Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?

news.ycombinator.com

201–210 of 215 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?

#201
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's easy to say with the benefit of hindsight! But before going down the rabbit holes, we didn't know which ones were unnecessary. If you didn't go down any of the rabbit holes, you'd end up with a US$60k machine built around US$5k ballscrews and ABS and whatnot. The point at which people serious about making a shippable product got involved was already after it was no longer theoretical.

>If you didn't go down any of the rabbit holes, you'd end up with a US$60k machine built around US$5k ballscrews and ABS and whatnot. Honestly that's the normal way to do product design, start with the expensive version that works and then slowly redevelop it to use cheaper parts, or make big enough purchases that the cost of the parts naturally comes down. I get that you were involved in the project, and won't hear…

I wasn't; by "we" I meant "humanity".

Evidently the normal way to do product design failed at producing consumer 3-D printers, as it invariably fails at big innovations, so in those cases people have to be tinkerers to be serious about shipping. Clayton Christensen has a book about this you might be interested in reading.

Re: Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?

#202
post #182
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What similar opportunities are we missing today? Something You have not done yourself or something for what You have not paid to someone else to do. Life is complicated, it is very typical when appear opportunity but nobody use it. Because to use opportunity need 3 things: 1. The will. 2. Enough qualification (or enough IQ and time to learn). 3. Free (!!!) resources or cheap borrowed funds. If only one thing from l…

Yes, of great interest! And in particular I'm interested in how to make do in environments full of prohibitive regulations that make it difficult to do anything, because I live in Argentina.

I usually state: for use opportunity, you must run business.

Well, must admit, this is not only way, but most effective.

Also possible to use opportunity in educational environment or at community or in government organization. But from organizational science, all of these are just special type of business - educational business, or business owned by community , or business owned by government.

And yes, many people are practically running business, but don't think it is business. And this is very serious problem for economy, because they use this opinion "not a business" as consideration to avoid vital business transactions, and thus killing opportunities.

Re: Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?

#203
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you didn't go down any of the rabbit holes, you'd end up with a US$60k machine built around US$5k ballscrews and ABS and whatnot. Honestly that's the normal way to do product design, start with the expensive version that works and then slowly redevelop it to use cheaper parts, or make big enough purchases that the cost of the parts naturally comes down. I get that you were involved in the project, and won't hear…

I wasn't; by "we" I meant "humanity". Evidently the normal way to do product design failed at producing consumer 3-D printers, as it invariably fails at big innovations, so in those cases people have to be tinkerers to be serious about shipping. Clayton Christensen has a book about this you might be interested in reading.

> by "we" I meant "humanity".

Humanity is not one subject. It is multitude of objects and subjects. The best analogy is loose coupled network (each active node have ~10..100 connections, and billions passive objects with 1..3 connections).

Because of this, we could talk only about some subjects, who directly interested in use opportunities and have all need for this activity.

Even if use relatively conservative approach and consider only formally declared countries as subjects, we will have about 200 subjects (plus some active and successful humans - for example, in business usually considered 80% value of company is good CEO). If we look slightly deeper, we will see some trans-national subjects, like G7, G20, ITU, and many regional subjects. And you should understand me right, before We (I and You) create some at least voice agreement, we cannot consider any subject "we".

Yes, exists "invisible power of market", and some other similar things, like libido, but they all are unconscious powers, and you cannot expect for them to do conscious decisions and conscious things.

Re: Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?

#204
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An offtopic question: how do you manage to write all the years consistently with 0 at the start (I know why, but how ), when everyone around you uses a different standard. If I decided, IDK, to write "cnow" instead of "know", or "J" instead of "I", I wouldn't be able to do so consistently. Not in a world that massively uses the other word. Or it would take me twice as much time to double-check everything that I have…

You get into the habit fairly quickly. I type organise rather than organize despite everyone around me not doing that, but it is legitimately difficult for me to do it the popular way.

Organise is the British english spelling. So you're right somewhere!

Re: Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?

#205
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure floating point is possible, but if you're thinking of something like a 6502 or Z80 you'd have to implement it yourself - no maths co-processor, or dedicated instructions for it. In terms of paging I was thinking of paging in later layers of data from disk, perhaps from a large file, perhaps from a series of files. But CP/M certainly did have support for paging RAM, in 3.x, if your hardware supported it. (My own…

Yeah, people did do overlays a lot on CP/M. If you were using a 6502 or Z80 in the late 70s you wouldn't have to write the floating-point routines; you could just call the ones in the BASIC interpreter you probably had in ROM. They'd still be slow. As for paging RAM, do you mean bank switching? The 8085 and Z80 didn't have MMUs, so you couldn't do "paging" in the sense people normally understand it today.

The ROM floating point routines in Microsoft BASIC on the Apple ][ (and similar) took on the order of 4 ms for a single precision multiply. BASICA on an IBM PC was only slightly faster.

The FP routines in the Arduino library take about 5 µs for a multiply on an AVR (e.g. Uno).

That's 1000 times faster.

Factors in that include:

- 16x faster clock speed

- typically 1 cycle per instruction vs 3

- 32 8-bit registers can easily hold all the data for operands and result and temporary values, vs Zero-page on the 6502

- single-cycle register to register 8 bit arithmetic vs three instructions needed per 8 bits on 6502

So that's a factor of around 1633 = 144x combined.

All the above apply equally to add/sub and multiply, but also:

- AVR has 2-cycle 8x8 -> 16 multiply instructions, for signed, unsigned, or mixed operands, and for fixed point 1.7 format as well. That's hundreds of clock cycles on 6502 or z80.

Also, the Microsoft BASIC interpreters used a 40 bit floating point format (32 bits of mantissa) instead of 32 bit. That's another factor of 16/9 for multiply.

The 8080/z80 and 8086 have more registers than the 6502, but not enough to implement soft FP keeping values in registers like AVR can.

Re: Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?

#206
post #202
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, of great interest! And in particular I'm interested in how to make do in environments full of prohibitive regulations that make it difficult to do anything, because I live in Argentina.

I usually state: for use opportunity, you must run business. Well, must admit, this is not only way, but most effective. Also possible to use opportunity in educational environment or at community or in government organization. But from organizational science, all of these are just special type of business - educational business, or business owned by community , or business owned by government. And yes, many people a…

Hmm, very thought-provoking. But doesn't that make your activities more vulnerable to regulation?

Re: Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?

#207
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, people did do overlays a lot on CP/M. If you were using a 6502 or Z80 in the late 70s you wouldn't have to write the floating-point routines; you could just call the ones in the BASIC interpreter you probably had in ROM. They'd still be slow. As for paging RAM, do you mean bank switching? The 8085 and Z80 didn't have MMUs, so you couldn't do "paging" in the sense people normally understand it today.

The ROM floating point routines in Microsoft BASIC on the Apple ][ (and similar) took on the order of 4 ms for a single precision multiply. BASICA on an IBM PC was only slightly faster. The FP routines in the Arduino library take about 5 µs for a multiply on an AVR (e.g. Uno). That's 1000 times faster. Factors in that include: - 16x faster clock speed - typically 1 cycle per instruction vs 3 - 32 8-bit registers can…

Yes, excellent points! But you don't have to do floating-point math to interpret G-code or generate motor control waveforms. You could probably do it on an 8051 fast enough to run a 3-D printer entirely in floating point, but you can also do the math in integers, only going beyond 8-bit precision when necessary.

Re: Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?

#208
post #206
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I usually state: for use opportunity, you must run business. Well, must admit, this is not only way, but most effective. Also possible to use opportunity in educational environment or at community or in government organization. But from organizational science, all of these are just special type of business - educational business, or business owned by community , or business owned by government. And yes, many people a…

Hmm, very thought-provoking. But doesn't that make your activities more vulnerable to regulation?

Yes and no.

Yes, I agree, providing more info you become more vulnerable.

No, at concurrent market appear more priority matters.

You sure hear about Queueing theory, and may be you know, when execution unit wait for something, this time subtracted from max performance, and in worst case EU could wait 100% of time, so performance will be zero, no matter how fast EU could run ideal case.

How this apply to economy - business do many things without guarantees, only based on trust ("business is all about trust" - you could make big table with this phrase and hang it on the wall as icon).

In low tech business, typical to invest large resources to stored things, so people could just pay money and got product immediately, and do not wait until it will arrive from fields.

In high tech business appear additional dimensions, investments made into r&d and into prototypes of products, before mass production.

Services are just genuine trust, as in many cases you cannot know if service suitable for you before use it, so you should buy small amount of service or service business should spent some amount of it's resources to make gifts to try.

Any way, in many cases, need significant amount of borrowed money to start business or to scale business, and the more trust have subject, the cheaper will be borrow for him.

Statism is usually considered State as intermediary, who in theory should guarantee deals and even borrow cheap money, but this scheme is very limited and vulnerable for not good enough persons, because State itself must got resources somewhere to store them and to have something to share. If state have no spare resources it cannot guarantee anything. Not good persons use lot of tricks to force people to give their resources to State, and in extreme case just use violence to pick up resources from their owners (sure, this is bad for trust and killing free market).

Ideal business as I said before, called for trust. For example exists Islamic banking, which is extremely similar to idea of Venture Fund, and invented because for Muslims prohibited to give money for percents. So they create business with acceptor of money and got share in this business, and involve in this business to control that money will be spent wise.

And the last I should say - some people think, business could grow on internal money, just constantly withdraw some small amount from money circulation and reinvest these money into business grow.

Well, this scheme is working, but exists one problem - many business opportunities are limited in time, exists sort of time window (you could read more on this in ballistics or in space science, they use term as usually exists positions of planets, most energy effective). You could use such opportunity only if you will do things fast enough, so create your product or service before time window closed.

And grow on internal resources is very slow, usually it is just few percents faster then inflation, but to finish inside good time window in many cases need large investments, tens percents of turnaround or even more than turnaround, so without cheap borrowed money business will lost opportunity.

But to borrow money need to show clear enough organization; you may hear about Due Diligence, but I think you are not know, that Due Diligence is usually much more strict and deeper than tax reporting. So conclusion - to have more success in using business opportunities, you must share much more information than to just deal with state regulations.

Things looking even worse if we look on insurance and on finance transactions - typically insurance and finance transactions fees are depend on trust, so very high probability, semi-hidden business will constantly lose few percents of turnaround, and will be even more limited in using opportunities.

More detailed on this you could read in books from Acemoglu, Mises, Elinor Ostrom.

Re: Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?

#209
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get into the habit fairly quickly. I type organise rather than organize despite everyone around me not doing that, but it is legitimately difficult for me to do it the popular way.

Organise is the British english spelling. So you're right somewhere!

Indeed, I picked it up working with Brits early in my professional English learning journey.

Re: Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?

#210
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that Bowyer doesn't mention the patents at all in this interview, so I question your assertion that the patents were a huge impediment to him . Possibly they dissuaded other people from starting a RepRap-like project years earlier, but I think the vast majority of such people didn't even imagine that an affordable 3-D printer was possible.

Ah that’s a fair point. I asked him: https://bsky.app/profile/tlalexander.bsky.social/post/3laiw4... I think I have heard that in the country he was living in, violating patents for personal use was okay. My understanding is that things are much more strict in the USA, where I believe you can’t help others violate patents so you can’t publish work the way Adrian did. I know that in the early days of 3D printing every…

He seems to have responded:

> Under EU and UK law anyone can use a patented technology to research improvements in it without paying royalties. So no, it wasn't any problem.

> This is not the case in the US.

Post reply on HN