I'm super excited and bullish for manufacturing and I believe we are on the cusp of a manufacturing revolution. I believe we will get to a point in the next 100 years where many of our physical products are created at home, and instead of buying physical products, we will buy designs and "print" things at home. Distribution of physical goods will enjoy the same freedom the music in the 00's and video in the 10's enjoyed, with individuals being able to design and develop products and sell online without the logistics of distribution. Imagine being able to design a fork, spoon, and knife and sell it online for people to print out. Imagine being able to design a cup or a comb and offer it to people to print out.
3D Printers and CNCs are still marketed towards hobbyists and/or industry professionals similar to how computers were marketed in the early 80's. I believe in the next few years we will see the Personal Computer version of home manufacturing and a revolution will ensue.
I've never really understood the optimism about 3D printing of consumer goods. What goods exactly are you buying that can conceivably be 3D printed in plastic? Maybe some furniture and lighting fixtures, but that's about it, and that's something that ideally you would only buy a handful of times in your entire lifetime. Perhaps cutlery, plating and things like vases would be the same, but even those are extremely rare purchases.
So what are you left with that could possibly justify the cost of a 3D printer capable of printing a bed for you? Doodads and cheap plastic crap is better no consumed at all, rather than printing yourself some thingamajig, and is anyway already so cheap that getting it for free would hardly be an improvement.
I do see 3D printing as possibly a major advance for certain hobbies, where being able to create your own small parts for various uses can quickly justify even thousands of dollars of investment. But for someone who doesn't have any construction-like hobbies, I think there is really no reason for this optimism.
You can print other materials than just plastic. You are imagining today's 3D printers. OP spoke of a 100 year period. Computers are nothing like they were in their infancy, and there are many quotes of people claiming people would never need a computer at home.
Not that many, actually. You can't print most metals or glass (not without extreme temperatures), nor weaved materials. Maybe there are some ceramics that could be printed? You will also perhaps be able to print wood composites and a few other biological materials. Perhaps you may even print some electronics (though not something advanced like a microprocessor or FPGA).
If I'm missing somethign some examples of consumer goods you really think could be replaced by an advanced 3D printer that fits in an apartment or small-ish house (say, at maximum the size of a larger washing machine) would help a lot.
Again, you are comparing 100 years of exponential innovation to yesterday's technology. Yes, even today you can print many metals (gold, silver, titanium, aluminum, Tungsten, stainless steel, etc.) and you can print glass and fibers– let alone what will be possible in the future. And we aren't just talking 3D printing when discussing home manufacturing–there are reductive tools like CNCs and lasers as well.
You can walk through any Target or Walmart and see hundreds of items the could be made at home in the future.
You make good points but I think stores like Amazon with fast shipping are likely to be more convenient for people. It seems the majority of consumers would rather buy something than do it themself
I wouldn't look towards your standard home as a test bed for this. I don't need to 3D print cutlery or even most things around the house. You just don't use that much stuff. The economics don't make sense for me to spend a large amount of cash to print household things.
Farms, ranches, and other remote businesses definitely have an opportunity for that though, because not only do they need a lot of every day things, they are also far away and sometimes things aren't in stock.
It's a fun, satisfying hobby. You need to be willing to get your hands dirty with modeling, and be ready to engineer around the limitations of the technology, in order to unlock the potential as a tool for the home.
I print stuff for around the home all the time. It's great to be able to fix toys, closet doors, light fixtures, etc. My most recent print was a bunch of small stilts for a wooden playhouse we're building for our daughter. The playhouse will be on concrete in an uneven low spot, so I designed a piece that will take a 1/4" nut and bolt to allow the structure to be leveled, and keep the wood out of pooled water.
Over the years I've been working on a homemade force feedback steering wheel (for driving games). The gearbox is all 3D printed other than bearings, as well as a faux-wood dashboard. It's as performant as any commercially available force feedback wheel.
A 3D printer isn't going to evolve into some magical star trek replicator, though. It's a device for precisely making plastic objects within a bunch of constraints, or for precisely making resin into objects within other constraints.
Want a new bed? Just buy these seeds, plant them in a (at minimum) bed-sized pot, and don't forget to water, fertilize, keep in the right temperature range, and keep pests away for the next 1-2 years. Once it's fully grown, you'll just have to dig it out and allow a few more weeks until it stops growing new roots, a few more months until it dries into its final shape. Then, get ready to do some light sculpting to get rid of the root system, make good equal-sized flat feet, get rid of any branches that stick out. Now, buy some lacquer or paint to cover it thoroughly so it doesn't start rotting.
Hopefully it will not develop any disease or cancer in this time that could ruin its shape or kill it before it reaches the desired size.
I don’t think 3D printers will ever get that ubiquitous. I think more likely modeling tooling will improve to the point that 3D prints can be done by 3rd parties for cheaper and higher quality than you can do yourself and those vendors can post the results to you. Sort of like PCB Way does with electronics.
I can imagine all sorts of things I’d like to design and make but unless I make it a full time job the amortized cost of the equipment will never make it worth while. I don’t think 3D printers will come down in price enough to change that.
Right we don't need new things every day. Therefore we don't need our own 3D printer, we can share that with others. Let's order the "print" from Staples.
In the past there was a lot more local production. It switched to centralized production because that was cheaper and people valued cheap over custom. I doubt that will change anytime soon. Also a lot of the most useful materials are not amenable to 3d printing and CNC is non-trivial to operate because you have to deal with inventory, setup fixtures, cleanup parts, etc. Most people don't want to deal with the hassle and have other things they'd rather spend their time on. There are definitely a lot of cool things happening in this space, but I just don't see it being the revolutionary change other people do.
I think the shift to centralized production is not necessarily permanent.
Energy generation is decentralizing again. We can make more and more manufacturing feedstocks (metals, H2, CO2, biomolecules) using more modular processes that can also be decentralized.
Energy generation isn't really decentralizing in a meaningful way. Sure individuals can have their own solar panels or wind turbines (and for many people this makes sense), but the most efficient renewable projects are big centralized projects that take up a lot of land area. I believe it will always be that way for economy of scale reasons. This also means that large electricity consumers who can position themselves near cheap sources of electricity will have a cost advantage, which again increases the returns to centralized manufacturing.
I guess my objection is that when I was younger, we owned an actual printer, and now, we don't. They're annoying. I think the more likely outcome is that you take your design to the "print shop" and get it printed. 3D printers likely require a lot of maintenance and calibration.
In my field (medical physics), the technology is constantly improving, but the maintenance requirements never go away. High precision requires high effort; high complexity, generally, requires high precision. That goes triple if you want to eat off it.
Plus, you probably want a variety of materials — are we going to eat off of a plastic spoon, or melt metal in our houses? Space Kinko's can stock everything from aluminum bronze to Zylon composites.
The copyshop model might work out really well. Perhaps cross-pollinated with the MacDonald's model, ideally not by making the entire site run under e.g. Shapeways flag but less granular: "Mike's materializers" around the corner might have brand A processes x, y and z available, and brand B processes w and x, whereas "Jen's stuffmakers" further north has u through y from B but only y and z from A. The model directories list compatible sites near you with each model.
Right, we aren't there yet, but that doesn't mean we can't get there.
Growing up we had an Adam computer in the 80's but we got rid of it and didn't have anything until years later when we purchased an Apple LC II. That's what we need–an Apple computer for 3D printing/CNC/Laser. The Shaper Origin is a great step forward, but it still requires specific skills, but I do think we will get there.
Sure, every home could have its own craft beer brewing kit.
The thing is, unless you're enjoying it as a hobby, it's better to just buy it pre-made. You don't need to buy materials to have on hand, or guide the process of making it. And, you don't have to wait for it to be finished.
Same goes for any number of other hobbies- silk screen printing t shirts, candle and soap making, etc.
Would I want enough printable materials on hand to print a couch at any given time, or would I want to order them, then manually print a couch? Or just order one from a local print shop and have it delivered already made?
99% of people don't want to lose valuable storage space in their home to raw materials if they don't have to.
Unpopular opinion: I’m disappointed we put so much effort into designing forks, cups, and spoons.
Are any of these things better in 2022 than they were in 1922 or in 1722?
Let’s pick a standard design for forks and only update it when we get new classes of materials or new manufacturing processes that require or enable a design tweak.
We complain about the amount of human ingenuity that gets sunk into ad click rates or tricking people with dark patterns.
What about the amount of human ingenuity that goes into redesigning a four-legged wooden kitchen chair that looks like a four-legged wooden kitchen chair, or a stainless steel fork that looks like a stainless steel fork.
Design in furniture and certain kinds of cutlery is better thought of as art, not industrial design - they are closely related to architecture in this way. Sure, the piece has to meet some basic engineering needs, but otherwise it's main focus is decorative, not functional.
You may not care how you kitchen chair looks, but I assure you the vast majority people do care, at least as much as they care how their T-shirt or pants look.
There is an immense variety in the 10-20$ range, with very little brand recognition or true transparency on quality or attributes. It is likely that new iterations repeat previous mistakes or regress.
What we need is to find a robust, simple, sustainable, long-lasting, repairable optimum that is truly environmental friendly and is produced ethically, and then, as you suggest, focus human ingenuity on something else. This will not happen in the current economic system, but will require some kind of intervention or crisis.
By the way, if you're looking for the perfect fork, may I recommend the MSR Alpine tool fork? I bought it out of curiosity about reading an article about how it was designed. Was skeptical at first, but it does have great mouth-feel as well as a couple of other neat quality-of-life things. I use it for daily (non-camping) use btw.
My wife just found an amazing set in Thailand that not only look unique and cool, but in fact have important new features. The dinner knives are sharp enough to cut steak. The handles weigh enough that you can satisfied suspend the ends off the table, which means they handle brilliantly.
I wonder about this often. While I agree that additive manufacturing is incredibly exciting and just getting started, I don't expect that it will get as much mass market adoption as you think. Of my last dozen purchases or so, only a few would have been possible to 3d print. Many include microelectronics or precision machined surfaces with a finish that 3d printers would be hard pressed to match. Several need greasing, and only one was made entirely out of the same material. Nobody is printing entire washing machines or motorcycles anytime soon on house-level printers.
Music, movies and software had the huge advantage that basically all the effort is in the up-front design and then it can be digitally copied at basically zero cost. A car design or washing machine design on the other hand is only a small part of the total effort required to fabricate it. They require at least a dozen different raw material types, careful assembly, electrical certification, programming the microprocessors, greasing the bearings, etc. Most people will have neither the inclination or the skills to do the required post-processing themselves. Anyone living in an apartment will probably also simply lack the space for big machinery, especially if it sits idle most of the time.
Even apart from whether it could be made at all in a consumer-grade printer, some things are just unbeatably cheap with modern mass manufacturing methods. Your example of a cutlery set is one: a modern hydraulic press will stamp hundreds of spoons per minute out of steel plate. That process probably won't improve a lot by transporting the raw steel to your house first and manufacturing it yourself.
I think there are massive opportunities for additive manufacturing in industry, where companies would be willing to spend several million on a production grade device and can hire dedicated operators to get the most value out of it. You can already see that happening in the aerospace industry, and it will probably trickle down to almost anything that requires complex shapes in their assembly process. I don't think it will ever move beyond hobbyist in the home scene, the machinery is too expensive, too big and too complex. That said, the type of person who in the 80s would have gotten a lathe for their home workshop could now get a 3d printer instead (or both!).
My favorite example of late is http://royal.io. You can purchase a token (NFT) that represents fractional ownership in the licensing rights of a musician's song or album, and also comes along with other perks (such as free or discounted merch and concert tickets). The proceeds from the NFT sales help fund the artist's project, and then you participate in the upside by receiving a share of royalties for holding the token.
Thanks for the reply. Royal looks interesting, but I may be missing why an NFT is needed for this. Fractional ownership was existed for a long time before crypto. What does the part NFT provide?
- the uncorruptible chain of custody. While it's well known for decades that "just a database" would solve ASCAP/BMI robbing countless artists because "it's too hard to track them down", they're not going to do it. A royalty is meaningless if there's no mechanism to enforce it, and an autonomous one is simply superior. If you're then going to say "but I could do that with XYZ" then now the rhetorical burden is yours to explain to me why it NEVER caught on.
- fractional ownership is a doodad, but a particularly hard doodad to set up, especially alongside a royalty mechanism. Once again "but you can do that with" -- what? A Delaware corp? With specialized technology? Some combination of buggy lambdas on AWS? And _how_ are you going to offer this to artists and still make money?
NFT for royalties just makes sense. It's no wonder it's not making anywhere near the money that art NFTs do -- but that's art: you'd have to look far and wide to find a more contemptible and corrupted marketplace than fine art. It's no wonder they like crypto :)
NFTs can absolutely do that. They're programmable tokens that can be coded to do anything.
When people purchase songs though the smart contract, part of the value can be automatically sent to the wallet of the person who owns the NFT that corresponds to that song.
The problem is most people, even on here still think NFTs are just some dumb pointer.
You're begging the question; you are assuming all transactions will happen on chain. That's not reasonable. Most transactions will happen with normal currency, using normal means. This company then needs to track all of that and do the distribution on chain.
And if they only allow people to compensate artists through cryptocurrency, then it's not viable for artists.
As a crypto critic, monero is basically the only useful innovation to come out of crypto. Unfortunately, most people buy crypto on exchanges so the idea of decentralised, uncensorable etc are really oversold
> As a crypto critic, monero is basically the only useful innovation to come out of crypto.
I sort of agree with this assessment. I think it depends on what you mean by useful. Unfortunately, the only real-world, practical use of Monero is money laundering. I wouldn't want to trade a currency or work on a technology whose best use case is helping violent drug cartels conduct their financial transactions.
Yes! It’s a currency that’s probably closest to peoples intuitive ideas of what a cryptocurrency is. It absolutely can be used for criminal transactions but people who are very pro-privacy also argue for it.
Maybe I'm just too old, but I just don't understand what stuff like this is saying:
> A mirrortable is a way to take a legally compliant cap table held in a system like Carta and mirror it on the blockchain. It consists of an on-chain smart contract and a bidirectional interface that syncs changes made on-chain to the off-chain cap table and vice versa. In this it is similar to a stablecoin, which similarly links an on-chain asset like USDC to a legally compliant set of off-chain USD bank accounts.
It's basically saying the cap table is held 'offline', that is off of the blockchain, in a legally compliant digital place. There is then a copy of that cap table on the blockchain with a smart contract - an API if you will - to modify the cap table on the blockchain, which will then update the legally compliant one or vice versa. Not sure what the perks are here, but that's what it is.
It is argued that this is an example of illegal tying arrangement to between the markets of "mobile phones", "app distribution" and "payment systems" given the market power Apple has. This space notably is the one where Apple had its loss in the District Court ruling.
IMHO "the 30%" - the fact that you have to use Apple IAP when you ship on Apple's app store - isn't the problem with Apple's policies. It's just a convenient way to express that Apple has a lot of market power and is willing to wield it.
If Apple had a change of heart tomorrow and opened up app distribution, they probably would still charge 30% - because everyone does, even things like Steam which runs on platforms Valve doesn't own. However, that doesn't change the fact that Apple can gain competitive advantage over their own partners by utilizing their app distribution chokepoint.
Steam has competition though. Can you imagine if MS owned Steam and disallowed the Epic Launcher/Store on Windows? The Justice Department would be all over it.
Pretty sure it is 30% for the majority of professional full time developers, as normally company size scales with revenue. If you meant majority of apps, sure.
Best I could find is that they’ll wave fees on the first $15,000 in sales, which is pretty damned low. Then it’s 30% until you get in the millions of dollars, and then they’ll cut it to 25%.
I’m not sure about “vast majority”, but I’m sure that lots of devs are making no money purely because they sell basically no copies. But if a game has even a moderate success, it looks like Steam’s cut will be 30%
Yes, you can apply a set of updates atomically so they all fail or none, with conditions. No save points or nested transactions, though. And the transactions need to be grouped into a single request.
Joins, no. Most of the NoSQL systems distribute data by partitioning them on the primary key, and give you scalability by not doing any work across partitions. Which means that traditional joins won’t be supported. You can either join the application, or maintain a secondary schema that has your joined data organised in the access pattern you plan to use.
Google DynamoDB Alex DeBrie or Rick Houlihan for a ton of tutorials on how to restructure data for partitioned/distributed NoSQL systems.
Fwiw I think HN should be more forthcoming on how the ranking of yc co’s posts are ranked vs other posts. Are the ranked differently? Do the upvotes of yc members affect ranking more than other user’s upvotes?
p.s. I'm in the middle of traveling somewhere but I'll try to come back to this thread soon and respond to the more specific claims in the OP. The claims in there that I personally have direct knowledge about (at least the ones I've had time to read so far) are false, and I agree with you that forthcomingness would be helpful. Edit: more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070287.
They're entirely forthcoming about this: except for job and launch posts, YC posts aren't ranked differently, and YC company upvotes are treated no differently than anyone else's. I think it'd be hard to count how often Dan has said this.
You can choose, of course, not to believe him about this (I have a hard time thinking of a person in this industry I trust more than Dan), but you can't ask him to be more forthcoming about it!
Sure, I also, still, feel some of the kinetics need to be explained to avoid confusion.
Like the homepage doesnt make much sense to me after all these years of reading HN. As I write this there are 160 upvotes in one hour on this post and it is still #9, with many weaker posts ahead of it.
The specific answer (about this post) is that moderators haven't touched it in any way. Twitter.com links have a mild downweight, along with many other domains that produce a lot of sensational/offtopic content (relative to HN). That includes nearly all major media, forums like reddit, etc. Other than that, all you're seeing is the regular HN algorithm at work. It's more complex than just points + time—we've tweaked it over the years to (try to) do a better job of selecting for intellectual curiosity, dampening flamewars, and so on.
While I doubt there is a "non-YC penalty", and I doubt there is collusion on dang's part, it isn't correct to think of HN ranking as a unmoderated scoring function.
I didn't say HN operates on an "unmoderated scoring function"; it most certainly doesn't, as Dan has (again) repeatedly said. I said that YC posts aren't ranked differently, and YC votes don't count differently.
You are arguing the specifics of my comment and not the spirit of it. It’s not clear all the ways posts are modified and it isn’t clear who all knows all the ways posts are identified.
It's clear enough, if you pay attention. Follow Dan's comments over time; they're an informal moderation log of the site. You'll see what stuff does and doesn't happen to posts.
My comment was more about what are all the different ways post can be ranked higher/lower. I trust Dan that the two things I mentioned they don’t do, but is there anything else like keywords/hosts that if yc members knew would give them an edge.
There is no reason to believe anything like that is happening. We do well enough on HN that Dan called us out downthread, and certainly there are no secret tricks we're using --- short of "not having our friends vote us up when stuff of ours gets submitted". I think this is pretty much just conspiracy theories.
The discussion here is pretty unproductive. You're free to simply disbelieve Dan; that's a coherent perspective to have, even if I think it's deeply wrongheaded. But I assume we both know enough about the dynamics of message board "debate" to know that there's an unbounded set of un-falsifiable arguments you can throw up to support the idea that Stripe is unfairly gaming HN. Maybe they've found a wrinkle in the way the second-chance pool is handled!
You are quite defensive and I’ve never said I didn’t trust Dan but you keep saying it.
Because you knew enough about HN that this conversation is “unproductive” doesn’t mean it is unproductive to others. My comment got a lot of upvotes. Maybe that means the knowledge you have isn’t as wide spread as you think it is.
Also I recommend you compare Dan’s responses in this thread to your own. A very different tone—one that is “more productive” than how you’ve chosen to respond.
My entire point was more information could a. Prevent these posts in the future and b. Help to others understand the dynamics when a post like this is made. What is wrong with this? Jeez... was my initial comment that offensive to you?
pc is probably one of the most recognizable and respected folks in tech, the vast majority of people view him in a positive light and generally like the tone in which he comments on HN (forthcoming and open), so it's entirely possible he just gets upvoted up by a lot of readers for any of those reasons (i.e. there's a simpler explanation besides a a full-blown HN / YC conspiracy on his post rankings...)
Did you read the entire YAML spec before using it (https://yaml.org/spec/1.2-old/spec.html_? And all other specs? And docs for all your dependencies? What about docs for system services on all your servers?
Software/specs/formats have edge-cases. Theses exists usually because of a tradeoff in usability. That's why there is YAML, JSON, TOML, etc. Choose the one that best fits your use-case and the strictness you need.
This feels like an attempt at victim blaming. If you have to read an entire spec from top to bottom to avoid a pitfall in a relatively common operation, maybe something is wrong.
FWIW, I couldn't even find the relevant section in that spec from a quick glance. I probably would have to read a significant portion of that spec just to figure out where it went wrong.
I don't think I understand what this means in context of my comment. Are you referring to the parent of my comment?
Someone wrote an article about an interesting thing they discovered about a well-known spec and OP's response is "Are people not even reading about what they are using?" Did the author of the article do something wrong?
No, it's to your comment. One obvious reading of "did you read every relevant spec completely" is that if you didn't read every relevant spec 100% cover to cover then it's your fault that your software had a problem with that spec, and a reasonable person could view that as infeasible (those things get really long). Hence, it's easy to see your comment as victim blaming. (I'm not saying that I do or don't agree with that view, just trying to make sure everyone understands each other.)
Your tone suggests you think it's obviously infeasible to read the whole YAML speed before using it. But it is possible to read the whole JSON spec [1]. It takes less than a minute.
Saying that all formats have edge cases as an excuse for YAML's glaring faults is, frankly, a cop out. Like if a bridge collapses when a leaf lands on it and saying, well, all bridges have some maximum load. Yes, but in this case it's so bad it's just not useful for anything.
My comment was to point out how ridiculous the parents comment is in response to the article.
What does the length of the JSON spec have to do with my comment? The parent comment says if you don’t read all your docs you will be bit by an innocuous bug. You linked to a short spec, but that doesn’t mean anything in this context.
> Like if a bridge collapses when a leaf lands on it and saying, well, all bridges have some maximum load.
Is that what you got from reading my comment or the article? Is that what yaml is like?
Sorry, I misread the flow of the conversation. If anything my comment made more sense as a reply to the one you replied to, rather than yours.
More specifically, I missed the first line of their comment: "Are people not even reading about what they are using?" If you miss off that line, then it sounds (to me) that they're arguing YAML is a terrible format. With that line, it turns out they think it's reasonable, so long as you read the (huge) spec first. Madness!
It's not addressing what you said. I don't think what you said is very relevant, as the "read the spec" doesn't add anything to a discussion about whether something is a good idea to use. Length of spec is relevant to that question.
Thanks, I havent seen that before. It took me 10 minutes to go through and it is very clear (took a moment to realize whitespace also alllows no character).
A couple of years ago I looked at tutorials and found it very confusing, but the spec is just great.
While you’re right it’s a shorter spec (setting aside if you’re right about your broader point) this [0] is a more reasonable spec. Even JSON with its microscopic spec has implementation details, inconsistencies, and errata. Is this why we can’t have nice things?
I’m not sure what this comment is trying to say. I’ve been programming for a while and I know plenty of talented, amazing engineers. Nobody reads the whole spec top to bottom for like, anything.
Those are forgivable. I watched a team get burned by doing software HMAC and it turns out the underlying native function in the kernel is not thread safe. Would have caught me too.
JSON being a subset of YAML is a core feature. It was to help with adoption.
There's a difference in not reading all pages of every document and not reading anything at all. Not even a well researched blog post.
If this individual is a junior, then awesome, they learned a lot of valuable ideas and solutions.
If they're a senior, yikes. Don't use technology you can't explain to the junior discovering core features and writing blog posts about it
Titles are often relative to an orgs size. At a 4 person company I was a director in my twenties. At a 10,000 person company I was a staff engineer in my 30's. At a 150,000 person company I was a senior software engineer (i think? i don't think I ever knew my title, the titles of the people I worked with, or my managers title). I've had a "worse" title at each job while each job was a significant step up from the previous.
No, both are correct. Goldman, like all finance firms, have universal corporate titles that exist independent of job function. Associate, VP, MD. Those titles apply to tech, to traders, to HR, anything. There's a separate job description (ie, VP, forex trading systems design). Being named a "Senior Engineer" is a separate title. You won't be named Senior Engineer unless you've been a VP for at least 10 years.
I got an interview request from GS for a "Managing Director" position and I was really confused at first because I'm clearly in the IC track. From what I could find it seems equivalent to a Staff role.
WP is way past being a blogging platform. Try: replacement for online multi-role portal editor with knowledgebase, shop, forum, stock management, image gallery, document converter, .... elements installable in 2 clicks.
3D Printers and CNCs are still marketed towards hobbyists and/or industry professionals similar to how computers were marketed in the early 80's. I believe in the next few years we will see the Personal Computer version of home manufacturing and a revolution will ensue.