101–110 of 451 posts
After reading this headline I felt like I was having Deja Vu. I wasn't, it was posted 11 hours ago [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21831931 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15643663 (posted two years ago)
Partly, this was due to the fact the IBM PC did not have SIMD operations in 1983, but the rest is because modern compilers run complex optimization passes in tiny fractions of a second.
Also, I'd like to see this person say that operations on computers were perceptually instant while logged into a PDP-11/70 or (let's be a tad generous) a VAX-11/780 with a half-dozen other people all trying to use it at the same time. Yes, faster computers existed in 1983. Didn't mean the likes of you got to use them.
The other day I was thinking about the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, but I couldn't remember the name of it. So I googled "when you suddenly notice something everywhere" and Baader-Meinhof was first result. Go back to 1983 (maybe even 2003) and let me know how long it takes to structure your search terms so you get the right answer.
Kind of related: does anyone else notice how long it takes to change channels on the TV these days? It used to be instantaneous when cable first came out and at some point it became this laggy experience where you'll press buttons on the remote and the channel takes forever to change. I hate it and it's one of the reasons I don't have cable any more.
My favorite "the world is terrible" curmudgeon observation is how awful hotel TVs (and hotel TV remotes) are. Every single hotel room TV I've had the displeasure of using in the last N years takes more than 20 seconds to turn on after multiple button-presses, starts out on a terrible in-house channel at high volume regardless of the last-watched channel+volume, takes multiple seconds to change channels, and has no re…
Or just let me use an HDMI port.
I don't watch channels anymore, and I don't want to pay for your pay-per-view content.
One that got worse and then better again at least in my experience is boot up time. Old computers running MS-DOS I remember booting up very quickly (unless you waited for the full memory self test), then for quite a long time it took forever to get into Windows no matter what you did to try to speed it up. More recently things start up pretty quickly again; I think it's mainly hardware (solid-state disks being the ma…
>but I do think Windows seems to do a little better software-wise too Windows 10 does a little trick to speed up boot - when you perform a shutdown, Windows 10 saves a mini-hibernation image to the hibernation file. When you perform normal boot, it can start up quite fast[1]. This gives noticeably shorter boot time especially on spinning rust drives (i know, i know, $CURRENT_YEAR). However if you perform a "reboot" i…
There are some good points here, but of course I am going to ignore those to talk instead about the stuff I disagree with! The section about google maps follows a form of criticism that is widespread and particularly annoys me, namely => popular service 'x' doesn't exactly fit my power user need 'y', therefore x is hopelessly borked, poorly designed, and borderline useless. There is always room for improvement, but a…
They keep changing the interface faster than I can learn it.
The way to enable complex expression of tasks in a user interface is by composition. ie have microtasks that you can then combine in different ways.
That's what makes excel great - each cell is a single function but you can combine them to build stuff the developer never knew was possible.
Being able to store state ( a location ) and then operate on that state is a pretty basic building block of a composable map UI.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
joncrane was complaining about the time to change channels. This approach does nothing to decrease this time.
Exactly. It does placate users with some indication of activity. This can impact how someone feels about the change, but does nothing to solve the time to change problem. One thing it does do is confirm the change is in progress. That is a subset of the time to change problem. Many current UX on this do not give a very good, or any indicator of successful input. Quite a few people may see their feelings about the tim…
A black screen is also a sign that a change is in progress. But this is exactly what my parent fortran77 complained about (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21835676).
Kind of related: does anyone else notice how long it takes to change channels on the TV these days? It used to be instantaneous when cable first came out and at some point it became this laggy experience where you'll press buttons on the remote and the channel takes forever to change. I hate it and it's one of the reasons I don't have cable any more.
The central reason is that modern video codecs use I-frames and P-frames (sometimes also B-frames; even though as far as I am aware, these are not used for TV broadcasts); see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Video_compression... I-frames are only sent, say, once or twice a second. When a channel is switched, the TV has to wait for the next I-frame, since P-frames (and B-frames) only encode the difference t…
Kind of related: does anyone else notice how long it takes to change channels on the TV these days? It used to be instantaneous when cable first came out and at some point it became this laggy experience where you'll press buttons on the remote and the channel takes forever to change. I hate it and it's one of the reasons I don't have cable any more.
When working on digital settop boxes a decade or 2 ago, channel change latency was one of the toughest problems. Eventually we (collectively, the whole industry) gave up and settled for 1 second as acceptable. Channel surfing quietly went away. When your i-frame only comes so often, there's not a whole lot you can do. Nowadays, that problem is solved by reducing actual live content to a strict minimum; everything els…
The cheapest would be to just use a constant neutral-grey i-frame whenever the channel flips, and update that until a real i-frame comes along, while playing the channel audio immediately. Ugly video for a second, but high-action scenes fill in faster. I'd bet that most people could identify an already-watched movie or series before an i-frame comes in, at least 80% of the time.
More expensive would be to cache incoming i-frames of channels adjacent to the viewed channel, and use the cached image instead of the grey frame. Looks like a digital channel dropping update frames during a thunderstorm for a second.
Prohibitively expensive (back then) would be to use multiple tuners that tune in to channels adjacent to the viewed channel, and then swap the active video and audio when the channel up or channel down buttons are pressed. Drop the channels that just exited the surfing window, and tune in to the ones that just entered it. Surfing speed limited by number of tuners.
Televisions still don't do this, even after more than a decade of digital broadcast, and multiple-tuner, multiple-output DVR boxes.
Has anyone ever also noticed how cars are always heavier than the bikes we used when we were children. And how much more air you need and how much longer it takes to fill a car tire with a hand pump. Also, remember when none of us was a portuguese author and we used paragraphs rationally and wrote things down without splitting them into 200 letter long strings because we used mediums made for rants and did not need a…
Your comment is ad-hominem (dismissive) and does not contribute to the conversation. You can dislike with the style/syntax of the article but the point it's making isn't "things change" it's that "things change for the worse" complete with several examples which other commenters here either support or disagree with, but helpful comments mention central points in the article in good-faith conversation.