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

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

#681

Post by smikhanov »

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 don't know how to solve that problem or even if it will ever be "solved".
It will not be “solved” because it’s a non-problem.

You can run a thought experiment imagining an alternative universe where human resource were directed towards optimization, and that alternative universe would look nothing like ours. One extra engineer working on optimization means one less engineer working on features. For what exactly? To save some CPU cycles? Don’t make me laugh.

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

#682

Post by shireboy »

.NET has made great strides in this front in recent years. Newer versions optimize cpu and ram usage of lots of fundamentals, and introduced new constructs to reduce allocations and cpu for new code. One might argue they were able because they were so bad, but it’s worth looking into if you haven’t in a while.

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

#683

Post by [deleted] »

immibis wrote: post #643
rapsey wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gaping wound that lifted billions out of powerty and produced the greatest standard of living in human history.

Actually, the system that produced the greatest standard of living increase in human history is whatever Communist China's been doing for the last century.

[deleted]

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

#684

Post by alabastervlog »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #575
didgetmaster wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once upon a time, the price of a product was often a good indicator of its quality. If you saw two products side by side on the shelf and one was more expensive, then you might assume that it was less likely to break or wear out soon. Now it seems that the price has very little to do with quality. Cheaply made products might be priced higher just to give the appearance of quality. Even well known brands will cut corn…

What about furniture? From my childhood until now, it seems like furniture has really held out. Price is a pretty good indication of quality.

Within the (wide!) price tier in which most people buy furniture, almost everything is worse than IKEA but a lot of it’s 2-3x the price. You have to go even higher to get consistently-better-than-ikea, but most people won’t even see that kind of furniture when they go shopping for a new couch or kitchen table.

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

#685

Post by jdsleppy »

Turskarama wrote: post #672
immibis wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, free market and capitalism are opposites.

Lol no they aren't, they're orthogonal, almost entirely unrelated.

I assume they are saying that in practice, if wealth gives one influence (if one lives in capitalism), one will use that influence to make one's market less free to one's benefit.

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

#686

Post by loloquwowndueo »

ninalanyon wrote: post #671
CelestialMystic wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I literally had a new toilet put in a couple of years ago. It clogs pretty easily. So you just end up flushing it more, so you don't actually save any water. BTW the same thing happened with vacuum cleaners, you need to hover more to get the same amount of dust out because they capped the power in the EU. My old Vacuum Cleaner I managed to find, literally sticks to the carpet when hoovering.

My Philips Silentio vacuum cleaner is both quiet and powerful and is also within the EU limits on input power. It will stick to the floor if I turn up the power too high. And the Norwegian made and designed low flow toilets in my house flush perfectly every time. Have the flush volumes reduced further in the last fifteen years?

Nap, parent just bought a crappy toilet.

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

#687

Post by alabastervlog »

codethief wrote: post #530
mtalantikite wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> [1] https://studiotanais.com/ First, honest impression: At least on my phone (Android/Chromium) the typography and style of the website don't quite match that "high quality & expensive ingredients" vibe the parfums are supposed to convey. The banners (3 at once on the very first screen, one of them animated!), italic text, varying font sizes, and janky video header would be rather off-putting to me. Maybe it's also…

I am somewhat familiar with this market and would probably be turned off by this site mostly because it looks too slick and the ones I’ve seen that were this slick mostly weren’t for me (marketed to, and making perfume entirely or almost entirely for, women).

The ones for me usually look way shittier or just use Etsy.

[edit] the only exception I can come up with is Imaginary Authors, which is much slicker-looking than this, actually, but with a far darker palette—this one definitely says “this is feminine stuff” in the design. And actually I’d say IA leans far more feminine as far as overall vibe of their catalog than most others that’ve had at least one scent that worked out for me.

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

#688

Post by mdnahas »

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…

These economic forces exist in math too. Almost every mathematician publishes informal proofs. These contain just enough discussion in English (or other human language) to convince a few other mathematicians in the same field that they their idea is valid. But it is possible to make errors. There are other techniques: formal step-by-step proof presentations (e.g. by Leslie Lamport) or computer-checked proofs that would be more reliable. But almost no mathematician uses these.

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

#689

Post by computerthings »

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…

[dead]

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

#690

Post by branko_d »

Often, this is presented as a tradeoff between the cost of development and the cost of hardware. However, there is a third leg of that stool: the cost of end-user experience.

When you have a system which is sluggish to use because your skimped on development, it is often the case that you cannot make it much faster no matter how expensive is the hardware you throw at it. Either there is a single-threaded critical path, so you hit the limit of what one CPU can do (and adding more does not help), or you hit the laws of physics, such as with network latency which is ultimately bound by the speed of light.

And even when the situation could be improved by throwing more hardware at it, this is often done only to the extent to make the user experience "acceptable", but not "great".

In either case, the user experience suffers and each individual user is less productive. And since there are (usually) orders of magnitude more users than developers, the total damage done can be much greater than the increased cost of performance-focused development. But the cost of development is "concentrated" while the cost of user experience is "distributed", so it's more difficult to measure or incentivize for.

The cost of poor user experience is a real cost, is larger than most people seem to think and is non-linear. This was observed in the experiments done by IBM, Google, Amazon and others decades ago. For example, take a look at:

The Economic Value of Rapid Response Time https://jlelliotton.blogspot.com/p/the-economic-value-of-rap...

He and Richard P. Kelisky, Director of Computing Systems for IBM's Research Division, wrote about their observations in 1979, "...each second of system response degradation leads to a similar degradation added to the user's time for the following [command]. This phenomenon seems to be related to an individual's attention span. The traditional model of a person thinking after each system response appears to be inaccurate. Instead, people seem to have a sequence of actions in mind, contained in a short-term mental memory buffer. Increases in SRT [system response time] seem to disrupt the thought processes, and this may result in having to rethink the sequence of actions to be continued."

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