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

#461

Post by caseyy » Tue, May 13, 2025, 7:35 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…

> I don’t think this leads to market collapse

You must have read that the Market for Lemons is a type of market failure or collapse. Market failure (in macroeconomics) does not yet mean collapse. It describes a failure to allocate resources in the market such that the overall welfare of the market participants decreases. With this decrease may come a reduction in trade volume. When the trade volume decreases significantly, we call it a market collapse. Usually, some segment of the market that existed ceases to exist (example in a moment).

There is a demand for inferior goods and services, and a demand for superior goods. The demand for superior goods generally increases as the buyer becomes wealthier, and the demand for inferior goods generally increases as the buyer becomes less wealthy.

In this case, wealthier buyers cannot buy the superior relevant software previously available, even if they create demand for it. Therefore, we would say a market fault has developed as the market could not organize resources to meet this demand. Then, the volume of high-quality software sales drops dramatically. That market segment collapses, so you are describing a market collapse.

> There’s probably another name for this

You might be thinking about "regression to normal profits" or a "race to the bottom." The Market for Lemons is an adjacent scenario to both, where a collapse develops due to asymmetric information in the seller's favor. One note about macroecon — there's never just one market force or phenomenon affecting any real situation. It's always a mix of some established and obscure theories.

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

#462

Post by monkeyelite » Tue, May 13, 2025, 7:36 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #457

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 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 basical…

> Your understanding of how bounds checking works in modern languages and compilers is not up to date.

One I am familiar with is Swift - which does exactly this because it’s a library feature of Array.

Which languages will always be able to determine through function calls, indirect addressing, etc whether it needs to bounds check or not?

And how will I know if it succeeded or whether something silently failed?

> 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

I agree. And note this is an example of a scenario you can encounter in other forms.

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

Yes. Java and python are not competitive for graphics and audio processing.

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

#463

Post by mike_hearn » Tue, May 13, 2025, 7:38 PM UTC

queuebert wrote: post #204

bob1029 wrote: post #46

We've been able to run order matching engines for entire exchanges on a single thread for over a decade by this point. I think this specific class of computational power - strictly serialized transaction processing - has not grown at the same rate as other metrics would suggest. Adding 31 additional cores doesn't make the order matching engine go any faster (it could only go slower). If your product is handling fewer…

Why can you not match orders in parallel using logarithmic reduction, the same way you would sort in parallel? Is it that there is not enough other computation being done other than sorting by time and price?

It's an inherently serial problem and regulations require it to be that way. Users who submit first want their orders to be the one that crosses.

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

#464

Post by Earw0rm » Tue, May 13, 2025, 7:44 PM UTC

Optimise is never a neutral word.

You always optimise FOR something at the expense of something.

And that can, and frequently should, be lean resource consumption, but it can come at a price.

Which might be one or more of: Accessibility. Full internationalisation. Integration paradigms (thinking about how modern web apps bring UI and data elements in from third parties). Readability/maintainability. Displays that can actually represent text correctly at any size without relying on font hinting hacks. All sorts of subtle points around UX. Economic/business model stuff (megabytes of cookie BS on every web site, looking at you right now.) Etc.

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

#465

Post by nostrademons » Tue, May 13, 2025, 7:45 PM UTC

bruce511 wrote: post #452

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…

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…

Quality can lead to sales - this was the premise behind the original Google (they never spent a dime on advertising their own product until the Parisian Love commercial [1] came out in 2009, a decade after founding), and a few other tech-heavy startups like Netscape or Stripe. Microsoft certainly didn't spend a billion $ marketing Altair Basic.

The key point to understand is the only effort that matters is that which makes the sale. Business is a series of transactions, and each individual transaction is binary: it either happens or it doesn't. Sometimes, you can make the sale by having a product which is so much better than alternatives that it's a complete no-brainer to use it, and then makes people so excited that they tell all their friends. Sometimes you make the sale by reaching out seven times to a prospect that's initially cold but warms up in the face of your persistence. Sometimes, you make the sale by associating your product with other experiences that your customers want to have, like showing a pretty woman drinking your beer on a beach. Sometimes, you make the sale by offering your product 80% off to people who will switch from competitors and then jacking up the price once they've become dependent on it.

You should know which category your product fits into, and how and why customers will buy it, because that's the only way you can make smart decisions about how to allocate your resources. Investing in engineering quality is pointless if there is no headroom to deliver experiences that will make a customer say "Wow, I need to have that." But if you are sitting on one of those gold mines, capitalizing on it effectively is orders of magnitude more efficient than trying to market a product that doesn't really work.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsSUqgkDwU

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

#466

Post by dahart » Tue, May 13, 2025, 7:54 PM UTC

caseyy wrote: post #461

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 don’t think this leads to market collapse You must have read that the Market for Lemons is a type of market failure or collapse. Market failure (in macroeconomics) does not yet mean collapse. It describes a failure to allocate resources in the market such that the overall welfare of the market participants decreases. With this decrease may come a reduction in trade volume. When the trade volume decreases signific…

The Wikipedia page for Market for Lemons more or less summarizes it as a condition of defective products caused by information asymmetry, which can lead to adverse selection, which can lead to market collapse.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

The Market for Lemons idea seems like it has merit in general but is too strong and too binary to apply broadly, that’s where I was headed with the suggestion for another name. It’s not that people want low quality. Nobody actually wants defective products. People are just price sensitive, and often don’t know what high quality is or how to find it (or how to price it), so obviously market forces will find a balance somewhere. And that balance is extremely likely to be lower on the quality scale than what people who care about high quality prefer. This is why I think you’re right about the software market tolerating low quality; it’s because market forces push everything toward low quality.

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

#467

Post by didibus » Tue, May 13, 2025, 7:55 PM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #382

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…

There’s probably another name for this Capitalism? Marx's core belief was that capitalists would always lean towards paying the absolute lowest price they could for labor and raw materials that would allow them to stay in production. If there's more profit in manufacturing mediocrity at scale than quality at a smaller scale, mediocrity it is. Not all commerce is capitalistic. If a commercial venture is dedicated to q…

In the 50s and 60s, capitalism used to refer to stakeholder capitalism. It was dedicated to maximize value for stakeholders, such as customers, employees, society, etc.

But that shifted later, with Milton Friedman, who pushed the idea of shareholder capitalism in the 70s. Where companies switched to thinking the only goal is to maximize shareholder value.

In his theory, government would provide regulation and policies to address stakeholder's needs, and companies therefore needed focus on shareholders.

In practice, lobbying, propaganda and corruption made it so governments dropped the ball and also sided to maximize shareholder value, along with companies.

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

#468

Post by talldatethrow » Tue, May 13, 2025, 7:56 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…

I'm a layman, but in my opinion building quality software can't really be a differentiator because anyone can build quality software given enough time and resources. You could take two car mechanics and with enough training, time, assistance from professional dev consultants, testing, rework, so and so forth, make a quality piece of software. But you'd have spent $6 million to make a quality alarm clock app.

A differentiator would be having the ability to have a higher than average quality per cost. Then maybe you're onto something.

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

#469

Post by rjbwork » Tue, May 13, 2025, 8:00 PM UTC

naasking wrote: post #410

rjbwork wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consider functional thinking and ability to use list comprehensions/LINQ/lodash/etc. to be fundamental skills in today's software world. The what, not the how!

Agreed, but it doesn't go far enough IMO. Why not add language/runtime support for durable list comprehensions, and also atomically updatable ones so they can be concurrently shared, etc. Bring the database into the language in a way that's just as easily to use and query as any other value.

Well, you can do that with LINQ + EF and embedded databases like SQL Lite or similar.

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

#470

Post by bri3d » Tue, May 13, 2025, 8:02 PM UTC

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…

This; "quality" is such an unclear term here.

In an efficient market people buy things based on a value which in the case of software, is derived from overall fitness for use. "Quality" as a raw performance metric or a bug count metric aren't relevant; the criteria is "how much money does using this product make or save me versus its competition or not using it."

In some cases there's a Market of Lemons / contract / scam / lack of market transparency issue (ie - companies selling defective software with arbitrary lock-ins and long contracts), but overall the slower or more "defective" software is often more fit for purpose than that provided by the competition. If you _must_ have a feature that only a slow piece of software provides, it's still a better deal to acquire that software than to not. Likewise, if software is "janky" and contains minor bugs that don't affect the end results it provides, it will outcompete an alternative which can't produce the same results.