The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority • Hacker News Board

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

#311

Post by regularfry » Tue, May 13, 2025, 4:25 PM UTC

dahart wrote: post #217

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 dumbest and most obvious of realizations finally dawned on me after trying to build a software startup that was based on quality differentiation. We were sure that a better product would win people over and lead to viral success. It didn’t. Things grew, but so slowly that we ran out of money after a few years before reaching break even. What I realized is that lower costs, and therefore lower quality, are a compe…

There's an analogy with evolution. In that case, what survives might be the fittest, but it's not the fittest possible. It's the least fit that can possibly win. Anything else represents an energy expenditure that something else can avoid, and thus outcompete.

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

#312

Post by turtlebits » Tue, May 13, 2025, 4:25 PM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #180

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 buyer cannot differentiate between high and low-quality goods before buying, so the demand for high and low-quality goods is artificially even. The cause is asymmetric information. That's where FOSS or even proprietary "shared source" wins. You know if the software you depend on is generally badly or generally well programmed. You may not be able to find the bugs, but you can see how long the functions are, the…

IME, the problem is that FOSS consumer facing software is just about the worst in UX and design.

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

#313

Post by vel0city » Tue, May 13, 2025, 4:26 PM UTC

aloha2436 wrote: post #147

maccard wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack, teams, vs code, miro, excel, rider/intellij, outlook, photoshop/affinity are all applications I use every day that take 20+ seconds to launch. My corporate VPN app takes 30 seconds to go from a blank screen to deciding if it’s going to prompt me for credentials or remember my login, every morning. This is on an i9 with 64GB ram, and 1GN fiber. On the website front - Facebook, twitter, Airbnb, Reddit, most news…

I'm on a four year old mid-tier laptop and opening VS Code takes maybe five seconds. Opening IDEA takes five seconds. Opening twitter on an empty cache takes perhaps four seconds and I believe I am a long way from their servers. On my work machine slack takes five seconds, IDEA is pretty close to instant, the corporate VPN starts nearly instantly (although the Okta process seems unnecessarily slow I'll admit), and mo…

It's probably more so that any corporate Windows box has dozens of extra security and metrics agents interrupting and blocking every network request and file open and OS syscall installed by IT teams while the Macs have some very basic MDM profile applied.

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

#314

Post by sorcerer-mar » Tue, May 13, 2025, 4:27 PM UTC

CyberDildonics wrote: post #276

sorcerer-mar wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These kinds of myths get perpetuated by people who repeat it without having experienced the side of just writing native software. I think mostly it is people rationalizing not learning assembly and sticking to C++ or PERL because that's what they learned first. Why stop at C++? Is that what you happen to be comfortable with? Couldn't you create even faster software if you went down another level? Why don't you?

Couldn't you create even faster software if you went down another level? Why don't you? No and if you understood what makes software fast you would know that. Most software is allocating memory inside hot loops and taking that out is extremely easy and can easily be a 7x speedup. Looping through contiguous memory instead of chasing pointers through heap allocated variables is another 25x - 100x speed improvement at l…

Sorry but it is absolutely the case that there are optimizations available to someone working in assembly that are not available to someone working in C++.

You are probably a lazy or inexperienced engineer if you choose to work in C++.

In fact, there are optimizations available at the silicon level that are not available in assembly.

You are probably a lazy or inexperienced engineer if you choose to work in assembly.

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

#315

Post by turtlebits » Tue, May 13, 2025, 4:30 PM UTC

1. Consumers are attracted to pretty UIs and lots of features, which pretty much drives inefficiency.

2. The consumers that have the money to buy software/pay for subscriptions have the newer hardware.

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

#316

Post by MattSayar » Tue, May 13, 2025, 4:32 PM UTC

AndrewDucker wrote: post #2

Well, yes. It's an economic problem (which is to say, it's a resource allocation problem). Do you have someone spend extra time optimising your software or do you have them produce more functionality. If the latter generates more cash then that's what you'll get them to do. If the former becomes important to your cashflow then you'll get them to do that.

Efficiency is critical to my everyday life. For example, before I get up from my desk to grab a snack from the kitchen, I'll bring any trash/dishes with me to double the trip's benefits. I do this kind of thing often.

Optimizing software has a similar appeal. But when the problem is "spend hours of expensive engineering time optimizing the thing" vs "throw some more cheap RAM at it," the cheaper option will prevail. Sometimes, the problem is big enough that it's worth the optimization.

The market will decide which option is worth pursuing. If we get to a point where we've reached diminishing returns on throwing hardware at a problem, we'll optimize the software. Moore's Law may be slowing down, but evidently we haven't reached that point yet.

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

#317

Post by cletus » Tue, May 13, 2025, 4:32 PM UTC

So I've worked for Google (and Facebook) and it really drives the point home of just how cheap hardware is and how not worth it optimizing code is most of the time.

More than a decade ago Google had to start managing their resource usage in data centers. Every project has a budget. CPU cores, hard disk space, flash storage, hard disk spindles, memory, etc. And these are generally convertible to each other so you can see the relative cost.

Fun fact: even though at the time flash storage was ~20x the cost of hard disk storage, it was often cheaper net because of the spindle bottleneck.

Anyway, all of these things can be turned into software engineer hours, often called "mili-SWEs" meaning a thousandth of the effort of 1 SWE for 1 year. So projects could save on hardware and hire more people or hire fewer people but get more hardware within their current budgets.

I don't remember the exact number of CPU cores amounted to a single SWE but IIRC it was in the thousands. So if you spend 1 SWE year working on optimization acrosss your project and you're not saving 5000 CPU cores, it's a net loss.

Some projects were incredibly large and used much more than that so optimization made sense. But so often it didn't, particularly when whatever code you wrote would probably get replaced at some point anyway.

The other side of this is that there is (IMHO) a general usability problem with the Web in that it simply shouldn't take the resources it does. If you know people who had to or still do data entry for their jobs, you'll know that the mouse is pretty inefficient. The old terminals from 30-40+ years ago that were text-based had some incredibly efficent interfaces at a tiny fraction of the resource usage.

I had expected that at some point the Web would be "solved" in the sense that there'd be a generally expected technology stack and we'd move on to other problems but it simply hasn't happened. There's still a "framework of the week" and we're still doing dumb things like reimplementing scroll bars in user code that don't work right with the mouse wheel.

I don't know how to solve that problem or even if it will ever be "solved".

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

#318

Post by vel0city » Tue, May 13, 2025, 4:33 PM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #172

tjader wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just clicked on the network icon next to the clock on a Windows 11 laptop. A gray box appeared immediately, about one second later all the buttons for wifi, bluetooth, etc appeared. Windows is full of situations like this, that require no network calls, but still take over one second to render.

It's strange, it visibly loading the buttons is indicative they use async technology that can use multithreaded CPUs effectively... but it's slower than the old synchronous UI stuff. I'm sure it's significantly more expensive to render than Windows 3.11 - XP were - rounded corners and scalable vector graphics instead of bitmaps or whatever - but surely not that much? And the resulting graphics can be cached.

Windows 3.1 wasn't checking WiFi, Bluetooth, energy saving profile, night light setting, audio devices, current power status and battery level, audio devices, and more when clicking the non-existent icon on the non-existent taskbar. Windows XP didn't have this quick setting area at all. But I do recall having the volume slider take a second to render on XP from time to time, and that was only rendering a slider.

And FWIW this stuff is then cached. I hadn't clicked that setting area in a while (maybe the first time this boot?) and did get a brief gray box that then a second later populated with all the buttons and settings. Now every time I click it again it appears instantly.

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

#319

Post by regularfry » Tue, May 13, 2025, 4:34 PM UTC

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…

Across three jobs, I have now seen three different HR systems from the same supplier which were all differently terrible.

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

#320

Post by asoneth » Tue, May 13, 2025, 4:38 PM UTC

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.

"In the long run, we are all dead." -- Keynes

In my experiences, companies can afford to care about good software if they have extreme demands (e.g. military, finance) or amortize over very long timeframes (e.g. privately owned). It's rare for consumer products to fall into either of these categories.