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

441–450 of 842 posts

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

#441

Post by vel0city »

tjader wrote: post #435
vel0city wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who routinely hops between WiFi networks, I've never seen a wrong value here. And OK, we'll draw a tile with all the buttons with greyed out status for that half second and then refresh to show the real status. Did that really make things better, or did it make it worse? And if we bothered keeping all that in memory, and kept using the CPU cycles to make sure it was actually accurate and up to date on the…

> And OK, we'll draw a tile with all the buttons with greyed out status for that half second and then refresh to show the real status. Did that really make things better, or did it make it worse? Clearly better. Most of the buttons should also work instantly, most of the information should also be available instantly. The button layout is rendered instantly, so I can already figure out where I want to click without h…

It doesn't even know if the devices are still attached (as it potentially hasn't tried interfacing them for hours) but should instantly be able to allow input to control them and fully understand their current status. Right. Makes sense.

And if you don't remember the volume slider taking several seconds to render on XP you must be much wealthier than me or have some extremely rose colored glasses. I play around with old hardware all the time and get frustrated with the unresponsiveness of old equipment with period accurate software, and had a lot of decent hardware (to me at least) in the 90s and 00s. I've definitely experienced lots of times of the start menu painting one entry after the other at launch, taking a second to roll out, seeking on disk for that third level menu in 98, etc.

Rose colored glasses, the lot of you. Go use an old 386 for a month. Tell me how much more productive you are after.

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

#442

Post by svachalek »

olejorgenb wrote: post #377
rpnx wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

You have to have bought the item om Amazon to review right? So these reviewers buy and return, or how does it work?

There are various ways to do the trick, sometimes they ship out rocks to create a paper trail, sometimes they take a cheap/light product and then replace the listing with something more expensive and carry over all the reviews (which is just stupid that Amazon allows but apparently they do)

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

#444

Post by aspenmayer »

BobaFloutist wrote: post #367
_aavaa_ wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd wager that a 2021 MacBook, like the one I have, is stronger than the laptop used by majority of people in the world. Life on an entry or even mid level windows laptop is a very different world.

When I bought my current laptop, it was the cheapest one Costco had with 8 gigs of memory, which was at the time plenty for all but specialized uses. I've since upgraded it to 16, which feels like the current standard for that. But...why? Why on earth do I need 16 gigs of memory for web browsing and basic application use? I'm not even playing games on this thing. But there was an immediate, massive spike in performan…

Most cheap laptops these days ship with only one stick of RAM, and thus are only operating in single-channel mode. By adding another memory module, you can operate in dual-channel mode which can increase performance a lot. You can see the difference in performance by running a full memory test in single-channel mode vs multi-channel mode with a program like memtest86 or memtest86+ or others.

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

#445

Post by monkeyelite »

timbit42 wrote: post #334
monkeyelite wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If dynamic array bounds checking cost 5% (narrator: it is far less than that) It doesn’t work like that. If an image processing algorithm takes 2 instructions per pixel, adding a check to every access could 3-4x the cost. This is why if you dictate bounds checking then the language becomes uncompetitive for certain tasks. The vast majority of cases it doesn’t matter at all - much less than 5%. I think safe/unsafe o…

Your argument is exactly why we ended up with the abominations of C and C++ instead of the safety of Pascal, Modula-2, Ada, Oberon, etc. Programmers at the time didn't realize how little impact safety features like bounds checking have. The bounds only need to be checked once for a for loop, not on each iteration.

> The bounds only need to be checked once for a for loop, not on each iteration.

This is a theoretical argument. It depends on the compiler being able to see that’s what you’re doing and prove that there is no other mutation.

> abominations of C and C++

Sounds like you don’t understand the design choices that made this languages successful.

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

#446

Post by monkeyelite »

miloignis wrote: post #218
monkeyelite wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If dynamic array bounds checking cost 5% (narrator: it is far less than that) It doesn’t work like that. If an image processing algorithm takes 2 instructions per pixel, adding a check to every access could 3-4x the cost. This is why if you dictate bounds checking then the language becomes uncompetitive for certain tasks. The vast majority of cases it doesn’t matter at all - much less than 5%. I think safe/unsafe o…

It's not that simple either - normally, if you're doing some loops over a large array of pixels, say, to perform some operation to them, there will only be a couple of bounds checks before the loop starts, checking the starting and ending conditions of the loops, not re-doing the bounds check for every pixel. So very rarely should it be anything like 3-4x the cost, though some complex indexing could cause it to happe…

You’re describing a situation where I - or a very smart compiler can choose when to bounds check or not to make that intelligent realization.

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

#447

Post by maccard »

bjourne wrote: post #411
xondono wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except you’re self selecting for a company that has high engineering costs, big fat margins to accommodate expenses like additional hardware, and lots of projects for engineers to work on. The evaluation needs to happen in the margins, even if it saves pennies/year on the dollar, it’s best to have those engineers doing that than have them idling. The problem is that almost no one is doing it, because the way we make…

I think the parent's point is that if Google with millions of servers can't make performance optimization worthwhile, then it is very unlikely that a smaller company can. If salaries dominate over compute costs, then minimizing the latter at the expense of the former is counterproductive. > The evaluation needs to happen in the margins, even if it saves pennies/year on the dollar, it’s best to have those engineers do…

> If salaries dominate over compute costs, then minimizing the latter at the expense of the former is counterproductive.

And with client side software, compute costs approach 0 (as the company isn’t paying for it).

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

#448

Post by qaq »

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…

I see another dynamic "customer value" features get prioritized and eventually product reaches a point of crushing tech debt. It results in "customer value" features delivery velocity grinding to a halt. Obviously subject to other forces but it is not infrequent for someone to come in and disrupt the incumbents at this point.

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

#449

Post by Aurornis »

Gigachad wrote: post #60
_aavaa_ wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except we've squandered that 1000x not on bounds checking but on countless layers of abstractions and inefficiency.

Am I taking crazy pills or are programs not nearly as slow as HN comments make them out to be? Almost everything loads instantly on my 2021 MacBook and 2020 iPhone. Every program is incredibly responsive. 5 year old mobile CPUs load modern SPA web apps with no problems. The only thing I can think of that’s slow is Autodesk Fusion starting up. Not really sure how they made that so bad but everything else seems super s…

I can never tell if all of these comments are exaggerations to make a point, or if some people really have computers so slow that everything takes 20 seconds to launch (like the other comment claims).

I'm sure some of these people are using 10 year old corporate laptops with heavy corporate anti-virus scanning, leading to slow startup times. However, I think a lot of people are just exaggerating. If it's not instantly open, it's too long for them.

I, too, can get programs like Slack and Visual Studio Code to launch in a couple seconds at most, in contrast to all of these comments claiming 20 second launch times. I also don't quit these programs, so the only time I see that load time is after an update or reboot. Even if every program did take 20 seconds to launch and I rebooted my computer once a week, the net time lost would be measured in a couple of minutes.

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

#450

Post by Aurornis »

maccard wrote: post #119
Gigachad wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I taking crazy pills or are programs not nearly as slow as HN comments make them out to be? Almost everything loads instantly on my 2021 MacBook and 2020 iPhone. Every program is incredibly responsive. 5 year old mobile CPUs load modern SPA web apps with no problems. The only thing I can think of that’s slow is Autodesk Fusion starting up. Not really sure how they made that so bad but everything else seems super s…

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…

> Slack, teams, vs code, miro, excel, rider/intellij, outlook, photoshop/affinity are all applications I use every day that take 20+ seconds to launch.

> On the website front - Facebook, twitter, Airbnb, Reddit, most news sites, all take 10+ seconds to load or be functional

I just launched IntelliJ (first time since reboot). Took maybe 2 seconds to the projects screen. I clicked a random project and was editing it 2 seconds after that.

I tried Twitter, Reddit, AirBnB, and tried to count the loading time. Twitter was the slowest at about 3 seconds.

I have a 4 year old laptop. If you're seeing 10 second load times for every website and 20 second launch times for every app, you have something else going on. You mentioned corporate VPN, so I suspect you might have some heavy anti-virus or corporate security scanning that's slowing your computer down more than you expect.

Post reply on HN