8 ms·

I have on my desk a machine that would be an equivalent of a large datacenter two decades ago and then sometimes it is barely able to keep up with me pressing k

I have on my desk a machine that would be an equivalent of a large datacenter two decades ago and then sometimes it is barely able to keep up with me pressing keys on the keyboard. I think the next major step will be for the humanity to learn make software more efficient and effective rather than throw more CPU cycles at the problem.

snarfy 8y ago
It will happen naturally. Throwing hardware at the problem is still the most economical thing to do. Features and speed of development still beat performance. When that's no longer true we'll focus on performance again.
Kurtz79 8y ago
In the last few years we switched from throwing more CPU cycles at the problem to throwing more CPUs at the (not necessarily parallelizable) problem.
- maccard 8y ago
  Each of the 40 cores on my workstation runs at 3.5 GHz. I had a quick look and I found reference to Google using pentium 2 CPUs in their data centres in 1999. According to Wikipedia, they max out at 450MHz. So my workstation is 8 times faster per core, and has 40 more cores. It's hard to justify the differences really.
  - Kurtz79 8y ago
    20 years is equivalent to a couple of geological ages in tech, definitely not the "last few years" I was referring to. This article is from 2014 but hardly anything has changed. https://www.comsol.com/blogs/havent-cpu-clock-speeds-increased-last-years/ https://www.comsol.com/blogs/havent-cpu-clock-speeds-increas... https://superuser.com/questions/543702/why-are-newer-generations-of-processors-faster-at-the-same-clock-speed https://superuser.com/questions/543702/why-are-newer-generat... https://i.stack.imgur.com/z94Of.png https://i.stack.imgur.com/z94Of.png
    - Kadin 8y ago
      > 20 years is equivalent to a couple of geological ages in tech I disagree with this. I'm not going after you specifically, but I think this attitude is part of why the IT industry seems to reinvent the wheel every few years; there's this perception that we're GOING WHERE NOBODY HAS GONE BEFORE. No, most of us are not. Maybe a very few people in research labs are, or people really pushing at the raw edge of cryptography or mathematics, but the rest of us are basically cycling through the same ideas over and over, in different clothing. I can't tell you how many times I've run into a problem and done some research, and found out that the optimal practical solution or algo was devised by some dude working at IBM in the 60s. (In fairness, some of those guys were really ahead of their time.) A person could make a very good living just strip-mining old ACM research papers from the 80s and selling the ideas in proof-of-concept form to the government, military, investors, or anyone else with no sense of history. Sometimes I wonder how much further we'd get if we did a better job building on prior efforts and resisting the urge to clean-slate things quite so often.
HeadsUpHigh 8y ago
What I want is a system where the keyboard is connected by some connection that is a hardware interrupt like the keebs of the old time. Just don't make it interrupt only when booting. That alone will save a few dozen ms of delay. Then that letter goes straight into a framebuffer that displays it on a 100% 2d DE/editor. Just how writing text is supposed to be.
JensRex 8y ago
Instead we get Electron, and people use it to make text editors that take up 500 MB of space.
- bluejekyll 8y ago
  Electron gets a lot of hate, but I think people generally are looking at the wrong thing when focusing on memory usage, ask yourself why it’s so important to so many organizations. The number one cost at most companies, is humans. Before electron what did you have for cross platform development? Java was there, but that never really took off for embedded UI inside the browser, and the browser became the primary target for most businesses in the last ten years. Electron allows small teams to focus their most costly investment on developing toward one product being developed across many platforms. I use electron apps that give a consistent experience, on macOS and Linux (not personally Windows, obviously as well), and then the same web app on Firefox, Chrome and Safari across those same platforms with the addition of my phone. Yes, that comes at the cost of running a full browser, but it’s a logical choice when optimizing for the diverse computing landscape of today.
  - boomlinde 8y ago
    "Looking at the wrong thing" is a matter of perspective. As a user, I couldn't care less that you saved money by writing a bloated web app. I care about the resources I have, which includes my own time, energy, money, computer, battery etc. In those terms, there are clear disadvantages to Electron based software.
    - bluejekyll 8y ago
      See my response to a similar sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17826915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17826915 My basic point there being that losing a small number of users due to these concerns is probably worth it. I don't want to come across as someone who's hyper-defensive of Electron. I hate the fact that such a bloated piece of software has become the standard means for supporting cross-platform development. At the same time, I really don't see other viable options at this point in time. I'm curious though, is there something you would recommend instead that meets these requirements with a single codebase (~90% shared code): target all major platforms (macOS, Windows, Linux) and target all major browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, IE), (edit: and how could I forget, all major phone browsers) with nearly identical UI/UX?

snarfy 8y ago

It will happen naturally. Throwing hardware at the problem is still the most economical thing to do. Features and speed of development still beat performance. When that's no longer true we'll focus on performance again.

Kurtz79 8y ago

In the last few years we switched from throwing more CPU cycles at the problem to throwing more CPUs at the (not necessarily parallelizable) problem.

maccard 8y ago
Each of the 40 cores on my workstation runs at 3.5 GHz. I had a quick look and I found reference to Google using pentium 2 CPUs in their data centres in 1999. According to Wikipedia, they max out at 450MHz. So my workstation is 8 times faster per core, and has 40 more cores. It's hard to justify the differences really.
- Kurtz79 8y ago
  20 years is equivalent to a couple of geological ages in tech, definitely not the "last few years" I was referring to. This article is from 2014 but hardly anything has changed. https://www.comsol.com/blogs/havent-cpu-clock-speeds-increased-last-years/ https://www.comsol.com/blogs/havent-cpu-clock-speeds-increas... https://superuser.com/questions/543702/why-are-newer-generations-of-processors-faster-at-the-same-clock-speed https://superuser.com/questions/543702/why-are-newer-generat... https://i.stack.imgur.com/z94Of.png https://i.stack.imgur.com/z94Of.png
  - Kadin 8y ago
    > 20 years is equivalent to a couple of geological ages in tech I disagree with this. I'm not going after you specifically, but I think this attitude is part of why the IT industry seems to reinvent the wheel every few years; there's this perception that we're GOING WHERE NOBODY HAS GONE BEFORE. No, most of us are not. Maybe a very few people in research labs are, or people really pushing at the raw edge of cryptography or mathematics, but the rest of us are basically cycling through the same ideas over and over, in different clothing. I can't tell you how many times I've run into a problem and done some research, and found out that the optimal practical solution or algo was devised by some dude working at IBM in the 60s. (In fairness, some of those guys were really ahead of their time.) A person could make a very good living just strip-mining old ACM research papers from the 80s and selling the ideas in proof-of-concept form to the government, military, investors, or anyone else with no sense of history. Sometimes I wonder how much further we'd get if we did a better job building on prior efforts and resisting the urge to clean-slate things quite so often.

HeadsUpHigh 8y ago

What I want is a system where the keyboard is connected by some connection that is a hardware interrupt like the keebs of the old time. Just don't make it interrupt only when booting. That alone will save a few dozen ms of delay. Then that letter goes straight into a framebuffer that displays it on a 100% 2d DE/editor. Just how writing text is supposed to be.

JensRex 8y ago

Instead we get Electron, and people use it to make text editors that take up 500 MB of space.

bluejekyll 8y ago
Electron gets a lot of hate, but I think people generally are looking at the wrong thing when focusing on memory usage, ask yourself why it’s so important to so many organizations. The number one cost at most companies, is humans. Before electron what did you have for cross platform development? Java was there, but that never really took off for embedded UI inside the browser, and the browser became the primary target for most businesses in the last ten years. Electron allows small teams to focus their most costly investment on developing toward one product being developed across many platforms. I use electron apps that give a consistent experience, on macOS and Linux (not personally Windows, obviously as well), and then the same web app on Firefox, Chrome and Safari across those same platforms with the addition of my phone. Yes, that comes at the cost of running a full browser, but it’s a logical choice when optimizing for the diverse computing landscape of today.
- boomlinde 8y ago
  "Looking at the wrong thing" is a matter of perspective. As a user, I couldn't care less that you saved money by writing a bloated web app. I care about the resources I have, which includes my own time, energy, money, computer, battery etc. In those terms, there are clear disadvantages to Electron based software.
  - bluejekyll 8y ago
    See my response to a similar sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17826915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17826915 My basic point there being that losing a small number of users due to these concerns is probably worth it. I don't want to come across as someone who's hyper-defensive of Electron. I hate the fact that such a bloated piece of software has become the standard means for supporting cross-platform development. At the same time, I really don't see other viable options at this point in time. I'm curious though, is there something you would recommend instead that meets these requirements with a single codebase (~90% shared code): target all major platforms (macOS, Windows, Linux) and target all major browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, IE), (edit: and how could I forget, all major phone browsers) with nearly identical UI/UX?