Hacker News Reader

> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Interestingly, this post about the exact same topic hasn’t gotten removed and is still on the HN front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27760573

Why?

Randomness. The answer to most things.

I would not have been aware of this news without HN. Thank you for sharing this OP.

Little known fact about semiconductors: nobody really knows how they work, beyond that doped substrate, it's all voodoo. And now, a cleansing ritual will have to be performed before our Ryzens turn against us. Again.

Not quite correct. The condensed matter physicists do understand how they work. The problem is it's complicated so the "theory" they teach undergrads is dumbed down to be more palatable.

The sleight of hand comes in where, in the beginning, the "holes" are atoms in the substrate that have lost an electron which, by the time the hall effect appears, those holes are now moving but in the beginning they were stationary.

In fact, in semiconductor physics as taught, both the 'electron' and 'hole' are in fact quasi-particles and only tenuously connected to the electron of the standard model.