Did we lose our way in making efficient software? • Hacker News Board

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#81

Post by HappMacDonald » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 5:47 PM UTC

EGreg wrote: post #52

stephc_int13 wrote: post #20

My opinion about this is that yes, we lost our way, and the reason is very simple, it is because we could. It was the path of least resistance, so we took it. Software has been freeriding on hardware improvements for a few decades, especially on web and desktop apps. Moore's law has been a blessing and a curse. The software you use today was written by people who learned their craft while this free-ride was still ful…

Now imagine same but with AI killer bot swarms. Slaughterbots. Because we could ! As long as we have COMPETITION as the main principle for all tech development — between countries or corporations etc. — we will not be able to rein in global crises such as climate change, destruction of ecosystems, or killer AI. We need “collaboration” and “cooperation” at the highest levels as an organizing principle, instead. Compet…

What we really need is some way to force competition to be sportsmanlike. EG: cooperating to compete, just like well adjusted competitors in a friendly tournament who actually care about refining their own skills and facing a challenge from others who feel the same way instead of cutting corners and throats to get ahead.

Cooperation with no competition subtracts all urgency because one must prioritize not rocking the boat and one never knows what negative consequences any decision one makes might prove to have. You need both forces to be present, but cooperation must also be the background/default touchstone with adversarial competition employed as a tool within that framework.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#82

Post by cmiles74 » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 5:48 PM UTC

mattl wrote: post #40

s1k3s wrote: post #6

I want to make native apps but Apple and Microsoft seem to be trying really hard to stop me. I have to buy developer accounts, buy certificates for signing binaries, share 30% of my revenue with them for barely any reason and so on. Not to mention the mess they've introduced in their APIs - especially Microsoft. So of course we choose the much simpler, much cheaper way of the web.

You don’t have to do any of that for a native Mac app. Signing it is a good idea but not required and you can distribute it from your own website or even from GitHub/Lab where you can tell people it’s not notarized and they’ll need to command click and open it the first time.

In my opinion, this will become harder and harder to do with every release of Windows and MacOS. I wouldn't count on the average customer of these vendors being willing to shop outside of their plaatform's app stores forever.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#83

Post by pjmlp » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 5:48 PM UTC

injuly wrote: post #54

rini17 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't use Qt?

Qt licensing is its own mess. For commercial software, the pricing is 350-500$ per developer, per month. Seriously [1]. The company that now owns the framework doesn't seem to acknowledge the gap between big enterprises and solo developers/smaller teams. [1] Yes, one can use Qt for commercial software without buying a license (as long as it is dynamically linked), but their marketing does everything it can to hide th…

Imagine that, having to pay for the tools one has to use for their work, what an abuse.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#84

Post by internetter » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 5:50 PM UTC

mattl wrote: post #44

cma wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had a $100 yearly dev fee for ios.

Only if you want to distribute via the App Store. There’s also TestFlight and distribution of source code I believe if you want to avoid that.

Both of these are completely false. Testflight distribution without a developer license is impossible. Asking users to compile the app themself is infeasible, as the XCode toolchain is upwards of 18gb and they will be required to compile it once every week to keep it on their device. The developer fee is unavoidable — even with EU intervention

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#85

Post by jcelerier » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 5:51 PM UTC

01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #28

jcelerier wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

whenever I do native (native as in, compiled without going through some bytecode / VM / interpreter ...) apps for mac / windows / linux I don't have to do any of this, I just use Qt

But then you have to use c++ or Python, and figure out a good way to ship 10 dlls

I ship apps that statically link against Qt, but even if I didn't it's not like "shipping DLLs" wasn't a solved problem two decades ago

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#86

Post by paulddraper » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 5:55 PM UTC

zer00eyz wrote: post #45

s1k3s wrote: post #6

I want to make native apps but Apple and Microsoft seem to be trying really hard to stop me. I have to buy developer accounts, buy certificates for signing binaries, share 30% of my revenue with them for barely any reason and so on. Not to mention the mess they've introduced in their APIs - especially Microsoft. So of course we choose the much simpler, much cheaper way of the web.

Ok Set up CC processing on the web: How much are you going to pay stripe? 2.9% + 30¢ ... that means you have to charge 10 bucks to get down to a 6% transaction fee. Quite the price floor and an interesting cap on your pricing model! What does managing chargebacks cost you? The moment your taking money your going to hire in customer service, or spend time dealing with CS. What happens when you get a chargeback, or do…

> apple is going to be a far better deal

?

Your math seems to show the exact opposite.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#87

Post by colecut » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 5:57 PM UTC

silverquiet wrote: post #42

s1k3s wrote: post #6

I want to make native apps but Apple and Microsoft seem to be trying really hard to stop me. I have to buy developer accounts, buy certificates for signing binaries, share 30% of my revenue with them for barely any reason and so on. Not to mention the mess they've introduced in their APIs - especially Microsoft. So of course we choose the much simpler, much cheaper way of the web.

I work at a place that ships an app to both Apple and Microsoft Desktops (we could even do Linux is there was ever any demand for it). We use this old thing called Java which still seems to work. I don't develop it though so I guess I don't have to worry about too much of my resume getting caught up with unfashionable languages (let's face the facts about what most tech these days is trying to advance - promotions -…

OP is obviously talking about mobile apps.

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#88

Post by tomsmeding » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 5:57 PM UTC

alerighi wrote: post #64

stephc_int13 wrote: post #20

My opinion about this is that yes, we lost our way, and the reason is very simple, it is because we could. It was the path of least resistance, so we took it. Software has been freeriding on hardware improvements for a few decades, especially on web and desktop apps. Moore's law has been a blessing and a curse. The software you use today was written by people who learned their craft while this free-ride was still ful…

The thing that makes me crazy is that the thing that we do on computers are basically the same each year, yet software are more and more heavy. For example just in 2010 a Linux distribution with a DE just started did consume 100Mb of RAM, an optimized version 60Mb of RAM. I remember it perfectly. I had 2Gb of RAM and did not have even a swap partition. Now just a decade later, a computer with less than 8Gb of RAM is…

Not discounting your lament about memory use, this caught my eye:

> I would throw my computer out of the window if it takes more than a minute to boot up, even Windows 98 was faster!

Sure, Windows has grown a lot in size (as have other OSes). But startup is typically bounded by disk random access, not compute power or memory (granted, I don't use Windows, if 8GB is not enough to boot the OS then things are much worse than I thought). Have you tried putting an SSD in that thing?

(And yes, I realise the irony of saying "just buy more expensive hardware". But SSDs are actually really cheap these days.)

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#89

Post by geor9e » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 5:59 PM UTC

Google Docs might be able to directly edit .docx files now, but that is pretty new feature, and it doesn't surprise me that it's slow. It's a proprietary format owned by Microsoft. The argument that software ought to be efficient is valid, but the example of editing a non-native format seems unfair. Any time you add emulation layers you should expect things to slow down.

Did you consider trying Microsoft's own browser-based Word editor? It's free too. And .docx is it's native format.

Or, consider doing a conversion to Google Docs native format first (you'll lose some formatting though, possibly a lot of it).

Re: Did we lose our way in making efficient software?

#90

Post by michelb » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 6:00 PM UTC

In my MacOS Passwords I have ±3400 entries. A roughly 341KB CSV. Searching in that list in the preference panel or Keychain app is dog-slow on my M1 Pro Studio or on my M3 MacBook Air. How??