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

The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 842 posts

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#181

Post by alkonaut »

"The world" runs on _features_ not elegant, fast, or bug free software. To the end user, there is no difference between a lack of a feature, and a bug. Nor is there any meaningful difference between software taking 5 minutes to complete something because of poor performance, compared to the feature not being there and the user having to spend 5 minutes completing the same task manually. It's "slow".

If you keep maximizing value for the end user, then you invariably create slow and buggy software. But also, if you ask the user whether they would want faster and less buggy software in exchange for fewer features, they - surprise - say no. And even more importantly: if you ask the buyer of software, which in the business world is rarely the end user, then they want features even more, and performance and elegance even less. Given the same feature set, a user/buyer would opt for the fastest/least buggy/most elegant software. But if it lacks any features - it loses. The reason to keep software fast and elegant is because it's the most likely path to be able to _keep_ adding features to it as to not be the less feature rich offering. People will describe the fast and elegant solution with great reviews, praising how good it feels to use. Which might lead people to think that it's an important aspect. But in the end - they wouldn't buy it at all if it didn't do what they wanted. They'd go for the slow frustrating buggy mess if it has the critical feature they need.

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#182

Post by ashoeafoot »

caseyy wrote: post #91

There is an argument to be made that the market buys bug-filled, inefficient software about as well as it buys pristine software. And one of them is the cheapest software you could make. It's similar to the "Market for Lemons" story. In short, the market sells as if all goods were high-quality but underhandedly reduces the quality to reduce marginal costs. The buyer cannot differentiate between high and low-quality g…

Therefore brands as guardians of quality .

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#183

Post by michaelgburton »

caseyy wrote: post #135
armchairhacker wrote: post #108

Is there or could we make an iPhone-like that runs 100x slower than conventional phones but uses much less energy, so it powers itself on solar? It would be good for the environment and useful in survival situations. Or could we make a phone that runs 100x slower but is much cheaper? If it also runs on solar it would be useful in third-world countries. Processors are more than fast enough for most tasks nowadays; mor…

We have much hardware on the secondary market (resale) that's only 2-3x slower than pristine new primary market devices. It is cheap, it is reuse, and it helps people save in a hyper-consumerist society. The common complaint is that it doesn't run bloated software anymore. And I don't think we can make non-bloated software for a variety of reasons. As a video game developer, I can add some perspective (N=1 if you wil…

One only needs to look at Horizon: Zero Dawn to note that the truth of this is deeply uneven across the games industry. World streaming architectures are incredible technical achievements. So are moddable engines. There are plenty of technical limits being pushed by devs, it's just not done at all levels.

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#184

Post by Ajedi32 »

genghisjahn wrote: post #130
caseyy wrote: post #91

There is an argument to be made that the market buys bug-filled, inefficient software about as well as it buys pristine software. And one of them is the cheapest software you could make. It's similar to the "Market for Lemons" story. In short, the market sells as if all goods were high-quality but underhandedly reduces the quality to reduce marginal costs. The buyer cannot differentiate between high and low-quality g…

I have worked for large corporations that have foisted awful HR, expense reporting, time tracking and insurance "portals" that were so awful I had to wonder if anyone writing the checks had ever seen the product. I brought up the point several times that if my team tried to tell a customer that we had their project all done but it was full of as many bugs and UI nightmares as these back office platforms, I would be c…

> I had to wonder if anyone writing the checks had ever seen the product

Probably not, and that's like 90% of the issue with enterprise software. Sadly enterprise software products are often sold based mainly on how many boxes they check in the list of features sent to management, not based on the actual quality and usability of the product itself.

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#185

Post by caseyy »

mjr00 wrote: post #179
caseyy wrote: post #91

There is an argument to be made that the market buys bug-filled, inefficient software about as well as it buys pristine software. And one of them is the cheapest software you could make. It's similar to the "Market for Lemons" story. In short, the market sells as if all goods were high-quality but underhandedly reduces the quality to reduce marginal costs. The buyer cannot differentiate between high and low-quality g…

> the market sells as if all goods were high-quality The phrase "high-quality" is doing work here. The implication I'm reading is that poor performance = low quality. However, the applications people are mentioning in this comment section as low performance (Teams, Slack, Jira, etc) all have competitors with much better performance. But if I ask a person to pick between Slack and, say, a a fast IRC client like Weecha…

That's true. I meant it in a broader sense. Quality = {speed, function, lack of bugs, ergonomics, ... }.

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#186

Post by scotty79 »

bluGill wrote: post #117
scotty79 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think we are gonna go there. Talking is cumbersome. There's a reason, besides social anxiety that people prefer to use self-checkout and electronically order fastfood. There are easier ways to do a lot of things than with words. I'd bet on maybe ad hoc ai designed ui-s you click but have a voice search when you are confused about something.

If you know what you want then not talking to a human is faster. However if you are not sure a human can figure out. I'm not sure I'd trust a voice assistant - the value in the human is an informed opinion which is hard to program, but it is easy to program a recommendation for whatever makes the most profit. Of course humans often don't have an informed opinion either, but at least sometimes they do, and they will a…

> the value in the human is an informed opinion which is hard to program

I don't think I ever used a human for that. They are usually very uninformed about everything that's not their standard operational procedure or some current promotional materials.

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#187

Post by flohofwoe »

jayd16 wrote: post #171
flohofwoe wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you don't need to wrestle with Xcode? Somehow the Xcode team managed to make startup and some features in newer Xcode versions slower than older Xcode versions running on old Intel Macs. E.g. the ARM Macs are a perfect illustration that software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster. After a very short 'free lunch' right after the Intel => ARM transition we're now back to the same old software performa…

You're comparing the art(!) of two different games, that targeted two different sets of hardware while using the ideal hardware for one and not the other. Kind of a terrible example.

> You're comparing the art(!)

The art direction, modelling and animation work is mostly fine, the worse look results from the lack of dynamic lighting and ambient occlusion in the Oblivion Remaster when switching Lumen (UE5's realtime global illumination feature) to the lowest setting, this results in completely flat lighting for the vegetation but is needed to get an acceptable base frame rate (it doesn't solve the random stuttering though).

Basically, the best art will always look bad without good lighting (and even baked or faked ambient lighting like in Skyrim looks better than no ambient lighting at all.

Digital Foundry has an excellent video about the issues:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0rCA1vpgSw

TL;DR: the 'ideal hardware' for the Oblivion Remaster doesn't exist, even if you get the best gaming rig money can buy.

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#188

Post by bluGill »

bob1029 wrote: post #166
bluGill wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are only able to do that because you are doing simple processing on each transaction. If you had to do more complex processing on each transaction it wouldn't be possible to do that many. Though it is hard for me to imagine what more complex processing would be (I'm not in your domain)

The order matching engine is mostly about updating an in-memory order book representation. It is rarely the case that high volume transaction processing facilities also need to deal with deeply complex transactions. I can't think of many domains of business wherein each transaction is so compute intensive that waiting for I/O doesn't typically dominate.

HFT would love to do more complex calculations for some of their trades. They often make the compromise of using a faster algorithm that is known to be right only 60% of the time vs the better but slower algorithm that is right 90% of the time.

That is a different problem from yours though and so it has different considerations. In some areas I/O dominates, in some it does not.

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#189

Post by pessimizer »

dmos62 wrote: post #133
caseyy wrote: post #91

There is an argument to be made that the market buys bug-filled, inefficient software about as well as it buys pristine software. And one of them is the cheapest software you could make. It's similar to the "Market for Lemons" story. In short, the market sells as if all goods were high-quality but underhandedly reduces the quality to reduce marginal costs. The buyer cannot differentiate between high and low-quality g…

Bad software is not cheaper to make (or maintain) in the long-term.

What does "make in the long-term" even mean? How do you make a sandwich in the long-term?

Bad things are cheaper and easier to make. If they weren't, people would always make good things. You might say "work smarter," but smarter people cost more money. If smarter people didn't cost more money, everyone would always have the smartest people.

Re: The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

#190

Post by QuadrupleA »

This always saddens me. We could have things instant, simple, and compute & storage would be 100x more abundant in practical terms than it is today.

It's not even a trade off a lot of the time, simpler architectures perform better but are also vastly easier and cheaper to maintain.

We just lack expertise I think, and pass on cargo cult "best practices" much of the time.

Post reply on HN