Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How much your computer can do in a second

computers-are-fast.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 244 posts

Re: How much your computer can do in a second

#81

Post by Athas »

matt4077 wrote: post #78
Athas wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Computers are fast, but not if all that speed is wasted. While computers are fast, the performance improvements have been spread very unevenly. CPUs have improved the most, with memory lagging significantly behind, and persistent storage even more distant. On the other hand, networks have become much faster than before. I like this list of Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know: https://gist.github.com/jboner…

Is that still true? I would think that the rise of SSD means persistent storage has improved much more CPU, at least in the last decade or so.

Not really, it's just another example of uneven performance improvements. Peak CPU performance has increased massively, but achieving it requires the use of vector instructions (and multiple cores). It is true that the speed of persistent storage has increased faster than sequential CPU performance (but it's still quite far off).

Re: How much your computer can do in a second

#82

Post by nashashmi »

sametmax wrote: post #66
userbinator wrote: post #13

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

It's wasted only if it's not traded for something else. But it is. A lot of system would simply not exist if we would have waited for people doing it properly because there is a limited pool of very skilled experts and the demand for IT far exceed our ability to supply. Plus writing good code takes a lot of time and resources, but our society changes now so fast that it very well maybe rewritten next year. Hence, we…

So by making a complex task much much easier, we have traded efficiency for larger numbers of wasteful systems.

The Crux of industrialization?

The future of mankind? Make task easy. Get more people to do task.

Re: How much your computer can do in a second

#83

Post by sametmax »

aschampion wrote: post #79
sametmax wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's wasted only if it's not traded for something else. But it is. A lot of system would simply not exist if we would have waited for people doing it properly because there is a limited pool of very skilled experts and the demand for IT far exceed our ability to supply. Plus writing good code takes a lot of time and resources, but our society changes now so fast that it very well maybe rewritten next year. Hence, we…

> Because until now making a beautiful, powerful and modern app with a portable GUI was something only a few people would be able to do. Except it's none of these things: electron apps suffer the same presentation-before-content problems as most of the web, they inherit all of the state bugs of web apps, and they're painfully slow despite usually just being menus of nested lists and text boxes. It's passing a burden…

Let's be clear, I dislike slow apps, I think current behemoth web pages size is a monstrosity and every time I start an electron app (minus the excellent vscode), I scream in my head.

Yet.

Most electron app I tried have a ratio result/effort far better than any other solutions for the dev.

Re: How much your computer can do in a second

#85

Post by [deleted] »

userbinator wrote: post #36
mwcampbell wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is there any way to stop this treadmill, short of overthrowing capitalism itself? Edit: If that seems like a non-sequitur, I said it because the parent comment started by saying that the market is wasteful.

I don't think capitalism is to blame, as this is endemic even in free software. The way to stop this is to stop repeating dogmatic myths about optimisation, consider efficiency/optimisation as an integrated part of the design process and not something to be applied afterwards, and focus on " user time is expensive" instead of "developer time is expensive" --- and sometimes, those users may also be developers.

[deleted]

Re: How much your computer can do in a second

#87

Post by narag »

realo wrote: post #22

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. _…

This is the coolest fact, how incredibly fast they can react.

Re: How much your computer can do in a second

#88

Post by gizmo »

logicallee wrote: post #53
gizmo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When software is too slow it hurts sales. When software lacks features that hurts sales too. Faster doesn't make for compelling marketing (anybody can claim their software is fast) but you can get people to upgrade for new features. So features are added with every release and performance improvements are made up so to the point where it's "good enough" again. You don't need a product manager conspiracy to explain wh…

Okay, so let's update the experiment protocol. So the hypothesis is that if it's too fast it's not considered done by a product manager. So as an updated test protocol, let us repeat with two groups of Product Managers, and this time they must evaluate the software, which they have never used before. Some candidates get the older version on the metal, and others get the older version slowed down 10x for example by ru…

If slowness is the goal and if product managers insist on slowness, then you'd expect a lot of sleep() calls in commercial software (which has product managers) and no sleep() calls in open source software. This doesn't happen.

What we see is that commercial software has better documentation, gets more long term maintenance and support, and supports more cumbersome enterprise features. Exactly what you'd expect when you have salespeople and product managers who talk to customers.

Your hypothesis is falsifiable, which is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for it to be scientific. For it to be scientific you would also have to provide evidence that your hypothesis is more plausible than the alternatives, before you do any experiments. After all, it's easy to come up with thousands of silly hypothesis, and by happenstance some of them will get a positive correlation when tested. So every hypothesis has to undergo serious scrutiny.

Re: How much your computer can do in a second

#89

Post by zeta0134 »

sametmax wrote: post #83
aschampion wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because until now making a beautiful, powerful and modern app with a portable GUI was something only a few people would be able to do. Except it's none of these things: electron apps suffer the same presentation-before-content problems as most of the web, they inherit all of the state bugs of web apps, and they're painfully slow despite usually just being menus of nested lists and text boxes. It's passing a burden…

Let's be clear, I dislike slow apps, I think current behemoth web pages size is a monstrosity and every time I start an electron app (minus the excellent vscode), I scream in my head. Yet. Most electron app I tried have a ratio result/effort far better than any other solutions for the dev.

This cannot be understated. It really can't. The programmer in me will always be drawn to small, lightweight code that gets the job done while using minimal resources. But that programmer is an algorithmic designer, which doesn't often need to deal with the realities of UI, graphics card drivers, or cross-platform compatability.

Electron is popular precisely because it enables developers of nearly any skill level to solve real world problems without investing the additional time to become a systems engineer. And the truth of the matter is that there are many more real world problems that need solving. Computers are cheap, humans are expensive.

When performance matters, by all means, hire the expensive programmers and code it from scratch. Do it "right." But doing it at all is often the only thing that needs doing, and for those problems, Electron is often, begrudgingly, the best choice.

Re: How much your computer can do in a second

#90

Post by ori_b »

sametmax wrote: post #66
userbinator wrote: post #13

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

It's wasted only if it's not traded for something else. But it is. A lot of system would simply not exist if we would have waited for people doing it properly because there is a limited pool of very skilled experts and the demand for IT far exceed our ability to supply. Plus writing good code takes a lot of time and resources, but our society changes now so fast that it very well maybe rewritten next year. Hence, we…

I mostly do back end code. But when I look at electron and compare it to something like QT Quick, QT Quick looks much more pleasant and easy to use to me.
Post reply on HN