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

451–460 of 842 posts

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

#451

Post by godelski »

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…

  > And one of them is the cheapest software you could make.
I actually disagree a bit. Sloppy software is cheap when you're a startup but it's quite expensive when you're big. You have all the costs of transmission and instances you need to account for. If airlines are going to cut an olive from the salad why wouldn't we pay programmers to optimize? This stuff compounds too.

We're currently operate in a world where new features are pushed that don't interest consumers. While they can't tell the difference between slop and not at purchase they sure can between updates. People constantly complain about stuff getting slower. But they also do get excited when things get faster.

Imo it's in part because we turned engineers into MBAs. Wherever I ask why can't we solve a problem some engineer always responds "well it's not that valuable". The bug fix is valuable to the user but they always clarify they mean money. Let's be honest, all those values are made up. It's not the job of the engineer to figure out how much profit a big fix will result in, it's their job to fix bugs.

Famously Coke doesn't advertise to make you aware of Coke. They advertise to associate good feelings. Similarly, car companies advertise to get their cars associated with class. Which is why sometimes they will advertise to people who have no chance of buying the car. What I'm saying is that brand matters. The problem right now is that all major brands have decided brand doesn't matter or brand decisions are always set in stone. Maybe they're right, how often do people switch? But maybe they're wrong, switching seems to just have the same features but a new UI that you got to learn from scratch (yes, even Apple devices aren't intuitive)

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

#452

Post by bruce511 »

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…

You're on the right track, but missing an important aspect.

In most cases the company making the inferior product didn't spend less. But they did spend differently. As in, they spent a lot on marketing.

You were focused on quality, and hoped for viral word of mouth marketing. Your competitors spent the same as you, but half their budget went to marketing. Since people buy what they know, they won.

Back in the day MS made Windows 95. IBM made OS/2. MS spend a billion $ on marketing Windows 95. That's a billion back when a billion was a lot. Just for the launch.

Techies think that Quality leads to sales. If does not. Marketing leads to sales. There literally is no secret to business success other than internalizing that fact.

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

#453

Post by Aurornis »

KapKap66 wrote: post #387
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…

There's a problem when people who aren't very sensitive to latency and try and track it, and that is that their perception of what "instant" actually means is wrong. For them, instant is like, one second. For someone who cares about latency, instant is less than 10 milliseconds, or whatever threshold makes the difference between input and result imperceptible. People have the same problem judging video game framerate…

> For someone who cares about latency, instant is less than 10 milliseconds

Click latency of the fastest input devices is about 1ms and with a 120Hz screen you're waiting 8.3ms between frames. If someone is annoyed by 10ms of latency they're going to have a hard time in the real world where everything takes longer than that.

I think the real difference is that 1-3 seconds is completely negligible launch time for an app when you're going to be using it all day or week, so most people do not care. That's effectively instant.

The people who get irrationally angry that their app launch took 3 seconds out of their day instead of being ready to go on the very next frame are just never going to be happy.

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

#454

Post by nostrademons »

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…

That's sorta the premise of the tweet, though.

Right now, the market buys bug-filled, inefficient software because you can always count on being able to buy hardware that is good enough to run it. The software expands to fill the processing specs of the machine it is running on - "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away" [1]. So there is no economic incentive to produce leaner, higher-quality software that does only the core functionality and does it well.

But imagine a world where you suddenly cannot get top-of-the-line chips anymore. Maybe China invaded Taiwan and blockaded the whole island, or WW3 broke out and all the modern fabs were bombed, or the POTUS instituted 500% tariffs on all electronics. Regardless of cause, you're now reduced to salvaging microchips from key fobs and toaster ovens and pregnancy tests [2] to fulfill your computing needs. In this world, there is quite a lot of economic value to being able to write tight, resource-constrained software, because the bloated stuff simply won't run anymore.

Carmack is saying that in this scenario, we would be fine (after an initial period of adjustment), because there is enough headroom in optimizing our existing software that we can make things work on orders-of-magnitude less powerful chips.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law

[2] https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a33957256/this-prog...

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

#455

Post by [deleted] »

cogman10 wrote: post #282
jayd16 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have self driving cars, amazing advancement in computer graphics, dead reckoning of camera position from visual input... In the meantime, hardware has had to go wide on threads as single core performance has not improved. You could argue that's been a software gain and a hardware failure.

> single core performance has not improved. Single core performance has improved, but at a much slower rate than I experienced as a kid. Over the last 10 years, we are something like 120% improvement in single core performance. And, not for nothing, efficiency has become much more important. More CPU performance hasn't been a major driving factor vs having a laptop that runs for 12 hours. It's simply easier to add a…

[deleted]

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

#456

Post by sdeframond »

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…

"Quality is free"[1], luxury isn't.

Also, one should not confuse the quality of the final product and the quality of the process.

[1] https://archive.org/details/qualityisfree00cros

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

#457

Post by Aurornis »

monkeyelite wrote: post #156
titzer wrote: post #12

I like to point out that since ~1980, computing power has increased about 1000X. If dynamic array bounds checking cost 5% (narrator: it is far less than that), and we turned it on everywhere, we could have computers that are just a mere 950X faster. If you went back in time to 1980 and offered the following choice: I'll give you a computer that runs 950X faster and doesn't have a huge class of memory safety vulnerabi…

> 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 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.

Your understanding of how bounds checking works in modern languages and compilers is not up to date. You're not going to find a situation where bounds checking causes an algorithm to take 3-4X longer.

A lot of people are surprised when the bounds checking in Rust is basically negligible, maybe 5% at most. In many cases if you use iterators you might not see a hit at all.

Then again, if you have an image processing algorithm that is literally reading every single pixel one-by-one to perform a 2-instruction operation and calculating bounds check on every access in the year 2025, you're doing a lot of things very wrong.

> This is why if you dictate bounds checking then the language becomes uncompetitive for certain tasks.

Do you have any examples at all? Or is this just speculation?

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

#458

Post by mike_hearn »

cletus wrote: post #317

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…

I worked there too and you're talking about performance in terms of optimal usage of CPU on a per-project basis.

Google DID put a ton of effort into two other aspects of performance: latency, and overall machine utilization. Both of these were top-down directives that absorbed a lot of time and attention from thousands of engineers. The salary costs were huge. But, if you're machine constrained you really don't want a lot of cores idling for no reason even if they're individually cheap (because the opportunity cost of waiting on new DC builds is high). And if your usage is very sensitive to latency then it makes sense to shave milliseconds off because of business metrics, not hardware $ savings.

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

#459

Post by worik »

Multicomp wrote: post #301
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luckily for mechanics, the shortage of actual blue collar Hands-On labor is so small, that good mechanics actually can charge more. The issue is that you have to be able to distinguish a good mechanic from a bad mechanic cuz they all get to charge a lot because of the shortage. Same thing for plumbing, electrical, HVAC, etc etc etc But I understand your point.

Here in Atlanta Georgia, we have a ToyoTechs business. They perform maintenance on only Toyota-family automobiles. They have 2 locations, one for large trucks, one for cars, hybrids, and SUV-looking cars. Both are always filled up with customers. Some of whom drive hundreds of miles out of state to bring their vehicles exclusively there, whether the beater is a customized off-roader or a simple econobox with sentimen…

People understand cars. Abstract data structures, not so much.

There are laws about what goes into a car, strict regulation. Software, not so much.

Until my boss can be prosecuted for selling untested bug ridden bad software that is what I am instructed to produce

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

#460

Post by hinkley »

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…

If you’re trying to sell a product to the masses, you either need to make it cheap or a fad.

You cannot make a cheap product with high margins and get away with it. Motorola tried with the RAZR. They had about five or six good quarters from it and then within three years of initial launch were hemorrhaging over a billion dollars a year.

You have to make premium products if you want high margins. And premium means you’re going for 10% market share, not dominant market share. And if you guess wrong and a recession happens, you might be fucked.

Post reply on HN