Treblemaker

I've purchased many products from local retailers that contain explicit instructions from the manufacturer to NOT contact the retailer if there are any issues, but to contact them directly. So it seems it is possible.

Perhaps so in the context of PCB assembly. In the semiconductor industry we still call them chips. So do Micron Semiconductor [1], TSMC [2] and Intel [3]

[1] https://www.micron.com/foundation/semiconductors

[2] https://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technology/SoI...

[3] (pdf) http://download.intel.com/pressroom/kits/chipmaking/Making_o...

It's not "IC design" that's orders of magnitude more complex. It's "IC implementation" where the complexity lies.

Design for test, Logical verifcation (simulation, logical equivalence checks, electrical design rules), Physical implementation (library development and characterization, floorplanning, place and route, signal integrity), signoff (timing closure, electrical desing rules (again), physical verification, OPC) all require highly complex tools to automate. For large designs you will have people dedicated to each individual step because the ways in which things can go wrong -- and the absolute necessity of things going right to get a working chip -- are legion. And there's no substitute for experience to know the right questions to ask.

It's like the difference between driving your car across the country and flying to orbit. If you make a wrong turn in your car you can just make another turn or backtrack (edit the source code and rebuild). If don't have the right torque on the tank strut bolts on your rocket, "You will not go to space today".

Source: 30 years in the ASIC and EDA industries doing chip implementation and EDA tool flow development.

Wiby.com was discussed here a while back:

"Does anyone remember websites?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15631565

This sounds like a great topic for an "Ask HN" post.

Just got my first moderation warning in twelve years on facebook for posting this [1]. It was, in a strange way, a relief to find the parent article only a few minutes later.

[1] Linked to and commented on this fun, obviously fictional story: https://medium.com/@donhopkins/cobol-forever-1a49f7d28a39

> Stefan’s paper asks what would happen if we could just stick a direct wire between certain pairs of LUTs, like you can when designing fully-custom hardware. It’s a hypothetical question, of course, because FPGAs don’t actually allow this.

Granted, it's been almost 30 years since I touched an FPGA, but are Long-Lines not a thing anymore? They were a limited resource, but as I recall they did make it possible to make fast long-distance connections.

> ‡ It's still there, but disabled by default. So in terms of discoverability, it might as well not exist.

Well played my friend; well played.

It is just an infrastructure investment. It's no different from Amazon building a local distribution center in your city.

An "internet fast lane" would be like the city government saying to Amazon, "and also, all traffic lights will immediately switch to green for amazon delivery vehicles."

No, they're still using the same roads as everyone else, they're just starting from a lot closer to the destination.

It does no such thing. All ISPs and public wifi I have ever connected to have terms of service that prohibit illegal activities.

This is the case that first brought it to my attention:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/08/fcc-rules-against-comc....

Why do you not support it?

Would love to find something like this for rural areas. Maddening sometimes how details disappear from most online maps based only on zoom level rather than on feature density.

I just got comcast installed in a new home, and the experience was completely different from what I've experienced in the past -- think "apple store", rather than "we're the phone company; we don't have to care". The customer service rep that helped me said they just finished six months of training, and even they were surprised that the system "just worked" when I went in to pick up the gear (my choice to pick it up two hours after calling them rather than waiting for delivery). I won't go into detail about all the other things that "went right" to avoid sounding like a marketing bird, but from what I heard it is a corporate initiative and not just for the fiber buildout.

> A particular oddity of a lot of these systems is that they have different generations of receivers that use different methods, so sometimes you'll end up hearing the tones played aloud if a receiver opens squelch in reaction to something earlier in the sequence.

Good grief, I'm getting old... First thing I thought of after reading that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obkpqUyfYks&t=26

Thank you! I've been searching all afternoon for this one.

I get that this is intended to be a general exercise in spotting schematic errors. But as someone who brought-up and debugged numerous complex power supply boards for mobile electronics, it seems to me the most important and useful bit of information is missing from this exercise: show me where the smoke came out!

> This is about one AEB event every 3,300 driven miles:

What the hell are people doing when they're driving? I don't mean the ones distracted by cell phones or whatever. I mean the ones who appear to be looking out their windshield, but simply don't react when something unexpected starts to happen in front of them.

I routinely find myself braking before the driver ahead of me. Passengers have even commented on it because -- I guess -- it's... unusual? So I can't fathom what. are. people. looking. at?

I well remember my confusion and frustration years ago trying to find an address on Kifer Rd between Sunnyvale and Santa Clara in California. I think I must have turned around four times before I realized what was happening...

But doesn't that carbon footprint assume that the energy to manufacture and transport the panels comes from fossil fuels? Then it seems we would eventually reach a point where a sufficient fraction of the energy to produce and transport would itself come from solar, leading to a reduction and eventual elimination of that carbon footprint.

"That's the first lesson in basic nanotechnology. First, program the off switch. Everybody knows that."

https://qntm.org/gorge

Businesses pay property tax on capital equipment, and the vast majority of small and medium businesses function just fine with the existing tax rates.

But when you look at cost of capital equipment per job created, there's a difference of several orders of magnitude between Acme widget manufacturing and a semiconductor fab. The semiconductor fab does not fit the model on which the tax rates are based. It's an outlier. Tax breaks to bring their costs back in line with the "typical" business are perfectly reasonable if you want them to bring the jobs.

Finally, in Intel's case, let's assume "hundreds" of employees means 500. That's 0.5% of their total worldwide workforce. Does that justify increasing their property tax costs by several orders of magnitude (canceling the tax breaks)?

I wonder if there was sufficient institutional memory to consider this during the 737MAX certification.

In a 1992 recorded interview David P. Davies -- chief pilot of the UK Air Registration Board (ARB) from the 1950's through 1970's -- described a problem during certification of a new 707 variant that is remarkably similar to the recent 737MAX issue.

Fascinating full set of interviews at the main site if you have time to listen to them:

https://soundcloud.com/aerosociety-podcast/sets (scroll down to "An Interview With...", and scroll that list for "The D. P. Davies Interview", #'s 19, 18, 17, 16)

Summary: 707-330C variant added leading-edge devices to the wing that caused center of lift to move forward at high Angle of Attack, increasing the pitching moment and reducing the stick forces. Even though the stall behavior was fairly benign, Davies refused to certify it against broad opposition from the airline customers, Boeing, and even his own management in the ARB.

A significant part of his argument was (what I now know as) "Normalization of Deviance". They "solved" it by adding a stick pusher to "nudge" the yoke forward in certain conditions.

Vernier calipers capable of measuring 0.001 inch were available in 1851. Agree on your first point, however.

"Based on reports made to the company and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, less than one tenth of one percent of the millions of Pyrex products sold each year experience thermal breakage"

So, that's potentially thousands of people experiencing this each year? Not a record I would be proud of....

Is your disagreement with characterizing the air compression as "violent", or do you have a different understanding of what causes the heating during re-entry?

Depends on the how the charging controller is implemented. There is, at the very least a state machine -- if not an MCU -- managing the charging process. So I think it's highly unlikely to _start_ charging with the clock stopped, and one would hope there are some analog triggers to halt charging (eg. battery over-voltage) if the clock stopped while it was charging.

When chips are manufactured there are process tests using test structures embedded in the pad ring and scribe area between the die images, as well as functional tests that are specific to the design.

Risk production just means the "customer" will accept the parts from the fab without the parts being fully tested.

In other words, the customer is accepting the "risk" of parts not working. When the fab settings and test flow are mature then the fab assumes responsibility for parts that do not pass the testing.

I know, right? https://pasteboard.co/Hn35e51.png

I found this article [1] to be much more enlightening [2]. The problem is not so much that puns are bad, but that so many puns are just bad puns.

As described here [3],

> "It's not enough to just substitute a word that sounds the same (aka a 'homophone'); for example, which is funnier, 'Be kind to your dentist because he has fillings too' or 'She ate my breakfast role'? You probably said the first pun, because the meaning of the substitute word also makes sense in the context of the sentence, and it’s this second meaning that actually makes the joke funny."

[1] https://slifty.com/2016/03/a-puntitled-framework-for-evaluat...

[2] Heh.

[3] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/seriouslyscience/2014/06/1...