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Comment by collinmcnulty | Hacker News Reader

Relatedly, I fully expect the software business to fail to learn from (nearly) literally every other industry how to operate when your marginal costs are no longer zero. It drives me nuts the number of people in software who think that people in other industries are slow because they’re just not as smart as us, rather than because when it takes months to get a cast part made, it better be right the first time.

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It's even funnier when you realize that not too long ago a decent chunk of the software industry did have to deal with the realities of having to press CDs, print boxes and ship them to retailers in time for the holiday season. The idea that you can ship a half-baked product directly to your end users, charge for it and promise it will get better over time (but only if you manage to secure enough VC funding in the meantime) is a relatively new invention.

> did have to deal with the realities of having to press CDs, print boxes and ship them to retailers in time

This is because the we have these periodic influxes of scammers into the IT the industry, with their empty promises and trust me bro culture.

I remember working in the games industry in the 90s and early 2000s; getting a game past Sony testing was so fricking difficult, but it was because once that black disc was cut, there was no way to get an update. You had to be on the money, first release.

Yet this is part correct, part wrong. Indeed every industry has some unique challenges that are not directly solvable. However, while a cast is absurdly expensive, the problem is being solved in large part by software in the FDM (3D printing) space and it's changing how things are built.

edit: this doesn't invalidate the OP thesis, which I strongly agree with. Except that it's not just engineers, this is a more general thing across many fields.

Do you work in this field or are you just reading that? I’ve been out of the game for over five years now, but as far as I can tell from people I know still in that world, if you’re going to make more than like … 3 of a part, casting is going to be much cheaper. And while you can do some prototyping on 3d prints, the nature of the material winds up different from a cast part.

I'm not building molds, but I'm actively researching the field in conjunction with my work. Based on what I'm seeing and reading things have changed in the last few years dramatically. Concretely in the selective laser sintering (SLS) Formlabs is redefining small-scale manufacturing. But don't get distracted by the "small-scale". It's a bit like how small servers replaced mainframes. Production lines are getting replaced by much more versatile alternatives.

Formlabs recently launched a $80K industrial-grade machine that works better than it's $500K alternatives.

https://formlabs.com/blog/announcing-fuse-x1-industrial-sls/ https://formlabs.com/blog/diy-injection-molding/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TvjUVdn3YQ&t=2586s

Formlabs is used by Tesla to print car parts to Ukraine to print drones.

The thing about SLS is that it works with metal too. So you have startups like Divergent (recently raised $290M) in LA printing car engines https://www.latimes.com/b2b/space-tech/story/2026-06-23/dive...

Note that rocket engines are 3d printed too from SpaceX to India's Sky Roots https://www.selfcad.com/blog/how-spacex-uses-additive-manufa... https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/skyroots-vikram-1-reache...

So is injection molding more effective than additive manufacturing? This question is a bit like "no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim".

But while you have metal at industrial scale you have "desktop" metal printers for ~$10K https://all3dp.com/4/first-look-at-the-scrap-1-desktop-metal...

You'd need hundreds, if not thousands, of parts to justify a mold for casting. And even then, by the time you got the mold made you could have already printed hundreds of parts on a print farm, so you're losing time too.

That's totally untrue. You clearly do not have any experience designing, building, manufacturing, testing, and certifying either cast metal or PBF parts. BTW, PBF is powerbed fusion and it is how you make 3D printed metal parts. FDM is a plastic manufacturing process and has nothing at all to do with replacing metal castings.

For a certain aircraft part that I designed, that measured approximately 16"x8"x10", if you needed up to 12 of them it was cheapest to 3D print them using powerbed fusion from AlSi10Mg, but with a 25% weight penalty due to the lower mechanical properties of 3D printed aluminum compared to cast. If you needed between 12 and 50 of them, it was cheapest to use 3D printing to make a wax preform then use the preform to make a traditional metal investment casting from A356. For more than 50 of them, it was cheapest to invest in permanent closed die tooling.

Other than for prototyping and extremely low volume production, additive has been a total flop for real-world manufacturing, and has not at all lived up to any of it's lofty promises.

Do you see that changing as parts are designed for additive manufacturing? Things that basically cannot be made another way, but have strength, weight, and even functional benefits over a traditionally made part?

I’m thinking of say cooling channels built into walls of rocket combustion chambers, or car brake/axle assemblies, and some of the „organic“ designs that are lighter and stronger than a cast/machined part.

I wrote FDM instead of additive manufacturing. I'm referring to is actually in SLS (selective laser sintering) space (which is what you refer as PBF?)

What I'm seeing is that companies like Formlabs (plastics) and divergent (metal) are changing the game and you have car parts to car engines to rocket engines being 3d printed.

See my other comment above for more links, but things seem to be changing fast in manufacturing.

Edit:

I think this quote sums the point though:

“With the increased throughput and decreased costs, Fuse X1 has completely changed our perspective on what kinds of projects our lab can support versus what we would have traditionally moved to an injection mold.” Cody Jepsen, Engineering Technician, Additive Manufacturing at Tesla Giga NV

Yes, the future of software as an institution, if there is any, is driven by the loudest voices. Those loudest voices are thus driven by selected personalities as opposed to any accomplishment or title. The people who are the highest achievers are rarely the loudest voices as they tend to be the people spending time solving real problems as opposed to the people who just talk about themselves, the forest for the trees.

As a buddy in construction used to say, concrete erasers are expensive.

Speaking of which, are you done with my cat5-stretcher?

IDK, I think it's been a bit of a (reverse?) bell curve of sorts.

30+ years ago, You had to be a -lot- more careful about how you handled releasing software. Your stuff was in boxes on shelves, most people didn't have internet access to 'download an update' so fixing anything had a long tail support cost (i.e. paying for the media containing the fix and shipping).

But there's a fine line. As an example, If your shop is having a vendor do brand new stuff, -compartmentalized from your other stuff-, using technologies that are actually out of support vs an in-support version is a free/zero effort update versus using the outdated stuff... Something went wrong on the management side.

> Your stuff was in boxes on shelves...

Have you ever heard of an SLA? This "used to be" story about software has never been true. If you can't meet the agreement, then or now, you're done.

Software has always been a lot more diverse than just consumer goods. Why is that your only evidence of how you think software projects are managed?

> Have you ever heard of an SLA? This "used to be" story about software has never been true. If you can't meet the agreement, then or now, you're done.

I will admit, My judgement of 'non-consumer-software' is somewhat based on my corporate experience, where either:

- The contract with the vendor writing/providing software to the company is written so poorly that absolutely counter-intuitive decisions are made to try to steer the ship at the last moment, because the contract was written so bad there is no support

- For SaaS-ish offerings, the company would have some guy in a corner fixing the bugs in the data within the SLA, not necessarily fixing the actual bug causing the problem.

- You're lucky enough to be at a shop where the requirements are handled well enough that, yes, to your point, You have SLAs and things get fixed or there are penalties involved.

I will however stand by my original point; Before the days of the Internet and automatic updates (let alone 'SaaS web apps',) shipping an update could still be very expensive from a cost perspective.

Exactly!

How many updates did one apply to Windows 3.0 and Word in those days??

Sure, there might have been a “hotfix” available for download over a long distance BBS, but virtually nobody would have ever done so (even if they were lucky enough to have a modem). Maybe large companies applied such when impacted.

Even in the Windows XP days, I think windowsupdate.com was still a manually triggered process…

For a while, bundled drivers were a steaming pile of crap in quality and several generations of Windows suffered greatly until Microsoft got vendors in line and updates became common.

Somewhere in my Dad's house, I think I still have the 'free' DOS 6.22 update disks that came if you registered 6.21.

> It drives me nuts the number of people in software who think that people in other industries are slow because they’re just not as smart as us. . .

Ha! I studied computer science and became a programmer because I knew I was too dumb for med. school and the other engineering paths.

Don't discount yourself like that mate. Programming is much harder than the run of the mill medical work or engineering work.

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