22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage • Hacker News Board

Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage

#251

Post by amoorthy » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 7:54 PM UTC

osrec wrote: post #18

TrackerFF wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to compete with FAANG, Finance, and Consulting. Unfortunately, that's where a lot of people end up.

Comfortable money + marketing hype keep it that way unfortunately. If governments really wanted to prioritise innovation, they should consider giving a banker's salary to a research scientist.

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".

[1] https://www.curiousjuice.com/blog-0/bid/89407/How-much-salar...

Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage

#252

Post by kilroy123 » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 7:59 PM UTC

emadabdulrahim wrote: post #238

neogodless wrote: post #32

I think one of the great takeaways is his quote: > 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 lit…

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-taugh…

Just tackle it by doing 30-60 minutes a day of self study. After a year you'll rack up hundreds of hours of studying.

Keep that up for 10 years and you're at thousands of hours of studying.

Plus all the experience on the job. That'll compound for sure.

Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage

#253

Post by zomglings » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 8:07 PM UTC

ezconnect wrote: post #159

hnthrowaway0315 wrote: post #106

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 s…

He has support from his family.

That was necessary but not sufficient for him to have built what he has. He deserves credit for what he has done.

Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage

#254

Post by adolph » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 8:09 PM UTC

bruceb wrote: post #214

hwers wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AKA how Bill Gates because Bill Gates. One of the very few kids to have access to a computer at the time.

And Allen:

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.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/02/microsoft-co-founders-bill-g...

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.

https://www.wired.com/story/inside-bills-brain-outliers/

Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage

#255

Post by mgraczyk » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 8:10 PM UTC

danielrpa wrote: post #10

Amazing! "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.

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.

Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage

#256

Post by rdtwo » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 8:13 PM UTC

was_a_dev wrote: post #216

rdtwo wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not eBay? Usally things are more expensive but for small stuff you pay market price

eBay in the UK is just a platform for people to sell their old hardware near retail price. Some niches are decent value Finding a £1k electron microscope would never happen Edit: A quick search across Europen eBay, I could buy a used/broken SEM for £5000 ($6850) Then I'd need to rent somewhere to operate it

Space is a huge problem. I would have had the same issue as 25 year old.

Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage

#257

Post by csense » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 8:20 PM UTC

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?

Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage

#258

Post by was_a_dev » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 8:25 PM UTC

Symbiote wrote: post #248

csdvrx wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's rather inconsiderate to refer to $1K as "dirt cheap" when replying to someone who says they can only just afford a soldering iron That's like 10 bucks on amazon? Skip 2 meals, or panhandle for 4 hours. Done - soldering iron.

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…

It truly is a career driven via passion rather than monetary gain

Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage

#259

Post by kkjjkgjjgg » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 8:32 PM UTC

JohnBooty wrote: post #160

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 le…

I believe everything you're saying! 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 thi…

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.

Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage

#260

Post by kkjjkgjjgg » Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 8:33 PM UTC

bradlys wrote: post #206

JohnBooty wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe everything you're saying! 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 thi…

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…

So would you say it is worth shelling out money to go to CMU? What do they teach that others don't?