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

Software Disenchantment (2018)

tonsky.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 504 posts

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#81

Post by pm90 »

buboard wrote: post #68

He has a nice follow up which gets to the reasons why https://tonsky.me/blog/good-times-weak-men/ Another take: rewrites and rehashes tend to be bad because they are not exciting for programmers. Everything you re about to write is predictable, nothing looks Clearly better and it just feels forced. First versions of anything are exciting, the possibilities are endless, and even if the choices along the path are subop…

Rewrites can be really amazing if you incentivize it that way. Its really important to have a solid reason for doing a rewrite though. But if there are good reasons, the problem of 0 (or Anecdotally, a lot of rewrites happen for the wrong reasons, usually NIH or churn. The key to a good rewrite is understanding the current system really well, without that its very hard to work with it let alone replace it.

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#82

Post by bhauer »

hburd wrote: post #48
rogerdb wrote: post #20

> Would you buy a car if it eats 100 liters per 100 kilometers? How about 1000 liters? I think the analogy here is backwards. The better question is "how much would you prioritize a car that used only 0.05 liters per 100km over one that used 0.5? What about one that used only 0.005L?". I'd say that at that point, other factors like comfort, performance, base price, etc. become (relatively) much more important. If bas…

> These days, I think most users will lose more time and be more frustrated by poor UI design, accidental inputs, etc. than any performance characteristics of the software they use. I’m willing to bet that a significant percentage of my accidental inputs are due to UI latency.

Virtually all of my accidental inputs are caused by application slowness or repaints that occur several hundred milliseconds after they should have.

I want all interactions with all of my computing devices to occur in as close to 0ms as possible. 0ms is great; 20ms is good; 200ms is bad; 500ms is absolutely inexcusable unless you're doing significant computation. I find it astonishing how many things will run in the 200-500ms range for utterly trivial operations such as just navigating between UI elements. And no, animation is not an acceptable illusion to hide slowness.

I am with the OP. "Good enough" is a bane on our discipline.

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#83

Post by pantalaimon »

xchaotic wrote: post #71
megous wrote: post #43

I was in Rome recently, and google maps were basically unusable on EDGE (dsepite pre-downloading the area before the trip). We'd wait a minute (or more) for a timetable of a bus stop and a route of the bus to be show on the map. Try planning a route in an unfamiliar area with this slow an UI when you are standing outside and there's no place to sit and rest, and you need to click around on a bunch of stops just to se…

Why were you using EDGE if there’s dense 4G coverage in Rome ?

Replace Rome with the German countryside and you'll still just have EDGE.

Sites like Hacker News or https://i.reddit.com are still perfectly usable. In contrast to the 'modern' Reddit UI that that takes a couple of seconds to load even on my home WiFi.

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#84

Post by city41 »

Wald76 wrote: post #46

Safari on iOS would not render Nikita’s article until I killed and restarted it, nicely illustrating one of his key points.

iOS has evolved into such a buggy mess I switched to Android. I used to be a huge Apple fan, and now I don't use any Apple products. I feel they are one of the worst offenders in degrading software quality, unfortunately.

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#85

Post by userbinator »

A related article in a similar spirit from 4 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8679471

I can comfortably play games, watch 4K videos, but not scroll web pages?

I think this is one of the more important points that the article tries to get across, although it's implicit: while the peak of what's possible with computing has improved, the average hasn't --- and may have gotten worse. This is the point that everyone pointing at language benchmarks, compiler/optimisation, and hardware improvements fail to see. All the "Java/.NET is not slow/bloated" articles exemplify this. They think that, just because it's possible for X to be faster, it always will be, when the reality couldn't be further from that.

Speaking of bloat, it's funny to see the author using Google's apps and Android as an example, when Google has recently outdone itself with a 400MB(!) web page that purports to show off its "best designs of 2019": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21916740

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#86

Post by rogerdb »

thanhhaimai wrote: post #45
rogerdb wrote: post #20

> Would you buy a car if it eats 100 liters per 100 kilometers? How about 1000 liters? I think the analogy here is backwards. The better question is "how much would you prioritize a car that used only 0.05 liters per 100km over one that used 0.5? What about one that used only 0.005L?". I'd say that at that point, other factors like comfort, performance, base price, etc. become (relatively) much more important. If bas…

> "how much would you prioritize a car that used only 0.05 liters per 100km over one that used 0.5? What about one that used only 0.005L?". I'd say that at that point, other factors like comfort, performance, base price, etc. become (relatively) much more important. I'll prioritize the 0.005L per 100km car for sure. That means the car can be driven for all its expected lifetime (500k km) in a single tank of gas, fill…

This is definitely an interesting take on the car analogy so thanks for posting it! I don't know that I agree 100% (I think I could 'settle' for a car that needed be be fueled once or twice a year if it came with some other noticeable benefits), but it is definitely worth remembering that sometimes an apparently small nudge in performance can enable big improvements. Miniaturization of electronics (including batteries and storage media) and continuing improvements to wireless broadband come to mind as the most obvious of these in the past decades.

I'm struggling to think of recent (or not-so-recent) software improvements that have had a similar impact though. It seems like many of the "big" algorithms and optimization techniques that underpin modern applications have been around for a long time, and there aren't a lot of solutions that are "just about" ready to make the jump from supercomputers to servers, servers to desktops, or desktops to mobile. I guess machine learning is a probably contender in this space, but I imagine that's still an active area of optimization and probably not what the author of the article had in mind. I'd love if someone could provide an example of recent consumer software that is only possible due to careful software optimization.

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#87

Post by buboard »

rogerdb wrote: post #20

> Would you buy a car if it eats 100 liters per 100 kilometers? How about 1000 liters? I think the analogy here is backwards. The better question is "how much would you prioritize a car that used only 0.05 liters per 100km over one that used 0.5? What about one that used only 0.005L?". I'd say that at that point, other factors like comfort, performance, base price, etc. become (relatively) much more important. If bas…

I dont know, that just feels wrong. If anything, the rise of mobile means there should be more emphasis on speed. All the bloat is because of misguided aesthetics (which all look the same, as if designers move between companies every year, which they do) and fanciness. Can you point to a newish app that is clearly better that its predecessor?

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#88

Post by jiofih »

buboard wrote: post #68

He has a nice follow up which gets to the reasons why https://tonsky.me/blog/good-times-weak-men/ Another take: rewrites and rehashes tend to be bad because they are not exciting for programmers. Everything you re about to write is predictable, nothing looks Clearly better and it just feels forced. First versions of anything are exciting, the possibilities are endless, and even if the choices along the path are subop…

He hints at Electron in the end, but I think the real blame lies on React which has become standard in the past five years.

Nobody has any fucking idea what’s going on in their react projects. I work with incredibly bright people and not a single one can explain accurately what happens when you press a button. On the way to solving UI consistency it actually made it impossible for anyone to reason about what’s happening on the screen, and bugs like the ones shown simply pop up in random places, due to the complete lack of visibility into the system. No, the debug tooling is not enough. I’m really looking forward to whatever next thing becomes popular and replaces this shit show.

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#89

Post by literallycancer »

nixpulvis wrote: post #38
groby_b wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent. What, then, are you doing to make sure this shit doesn't happen? Are you willing to pay $20 for a phone app, instead of fishing for the free version? Are you willing to pay for websites to get rid of ads? Are you willing to pay $300 for a new OS? Alternatively, are you willing to ditch capitalism for a system that prioritizes the commons? It's us. We are creating the incentives for a world that produces th…

I'd like it if my phone let me install my own software. That would be a pretty big step for me personally. But I'm still stuck on iOS for now.

iOS doesn't have 3rd party app markets?

Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)

#90

Post by anthk »

coldtea wrote: post #72

> Modern text editors have higher latency than 42-year-old Emacs. Text editors! What can be simpler? On each keystroke, all you have to do is update a tiny rectangular region and modern text editors can’t do that in 16ms. It’s a lot of time. A LOT. A 3D game can fill the whole screen with hundreds of thousands (!!!) of polygons in the same 16ms and also process input, recalculate the world and dynamically load/unload…

>Well, where's your word processor buddy? Try to write one to achieve those goals -- and offer what people want today, including syntax highlighting, linting, auto-completions, etc, and come back to us...

Emacs could do that since 25 years ago, if not more.

Post reply on HN