding CDN.
https://rvembedded.com/products/project-lab/
Definitely interested!
Does anyone have an archive?
Some serious stuff he builds on top of those chips.
Is that really your take?
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
― Stephen Jay Gould