The State of the Art is Terrible • Hacker News Board

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#201

Post by PostOnce » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 2:53 PM UTC

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #31

...Sure, your computer can perform 10 billion floating point operations per second. But most of the time it’s not doing anything at all. Just like you... This is a great rant. Nice emotional content, lots of technical details, the author qualifies his credentials, etc. Easily one of the better articles I've read in the past few weeks. One of the things he mentions is the pain of setup -- something I've painfully watc…

...Sure, your car can go 150 miles per hour. But most of the time, it's not even being driven.

You need not use all of your capabilities all the time. My A/C can go to 50 degrees. Maybe there will come a day when I need that. Until then, I'll keep it above 70.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#202

Post by drzaiusapelord » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 2:58 PM UTC

thaumaturgy wrote: post #70

I'd like to buy Zack a drink, because all of this is obvious to those poor shmucks among us that handle the support end of things (also known as the "shit end"). I've been saying a lot of the same things for years. I'm tired of it now; I'm starting to give up, because it's obvious there isn't a programmer out there that gives a damn. You can try telling them that there's something wrong with software -- something fun…

This is also why IT admins become fascists over the long haul. Turns out nothing is compatible with anything, especially turn-key software. Turns out that no vendors care to test with any other vendors. Turns out that everything is in some state of brokeness and the only sane solution is to limit complexity and variety and focus on x amount of technologies that we have time to test and make work.

This is why you get a PC without admin rights, set to autoupdate, with our default image, our security policies, and our unpopular defaults (IE9 in my case) but with an option for chrome for those who request it.

I have no idea how home users get by. I hear about their problems and its sounds like a nightmare of poorly written default (your average home laptop is a minefield of OEM junk and a malware magnet). I suspect this is why Apple is doing so well. They abstract away the complexity and actually make their products compatible with their OS and other offerings! Toss in the fact that OSX isn't as targetted by malware, and I can see the allure. On the corporate side, linux is the same deal. We all are comfortable with the command line tools we learned in high school/college/whenever and they haven't changed. Its like an old friend. Sure, it may not generally "just work" but its easier to tinker and fix than a closed system.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#203

Post by speleding » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 3:11 PM UTC

zackmorris wrote: post #13

singular wrote: post #11

Though I speak from a probably utterly uninformed + unqualified standpoint, this raises a few points for me:- 1. If x86 hardware is so terrible (and I have heard that the architecture really is bad many times), how come we don't have competing chips out there which are many, many times more efficient? I know ARM outperforms on the low-power front, but not in terms of perf to my knowledge. Do such chips exist? And if…

You are right that it's hard to compete with x86 but it's for a weird reason (beyond the economic might of behemoths like Intel). x86 has good density, so it can do more in a few bytes than sparser instruction sets like RISC. In the late 90s when computers starting being memory bandwidth limited, PowerPC lost out even though it was perhaps a more "modern" architecture. I've often wondered if someone would generalize…

There are other downsides to the ancient x86 instruction set than just a complicated decode step (which isn't all that complicated in transistor count). For example, think how much more efficient a compiler could be if it had 256 registers to work with. Or what if we could swap context in a cycle or two instead of the multi cycle ordeal that's needed now to go from user space to kernel space. It would finally make a micro kernel a viable option. Technically easy enough if you can start from scratch, but all software would need to be rewritten.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#204

Post by groovy2shoes » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 3:32 PM UTC

tensor wrote: post #98

The thing that the author of this rant and every other rant like it don't understand is that computer science is hard . While tools like functional programming may indeed deliver on the promise of a 60% code reduction, they have a correspondingly higher barrier to learning. Evolving algorithms? Automatic programming? These problems become theoretically intractable so quickly it's not even funny (I currently do resear…

Semicolons in a grammar are nothing like nails or screws. Nails and screws hold things together. The vast majority of the time, semicolons in code are only visual indicators of the end of a statement; another perfectly good visual indicator is a newline. Many languages that require semicolons could (with minor modifications to the grammar) be cleanly parsed without any sort of statement terminator. See the Lua grammar for an example: http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/manual.html#8

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#205

Post by groovy2shoes » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 3:37 PM UTC

bobsh wrote: post #125

Oberon - The Overlooked Jewel: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~franz/Site/pubs-pdf/BC03.pdf

Unfortunately, the history of computing is littered with overlooked jewels. Oberon is only one example.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#206

Post by srdev » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 3:49 PM UTC

zackmorris wrote: post #103

Hey everyone thanks for your comments, I have learned a lot today. For all I complain about the state of technology, it's remarkable that I am using it to communicate with some of the most amazing people in the world. You just can't make this stuff up. I think that maybe it's time to stop taking the pain and do something about it. The only part I've never been able to figure out is how to earn enough income and maint…

The first step to solving a problem is to understand exactly what the problem is and know the problem domain. I read your rant, and I'm afraid I did not come away understanding what the problem is.

What do you think the problem (or problems) is exactly?

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#207

Post by balloot » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 4:02 PM UTC

thaumaturgy wrote: post #70

I'd like to buy Zack a drink, because all of this is obvious to those poor shmucks among us that handle the support end of things (also known as the "shit end"). I've been saying a lot of the same things for years. I'm tired of it now; I'm starting to give up, because it's obvious there isn't a programmer out there that gives a damn. You can try telling them that there's something wrong with software -- something fun…

You remember when most things "just worked"? When exactly was that?

I remember when you would buy a new mouse and sometimes it just wouldn't work and then you actually had to take it back to the store because you had something slightly different about your computer and there wasn't a released driver yet.

I remember when Blue Screen of Death was more than just a joke, and it was an actual thing that happened on a fairly regular basis.

You know how everyone thinks IE6 is teh devil? I remember when it came out and was awesome and it actually killed off the competitors for good with all its sweet features.

That's the world I grew up in, and the current state of things is MUCH better.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#208

Post by ChuckMcM » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 4:02 PM UTC

aquark wrote: post #76

buff-a wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so surely if it is possible to develop a processor which is so much better than x86 then why don't they already exist? Suppose I invented a new chip that was awesome for gaming, spreadsheets, word processing, databases and power consumption. Who would build PCs with it? What OS would it run if someone built it? Who would buy that? Its not merely a "huge, massively important thing". Its the only thing.

Intel & HP tried this with the Itanium. A decade (or two) and billions of dollars later and x86 or at least x64 is still king. No doubt they made some mistakes, but it wasn't for lack of trying. (And having debugged code on an ia64 I'm quite happy with the status quo!)

Yes, and it was hilarious. It stunned me that Intel couldn't figure out that AMD was going to eat their lunch when they figured out a way to extend the x86 architecture to 64 bits while retaining software portability. For years Intel had beaten challenger after challenger based on the juggernaut of their software base (680x0, MIPS, NS32032, SPARC, PowerPC, Etc) and yet their brash attempt to push Itanium by not extending x86 was counter to all those previous victories. Kind of like a general taking a battle plan known to work and ignoring it.

As we move into an era of 'I don't see why I should get a new machine' of growth minimization there is a window for folks like ARM to get in with 'all day computing.' But it will take someone extraordinary to make that happen. Look at the state of Linux on ARM to understand the power of a legacy architecture.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#209

Post by sangaya » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 4:09 PM UTC

thaumaturgy wrote: post #70

I'd like to buy Zack a drink, because all of this is obvious to those poor shmucks among us that handle the support end of things (also known as the "shit end"). I've been saying a lot of the same things for years. I'm tired of it now; I'm starting to give up, because it's obvious there isn't a programmer out there that gives a damn. You can try telling them that there's something wrong with software -- something fun…

Every morning when I get in my car for the morning commute my Android device automatically connects to it via Bluetooth. From the steering wheel I press play and my personal music collection on Google Music's cloud starts streaming through the internet, to the 4G cell network, to my device in a car traveling 70mph, to the car via Bluetooth, and I hear the music through my car speakers.

"Everything is amazing and nobody is happy" - Louis CK

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#210

Post by balloot » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 4:13 PM UTC

This guy just sounds like you run-of-the-mill crappy programmer.

"I can't get things to work! It's the fault of The World - it couldn't possibly be me! I've had a game in the App Store!"

As a rule, the worse the programmer, the more convoluted his solutions to problems. Maybe instead of writing huge rants on his blog, he should re-evaluate the way he does things so the world doesn't seem so horrible. Or get a new job.