21 ms·

Yup. A lot of modern software is beyond parody now: https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1640827575437250561?s=20 https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/164082757

Yup. A lot of modern software is beyond parody now: https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1640827575437250561?s=20 https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1640827575437250561?s=2... (the "new and improved" Microsoft Teams takes 9 seconds to display under a kilobyte of text, including 3 seconds to just display a splash screen)

pjerem 4y ago
Yes but developer experience !!
smitty1e 4y ago
[flagged]
MontyCarloHall 4y ago
Ironic that all the devs being asked Leetcode algorithm optimization questions during their interviews don’t seem to be putting any of that to use where it actually matters!
- layer8 4y ago
  I’m sure the Teams splash screen is O(1).
  - MontyCarloHall 4y ago
    Algorithmic optimization is more than just about asymptotic complexity; reducing that leading coefficient is equally important. Constant time is meaningless if the constant is measured in seconds.
    - layer8 4y ago
      That was the joke. Leetcode usually only cares about asymptotic complexity.
      - vostok 4y ago
        I thought leetcode cares about the actual run time.
        layer8 4y ago
        It measures runtime, but not reliably, multiple runs of the same code can report very different runtimes. My impression is the focus is mostly on getting the time complexity right.
        cancerhacker 4y ago
        Suggestion (not for you specifically, just a general comment): never answer leetcode questions right away. Push back and ask the interviewer to describe the problem they're actually trying to solve. Probe their constraints - memory limitations, throughput. 99% of software isn't going to be the leetcode algorithm but the reasons for it being there. (Caveat: I haven't had to be in an leetcode driven interview for some years, and this probably doesn't work great with people that love algorithms more than getting something done.)
bsenftner 4y ago
I recently took a computer vision course taught in both Python and C++, students chose the language they used for assignments. I signed up twice and did both languages. The C++ versions of the exact same tasks are not only significantly faster, they also occupy exponentially less memory, and in a few tasks I was able to trivially introduce C++ threads for jaw dropping speed improvements, while Python's situation for such optimizations is dismally convoluted. From the experience of this class taken twice, it really looks like there are serious gains to be had with an optimization pass via C++/rust/go for many systems that could benefit from multi-core implementations.
- midasuni 4y ago
  The ffmpeg patches of a few lines of assembly that make 10-100 fold improvements on slow C amaze me
  - bsenftner 4y ago
    I worked on an facial recognition system written in C++ that used SIMD optimizations to achieve 25M facial compares per core per second. On that same system I wrote an optimized ffmpeg player library that only consumed one core while doing a few hundred frames per second with 4K video.
- FpUser 4y ago
  Python is a glue language. It is one thing to use it to string together bunch of algorithms written in C. But somebody's got this genius idea of using it as a general language and now we have this backend frameworks that are 2 orders of magnitude slower than they should be.
  - justinclift 4y ago
    Not just the speed, but the memory use. A popular approach for Python web serving is to launch a number of "workers" (eg via gunicorn, etc), that hang around waiting to serve requests. Each one of these workers in recently running code (here) idled using ~250MB of non-shared memory. With about 40 workers needed to handle some fairly basic load. :( Rewrote the code in Go. No need for workers (just using goroutines), and the whole thing idles using about 20MB of memory, completely replacing all those Python workers. o_O This doesn't seem to be all that unusual for Python either.
Spooky23 4y ago
Don’t worry; Teams 2.0 promises to suck less. They are ditching Chromium for new Edge technology.
- illiarian 4y ago
  That's the 9s one they are advertising :)
andrepd 4y ago
Next time someone tells me that there is no problem with the bloated state of modern software, I'm going to point them to this video where a multimillion dollar development team congratulate themselves on reaching Windows 3.1-tier performance.
- userbinator 4y ago
  You may enjoy this article about writing a Slack client for Windows 3.1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21831951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21831951 AFAIK part of the Teams API has been RE'd and is sufficient for writing an IM-only client, so it would certainly be an interesting exercise to do the same as above but for Teams.
  - andrepd 4y ago
    As demonstrated (heh) by the demoscene, the TI calculator scene, game development, etc, restriction breeds innovation.

pjerem 4y ago

Yes but developer experience !!

smitty1e 4y ago

[flagged]

MontyCarloHall 4y ago

Ironic that all the devs being asked Leetcode algorithm optimization questions during their interviews don’t seem to be putting any of that to use where it actually matters!

layer8 4y ago
I’m sure the Teams splash screen is O(1).
- MontyCarloHall 4y ago
  Algorithmic optimization is more than just about asymptotic complexity; reducing that leading coefficient is equally important. Constant time is meaningless if the constant is measured in seconds.
  - layer8 4y ago
    That was the joke. Leetcode usually only cares about asymptotic complexity.
    - vostok 4y ago
      I thought leetcode cares about the actual run time.
      - layer8 4y ago
        It measures runtime, but not reliably, multiple runs of the same code can report very different runtimes. My impression is the focus is mostly on getting the time complexity right.
        cancerhacker 4y ago
        Suggestion (not for you specifically, just a general comment): never answer leetcode questions right away. Push back and ask the interviewer to describe the problem they're actually trying to solve. Probe their constraints - memory limitations, throughput. 99% of software isn't going to be the leetcode algorithm but the reasons for it being there. (Caveat: I haven't had to be in an leetcode driven interview for some years, and this probably doesn't work great with people that love algorithms more than getting something done.)

bsenftner 4y ago

I recently took a computer vision course taught in both Python and C++, students chose the language they used for assignments. I signed up twice and did both languages. The C++ versions of the exact same tasks are not only significantly faster, they also occupy exponentially less memory, and in a few tasks I was able to trivially introduce C++ threads for jaw dropping speed improvements, while Python's situation for such optimizations is dismally convoluted. From the experience of this class taken twice, it really looks like there are serious gains to be had with an optimization pass via C++/rust/go for many systems that could benefit from multi-core implementations.

midasuni 4y ago
The ffmpeg patches of a few lines of assembly that make 10-100 fold improvements on slow C amaze me
- bsenftner 4y ago
  I worked on an facial recognition system written in C++ that used SIMD optimizations to achieve 25M facial compares per core per second. On that same system I wrote an optimized ffmpeg player library that only consumed one core while doing a few hundred frames per second with 4K video.
FpUser 4y ago
Python is a glue language. It is one thing to use it to string together bunch of algorithms written in C. But somebody's got this genius idea of using it as a general language and now we have this backend frameworks that are 2 orders of magnitude slower than they should be.
- justinclift 4y ago
  Not just the speed, but the memory use. A popular approach for Python web serving is to launch a number of "workers" (eg via gunicorn, etc), that hang around waiting to serve requests. Each one of these workers in recently running code (here) idled using ~250MB of non-shared memory. With about 40 workers needed to handle some fairly basic load. :( Rewrote the code in Go. No need for workers (just using goroutines), and the whole thing idles using about 20MB of memory, completely replacing all those Python workers. o_O This doesn't seem to be all that unusual for Python either.

Spooky23 4y ago

Don’t worry; Teams 2.0 promises to suck less. They are ditching Chromium for new Edge technology.

illiarian 4y ago
That's the 9s one they are advertising :)

andrepd 4y ago

Next time someone tells me that there is no problem with the bloated state of modern software, I'm going to point them to this video where a multimillion dollar development team congratulate themselves on reaching Windows 3.1-tier performance.

userbinator 4y ago
You may enjoy this article about writing a Slack client for Windows 3.1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21831951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21831951 AFAIK part of the Teams API has been RE'd and is sufficient for writing an IM-only client, so it would certainly be an interesting exercise to do the same as above but for Teams.
- andrepd 4y ago
  As demonstrated (heh) by the demoscene, the TI calculator scene, game development, etc, restriction breeds innovation.