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Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?

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Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?

#71

Post by solardev »

archagon wrote: post #69
solardev wrote: post #8

The future of gaming is streaming, and home PC gaming hardware will eventually go the way of DVD players. GeForce Now is succeeding where OnLive and Stadia failed (20+ million users now, apparently). Offloading rendering to the cloud means much improved thermals, graphics, and battery life -- especially for laptop users and Mac owners. Apple Silicon is cool, but it's not going to beat a 4080 for pure graphics perform…

There is no way you’re playing shooters on any sort of competitive level over a streaming service.

Maybe not if you want to go pro, but amateur/casual FPS play is totally fine. Have you tried it recently?

Between GeForce Now's 120 Hz support, adaptive v-sync, and Nvidia Reflex, it's very playable IMHO. No, it's not as nice as having a 4080 below your desk, but compared to midrange or lower GPUs, the minor input/network latency is more than worth it in exchange for a smooth high FPS, higher viewing distance, and great DLSS.

I don't play competitively (as in ranked), but I do play a lot of shooters on it. It's so much better than it was on Stadia, for example.

Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?

#72

Post by archagon »

solardev wrote: post #71
archagon wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way you’re playing shooters on any sort of competitive level over a streaming service.

Maybe not if you want to go pro, but amateur/casual FPS play is totally fine. Have you tried it recently? Between GeForce Now's 120 Hz support, adaptive v-sync, and Nvidia Reflex, it's very playable IMHO. No, it's not as nice as having a 4080 below your desk, but compared to midrange or lower GPUs, the minor input/network latency is more than worth it in exchange for a smooth high FPS, higher viewing distance, and gr…

I don't play competitively either, but it's pretty easy for me to detect a frame of lag in my mouse controls. (I had to return a non-gaming ergonomic mouse for this reason.) Maybe most people won't care, but it has a material impact on gameplay and immersion.

Anyway, my problem is with the assertion that streaming is "the future" of gaming. It might become a major segment of the market, but I don't expect that it will dominate.

Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?

#74

Post by RetroTechie »

User time is more valuable than programmer's time. Read: programmers should operate as if CPU cycles, RAM, disk space etc is precious. Less = more.

Why? If programmer builds something only for him/herself, or a few of their peers, it really doesn't matter. Do as you like. But be aware that one-off / prototype != final product.

Commonly held view is that programmers are a small % of population, thus their skills are rare (valuable), thus if programmer's time can be saved by wasting some (user) CPU cycles, RAM etc (scripting languages, I'm looking at you!), so be it. Optimize only if necessary.

BUT! Ideally, the programming is only done once. If software is successful, it will be used by many users, again & again over a long time.

The time / RAM / storage wasted over the many runs of such software (not to mention bugs), by many users, outweighs any saving in programmers time.

In short: fine, kick out a prototype or something duct-taped from inefficient components.

But if it catches on: optimize / re-design / simplify / debug / verify the heck out of it, to the point where no CPU cycle or byte can be taken out without losing the core functionality.

Existing software landscape is too much duct-tape, compute expensive but never-used features, inefficient, RAM gobbling, bug-ridden crap that should never have been released.

And that developer has a beefy machine doesn't mean users do.

Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?

#75

Post by RetroTechie »

mikewarot wrote: post #17

BitGrid[1] is the most efficient general purpose compute architecture possible for Petaflops and beyond. It eliminates memory bandwidth issues. Its a nice elegant alternative architecture. I'm quite surprised nobody actually tried it earlier. [1] https://github.com/mikewarot/Bitgrid * I give 50/50 odds I'm a crackpot on this one... I'd really like to know for sure which way that coin toss comes out in the end

> It eliminates memory bandwidth issues.

About that: where is the RAM here?

Some applications are compute-heavy, and BitGrid seems a nice architecture for that.

But some applications are not. Where can they get/put their data?

Btw... this screams for implementation on reasonably sized FPGA (say, 100k+ LUTs). The size to have a go at more interesting uses than "hello world" type ones.

Any chance of doing that? A single cell in the grid looks simple enough. Plenty cheapo FPGA boards around.

Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?

#76

Post by solardev »

archagon wrote: post #72
solardev wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe not if you want to go pro, but amateur/casual FPS play is totally fine. Have you tried it recently? Between GeForce Now's 120 Hz support, adaptive v-sync, and Nvidia Reflex, it's very playable IMHO. No, it's not as nice as having a 4080 below your desk, but compared to midrange or lower GPUs, the minor input/network latency is more than worth it in exchange for a smooth high FPS, higher viewing distance, and gr…

I don't play competitively either, but it's pretty easy for me to detect a frame of lag in my mouse controls. (I had to return a non-gaming ergonomic mouse for this reason.) Maybe most people won't care, but it has a material impact on gameplay and immersion. Anyway, my problem is with the assertion that streaming is "the future" of gaming. It might become a major segment of the market, but I don't expect that it wil…

Well, that's why it's an opinion that few agree with :)

IMO most people don't care about playing competitively anyway (as in ranked e-sports). PVP shooters are common even on shitty devices (like PUBG or Fortnite on phones)... and of course consoles. Having a leet PC gaming setup with a super high DPI mouse just isn't a concern of many -- or maybe most -- gamers. Good enough is good enough.

Granted, people have been saying "cloud gaming is the future!" for ~~the better part of~~ (edit: more than!) a decade now, since OnLive was first launched. Stadia was a very public failure, but now there are many (GFN, PSNow, XCloud, Luna, Boosteroid, Shadow, etc.) Among them, GeForce Now is the only one that has the synergy of also being the dominant GPU producer. I believe it won't be long before more players game on the cloud than on PCs.

But feel free to come back in 5-10 years and tell me how wrong I was, lol.

Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?

#77

Post by cratermoon »

akasakahakada wrote: post #48
cratermoon wrote: post #5

I have two, at least. 1. Personal names are not generic strings, any more than Dates are numbers or Money is a floating point value. Name, as in a person's given and family name, or whatever, should be a type in every standard library, with behaviors appropriate for the semantics of a Name, language, and country. Yes there are lots of conflicting international differences. We've managed to handle languages and calend…

1. Structure of a name depends on that person, not the country or state or ethnicity. Whatever standards you make, it won't fit.

So taking a name and applying the reverse() operation on it yields a name? You can concatenate the names of two people together and that becomes a valid identifier for the two-person tuple?

Strings have behaviors that names don't, and names have domain-specific meaning that strings don't. An entire class of bugs can be eliminated if we stop treating people's names as sequences of characters enclosed in quotes.

Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?

#78

Post by mikewarot »

RetroTechie wrote: post #75
mikewarot wrote: post #17

BitGrid[1] is the most efficient general purpose compute architecture possible for Petaflops and beyond. It eliminates memory bandwidth issues. Its a nice elegant alternative architecture. I'm quite surprised nobody actually tried it earlier. [1] https://github.com/mikewarot/Bitgrid * I give 50/50 odds I'm a crackpot on this one... I'd really like to know for sure which way that coin toss comes out in the end

> It eliminates memory bandwidth issues. About that: where is the RAM here? Some applications are compute-heavy, and BitGrid seems a nice architecture for that. But some applications are not. Where can they get/put their data? Btw... this screams for implementation on reasonably sized FPGA (say, 100k+ LUTs). The size to have a go at more interesting uses than "hello world" type ones. Any chance of doing that? A singl…

The program RAM is the columns of the LUTs, 64 bits/cell.

The Data RAM is the latches of the data flowing through the LUTs, 4 bits/cell.

I've thought it likely that edge I/O would be best.

The debug tooling would ideally map everything as 2 chunks of RAM, program and state, thus allowing random I/O via a host CPU or DMA.

The major hurdle after that is software for compiling and routing, which I intend to build

My emulator runs at a good clip, 32 x 32 cells at about 35 khz, or 1024 x 1024 at about 16 hz. I haven't multi threaded it yet, but I can. That should give about 4x performance

Maybe an emulator library for the Arduino would be a good idea?

The Google chip shuttles should be a good way to get it implemented for real.

Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?

#79

Post by bnchrch »

Oooh this is fun!

Ok quick list

* Class Inheritance is an anti-pattern.

* Python is an anti-pattern.

* The 80/20 of functional programming is use pure functions and acknowledge that everything is a list or an operation on a list.

* Javascript/Typescript will continue to win.

* Erlang/Elixir/BEAM is the better timeline. But unfortunately we're not on it.

* Microservices are a luxury and most people should just vertically scale their monolith

* GraphQL is better than REST when you have multiple clients, codegen or any AI/RAG needs

* Frontend Frameworks are not changing as fast as a backend developer wants you to believe

* Including a FE Framework in your application at the begining is a smart move for anything consumer facing.

* The Haskell community is their own worst enemy.

Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?

#80

Post by mattbillenstein »

karmakaze wrote: post #62
mattbillenstein wrote: post #10

I'd almost always rather build something than use a 3rd party service. I understand it, I run it, and I don't have to deal with 3rd party's changes, performance problems, or downtime. Also, less bugs related to data consistency.

Everything? Write your own distributed database? I'd much rather use opensource.

No, I mean I'd rather build tooling to run Postgres than use a 3rd party service to run it for me.
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