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

The State of the Art is Terrible

zackarymorris.tumblr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 242 posts

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#181

Post by 0x12 »

keeperofdakeys wrote: post #126
megablast wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are kidding, right? Cars have hardly changed at all, still the same petrol powered devices with are a hard shell. Sure the car companies were forced to add in some extra safety mechanisms, but this does not mean much.

How often do cars break down now compared to 30, 50 or 80 years ago? I am pretty sure most of the early drivers were quite good mechanics, these days? Not so much. I'm sure Mr. Ford would find modern cars very foreign. A chair, clothing and even houses haven't changed much over the years either. Most designs only change bits at a time, slowly morphing into unrecognisable things.

True, but a minor head overhaul would have been about 1/2 an hour with 'roadside tools' (say to replace a valve spring) possibly during your trip to grandma.

Today that same repair would be a couple of days in the shop, requiring tens of thousands of dollars of specialty tools. Of course those springs don't fail as often as they did back then (a combination of improved materials science and engineering) but when they do the fix is out of reach, even for a trained mechanic without access to a shop with all the required specialty tools.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#182

Post by DanielBMarkham »

JoachimSchipper wrote: post #154
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Youngster? Gee, thanks! I remember writing my first program on a Commodore Pet with 4K of RAM. Used peek and poke statements to draw the game field on the screen and loaded and saved the whole thing on a cassette tape. The problem here is that you can argue this either way, so let me clarify. When we do systems analysis, we first focus on "happy path" scenarios. You want something, there's no exceptions, you push a b…

(Off-topic, but if you want to rejuvenate the F#-as-node.js thing, look into FastCGI. It's still a bag of hurt, though - notably, mod_fcgi feels proof-of-concept-y and will not multiplex requests over a single connection. Other HTTP servers apparently do better.)

I got as far as mod_fcgi, but I couldn't figure out how to write a mono program to integrate with it. Found some nice C examples, but nothing for mono. I still think it would be a hell of a great side project -- lots of power and expressiveness in F# that JS doesn't have.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#183

Post by brain5ide »

Kudos for a beautiful rant, I really liked it an resonated. But after it and all of the comments in here I remembered Jobs' saying: "Computers are bicycles for mind". Which means you need to pedal it to get somewhere. As much as programmers would like automation and being lazy, It's still about pedaling.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#185

Post by stonemetal »

singular wrote: post #11

Though I speak from a probably utterly uninformed + unqualified standpoint, this raises a few points for me:- 1. If x86 hardware is so terrible (and I have heard that the architecture really is bad many times), how come we don't have competing chips out there which are many, many times more efficient? I know ARM outperforms on the low-power front, but not in terms of perf to my knowledge. Do such chips exist? And if…

1 it is lie that people like to wank on about. The inefficient x86 portion of a CPU they talk about is less than 1% of the transistors in a modern processor. The first thing an intel processor does when it receives an x86 Opcode is translate it into a more efficient internal Opcode that it actually executes. In fact it could be claimed this has helped to improve efficiency because front side bus bandwidth is at a premium and Opcodes that convey more information help conserve FSB bandwidth. Basically if it wasn't a processor designer who told you that I would take it with a grain of salt because people(including myself) like to pontificate on topics which are adjacent to their domains of knowledge, but which they know little.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#186

Post by oldcigarette »

0x12 wrote: post #181
keeperofdakeys wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How often do cars break down now compared to 30, 50 or 80 years ago? I am pretty sure most of the early drivers were quite good mechanics, these days? Not so much. I'm sure Mr. Ford would find modern cars very foreign. A chair, clothing and even houses haven't changed much over the years either. Most designs only change bits at a time, slowly morphing into unrecognisable things.

True, but a minor head overhaul would have been about 1/2 an hour with 'roadside tools' (say to replace a valve spring) possibly during your trip to grandma. Today that same repair would be a couple of days in the shop, requiring tens of thousands of dollars of specialty tools. Of course those springs don't fail as often as they did back then (a combination of improved materials science and engineering) but when they…

I don't think anybody carries a valve spring compressor in their toolbox. Plus you'd run the risk of dropping the valve unless you was really careful and good luck getting the keepers back in on the side of the road without a way to hold the valve up. Even then who has the parts with them to make this a 1/2 hour job? Cars are just as hard/easy to fix now as back then. Fuel injection is arguably easier to troubleshoot then a carb given the computers help.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#187

Post by 0x12 »

oldcigarette wrote: post #186
0x12 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but a minor head overhaul would have been about 1/2 an hour with 'roadside tools' (say to replace a valve spring) possibly during your trip to grandma. Today that same repair would be a couple of days in the shop, requiring tens of thousands of dollars of specialty tools. Of course those springs don't fail as often as they did back then (a combination of improved materials science and engineering) but when they…

I don't think anybody carries a valve spring compressor in their toolbox. Plus you'd run the risk of dropping the valve unless you was really careful and good luck getting the keepers back in on the side of the road without a way to hold the valve up. Even then who has the parts with them to make this a 1/2 hour job? Cars are just as hard/easy to fix now as back then. Fuel injection is arguably easier to troubleshoot…

This used to be s.o.p. in the early 20's.

Have a read:

http://www.motorera.com/history/hist03.htm

The good old days of grease and spittle and they didn't even have duct tape yet!

That link is about replacing the entire valve (valves were a wear part, much like tires today, only with much shorter service life).

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#188

Post by michaelochurch »

alnayyir wrote: post #99
michaelochurch wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything below the top, say, 2-5% of software is guaranteed to be shit because all the programmers below the top 2-5% are shit. There is no grand movement or methodology to be had here. It's a people problem. Disagree. I don't think 95-98% of programmers are idiots. However, a lot of programmers (even some very smart ones) are terrible architects and have no sense of the big picture. Moreover, a lot of projects start…

>Disagree. I don't think 95-98% of programmers are idiots. I didn't say that. > It takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become good at something, People need to stop re-hashing this. 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is likely but not necessarily going to make you an excellent programmer. I know plenty of programmers in their 40s and older who have that much time in or more that are frankly, garbage. Invest…

People need to stop re-hashing this. 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is likely but not necessarily going to make you an excellent programmer. I know plenty of programmers in their 40s and older who have that much time in or more that are frankly, garbage.

Sure. And I could spend 10,000 hours playing basketball and I'd never become good at it. I don't have the genes. The point about "10,000 hours" is not that anyone can become good. It's that this is the amount of time that it takes for a person with sufficient talent (which is uncommon but not outstandingly rare, as it might seem) to become great at something.

Also, 10,000 hours of inadequate or badly-structured practice is useless. Otherwise, five years of work would be enough, and for most people, it's not. Most of the things that software developers do for money don't make them better programmers and therefore don't count.

It's hit or miss. In my experience, passion counts more than anything.

I agree. Passion, creativity, and courage are all important. It takes all three to figure out how to divert 10,000 hours away from what you're "supposed to do" and toward what will actually teach you something.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#189

Post by sesqu »

kvnn wrote: post #63
mhewett wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, you youngsters. Trust me, it is FAR easier now to get started than any time in computing history. Before GitHub, you installed SVN or CVS on your own. Before that you accidentally overwrote your software once a month. Before Cloudant you installed MySQL on your own. Before that you wrote your own storage system. Before Amazon you bought a server and installed Linux on it. Before that you wrote customer databases…

"Go do great things". I'm with you. Go build a new computer architecture, Zachary Morris. It seems you have the knowledge and the support. Put it on kickstarter and I'll give you money. Godspeed.

A new architecture isn't going to happen until it has to, which fortunately may be soon. The best opportunity for that is if and when we start building parallel microprocessors based on one of the newer transistor replacements, but engineers need to agree that compatibility with x86 isn't important, first.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#190

Post by bsaunder »

brain5ide wrote: post #173
noonespecial wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember when it was, when it seemed like most things just worked, even though they didn't look pretty. I remember spending hours moving around jumpers to set DMA and IRQ. Only to find out that the only free IRQ was #9 and bloody Packard Bells sometimes didn't have a frikkin' 9 because that batch of boards was $2 cheaper that month... I remember when it wasn't pretty and it took ridiculous efforts to make it work e…

Hardware improved. I believe the guy's talking about software.

I believe he's talking about the whole lot of it. Software and hardware . I think USBs suffer their own issues (see http://wiki.gbatemp.net/wiki/USB_Devices_Compatibility_List as a simple example (hint see the ""If the Device does not work" section)).

This fits the OPs notion that no one really understand the crap underneath it all.

Post reply on HN