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

#351

Post by rtkwe » Tue, May 13, 2025, 5:13 PM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #168

aloha2436 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

VS Code defers a lot of tasks to the background at least. This is a bit more visible in intellij; you seem to measure how long it takes to show its window, but how long does it take for it to warm up and finish indexing / loading everything, or before it actually becomes responsive? Anyway, five seconds is long for a text editor; 10, 15 years ago, sublime text loaded and opened up a file in Also keep in mind that des…

Sublime Text isn't an IDE though so comparing it to VS Code is comparing grapes and apples. VS Code is doing a lot more.

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

#352

Post by rpnx » Tue, May 13, 2025, 5:13 PM UTC

thijson wrote: post #248

dahart wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I kind of see this in action when I'm comparing products on Amazon. When comparing two products on Amazon that are substantially the same, the cheaper one will have way more reviews. I guess this implies that it has captured the majority of the market.

I think this honestly has more to do with moslty Chinese sellers engaging in review fraud, which is a rampant problem. I'm not saying non-Chinese sellers don't engage in review fraud, but I have noticed a trend that around 98% of fake or fraudulently advertised products are of Chinese origin.

If it was just because it was cheap, we'd also see similar fraud from Mexican or Vietnamese sellers, but I don't really see that.

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

#353

Post by turol » Tue, May 13, 2025, 5:15 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 probably another name for this

Race to the bottom

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

#354

Post by titzer » Tue, May 13, 2025, 5:15 PM UTC

vel0city wrote: post #322

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. I suspect GP has just gotten used to this and it is the new “snappy” to them. I see this all the time with people who have old computers. “My computer is really fast. I have no need to upgrade” I press cmd+tab and watch it take 5 seconds to switch to the next window. That’s a real life interaction I had with my parents in the past month. People just don’t know what they’re missing out on if they aren’t using it…

Yeah, I play around with retro computers all the time. Even with IO devices that are unthinkably performant compared to storage hardware actually common at the time these machines are often dog slow. Just rendering JPEGs can be really slow. Maybe if you're in a purely text console doing purely text things 100% in memory it can feel snappy. But the moment you do anything graphical or start working on large datasets it…

64MB is about the size of (a big) L3 cache. Today's L3 caches have a latency of 3-12ns and throughput measured in hundreds of gigabytes per second. And yet we can't manage to get responsive UIs because of tons of crud.

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

#355

Post by xondono » Tue, May 13, 2025, 5:15 PM UTC

cogman10 wrote: post #271

I'm going to be pretty blunt. Carmack gets worshiped when he shouldn't be. He has several bad takes in terms of software. Further, he's frankly behind the times when it comes to the current state of the software ecosystem. I get it, he's legendary for the work he did at id software. But this is the guy who only like 5 years ago was convinced that static analysis was actually a good thing for code. He seems to have a…

> Interpreted languages are now within a single digit multiple of natively compiled languages.

You have to be either clueless or delusional if you really believe that.

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

#356

Post by piperswe » Tue, May 13, 2025, 5:15 PM UTC

HappMacDonald wrote: post #174

ngangaga wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Innovative new products would get much rarer without super cheap and scalable compute, of course". Interesting conclusion—I'd argue we haven't seen much innovation since the smartphone (18 years ago now), and it's entirely because capital is relying on the advances of hardware to sell what is to consumers essentially the same product that they already have. Of course, I can't read anything past the first tweet.

And I'd argue that we've seen tons of innovation in the past 18 years aside from just "the smartphone" but it's all too easy to take for granted and forget from our current perspective. First up, the smartphone itself had to evolve a hell of a lot over 18 years or so. Go try to use an iPhone 1 and you'll quickly see all of the roadblocks and what we now consider poor design choices littered everywhere, vs improvement…

> * Video streaming services

Netflix video streaming launched in 2007.

> * VSCode-style IDEs (you really would not have appreciated Visual Studio or Eclipse of the time..)

I used VS2005 a little bit in the past few years, and I was surprised to see that it contains most of the features that I want from an IDE. Honestly, I wouldn't mind working on a C# project in VS2005 - both C# 2.0 and VS2005 were complete enough that they'd only be a mild annoyance compared to something more modern.

> partial autopilot features aside from 1970's cruise control

Radar cruise control was a fairly common option on mid-range to high-end cars by 2007. It's still not standard in all cars today (even though it _is_ standard on multiple economy brands). Lane departure warning was also available in several cars. I will hand it to you that L2 ADAS didn't really exist the way it does today though.

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

#357

Post by dsr_ » Tue, May 13, 2025, 5:17 PM UTC

rpnx wrote: post #345

dahart wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I actually disagree. I think that people will pay more for higher quality software, but only if they know the software is higher quality. It's great to say your software is higher quality, but the question I have is whether or not is is higher quality with the same or similar features, and second, whether the better quality is known to the customers. It's the same way that I will pay hundreds of dollars for Jetbrains…

The Lemon Market exists specifically when customers cannot tell, prior to receipt and usage, whether they are buying high quality or low quality.

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

#358

Post by ayewo » Tue, May 13, 2025, 5:18 PM UTC

mtalantikite wrote: post #335

dahart wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My wife has a perfume business. She makes really high quality extrait de parfums [1] with expensive materials and great formulations. But the market is flooded with eau de parfums -- which are far more diluted than a extrait -- using cheaper ingredients, selling for about the same price. We've had so many conversations about whether she should dilute everything like the other companies do, but you lose so much of the…

> But the market is flooded with eau de parfums -- which are far more diluted than a extrait -- using cheaper ingredients, selling for about the same price.

Has she tried raising prices? To signal that her product is highly quality and thus more expensive than her competition?

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

#359

Post by dsr_ » Tue, May 13, 2025, 5:19 PM UTC

mieubrisse wrote: post #347

dahart wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I had the exact same experience trying to build a startup. The thing that always puzzled me was Apple: they've grown into one of the most profitable companies in the world on the basis of high-quality stuff. How did they pull it off?

Not on Macintosh. On iPod, iPhone and iPad.

All of those were marketed as just-barely-affordable consumer luxury goods. The physical design and the marketing were more important than the specs.

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

#360

Post by thewebguyd » Tue, May 13, 2025, 5:19 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…

5 seconds is a lot for a machine with an M4 Pro, and tons of RAM and a very fast SSD.

There's native apps just as, if not more, complicated than VSCode that open faster.

The real problem is electron. There's still good, performant native software out there. We've just settled on shipping a web browser with every app instead.