There's no reason for software to be slow anymore • Hacker News Board

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#241

Post by xstas1 » Sat, Aug 22, 2026, 6:46 AM UTC

alightsoul wrote: post #231

jbstack wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your app absolutely must rely on the cloud for every one of its interactions, then fine. If not, you're just applying band-aids to a problem of your own making. Many apps could easily be local only, or local first. If you're not constantly accessing the network for information which could be stored locally, then you don't need to hide your app's slowness behind animations.

Canva replaced PowerPoint. Canva is cloud based and PowerPoint is not. There's so many apps that are cloud only so that corporate it no longer has to manage installations and users don't need to ask IT for permission anymore. I think SaaS doesn't really work without the cloud, you could technically do what adobe does but why bother with app distribution and windows' quirks. Cloud based web apps are write once, run an…

I like this example. A lot of people would prefer to use PowerPoint because they can still use their files and templates they made last year even if Microsoft doubles the price of Powerpoint, removes features, discontinues the product, or goes bankrupt.

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#242

Post by catdog » Sat, Aug 22, 2026, 6:51 AM UTC

alightsoul wrote: post #187

intrasight wrote: post #62

I've been using computers for 4 decades. They have gotten no faster. The nuclear plant computer system we built in 1989 had to present selected screens in 1 second. I don't think any apps I use today can do that.

At some point, probably in the 1980s, people probably decided that computers could update UI fast enough, so any additional compute power or speed has been used for other things like making it prettier or reducing development effort or time, and now ai

The problem is that the UI speed largely was not kept at that level but considerably slowed down again despite exponentially growing compute power.

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#243

Post by devin » Sat, Aug 22, 2026, 6:54 AM UTC

ehnto wrote: post #44

One of the biggest causes of slowness is just waiting for web requests. The fact that so much software is either online or built using the same stack even if it isn't, puts all that software in this blocked/waiting state constantly while using it. Anyone not in the US feels this even more since so much online is US hosted, 300ms for every little interaction adds up quick. If your software has the affordance of a wait…

This is kind of a shallow assessment of "slowness". Slowness is a feeling, not a fact. Network is slow as a rule relative to other parts of the stack, but it is not usually what contributes to the feeling that your software is slow. It takes a good amount of incompetence and arrogance to cultivate that particular experience.

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#244

Post by riazrizvi » Sat, Aug 22, 2026, 6:55 AM UTC

Not paying for premium? That's still a good reason. Even solo SaaS builders have to pay the rent.

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#245

Post by zem » Sat, Aug 22, 2026, 6:58 AM UTC

josephg wrote: post #133

mccoyb wrote: post #55

Here's this boiled down: > A stochastic search process with an executable optimization objective over space of programs S can only maintain or improve the objective This is superoptimization. We've known this since the 80s (Massalin, STOKE is more recent: https://github.com/StanfordPL/stoke ) The only novelty is that the proposer is now way better with LMs. Further, there's a large number of reasons for software writ…

> iykyk A story. I have a friend, who is - like me - interested in the CRDT / collaborative editing space. He asked ChatGPT to write him a CRDT. Then he grabbed every good CRDT implementation, and asked chatgpt to benchmark and optimise his CRDT, using tricks and techniques from existing hand-optimised CRDTs. He got massive performance gains by doing this - which is really interesting! I think it helped that he had a…

yep, i think the real LLM superpower is knowing that something has been done before and having access to the code that did it. so much of even novel software includes bits and pieces that have well-optimised existing solutions, and the bot knows those solutions a lot better than i do, and can even pattern match them from the general shape of the problem.

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#246

Post by neo1 » Sat, Aug 22, 2026, 7:00 AM UTC

Just an aside. mawk 2.0 (high performance awk) has been out for about a decade. It's about 2x the performance of its predecessor mawk 1.3.4, and 4x performance of GNU awk. Practically no distro uses it, because the author Mike Brennan is not the "I maintain this code in perpetuity" guy and the mawk maintainer Thomas E. Dickey doesn't care move on from from 1.3.4.

The point is: Code needs to be maintained if it is to be relied on. I haven't heard good things about LLM's on that front.

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#247

Post by taeric » Sat, Aug 22, 2026, 7:01 AM UTC

ntoskrnl_exe wrote: post #223

ehnto wrote: post #44

One of the biggest causes of slowness is just waiting for web requests. The fact that so much software is either online or built using the same stack even if it isn't, puts all that software in this blocked/waiting state constantly while using it. Anyone not in the US feels this even more since so much online is US hosted, 300ms for every little interaction adds up quick. If your software has the affordance of a wait…

Anyone not in the US feels this even more since so much online is US hosted, 300ms for every little interaction adds up quick. Don’t know about that, pretty much everything is hosted on Cloudflare, Azure or S3 these days and all of them have at least one CDN on each continent.

There are CDNs everywhere, true. It is not true that everyone deploys to them all, though. Also it dodges that the networks available to everyone are still not equal.

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#248

Post by geraneum » Sat, Aug 22, 2026, 7:01 AM UTC

malisper wrote: post #209

hunterpayne wrote: post #197

"LLMs are causing slow, bloated, code are going to eat crow once they re-write everything in super-optimized assembly." This person doesn't understand how to make efficient code. I can write code in almost any language (with a couple of exceptions) that outperforms "super-optimized assembly". Writing efficient code isn't about the language, and often isn't about the best algorithms either (but sometimes it is). Its a…

> This person doesn't understand how to make efficient code The author is one of the most knowledgeable people about performance there is

Seems like author’s main focus recently is AI and agents unsurprisingly, hence the suspicion. But it seems like he has a backgrounded in relevant fields in the past.

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#249

Post by duskdozer » Sat, Aug 22, 2026, 7:01 AM UTC

markdown wrote: post #99

tom_ wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His site has always looked like this, i'm sure of it. This is what sites look like if you just write them as text. Not everybody knows how to use sql or css or java or whatever thing it is that lets you pick the font.

I'm almost certain he used to have a reasonably styled website. I just tried to look it up but it looks like he's excluded the website from WayBackMachine. > Not everybody knows how to use sql or css or java or whatever thing it is that lets you pick the font. lol at the idea that Dan Luu can't add css to his website by copypasting some links into his html. He could make the site readable in about 3 mins and never ha…

Honestly I prefer the minimal style because I add my own to many pages as it is, or use the built-in reader or a reader extension. People have much different opinions on what's readable.

Re: There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

#250

Post by hodgehog11 » Sat, Aug 22, 2026, 7:03 AM UTC

adamddev1 wrote: post #153

hodgehog11 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it really is about the test suite, and provably so. As another poster pointed out, speed is a superoptimization problem and the test suite provides the constraints. If the constraints are appropriately set, even a naive genetic algorithm will eventually improve the outcome over time, provided suitable mixing of the proposal scheme. LLMs provide measurably better proposals than naive approaches, so the entire chain…

Tests do not prove the absence of bugs.

I hope you understand the context in which that was said. The point of that statement is that the only way to rigorously verify correctness of a program is by using formal methods. Those are often too difficult to achieve by humans, which is why there is an entire program of developing autoformalization using LLMs. You are supporting what I have said.

In practice, no one rigorously "proves" that their program works at present, and well-written tests do suffice. The definition of "well-written" here is circular, granted, but there isn't really an alternative. Even strong programmers should be writing high-quality testing suites.