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Comment by northwest65 | Hacker News Reader

I think it's because CPUs don't run faster just because they're colder, they run faster when you overclock them. Often to get them stable at higher clock speeds you need more voltage, which at some point demands more cooling to mitigate that.

AFAICT doing interesting but ultimately trivially complicated stuff as a youngster can still result in scholarships etc, Ahmed Mohamed comes to mind.

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Perhaps that generation of cpus was very insufficiently cooled? This is before people even really put much of a heat sink on a cpu. The code did run faster with ice water, and faster again with liquid nitrogen. It was a high school, county-level science fair. I don’t know how things stand today, but at the time “will a computer run faster with better cooling?” was a perfectly acceptable level of scientific inquiry for a 14 year old.

I’m truly sorry if my childhood anecdote has inadvertently spread misinformation on this topic :)

> Perhaps that generation of cpus was very insufficiently cooled? This is before people even really put much of a heat sink on a cpu.

The 286 came out in 1982 but it wasn't until ~2000 (with the release of the Pentium 4) that thermal throttling was introduced.

From ~1995-2000 if the CPU got over temperature, your PC just turned off immediately. And prior to ~1995 if you ran a CPU without a heatsink it could overheat and destroy itself. We just had to be careful not to do that :)

Alternative theory: you also ended up cooling the crystal oscillator, which subtly influenced clock speed.

At any rate, sounds like a really fun high school project!

People get upset when their understanding of the world conflicts with evidence, especially the scientifically minded.

I mean, this tends to be true, but what evidence are you referring to?

The evidence relayed by the person I replied to, that as the chip was cooled the performance increased.

the singular form of evidence is not anecdote. I think it's an interesting conundrum myself. as others have pointed out, the story as it was told is not consistent with the physics and current knowledge of what things were like in those days: CPUs did not yet do thermal throttling and simply cooling a CPU from that time doesn't make it go faster.

somebody else mentioned the possibility that the cooling did something to the crystal oscillator, but I think there are another two explanations that either alone or in combination might explain what happened: unreliable narrator (OP was very young when the memory was formed) and external influence - his dad or teacher might have done the overclocking which might have been beyond his understanding and therefore notice at the time.

either way there's no reason to take anecdotes uncritically.

> the singular form of evidence is not anecdote

It is in Bayesian reasoning.

that's right, and you don't just update your posterior to match the one dodgy data point at the expense of decades of evidence.

That’s right. Did somebody investigate the same thing and had different results? Because in this thread there are only theoretical explanations why it cannot be, and not experiments. So in short, there is only one data point.

What conclusions do you believe it is reasonable to draw in light of this? Is your position significantly different from what I said:

> either way there's no reason to take anecdotes uncritically.

> Because in this thread there are only theoretical explanations why it cannot be

No, the explanations are referring to the mountain of evidence based on the physics of the chips and the known characteristics of the chips of the time. That's not theoretical, that past observations.

Show me those observations. Without that your word is just another anecdote.

what would you accept as evidence? does it need to be certified by a notary public?

You know well that a single study about the temperature response of the given CPU is enough.

Those CPUs can fly. Now you have to show me a single study about the flight response of the given CPU.

The logic which you apply here caused several decades and centuries of scientific delays for no good reason.

that's right, we should have been throwing CPUs off a cliff several decades and centuries ago.

Trolling on HN might be one of the stupidest things I've witnessed in a while.

Alright, that's an interestingly chill take on 'evidence'.

Never has someone described my personal epistemology so succinctly!

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