A 3rd World Embedded Engineer Responds to "RISC-V They Should Have Known Better"
69 points by Narishma 2 hours ago | 17 comments
Sha1rholder 33 minutes ago
Nice read!
replyThough it feels a bit strange that "I have exceeded the allowed number of requests. (500 times)" when I first clicked the article and I'm pretty sure I don't share the ip of my self-hosted VPN with anyone.
kqr2 31 minutes ago
Original HN discussion referenced:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49298035
replyavmich 33 minutes ago
To me it feels like the difference in positions is "this could be made better" vs. "but this is already so much better than before". Both are right.
replyMaybe I'm missing something important so far...
> The students I want to teach are in the same position, and so are the ones in Nigeria and Bangladesh
It does not take $60 to ship small sub $1 chips from Asia to Nigeria/Bangladesh. These two countries are all on global trade routes (both supply and demand) and the expensive last mile delivery costs are fairly low there too.
HN hasn't been Bay Area centric in years. Honestly, most comments and usership on the platform seems to now align with DACH and CEE.
Presumed RISC-V hate is a perfect example of that - the UCs and CSUs have been using RISC-V in their curriculum since the 2010s becuase Patterson is faculty at Cal and most CompArch courses in both systems have been using RISC-V as a result because 61a/b/c are often used as the benchmark curricula wise. An entire generation of Californian computer engineers have been RISC-V fluent as a result.
The hivemind assumption that HN's user base is "venture capital", "tech bro", "founders", and "Silicon Valley" is around 5 years out of date.
Anecdotally, the vast majority of younger (below 30) founders, engineers, VCs, and builders in the Bay have either not heard of HN or quit it within weeks due to toxicity.
I honestly do not get this at all. HN remains very US-centric to me, and apart from some takes on tech rights, does not really remind me of my experience in DACH.
The majority of HN's usership, posting, and comment activity occurs during peak EU work hours (3am-9am), stylistic patterns that are common for German-native speakers are increasingly prominent, and the fact that IRL conversation topics in the Bay Area tech scene are entirely different from those on HN shows a massive divergence in userbase.
HN "Who wants to get hired" threads are a good example of that as well.
I'd recommend deep diving in the HN scrape dataset on HuggingFace [0]. The site has diverged heavily compared to 2018 or 2012.
[0] - https://huggingface.co/datasets/open-index/hacker-news