5 ms·

HN comment of the year winner right here! Makes you wonder how many other laws are built on nothing. If there's one thing I leaned doing a Ph.D. is if you dig

HN comment of the year winner right here! Makes you wonder how many other laws are built on nothing. If there's one thing I leaned doing a Ph.D. is if you dig deep enough, you find many foundational laws of nature rely on some necessary assumption that, if proven incorrect, would topple the whole thing

toyg 4y ago
CS "laws" like Metcalfe's are closer to Murphy's Law than Newton's...
shuntress 4y ago
"IF proven incorrect" is the important part. This "law" isn't somehow less true just because it was originally used as a sales tactic.
- oldgradstudent 4y ago
  How would you even test such a vague law, let alone disproving it?
  - btilly 4y ago
    The law implies testable consequences, such as what the economic incentives should be from interconnecting networks. They are good enough that we should expect to see more drive to interconnect, and stronger barriers to entry for future networks, than history actually shows. https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.pdf https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.pdf offers this and several other lines of evidence that the law is wrong, and O(n log(n)) is a more accurate scaling law.
magic_hamster 4y ago
It's worth mentioning Moore's Law, which was actually a short term prediction, arguably turned into a business goal. The "law" states that the number of transistors in integrated circuits (like CPUs) will be doubled every two years (or 18 months by some variations). It wasn't entirely made up, as it was mostly based on advances in manufacturing technology, but it was a prediction made in 1965 that was supposed to hold for ten years. However reality kept up with this prediction for far longer than anticipated until the physical limits of silicon miniaturization became apparent in recent (ish) years, until the mid 00's (maybe later?).
- vlovich123 4y ago
  I think it technically kept going into the early 2010s due to additional advancements and technically it hasn’t yet stopped but people are generally skeptical that TSMC and Samsung can keep this party going (a party that seems to have stopped for Intel itself apparently). Dennard scaling though did end in the mid 00s and this impacted Koomey’s law which talks about performance/watt and saw a similar petering out. Apparently the bound at even a conservative rate puts the thermodynamic doubling limit at 2080. After that we’ll have to really hope smart people have figured out how to make reversible computing a thing.
  - logi2mus 4y ago
    lots of (not only european) public funding made progress to euv of asml, zeiss and other possible.
  - btilly 4y ago
    CPU clock speed stopped improving slightly sooner than that. Performance continued to improve, but they switched from making single threaded code faster to adding more cores. This was a bit of a bummer for programmers working in single threaded languages who found that their code stopped getting faster for free.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Moore's law is almost the opposite of Metcalfe's - Metcalfe's encourages you to build out the network as fast as possible to get the most value; Moore's implies you should wait as long as possible before buying processing power to get the most you can.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  Moore’s law isn’t even dead. It says that the number of transistors per dollar rises at that rate, which is still going. Commenters tend to omit the cost component of Moore’s remark.
- chx 4y ago
  Moore's law is still going , or so I thought. It's Dennard scaling that stopped around 2006. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/transistors-per-microprocessor https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/transistors-per-microproc...
syedkarim 4y ago
Do you know of any in particular?
swayvil 4y ago
When observation is translated to "law". That is an act of judgment on the part of the law-maker, purely. Call it "built on nothing" if you like. But as opposed to what?
fsckboy 4y ago
> Makes you wonder how many other laws are built on nothing. variance/standard deviation (also btw, a sum of squares concept) it marks the inflection points on the gaussian curves, but so what, the 2nd derivative points to something significant about the integral? not really. But even if we accept that it does, what does two standard deviations mean? a linear double on the x coordinates says what about the a hairy population density function? nothing. or similar to Metcalfe's Law, the very widely used Herfindahl Index (also squares!). It's a cross between a hash and a compression, it says something about the original numbers, but wildly different scenarios can collide.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
RHSman2 4y ago
Read ‚The Unlocking Project’

toyg 4y ago

CS "laws" like Metcalfe's are closer to Murphy's Law than Newton's...

shuntress 4y ago

"IF proven incorrect" is the important part. This "law" isn't somehow less true just because it was originally used as a sales tactic.

oldgradstudent 4y ago
How would you even test such a vague law, let alone disproving it?
- btilly 4y ago
  The law implies testable consequences, such as what the economic incentives should be from interconnecting networks. They are good enough that we should expect to see more drive to interconnect, and stronger barriers to entry for future networks, than history actually shows. https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.pdf https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.pdf offers this and several other lines of evidence that the law is wrong, and O(n log(n)) is a more accurate scaling law.

magic_hamster 4y ago

It's worth mentioning Moore's Law, which was actually a short term prediction, arguably turned into a business goal. The "law" states that the number of transistors in integrated circuits (like CPUs) will be doubled every two years (or 18 months by some variations). It wasn't entirely made up, as it was mostly based on advances in manufacturing technology, but it was a prediction made in 1965 that was supposed to hold for ten years. However reality kept up with this prediction for far longer than anticipated until the physical limits of silicon miniaturization became apparent in recent (ish) years, until the mid 00's (maybe later?).

vlovich123 4y ago
I think it technically kept going into the early 2010s due to additional advancements and technically it hasn’t yet stopped but people are generally skeptical that TSMC and Samsung can keep this party going (a party that seems to have stopped for Intel itself apparently). Dennard scaling though did end in the mid 00s and this impacted Koomey’s law which talks about performance/watt and saw a similar petering out. Apparently the bound at even a conservative rate puts the thermodynamic doubling limit at 2080. After that we’ll have to really hope smart people have figured out how to make reversible computing a thing.
- logi2mus 4y ago
  lots of (not only european) public funding made progress to euv of asml, zeiss and other possible.
- btilly 4y ago
  CPU clock speed stopped improving slightly sooner than that. Performance continued to improve, but they switched from making single threaded code faster to adding more cores. This was a bit of a bummer for programmers working in single threaded languages who found that their code stopped getting faster for free.
bombcar 4y ago
Moore's law is almost the opposite of Metcalfe's - Metcalfe's encourages you to build out the network as fast as possible to get the most value; Moore's implies you should wait as long as possible before buying processing power to get the most you can.
jeffbee 4y ago
Moore’s law isn’t even dead. It says that the number of transistors per dollar rises at that rate, which is still going. Commenters tend to omit the cost component of Moore’s remark.
chx 4y ago
Moore's law is still going , or so I thought. It's Dennard scaling that stopped around 2006. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/transistors-per-microprocessor https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/transistors-per-microproc...

syedkarim 4y ago

Do you know of any in particular?

swayvil 4y ago

When observation is translated to "law". That is an act of judgment on the part of the law-maker, purely. Call it "built on nothing" if you like. But as opposed to what?

fsckboy 4y ago

> Makes you wonder how many other laws are built on nothing. variance/standard deviation (also btw, a sum of squares concept) it marks the inflection points on the gaussian curves, but so what, the 2nd derivative points to something significant about the integral? not really. But even if we accept that it does, what does two standard deviations mean? a linear double on the x coordinates says what about the a hairy population density function? nothing. or similar to Metcalfe's Law, the very widely used Herfindahl Index (also squares!). It's a cross between a hash and a compression, it says something about the original numbers, but wildly different scenarios can collide.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

RHSman2 4y ago

Read ‚The Unlocking Project’