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Comment by prologist11 | Hacker News Reader

This is super cool but what's interesting is that this same kind of bootstrapping problem exists for hardware as well. What makes computers? Previously built computers and software running on them. The whole thing is really interesting to think about.

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The same bootstrapping problem exists for everything. What makes roads? Construction equipment. How do you get that construction equipment to the job site, without a road already being there?

I actually met a person a few months ago who worked for a startup doing delivery/fulfillment of materials for construction projects. They pointed out that this requires special expertise beyond, say, Amazon, not only because these materials tend to have unusual and/or dangerous physical properties, but also because the delivery addresses tend to be... well, they tend not to have addresses yet! This is all solvable (apparently), but only with expertise beyond the usual for delivery companies in the modern age.

fascinating! I suppose our normal modern systems aren't equipped to handle descriptive addresses - "take a right after the foo store and then go to the end of the road and give the equipment to the people at the end of the road so they can make more road"

I used to work at a company that built data centers. They were trying to get their software to appoint that you could turn up an entire data center from a laptop. Why? So that you could work with European companies and prove to regulators that there were no backdoors. It was a fascinating problem but very difficult. My team was only tangentially involved but we did some work to forward our data to a proxy that ensured that all our data was auditable and not sending stuff it shouldn't. I left before it finished but I heard it was scrapped as too difficult.

Anecdotally I've used software that was capable of it if your hardware could be netbooted, preferably with pxe/ipxe. I used rackn and there's other vendors like maas with purportedly the same abilities.

RackN is good enough it'll let you build virtualization on top of bare metal and then keep going up the stack: building VMs, kubernetes, whatever. You just set up rules for pools, turn on dhcp and let auto discovered equipment take on roles based on the rules you set. Easy to do although I wouldn't envy anyone building a competitor from scratch.

There's a few prerequisites that make this all very realistic if the time is put in

* An LTE remote access box connected to a few switches management ports so you can configure the switches yourself

* Ensuring that the vendors pre-cable the racks and provide port-mapping data

* Ensuring that the vendors set the machines to PXE boot

* Ensuring the vendors double-check the list of MAC addresses of the HW provided for both in-band and oob

This is something like what Oxide Computer is trying to do, but of course you have to use their hardware to benefit.

https://oxide.computer/blog/the-cloud-computer

Then you look at the assembly for the old Cray-1 computers (octal opcodes) and the IBM System/360 computers (word opcodes), and you realize, they made it so amazingly simple you can mostly just write the opcode bytes and assemble by hand if you like.

Then x86 came along, without the giant budgets or the big purchasers, and so they made that assembly as efficient and densely packed as is possible; unfortunately, you lose what you might otherwise conveniently have on other machines.

x86 is the same if you stick to the origional 4bit subset. However it has been extended so many times that you can't find the nice parts.

I've read somewhere that Seymour Cray used to write his entire operating system in absolute octal. ("Absolute" means no relocation; all memory accesses and jumps must be hand-targeted to the correct address, as they would have to be with no assembler involved.)

This is one of the coolest things about these kinds of bootstrapping projects + reproducible builds IMO. One could imagine creating an incredibly simple computer directly out of discrete components. It would be big, inefficient and slow as molasses, but it could in theory conform to instruction set architecture, and you could use it to build these bootstrap programs, and you could then assert that you get the same result on your fully-understood bad computer as you get on not-fully-trusted modern hardware.

Interesting to think about even at a human civilization level. What if humans somehow went back to the Stone Age, but in present day. Could we build back to what we have now?

Kind of a bootstrapping problem. For example, current oil reserves are harder to get than they were a century ago. Could we bootstrap our way into getting them?

Would we want to build the same stuff again? Why bootstrap to oil if you can directly go for renewable alternatives?

But we used simpler forms like oil to bootstrap renewables. For instance, making solar panels takes lots of energy. Would it be possible to go straight to renewables?

Wind power existed for hundreds of years before we started drilling for oil. I doubt you can make useful solar cells, but you can make useful windmills, rechargeable batteries, light bulbs (incandescent), and motors.

However just the above list needs a large list of industry to pull off. Can you make a wire? What about a ball bearing - they are made by the millions of insane levels of precision and are cheap. All those little details are why you can't pull it off. Sure if given all the parts you can pull off the next step, but there are so many steps you can't do it.

I've thought a lot about these problems and you eventually hit the need for stronger than natural magnets. Without electricity it's a hard challenge, but without magnets creating electricity in a simple bench scale is a lot harder.

I ended up thinking that you'd need to do a chemical battery to bootstrap electricity and then with electricity generate the electromagnet to create stronger magnets and then iterate from there.

Your next stumbling block from there would be optics as everything else can be made with horrible tolerances. Even lathes and similar machinery can be made with pretty good tolerances without optics. But when you start needing time keeping or miniaturizing components for improved efficiencies, it becomes a blocking issue.

You also need to discover photo-reactive elements to do lithography, but that's a lot easier since it's just silver nitrate and you'd already have the components when you are working towards the initiate bootstrap battery.

would you need to rediscover the table of elements and atomic theory in your version of things? There's a lot of a scientific learning we take for granted that is actually important when building a new civilization from scratch.

How far can you get - there is a lot I know how to do but won't have time to create before I die

If you include Coppicing for charcoal and building wood, along with modern knowledge, it should be possible to go straight to wind power and rush solar.

I’m not sure the actual problem would be bootstrapping, i think the main problems (not sure in which order) would be: discovery (how do you know who has the necessary skill?), logistics (how do we get all the people in the same place for them to work together and how do we extract and transport the necessary resources in such place?) and ultimately time (how do we do a minimal technological bootstrap before the people currently holding knowledge die before of old age?).

Lithography masks for early integrated circuits were drawn by hand iirc.

Not just ICs, microprocessors:

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

> Certain digital image editing programs that have masking features may use a red overlay to designate masked areas, mimicking the use of actual Rubylith film.

Oh so that's why masking mode in Photoshop is a red overlay?! TIL.

And who makes people?

Storks

Crass joke time!

Little Timmy came into his parents room one afternoon and said "mommy, daddy, where do babies come from?"

His parents were surprised, he's a little young for that, so that sat him down and explain gently "when two people love each other very much, sometimes, a stork flies in carrying a baby wrapped in blankets in it's bill, and it leaves the baby on the new parents doorstep!"

Little Timmy scrunches up his face, confused, then asks "well then who fucks the stork?"

Which came first, the computers or the code?

Code, unless you count the abacus etc

i heard the first assembler was written in machine code, then that was used to create compiler. machine code u can just chuck into the cpu. its a little less trivial than assembly because its harder to remember but if u know assembly u can learn it easy enough :>. i dont feel this is an unrealistic path sk i chose to beleive it without any evidence :D

(The code, of course; the code drove music boxes and looms centuries before computers. Same for chicken and egg: eggs are maybe a billion years older.)

so..the code drove computers

Correct. And the chicken was written in COBOL.

So that is how it crossed the road

No. It was running on a mainframe. It was JCL that let it cross the road.

Probably off-topic, but the chicken and the egg "paradox" always seemed silly to me in the context of evolution. We know that there were birds long before chickens, so at some point, the first bird that we would consider to be in the species "chicken" had to hatch from an egg from a bird that was _not_ a chicken, so the egg came first. (This assumes that the question is specifically about chicken eggs; it's even simpler if you count non-chicken eggs from the ancestors of the first chicken, but the logic still works even if you don't).

the chicken is just an example of an egg-laying and -borne animal. substitute it with the first

I think that changes the answer by GP's logic though, since then the first egg-layer obviously came before its egg.

Or to take it another direction - how do they gestate? At what point can we call it a chicken and when does the shell (assuming that's what would make us call it an egg) develop?

There is no paradox, because there was never a non-chicken parent which was so different that we could consider the newborn chicken a new species. It takes thousands of generations to say such things, not one.

And this "it's a chicken" versus "it's not a chicken" distinction is ours, Mother Nature doesn't care whether these are chickens or not, the chickens do not make such a distinction. Same with particle/ wave duality, Mother Nature doesn't care whether light is a particle or not, that's our model and if it doesn't work too good it's our fault.

You have the draw the line _somewhere_ though, right? If not biologically, at least linguistically we don't call other birds chickens, and we don't call other animals with shared common ancestors chickens, and I don't think that you can argue that the common ancestors of chickens and, say, primates, can be referred to as both "human" without being prescriptivist to the point that you'd be dictating rules that essentially zero English speakers actually follow.

To be clear, I don't disagree with you that my argument makes little sense biologically; my point is that the question itself is phrased in a way that doesn't really parse correctly in a scientific sense. To me, it reads more like a semantics question (i.e. it depends on your definition of "chicken" and "egg) because the only way to get a scientifically precise answer is to expand the definition of "chicken" beyond recognition.

Yes, we need to draw a line and the question seems flawed. Sure, it makes you think, it is funny, but it contains an invalid assumption that the line's width is a single generation. If we assume that the question is about species, it takes thousands of generations for an offspring not to be able to reproduce with its ancestors.

Ada Lovelace is often credited as the first computer programmer. She died in the late 1800s. Programmable electronic computers didn't come along until the mid 1900s.

Though it obviously depends a bit on what you are willing to count as computer, or as code.

We all know why the Lovelace myth still persists http://projects.exeter.ac.uk/babbage/ada.html "It is often suggested that Ada was the world's first programmer. This is nonsense: Babbage was, if programmer is the right term. After Babbage came a mathematical assistant of his, Babbage's eldest son, Herschel, and possibly Babbage's two younger sons. Ada was probably the fourth, fifth or six person to write the programmes. Moreover all she did was rework some calculations Babbage had carried out years earlier. Ada's calculations were student exercises. Ada Lovelace figures in the history of the Calculating Engines as Babbage's interpretress"

Can't we let women have this one thing? Like... just this one thing? It's fine. Who knows, a lot of time has passed and I'm sure there's many people who "programmed" and never told anyone.

It's fine, let Ada have this. It's dead anyway and we clearly don't have nearly enough women in Computer Science so we can let this one go. We already have 99% of all stuff, we shouldn't get greedy.

that's extremely patronizing to women

Says who? You, all women?

Ada Lovelace is a real person. What's patronizing about it? We didn't make her up out of pity for women.

Instead of patronizingly giving women a false hero, instead introduce them to a real one: Klara Von Neumann (yes, that Von Neumann) who was the first coder for what we might recognize as a digital computer in the modern sense. She had to pioneer a lot of stuff!

It has to be the code, since those are the information/ideas that you've written on any kind of medium such as on a whiteboard or on a paper, or better known as "algorithms".

Also keep in mind with the use of "computer" -- in the past real humans, and in paricular a huge batch, are hired to compute log and sine lookup tables on hand. Earliest case of human SIMD by the way, and some would even take to break encryption by breaking and reversing code boxes, hence they are called "computers", and I reckon many of them being females.

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