We’re approaching the limits of computer power – we need new programmers • Hacker News Board

Re: We’re approaching the limits of computer power – we need new programmers

#161

Post by username90 » Sun, Jan 12, 2020, 9:08 AM UTC

kick wrote: post #89

username90 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Excel is a much better product than Google Sheets, but having the better product doesn't mean having the winning product. Much better product? Sheets takes literally seconds to download and install and runs on all your devices. Also it automatically syncs your data between devices and sharing data with other people is as easy as sharing a website. These are very important features in my view and makes Sheets into a…

Excel also has a web client that can be downloaded in seconds and has more features than Google Sheets.

I didn't know that, pretty neat. One feature it has is that it picks my local language and I see no option to change it to English like I have everywhere else, so I still wont use it. I really dislike internationalization efforts, they are often so bad that it makes everything a lot harder to use for non-Americans than if they just got the same page as Americans.

Re: We’re approaching the limits of computer power – we need new programmers

#162

Post by WhyNott » Sun, Jan 12, 2020, 9:26 AM UTC

papermachete wrote: post #7

sumanthvepa wrote: post #2

The renewed interest in C++ and other compiled languages is an indication of the need to get more efficient. Programmer skill will become more important in the future. But they won't be today's skills. I expect that programming in the future will be more about getting the AI to do what you want rather than writing code directly.

Agreed. Hopefuly a fusion between prolog and haskell comes by - a modern declarative language to end all languages. Let it decide what's best for cache locality and profile your performance. Let it choose the best data structures based on your constraints - compile time and maybe runtime.

FYI, a fusion between prolog and haskell already exists: its called mercury. Its a statically compiled language with decent performance characteristics (at least, in its category).

Re: We’re approaching the limits of computer power – we need new programmers

#163

Post by srg0 » Sun, Jan 12, 2020, 9:45 AM UTC

jonas21 wrote: post #106

champtar wrote: post #81

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…

Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of code performing large matrix multiplications these days was written in Python and executed on GPUs by libraries like Tensorflow and PyTorch. With the right abstractions, programmers can be "lazy" and still get great performance.

Matrix multiplication is usually done by a platform-specific BLAS library (BLAS is an API, there are multiple implementations, e.g. Intel MKL, OpenBLAS, cuBLAS). There are some other linear algebra APIs/libraries, but this is what's used the most.

Most of the numerical code that cares about performance for linear algebra uses this API and links an appropriate implementation.

Re: We’re approaching the limits of computer power – we need new programmers

#164

Post by tluyben2 » Sun, Jan 12, 2020, 10:34 AM UTC

garethmcc wrote: post #137

tluyben2 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 A…

You definitely know what you are doing then; I see mostly the negative cases... The abuses of things for which they are not made etc. Thanks for the insight!

> as well as the overhead of managing servers and container clusters which is a lot more costly than you might think

A lot of people underestimate that in my experience; I see a lot of people who find it cool setting them up (also, a large amount are not doing this scripted but via the web interface). My current case has a myriad of VPC, container clusters, load balancers, clusters, auto scaling etc and it looks really impressive but it's very costly and their dev (who was also devops) disappeared as he buckled under the stress. Also, none of that is needed in this case (not saying there are not many cases it is needed!).

Anyway I will experiment more with Lambda; I think I'm tainted by the very costly abuse cases I had to move to normal linux environments to make affordable for the startup.

Re: We’re approaching the limits of computer power – we need new programmers

#165

Post by tluyben2 » Sun, Jan 12, 2020, 10:46 AM UTC

baron816 wrote: post #134

tluyben2 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> there were a handful of bottlenecks that you caught immediately

Exactly. I was responding mostly to the point that most CTO's/management belief that you should just let hardware handle it while programmers should just deliver fast as they can. He says it is always a balance; you cannot pay for optimized assembly when writing a crud application, but I claim we completely swung to the other side of the spectrum. For instance, a financial company I did work for had no database indices besides the primary key and left AWS to scale that for them. And then we are not even talking about Mongo (this was MySQL); Mongo is completely abused as it is famous for 'scaling' and 'no effort setup', so a lot of people don't think about performance or structure at all in any way; people just dump data in it and query it in diabolical ways. They just trust the software/hardware to fix that for them. I recently tried to migrate a large one to MySQL, but it is pure hell because of it's dynamic nature; complete structured changed over time while the data from all the past is still in there; fields appeared, changed content type etc and nothing is structured or documented. With 100s of gbs of that and not sure if things are actually correctly imported, I gave up. They are still paying through the nose; I fixed some indexing in their setup (I am by no means a Mongo expert but some things are universal when you think about data structures, performance and data management) which made some difference, but MySQL or Postgresql would've saved them a lot of money in my opinion. Ah well; at least the development of the system was cheap...

Re: We’re approaching the limits of computer power – we need new programmers

#166

Post by tluyben2 » Sun, Jan 12, 2020, 10:54 AM UTC

herval wrote: post #94

tluyben2 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What sort of waste you tend to see more, if you do this regularly? Is it the case that people are aware of the cost and “don’t care”, or is it surprising/hidden cost?

There are 2 types: 1) they know the costs and thought it would scale infinitely with money but it doesn't (crashes, hangs, etc) 2) they knew it would cost more to scale but they did not expect it going up quite that fast as it does with more traffic (not linear).

Re: We’re approaching the limits of computer power – we need new programmers

#167

Post by anonytrary » Sun, Jan 12, 2020, 10:57 AM UTC

majewsky wrote: post #36

ledauphin wrote: post #10

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…

> 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.

5 seconds is probably fast enough to deliver the content to 80% of the people who need it. If that application has an acceptable bounce rate even with a load time of 5 seconds, then that might be the minimum acceptable human time.

Re: We’re approaching the limits of computer power – we need new programmers

#168

Post by noisem4ker » Sun, Jan 12, 2020, 11:06 AM UTC

peterwwillis wrote: post #97

Does the sad realization occur to anyone else that if all software was open instead of proprietary, we probably would already have the most optimized, most efficient, most advanced software? Instead, most of it's proprietary, so we've been re-inventing the wheel for decades. I remember how well and how fast software worked 20 years ago. Today I have to reboot my telephone to make a call.

I think there's so much more code already than people are capable and willing to work on. Exposing my business' code to the world would only add to the pile.

Open source as we know it is the perfect playground for trying out new technologies, just for the sake of it or for building resumes. This is exactly "reinventing the wheel" as you say it.

Last, I'm not sure of the link between open source and software quality.

Re: We’re approaching the limits of computer power – we need new programmers

#169

Post by tluyben2 » Sun, Jan 12, 2020, 11:12 AM UTC

WhyNott wrote: post #162

papermachete wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Hopefuly a fusion between prolog and haskell comes by - a modern declarative language to end all languages. Let it decide what's best for cache locality and profile your performance. Let it choose the best data structures based on your constraints - compile time and maybe runtime.

FYI, a fusion between prolog and haskell already exists: its called mercury. Its a statically compiled language with decent performance characteristics (at least, in its category).

Mercury was pretty good last I tried and a very interesting language at that; I like Prolog and did quite a lot of work in it in the 90s (mostly research). I like how clean it looks (that's from Prolog) and the performance is great due to the fact that you give quite a lot of info to the compiler when you are programming (see for instance [0]). It has many backends it compiles to (Java, .NET, Erlang, native; not sure how well they are all maintained). It is a shame that not more people are working on the language and that not more people use it; I think there was not enough hype surrounding it. I gave up as it could not produce native code for ARM, a platform I always need for everything I do (for many years already), so to take a language seriously as something to dive in, it needs to have ARM support. Not sure what the state of that is now; this is many years ago.

[0] https://www.mercurylang.org/information/doc-latest/mercury_r...

Re: We’re approaching the limits of computer power – we need new programmers

#170

Post by tluyben2 » Sun, Jan 12, 2020, 11:24 AM UTC

qwerty456127 wrote: post #27

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.

> Why do we need more computer power?

A lot of the latest revolutions (good or bad, that's up to the reader); crunching huge data, ML, every more realistic simulations etc comes from every faster machines. If that growth stops, the article suggests we do something that was (and still is in some circles) normal in the 70-80s with homecomputers and consoles; because you could not upgrade the hardware and almost nothing was compatible (which is the most common reason the IBM PC won) to the next generation, you optimised the software to get everything from that existing hardware you had on your desk. And people are still doing that.

One of my personal miracle examples; my first love was the MSX computer, which is a Z80 3.58mhz computer with (in my case) 128kb in it. This machine could do nice games for the time and some business applications. Many years later, that same physical hardware (I still have my first one) can do this [0]. Obviously the hardware was always capable of doing this, but it needed many years (decades) for programmer(s) to figure out how to get every ounce of performance and memory utilization out of these things and push it beyond what anyone thought possible.

If the improvements in performance stagnate, there is a lot of room for getting most out of the existing hardware. I would think though that in the case of modern hardware, the geniuses that get to that point will get some language to compile to this optimised optimum instead of having to handcode and optimise applications like the Symbos guy did.

[0] http://www.symbos.de/