4 ms·

"Especially today, where CPU designers have run out of ideas" I wonder how many readers made it past the formatting, only to stop reading here?

Twisol 5y ago
What's wrong with the formatting? Plain text has a lot going for it. (I remember when most/all GameFAQs guides were text files just like this -- not to mention the Super Metroid guide [0] that manually justified every paragraph via word choice.) [0] https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/snes/588741-super-metroid/faqs/10114 https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/snes/588741-super-metroid/faqs...
- cylon13 5y ago
  On mobile it looks terrible. The lines will wrap and then a few words later there’s a forced line break.
  - Twisol 5y ago
    That's a reasonable criticism. It works better in Reader View (because you can scale the font down, at least in Firefox), but I have to rotate to landscape as well.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  Yeah. GameFAQs guides had perfect usability. Now they're multipage HTML documents and searching is impossible. Sometimes the "guide" consists of nothing but YouTube links.
- avgcorrection 5y ago
  > What's wrong with the formatting? It messes up Firefox reader mode. I myself have gotten complaints from other people when using linebreaks in Github comments because their device renders them.
bidirectional 5y ago
Seems like a pretty innocent, tongue-in-cheek comment?
- convolvatron 5y ago
  actually its a pretty substantive and spot-on comment. the cpu people have been trying _really_ hard to make existing workloads run faster. but the software people have known for 50 years that concurrency was going to be necessary to go further..but it was never really a good time. maybe we can finally start looking at other programming models instead of wasting so much time and getting such crappy reliability and performance out of thread-and-lock?
carapace 5y ago
I kept reading but I did have a "hey, that's kind of unfair" reaction at that line. It's not their fault that the speed of light is a hard limit, eh? There's a chicken and egg problem with compilers and languages on the one side and machines architectures and instruction sets on the other, it's not easy breaking the mold. (GPUs are a counter-example perhaps?) CPU designers can't all be Ivan Godard ( https://hackaday.com/2013/08/02/the-mill-cpu-architecture/ https://hackaday.com/2013/08/02/the-mill-cpu-architecture/ https://millcomputing.com/ https://millcomputing.com/ ) or Chuck Moore ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_H._Moore#Hardware_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_H._Moore#Hardware_desi... http://www.greenarraychips.com/ http://www.greenarraychips.com/ ) eh?
- Syzygies 5y ago
  > It's not their fault that the speed of light is a hard limit, eh? If you're at Intel, you not likely to see this as a calm period bereft of ideas, while Apple silicon has made such strides. New ideas, or simply a rebalancing of familiar ideas, can make significant progress against the same physics.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dang 5y ago
Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article and then copy it into the threads to complain about it. The most provocative thing is nearly always something shallow and barely (if at all) related. This leads to shallow/indignant discussions, which are the opposite of what we're going for here. It would be much better to find the most interesting/surprising/meaty thing and start a thread with that. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%22most%20provocative%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... (Also, re formatting - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful." p.s. Your comments are usually excellent—thank you!

Twisol 5y ago

What's wrong with the formatting? Plain text has a lot going for it. (I remember when most/all GameFAQs guides were text files just like this -- not to mention the Super Metroid guide [0] that manually justified every paragraph via word choice.) [0] https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/snes/588741-super-metroid/faqs/10114 https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/snes/588741-super-metroid/faqs...

cylon13 5y ago
On mobile it looks terrible. The lines will wrap and then a few words later there’s a forced line break.
- Twisol 5y ago
  That's a reasonable criticism. It works better in Reader View (because you can scale the font down, at least in Firefox), but I have to rotate to landscape as well.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
Yeah. GameFAQs guides had perfect usability. Now they're multipage HTML documents and searching is impossible. Sometimes the "guide" consists of nothing but YouTube links.
avgcorrection 5y ago
> What's wrong with the formatting? It messes up Firefox reader mode. I myself have gotten complaints from other people when using linebreaks in Github comments because their device renders them.

bidirectional 5y ago

Seems like a pretty innocent, tongue-in-cheek comment?

convolvatron 5y ago
actually its a pretty substantive and spot-on comment. the cpu people have been trying _really_ hard to make existing workloads run faster. but the software people have known for 50 years that concurrency was going to be necessary to go further..but it was never really a good time. maybe we can finally start looking at other programming models instead of wasting so much time and getting such crappy reliability and performance out of thread-and-lock?

carapace 5y ago

I kept reading but I did have a "hey, that's kind of unfair" reaction at that line. It's not their fault that the speed of light is a hard limit, eh? There's a chicken and egg problem with compilers and languages on the one side and machines architectures and instruction sets on the other, it's not easy breaking the mold. (GPUs are a counter-example perhaps?) CPU designers can't all be Ivan Godard ( https://hackaday.com/2013/08/02/the-mill-cpu-architecture/ https://hackaday.com/2013/08/02/the-mill-cpu-architecture/ https://millcomputing.com/ https://millcomputing.com/ ) or Chuck Moore ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_H._Moore#Hardware_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_H._Moore#Hardware_desi... http://www.greenarraychips.com/ http://www.greenarraychips.com/ ) eh?

Syzygies 5y ago
> It's not their fault that the speed of light is a hard limit, eh? If you're at Intel, you not likely to see this as a calm period bereft of ideas, while Apple silicon has made such strides. New ideas, or simply a rebalancing of familiar ideas, can make significant progress against the same physics.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

dang 5y ago

Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article and then copy it into the threads to complain about it. The most provocative thing is nearly always something shallow and barely (if at all) related. This leads to shallow/indignant discussions, which are the opposite of what we're going for here. It would be much better to find the most interesting/surprising/meaty thing and start a thread with that. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%22most%20provocative%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... (Also, re formatting - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful." p.s. Your comments are usually excellent—thank you!