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Fast

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Re: Fast

#291

Post by quarkcarbon279 »

cycomanic wrote: post #146
PaulHoule wrote: post #2

Kinda funny but I think LLM-assisted workflows are frequently slow -- that is, if I use the "refactor" features in my IDE it is done in a second, if I ask the faster kind of assistant it comes back in 30 seconds, if I ask the "agentic" kind of assistant it comes back in 15 minutes. I asked an agent to write an http endpoint at the end of the work day when I had just 30 min left -- my first thought was "it took 10 min…

I've already written about this several times here. I think the current trend of LLMs chasing benchmark scores are going in the wrong direction at least as programming tools. In my experience they get it wrong with enough probability, so I always need to check the work. So I end up in a back and forth with the LLM and because of the slow responses it becomes a really painful process and I could often have done the ta…

World of LLMs or not, development should always strive for being fast. In the LLM World, users should always have the controls on accuracy Vs speed. (Though we can try for improving both and not one way or other). For eg at rtrvr.ai we use Gemini Flash as our default and did benchmarking on flash too with 0.9 min per task in the benchmark still yielding top results. That said, I have to accept there are certain web tasks on tail end sites that needs pro to accurately navigate at this point. This is the limitation given our reliance on Gemini models straight up, once we move to our models trained on web trajectories this hopefully will not be a problem.

If using off the shelf LLMs always have a bottleneck of their speed.

Re: Fast

#292

Post by AnonC »

KPGv2 wrote: post #157
Eji1700 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Information density and ease of identification is the antithesis of "engagement" which often has some time on site metric they're hunting. If you can find what you want and read it you might not spend 5 extra seconds lost on their page and thus they can pad their stats for advertisers. Bonus points if the stupid page loads in such a way you accidentally click on something and give them a "conversion". Sadly financial…

The one and only thing I'd do is make the font bigger and increase padding. There's overwhelming consensus that you should have (for English) about 50–70 characters per line of text for the best, fastest, most accurate readability. That's why newspapers pair a small font with multiple columns: to limit number of characters per line of text. HN might have over 100 chars per line of text. It could be better. I know I c…

I agree. In my experience, the default HN is terrible for accessibility (in many ways). I’ve just been waiting for dang and tomhow to get a lot older so that they face the issues themselves enough times to care.

Re: Fast

#293

Post by ryandrake »

NobodyNada wrote: post #211
KPGv2 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one and only thing I'd do is make the font bigger and increase padding. There's overwhelming consensus that you should have (for English) about 50–70 characters per line of text for the best, fastest, most accurate readability. That's why newspapers pair a small font with multiple columns: to limit number of characters per line of text. HN might have over 100 chars per line of text. It could be better. I know I c…

A narrow column of text can make it easier to read individual sentences, but it does so by sacrificing vertical space, which makes it harder to skim a page for relevant content and makes it easier for me to lose track of my place since I can't see as much context, images, and headings on screen all at once. I also find it much harder to read text when the paragraphs form monotonous blocks spanning 10 lines of text ra…

The user should have the choice. If I wanted my browser to display text in a tiny column on my monitor because I thought it would be easier to read, I would... resize my browser to be a tiny column on my monitor!

Re: Fast

#295

Post by bentcorner »

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.

I use this script: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/441566-hn-avatars-in-396-b...

Doesn't really help a ton with recognizing but it makes it easier to track within a thread.

Re: Fast

#296

Post by SatvikBeri »

qingcharles wrote: post #267
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…

What changes have been made to the HN design since it was launched? I know there are changes to the moderation that have taken place many times, but not to the UI. It's one of the most stable sites in terms of design that I can think of. What other sites have lasted this long without giving in to their users' whims? Over the last 4 years my whole design ethos has transformed to "WWHND" (What Would Hacker News Do?) ev…

The only one I remember is adding the ability to collapse comment threads

Re: Fast

#297

Post by [deleted] »

old-gregg wrote: post #60

Fun story time! Early in my career as a software engineer, I developed a reputation for speeding things up. This was back in the day where algorithm knowledge was just as important as the ability to examine the output of a compiler, every new Intel processor was met with a ton of anticipation, and Carmak and Abrash were rapidly becoming famous. Anyway, the 22 year old me unexpectedly gets invited to a customer meetin…

[deleted]

Re: Fast

#298

Post by NobodyNada »

accoil wrote: post #258
NobodyNada wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A narrow column of text can make it easier to read individual sentences, but it does so by sacrificing vertical space, which makes it harder to skim a page for relevant content and makes it easier for me to lose track of my place since I can't see as much context, images, and headings on screen all at once. I also find it much harder to read text when the paragraphs form monotonous blocks spanning 10 lines of text ra…

Why would shorter lines be regular? I use hn with `max-width: 60rem;`, and I get a ragged right (which I very much prefer over justification), while also getting a line length easier for my eyes to follow.

My eyes seem to navigate by paragraph more so than by line. It's hard to try to overanalyze how I read, but I think "corners" of a paragraph are landmarks that I latch onto, and when I reach the end of a line of text I don't scan back along the the line horizontally back to the left, I "jump" back, using the boundaries of the paragraph to estimate the start of the next line, and continue reading from there.

This means that I have a difficult time reading text with very large paragraphs. If a paragraph goes on for 10+ lines, I'll start to lose my place at the end of most lines. This is infuriating and drastically impairs my ability to read and comprehend the text.

It's interesting to me that you mention preferring a ragged right over justification, because I literally do not notice the difference. This suggests to me that we read in different ways -- perhaps you focus on the shape and boundaries of a line more than the shape of a paragraph. This makes intuitive sense to me as to why you would prefer narrower columns.

I don't think that I'm "right" for preferring wider columns or that you or anyone else are "wrong" for preferring narrower columns. I think it's just how my brain learned to process text.

I have pretty strong opinions on what's too wide of a column and what's too narrow of a column, so I won't fullscreen a browser window on anything larger than a laptop. Rather, I'll set it for a size that's comfortable for me. If some web designer decides "actually, your preferred text width is wrong, use mine instead" then I'm gonna be pretty annoyed, and I think rightfully so, because what those studies say is "optimal" for the average person is nigh unreadable for me. (Daring Fireball is the worst offender I can think of off the top of my head. I also find desktop Wikipedia's default view pretty hard to read, but the toggleable "wide" mode is excellent).

Re: Fast

#299

Post by rablackburn »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #174
pron wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programmers (and I'm including myself here) often go to great lengths to not think, to the point of working (with or without a coding assistant) for hours in the hope of avoiding one hour of thinking. What's the saying? "An hour of debugging/programming can save you minutes of thinking," or something like that. In the end, we usually find that we need to do the thinking after all. I think coding assistants would end…

I do both. I like to develop designs in my head, and there’s a lot of trial and error. I think the results are excellent, but I can hit a lot of dead ends, on the way. I just spent several days, trying out all sorts of approaches to PassKeys/WebAuthn. I finally settled on an approach that I think will work great. I have found that the old-fashioned “measure twice, cut once” approach is highly destructive. It was how…

> I have found that the old-fashioned “measure twice, cut once” approach is highly destructive. It was how I was trained, so walking away from it was scary.

To be fair it’s great advice when you’re dealing with atoms.

Mutable patterns of electrons, not so much (:

Re: Fast

#300

Post by bjackman »

Liftyee wrote: post #54

I always have to remind myself of the bank transfer situation in the US whenever I read an article complaining about it. Here in the UK, bank transfers are quick and simple (the money appears to move virtually instantly). Feel free to enlighten me to why they're so slow in the US.

Here in Switzerland bank transfers only take place during business hours

I believe this is because Ürs has to load my silver pieces onto the donkey and drive it to the other bank.

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