Hacker News: bgnn

New comment by bgnn in "Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing"

bgnn — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 20:25:09 +0000

Chips age and fail with age. You can check hot-carrier injection, bias-temperature instability and electromigration as they are the main aging mechanisms. All if these are a linear function of time but exponentieal of temperature. 90-100C these chips are running at are really tough, so they are likely to fail at couple of percent to 10% range in 2-3 years depending on the margins they have in the design.

The solder joints are notorious to fail at a high rate too.

New comment by bgnn in "Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools"

bgnn — Tue, 12 May 2026 18:32:06 +0000

Similar to an HFT company I know, using the money spent on tokens per developer as their efficiency metric. Insane.

New comment by bgnn in "Why does it take so long to release black fan versions?"

bgnn — Sat, 02 May 2026 20:25:30 +0000

Wow this is a nice read. I never thought injection moulding precision, relative to the dimensions of the object, to be in the same ballpark of what you can achieve with photolithography in chip manufacturing. This of course makes sense because we are at the end limited by the same principles of mechanical inaccuracy.

New comment by bgnn in "How Semiconductors Were Made in America"

bgnn — Fri, 01 May 2026 21:11:22 +0000

Even in late 90's the IP wasn't waponized. Most start-ups were just a bunch of employees leaving a company to compete with them while improving upon the previous IP.

Nowadays even start-ups are paranoid and starting a semicon company is orders of magnitude harder..

New comment by bgnn in "How Semiconductors Were Made in America"

bgnn — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 21:42:44 +0000

This is really inaccurate. The real reason is similar to why America was at the forefront of the other high tech sectors like aviation etc too: massive defense spending, a lot of business people (like Fairchild) willing to invest in a sector where they see the potential procurement from Pentagon, while starting to serve the civilian sector.

New comment by bgnn in "Aegis – open-source FPGA silicon"

bgnn — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:54:22 +0000

This is plainly wrong. I'm a chip designer. There's no way to implement a DFF operating at 12 GHz in 180nm, period. This isn't an optimization problem, it is physics.

New comment by bgnn in "My Experience as a Rice Farmer"

bgnn — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:49:35 +0000

Wait. Dod I read this right? Are you saying rice isn't real food but meat is?

I understand most cultures over-appreciate meat, but treating a premium carb source like rice lowly is a surprise.

New comment by bgnn in "Aegis – open-source FPGA silicon"

bgnn — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 21:19:25 +0000

12 GHz on 180nm? Sorry, that's not possible. What's the actual clock speed?

New comment by bgnn in "Aegis – open-source FPGA silicon"

bgnn — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 21:16:19 +0000

Because you can just look into it and see if it's what you sent fof production, and if not and the word gets out you are done as a fab. Fab business is about trust. You also should trust that your design isn't leaked to the competition.

It's very common to xray the dies, especially for debugging. Also common is to etch it layer by layer, take photos and rebuild the circuit schematic, mainly for reverse engineering but I've seen companies doing it to their own dies too.

Things get more blurry at the board level, the combinations of suppliers and service providers are endless.

New comment by bgnn in "Miscellanea: The War in Iran"

bgnn — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 19:17:13 +0000

That's one way to make sure people living under aerial bombing firmly support a regime defending their sovereignty, hence legitimizing the islamic republic. Example: Taliban, with boots on the ground, didn't get any weaker at the end.

New comment by bgnn in "Turkish Coffee? Since the 16th Century, It's in the Water"

bgnn — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 21:27:40 +0000

[flagged]

New comment by bgnn in "Airbus is preparing two uncrewed combat aircraft"

bgnn — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 14:50:32 +0000

Instead of this we have anti dual-use policies, especially in semiconductor. Any chip a fab produces need hefty paper work to prove it cannot be used for military. This is due to the military-industrial complex lobby. They don't want cheap competition.

New comment by bgnn in "Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock"

bgnn — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 23:18:40 +0000

14 kelvin is not easy to achieve at scale + after that, you need to keep it pure.

New comment by bgnn in "Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock"

bgnn — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 23:17:21 +0000

This is an extremely pure form of He, not the stuff used by the divers. That's a completely different supply chain.

New comment by bgnn in "US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters"

bgnn — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 22:25:57 +0000

> Alaska and Norway understood something critical when oil was discovered: if you don't assert collective ownership of the resource before private companies capture all the value, you never will. Alaska amended its constitution. Norway built the largest sovereign wealth fund on earth. Both were acts of people saying "this belongs to us, and we deserve a return on its extraction."

This is also true for the first commercially exploited natural gas fields in the world, in the Netherlands. This ruined the Dutch manufacturing industry, and became a textbook example of tge development of one sector harming others known as Dutch disease [].

AI has a great potential like this too..

[] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease

New comment by bgnn in "Sea level much higher than assumed in most coastal hazard assessments"

bgnn — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 22:38:12 +0000

It's not only carbon. There are a multitude of gasses which cause greenhouse effect.

New comment by bgnn in "Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon"

bgnn — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 21:40:49 +0000

Yeah of you are running Comsol you need real cores + high clock frequency + high memory bandwidth.

Gaming CPUs and some EPYCs are the best

New comment by bgnn in "Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon"

bgnn — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 21:36:57 +0000

In HPC, like physics simulation, they are preferred. There's almost no benefit of HT. What's also preferred is high cluck frequencies. These high core count CPUs nerd their clixk frequencies though.

New comment by bgnn in "British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time"

bgnn — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 21:26:04 +0000

Good to see this is getting more common!

Changing the time every year cause a lot of accidents involving wildlife. Wild animals learn human activity patterns and avoid the roads during our active hours. When we shift the time we start they get caught off guard and a lot of accidents happen. It takes roughly 2 weeks of adjustment apparently.

New comment by bgnn in "Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS"

bgnn — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 22:29:21 +0000

You cannot pay with cash in a lot of places in my European country. The number of no cash places is increasing by day.

You can use your debit card though.