Hacker News

points by realo 1 day ago | 0 comments

Faster than Shenzen, fine ... but quite a bit more expensive, even taking into account the USA tariffs, which we do not have in the rest of the world.

Seems to me that Shenzen still wins at least for the non-USA world.

[–] 1970-01-01 1 day ago

Costs come down at scale. Vote with your wallet, tell your friends, and we just might have our faster+better+cheaper problem solved.

[–] dolkycape 1 day ago

I don't see why non-US companies should "vote with their wallet" by over-spending so that they can have a US supply chain instead of a Chinese supply chain. They're both foreign, outside their control and vulnerable to political stunts.

[–] bluGill 1 day ago

> vulnerable to political stunts.

They are different political stunts though. If your supply chain is vulnerable to politics then you want options so that any one stunt cannot hurt you.

Also, while there are political stunts, my current reading is the US stunts are more temporary and the next president won't continue them. While China's are likely longer term - there is a reasonably possibly China will attack Taiwan and Europe will join with the US and defending. Only time will tell, but that is my read on the situation.

[–] realo 1 day ago

China has not threatened to invade Canada yet.

[–] 1970-01-01 1 day ago

They're literally probing Canadian defenses.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/vancouver/article/canadian-military-e...

[–] gpm 1 day ago

While it seems likely... that article actually discusses them probing American waters and air space (edit: actually international air space closest to America), and not Canadian...

[–] ixtli 1 day ago

“The next president won’t continue this” is what I’ve been hearing since the 90s.

[–] dukeyukey 1 day ago

Trump was elected twice. This time, his vice-president is absolutely someone who would continue the same policies, albeit in a more sober way.

I am not sure you understand the damage this administration has done.

[–] ixtli 1 day ago

Or, frankly, the way in which the rotation between the Democrats and the republicans works and is critical to the overall direction the US is heading and has been heading since the 80s.

[–] mrandish 1 day ago

Indeed, the current White House occupant is much louder and more annoyingly abrasive with some bizarre one-off impulses vs the usual occupants, but it's now clear that over the last ~30 years, career politicians, corporate vested interests, lobbyists and the administrative state have increasingly subverted the two-party duopoly into pure political theater.

It's a little sad that Trump is such a divisive train-wreck spectacle that many haven't noticed that Clinton, Obama and Biden were achieving many of the same outcomes as Bush/Trump, just more smoothly and with more appealing rationalizations.

The best thing about Trump is that he's such an obvious self-interested kleptocrat and he doesn't even care to hide it (in fact, he seems to enjoy flaunting it). But is it really that much better to be sold out by a more likeable persona who seems like part of our tribe and has the skills to mask the long con more deftly? I guess maybe at least then we won't notice as much or feel as bad about the same outcome?

[–] sagarm 10 hours ago

All that rambling to say what, exactly? What vague "outcomes" have "both sides" been trying to achieve?

[–] leptons 1 day ago

"both sides" are not even close to being the same.

[–] mschuster91 1 day ago

I think their point is that non-US regions should set up their own non-China supply chain.

And here in Europe we're busy divesting from both. The priority for now is getting rid of the US simply because of the erratic President but if you read between the lines, a lot of the plans also aim for getting rid of the dependence on China.

[–] seddona 1 day ago

Yeah Europe needs this capability too, we have offices in Europe so you can probably guess where this is going :-)

[–] utopiah 13 hours ago

Hi, when will you take orders from EU to EU and what's the smallest batch size? Single prototype board or more?

[–] lenerdenator 1 day ago

This is HN. Asking people here to consider any long-term geopolitical ramifications associated with their economic activity is futile.

[–] InsidiousWombat 1 day ago

Well the people chose the clown that doesn't either so live with it

[–] lenerdenator 1 day ago

Plenty of those people around here.

[–] NovemberPapa 1 day ago

I ordered 2 power supplies from China for work, and they power supplies were $60/each, and the tariffs were $45/ea. I am all for manufacturing in the US, but holy hell, give industry time to develop the skills and infrastructure

[–] tbrownaw 1 day ago

For now.

I'd imagine that just because they've decided it's good enough to go public with it, doesn't mean it's done getting better. Or that someone else can't do it better, now that it's been shown to work.

[–] brudgers 1 day ago

The first Circuit Hub link posted to HN was in 2013.

[–] dv_dt 1 day ago

I could be misremembering, but wasn't it mostly a software offering at that point?

[–] brudgers 1 day ago

From TFA

It's not a prototype. The Grid has been running for customers for five years. It already builds tens of millions of dollars of electronics a year. Across CircuitHub we've shipped more than 2.2 million boards, placed more than 150 million parts and served more than 26,000 engineers.

[–] sgt 1 day ago

But for prototyping, paying extra for quick turnaround is often very sensible

[–] bluGill 1 day ago

I'm surprised they don't offer next day turn around (whenever fedex's last pickup plus however long to build). Even same day if you live close to their factory.

Meanwhile as a hobbyist I'd be glad for the discount "we will get around to it sometime in the next two weeks discount"

[–] crote 1 day ago

Because the US doesn't have the supply lines for that. You simply can't compete with a Shenzhen where there are a dozen PCB factories and a warehouse for virtually every part you can imagine within a 30-minute drive.

In Shenzhen you can have Some Guy in a truck doing a parts pickup round around town a couple of times a day. In the US you're waiting for overnight Fedex from Digikey. And sure, there's a lot you can stock in advance, but virtually every board will have this one weird part you don't stock yet.

[–] sgt 17 hours ago

Can't you just design better PCB's without weird parts that are likely to be out of stock? Adds to resilience.

[–] brudgers 1 day ago

Right.

Plus if you can get someone on the phone there can be value in that.

And if a sales engineer comes out and sees your operation you might get more than a free lunch…