101–110 of 265 posts
Why do we need more computer power? I haven't upgraded my laptop since 2009 (well, I've replaced its HDD with an SSD 2 years ago and it made a huge difference) and I'm okay. Some people insist on photorealistic 3D graphics in the games they play, I agree that's cool but wouldn't say that's anything close to important.
Virtual reality and augmented reality
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I just realized that this situation hasn't improved much in twenty years. But the problems are really commercial (or maybe "political") not technical. Then there's the ongoing War On Native Apps. I'm no prophet, but I did predict then that the browser would have eaten all the business applications space by now. It was just obvious. Colleagues objected that the web could not match rich native programs.
> this situation hasn't improved much in twenty years It's gotten much worse. Now you have iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, wed, and Linux(?). In 2000, you had Windows. You couldn't do anything interesting on mobile, Web 2.0 (cringe) wasn't a thing, and Mac's market share was about 3%.
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> It's designed to work at human speed. It would be great if most applications worked at human speed. Instead we have web applications taking 5 seconds to load what is basically 3 records from a small database.
That is human speed though (better than human speed, even). For most human tasks that need to be done, 5ms versus 5s doesn't really matter. Consider also that spending an hour at the DMV for them to update a database entry or two is also human speed.
Every few years something like this gets written. I remember similar things being written in 2004-2005 before the Core 2 line of processors came out. There is still improvements being made to the current tech or new takes on the current tech that aren't incorporated yet in the current bunch of consumer processors. Also I happen to think that what makes a computer fast is the removal of bottlenecks in the hardware. Yo…
except now it has actually been true for years. clock rates aren't increasing. advances in performance have been only from things that are tricky for developers to efficiently leverage (cache, simd, more cores). We need developers who understand these new low level details as much now as we needed that kind of developer in the past.
The major problem areas are those where it's economically "best" to do the computationally inefficient thing. The obvious example is the quick-to-build MVP, but many of the bigger problems come from platform conflicts. Because we have at least five different actively uncooperating operating system platforms, it's hard to build portable native apps - so people build electron apps instead. We also use the web browser a…
One of the best 2h practical course that I had was just write the fastest square matrix multiplication. You could use any language, any algorithm, just no libraries. The target was a 32 core CPU server (this was ~10 years ago). At 5000x5000 all the Java and Python attempts were running out of memory. In C, We tried some openmp, some optimized algorithm, but in the end the best trick was to flip one of the matrix so t…
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Well it can't, but it doesn't matter in the way your colleagues thought it would. Excel is a much better product than Google Sheets, but having the better product doesn't mean having the winning product.
Some times, there's one feature that's so useful it justifies the lack of many others. Google Docs is a terrible word processor compared to Word or even Pages, but being able to edit a document at the same time as someone else (with full features and little friction—IIRC Pages doesn't support Track Changes while collaborating) is so useful that I end up using Google Docs anyway.
When I first came on HN and learned about YC's motto (build something users love) this idea was reaffirmed.
[1] Google optimizes for a collaborative quick spreadsheet program (handy for consumers), and as other comments say, Microsoft focuses on pro spreadsheet use (e.g. finance).
The major problem areas are those where it's economically "best" to do the computationally inefficient thing. The obvious example is the quick-to-build MVP, but many of the bigger problems come from platform conflicts. Because we have at least five different actively uncooperating operating system platforms, it's hard to build portable native apps - so people build electron apps instead. We also use the web browser a…
I don't disagree with the gist of this, but from a your technical description verges on nonsense. I'm questioning if you're serious.
>...finding a less-efficient algorithm is a design goal...
At no point is anyone searching for an algorithm. Most mining algorithms were chosen at random or for novelty; Bitcoin uses double SHA-256, Litecoin uses scrypt, Primecoin searches for primes.
>...maximise the energy wasted...
Energy is wasted during mining in order to maximize security. The waste is a side effect.
>...in order to impose a global rate limit...
This is plain false.
>..."minting"...
It's called "mining". I wouldn't complain if this wasn't in quotes.
The whitepaper is only nine pages, but nobody seems to read it. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
I just don't buy this. I cut my teeth as a HPC programmer working with C and writing no-lock algorithms. There will always be a need for that, but realistically the vast majority of software being developed is simply not performance-critical. It's designed to work at human speed. Advances in language, compiler, and runtime implementations will continue to keep up with any growth in the need for performant application…
Programmers keep saying this, and users keep complaining about slow software.