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…
What about battery life? If you prefer, call it carbon footprint. Python has a huge carbon footprint. We should get rid of slow languages for environmental reasons.
But then we'd have to pour in more manpower, which involves more commute, more upkeeping (AC, lunch), etc.
That's not true. The coins that advertise ASIC resistance have chosen algorithms which are deliberately stubborn to optimize with HW. In other words, inefficiency (=> high resource consumption) is an explicit goal.
I did forget about ASIC resistant coins. I think my general point still stands. You're making a logical leap between intentional GPU/CPU coins and inefficiency as an explicit design goal. GPU/CPU coin developers are most likely true believers in a distributed security model. They could also own GPU farms or botnets. I highly doubt developers design cryptocurrencies while dreaming of squandering global resources.
If it's a real consequence of their actions that they're aware of, they're complicit in the continuance of that effect.
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.
How is google docs a terrible word editor? Do you mean that it lacking the advanced but rarely used features of word?
> almost 30k$/mo That's like, a couple full-time developers, AIUI? Maybe even less than that. Perhaps the people who say "people are more expensive than hardware" have a point - at least in the Bay Area. Or you can move to the Rust Belt if you'd like a change.
Sure, but my point was that they cut that bill with 20k PER month by giving me 5k one off... They gave me 10k runway to poke around but 5k was enough to fix it; it was simply that bad to start with. The low hanging fruit in most systems I see is really trivial to fix; they just have no one to do it... I bet other people here have seen that before when thrown into an existing project (and I read Spolsky at an impressi…
What you’re saying is that there were a handful of bottlenecks that you caught immediately or were found with some simple profiling, right? Not that they made the mistake of writing their app in Python instead of assembly, as the article seems to imply is now necessary.
Functional programming is something to watch and learn. It can help take advantage of multi-core single machines and distributed computing alike because it is thread safe due to using immutable variables and the mathematics behind pure functions. Compared to OOP, no locking, concurrency, or race conditions to worry about if used correctly.
Functional program helps immensely, but I don't think you are describing it quite right. You cannot to distributed systems without concurrency. Even if you don't have low level synchronization failures, you still need to watch out for determinism. Fortunately we have the math for that (usually order theory).
I make this point as someone whose job is Haskell. Too many people expect awesome magic sauce and basically write the same old imperative stuff in functional programming languages: not in the small but in the large. There's still plenty of benefit of using a good language for that, but you won't get zomg auto-parallelism.
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
I'm doing VR on a 6 year old i7 and it runs perfectly fine. Improvements come almost entirely from updating the gpu
I don’t know if you feel this way, but my complaint about the more hyped cloud services is that not only can they be expensive (fine) but the promised time-savings and simplicity of operating the system often doesn’t really materialize either, except in restricted circumstances that you don’t appreciate in advance and only find out later after you’ve already committed. If it really did save time and were simpler, som…
Well it is better than making even trivial architectures with actual hardware (I have some pictures of me hauling servers over xmas a long time ago; that was cheap (in monthlies and hardware, not in hours!) but I would and do pay a premium for that). Otherwise I do agree somewhat; most overbearing systems can be done much simpler but we are all preparing (and thus paying) for eventualities that most likely will never…
There are some significant high volume cases. We work with companies doing billions of Lambda invocations per month and realising large cost saving benefits. Lambda itself is usually the smallest part of the bill as one of the advantages of building serverless applications is you shift the responsibility of certain execution to specially designed managed services as opposed to code consuming CPU cycles; for example API Gateway takes over routing, S3 takes over file system calls, etc. A large portion of savings organisations see though is in time to production, as well as the overhead of managing servers and container clusters which is a lot more costly than you might think. Especially in the environment we are in now where qualified Dev Ops talent is hard to come by and at a premium. Sure, a developer can take some time to try and learn how to put together some infrastructure, but that's time taken away from adding direct value to business needs and not to mention the fall out when things go pear shaped later because it turns out a few hours Googling doesn't turn someone into a DevOps expert.
But that is the case now too and in my experience it swung to paying through the nose for hardware in general; as more or less a sidetrack I take on projects where I optimise (mostly online) systems. Example; a few weeks ago a startup asked me to check out their setup as they were spending almost 30k$/mo on AWS. I spent a few days optimising and now they are down to less than 10k$. With some more work it will be a fe…
I don’t know if you feel this way, but my complaint about the more hyped cloud services is that not only can they be expensive (fine) but the promised time-savings and simplicity of operating the system often doesn’t really materialize either, except in restricted circumstances that you don’t appreciate in advance and only find out later after you’ve already committed. If it really did save time and were simpler, som…
But it does save an enormous amount of time. We have numerous customers using tools like the Serverless Framework to help put together sophisticated systems in days that would have traditionally taken months. I've experienced it myself personally and worked with multiple customers who see the same thing.
Its also not the initial time saving. After implementation, infrastructure maintenance is almost non-existent because the services are all managed for you and you can focus on providing direct value and not worrying about whether your infrastructure can meet your needs.
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…
reminds me of the dude who managed to parse TB with awk instead of whatever spark like product was trendy
What about battery life? If you prefer, call it carbon footprint. Python has a huge carbon footprint. We should get rid of slow languages for environmental reasons.
But then we'd have to pour in more manpower, which involves more commute, more upkeeping (AC, lunch), etc.