Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't need wireshark - open dev console and observe that any map operation (drag/zoom/draw and anything else) requires an api request to gmaps. You can contrast that with mapbox which seems to have been designed upfront with offline mode in mind.
Google probably wants the usage data, so they take additional load to handle more requests.
Software Disenchantment (2018)
281–290 of 504 posts
Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)
#282> And then there’s bloat. Web apps could open up to 10 times faster if you just simply blocked all ads. Google begs everyone to stop shooting themselves in the foot with the AMP initiative—a technology solution to a problem that doesn’t need any technology, just a little bit of common sense. If you remove bloat, the web becomes crazy fast. How smart do you have to be to understand that? If you "simply blocked all ads…
> If you "simply blocked all ads" the people making the pages wouldn't have the income which they maintain the pages with. That's how we get deliberately slow pages, articles split over multiple page loads, image slideshows and deliberately slow pages (because time spent on your site is time not spent on the competing websites). On the other hand we have pages like HN, paid for(?) using other means and built to be pe…
Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why were you using EDGE if there’s dense 4G coverage in Rome ?
Replace Rome with the German countryside and you'll still just have EDGE. Sites like Hacker News or https://i.reddit.com are still perfectly usable. In contrast to the 'modern' Reddit UI that that takes a couple of seconds to load even on my home WiFi.
Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except that it also happens with internal software, where there's no separation between developers and end-users. It's second-system effect writ large. "We'll rewrite this old, outdated software and add plenty of bells and whistles! This time will be different, we'll finally be doing it right."
See, to me, internal software may be the one place where "developer time" really is more valuable (depending on the size of the organization), because you're developing for far fewer uses. One second times five million users is almost two months. One second times five thousand users is less than 90 minutes.
There's way more to life than just dollars and cents. Indeed, this really seems to be the larger point here. The bean counters and ladder climbers are now in control of everything, with disastrous consequences.
Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm thinking why not train a LSTM to take in http requests and generate the http response? Why? With responses generated according to what? Are you really just suggesting using neural networks in the compiler's optimiser? > Then try using a smaller network until something like your registration flow, or a simple content management system was just a bunch of floating point numbers in some matrices saved off to disk.…
I'm suggesting that you take an existing system and build up a corpus of request/response pairs. Then you use the LSTM to build a prediction model so that given a request it will tell you that the current production system will produce the following sql statement and this http response. Once the LSTM's output is indistinguishable from your current production system , for all use cases, then you replace the production…
I'm not sure I'd like a http webserver to silently fail, or be undebuggable when it comes to security vulnerabilities when given strange inputs.
Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)
#286Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)
#287Long ago I watched a documentary about the early Apple days, when management was encouraging their developers to reduce boot times by 10 seconds. The argument was that 10 seconds multiplied by the number of boot sequences would result in saving many human lives worth of time. Edit: found a link with the same story: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Saving_Lives.txt The software world needs more of this kind…
I wish more companies thought like this in general. I often think about the nature of the work I'm doing as a developer and wonder if it's making society better off as a whole. The answer is usually a resounding no.
In my country, SW engineer is one of the best careers in terms of income, and I bet it is similar in most of the other countries. Why do we deserve that much buzz/fame/respect/income if the work we are doing is NOT making the society better?
These thoughts just haunt me from time to time.
Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be honest, I have never seen any phone or computer that could boot in about 2 seconds. 6-7 seconds is the absolute minimum I've ever seen, regardless of hardware or OS.
Ever tried installing freeDOS on your computer?
Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)
#289I support the idealism of the article, but this quote is very accurate. Nobody wants to pay for quality software. Not your users, not your stakeholders, not even you!
And that's because the price of quality isn't just a little more expensive. It's not 1$ a year. It's exponentially more expensive. And some of those paid efforts will still end up slow and crappy in outcome, because of something else the article doesn't acknowledge:
Writing fast, efficient, simple, correct, full featured software is really really hard.
So not only is it expensive, it's also just plain difficult. Meaning it's not just about money and resources, but also time, time to experiment and fail.