It takes a PhD to develop that • Hacker News Board

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#81

Post by zohch » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 8:46 AM UTC

oakfr wrote: post #70

zohch wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It saddens me to see, time and again, the role of leadership painted in such a dire and incorrect way. It saddens me to time and again be stuck with "leaders" who don't know what they are talking about and think they need to weigh in on everything, even though they add negative value when they do so, because they want to justify their mostly pointless job. In a 14 year career, I have had "leadership" that is not co…

Of course we have all met people who were pompous, arrogant and ignorant. But there are some good and outstanding leaders out there. If you never had the chance to meet one (or did not recognize them when they were in front of you), I am sorry for you.

> But there are some good and outstanding leaders out there.

There are, though they are just almost never the people who's job it is to be a leader.

> If you never had the chance to meet one (or did not recognize them when they were in front of you), I am sorry for you.

The worst of the worst are the "outstanding" leaders that just "did not get recognized" as such. Not even the worst part of the worst hell would be good fitting for that group.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#82

Post by simonh » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 8:49 AM UTC

intricatedetail wrote: post #15

It's a shame that engineers commit their time for free for the benefit of multi billion corporation. Why do they do it? These corporations are not your friends.

Maybe because they are working with people, and treat them as people. After all corporations are made up of human beings.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#83

Post by dagw » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 8:50 AM UTC

cryptica wrote: post #11

PhDs often make the worst possible developers. People with PhDs (especially in Mathematics) are often lacking the most critical characteristic of a good developer; they don't know why they do things. Being good at math requires being able to solve problems whose solutions often do not have any practical uses or whose practical uses may not be clear. This is very different from how software problems should be approach…

If you're hiring a PhD Mathematician and expecting them to be great developers, then you're quite frankly doing it wrong. Don't get me wrong there are great developers with a PhD in mathematics, but that's got nothing to with their PhD (in general). You hire a PhD mathematician because you have math problems relative to their expertise that you need solving, and if they're not great programmers you pair them with a great programmer to help implement their solutions.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#84

Post by Hnus » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 8:54 AM UTC

mwcampbell wrote: post #56

tinco wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the experienced developer is Casey Muratori who is somewhat well known for being a very experienced developer. That makes it less likely that he doesn't know what he's talking about and is skipping over hard/slow features.

However, his experience, in games and game development tools AFAIK, might not be fully applicable to the development of mainstream commercial software that has to try to be all things to all people, including considerations like internationalization, accessibility, and backward compatibility. The performance difference that he demonstrated between Windows Terminal and refterm is certainly dramatic, but I wouldn't be…

When I saw this mentioned on HN I immediately knew this kind of comment would be there because something along the lines and I am paraphrasing "its probably fast because its not enterprise enough" was repeated in every place the refterm was shared by different people even multiple times even after showing all the proof in the world that its in fact the opposite they almost refused to believe that software can be that much better than its standard today even to the point of bringing up arguments like 16fps terminal is better than 7500 one because so many fps would probably consume to much resources. Before I found Casey's tone criticizing bad software off putting but now I understand that after many years of such arguments it takes toll on you.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#85

Post by stillblue » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 8:54 AM UTC

csande17 wrote: post #42

choeger wrote: post #10

Counter argument: If the experienced programmers stay where they are, software development will forever remain craftsmanship. A single developer can only tutor so many juniors. In fact, I think that teaching and encouraging to learn is the most important thing in SE. And that has to begin with leadership figures that don't believe their own knowledge gets obsolete after one year just because the latest framework got…

> SE should not be an art form. It should be founded in solid science and abstraction should allow us to keep our knowledge applicable. Software engineering can never be anything but an art form! A lot of fields of endeavor have both mechanical "science-based" components and creative "art form" ones. An inexperienced chef can get some productive cooking done by mechanically following the steps of a recipe someone els…

I think you've got heuristics and art form mixed up

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#86

Post by AndrewThrowaway » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 8:55 AM UTC

meheleventyone wrote: post #77

AndrewThrowaway wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit out of topic but has anybody followed performance issues of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020? For more than half a year it was struggling with performance because it was CPU heavy, only loading one core and etc. Barely ran on my i5 6500. Fast forward half a year, they want to release it on XBox. MS/Asobo moves a lot of computation on GPU, game starts running smoothly on the very same i5 with maximized quality se…

It's pretty straightforward case of prioritization. There are always more things to do on a game project than you have people and time to do. The game runs well enough so the people who could optimize things by rewriting them from CPU to GPU are doing other things instead. Later performance is a noticeable problem to the dev team, from customer feedback and need to ship in more resource constrained environments (VR a…

Makes sense and then it kinda agrees with parent comment that "Microsoft developers simply didn't have performance in the vocabulary".

Yes, there is no doubt that "there are always more things to do on a game project than you have people and time to do". However how there is time to firstly make "main thread on single core" monster and then redo it according to game development 101 - make use of GPU.

It is no joke - GPU was barely loaded, while CPU choking. On a modern game released by top software company proudly presenting their branding in the very title.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#87

Post by ivanhoe » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 8:56 AM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #7

A few hours later another programmer came up with the prototype of a much faster terminal renderer, proving that for an experienced programmer a terminal renderer is a fun weekend project and far away from being a multiyear long research undertaking. I have no idea if this is the case here, and I suspect it might not be, but pretty much every time I've seen a developer complain that something is slow and then 'prove'…

Not necessarily, often times, especially in big corporations programmers will be incentivized to deliver things quickly, rather than to provide the optimal solution. Not because they are bad at programming, but because they have quotas and deadlines to meet. Just remember that story of how in the first Excel version a dev had hard-coded some of the cell dimension calculations as they were under pressure to close as much tasks as fast as possible.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#88

Post by redis_mlc » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 9:00 AM UTC

AndrewThrowaway wrote: post #52

jiggawatts wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This particular case was discussed at length on Reddit and on YC News. The general consensus was that the Microsoft developers simply didn't have performance in the vocabulary, and couldn't fathom it being a solvable problem despite having a trivial scenario on their hands with no complexity to it at all. The "complaining developer" produced a proof of concept in just two weekends that notably had more features[1] an…

A bit out of topic but has anybody followed performance issues of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020? For more than half a year it was struggling with performance because it was CPU heavy, only loading one core and etc. Barely ran on my i5 6500. Fast forward half a year, they want to release it on XBox. MS/Asobo moves a lot of computation on GPU, game starts running smoothly on the very same i5 with maximized quality se…

I followed MSFS performance pretty closely since before FS5.

What's happening is this:

- the FS developers are using the fastest possible machines, beyond what non-overclockers can get

- the developers refused to prioritize the tile stuttering problem evident in all versions. Ignoring that for over 30 years is just plain wilful unless ...

- I'm pretty sure the DoD funded FS (hence the non-consumer license for Pr3pared), and I think there was a requirement for performance as a "consumer game" to not be too perfect, hence the tile stuttering.

This is even more likely since Jane's had full-page ads for military sims using the FS engine back in the day. IOW, FS was too killer for its own good.

(I actually did my Instrument rating practical preparation on FS5, and passed in the first attempt at a Class B airport. I don't think DoD liked where the public FS game was headed, especially FS 2000.)

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#89

Post by joshuamorton » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 9:02 AM UTC

zohch wrote: post #71

joshuamorton wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So have you met any good leaders? Or are you saying that good leaders are nearly impossible to find (and therefore perhaps the job is difficult?)

> So have you met any good leaders? I have met people who lead well, but I have not met anyone who's job it was to be a leader that lead well. > Or are you saying that good leaders are nearly impossible to find (and therefore perhaps the job is difficult?) It's almost impossible to find someone that has a job of being a leader that is good leader. The job being difficult does not explain why the worst possible people…

What is good leadership, in your opinion? What makes someone's job a "leader" job, do you mean management only, or technical leadership roles as well? What is a leaders job?

When you say that "leadership is feckless", do you mean the leaders you've encountered, or that having a role of official leadership or hierarchy is irresponsible or negative?

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#90

Post by meheleventyone » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 9:05 AM UTC

AndrewThrowaway wrote: post #86

meheleventyone wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty straightforward case of prioritization. There are always more things to do on a game project than you have people and time to do. The game runs well enough so the people who could optimize things by rewriting them from CPU to GPU are doing other things instead. Later performance is a noticeable problem to the dev team, from customer feedback and need to ship in more resource constrained environments (VR a…

Makes sense and then it kinda agrees with parent comment that "Microsoft developers simply didn't have performance in the vocabulary". Yes, there is no doubt that "there are always more things to do on a game project than you have people and time to do". However how there is time to firstly make "main thread on single core" monster and then redo it according to game development 101 - make use of GPU. It is no joke -…

It was actually made by a third-party game development studio rather than Microsoft.

Also the assumption that the culture of the Windows Terminal team is the same as the team building a flight simulator is a bit far fetched. Large organisations typically have very specific local cultures.

Rewriting stuff from CPU to GPU also isn't 101 game development. Both because it's actually quite hard and because not all problems are amenable to GPU compute and would actually slow things down.