So strange
> [...] A materials scientist working for Rubycon in Japan left the company, taking the secret water-based electrolyte formula for Rubycon's ZA and ZL series capacitors, and began working for a Chinese company. The scientist then developed a copy of this electrolyte. Then, some staff members who defected from the Chinese company copied an incomplete version of the formula and began to market it to many of the aluminium electrolytic manufacturers in Taiwan [...]
"You will go to jail if you kill someone" isn't a control against murder.
If it weren’t that hard to replicate, several countries (and Bezos/Blue Origin) would have replicated it by now.
I think you vastly underestimate how difficult rocketry is. There’s a reason “rocket science” is colloquially a metaphor for an extremely difficult and technical task.
The materials science aspect is a challenge, not to produce, but to produce with a sane cost.
The rocket science aspect of things (namely the linearisation of the booster model in order to be able to be solved in constant time by an MPC) is more or less a solved problem.
Coordinating such complex interconnected systems will always remain one.
isn't that what they do in SpaceX????, your comment literally counterproductive
Yet you don't hear people throw the phrase "automotive science" around.
Rocket science has some niche parts that are very hard indeed. But this is not where the major challenge lies.
"sure, let's put four RL-10 hydrogen engines on it! They are expensive and the worst possible for the low-altitude flights we are going to do so some sucker will believe we can do multi-stage reusable flights to orbit".
"sure, we don't actually need to go to orbit anyway. That was always a dumb idea. Who said we ever wanted to do that? No, suborbital is really useful, we promise. And we are going to do it with a single stage (using hydrogen) cuz we are so smart and the future and everything!"
"sure, let's build a specialized hydrogen tank in a stupid shape."
"sure, let's give the whole single-stage low-altitude rocket a k00l shape that makes it more expensive."
"People knowing it can't be done shouldn't interrupt people doing it wrong."
There is a 100% chance multiple countries/companies will have replicated it in the next decade. If SpaceX never existed, they likely would have achieved it at the same pace regardless.
This is the same with EVs. If Tesla never rose, the world EV market outside of Tesla would have seen precisely the same rise.
There is a tendency to attribute the early movers with innovation in the inevitable, where we all stand on the shoulders of others and just reach a little higher.
As to the rocket science misnomer, that's a space race hangover where an engineering role was extremely public and celebrated, but in actual reality "rocket science" is a mediocre field with miserable pay and high unemployment.
As to how valuable it is, "insanely"? The world has a fairly finite launch need, such that SpaceX made a whole new business -- Starlink -- to make work for their capacity. Economically the space launch business is relatively minuscule.
would have seen the same rise _eventually_. I know from a friend that worked R&D at a major car company that Tesla really lit a fire under then and 'forced' them to push their own EV experiments from proof of concepts to commercial product much faster than they where originally thinking about doing it.
Through almost all of Tesla's existence, its business model was ironically the sale of gasoline vehicles. Because, of course, Tesla's entire business model relied upon selling green credits to incumbent ICE vehicle makers.
So it didn't really prove much of a business model, effectively being parasitic.
>the technology and path from niche sports car to the best selling car on earth,
The overwhelming bulk of the technology advancements that enable modern EVs -- from advances in batteries to cameras to sensors to embedded controllers and CPUs -- is thanks to the smartphone industry. Modern EVs owe infinitely more to those than they do to anything Tesla did.
>knowing that a solution exists and is financially viable, is enough to motivate the competition.
I think of this much like compact fluorescents. Remember those? We all rushed to transition, and then they were absolutely demolished in every metric -- efficiency, colour, and most importantly the amount of environmental contamination when disposed -- by LED lights. I feel like we're going to feel the same about early EVs.
>now on to the lowest cost per mile robotaxi
Is this a serious comment?
Would you point me to a source where I can read about this?
Absolutely a serious comment and why Waymo will likely be unable to compete. Tesla is designing their fleet for the lowest cost per mile, and likely the real reason why they have pushed back on Lidar versus camera - humans can drive with binocular (some with just monocular) vision, why use Lidar as it’s more expensive.
If a Waymo car costs $100k and is good for 100k miles, then that’s $1/mile. Tesla’s robotaxi is likely designed for 500k miles at under $0.10/mile. Tesla’s robotaxi will be able to drive me for cheaper than I’ll be able to drive myself. Think of a cab company with scale enough to build their own cabs, optimizing for the lowest cost per mile, and with $0 labor costs. That’s going to be their huge win. And no, I’m not an Elon fan, but I do understand his business plan, and it’s brilliant. And no, I don’t think it’s going to displace personal cars. There’s too much burst demand during rush hour for a peak scaled fleet to be cost effective (I haven’t run the numbers, so even that slight may be incorrect). However I do expect to never have to drive myself once I hit retirement age, and I’ll probably not even own the vehicle. My hope is that there will be a fast follower, able to compete against Tesla, otherwise I’ll be paying Tesla $0.99/mile instead of $0.12/mile.
TLDR: It's nonsense.
It mentions the mine "collapsed" in 1989. Does that mean literally? Just financially? Was there an insurance payout? Did everyone lose their investment? Did Errol Musk own 1% or 90%?
* In quoting another article, it does say: "Errol Musk, an engineer, owned a small percentage of an emerald mine and had a couple of good years before the mine went bust and wiped out his investment."
Elon graduated from college less than 10 years later but says he was $100k in debt. Was he actually in debt? Did he spend years paying that off or did he (or someone else) pay it off shortly after in a lump sum or very quickly?
His dad provided $20k of a $200k seed round for Zip2, was the rest also from friends and family or more institutional investors? Did his dad receive equity for that or was it a gift?
Reading through the article again (and a little more closely than before) it doesn't seem Elon had "an incredibly privileged upbringing" but maybe that's a mix of good PR and this now being 40-some years ago? They're referred to as upper middle class but if that's all it takes to be "incredibly privileged" then 90% of the kids born to people reading HN are also incredibly privileged.
Arnold's piece seems to contradict basically everything else in the article so I'm not sure what to make of it, but it also sounds like he made about $350k profit over the lifetime of his ownership in the mine? Certainly not nothing but it's not opulence and it doesn't sound like most (any?) of that made its way to Elon.
> Wanderlust ran on both sides of the family. On holidays, Errol and his kids would travel, he said: to Europe, Hong Kong, throughout the United States. Or they'd take the plane to Lake Tanganyika [in Zambia], where Errol had a stake in an emerald mine.
That sounds more privileged than upper middle class to me.
("export control" in this sense really doesn't have to do with moving a physical object out of the country but sharing information, to the extent that a conversation in an elevator could be an export violation. most export violations amount to emails being sent to the wrong person)
When I worked briefly in defense, for example, there would be regular random searches of my stuff as I exited the building and security would wander the building and look at what you left out on your desk while you went to lunch. Entirely seriously they told us not to wear our badge in public if we left the building and not to leave our laptops in our cars because someone might follow us and steal it. Had colleagues who were visiting a foreign country for work have their hotel rooms obviously thoroughly and messily searched while they were out.
They also do national security missions so there are folks there with high clearances.
Thing is that even if you did steal a bunch of information, that doesn't mean you could just copy and be successful. Any one of a million things can go wrong with a self-landing rocket that will cause it to explode, you can't just steal the whole system of operation that keeps these things from happening.
You couldn't steal all of the secrets of a circus performer and suddenly be able to juggle chainsaws while riding a unicycle.
Maybe they shouldn't be? And I think honest people can have that debate.
But you can't really argue against the effectiveness of government subsidy as a path to prosperity for the guy getting the money.
While there are some really nice components and clever ideas (Merlin/Raptor engines & very good guidance tech) this all really has been doable for decades in less efficient form.
But so far no one other than Space X has been able to win against all the naysayers who were so sure only single use rockets are ever going to work, get enough funding to build a partial RLV & then operate it successfully as a business.
I don't think it depends on any single technology or a set of them only they have access to - rather that they have been able to persist and see it through, unlike all the other RLV projects that never got funding to go past the paper stage or very simply not viable (Space shuttle).
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Business-Adventures-Twelve-Classic-St...
Following a recipe can you close enough for thousands of Door Dash customers to put the original restaurant out of business.
For an analogy, no one cares if you're a good cook if you're able to make a passable burger. Most of the demand is not for the best burger money can buy, the just want a burger.
To be fair, they have taken the effort to build the CJ 1000A engine - which is on wing testing should the tangerine fellow cut them off. But its Plan B at best.
We could hand the full project file to a competitor and they almost certainly would not be able to build functional units. The failure points are fractal, so you need a strong intuition about what part you are installing, what qualities an ideal part has, what qualities the one in your hand has, how you might install it differently because of those qualities, and/or how you might change a later process to accommodate it. Or if the part should just be junked. The process is fraught with seemingly good intuitions that will ultimately lead you to failure as well.
These units also cannot be reworked, reused, or repaired, so any mistake before finalizing the build junks the entire thing.
For extremely low-entropy products, mother nature is incredibly unforgiving.
There is a specialised trade known as tool and die maker, or just die maker (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_and_die_maker) that is fundamental to a country’s ability to create industrial capacity. So far, no automation tool has been able to replace their expertise.
Without die makers, you can’t build tools that make things, you can’t build factories, and mass production in general is dependent on their skillset.
Right now, the USA only has 50k die makers, and the average age of a die maker, including apprentices, is 54. The average age of a master die maker is 73, and the average age of a journeyman is 62. A master die maker can teach about 5 apprentices to the journey man level in a work environment, after 2+ years of basic engineering school, in about 5-7 years. A journeyman may generally considered a master after 10-20 years of experience, depending on the nature of their experience.
We don’t have enough die makers to rebuild the industrial capacity of the USA, and we can’t teach the amount we need in less than 5-7decades without some kind of major change in the process of doing so. And since more than half of the master die makers are months from retirement or death, we are in an extremely precarious position as a viable industrial power.
This is why it is extremely difficult to build anything physical in the USA using only USA sourced parts and materials. It’s almost impossible to even get a decent variety of screws and fasteners made here in the USA, and we can’t easy build the machines to make screws because of the critical shortage of master die makers.
If we are to maintain the ability to build and maintain our machines, weapons, and critical infrastructure without being completely dependent on imported tools, supplies, and knowledge, we will have to reinvent the industrial process using automation or something similar to compensate for our foolish exportation and devaluation of strategic skills and capabilities.
This is the shortcoming with most technical fields. No one is incentivized to see the big picture of the training pipeline that exists well outside the scope of their own company. No one likes juniors but that is their future.
If you are smart enough to be a good tool maker, you are likely smart enough to be a good 6-figure keyboard-all-day worker. Losing a finger (or three) and breathing VOCs all day for half the pay is not very enticing.
These industries aren't glamourous for investors either. The business proposition sucks, the cost and liabilities are intense, and the margins would need to be negative to be truly competitive.
And worse than anything, the stuff that comes from China is not only 1/10th the cost, it's also now better quality.
Otherwise, completely homegrown manufacturing is essentially dead in the water.
If we want to regrow US domestic manufacturing, we need to throw about 100B at scholarships and incentives, or figure out how to capture remaining diemaker empirical knowledge into ML / robotics.
Or maybe we could spend 10B on immigration incentives for qualified Diemakers? Idk about the global state of affairs and how that would work. At any rate we need at least 100-300k new diemakers if we really want to rebuild 100 percent domestic capabilities overnight. And then we need a career path for them 20 years farther down the road.
It was really, really foolish to allow strategic industrial capability to wither on the vine.
SmarterEveryDay attempted to make a grill scrubber in the US. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY
tl;dr He did it, but it went very poorly.
The SmarterEveryDay piece was disheartening for sure, echoes what I have been singing from the rooftops ever since the government dropped the USA origin of manufacturing requirements for all purchases. Sure, it was a kind of corporate welfare, and it made for a tricky incentive misalignment, but it kept a lot of strategic industries on life support. We would be in a way, way better position now if it hadn’t ended.
All our military work still uses US electronics shops and machine shops.
At this point I think in practice it’s a preference for US manufacturers but a long way from robust enough to establish domestic supply chains.
Also -a lot- of military purchases are local, discretionary on a credit card, and there is no oversight on the origin there- it’s whatever they need from office max or the hardware store.
Chinese skilled labor wages aren’t that low anymore. The reason they can do most work for 1/10 of the local cost is advanced automation, government VC investment, and somewhat less c-suite greed. The incentive alignment of the government VC is also distinct from typical US VC.
We can’t even build the machines that would enable that kind of automation in the USA. We’d need to buy them from China, IF China was willing to sell them to us. Unlike the USA, China is probably not going to be stupid about diluting their advantages. I’m sure the CCP hasn’t forgotten the decades where we were unwilling to sell them high precision machine tools lol.
Unfortunately, we are more likely to see a slow deterioration of the US economy and infrastructure, until we hit about a 5-6x wage advantage over China which we could potentially use to copy the Chinese playbook and rebuild our presence.
I really hope I’m completely wrong lol.
See perhaps:
> Tacit knowledge or implicit knowledge is knowledge that is difficult to extract or articulate—as opposed to conceptualized, formalized, codified, or explicit knowledge—and is therefore more difficult to convey to others through verbalization or writing. Examples of this include individual wisdom, experience, insight, motor skill, and intuition.[1] An example of "explicit" information that can be recorded, conveyed, and understood by the recipient is the knowledge that London is in the United Kingdom. Speaking a language, riding a bicycle, kneading dough, playing an instrument, or designing and operating sophisticated machinery, on the other hand, all require a variety of knowledge that is difficult or impossible to transfer to other people and is not always known "explicitly," even by skilled practitioners.
Then parts have to be hard anodised and sand blasted.
- Sand blasting uneven - Sharp edges remaining - Streaks - Contamination - Exposed bare metal (it is only acceptable in the holes that could be used for hanging)
Companies also have virtually non existent QA. You can list them things that will cause rejection and they send it anyway.
One company told him after sending a batch that was complete carnage "We can give you $100 coupon for next order!" he insisted on rework. So they sent again, even worse.
But when push comes to shove if manufacturing is cheaper in a country where lots of folks want to steal your things. -shrug- Short term profits win.
I think that the more of a free for all folks stealing tech as they wish will push companies who do the development work towards more proprietary / DRM and similar solutions ... I don't like that.
Allowing people to profit from their inventions / investments encourages more such development, and without that discourages it or encourages less good options.
Your engineers lose their jobs, your businesses go bankrupt, you exit that entire field entirely for your entire population. Slowly your ability to do work begins to evaporate.
It's happened before and it'll continue to happen.
To be clear about this, you can still physically do the work same as before, it's just become uneconomic/not competitive. It's not all bad though. Having another country take the bulk of the market leaves you free to differentiate and specialize in one or more profitable niches that are not being served well by what is now the main supplier. You might end up dominating some fraction of what's now a vastly bigger market, with improved economies of scale that you're free to exploit as well.
We hope that it works out that way, but there's simply no guarantee. It's not an economic law.
If the country supplying said thing can have domestic companies deliver at lower margin, you're still kind of screwed. Their internal competition fills out the niches, which they can then export.
there's something that rubs me wrong about the argument of "we need IP laws because otherwise someone else might do the same thing as us, but better, and we won't be able to compete"
TSMC alone is 12% of Taiwanese exports. The entire semiconductor industry is 25% of Taiwan's GDP. It's obvious why the Taiwanese government and society, to say nothing of TSMC's shareholders, would care.
I will grant you, the specific case of TSMC is definitely in the rarer case where there are true tech secrets.
If they compartmentalize their hardware and software departments, we might as well split them into a hardware and a software company.
People are questioning whether the technology was leaked to Rapidus through Japanese equipment suppliers.
Unless it has great yields with 0 issues, there's always things to learn from. It's also possible the IBM process isn't what it seems and there's more to it.
I still want to get a look at China's. Right down to the metallurgy.
Link: https://asia.nikkei.com/business/technology/tsmc-fires-worke...
Archive: https://archive.ph/ta1kq
One such file was an Excel file that was more script than anything else. We had to have labels in a specific format on every machine we owned in the fab, which was something like 250 of them. The normal stuff like its id number, and also which points of contact for a technician and engineer, as well as their photos and phone numbers. Manually balancing and re-balancing every time a shift gained or lost an employee would’ve been obnoxious, so naturally instead countless hours were spent coercing VBA and ODBC to query a DB containing employee info, extracting and resizing their headshot, applying all of this to a template label, queuing a print job, and repeating. It was pretty fun to watch, honestly. I think I also had created a floor plan map somehow, and it would do its best to group a given technician’s assigned machines such that they minimized distance traveled during inspections. Anyway, the large file size was due to it caching the headshots (might have made a hidden tab for each? I don’t remember) for better performance, as that had proven to be a bottleneck.
be it things better done with a database, a word processor, a diagramming program, a label generator, a Form editor, a markup language, a web page, anything: they had all the tools at their disposal but no, no, they felt the odd compulsive need to do it with only Excel instead…
…often leading to problems down the line when the limitations of Excel for the use case (for which it wasn't made) would show more and more but they wasted already so much time and (needless) effort doing it in Excel that they would be even more reluctant to the possibility of switching to any more appropriate tool for the task.
Until the web version takes over, and you can no longer connect to anything real.
"Lessons from writing a Kubernetes Security book" at
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44784495
all about the joys and problems developers encounter using kubernetes/k8.
And reading now, today here about Excel/VBA, it struck me that something was missing: couldn't I eliminate 90% of computer software and ease 80% of software devops simply by building/selling a system that ran purely Excel atop kubernetes?
I mean, isn't that all there is to computing nowadays? Plus a little social media? And some AI for fun and maybe a little Excel/k8 work as frosting on the cake.
EDIT: Upon some further thought and prompting by helpful anonymous others, I have found a slightly different path: a FORTH/kubernetes system that will be used to bootstrap versions of VBA & Excel to the cloud. This will be made available to the great unwashed masses of humanity (and their AI friends) for implementing social media for all.
Lo and behold, not every math package provides "shadow values". So you either buy a specialized math tool, or... use Excel, that has it built-in.
That one estimated nominal and peak loading on electrical distribution circuits by querying a DB for consumption on a given branch, and comparing it to a table containing current handling capabilities of various kinds of ACSR (overhead power lines). It was easier to do that in Excel because people were already used to it for various calculations.
Also if you’re wondering, yes, we had some bespoke software whose name escapes me that was specifically created to model electrical circuits; unfortunately no one knew how to use it, but one guy thought he did, and convinced management that we didn’t need to pay for training because he would train everyone else. He did not.
In my case, another not-insignificant factor was that multiple people on the team were quite good at abusing Excel and VBA, but only two others knew any other programming languages. One of them was an engineer (not SWE, engineer as in fab tool engineer - I think he was an EE) who occasionally wrote stuff in C for fun, and the other was also an engineer, but one who had convinced management that we should create an in-house SWE team. Great idea, and we weren’t the first to do so; unfortunately our manager was abruptly replaced, and his successor saw no value in the proposition.
Because I had already done about the same thing in HP basic before PC's existed, when there wasn't a spreadsheet app anyway.
And it was on my mind the whole time.
It didn't take many more years before clients wanted their results in XLS on one tab and the invoice on another tab. Rather than the DOC files they had been wanting, which were reasonable facsimiles of the top linen typewritten paperwork I used to fax then mail by USPS or Fedex at the beginning. With the original invoice attached using a "gold" paperclip, nothing ever stapled or folded.
Oh how low I have sunk since then :\
Anyway it was pretty easy to switch from Word to Excel using the same fonts and similar formatting, even though direct integration was provided for, I just switched. When clients printed it they looked almost indistinguishable from my old typewritten multi-font documents.
And that just happened to put the paperwork onto the same spreadsheet as the data. Left one blank tab for future AI use, and the two tabs to send to the clients are in place to the right of that.
Eventually there were quite a few tabs in between the blank placeholder and the final two tabs that the clients would receive. Each with its own function to further leverage built-in Excel capabilities and make further progress toward a "paperless" office.
Saved gobs of code there too, but it gets "worse" from here ;)
It all came together by writing more VBA modules until there was an automation "shell" around the working system. Once complete it would stop so you could look at the data, decide what to type into the blank tab ("naturally", in the absence of AI) then hit the button.
And you were done.
From developer point of view I see that the effort would most certainly be diverted in another kind of solution.
But yeah, "citizen developer" stuff is a thing that microsoft pushes especially in Power Platform / Canvas Apps - one programs with WYSIWIG and Excel-like formulas (PowerFX)
But then again I wonder who are the people that can program in VBA and chooses excel. Is it the constraint around software they can use? An excel being a GUI which you don't have to implement? Anyways, a net positive for business.
My guess is that they're worried that you'll download data and then copy it out of the device while the device is offline. An employee could even "lose" the device, giving an attacker unbound time to extract data from it.
Another equally likely explanation is that the exec in charge of their cloud services gains more prestige due to his solution being universally adopted internally, or some other crap along this line.
Converting costs money. Unless there is a good reason, nobody will do it.
How easily could another company replicate this process if they knew all the key details? It was my understanding that access to photolithography machines was one of the major obstacles in replicating chip manufacturing processes.
There's way too many fine details to even begin to list. Modern chip fabbing is the closest thing on the planet to actual dark magic, and the difficulty only rises exponentially with every new fabrication node. Literally any part of this could be considered a "trade secret" if it's not already described publicly as part of patents, academic research or both.
More specifically, Rapidus.
>Does your question imply that none of these countries are capable of orchestrating this and only nation-states can do it?
It's not clear to me that Russia can summon the ambition. But point conceded.
It's a shibboleth, similar to HN favorites: "orders of magnitude" and "orthogonal". Shibboleths are often social signifiers, sociology has lots of research on why people use them
edit: in this case someone pointed out it's a different nation so I'm surprised
[1] No details have been shared on the nature of the information obtained. It is likely that it relates to the 2nm process in general rather than anything specific to Apple’s A20 chip.
Not that I think you can just plug in a thumb drive and download as you please, but just a sense of scale on how much data describes the design.
Why not? It's just data, and a thumb drive stores data. As long as it fits.
https://www.freethink.com/the-changing-world-order/chinese-i...
delroth•6mo ago
0cf8612b2e1e•6mo ago