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johapers's comments

johapers | 9 years ago | on: Ask HN: Working in Sweden?

Native Swede here.

Stockholm is quite dynamic in terms of its start up culture. There are a number of ways to network within the industry, most prevalent way to do so is Sthlm Tech Meetup.

Salaries are relatively low for engineering jobs (compared to ex Germany), but should be ok in the software space. Ok in this case would be ~4000-4500k€/month for a relatively experienced software engineer. Do note that tax levels are rather high once you reach higher levels of income (50%-55% marginal tax rate). The tax is a pain until you have kids and you pay almost nothing for daycare and schools.

The main thing to be aware of is that the housing market in Stockholm is completely crazy. It is very difficult to find somewhere to live. If you manage to get relocation support this should not become an issue for a while. Be ready to pay ridiculous money for second hand rentals (compared to salary)

johapers | 12 years ago | on: Particle accelerators: Small really is beautiful

I don't believe that this is a major problem for the technology. I can imagine that the level of flux (amount of electrons coming through the device and being accelerated) is rather low at the moment however.

johapers | 14 years ago | on: Magnetic recording breakthrough reported

The readout will still be carried out by a magnetoresistive sensor, so that is not directly affected. With a smaller bit size it might be necessary to further develop the read head, but the road map for that is quite well understood at the moment.

johapers | 14 years ago | on: IBM creates 9nm carbon nanotube transistor that outperforms silicon

I apologize if this is a bit long:

The answer can be found in the supplementary information to the article here: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/suppl/10.1021/nl203701g/suppl_file/n...

In short, they grew the nanotubes on a quarts crystal, transferred them with tape quite randomly to gates already made on a Si-wafer and then etched and metalized around these gates. They then tested a large amount of devices to find ones where a nanotube of the right kind (semiconducting) had placed itself in a correct alignment with the gate and metalized contacts (source and drain). Once they knew what devices were working they imaged some of the working devices with an Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) and did a bunch of standard transistor measurements.

As was commented earlier, the specific growth of nanotubes in a well defined position is not easily achieved. There is IMO a long time until anyone can do a full chip where nanotubes grow exactly where one wants the transistors. It might even be that graphene is a more convenient technology for just this reason (since graphene can be grown somewhat more conveniently by annealing SiC wafers). A side note I guess is that growing nanotubes and pillars vertically can be done in specific spots on a wafer, but that makes manufacturing of the gate a bit problematic. And I do not know wheter carbon nanotubes can be grown selectively this way.

johapers | 14 years ago | on: The future of work: What happens when talent trumps capital?

I think it is an interesting scenario, but I don't think that every competent software engineer will want to start their own business, even if the capital cost is zero. I believe that even most of the competent people in the world likes a safe employment where they are challenged. So maybe there is a middle ground somewhere.

johapers | 15 years ago | on: The Moore's Law of solar energy

Moores law also states that the development cost for the next generation of smaller devices will follow the same exponential curve. My guess would be that the solar market will have one or a few huge players only. The solar tech scene is still quite diverse though and it is hard to say if any single technology will "win", so in that sense maybe not. End ramble.
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