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Comment by larelli | Hacker News Reader

From the headline I assumed that technicians were literally able to smell whether a chip is new, possibly by it releasing gases shortly after production. It reminded me of the distinct smell of new hard drives when you open the factory sealed pouch.

I was slightly disappointed when I found that the article describes software based testing instead.

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I can confirm from experience that if you apply too much voltage it takes on that “never going to work again” smell :-)

"All diodes can be light-emitting - once"

Funnily enough, all diodes actually are light emitting, and light receiving, to some extent. It's why diodes are generally in opaque encapsulation. Whether a PN junction is an LED, PV cell or rectifier/switch is a matter of what the design optimises for. Try putting a voltmeter across a glass encased signal diode and shining a strong light on it to see it act as a PV cell. One wouldn't normally use a diode as a PV cell, but if the desired power was very small, a glass encased diode might be used as a cheap PV cell.

That has a name, too-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_smoke

Of course chips don’t work if the smoke escapes, internally they operate on smoke. We tested this with a chip socket connected to 120VAC. All the chips that we connected released smoke, and none of them ever worked again.

From tinkering with electronics my brain has imprinted the smell of various components (resistors, capacitors), isolation. I often wonder what effect inhaling those fumes had on me, can't imagine it was a positive one.

One can imagine your disappointment when you discovered "code smell" has no actual odor.

That is an awesome product idea: A device connected to your computer that emits a pungent substance when you commit "smelly" code.

It could be part of CI. Instead of giving you an error, it fails silently but releases a terrible odor.

I saw this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISmell at Internet World in Palo Alto in 2000. It worked but it had no market. Maybe it can be resurrected.

You've just described my gastrointestinal system.

I'm sure a few web shops are quite happy bad code doesn't actually smell

Are you sure about that? I never want to be down in those CS labs ever again.

It does on my floor. =<

It's, uh, a reference to "new car smell" -- the combination of fragrance and volatile outgassing from new plastics that only lasts for a few months after manufacture. Even if you missed the social reference you got the idea: "new hard drive smell" is surely a physically similar effect.

I understood that part of the reference, but "tech" is ambiguous. If it meant "technician", then it would imply to me that the "new memory smell" was both figurative and something that a human nose could detect, in a literal sense.

Reading the article makes it clear that "tech" refers to "technology", making it more likely that the "smell" is purely figurative.

I too expected to read about people smelling the flash memory. The reason I expected that was exactly because I have smelt new car smell.

You can buy that smell in a spray can.

In my imagined version there was a chemical sampler/detector connected to a machine-learning algorithm, so basically a robot was doing the smelling.

I personally assumed it was a dog called 'Tech'.

Now if only they could detect how much wear and tear is on the filament.

6.3 VAC

Uhhhhhh, embarrassingly, same.

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