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Fast

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Re: Fast

#271

Post by FridgeSeal »

bravesoul2 wrote: post #164

I find most jobs I had fast becomes a big issue once things are too slow. Or expensive. It's a retroactively fixed thing. Like imagine forgetting to make a UI, shipping just an API to a customer then thinking "oh shit, they need a UI they are not programmers". And only noticing from customer complaints. That is how performance is often treated. This is probably because performance problems usually require load or unu…

In addition to all this, I’m also of the opinion that most users just have software “lumped on them” and have little to no recourse for complaint, so they’re just forced/trained to put-up-and-shut-up about it.

As a result, performance (and a few other things) functionally never gets “requested”. Throw in the fact that for many mid-to-large orgs, software is not bought by the people who are forced to use it and you have the perfect storm for never hearing about performance complaints.

This in turn, justifies never prioritising performance.

Re: Fast

#272

Post by arunc »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #73

I wish I could live in a world of fast. C++ with no forward decls, no clang to give data about why the compile time is taking so long. 20 minute compiles. Only git tool I like (git-cola) is written in Python and slows to a crawl. gitk takes a good minute just to start up. Only environments are MSYS which is slow due to Windows, and WSL which isn't slow but can't do DPI scaling so I squint at everything.

I might get down voted for saying this on HN, but I'll still say it.

As C++ devs we used to complain a lot about it's compilation speed. Now after moving to Rust, sometimes we wish we could just go back to C++ due to Rust's terrible compilation speeds! :-)

Re: Fast

#273

Post by qingcharles »

RandomBacon wrote: post #217
underdeserver wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, I think the HN crowd likes fast because most tech today is unreasonably slow, when we know it could be fast.

It's infuriating when I have to use a chatbot, and it pretends to be typing (or maybe looking up a pre-planned generic response or question)... I'm already pissed I have to use the damn thing, please don't piss me off more.

What's sad is that I always open grok.com if it's a quick simple query because their UI loads about 10X faster than GPT/Gemini/Claude.

Re: Fast

#274

Post by citizenpaul »

skydhash wrote: post #94
citizenpaul wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing I've found that LLM speeds up my work is a sort of advanced find replace. A prompt like " I want to make this change in the code where any logic deals with XXX. To be/do XXX instead/additionally/somelogicchange/whatever" It has been pretty decent at these types of changes and saves time of poking though and finding all the places I would have updated manually in a way that find/replace never could. Tho…

I supposed you haven’t tried emacs grep mode or vim quickfix? If the change is mechanical, you create a macro and be done in seconds. If it’s not, you still got the high level overview and quick navigation.

I'm decent at that kind of stuff. However thats not really what I'm talking about. For instance today I needed two logic flows. One for data flowing in one direction. Then a basically but not quite reversed version of the same logic for when the data comes back. I was able to write the first version then tell the LLM

"Now duplicate this code but invert the logic for data flowing in the opposite direction."

I'm simplifying this whole example obviously but that was the basic task I was working on. It was able to spit out in a few seconds what would have taken me probably more than an hour and at least one tedium headache break. I'm not aware of any pre LLM way to do something like that.

Or a little while back I was implementing a basic login/auth for a website. I was experimenting with high output token LLM's (i'm not sure that's the technical term) and asked it to make a very comprehensive login handler. I had to stop it somewhere in the triple digits of cases and functions. Perhaps not a great "pro" example of LLM but even though it was a hilariously over complex setup it did give me some ideas I hadn't thought about. I didn't use any of the code though.

Its far from the magic LLM sellers want us to believe but it can save time same as various emac/vim tricks can to devs that want to learn them.

Re: Fast

#275

Post by qingcharles »

angrydev wrote: post #224
chamomeal wrote: post #28

Only sorta related, but it’s crazy that to me how much our standards have dropped for speed/responsiveness in some areas. I used to play games on N64 with three friends. I didn’t even have a concept of input lag back then. Control inputs were just instantly respected by the game. Meanwhile today, if I want to play rocket league with three friends on my Xbox series S (the latest gen, but the less powerful version), I…

How about the speed of going from a powered off console to playing the actual game? Sleep mode helps with resuming on console, but god forbid you’re on a pc with a game that has anti cheat, or comped menus. You will sit there, sometimes for a full minute waiting. I absolutely cannot stand these games.

My buddy booted up his PC after gaming on his PS5 for two weeks and every single app needed multi-gig updates. Xbox app, Logitech app, Discord, Windows 11, Chrome, Steam. The whole enchilada. Rage inducing compared to sticking a cart in an N64.

Re: Fast

#276

Post by spangry »

cyanydeez wrote: post #139
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #104

Just want to say how much I thank YCom for not f'ing up the HN interface, and keeping it fast. I distinctly remember when Slashdot committed suicide. They had an interface that was very easy for me to scan and find high value comments, and in the name of "modern UI" or some other nonsense needed to keep a few designers employed, completely revamped it so that it had a ton of whitespace and made it basically impossibl…

Ive wanted tp poll HN about how many people actively track usernames. With IRC its basically part of the task, but every forum i read, its rare that i ever consider whose saying what.

For me it's more a recognition after the fact thing: "Oh that was a good comment who said that? Oh that guy, yeah not surprised."

Re: Fast

#277

Post by pmarreck »

Fast is why, after decades doing high-level scripting, I'm now exploring lower-level languages that live closer to the metal...

Re: Fast

#278

Post by ChadNauseam »

xyzzy123 wrote: post #266
resonious wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counter example (re: agents), I routinely delegate simple tasks to Claude Code and get near-perfect results. But I've also had experiences like yours where I ended up wasting more time than saved. I just kept trying with different types of tasks, and narrowed it down to the point where I have a good intuition for what works and what doesn't. The benefit is I can fire off a request on my phone, stick it in my poc…

Thats cool, how are you integrating your phone with your Claude workflow?

I don't know how to do it with Claude Code, but I was at a beach vacation for the past few days and I was studying french on my phone with an webapp that I made. Sometimes I'd notice something bug me, and I used cursor's "background agents" tool to ask it to make a change. This is essentially just a website where you can type in your request, and they allocate a VM, check out your repository, then run the cursor LLM agent inside that VM to implement your requested changes, then push it and create a pull request to your repo. Because I have CI/CD setup, I then just merged the change and waited for it to deploy (usually going for a swim in-between).

I realized as I was doing it that I wouldn't be able to tell anyone about it because I would sound like the most obnoxious AI bro ever. But it worked! (For the simple requests I used it on.) The most annoying part was that I had to tell it to run rustfmt every time, because otherwise it would fail CI and I wouldn't be able to merge it. And then it would take forever to install a rust toolchain and figure out how to run clippy and stuff. But it did feel crazy to be able to work on it from the beach. Anyway, I'm apparently not very good at taking vacations, lol

Re: Fast

#279

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

Otek wrote: post #149
stronglikedan wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah it's one of those things that are funny to the people saying it because they don't yet realize it doesn't make sense. I bet they felt that later, in the hotel room, in the shower, probably with a bottle of scotch.

> I bet they felt that later, in the hotel room, in the shower, probably with a bottle of scotch. Geez, life in my opinion is not so serious. It’s okay to say stupid things and not feel bad about it, as long as you are not trying to hurt anyone. I bet they felt great and immediately forgot about this bad joke.

Not in front of an executive of an important customer, it isn't. They are remarkably humorless about making money.

Re: Fast

#280

Post by emmelaich »

didibus wrote: post #194
9rx wrote: post #12

> Rarely in software does anyone ask for “fast.” They don't explicitly ask for it, but they won't take you seriously if you don't at least pretend to be. "Fast" is assumed. Imagine if Rust had shown up, identical in every other way, but said "However, it is slower than Ruby". Nobody would have given it the time of day. The only reason it was able to gain attention was because it claimed to be "Faster than C++". Watch…

You're taking the wrong conclusion, "Fast" is a winning differentiator only when you offer the same feature-set, but faster. Your example says it, people will go, this is like X (meaning it does/has the same features as X), but faster. And now people will flock from X to your X+faster thing. Which tells us nothing about if people would also move to a X+more-features, or a X+nicer-ux, or a X+cheaper, etc., without the…

Really not sure about that. People will give up features for speed all the time. See git vs bzr/hg/svn/darcs/monotone,...
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