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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

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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?).

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.

lots of (not only european) public funding made progress to euv of asml, zeiss and other possible.

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.

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.

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.

Moore's law is still going , or so I thought. It's Dennard scaling that stopped around 2006.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/transistors-per-microproc...

Sorta. It didn't hit a hard boundary per se, but SRAM has practically stopped scaling and even random logic is only scaling at about 1.5x every three years or so. Like a lot of cases it's an s-curve, and we're on the other side of the bend at this point.

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

> 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.

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?

Do you know of any in particular?

Read ‚The Unlocking Project’

"IF proven incorrect" is the important part.

This "law" isn't somehow less true just because it was originally used as a sales tactic.

How would you even test such a vague law, let alone disproving it?

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 offers this and several other lines of evidence that the law is wrong, and O(n log(n)) is a more accurate scaling law.

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