ampdepolymerase

Entire classes of diseases may become history. Creutzfeldt-Jakob and other prion diseases can now be completely understood. Precision targeting of cancerous cells will become trivial (in theory). Minimal life projects (simplest cell possible) will require less trial and error. In general, it will provide a magnitude level improvement to biotechnology, akin to moving from Aristotelian physics to Newtonian.

Some possibilities: artificial muscles for robots, man-made blood substitutes, designer enzymes to break down plastic and other compounds. Software defined biology, where the pipeline from DNA code to actual protein can now be modeled in silico ahead of time. The biology classes of the future may be less observation of animals and more training in usage of whatever the equivalent of Autodesk for biology will be. Healthcare economics in developing nations will be changed as biochemistry itself may finally become deterministic (to some extent). Orphan drug development price would drop (and if you take into account right to try laws and ignore ethics in favor of progress, then people with rare disease may be cured en masse without bankrupting the health insurance company).

@dang, please combine the thread with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25253488

There is the Microsoft SQ2 and the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2.

You are right, I am mostly estimating based off upgrading existing architectures with insights obtained from M1. 50 million may be enough for the raw manufacturing cost for one batch but research and development from scratch would not be cheap. I am basing the cost off the assumption that there are already experienced chip designers at Intel/Qualcomm who are willing to take the opportunity to build a startup with a 50 mil budget.

Most of the solutions in this thread are simply not viable. Stuff like the Pinebook and Raspberry Pi are several magnitudes away from Apple's M1 SoC. No amount of hackerish imitation will bridge that gap, the laws of physics are not kind to consumer product hardware hackers. It is very obvious that most of the people commenting here has never held a soldering iron, nor taken a single computer architecture class. The only true way to match Apple on both performance and efficiency is to fund custom silicon. Cerebras needed 100 million to get started. Apple has already laid the architectural groundwork, a chip with similar performance numbers can probably be commissioned with ~50 million. Another 10-20 million for the emulator/hypervisor crowd to get x86 virtualization up and running. This could probably be done by existing players so the cost can be discounted. A crowd investing approach is most likely the best bet, with the initial rounds being led by a VC experienced in hardware.

This is the Sputnik moment for open source. Should ACPI (and its associated lassiez-faire mindset) become obsolete as a standard, then general purpose computing on consumer devices would become history.

All the comments about how Apple's Macs are not worth it are entirely missing the point. There is nothing comparable to Apple's M1 right now. Your Purism/Lambda labs/Starlabs/System76/Pine64 usual Clevo shell machine with Linux pre-installed would never be able to compete with a M1 powered system. This isn't about 16:10/3:2 display ratios, machined aluminium, or HN's favorite complaint: "build quality". Even a well-funded premium laptop company like Razer would not be able produce something to compete with the MBP if they don't have a similarly efficient chip. Forget about the bigger players like Lenovo and Dell. Intel and AMD dropped the ball big time, and if the open source community doesn't step up, then the future will be locked-down ARM systems. RISC-V will not be competitive for another half a decade and there is no guarantee that it won't be locked down if the community does not push back against the embedded hardware culture (where VHDL/Verilog libraries are referred to as "intellectual property") which pervades ARM's heritage.

Does it count if I render everything with WebAssembly?

Don't forget HN's favorite, Mullvad. Hey if Mozilla trusts them, it must totally mean they are not compromised by the government right?

What he's describing only works for symmetric encryption. Assymetric is the problematic one. There is no real way to verify the trustworthiness of VPN/proxy systems.

A bigger issue is IANA. The way that IP addresses are managed and controlled is really disadvantageous for smaller entities. The organisation itself should be moved to Switzerland as a start.

Those aren't free.

And uploaded to a cloud analytics platform so your insurance provider can better do risk modeling.

Found yer old union gatekeeper. Canadian engineer?

Ah yes, the standard gatekeeping post.

3 is only an issue when you are small. Everything's different the moment you have spare funds and engineering manpower.

The five dollar latte crowd is willing to pay and consume. Walk into any café and good luck finding non-Apple machines. (Occasionally there will be a Surface or two, especially if you live in Seattle).

Quantopian tried this. Didn't work out. Now they have been acquihired by Robin Hood.

There are very good reasons why whiteboarding focuses on computer science, and not the actual practice of writing software.

Isn't that what literally every algorithms course teach you?

Statistics by definition is not science. The vernacular usage of science refers to the empirical sciences; physics, chemistry, geography, biology. Mathematics, statistics, and computer science are all formal sciences, sometimes simply referred to as math.

See the application section of https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dsepd/ss1978/lesson1/section1.html.

And for when the two fields clash: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04243-3

Unrelated but which library did you use for the loading spinner? It is the exact same widget as the one used by the new Medium site.

You are seeing economies of scale (and cheap labour) in action.

The decline of rigor made computing accessible. Do you really want computing to become like civil engineering or biotechnology? Where changing the shape of a button would require several committee meetings followed by ethics board clearance and regulatory approval before anything gets done.

Calibre may not be pretty but for a CRUD app it is usable. People who have complaints about Calibre generally have issues with its chrome and dated layout but nobody dislikes it because it is hard to use. A default GTK style UI always looks terrible on Windows and Mac, both of which have much higher requirements for user interface defaults. This is especially so with Amazon and iBooks setting differing expectations for how an eReader should look like. The issue with GIMP is with both its UI and its UX. Trying to get work done in GIMP is difficult and challenging. It is not a mere CRUD app like Calibre.

And most people used to believe that ergonomic, zero cost memory safety was impossible too. And yet it moves. There is no reason why we have to settle for a poor FFI solution just because it was the choice of our predecessors.

A modern alternative to C's FFI needs to be developed, perhaps a standard like gRPC but as a compiler extension. C's FFI contains so little information due to its weak type system that it is wholly unsuitable for higher level languages. Yet we use it because it is the lowest common denominator. The C FFI has cost hundreds of hours of lost productivity due to having to re-annotate all the types in the non-C caller. This is before we even take into account the mess that is function pointers and types generated using the pre-processor. And no, tools like bindgen and c2rust are stop gaps, not a real solution. A lot of low level code cannot be effectively called safely in a higher level language at all without hundreds of hours of manual work wrapping and annotating each individual function. We need a new standardized, zero cost, cross language interop format that functions on the ABI/memory level. Rust's Cxx is a good start but it doesn't scale m:n with regards to new languages. Every new language has to implement a custom wrapper for calling another high level language if they do not want to lose 80% of the benefits of the respective language's type system when passing through the primitive C FFI. For example, calling Rust from Julia, calling Julia from V lang. The lack of a common interop format is hurting the developer ecosystem as more proliferation of programming languages simply leads to greater fragmentation. The web solved this a long time ago with JSON APIs, generated OpenAPI clients (and now Graphql), and to a lesser extent, gRPC. We need to do better when it comes to systems programming.

A lot of investment is about minimizing risk. If you want examples of hyped-up tech companies that failed after IPO, just look at the dotcom bubble, it wasn't that long ago.

Ah yes, the recurring obsession hacker news has with biology - except that no startup would pay a biologist a software engineer's wage. Talking about biology is nice. But what's nicer is dismantling the elephant in the room.

No country right now has a monopoly on ASAT technology and geosynchronous satellites are not exactly uncommon either. Should ASAT be used in a regional conflict, the entire world's access to space could easily be denied due to the after effects. It unlikely that shooting down satellites would be the first choice in a small conflict.

Unfortunately Tardigrade DB has already been taken. Radiodurans DB might be a good alternative.

There is nothing new about this. There has been a huge body of literature about replacing the taser wire with a laser.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolaser