I'm more interested how he managed to master the knowledge of chip manufacturing plus a ton of electronics repairs (see his microscope and other equipment) at such an early age. Very admirable.
Look at what he did:
> Photolithography machines are expensive—up to $150 million—and so Zeloof made his own by bolting a modified conference room projector bought on Amazon onto a microscope. It projects his designs at tiny scale onto silicon wafers that Zeloof coats in material sensitive to ultraviolet light.
> One of Zeloof’s best finds was a broken electron microscope that cost $250,000 in the early ’90s; he bought it for $1,000 and repaired it. He uses it to inspect his chips for flaws, as well as the nanostructures on butterfly wings.
Think of all the kids who might start working on automotive stuff at 8 years old, building race car parts or engines or go karts. Then imagine the best of the best of thousands of them with parental? resources to build out a great kit and tinker with a lot stuff. This guy is the semiconductor equivalent.
I want my kid to start early on something he is interested in too but I don't really know how to do that. I know the general rules (expose him to a lot of stuffs, watch him do things, etc.) but don't know how to implement them properly. I myself wasted a lot of time in my childhood so I guess that's why I don't know how to do it properly.
You probably can't go wrong with giving your child resources that's too expensive for other children to be exposed to for some free future competitive advantage (which translates to adult success), as a general first heuristic.
To be fair, Gates published one and only CS paper. It was on prefix sorting and shows pretty serious mastery of discrete math for his age or any age. Perhaps the co-author -- legendary algorithms professor Papadimitriou -- honed the proofs but Gates was clearly not a one-trick programming pony.
He also chased programming like a starved Tiger, doing things like looking through corporate trash bins for source listings and that sort of stuff. Not to mention that Allen was also a person of extreme intellect and Ballmer is actually a mathematician combined with a charismatic business brain and a small nuclear reactor in one.
Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen first met as teenagers in the late 1960s at Lakeside School in Seattle, when Gates was in eighth grade and Allen was in tenth grade.
See also Levy: "Inside Bill's Brain Calls BS on Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers Theory":
Inside Bill's Brain lays the Gladwell Theorem to waste. By delving into Gates' very early life, Guggenheim reveals that, basically, Bill Gates arrived on Earth as a Martian. From the instant baby Gates joined his well-off clan, he understood there was a giant impedance mismatch between his cosmic intellect and that of the world. There's an amazing moment when he recounts the time his parents had him take a test to get into an exclusive private school for the sixth grade. He asked himself, did he want to go, figuring that if not, he would purposely blow the test.
You can easily go wrong when you zoom in from abstract resources and find yourself deciding which pieces of hardware they actually could use (almost none of which, it is assumed, you have used yourself.)
You can't really force it and there isn't a formula. I'm just a journeyman software jockey but my brother got into Harvard, Yale, and Stanford even after skipping a year of high school.
You don't need necessarily need to spend much. Of course quality music lessons or gymnastics will consistently cost a bunch but the lion's share of things will not. I know plenty of impressive scientists who were very middle class growing up. Collect coins, stamps, or sports memorabilia. Practice sports statistics and trivia. Go for hikes and catalog leaves, plants, and insect specimens. Grow a garden or vegetable from seed. Learn cooking while teaching the physics and chemistry of it, or focus on the artistic aspects. Explore your local road maps and learn navigation skills. Put a world map on the wall, then throw a dart at a country and grab a book on it from the library. Draw comics or try digital art. Draw dinosaurs. Build PCs from spare parts or try retro computing or vintage electronics. Do online coding for kids. Try robotics kits. Learn how to do bike tune-ups and maintenance, then get old grody bikes from friends and refurbish them. Try a new game monthly like Chess, Go, or Backgammon. And an important one would be to take advantage of local geography and culture. For example, in Illinois and Wisconsin, we can enjoy the geology and ecology of the Great Lakes, or the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright.
My daughter is only a month older and I share your feelings. I'm glad you posted that comment above, I often feel intimidated about admitting how little I truly know about parenting.
Regarding the custom photolithography machine, I recall seeing some pictures of chip workers from the 70s that essentially did the same thing.
A group of women (I'm pretty sure it was all women) were responsible for manually drawing out (actually more like cutting out) the chip designs on these big sheets, which were then projected down to create the photoresist masks.
For sure, but I bet not all kids with support from their family do cool things. Or put it in the other way, you have to prove yourself worthy before getting any fund (even from parents).
> Or put it in the other way, you have to prove yourself worthy before getting any fund (even from parents).
I really don’t know where you got this mindset but it’s 100% not true. I know many parents who throw many resources at their kids whenever their kids show even slight interest in something. Even if they don’t show interest in many things - they still get great access.
The other factor is access to youtube to find likeminded people and have things explained and see
what is possible. When I was young I loved computers but even install Linux or learn machine code seemed like this impenetrable world that was “for adults”. I think the modern internet is great for people sharing knowhow.
> That is not to take anything away from his achievements
The entire purpose of mentioning his privilege at all is to take away from his achievements. Otherwise, why mention it. Surely it is obvious to all who read the article that you would have had to have access to capital to do what he did?
If you want to believe my opinion is something other than the one I'm explicitly stating, that is a very strange decision.
For the record: I'm not sure how much more clear I can be, but I do not feel that it takes away from his achievements whatsoever. I made my statement in reply to another poster who seemed to have the impression that this level of opportunity was the norm in America. That was the full extent of my "purpose."
Some kids have go karting or motorcycle racing hobbies. Some have archery, golf, etc. They all cost a lot of money over time. Hell, some kids sail! That's really not cheap.
There are a lot of middle class families who spend 10s of thousands of dollars on sports camps, dance lessons, ski instructors, piano tutors... if their kid was really excited by electronics instead I can see a lot of families helping with that hobby.
Like yes that is a sizeable sum of money worthy of consideration but it's not at all prohibitive or unusual for a middle class family.
I would describe what you said as upper-middle class at least. Everyone seems to have different definitions though and the tech crowd is probably skewed up.
I think it depends on how middle class they are. If they are new immigrants who just get a pair of jobs I think even 1K is a lot of money. However over time they should be able to build up the fund for their kids. And again some families have a lot of kids with different interests, so that's also tough to allocate 10K for each of them.
Well that goalpost sure made a leap. Spread it out over six years and imagine the kid is pulling in real cash with a youtube channel showcasing his projects.
The 1000 dollars bill is for a single piece of equipment, a full lab is considerably more. The median household income is 70k in the U.S, in western Europe it's closer to 30k. The income distribution on youtube follows a power law.
I don't think that puts it within reach of your average middle class family, even over 5 years.
"Zeloof says he doesn’t know for sure what he wants to do after graduating this spring" - I hope we don't hear later that he went to work for FAANG. One the saddest things about Big Tech is how they take young talent away from innovative, potentially competing enterprises and into busy work internal projects just because they can.
TC isn't everything. I'm pulling truly bonkers TC at 26, and yet I feel a deep void inside me.
I recently realized that this void is because I am not living by my ideals/purpose. I know what I want to do in life, I know how I want to contribute to the story of humanity, and yet I am letting my greed overrule me and force me into a different path. Essentially, I am betraying myself, and this causes that feeling of unfulfillment/void.
I suspect I am not the only FAANG/unicorn/quant engineer that feels this way. Don't get me wrong, I greatly enjoy the day to day technical work I do. But my day job does not help me work towards what I have defined as my existential purpose.
Recently I decided I will change this, whether through volunteering or a new job (even if it might pay less.) I'm more excited than I have been in months. I will die happy if I can positively impact humanity towards the direction I hope for it to go towards.
Trust me it's not better on the other side. Followed my dreams and I'll forever be financially decades behind you (i.e I'll never catch up) unless I win the lottery or something. I'm 100% sure if I were in your shoes I too would feel exactly as you do. The lesson here is to be content with what we have and what we've done. At least now you have the financial freedom to spend the rest of your life more or less as you see fit.
I've spent a large part of my life as a high end specialist, consulting, and thus, have had incredibly encompassing exposure to a huge variety of companies.
Whether non-profits, government departments, or corps, it's humans which cause the often ineffectual result, of our loving attempts to being order, and stability to our labourious output.
People are the same everywhere, and thus, so your endeavours will be.
The grass is not greener on the other side.
So what I would say is:
* if you strike out on your own, you can at least move on past things which bore you
* you need true financial independence to achieve this, to become a relaxed garage tinkerer of tech
* right now, we are at a moment of golden opportunity. The markets are down. This is where you buy in. The returns are buying in these times, not in time of feast.
So... maybe this is a good time to reassess. Invest. And plan to retire once you profit?
A long time ago, I had the mindset that I really didn't care about money: I wanted to live my "ideal" life, no matter what. So I frittered away my early twenties being a bum, trying to materialize what I felt was the "dream."
Then I got kicked out of my home and had to work back-breaking jobs, commute 2-4 hours either walking or biking, and at the end of the day barely earn enough money to make any progress (I was lucky that a family member let me sleep in their house, otherwise I would've been living paycheck to paycheck).
During that time I felt like my mind forced me to "withdraw inside myself," so my spirit wouldn't be completely broken. It had seemed that all of my thoughts, feelings, and emotions had been stripped away from me, and the only things left were those needed to "survive."
A little bit later I was lucky enough to get my first software job, making a very good salary, and lift myself out of poverty (and start "financially progressing"); but even though my life had been the best it ever was, I never regained the feelings that I lost.
I think what I lost was my naive worldview: one that was modeled by two decades worth of living upper middle class; where I survived by virtue of my birth, and not because I personally did anything -- detached from reality.
It was a very self-centered existence. I was only concerned about my own pleasure, and escaping from any displeasure ("fat FIRE" was an escape from the perceived displeasure of having to work, and not being able to partake in idle leisure). Other than this, I had no values, nor real "ideals" (but I did have an "ideal" life I wanted to build).
I think that's where my early "dreams" came from: a self-centered pursuit of personal gain and maximization of pleasure. I didn't really care about anything or anyone, nor was my existence driven by deeply-ingrained values that could serve as a bottomless well of direction and energy. I was simply living an animalistic life.
Being thrust into the "real world" destroyed all these notions; or rather, living in reality forced me to restrain myself: my emotions had no structure, and so I was fluttering about to wherever they took me. Having to "box" them in to do something useful and purposeful finally wrangled them in, and "molded" my personality to something other than "do the things I like, and get away from the things I don't like."
I would later have to rebuild my worldview and wrestle with the void in my soul that could no longer be filled with material distractions (a life-long process).
During this process, I realized putting financial considerations as my number one priority would not lead me to anywhere fulfilled (neither would idle retirement). The only thought that rang "true" at the time was that I needed to cultivate values, and those would dictate my purpose.
It's a never-ending process. And it always keeps me busy, but unlike focusing on material things, the fulfillment and sense of goodness I feel is not transient -- it lasts, and has built up through the years.
This is how I went from trying to live an ideal life, to one where I live by ideals.
Don't listen to the negativity, Software Engineers are paid handsomely, if you find that your dream path isn't working out you can always return to highly paid work and make up pretty fast.
Sounds like me at 26. I finally walked away from it at 28.
Your window to return to bonkers tech money is wide so you can afford to go away from it a while.
But after you do, you probably won't want to return. That's fine! Just sock away enough that you don't feel you have to, otherwise it'll feel like reinserting yourself in the matrix and it SUCKS.
Working on something that feels like it makes a difference can be very rewarding. But my experience is that if it really makes a difference (how do you measure that is probably a book by itself), it is never easy.
For the last 15 years I have worked on things that I felt needed doing. Others agreed. Even though our teams achieve something worthwhile it can often feel deeply frustrating. The challenges of financing something new, that doesn’t fit the box of how it is normally done, at some useful scale, is hard. I don’t want to do anything else, but sometimes it is very frustrating.
In the end, I think there is so much one can work on that really makes a difference in “the story of humanity” as you call it, that there really is no need to take a job that goes against ideals you may hold. Healthcare, energy systems, data for better governance, food tech, Ed tech, the list goes on. There will be something interesting to work on I am certain.
Was about to ask the same thing. There are ~280 resolutions to that initialism on a random website that I've found, none of which are easily applicable to the context.
One of the things I despise about these jobs is the overuse of initialisms and acronyms. It's literally gatekeeping even if done subconsciously. It also fucks with new hires quite a lot because they have no idea what AC, SOP, PR, NPS, etc mean
At least in the US, they're generally limited to salaries on the "general schedule", and management gets paid more than technical people, because "it wouldn't be fair" to have subordinates that make more than you. So there's a built-in glass ceiling for tech careers. https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...
Maybe “it’s not fair to have subordinates earn more” was the justification given to you, but businesses rarely make decisions based on what’s fair. Engineers are valuable, but individual engineers are largely replaceable. Being able to coordinate a large group successfully also has a lot of value.
Let's be honest. Engineer managers are largely replacable and more easily than individual engineers. The pool is larger and can accept more manager unrelated experience. There is more to this.
As the person senior leadership communicates with this person is seen as more important than they are. Senior leadership wants to maintain a leveling system to separate groups of people. It's a hedge a flat organization which makes senior leadership less important.
You could swap out this person with another without losing speed but it doesn't work as well with an engineer.
Then why don’t companies adopt a flatter structure with higher compensated engineers? The goal of a company is to make money after all. If management could be removed and top engineers retained with higher salaries, then a company would surely have an advantage in the marketplace. Since this doesn’t happen, there must be more to the picture than people in upper management simply clinging to their jobs. If removing middle management were so obvious a change to make, then shareholders would demand it.
> Then why don’t companies adopt a flatter structure with higher compensated engineers? The goal of a company is to make money after all.
Let's not forget that companies aren't real sentient beings, do not really take decisions and do not really have their own interest. They are legal fictions. Trying to understand the behavior of a company based on its self interest can therefore be misleading.
Why do bureaucracies develop? Why is Google launching yet another chat app? Why are so many companies disrupted by new techs instead of adapting? All this is against their interest after all.
Companies are ultimately led and controlled by many individuals, in pursuit of their own individual interest (mostly). Some groups of individuals within a company have more control than others, and will consequently bend the company toward what's in their own interest.
I'm not versed into sociology of organisations, but from a cursory look at some big corp internals it seems to me that this easily explains the frequent growth in numbers and importance of the coterie with the more agency over hiring, regardless of whether it's good or bad for the company as a whole, ie the growth of middle management cancer.
I would be careful with the "if they do it it must be sensible" reasoning. There are a lot of reasons that modeling firms using homo-economicus and perfect markets doesn't pan out.
To me, this is a case to apply Occam’s razor. What is more likely, that this decades old, Dilbertesque criticism of management is true, yet somehow eluded the purview of shareholders? Or that businesses are being run in a relatively efficient manner given the current human condition?
It's not that management is dumb, it's that every layer of management is self-interested. Every hierarchy has to contend with principal agent problems. Organizations can do a better or worse job of it, but the incentives are always there and they lead to predictable inefficiencies which are frequently observed. Everyone knows this, but unless you know how to get someone to manage without self-interest, you aren't in a position to solve the problem. Nobody is. That's why it lingers.
Is self-interested management really an inefficiency if it’s unavoidable? You don’t get to run a company in a vacuum. You have to run it within the bounds of human behavior. Saying that “if only all humans acted in some way against their nature, then the system would be more efficient” isn’t an effective management strategy.
You were arguing that RfR / Dilbert coludn't be true because if it were, it would have been optimized away. I argued that no, just because it happens and is broadly understood doesn't mean that it can be optimized away.
You can play semantic games about whether or not it should be called inefficiency -- I don't really care what you call it -- but the RfR / Dilbert dynamic is very real and very prevalent.
Many start out flat and as they grow they need to introduce middle management.
Middle management becomes necessary.
But the question is around pay. Should they always make more because they sit higher in the org chart?
I would suggest they make more because of power structures not utility or because they are not as easy to replace.
Because of first class shares, senior leadership shares percentages shareholders with a vote are often the people in power. Common shareholders don't hold much power.
this kind of reasoning simply does not follow in the real world. There are many, many cases of some companies out competing others. Why? if they were all rational actors none would have any advantage over the other.
I’m not claiming management structure is the only factor in whether or not a business is competitive. It’s just a factor, and business usually try to optimize the factors under their control to be the most competitive. Of course, there are many factors outside of the businesses control as well.
Ironically they see engineers as replaceable and view every member of leadership as a Jeff Bezos level unique business edge. I’m all honesty I have just always viewed managements role as a different skill set, one that has successfully thrived longer then the IT industry has even existed. Even while we as engineers tend to feel they are replaceable I think we don’t see the value in the work they do to ensure we get funding, resources, and leadership support.
I hate to say it, but I can imagine that a group of engineres with a manager nipping at the heels can be much more valuable in total to a company than a group of engineers left to their own devices. Some may be great at being independently productive but most probably are not.
Of course some random idiot nagging the engineers won't be worth much, they need to be experts at the specific business and domain to bring value in this situation. Which also makes them harder to replace.
Certainly, companies with engineers who are capable and independet problem-solvers, and who are experts at the company's needs and the domain it operates in, are the most valuable. These are not uncommon either. But a fast-growing company in a fast-growing industry has zero chance of solely hiring such people. They need to widen their net to people that require managing.
The project manager has the nudging role and the best insight on deliveriables. A manager usually manages other administration aspects and inspirational at times.
The Rules for Rulers theory vs the Leveraged Value Creation theory.
Naturally, reality is a bit of both, but people on top push LVC hard while they never mention RfR. A good leader earns their salary multiples over, but many poor leaders rake in the dough just from RfR.
Is it really proximity to the purse string? Because even large, profitable founder-led tech companies, where founders have full control and motive to run the company efficiently, adopt middle management. And what evidence is there that middle management is unnecessary? The only evidence presented is theoretical critiques from engineers who feel they stand to gain from the removal of management.
“They” (political leaders) choose to limit salaries, and if a problem is urgent enough, they can somehow find a way pay more. It is just politics. Paying more today increases cash spend today, and that looks bad for them come election time.
The annual budget of the entire NSF is $8.28B. The NIH is $42B
Google's net profit was $40B in 2020. Apple's was $94.6B in 2021. (all according to wikipedia).
Edit: The above is net income, so AFTER paying all the exorbitant salaries.
Apple alone makes enough money that it could fund pretty much all current publicly-funded science happening in the US at the current rate. That is a ridiculous amount of money, and publicly-funded science just cannot compete at that level.
(Currently on publicly-funded grants. Underpaid relative to what I could make elsewhere, but happy to be contributing to the greater good rather than helping some advertising company).
I'm torn on this. No doubt money is important but how much is needed? I've been thinking about this for a while [1] and I think more important to drive innovation is to change our culture to admire people who dedicate themselves to solving big problems over a long period of time. And a close second would be a culture that prizes modesty and eschews material wealth.
I realize this may be a pipe-dream but it feels like a better long-term strategy than "pay researchers more than FAANG".
If you want to stop the brain drain from more worthwhile areas to less worthwhile areas, you need to at least pay better starting salaries in the more worthwhile fields.
Otherwise, you'll end up with potential Einsteins playing with spreadsheets in investment banks rather than discovering relativity, simply because they wanted a bit of disposable income.
Algo coders, predictive analysis of publicly available data, large societal trends prediction, using social media data to detect malign intent prior to action, analyzing the same to look for foreign activity, hacking foreign infrastructure, etc etc, CIA/NSA and other agencies hire these types right from University typically.
They also fund startups which may be used for national interests and so on.
Much of the time, they contact you, not the other way around.
Lived and worked in D.C. and have a TS/SCI, sat for FSP…. The IC doesn’t pay even close to big tech rates. There is also no mystery around someone contacting you, just apply to the NSA / CIA / etc. if those paths pique your interest.
Startups working on IC-relevant tech getting funding via non-traditional means is absolutely true but not guaranteed.
I looked at NSA/CIA when I was graduating college and the compensation was notably below market and with very rigid structures. I was given to understand a common path was to put in some time at the actual agencies and then go over to a contractor where you could make good money.
That was 30 years ago, though. Could be completely different now.
Yes, and that's why we should be taxing the hell out of these companies. It's not just about raising revenue. It's about allowing other companies to compete with them.
What's the logic here? Do you somehow think that taxes will encourage innovation ?
Anybody can compete, but apparently most of us choose not to. Who forces a young talent to settle for a job instead of taking the risk to innovate ? Maybe risk-taking for innovation is what could be the encouraged through taxation.
>Do you somehow think that taxes will encourage innovation ?
That's what some EU members think. Ask us how that's going :)
That's why most of the big and wealthy companies hare are around 100 years old or more, vs about 30 years old in the US.
Here in Austria you can get various government and EU grants for your startup and tax waivers on social security, and if by some miracle, you don't crash and burn like 95% of startups and manage to produce a semi-profitable company in the end, then you have to pay to the government retroactively all the social security contributions and taxes that have been previously waived over the past years, which is the final nail in the coffin for most companies here never growing or scaling beyond a couple of guys from uni in an apartment kind of company.
Therefore most of the innovation happens nearly exclusively within academia, as "outside" it's a pretty hostile tax environment that mostly favors those 100 year old companies that already have solid revenue streams.
I must be misunderstanding your comment. You are saying that younger companies in the US are becoming more wealthy and innovating more or at the same level as a few entrench EU companies that have successfully stifled the EU market ensuring they never lose there market share or have a need to innovate to complete in a free market, is that correct?
He's saying that the various EU governments has stifled startups by offering "subsidies" (that operate more like loans) only to demand repayment for them at rate much faster than these startups are capable of building value/marketability/profit, resulting in many of them being DOA or remain limited in size until they are swallowed up by a bigger company.
> Do you somehow think that taxes will encourage innovation ?
I think that taxing large companies more than small ones might. The bedrock of capitalism is competition, and that is significantly stifled if big players with large amounts of capital can simply buy out anything innovative.
The money being required to live a normal life is the problem. A Star Trek style cashless society would allow people to live their life as they see fit, and would undoubtedly unlock a huge jump in human ingenuity.
But I don't think we are evolved enough to deal yet. We'd just end up in a communist prison life or something as people selfishly try to get more for themselves. Roddenberry thought an event like finding extraterrestrial life would be the push humans need, but I'm not so sure anymore.
One thing I never understood is that star fleet and the federation are somehow post-scarcity utopias, but you still have "gold-plated latinum" driving a huge underground criminal counter-culture. What's the point? The ferenghi should be having a cultural existential crisis, but instead they are happy just charging people for drinks that can be replicated freely.
my understanding is that the space the ferrengi operate in doesnt operate much with federation space. ds9 is in deep space. and you cant make gold pressed latinum in a replicator. so it is a good trade item for working on a frontier and as a currency as the federation cant just print it.
but dont quote me.
its also a plot device to let them talk about economics.
I don't remember gold-plated latinum being used within the Federation itself, all their worlds were blissful utopias. DS9 was outside the Federation, and at a place and time where the major civilizations were at war for decades. And even in DS9, the Starfleet officers never had any interest whatsoever in latinum.
The reason big companies have a huge advantage in the U.S is they get access to the jet stream of public market money that goes through highly regulated employee pensions and 401ks to Vanguard and Blackrock and then to the companies in public stock market indexes. The companies that form the stock market indexes get that money for very very cheap relative to small companies who have to find investors one by one or, outside of venture backed tech, take loans at high interest rates.
If someone can run a profitable business when money is hard to come by as a non-public company, it makes sense for a public company to buy them because they can get money much more easily and expand the smaller company's operations and make an even bigger profit. They can even run the company poorly and still make money because their money is cheaper.
Essentially, it's an information and regulation problem.
The best thing yet invented, taxwise, to counteract this advantage that big businesses have in attracting money is Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS)[1]. It' a great tax incentive program because it massively rewards people for investing in startups. It is highly targeted to encourage that and not be a general loophole.
That means that country that will do that will not have competitive big tech companies and other countries will have.
Also, big companies are needed because there are technologies that cannot be produced by small companies. I do not understand recent tendency
to make them look bad. Big companies are good for country and economy. Punishing companies for success is harmful for the progress.
I think letting market decide is better choice. Overregulation leads to decrease in competition and production.
Also, what is bad in it of big companies need to compete for talents? This competition leads for better opportunities and bigger salaries. I think it is good that person has a freedom of choice were to go.
This is not a recent trend. America has had a big political issue over large industry since day one. The Jeffersonian vision of a nation of yeoman farmers (who maybe owned slaves) vs. an industrial economy built on science and technology. This shows up in debates over railroads (anti-trust laws start here). It leads to the financing of canals, and cars (more democratic forms of transportation). It leads to subsidies for single family homes vs multi family living. It leads to the constant struggle to break up AT&T and liquidate telecom equipment manufacturing (lucent had other problems). And yeah it leads to a desire to split up large companies that make good money for the country.
Of course a lot of processes also scale with size. With a decent welfare system this greater efficiency could also be tapped to achieve widespread prosperity.
A car is privately owned and oriented toward a small scale family/individual. It can go from anywhere to anywhere at anytime (assuming roads). Unlike a railroad which achieves much greater efficiency but requires more fixed schedules and routes. Everyone must move to the same place at the same time together.
A lot of this is imagined but people really did buy into this (same with canals), and given the 200 year distrust of railroads, that gave a lot of political fodder to break up urban rail lines and make cities more car based.
> I think letting market decide is better choice. Overregulation leads to decrease in competition and production.
Not intrinsically, obviously, as anti-trust clearly shows. I am not anti-big intrinsically, for many of the reasons identified.
But I do think there are obvious downsides to be guarded against. If anything, as technology improves, technological barriers to entry should decrease and less big companies will be needed to work on certain advanced technologies.
The idea of imposing punitive taxes on some companies, to level the playing field for everyone else, reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron". It wouldn't have the desired effect anyway, since employee salaries are tax-deductible.
A better way to promote innovation might be through cultivating a spirit of entrepreneurship in young people, supporting startup accelerators, and handing out grants to promising candidates like the one in the article.
I heard a story at a recent robotics tournament about a team that had competed together all the way from 7th grade through 12th grade. As the story went, the teammates were hired en masse by a certain high profile company who agreed to pay for all their college, etc, etc.
I thought it was an interesting story as I heard it repeated among the students at the tournament. Many of the teams have sponsors who donate $1000s so the schools/clubs can buy parts, etc. They are trying to encourage interest in STEM. But if the story is true, one company could spend $1000000 and inspire 1000s of students, generating lottery psychology. Of course, one person could just make up such a story for $0 and achieve the same thing. But it amuses me to think of some altruistic billionaire having a little fun and doing such a thing.
> A better way to promote innovation might be through cultivating a spirit of entrepreneurship in young people, supporting startup accelerators, and handing out grants to promising candidates like the one in the article.
Taxing large corporations seems like it would be an excellent way in which to fund such grants.
I'm quite pro-taxing-corporations, but I don't see the connection. How is taxing certain tech companies more going to make the field more competitive? IMHO anti-trust laws are the tools need here. I don't see how you could target just the FAANG-esque companies with higher taxes without collateral impact to the very competitors you want to get more market share.
Why should I, as a young person, support a policy intentionally punishing companies for competing over my labor power just to make it so I have to work for petit-bourgeois small tech companies that can't pay as much?
Because they’re no longer competing. They wield monopoly power that is anticompetitive, and it’s bad for everything else you value. (Assuming you value more than streaming media, two retailers, and ads.)
Isn’t the collective wisdom around here that there’s no competing with FAANG when it comes to job offers?
And we know they’ve engaged in anticompetitive behavior among themselves when it comes to recruiting. I would be unsurprised to find out it still takes place.
But I think the point was monopoly power from their core products is the real issue, and that enables the astronomical salaries.
Perhaps because you might want to live in a society where our economic activity is directed at activities which actually promote our collective wealth and wellbeing.
There are plenty of people who prefer a different environment and culture from what those big companies have. Once the pay reaches level X ( different for each person) other factors become more important.
Who knows what this person wants? He probably doesn’t either.
Idk as somebody who has worked at both Facebook and Google, the chip design going on at these companies is at the top end in innovation. Apple is even better. Certainly wouldn't be a bad outcome for civilization.
> I hope we don't hear later that he went to work for FAANG. One the saddest things about Big Tech is how they take young talent away from innovative, potentially competing enterprises and into busy work internal projects just because they can.
yes i hope Zeloof (or someone else young, enthusiastic and social media adept like him) turns into the Marcin Jakubowski [1] or Dave Hakkens [2] of semi-conductors.
in this exciting still-early open source digital paradigm, a new type of leadership is required with a massive focus on horizontal knowledge production and transmission, a focus on a multitude of pedagogical styles, as well as a deep foundational belief in the abilities of our fellow humans (since it's easy and common to either believe we are 1) over-special or 2) dumb, as our schools are stuck in this reward/punishment paradigm which both 1) over-estimates a small number of students' skills because of advantages they gained outside of school (were you born with wealthy parents/community who had time and money to encourage/support you), or 2) which forces you into straightjacketed, (pedagogically) un-diverse, un-tailored learning journeys that make you take steps too quickly (a way to filter out as many working class people as possible except for a select few, by design)).
I feel like there hasn't been many of these recently. And the few that have been around get massive financing rounds that dilute options into nothing and never go ipo
Are you saying that Google, Facebook, etc have not been innovating over the last years? What does the landscape look like if you remove these companies' contributions from the public sphere?
What innovations have Google and Facebook had over the past few years? As far as I’m concerned Facebook could disappear overnight and the world would be a much better place.
Those are different concerns. Maybe you don't like what they do with their innovations, but they are bankrolling and directing quite a lot of sota research.
If one looks a century back: AT&T, Xerox, IBM ... those were opportunities we can romanticize in hindsight looking back at the glowing examples of Bell Labs, PARC etc.
Today's Big Tech is unrivaled in its unique position to fund R&D.
To put it on the talent's shoulder to decide against it ...? One can hope for individual cases but it is futile as Big Tech has fundamentally tilted the playing field not only on things like information flow but also on talent pool in their favor.
From a system's POV at some point this of course gets stuck.
For example Musk tries to outpace this with his "rate of innovation" concept which on surface seems like a refreshing idea but is running on an outdated and collapsing hardware ("actual existing globalization") resulting in absurd numbers on the BBI like $243B. Leaving aside the forgone "sign-changing" and hefty "printing" by the central processors, initiated manually by a curious circle of people with access who decided it was a good idea.
> Maybe it’s overconfidence, but I have a mentality that another human figured it out, so I can too, even if maybe it takes me longer
Sometimes I explain what I do in software. "There is no magic. I don't like when there is magic. Some people do but it leaves me feeling unsure about what my code will do. Instead I tend to work very slowly at first, seeing what each little piece of code does and slowly seeing all the pieces work together. There's an important tool that I'm shocked to sometimes discover not all developers use - debugging. It's really just having the computer execute one line of code at a time and being able to see what the computer sees, and understand how things work at that level."
Lithography is a black box to me... but of course it doesn't have to be. So it's exciting to see someone invest time and assemble the physical tools to learn this dark art from the comfort of their garage.
This is something I've struggled with my whole life and still do to this day.
I've had one of the worst educations, considering Egypt is at the bottom of the barrel for it's schooling system. So by the age of 25, I realize I haven't learned anything substantial.
I've managed to escape that somehow and now been working at high growth companies as a Deisnger and SW developer in SF.
Yet, because I'm basically self-taught and don't have good foundation in many topics such as Math, Compilers, and other important topics, I find myself extremely intimidated to approach such fields. For one, I realize I'll need to invest a lot of time to grasp them. Second, I get this feeling of anxiety that I'll never be able to get to the level I wish to be. Anxiety that can sometimes reach the level of a panic attack.
It sounds dramatic and maybe even pathetic to admit that about myself, but I'm still trying to figure out how to not get so worked up about that stuff when I'm learning and feeling hopelessly stuck to fully understand something.
Needless to say, I have a lot of work to do on myself.
> Zeloof’s family was supportive but also cautious. His father asked a semiconductor engineer he knew to offer some safety advice.
As impressive and independent as this is, you have to wonder if any other gifted child could have done the same feat. The article seems to skip over this point, how many people know a "semiconductor engineer"?
This is a story as old as time. When I was a kid growing up in the 1970s and 1980s and the school held science fairs, the kids whose parents were scientists and engineers had the coolest fair-winning projects while the rest of the kids made baking soda and vinegar volcanoes or lemon batteries.
I would have been ecstatic to even make a baking soda and vinegar volcano or lemon battery. The poor schools didn't have science fairs or anything like that.
Uh, I was just reminded of something - when I was a kid (5th grade) I was gifted a book of science experiments for kids. I was only able to do maybe 1 experiment in the book because I didn't have access to any materials needed for the experiments. Those books should come with a warning or something, cause I remember being like "what kid has access to this stuff? Where do you even buy this stuff?"
This isn't meant to be a "Woe is me" story, just trying to give some context.
On the order of millions of kids have parents who know semiconductor engineers, and 1 of them ended up manufacturing chips in the garage.
Please don't try to pick apart his accomplishments to make a point. He's still doing something that almost nobody with equivalent resources took the initiative to do.
I promise you that there are not millions of kids. Your argument may still hold, but the was majority of children knows no one with this level of technical experience, let alone any programmers.
> There are ten thousand semiconductor engineers kicking around Silicon Valley and Albuquerque and Portland, and another hundred thousand in Shenzhen and Taipei and Seoul. So conservatively ten million people know a semiconductor engineer.
Nobody says they were best friend with one. You know a lot of people, and those engineers know a lot of people. I don't know why you're doubling down on this.
Zeloof's father runs a sheet metal fabrication shop that makes components for other manufacturers. They do excellent work, I've worked with them in the past. I'm guessing his father knows engineers in all sorts of industries.
Success is a combination of talent and circumstance. It’s always been like that. It’s also why giving opportunities to as many people as possible is so important.
This is what I think whenever I see an Olympic gold medal athlete. Would they even be on the winners podium if every other person out there attempted to reach that place?
However, most winners have had to deal with losing, so they know they should be humble about it.
Isn't persistence exactly the thing that makes them distinct? Saying everybody could do it if they were persistent... Well yeah, but the point is most people aren't.
I am quite confident that almost nobody could have blazed this trail, even with the same support network. The resilience, ingenuity and practical skill required is outrageous.
There are ten thousand semiconductor engineers kicking around Silicon Valley and Albuquerque and Portland, and another hundred thousand in Shenzhen and Taipei and Seoul. So conservatively ten million people know a semiconductor engineer.
Instead of focusing on the problem that only one person in a thousand knows a semiconductor engineer, we should figure out how to fix the much worse problem that out of the ten million people who do, only two people have made transistors in their basement, because that leak in the pipeline is apparently about five thousand times worse.
There are probably 1000s of logic designers kicking around Silicon Valley, probably not 10s of thousands. These days little semiconductor engineering is happening there, all the new fabs have been built elsewhere for decades now
Would also add the fact his blog links to a brother who seems to be involved in Electronics and Photography, both critical for this project. Not taking away from his focus, but being surrounded by domain knowledge over a dinner table is a huge advantage.
I've followed this project for a while. And while it truly is an impressive feat, I just wonder how did he afford all this equipment.
I'm 24 and a physics PhD student, and just afforded my first soldering iron. I lack the space, let alone the equipment to attempt anything close to this.
>I just wonder how did he afford all this equipment.
Living in the US comes with certain advantages like some of the lowest consumer prices in the West including HW equipment being dirt cheap on the second hand market plus houses being big enough for space for such hobbies along with the biggest take home pays yielding some of the highest purchasing power in the West, a formula tough to replicate anywhere else.
At least compared to where I live now in Europe, such hobbies would definitely be unaffordable for me monetary and real-estate wise, which is also a monetary issue at the end of the day.
I was looking on an interesting blog about buying certain older ThinkPads or older multi-core server chips for $50 used for building a cheap home lab, and when I checked, super exited, on my local second hand market, such machines or chips were fetching north of €250 and that was before the chip shortage broke the market. That's just one anecdote, but you get the point.
But also, please understand that what he's accomplished here is monetarily out of the reach of your average American as well. Especially the average American teenager. The article notes that his dad is a very successful engineer, so roughly speaking he's almost certainly in the top 5-10%. Most homes do not have garages of this size and most garages are not climate controlled as this one is.
Additionally, his dad is an engineer. I grew up middle class, but my dad sold vegetables. Neither of my parents could do algebra, much less advanced stuff, so they weren't in a position financially or otherwise to help me start up a semiconductor fab in the garage. Not that I would have had the smarts or the drive to do that; I'm merely pointing out that this kid is at the intersection of talent and privilege.
In service of their "boy genius" narrative, the article glosses over how much parental monetary support this kid has had. To pick one example:
One of Zeloof’s best finds was a broken electron microscope
that cost $250,000 in the early ’90s; he bought it for $1,000
and repaired it.
Very impressive, but thousands more were spent on plumbing, repairs of the unit, a giant electrical transformer to power the thing, etc. Shipping costs alone may have exceeded the cost of the unit, but he doesn't touch on that. You can see some of the details in his video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJXio_jpc_Y
I remember in the 90's, my school turned down a free electron microscope for exactly that reason -- the cost of the unit itself is only the tip of the iceberg.
He went to CMU - I haven’t met someone who comes from a modest middle class family who went to CMU. I’m sure they exist but I haven’t found them and I’ve met quite a few grads.
The guy comes from an affluent family. The privilege is obvious from a mile away.
Still cool and all but in no way should anyone read this as a “oh, why wasn’t I able to do that” or “why aren’t more kids doing this?!” type of thing. It speaks to how out of touch most of HN is that they find this relatable.
Most prestigious universities offer deep discounts ("need-based financial aid") well into the upper middle class. At my parents’ income level, Harvard would have been free. UChicago was about half price, in the ballpark of my local state flagship. CMU expected us to pay the full $60k.
It's about signal - nothing else. It's a class signal. "I'm from the same class as you are - hiring manager. Now hire me. I'm not one of those dirty poors."
So what? Why does it matter if his parents have money and are able to help him with knowledge? It is still amazing that the universe produced this kid who could do it.
Suppose it would be possible while poor, and only his high IQ enabled him to do it. Then it would still be his luck for having parents with genes that produced high IQ in their kids. So it would still be "privilege".
What's more, his parents don't just happen to be all that, they presumably worked for it too, including looking for a suitable partner to have kids with.
It might even inspire the one or other person to try to earn more money to enable their kids to do great things that require a bit of money.
Or what is the reasoning behind privilege theory? If you go back in the ancestry of this guy, eventually you'll find some colonialist exploiting slaves, and if you go back in the ancestry of poor kids who don't create chips in their garage, eventually you'll find an exploited human who never had a chance to earn money?
Not even mentioning that creating chips in one's garage is not the only kind of achievement there is. And some poor kids do in fact succeed in life.
Steve Wozniak also was lucky to have a da who was a cutting edge engineer. So I guess that makes Wozniak owe all his money to society now, because he had such an unfair advantage.
Wow, you took that in a different direction. Seemingly responding to all kinds of things I never said.
I think you are, at a minimum, really missing out on some context?
My post was a direct response to a parent poster who mused about how this sort of thing is possible in America, whereas it's nearly impossible for most Europeans. I responded by pointing out that this sort of thing also isn't possible for most Americans.
Or what is the reasoning behind privilege theory?
Not sure what you mean. There's no "theory" in my post. I was not making some grand statement about society or the nature of privilege or whatever the heck else you imagined I was talking about. It would seem to me that you sure wanted to do that, though.
This kid seems super talented, and I'm glad that he seems to have parents with the inclination and means to support this sort of thing.
A 22-year old full time student can't even afford "dirt cheap" second hand equipment (nevermind the space to store it!) unless:
-They have some sort of windfall
-They have a trust fund or stipend that they receive just for existing
-Their parents pay for everything, or, alternatively, their parents pay for all of their living expenses so their own money is only "fun money."
-They, somehow, have a high paying job. In which case they probably won't be going to school full time also. Or they're "job" is having a lot of followers on social media.
This isn't a knock on anyone, I'm just trying to explain why one young adult student can be excited because they were finally able to save up for a soldering iron and another has a garage full of expensive experiment to tinker with.
It's pretty much implied this guy's living expenses (or most of them) are covered by his parents who also have tons of extra space and tolerance for him using it.
I am not sure about his case, but it's not very hard for a talent student to get $1k scholarship every month. That's lot of money to use if he does not need to pay for his living expenses.
My PhD is funded by a research council and my stipend is £12k. After rent, food and bills there is some room.
But it's laughable to think I could repair and run an electron microscope. Already mentioned, finding a broken microscope for £1k wouldn't happen here. And you're seriously underestimating the resource requirements to operate such a machine
If my public middle school could do that in some back room closet it can’t be that bad.
For reference in us costs and spend your public stipend is less than my city spends per person on homeless folks and half of minimum wage. I think we’re taking different scales of money.
These kinds of projects are open to the top 5-10% of earners in the us so 15million or so folks could fund this but only 1-2 actually do it.
In the UK the second hand market is non-existent with the likes of the US. You can't just pick up hardware off Craiglist for next to nothing. It simply doesn't happen
Space is another thing as well. But I'm sure there's plenty of Americans whole live more urban without such space as well.
My future prospects may be promising, but owning a large garage to tinker in, whether electronics or something like woodworking seems like an untenable goal.
We definitely have it easier here in America with regards to available space and the price of used equipment, though I'd note that this kid's situation isn't typical.
I grew up middle-class (my dad made, statistically, pretty much the median household income) and out of the scores of kids I knew, perhaps one of them might've had the parental and financial resources to do something like this, had he had the skill/intelligence/inclination.
We had a tiny garage, barely enough to fit a small car. Of course, there was no room for a car, because we needed to keep the yard tools and such in there.
I'm laughing -- trying to imagine my dad's reaction, had I asked him if I could build a science lab in there instead. "Sorry dad, the lawn mower's got to go somewhere else now" lol. He would have told me to go fuck myself.
I think it's easier to get the money if one has funding from parents or friends, after all most of this stuffs are dirty cheap (under $1K) and he has a whole garage to play around, but it's MUCH more difficult to learn the skills described in the article!
I'd assumed they were in India, but they wrote in another comment "My PhD is funded by a research council and my stipend is £12k."
I had forgotten the pathetic level of funding science PhDs get in Britain. £12k is possibly on the low end, but a PhD with this funding was on the fourth page of the main site listing them [1].
Minimum wage assuming a 40-hour working week is £19,760 per year, and after taxes works out to £17,100. In other words, they are probably already skipping meals.
For comparison, a PhD student at the University of Copenhagen is paid £47,500 per annum [2], or £31,000 after tax (probably more, I think there's a tax discount for foreign researchers).
Well if you choose passion over money, it's not really luck anymore when someone has more money than you. An engineering undergrad can probably earn more in a summer internship than your stipend pays in a year.
This guy is a student. It's not like he has "chosen" money unlike myself
I used to be a junior software developer (hence username) earning £40k - far above median income.
Post tax, rent, bills I could save over the year to purchase the £5k electron microscope I mentioned quite easily.
But then I'd need to rent space for it. And purchase the rest of the equipment.
My points aren't some "look how bad I have it" gotcha. It's highlighting the perspective that this student is lucky to be supported with the resources to excel in his passion. Even if his use case is quite exceptional
Others have highlighted for Americans this probably represents a family in the top 5-10% of earners. A realm which American software developers can fall into
For myself, the chance to work in a lab of equipment costing the order of six figures required a career change and significant pay cut. But that's just me
To clarify. I am mind blown he has pulled this off. It's an extraordinary feat. All I can be is envious of his skills and privilege
The others are misleading you with very limited perspectives. Are you comparing yourself to the father and the kid together or just the kid? The kid is using the parents' space. And while house prices have shot up recently pricing out the current generation, the parents are obviously not of the current generation. Housing in that part of New Jersey used to be quite cheap. They might be doing fairly well, but nothing he's done requires it. Frankly, a lot of what he's done suggests more blue collar access to tools, a truck, and ability to work with your hands fixing things.
The article says the microscope was $1k. That's about 750 GBP. The kid didn't make the purchase at the market rate when he just happpened to feel like it. He jumped at the right point when an opportunity presented itself. Everyone immersed in some hobby dealing with old equipment comes across such opportunities now and then.
I don't think you realize just how much higher the median income is in the US and how much space the typical family has.
A homeowner who earns middle class wages would have the space for a home lab/shop (without renting additional space) and would be able to pay a couple thousand dollars for their son's hobby. The stereotypical middle-class soccer mom spends more than that a year on her kid's activities. This is representative of at least the top 50% of American earners, not just the top 5-10%. This kid's father is the owner of a small sheet metal fabrication shop and he probably does decently well for himself but most of his wealth is likely the value of his business.
On posts advocating for density on HN, I often see people wondering why Americans resist densification because the benefits of a walkable city are so immense. Stuff like this and your belief that having a home electronics fabrication shop is out of reach for all but the rich (and the fact that most Americans can already do nearly any errand with less than 15 minutes of travel) are some of the reasons why. It is not that unusual for a middle class homeowner to have a home shop, though normally the equipment in them is something like a table saw or a mid-20th century manual milling machine, not a homebuilt photolithography machine and an old refurbished SEM. People who have them either use their garages (either an extra bay if they have a two/three car garage and only one/two cars or they use the entire garage and park their cars in the driveway or on the street) or they use a shed placed in their yard. Ever wondered where the stories of people starting companies in their garages come from?
To a middle-class American not living in a super high cost of living area this kid's story is something that they could have done had they had parents who trusted them and if they had the motivation and inclination to do it. The people complaining about that this kid being "privileged" are ignorant of how much of America lives and/or are jealous that they weren't able to do what he did when they were younger.
> I don't think you realize just how much higher the median income is in the US and how much space the typical family has.
You really don't realize just how low the median income in the USA is. It's $45k for the median full-time employed individual¹, compared to $39k (£29k) for the UK². You can put the figure in pounds into https://listentotaxman.com/ if you'd like to go further with this, and think of taxes, healthcare etc.
I think your argument still holds, but only for part of the middle class or above. (There's an income distribution table on the Wiki page.)
> …walkable city…
Very few people advocate for only dense, apartment-style housing. They are actually advocating for the choice, to be allowed to build something that isn't a large house with space all around it. This is forbidden by zoning rules in much of the USA.
In a European city, and I'll pick Copenhagen since I live here and it's often cited as one of the best in these arguments, you find apartments of various sizes in the city centre (plus a very few extremely old, extremely expensive houses). As you travel away from the centre, there's a mixture of apartment blocks, smaller apartment buildings (perhaps three apartments in a 3 floor building), denser single-family homes (e.g. shared walls with one or both neighbours), and homes with grass all around. The further you travel, the more the balance shifts to the end of that list -- though if you pass a railway station, you'll find some more apartment buildings. Shops are also distributed throughout, though they are usually nearer to the apartment buildings / stations for obvious reasons.
On [3], the part between the rough circle of water made by the rectangular lakes in the north west and the old zig-zag water fortifications in the south east is considered the city centre. You'll see the type of housing change if you zoom in, then move north, northwest or west. (South, you'll not get the same effect as you'll run into the airport or a nature reserve.) You can also search "Supermarket".
I have a colleague with a couple of children, a decent garden, a car, and a basement containing a metalworking workshop. He's still within 10 minutes walk of a supermarket, and it would be safe for a child to walk there alone.
A friend needed more space than that for her hobby, so she lives on the edge of the city. She has a huge garden (which is the hobby, part is growing food), but she also has a 20 minute walk to the station if she wants to go somewhere without driving, i.e. before and after drinking. (Or < 10 minutes on a bicycle, I assume.)
Conversely, I live in the city centre. A colleague with two children lives fairly close by, in an apartment. Our hobbies don't need lots of space, so we've never felt the need to move further out. The adults and children don't have plenty of space for big hobbies, but it's a more convenient location for other things, like cultural activities, restaurants, people living nearby.
One example of that: a friend's teenage son likes LARP. At 13/14 he obviously can't drive, but he can walk a few minutes to the station. That takes him to the shop selling foam swords and whatever in the city centre, and the locations in/around Copenhagen where LARP groups meet, mostly in the larger woods.
Your American income number is for individuals, but your British number is household income, not individual (your source is confusing, but the official government site states that the median household income is £29,900 [1]). The US has a PPP adjusted median individual disposable income of $42,800; the UK has a PPP adjusted median individual disposable income of $25,738 [2]. These numbers are after all taxes and benefits are paid. Someone earning the median income in the US has health insurance through their employer; the average premium for a single individual is $106/month and the average premium for a family is $466/mo [3]. So that brings our median income for a single earner family down from ~$43k to around ~$37k, which is still far ahead of our median Brit (though it's likely the single earner with a family is earning closer to the household income, not the median income of all workers, which affects the numbers for both countries). And this is comparing the entire US to a richer part of Europe! If we were to use the median PPP adjusted individual income for the entire European Union (plus UK), it'd be even worse as the US is weighed down by its poor regions but the poor regions of Europe are being excluded. Sorry, but Europeans are a lot poorer than Americans, and your governments spread lots of propaganda to prevent you from realizing it. The European argument for social service benefits outweighing lower wages only applies for the poor; for anyone middle class or above the increase in wages is greater than the decrease in services. You can talk about inequality all you want, but when comparing the lifestyles of the median person that is irrelevant.
The typical American does not see *any* benefit to giving up their car and house. Every single benefit like < 10 minute travel time is already a reality (because what matters is how long it takes to run an errand, not how it is run), but they'd have to live in a smaller house. They are a short drive already from all the activities they could ever want and are friends with all of their neighbors. Their kids can play in the street safely as there might be a dozen cars a day traveling down their street, most of which belong to people who live there. There is no need to though, because everyone has a yard to play in. You admitted that most of your friends could not set up a shop if they wanted to, and the ones who do have them live on the outskirts of the city and have to add 20 minutes to every trip (unless they drive). For the typical middle class American, increasing density offers *no* benefit as literally everything you describe is either something they already have or something irrelevant, but it has significant downsides.
If all you talk to are internet urbanists and tech people living in the Bay Area, you are *not* getting an accurate picture of how the average American lives. This is why urban activists (and Europeans who have pride for their hometowns) are constantly bewildered as to why anyone resists them and think it's because people just don't understand the benefits or are brainwashed by car companies, not that they've heard your arguments before or visited your ideal areas and decided that they just don't want to live in an area like that. Urban activist types tend not to be the type of person who would have a home shop in the first place or have any hobbies that require space and they have fewer (if any) children. They are a vocal minority in the US: only 19% of Americans want to live in a dense urban area [4].
So I used the numbers for a full-time employee, and I believe they are both correct. [1] if you prefer a government source, £611 × 52 = around $43k (increase presumably due to this being 4 years later).
Your British number is for all households, including those where one or both adults doesn't work. However, they are comparable.
On urbanism, you've completely missed my point. Americans are forbidden from living like Europeans by their state and local governments [2], and I consider this completely unreasonable.
Household income is always compared including all households; you can't exclude people who don't work as they are people in your country and how they live is important. No matter what income statistic you pick, on average, Americans earn significantly more than Europeans, even after taking benefits into account.
It is not illegal to build in a European style in most of the country; we have entire areas built in a similar style. Zoning is also not a fixed thing in the US; it is very common for zoning rules to change as the area grows. Most of the country is not the San Francisco Bay Area. Contrary to popular online belief, only 19% of Americans want to live in dense cities, so our cities actually mostly match people's preferences. Zoning and land use rules make it illegal to build American style cities in much of Europe as well, so far all you know, most Europeans would like American-style living they were allowed to have it. Here's a ridiculous example of some of your continent's NIMBYs not allowing a rural landowner to open a small restaurant [1]; the same sort of people are also opposed to building any form of suburban housing.
As mentioned, getting that equipment would cost an order of magnitude higher in my part of the world.
However, there is no doubt the feat pulled off here is impressive and insanely difficult to do. I most likely couldn't replicate it, but I wouldn't be able to find that out.
Anybody has a good estimate of how much this kind of home fab can cost? I am trying to do this in my own apartment (its going very slowly heh) and I estimate it would be USD100000. USD10000 would be barely believable if I can get that broken electron microscope for the same price he did. ($1000). Seems like the vacuum system would be the most expensive part. Another one would be random consumables (vacuum grease, oil, chemicals etc). I am trying to start with the most trivial part from his videos, which seems to be the wirebonder, and thats already like a few hundred minimum.
He doesn't mention costs directly, but this video covers the facts that they had to do some additional plumbing work, additional electrical work, there's a big-ass voltage transformer he had to acquire, etc.
I also wonder how much the shipping costs were on that machine. Unless they were able to pick it up locally with a rented van, shipping alone might have exceeded the cost of the unit. Shipping pallets of fragile gear with specialized handling constraints is not cheap.
My high school turned down a free electron microscope (a college was getting rid of it, I think) for reasons such as this. Even if you can get the microscope for free there are other costs, space requirements, etc.
Depends tremendously on how good you are at scrounging. Assuming you have more time than money and know how to find fruitful sources (ebay is meh, local universities, local industry, electronics recylers, equipment auctions, and knowing a guy are the best ways to get cheap/free gear), you could probably do something like the z1 for a few grand.
Sam's lab looks like it cost somewhere north of $10k, but south of $50k. But I mean that's like from empty garage with nary a multimeter to your name.
I also think this is the answer. People are amazingly good at finding discarded things that were once high-value and fixing them. People are amazingly good at scrapping things that are only a little broken, too.
We had one in our middle school. Somehow they hired some genius engineer and he took over the basement and built out the electron microscope, radio station and a whole bunch of other cool stuff. It’s definitely doable and repeatable
Yes, we can honour him for his achievements at the same time as acknowledging that he's been very lucky. Otherwise we have to ask whether we're being inspired by envy and not merely by a desire for justice.
Kicking ass is one thing, clearly it's an expensive hobby to following through the chipmaking history. The dedication is impressive, but, as long as his hobby doesn't affect the current paradigm, he's not kicking ass, but just a micro-celebrity on YT with expensive hobby + flexing.
Note that I wrote this comment, because I just don't like blind positivity. Money is really a problem. There were people who talked about home-made chips for a long time, but the no.1 issue had always been money. Optics and lithography is nothing new, and it just takes a lot of time, effort, and tons of money (+ opportunity cost) to find the right recipe that is reproducible.
Yeah, I know. I'm just a type of person who (over-)reacts to blind appraisals and optimism, which never dig into the actual details. Many people lick the surface, wow, party and leave - which is in the direct collision course with people who seek some seriousness. That's how "suckers make haters".
People here are really focused on the question of his family wealth, but it's such a distraction. Even were they extravagantly wealthy, it is an astonishing accomplishment for anyone, never mind a high-school student / college undergrad.
A 22-year-old builds 1970's-era chips with ~$1M capital in his garage.
Intel builds 2020's-era chips with ~$20B capital in Ohio.
Take the arithmetic mean of 1970 and 2020, and take the geometric mean of 1M and 20B. This very rough back-of-the-envelope calculation implies a small-ish company could build 1995-era chips with ~$141m capital.
It seems to me that $141m is a quite reasonable "insurance policy" price major automakers would be willing to pay to ensure a stable supply of microcontrollers with 1995-era specs, given that they were recently in a situation of being unable to sell a bunch of $35,000 trucks because they couldn't find a batch of $3.50 microcontrollers.
And this story repeats across a lot of different industries.
Why aren't people throwing money at quickly building cheap chip plants to churn out low-spec chips?
I mean, most MCUs are already 15+ years behind the state of the art process node and are still supply constrained. The issue, I think, is that once these market conditions are resolved, any new fabs will have ~zero value, and there is a non-zero chance that your shiny new-old fab comes online after the shortage is over. Not an easy sell to shareholders I suspect.
While everyone says we just need to assume that privacy is dead, that we can never truly know or trust our hardware, I disagree. This shows it's possible - not all that practical, but possible, and practical can come later - to make computer systems ourselves.
It's not that unfathomable to make a 100,000 gate device with the progression of what he's doing, and that's all it'd take to make a real, proper m68k processor capable of running a modern OS and any modern software with 100% verifiable source.
The patent, how you’d typically protect the chips, have long expired.
But the chip could have been protected as a work of art under copyright.
However that would cover only a very similar layout of the transistors. Functionally identical chips wouldn't be covered even if they weren’t re-created from scratch.
Didnt Nintendo do something similar with the MOS6502?
Chip layouts are typically covered by a separate copyright-like regime with different rules (most notably a much shorter period of exclusivity) [1]. I believe the original NMOS 6502 and the derived Nintendo/Ricoh 2A03 both predate these laws, so Ricoh only had to worry about patent infringement.
That being said, many chips also contain code (e.g. firmware, microcode) that is potentially eligible for copyright independently of the chip layout.
Nintendo partnered with Ricoh to put a Z80 in the NES, like Coleco and Sega, but Ricoh didn’t have the license to produce Z80s and didn’t think they would be able to reverse engineer it quickly enough. But they did have a reverse-engineered 6502 clone with the patented bits removed, and US copyright law didn’t cover IC lithography yet, and would they be interested in that instead?
Does anyone have an idea whether there is a potential hobbyist market for home-grown chips of this size? I know that I would definitely be willing to spend around $100 for a much smaller chip, like quad-gates or slightly above (1200 transistors is way beyond what I thought is possible in a garage), more the larger the chip gets, and ultimately including getting involved in the design of the chip -- but then of course paying for all failures resulting from that.
The upside, compared to things like Europractice or MOSIS being lower one-time costs and lower turnaround time, but higher per-chip costs, which matches very well with the "hobbyist" target.
I long thought that this would be a nice niche market, but I never found any clue about whether these are realistic numbers or if anyone else would be interested in that.
I would guess the market would be pretty fragmented, with only so much demand for each chip. Right now, for example, some people buy FPGA based replacements for Commodore 64 "SID" chips, because the originals do fail. Some amount of purists might prefer a "real" chip. But how many? There are also simpler chips in this space that are in demand. Old Kaypros have a couple of custom gate array chips that are hard to replicate, for example.
Or maybe the retro chip synthesizer crowd would buy a product, but again...how many?
That's was what came to mind for me as well. For digital you simply can't beat the cost of a mass-produced FPGA over having custom silicon fabricated (at small scale). Not to mention the additional design costs, EDA tool licensing, etc.
Now for hardened applications, these large nodes have their uses. But that's a very niche case.
PLDs evolved to FPGAs, which are far more powerful for that price. Homegrown chips would only be interesting for someone who regards ASIC design as an end, not a means, hence hobbyists.
All the research that was founded by tax dollars in the 70s before all the research was privatised (like nor more scientific publications how it was done etc).
absolutely believe this 100%. and even if isn't publicly funded, under capitalism wage laborers are shorted when they get paid a wage and their code becomes the private property of a capitalist. so yeah, i agree with your framing 100%.
my question was more: what is the short laundry list of the exact developments/research that allowed Zeloof's garage-size/at-home chip-making?
I have a superficial understanding of photolithography, but I'd guess the stuff he's doing is described pretty well in undergraduate textbooks, and he got loads of equipment very cheap as it's obsolete for commercial or even academic use.
Further, capital costs will rapidly start rising as well as the required knowhow as the feature size shrinks, so I think he's already quite close to the limit a one person hobby project can achieve.
All this being said, this is an extremely impressive achievement. There's a long way from reading how stuff is supposed to work, to actually doing it your garage. My hat's off to Mr. Zeloof.
What are the toxic chemicals used in chip fab? (serious question) I have literally all the chemicals mentioned in the first chart on this page in my modest maker garage, sans arsenic and phosphine; though anyone with certain rat poisons would have them.
There doesn't seem anything more toxic than what you would find in your run-of-the-mill chemical research lab. One time I got to handle a few liters of trimethylsilylcyanide (at work, not in my garage lol), that was an exciting day in the lab.
This is but one example of articles I've read talking about how "toxic" chip fab is...and I'm like, have you seen the coal industry?
> Aside from being caustic, many commonly-used chemicals are known human carcinogens. Some examples that can carry high risk are toluene, acetone, methylene chloride (DCM), xylene, chloroform, and isopropyl alcohol.
You mean paint stripper? Granted, DCM is being phased out, but I've worked with gallons of the stuff. Xylene/toluene are in spray paint. Acetone and isopropanol are literally under my bathroom sink. Acetone is straight-up not a carcinogen, and IPA is carcinogenic in the same way bacon and beer are carcinogenic. Like, technically yes, but it's not exactly methyl iodide.
> Others—like glycol ethers—may even cause reproductive harm.
You mean windex? Contains ethyl/butyl glycol ether (cellosolve).
Sure later in the article they mention mercury, cadmium, tellurium, those are pretty yucky. But how many NiCd batteries do consumers improperly dispose of every day?
Chip fab is probably no worse than your average autobody garage/paint shop combined with a metal plating facility. Yeah don't go dumping your effluents in landfills or storm drains, but we already have protocols and pipelines for chemical hygiene and waste management.
Chip fab actually has the advantage of tons of money to throw at proper chemical hygiene, unlike fossil fuel industry with razor thin margins.
Can we do something about the mining, fracking, and coal burning industries though?
Recently I've read a 1985 interview with a Soviet IC factory worker where phosphine, arsenic, antimony and hydrofluoric acid were named. Workers explicitly shut down their managers' plans to use pure phosphine. A death caused by arsine poisoning was mentioned.
FWIW, depending on your applications, other modalities might be easier: fluidics or even clockwork logic. You'll never be as efficient and fast as silicon, of course.
Watched his Hackaday talk, mighty impressed. I think this comment section however is pretty sad, it seems that to do something impressive you cannot have supportive parents and money.
> Instead of a standard HF etch, a buffered oxide etch of NH4F (Ammonium Fluoride) in HF can be used to control the etch rate and photoresist lifting. I use approximately 20-30g of 100% NH4F per 50mL of HF (stock whink rust remover) and etch time for 6000Å SiO2 is 20min at 20C. A couple drops of Triton X-100 nonionic surfactant may be added to the BOE to improve etch uniformity, wetting, and ensure consistency through a thicker resist. A good BOE recipe can be found here but assumes industrial-strength HF.
See my other threads. HF is Serious Business, but approachable for the hobbyist if you know about chemical hygiene. You can buy Whink at the hardware store.
I would think we should start exploring other materials and ideas if we really want to make accessable to everyone. Not everyone would be able to make it find the equipment he has.
Does the article say what he does with HF? Ive often thought home brew chip making at 70s scale would just be a lot of elbow grease, but definitely doable. Safety is not that hard. Chemicals not that bad. Nothing that American garage tinkerers haven't dealt with before (my favorite, tin can turbine)
Except for the HF. Ill admit I dont know much about HF, I used it only once in a lab (making BJTs) but: HF is nasty dangerous, impossible (?) to get without a license, impossible to dispose properly.
Is there an alternative to etch SiO2 or is this guy on the edge of legal and insane?
HF is scary but not that insane and not impossible to get without a license (in the US). You can get kits to etch glass which contain in-situ HF (armor etch for example). You can produce your own by obtaining fluoride salts and adding acid - though I would NOT recommend doing this without having some sort of lab chemistry training.
There's a line between "demands respect and thought during handling" and "reckless/insane". Having a properly ventilated workspace, and knowing how to handle dangerous chemicals, I would say HF is dangerous but not insane. Borderline insane for a hobbyist would be things like generating primary explosives/peroxides or toxic gases: cyanides, phosphines, hydrogen sulfide, ketene. I worked as a lab chemist for years and even with a decent home lab, I would be loathe to do any experiments which generates toxic gases in anything greater than 100's of mg quantity, because discharging your vent hood becomes a big concern. I've heard stories where someone accidentally acidified some cyanide (in a hood) and it killed a bunch of pigeons on the roof.
HF, eh, that's fume hood and PPE territory. Neutralize with calcium hydroxide, evaporate it in a hood to salt, and dispose as you would other solid chemical waste. It's just fluorite mineral at that point.
Flourides might work, because they set HF free at a low rate. I always wanted to try SiO2 etching with ArmourEtch (glass etching paste, i.e. flourides) but got sidetracked. There might be other problems with that specific paste, for example I don't know if it contains abrasives, but if you have access to a chemical lab then flourides should be easy to obtain.
AFAIK the chip industry uses flourides too (buffered oxide etch) because unbuffered HF has a too unpredictable etch rate.
As someone who grew up poor, but is now not poor, this is what I want for my kids. Taking on projects that they find interesting and challenging, and sharing it with the world.
I will be very sad if my kids end up doing nothing with their lives or spend it online making negative comments all day.
It requires a lot of exploration and guidance thus I'm super interested in how his childhood looks like. I myself wasted tons of time when I was young, ended up with a mediocre job and struggling with building a hobby. I have a 16 month boy and definitely wants him walk a different route.
Richness is a factor to enable this but the differentiator is will. A lot of rich kids waste their time with BS... This one worked hard and showed will to do something. Let us appreciate this.
Not that long ago the vast majority of scientific progress originated from rich men doing it in their free time. Does it really matter that they published their results for bragging rights instead of a need to fulfill some goofy academic pipeline requirements? Because those that think that money is the only thing standing between them and meaningful achievement... well, no amount of money will change that for them.
> Because those that think that money is the only thing standing between them and meaningful achievement... well, no amount of money will change that for them
What? Why couldn't they just be right? You yourself just said:
> Not that long ago the vast majority of scientific progress originated from rich men doing it in their free time
Is a person still not allowed to understand the fact that if they had more money they could accomplish more things?
I think what he is arguing is that someone with a negative attitude ("he can only do that because he's rich!") won't accomplish anything even if they were granted unlimited funding because they are focused on coming up with excuses instead of thinking about what they can do. There are plenty of poor people in third-world countries who have far less than the original commentator (who presumably lives in the first world) who have built very impressive things, especially considering the resources they have available. It is an attitude problem, not a financial one.
Put more bluntly than I was willing, but pretty much. I think this would be the case for the majority of the envious complaints, and the remainder would be a laughably unrealistic over-estimation of the power of money. As in: it doesn't suddenly make you smarter, more industrious, or gift you the ability to perform complex project management involving large organizations.
I worded it exactly as intended when I said "meaningful achievement" instead of "wildest dream". If the scope of your ambition is to push the envelope in astrophysics, you probably already have enough resources at your disposal - and if you don't, a very sophisticated radio astronomy setup is easily within the reach of most individuals and certainly a handful of friends. But if your ambition is very specifically to build a radio telescope on the dark side of the moon... well yeah, that would take a lot of money that you don't have and never will. But even if somebody gifted the amount to you, that radio telescope still isn't getting built - because it was never something that could be achieved at the individual scale in the first place. So the money wasn't the showstopper. Same story with chip fabrication. If somebody is whining about their inability to execute their dream design due to lack of resources - dropping a $500M EUV stepper on them won't fix their problem.
> If the scope of your ambition is to push the envelope in astrophysics, you probably already have enough resources at your disposal
That's pretty ridiculous. It takes a lot of excess financial capacity for a human to even develop such an ambition in the first place.
Even if you have that level of privilege, you have to compete for educational resources and social support against people who may have much more privilege than that.
His videos are an excellent educational resource that everyone can access easily. He's following that style (e.g. Applied Science) that is valuable for others wanting to learning how to build technologies without all of the fake complexity and grandstanding/secrecy that can sometimes accompany it. Nothing wrong with that!
A thousand dollars is an achievable amount of money for a smart kid in a poor family. I have had good friends from really poor families in Europe make more from bug bounty programs. If that's you're trying imply.
That's just one piece of equipment, though. Plus it's one of the cheaper parts and let's not mention the fact that this "spare garage" is bigger than many apartments in other parts of the world...
So it's not insignificant at all. If you live in a rented apartment (e.g. about 60% of all Swiss people), not even money will make up for the fact that you simply cannot do something like that because there's just no space.
It's many things that have to come together to make this possible - "will" or "talent" alone just doesn't cut it.
Yeah, no denying other factors but repairing that electron microscope is no walk in the park and it prob enables others to do it even cheaper given the walkthrough style tutorial. I'm just replying to a pretty flippant characterisation (see top comment) and not ignorant about other issues relating to circumstances and location like you mention.
I was a poor kid and didn't get financial support from my parents in young adulthood/college. I couldn't even fathom spending $1,000 on non-essential expenses during college. I was living entirely on student loans and minimum wage summer jobs - When that's your life you can't think about anything but pure survival. It's an entirely different mindset that I have now as a financially secure person.
If I got a $1,000 windfall during college it would go straight to bills/food. It would be entirely unfathomable to spend it on anything else. $1,000 is more than my monthly income during my college years.
Sorry. Posters here don’t understand. Why didn’t you have FAANG internships? Why didn’t you have an incredible scholarship that overpaid you and allowed you to spend $2000+/month on non-essential expenses cause everything else was covered. Not relatable! Not relatable! Does not compute!
People here are incredibly out of touch. $1000 for a poor college kid is a huge amount of fucking money. I had a full ride, monthly stipend, and jobs. Yet $1000 would’ve crushed me in many of my years in college and definitely wouldn’t have been something I would just splurge on for one month. It’s also only $1000 to purchase, doesn’t include transport, doesn’t include repairs, and doesn’t include all the additional work to get it running.
Not really. We all know poor people couldn't really do it, just as they couldn't do expensive sports and other expensive but still usual hobbies, for example.
But this guy is not the only upper middle class person in the world - he's from a country with the largest, richest middle class of all countries; and so discussing the money here is IMHO the more out of touch thing - there is more people in the US with enough money for this stunt than there is poor people.
Can't we just celebrate the incredible achievement that literally not a single other not-poor kid was able to do (compare to the number of semi-pro hockey players - hockey is notoriously expensive)?
> We all know poor people couldn't really do it, just as they couldn't do expensive sports and other expensive but still usual hobbies, for example.
That's empirically not true and IMO kinda offensive. The example I brought up in my comment above is very real. Not all parents have overview what their kids do and have. When you've got food and housing, that provides the ability to spend that $600 bug bounty on "expensive hobbies" what you want. Not an electron microscope because your flat is 430 sq ft for four people, but a sleeper PC build, absolutely.
Yeah I think most Americans could (not talking about averages here). It's roughly the same money as 1 year at an university, or a year of car lease payments, or a nice family vacation. Maybe two, but no more.
Anyone who rides a new-ish motorbike demonstrably has enough money to spare. Are motorbikes that unusual? Are second cars unusual? I don't think so. (and don't even look at how much people spend on cigarettes)
It's likely people wouldn't recognize the value and would buy the car or sports equipment instead and I'm not saying most people have the money on top of these other unnecessary expenses - but people prioritizing second cars/motorbikes/etc instead of their genius children are outside the scope of this discussion because they could, they just don't.
Damn dude - you really are out of touch. You should really step outside your comfort zone and talk to more people!
If you noticed anything about national trends - you'd know that motorcycles are basically dying and that things like sport cars are almost gone for good. MOST American families don't own an extra car.
You're also ignoring the real estate costs that are associated with what this guy had. Man, seriously - reevaluate. Read about what people are struggling with these days. Parents aren't paying that tuition out of their pocket - the kids are paying it with student loans.
This feat of ingenuity requires cca $25k - but distributed over 5 years. How many family households in the US could pay $5k/year?
3/4 of all US family households have income over $50k, more than 1/2 have income over $85k, more than 1/3 have income over $125k and more than 1/8 have income over $200k.[1]
$85k is enough to be comfortable and have $5k for the genius child even if you live in the Bay Area. $50k is enough for this outside major cities.
I find it funny that you all really believe this story line.
It amazes me how easy it is to manipulate the masses. Like Elon Musk is the poor South African "inventor".
I am having problems believing a rich kid (must be because huge cellar in New Jersey) find a very expensive and crucial equipment and fixes it for a few dollars (1000).
Without this story line, it all wouldn't be fascinating.
I have problems when people post sensational stories about people like him. It makes poor people look stupid.
Just link to his youtube or where he publishes his findings or whatever, but stop spreading sensational news. Main info is: he is so young and he achieved so much. Look at you random 22 year old: What did you do?
You posted 8 or 9 of these comments. That's abusive. Would you please stop?
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Note this one: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
Perhaps you don't feel you owe "rich kids" better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
> A thousand dollars is an achievable amount of money for a smart kid in a poor family
This is a by-the-book example of privilege.
And even if a poor "kid" has the combination of ability and luck to obtain $1K most poor people would spend such money on basic needs like food, clothing and house repairs than a hobby. And that would be the most reasonable choice.
My comment was merely a semantic point, really boring actually.
I don't really understand your frame to comprehend how your originated your first sentence. As far as i can understand you appear to have misinterpreted my reply. With that in mind i suppose your "observation" is completely worthless as well.
“Oh look another Rich Kid.” is what I called worthless. I’m sure the commenter certainly intended for it to be a negative thing, but that doesn’t really survive any closer scrutiny.
It’s as meaningful as stating that water is wet. Obvious, goes without saying.
No, anything of value. The thing that makes HN different from any other craphole like reddit is that the comment section in the link is as valuable (if not even more) than the link itself. This is possible when commenters willingly omit any flamebait, dismissive crap (like the comment above), etc.
Yeah better than those spend most of their money and time on "cool" stuff, like clubbing, travelling, hiking, biking, etc., which = I don't know what to do but I just don't want to work.
Look at what he did:
> Photolithography machines are expensive—up to $150 million—and so Zeloof made his own by bolting a modified conference room projector bought on Amazon onto a microscope. It projects his designs at tiny scale onto silicon wafers that Zeloof coats in material sensitive to ultraviolet light.
> One of Zeloof’s best finds was a broken electron microscope that cost $250,000 in the early ’90s; he bought it for $1,000 and repaired it. He uses it to inspect his chips for flaws, as well as the nanostructures on butterfly wings.
Damn this guy is good.