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

Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 451 posts

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#171

Post by hateful »

joncrane wrote: post #2

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.

I remember when this happened, when it went "digital" and I know why it takes a second to switch channels, but it ruined the experience for me. While, at the time there was ways to watch video on the computer or from a DVD or VHS, I still liked to "channel surf" every once in a while. But that requires switching channels fast for an random amount of time based upon what was on and how long it took your brain in that moment to absorb it. And sometimes you'd stop and go back. But with digital, most of the time the load time was longer than the time I'd be on that channel in the first place. It'd take minutes to go through 10 channels as opposed to seconds. Channel surfing was its own activity for me back then - and it was ruined.

Nowadays there's youtube - but it's hardly the same thing.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#173

Post by eitland »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #165
hyperdeficit wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hadn't even thought of this specifically, but after it was mentioned in the initial post I realized just how much that is my use case most of the time and how often I am fighting with google maps to accomplish what are relatively simple tasks like adding an additional point along a route. If you are trying to add multiple additional points on a route it gets even worse. This is all much worse on the Android app as…

> This is all much worse on the Android app as well, where it makes the assumption that your use case is to get from where you are right now to somewhere else. That strikes me as a fantastic assumption. I wonder what percentage of routes involve the user’s current location? I bet it’s high!

Yep. But it used to be even better when it made that assumption clear by adding a pre-filled box with your current location.

It just worked for the default case but when you needed something else it was straightforward to do that.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#175

Post by ineedasername »

normalnorm wrote: post #168
sonofaplum wrote: post #20

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…

> popular service 'x' doesn't exactly fit my power user need 'y', therefore x is hopelessly borked, poorly designed, and borderline useless. So you are telling me that wanting to see the name of a given street without having to zoom 10000x (and even then sometimes...) or figuring out how to get the directions to and from somewhere are "power users needs"? Give me a break. Google maps was way easier to user as a map b…

Getting directions is simple. Even the author doesn't take issue with that specific functionality. And I've never had an issue with Google maps hiding street names when there was ample room to show them, but if you're more than a little zoomed out, there isn't that room. Showing only major roads is a decent trade off, as is the mouse scroll wheel for zoom in/out. Or maybe it's my own failure of imagination: how would you improve in this particular area?

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#176

Post by kgoltsov »

sonofaplum wrote: post #20

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…

I like his point about not knowing what to look for. On a paper map, you can see all of the points of interest for a specific location. This is great for planning trips. On google maps, you might not see what's around until you zoom in, but you don't know where to zoom in the first place.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#177

Post by jborichevskiy »

I agree with a lot of this.

Every app wants you to "experience" its data solely in its walled garden with no ability to cross-compare data. Say I want to find a coffee shop on the way to somewhere but also one which appears in a list of great coffee shops on a separate Reddit post I found. Pretty much impossible on mobile, and a major pain on desktop.

At the very least, give me the ability to hide records/items/instances I've already seen as I'm working my way through several searches or lists. Often times searching things on Yelp and Google feels like re-reading the same list, just differently ordered over and over again.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#178

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

regulation_d wrote: post #103

In aggregate, search is orders of magnitude faster because it's so much more accurate. When was the last time you had to think about your search terms? 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 ta…

> When was the last time you had to think about your search terms?

Literally every day because Google has become so ridiculously bad at guessing what I want. I'm trying to tell it what I want, but it keeps throwing out words or adding synonyms or whatever else the fuck it does.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#179

Post by Legogris »

normalnorm wrote: post #168
sonofaplum wrote: post #20

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…

> popular service 'x' doesn't exactly fit my power user need 'y', therefore x is hopelessly borked, poorly designed, and borderline useless. So you are telling me that wanting to see the name of a given street without having to zoom 10000x (and even then sometimes...) or figuring out how to get the directions to and from somewhere are "power users needs"? Give me a break. Google maps was way easier to user as a map b…

Don't get me started on names of bus stops

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#180

Post by Taniwha »

wolfgke wrote: post #13
joncrane wrote: post #2

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…

It's actually worse than that - first you have to tune, then you have to wait for a PAT frame (which has a index of PMTs in it), then you have to wait for a PMT (which contains pointers to the audio, video and ECM streams, and then you have to wait for an ECM (encrypted key for the stream), at that point you have have decrypted video and can start looking for I-frames ....

(smart systems both cache a whole bunch of this stuff and revalidate their caches on the fly while they are tuning - first tunes after boot might be slower as these caches are filled)

Post reply on HN