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I would have really liked to see all these numbers in C, and other languages for that matter. Perhaps add a dropdown box to select the language from a handful of options?
The speed of light is about 300,000 km/s. That translates to roughly 1 ns per foot (yeah, I mix up my units... I'm Canadian...)
THUS, a computer with a clock speed of 2 GHz will be able to execute, on a single core/thread, about 4 (four !) single-clock instructions between the moment photons leave your screen, and the moment they arrive into your eye 2 feet (roughly) later.
_That_ should give you an idea of how fast modern computers really are.
And I _still_ wait quite a bit when starting up Microsoft Word.
Obviously we are talking about real world c compilers with real world optimizations so presumably we'd have to also consider whether the loop is executed at all?
Yes, modern computers are fast. How fast? The speed of light is about 300,000 km/s. That translates to roughly 1 ns per foot (yeah, I mix up my units... I'm Canadian...) THUS, a computer with a clock speed of 2 GHz will be able to execute, on a single core/thread, about 4 (four !) single-clock instructions between the moment photons leave your screen, and the moment they arrive into your eye 2 feet (roughly) later. _…
Pretty cool, but a number of the questions are totally unknowable. For instance the question about web requests to google. Depending on your internet connection you've got more than a order of magnitude difference in the outcome. In the question about SSD performance the only hint we have is that the computer has "an SSD", but a modern PCIe SSD like in the new Macbook pro is over 10 times faster than the SSDs we got…
Still, it was an intriguing idea, even if a lot of the answers were based on things not described. I did learn a few things... I don't do much parsing so I didn't realize how slow JSON was compared to other packaged formats.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The market is wasteful. Lots of things are subpar because of the competition requiring adhoc solutions pushed to market, then becoming standard, so on and so forth. You can blame the game or not. At least if there was some acknowledgement of that process and a little cleanup time to spread good ideas and good fix ... Personally I always feel weird booting up old boxes (say old = Pentium 2) and realizing how much the…
An eye-opening experience is running an IDE like Visual Studio 6 or a really old version of Photoshop on a modern machine. It starts instantly, compile times are a fraction of what we're used to. The interface is totally responsive. It's remarkable how much better software feels when everything is instant.
Alternatively, this could be titled "do you know how much your computer could do in a second but isn't because of bad design choices, overengineered bloated systems, and dogmatic adherence to the 'premature optimisation' myth?" Computers are fast, but not if all that speed is wasted. A recent related article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13940014
The market is wasteful. Lots of things are subpar because of the competition requiring adhoc solutions pushed to market, then becoming standard, so on and so forth. You can blame the game or not. At least if there was some acknowledgement of that process and a little cleanup time to spread good ideas and good fix ... Personally I always feel weird booting up old boxes (say old = Pentium 2) and realizing how much the…
Edit: If that seems like a non-sequitur, I said it because the parent comment started by saying that the market is wasteful.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
An eye-opening experience is running an IDE like Visual Studio 6 or a really old version of Photoshop on a modern machine. It starts instantly, compile times are a fraction of what we're used to. The interface is totally responsive. It's remarkable how much better software feels when everything is instant.
Developer tools like Visual Studio are somewhat ironic in that the developers who create inefficient software are essentially seeing this reflected indirectly in their tools also becoming inefficient. A perverse version of "do unto others as you would have them do unto you"?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The market is wasteful. Lots of things are subpar because of the competition requiring adhoc solutions pushed to market, then becoming standard, so on and so forth. You can blame the game or not. At least if there was some acknowledgement of that process and a little cleanup time to spread good ideas and good fix ... Personally I always feel weird booting up old boxes (say old = Pentium 2) and realizing how much the…
An eye-opening experience is running an IDE like Visual Studio 6 or a really old version of Photoshop on a modern machine. It starts instantly, compile times are a fraction of what we're used to. The interface is totally responsive. It's remarkable how much better software feels when everything is instant.
If you gave that to a Product Manager candidate (as part of an interview) and pretended it's your current product (assume they didn't know it already), asked them to play around with it for ten minutes and as their task come up with some thoughts regarding what they would add or improve, their eyes would pop open and they would say, "WOWWW!! THIS LOOKS LIKE IT ISN'T DOING ANYTHING -- THERE IS A LOT OF ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT HERE."
And in just fifteen minutes, they would gleefully tell you exactly how they would break it. (By adding crap to make it slow.)
(Note: this could be run as a real experiment, but the results above are my personal prediction - maybe it wouldn't happen as I predict.)
I really do think product managers are the people to blame here. To them, fast = broken or not doing anything. It's not done (to them) until it's (to us) broken.