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

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

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 265 posts

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

#61

Post by pinewurst »

btrettel wrote: post #34
jryb wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s critical for a lot of scientific and industrial applications. Too many things just can’t be done without a supercomputer.

I disagree. I did my masters' on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and I'd say that a large fraction of supercomputer use (in fluid dynamics at least) is wasted. Mostly because people take naive approaches and end up computing the wrong thing, set up their simulation poorly, reinvent the wheel, use HPC on something that can be computed by hand, etc. If they read more of the literature they'd have a more solid grasp…

This is _so_ true! I remember a few years ago interviewing for a position where the largest supercomputer in the area was being used to run Perl programs. Of course the place I ended up working was running Python at supercomputer scale and running out of I/O bandwidth because of all the naive Python runtime startup crud.

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

#62

Post by JustSomeNobody »

Right now, most organizations (and developers) are focused on developer speed/productivity. As compute resources plateau, some developers will be required to focus on compute efficiency and speed. There will always be a limit to how fast you want your CRUD web app to run vs how much you want to spend on developers, though.

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

#63

Post by nine_k »

errantspark wrote: post #57
narag wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just realized that this situation hasn't improved much in twenty years. But the problems are really commercial (or maybe "political") not technical. Then there's the ongoing War On Native Apps. I'm no prophet, but I did predict then that the browser would have eaten all the business applications space by now. It was just obvious. Colleagues objected that the web could not match rich native programs.

Well it can't, but it doesn't matter in the way your colleagues thought it would. Excel is a much better product than Google Sheets, but having the better product doesn't mean having the winning product.

Excel is still king in finance and much of other demanding cases.

Google Sheets ate the lower end, though; it's a bit like iOS vs Android.

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

#64

Post by narag »

errantspark wrote: post #57
narag wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just realized that this situation hasn't improved much in twenty years. But the problems are really commercial (or maybe "political") not technical. Then there's the ongoing War On Native Apps. I'm no prophet, but I did predict then that the browser would have eaten all the business applications space by now. It was just obvious. Colleagues objected that the web could not match rich native programs.

Well it can't, but it doesn't matter in the way your colleagues thought it would. Excel is a much better product than Google Sheets, but having the better product doesn't mean having the winning product.

I do believe a browser app can do pretty much the same as a native one, but I agree that the important bit is they didn't see the big picture: mostly free tech, no installation, safer, low mantainance, out-of-the-box truly client server, etc.

Actually the web now is 100X more beautiful and responsive than at that time. I mean what you can do with an intranet server, not the radioactive media monstrosities.

Not really a spreadsheet person, I can believe Excel is better than Sheets. But is web vs native the reason?

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

#65

Post by username90 »

errantspark wrote: post #57
narag wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just realized that this situation hasn't improved much in twenty years. But the problems are really commercial (or maybe "political") not technical. Then there's the ongoing War On Native Apps. I'm no prophet, but I did predict then that the browser would have eaten all the business applications space by now. It was just obvious. Colleagues objected that the web could not match rich native programs.

Well it can't, but it doesn't matter in the way your colleagues thought it would. Excel is a much better product than Google Sheets, but having the better product doesn't mean having the winning product.

> 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 better product than Excel. A power user might have different opinions, but to me writing sheet.new in my browser is just so much more convenient.

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

#66

Post by ac29 »

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.

That is human speed though (better than human speed, even). For most human tasks that need to be done, 5ms versus 5s doesn't really matter.

Consider also that spending an hour at the DMV for them to update a database entry or two is also human speed.

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

#67

Post by yoz-y »

michaelbrave wrote: post #48
pjc50 wrote: post #23

The major problem areas are those where it's economically "best" to do the computationally inefficient thing. The obvious example is the quick-to-build MVP, but many of the bigger problems come from platform conflicts. Because we have at least five different actively uncooperating operating system platforms, it's hard to build portable native apps - so people build electron apps instead. We also use the web browser a…

Flutter looks promising for solving a lot of the platform conflict problems.

Any multi platform framework will inevitably hit the hurdle of supporting only the common denominator. For many applications this is fine, but for the sake of consistency I hope native applications will still live for a while.

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

#69

Post by zozbot234 »

contingencies wrote: post #43
pjc50 wrote: post #23

The major problem areas are those where it's economically "best" to do the computationally inefficient thing. The obvious example is the quick-to-build MVP, but many of the bigger problems come from platform conflicts. Because we have at least five different actively uncooperating operating system platforms, it's hard to build portable native apps - so people build electron apps instead. We also use the web browser a…

Don't forget the benefits of portability and the need to hire people as factors contributing to the use of higher level, generally less efficient languages: a few days back I read a description of C as a "hard to find skill these days".

There are plenty of people with real skills in C working in embedded. It might even be easier to find C than C++ developers.

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

#70

Post by userbinator »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #68

Stock photo shows voltage regulator circuitry beneath cpu, most likely SMD capacitors. I wonder if the author thinks these are the parts he is writing about?

Those are the decoupling capacitors under the CPU socket. A very odd choice of photograph for this article, but perhaps an ironic hint that we need programmers who also know more about the hardware...
Post reply on HN