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Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?

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61–70 of 100 posts

Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?

#62

I'd almost always rather build something than use a 3rd party service. I understand it, I run it, and I don't have to deal with 3rd party's changes, performance problems, or downtime. Also, less bugs related to data consistency.

Everything? Write your own distributed database? I'd much rather use opensource.

Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easier for more people to afford broadband than a 4080 though. It only needs like 30 megabits or so.

Most gaming also doesn’t need a 4080 either though!

But most of it could benefit from one!

I have a M2 Max and struggle to play most recent games. Stutters, low details, no DLSS, etc.

Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?

#66

Concurrency using async function type is dumb. Either make and compose futures/promises with normal language features OR support auto-yielding coroutines/goroutines/fibers (lightweight threads).

>async function type is dumb

On the contrary, it's just too smart for me! With async function types, I just can't wrap my head around what's actually happening and if it's happening the way I want it to. I'd much rather deal directly with explicit coroutines.

Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?

#67

BitGrid[1] is the most efficient general purpose compute architecture possible for Petaflops and beyond. It eliminates memory bandwidth issues. Its a nice elegant alternative architecture. I'm quite surprised nobody actually tried it earlier. [1] https://github.com/mikewarot/Bitgrid * I give 50/50 odds I'm a crackpot on this one... I'd really like to know for sure which way that coin toss comes out in the end

This is some sort of cellular automata, nothing crackpot about that, perhaps a FPGA demo with it would demonstrate the claims its a superior architecture. There are many exotic architectures like Transport-triggered, Computational RAM and async CPUs, but they're not easily implemented in hardware and claims of these exotics outperforming conventional CPUs didn't materialize.

Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?

#68
Technology must serve humanity, not the other way around.

If a new technology threatens to eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs, and the benefits are marginal or largely in favor of the capital class, then we should probably not pursue that technology.

Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?

#69
post #8

The future of gaming is streaming, and home PC gaming hardware will eventually go the way of DVD players. GeForce Now is succeeding where OnLive and Stadia failed (20+ million users now, apparently). Offloading rendering to the cloud means much improved thermals, graphics, and battery life -- especially for laptop users and Mac owners. Apple Silicon is cool, but it's not going to beat a 4080 for pure graphics perform…

There is no way you’re playing shooters on any sort of competitive level over a streaming service.

Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?

#70
typescript is worse than plain javascript. The type system is not sound and can't actually catch that many bugs; at the same time it adds a lot of verbosity and wasted time satisfying the type checker.

mandatory code reviews on every merge are a net negative. Too many people wasting time on nits and YAGNI "improvements". Actually improving the code in a structural way is too hard and most reviewers won't spend the effort. It would be better to dedicate time and resources to code audit and improvement on a regular cadence, e.g. pre-release.

A/B testing is pure cargo cult science, it has no where near the rigor to actually determine anything about human behavior (look at the replication crisis in real psychology where they use 10x as much rigor!) You might as well use a magic eight-ball.

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