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Comment by Sakos | Hacker News Reader

Meh, the article is just hogwash and/or clickbait trash. They never define "innovation" and it seems like they're complaining that we value something other than massive tech companies that barely create jobs or value.

https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=PATS_IPC

This is a stupid measure (number of patents), but it's better than whatever nothing is in that article. Seems like the EU is doing fine. The EU has issues, but "Europe not being good at innovating" is quite the leap that I doubt they can actually base in fact.

I wonder what else the author will suggest in their next article. Loosening labor regulations?

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Even worse than that, the article has absolute nonsense in it such as this:

> Should your startup go bankrupt, chances are you will as well, and you’ll have to live under a multi-year purgatory during which time your innovative abilities are severely curtailed. No bank will touch you also. It really is pretty bad

(For reference, limited liability companies exist and are the norm in pretty much all European countries)

Also, talking in general "Europe" terms as if things (culture, regulations, people's perceptions) are the same in the Netherlands and Spain, let alone Estonia and Romania.

> They never define "innovation" and it seems like they're complaining that we value something other than massive tech companies that barely create jobs or value.

American exceptionalism at its finest. If it's American, it's superior by default. Even if in their jobs market the weakest part (workers) is screwed over by design. I'd never work in the unregulated US.

As for AI: https://www.statista.com/statistics/939627/ai-publications-w...

Hmmm. Also looks like we're doing fine.

Stable Diffusion was a big blow against OpenAI and was made at LMU Munich, Germany.

Number of patents is a stupid measure and it's not better then common sense and common knowledge. You're writing this on a device produced in asia, and designed in the US, running an operating system made by a US company, using a browser made by a US company. But european companies have patents, so they're doing fine.

Using machines developed and produced in Europe (ASML, for example). Innovation is not defined by who makes your phone

The most critical element of the EUV machine, the light source, was designed by an American company, Cymer (now a fully owned subsidiary of ASML). The second most critical element, the Zeiss optics, are European, but I’d consider that more precision manufacturing than high technology.

One can always play that game and find that actually almost any country is the only source of innovation by choosing the abort condition carefully (just as an example: the most important component of the light source is the high-power pulsed laser source, which is made by Trumpf - a German company).

Ya if you didn’t know what you were talking about or were lying you could say some other step in the value chain is the source of the critical IP. But in this case it’s pretty clear that the innovation took place at Cymer and Trumpf is the much more commodity component supplier.

Is it though? The laser needed for the laser-induced plasma EUV source are nothing you can buy of-the-shelve and is nothing trivial to design and Trumpf has lots of expertise in this area (since they are not just a supplier for lasers, but use the lasers themselves for machine tools). Could another company have made it? Probably! But the same is true for the whole EUV light source, since Cymer wasn't the only game in town after all (there were a number of other companies working on it in the US and in Europe) - with ASML also collaborating with several potential competing suppliers at the same time. But no one really cares about anyone but the winners in the end, so only ASML and Trumpf are left standing in the end to bask in the glory.

Uh yes of course there were several competing potential suppliers of light sources (just as there were entire EUV systems) but all the other ones didn’t work and were not close to working. That is the definition of a critical enabling technology. Cymer was in fact the only game in town.

Only one that worked is patently incorrect, since early ASML R&D units shipped with non-cymer EUV light sources (some Philips collaboration iirc). Best performance at the time maybe (be it reliability/output power/size/..), but not the only one that worked at all, so no..

They other light sources were orders of magnitude below the required brightness with no path to required commercial brightness, ie they didn’t work

I don't think that was true. Gigaphoton achieved similar numbers to Cymer roughly a year later with a very similar design idea (so unclear why they would have had no path forward? they are still on-par today with Cymer as far as I can tell), XTREME was not too far behind (within factor 3 I would say).

Actually, my OS was written by a guy in Finland.

Running on a British designed CPU architecture (Arm Ltd.) and with ICs made using Dutch made machines (ASML Holding N.V.)

- Snapdragon SoCs use ARM cores a chip architecture designed by ... ARM (UK)

- TSMC and Samsung Chip fabrication is done with machinery designed by ASML (Netherlands)

- ASML litography is only possible with precision optics designed by Zeiss (Germany)

- The Linux kernel of the 'US' designed OS is actually Finnish.

Cherry picking will paint whatever picture you want.

Linus Torvalds has been living in the US for a long time and is a US citizen. If [1] is accurate, the top Linux kernel contributor is Chinese, and almost all significant Linux contributors are outside of Europe. Arm microarchitecture is often designed in Austin, TX according to friends of mine at Arm. ASML and Zeiss are great, but, as a European, rather than gloating, I look, with great sadness, at the trajectory over the last half century, and see that the number European technology world-leaders has been steadily decreasing.

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/839772/

To tell the truth, ARM Holdings was founded by Acorn, a British company, and VLSI, an American company, with Apple, also an American company, investing some cash. Eventually the likes of Texas Instruments and other US companies joined, and a ton of smaller Eoropean companies was bought / merged in. So it's a truly cross-Atlantic venture.

OTOH ASML is definitely European, and, frankly, has no serious competition anywhere on the planet.

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