Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Autodesk criticised by architects

extranetevolution.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 387 posts

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#241

Post by quietbritishjim »

Hokusai wrote: post #133
imgabe wrote: post #5

There's easily a multi-billion dollar opportunity for anyone who can unseat Autodesk from the building design industry. Revit is the standard, and while it's improved a lot over the years it's still so ridiculously far from where it could be. I don't think people in software realize how incredibly far behind software tooling is in other industries. Take an idea like "version control for X" or "package manager for X"…

> There's easily a multi-billion dollar opportunity If I was able to build such a software that has potential on stealing Autodesk software. And Autodesk showed at my door with $50,000,000 in cash. I would sell it so fast that I would be flying in a hired private jet to some island free of the pandemic by next morning. The rational is simple. I will make up some numbers: If I have 1 chance in 1,000 to get 10 billion,…

> I will make up some numbers: If I have 1 chance in 1,000 to get 10 billion, that is an expected value of 10 million (10b/1000). 50 millions is way better return than the expected value of 10 million.

The situation is way more severe than this makes it sound:

* The benefit you get from $10b is not actually 200 times as much as the benefit of $50m. (Economists would talk of a "utility function" - that's what you should actually be taking the expectation of - and what I'm saying is that it's nonlinear.) How much it's worth very much depends on your personality, but for most people (maybe all?) it's worth well under twice as much, maybe barely 10% more? Either way, you never have to work again, and maybe your kids never have to work again, and you can enjoy your lifetime retirement in a great deal of luxury, so the difference in experience is minimal. It's probably not a big deal if you have to be careful not to charter private jets too often. So even if the chance of getting $10b is 1 in 10, or even 3 in 4, you still might find the $50m option wins.

* The $50m is right now whereas the $10b dollar requires effort. Not just 9-to-5 effort either, but possibly a CEO-of-a-startup 90-hours-a-week effort. Again, the benefit of $10b is not actually that much compared to $50m, so you might consider that marginal benefit less than than the extra work. If that's so, you would take the money now even if the big win were 100% guaranteed!

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#242

Post by namibj »

pjmlp wrote: post #77
donquichotte wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also remarkable that while in many areas with "theory-heavy" software development (e.g. compilers), the open-source solutions are arguably better than the proprietary ones, this is not at all the case for mechanical CAD software. I wonder whether the overlap of people who can program, people who know enough math to develop a mechanical CAD software and the people who care about mechanical CAD is just too small f…

Except that they are not. Proprietary Fortran compilers beat most of the open source alternatives, when some complain about Fortran performance usually 99% of the times they are using gfortran. Thanks to its license, many of the cool optimizations used by LLVM aren't upstreamed actually, and are kept by the OEMs like Sony, Apple, TI, ARM for their own toolchains. In HPC, many of those GNU/Linux clusters done in colla…

Except that, for CUDA, they do. https://github.com/NervanaSystems/maxas exhibited significantly higher performance than Nvidia's own SGEMM kernel, and https://github.com/mangpo/swizzle-inventor beats all named competitors in the non-texture-memory-input-using implemention. Namely, NVIDIA Performance Primitives, ArrayFire, and Iandola et al ( https://doi.org/10.1109/ICIP.2013.6738436 ).

As for GC implementations: did you consider ZGC in that statement? It's GPL 2.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#243

Post by MH15 »

twelvechairs wrote: post #182
poseva wrote: post #50

As an structural engineer and former Autodesk user, I completely agree with the letter. I always saw Autodesk as a company where software goes to die a slowly painful death. It started with Autodesk Structural Detaling. They bought the software from a small company, renamed the product... and that was it. It had the same bugs release after release... we as customers tried our best to report the bugs, but nobody liste…

Its not just Autodesk, all big software shops tend towards low innovation. Look at Adobe, ESRI, even Microsoft office etc. Core products often haven't changed appreciably in 20 years - the business/money isn't in innovation, it is in having proprietary file formats that are industry standards and bundling big packages of software together that makes it hard to shift off the platform.

With Adobe I'm extremely worried about their acquisition of Algorithmic, the makes of Substance Painter and Substance Designer. I use these tools in 3D animation/texturing, they are truly fantastic tools. Before Adobe bought them, they offered a purchase option, now it's just subscriptions of course.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#244

Post by ethbro »

TallGuyShort wrote: post #239
ethbro wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many people are robotic [...] going through the same steps day after day, file after file, and any change to the workflow is cause of extreme frustration, Work in semi-related process automation, and this . So much! Software engineers can't begin to understand what happens when you change a hotkey, when someone has been doing something 100 times a day for 10 years.

Using a hot key 100 times a day for 10 years sounds like exactly the kind of thing software engineers SHOULD understand. I heard a lot of anger from Vim users when Apple messed with the escape key.

In my experience (~10 years of doing this sort of work) software engineers typically understand how their users use the software in the abstract, but not in the actual experience.

E.g. It is well understood that users rely on a hotkey "a lot." It is not understood that users are so familiar with a hotkey that, if you relocated it on the keyboard, productivity would decrease 40% for 3 months.

That distinction is fairly important when trying to decide whether {new feature X} is actually worth disrupting {old feature Y}.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#245

Post by zorked »

ethbro wrote: post #210
syshum wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but to defend them somewhat long established products like MS Office suffer from 2 competing interests, people that want innovation and people that want stability For my core users any change at all to MS Office is met with frustration and huge amounts of backlash, even something as simple at changing the icon shading is a problem Many people are robotic when it comes to using these products, going through t…

> Many people are robotic [...] going through the same steps day after day, file after file, and any change to the workflow is cause of extreme frustration, Work in semi-related process automation, and this . So much! Software engineers can't begin to understand what happens when you change a hotkey, when someone has been doing something 100 times a day for 10 years.

Software engineers do get that, they have been using vim, emacs for decades with few changes.

Product designers on the other hand.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#246

Post by pjmlp »

namibj wrote: post #242
pjmlp wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that they are not. Proprietary Fortran compilers beat most of the open source alternatives, when some complain about Fortran performance usually 99% of the times they are using gfortran. Thanks to its license, many of the cool optimizations used by LLVM aren't upstreamed actually, and are kept by the OEMs like Sony, Apple, TI, ARM for their own toolchains. In HPC, many of those GNU/Linux clusters done in colla…

Except that, for CUDA, they do. https://github.com/NervanaSystems/maxas exhibited significantly higher performance than Nvidia's own SGEMM kernel, and https://github.com/mangpo/swizzle-inventor beats all named competitors in the non-texture-memory-input-using implemention. Namely, NVIDIA Performance Primitives, ArrayFire, and Iandola et al ( https://doi.org/10.1109/ICIP.2013.6738436 ). As for GC implementations: did…

Yes I did "all sponsored by deep pockets corporations."

Take their money out of the equation and the quality would be as the "state of the art GC" that CPython and MRI Ruby enjoy.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#247

Post by rjsw »

fsloth wrote: post #191
tannhaeuser wrote: post #98

Admittedly, I don't know very much about the requirements for CAD software, but I will say given building CAD software is extremely laborious and expensive, a key step is settling on a standard format for data exchange. When and during the time Google owned SketchUp, they made Collada/.dae export part of the community product, and eg Blender has really great support for Collada import (worked out of the box for a non…

There are many standards. Unfortunately the most used ones are called DXF (Autocad file) and RVT (Revit file). There is an open standard called IFC that has a foothold. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Foundation_Classes Unfortunately, it's still second place in most cases.

The exchange file formats for IFC use the same syntax as those for STEP. The models could have been the same too but the people behind IFC wanted to do their own thing.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#248

Post by namibj »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #238
namibj wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there anything a non-professional can use for the following four usecases (separate software is ok): 1) Reinforced concrete structure design, with support for non-trivial surfaces (e.g. splines/Bezier curves/surfaces). 2) Non-finely-meshed (in comparison to local volume thickness) truss structures, ideally not just classic steel beams + welded/riveted joints, 3) but also aluminium (considering fatigue from non-sta…

Hi there. I’m a metal fabricator by trade and work closely with engineers and steel detailers. You ask for a non-professional solution to four professional grade problems. So I doubt your gong to get a satisfactory answer.

Well, one doesn't need to be professional to the extend where one can argue Tekla Structures to be worth the cost, if the goal is to design structures for hobby/DIY work.

Depending on the purpose, structural failure might be sufficiently low-risk to not need more than a cursory glance by an engineer to check whether the concept is sufficiently-sane and the stresses the software calculated are no reason to worry.

People today build these structures without software-assisted structural analysis. Or anything, really, beyond rough numbers.

I hope there'd be something that be good enough to not fly blind when working on hobby projects that would benefit massively from clever structural design. Finding someone qualified to look over the finished design is often reasonable, but paying them to do clerical work (e.g. re-drawing your blueprint in their CAD, just to get the computer to calculate stresses), would be too expensive.

I just see that these tools all have license fees where any non-full-time usage is directly prohibitive.

Even if a good tool has e.g. 500$ + 20% royalties (of the sale price), that'd be far better than what I see out there from my searching.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#249

Post by Dork1234 »

wappa wrote: post #41
bfuclusion wrote: post #3

I can 100% believe that Autodesk isn't great at responding to customer requests, but presumably these firms would have enough budget to pay for devs to write a solution that works for them. Including making an open file format, EU specific data centers, etc. It would probably even take less time and money than trying to lobby the EU to legislate what they want.

Architect's margins are typically in 5-10%. Avg salary for architect is ~75-80k. They don't have the budget to even pay for small pilot or mvp, even if all 20+ firms pool their money together. The domain knowledge + software engineer skills + computer graphics skills needed are extremely rare.

You are right on point, it even says in the letter:

"It is in this context that a number of practices, who represent a revenue stream for Autodesk of over $22m over the last 5 years"

A $22m over 5 years is not a large deal for the large CAD companies such as Dassault, PTC, Siemens, Nemetschek.

Revit as a software package started as Reflex and then acquired by PTC, PTC decided they couldn't make enough money off it, and basically let former employees leave and start Charles River Software with the Reflex code base. The amount of work required to create Revit, It would not be good return on investment for any company other than Autodesk to sell it. The only reason it makes sense for Autodesk is it keeps the AutoCAD DWG monopoly going.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#250

Post by namibj »

pjmlp wrote: post #246
namibj wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that, for CUDA, they do. https://github.com/NervanaSystems/maxas exhibited significantly higher performance than Nvidia's own SGEMM kernel, and https://github.com/mangpo/swizzle-inventor beats all named competitors in the non-texture-memory-input-using implemention. Namely, NVIDIA Performance Primitives, ArrayFire, and Iandola et al ( https://doi.org/10.1109/ICIP.2013.6738436 ). As for GC implementations: did…

Yes I did "all sponsored by deep pockets corporations." Take their money out of the equation and the quality would be as the "state of the art GC" that CPython and MRI Ruby enjoy.

I see. Your sentence structure is a bit confusing and was successful in causing me to parse it as if you were referring to Java, .Net, and JavaScript with pure open source managed runtimes.
Post reply on HN