7 ms·

Pretty naïve, I'm surprised to see it here. Not that this is pointless study, but it's pretty easy to guess up these numbers if you know about how long it takes

by krick 13y ago

Pretty naïve, I'm surprised to see it here. Not that this is pointless study, but it's pretty easy to guess up these numbers if you know about how long it takes to use a register, L1, L2, RAM, hard drive (and you should). And exactly how long it would take is task-specific question, because depends more on what optimization techniques can be used for the task and what cannot, so unless you are interested specifically in summation mod 256, this information isn't much of use, as "processing" is much broader than "adding moulo 256". But it's nice that somewhere somebody else understood, that computers are fast. Seriously, no irony here. Because it's about time for people to realize, what disastrous world modern computing is. I mean, your home PC processes gigabytes of data in the matter of seconds, amount of computations (relative to its cost) it is capable of would drive some scientist 60 years ago crazy and it gets wasted. It's year 2014 and you have to wait for your computer. It's so much faster than you, but you are waiting for it! What an irony! You don't even want to add up gigabyte of numbers, you want to close a tab in your browser or whatever, and there are quite a few processes running in the background that actually have to be running right now to do something useful, unfortunately OS doesn't know about that. Unneeded data cached in the RAM and you wait while OS fetches memory page from HDD. But, well, after 20 layers of abstraction it's pretty hard to do only useful computations, so you make your user wait to finish some computationally simple stuff. About every time I write code I feel guilty.

narag 13y ago
Do you know what would make people instantly realise how fast computers are? Reaction: a program that reads a camera and reacts to some user action instantly moving a robot arm. Add to that an ultra-slow-motion camera so we can see what happened afterwards.
- yayitswei 13y ago
  Reminds me of the robot that wins rock-paper-scissors every time: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/video/2013/nov/06/japan-janken-robot-wins-rock-paper-scissors-every-time-video http://www.theguardian.com/technology/video/2013/nov/06/japa...
- jordan0day 13y ago
  There's a passage in Stephen Levy's book "Hackers" where he talks about a robot built by some students at MIT that could catch a ping pong ball thrown to it by a human. I don't recall what year this project was done, but I do recall what computer they used: a PDP-6. So a computer built 50 years ago is already fast enough to pass your instant-reaction test. (Well, admittedly, maybe it didn't respond instantly, but if it could catch a thrown ping pong ball, it was probably pretty quick). This comment isn't meant to scoff at your suggestion -- far from it -- I think an instant-reaction-bot will still impress most people (and rightfully so). I just wonder if we, as programmers and scientists and engineers, haven't been taking as much advantage of Moore' law as we ought to.
  - narag 13y ago
    yayitswei posted a link to a robot that produces the effect I meant. A modern version of the catcher that could outperform a human would be nice too. Or the knife trick by the robot in Aliens. Also I saw some news about a spanish uni developing one robot arm to catch space debris. The thing is we still don't realize how fast they really are. We say all the time that computers are dumb. The perception is somewhat distorted for most people. Moore's law has been almost completely eaten by the screen growth. That's the easiest least imaginative way.
  - joverholt 13y ago
    This demo about sketchpad is pretty impressive, too. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USyoT_Ha_bA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USyoT_Ha_bA You look at what they were able to accomplish, and it just seems like we lost a lot of steam somewhere.
zokier 13y ago
> It's year 2014 and you have to wait for your computer. It's so much faster than you, but you are waiting for it! The same is also evident on the web. In so many cases you need to wait for content, maybe couple of KB of text, to load even with our tens of Mb/s at last mile and tens of Gb/s at datacenter. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
- Negitivefrags 13y ago
  This is just due to the ridiculous way the development ecosystem for the web has grown. Nobody seems to care about fast languages anymore. Check out this website. http://forum.dlang.org/ http://forum.dlang.org/ Notice how amazingly fast it is. It's written in D. Oh, but I forgot, the bottleneck is in the database so feel free to waste millions of cycles every request chasing pointers around and around the vast quantities of memory that your dynamic language consumes. People don't even know what speed is anymore.
  - gleenn 13y ago
    Perhaps its because some people are more productive with dynamic languages and they value productivity over speed.
    - gtirloni 13y ago
      That's exactly it (and it's a message we've been hearing over and over for the past decade at least -- "worry about being productive, if it's slow, Moore's law will fix it for you in a few years"). The thing is, in some cases, all the productivity ends up costing a lot more. For small shops it will not be evident, but for bigger ones trying to scale, it'll be a major area of improvement (to use less cycles). And that's OK... comes down to using the right tool for the right job, matching the skills of your developers with the challenge, how fast you want things delivered, etc, etc, etc. I think the major issue people see is that when all of that slow programs are looked from a 10,000 feet view as a single thing, it looks like a damn waste of resources. Thus comments like "computing (as a whole) in the last X years has been terrible", etc. We can delve into programmer culture, lack of skills, people not caring about wasting resources, etc, etc, etc. I think the solution is better tooling. Let the programmer be productive, deliver things fast, etc, but build something more intelligent that will strip it down to only the necessary bits and deploy.
fsniper 13y ago
Exactly How I feel. We are adding up abstraction over abstraction, backwards compatibility, hardware compatibility, software compatibility, unrelated ui/ux features, animations.. I believe modern computing has 80/20 rule in a bad way. We use 80 percent of the computing power to do unrelated 20 percent of the job. we need to re-find Unix philosophy for modern day computing. Software should do a single task but do it well. Also have a look at Zawinski's Law. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski.27s_law_of_software_envelopment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski.27s_law...
- maxerickson 13y ago
  I wonder how much of the Unix philosophy is accidental success. 'Do one thing well' is a (relatively) easy way to make something that actually works correctly, so I guess I'm wondering if doing one thing is actually important, or if actually doing something in a consistent, reliable and predictable way is the more important aspect. (Small programs that enable composition are great, but so is, for example, a program that can uncompress any format in place with only an option or two)
  - valarauca1 13y ago
    The Unix Philosophy is an attitude not a philosophy. Unix doesn’t have a philosophy: it has an attitude. An attitude that says a simple, half-done job is more virtuous than a complex,well-executed one. An attitude that asserts the programmer’s time is more important than the user’s time, even if there are thousands of users for every programmer. It’s an attitude that praises the lowest common denominator • Small is beautiful. • 10 percent of the work solves 90 percent of the problems. • When faced with a choice, do whatever is simpler. Which sounds good until realize that these comments mean the exact same thing. • A small program is more desirable than a program that is functional or correct. • A shoddy job is perfectly acceptable. • When faced with a choice, cop out.
- ygra 13y ago
  And when you need to glue lots of things together that do just a single task, you end up spending much more (development and run) time at the joints, as in, constantly converting and parsing data again.
JoachimS 13y ago
To me, one of the really mind boogling things in terms of waste is how we today basically create piles of complete systems just to run a single application. The system used to run a single application is filled with other applications, libraries and functions that are never used. And the application being run is probably using shared lib and other complex mechanisms designed for shared environments when no sharing will in fact happen. Yes, these servers are virtual and just part of a file. But the overhead in space and energy is still mind boggling.
7952 13y ago
The computers are fast point really strikes a cord with me. Because so much of what programmers do seems to be about using abstractions and infrastructure to achieve things that are too slow when written naively in actual code. Just try plotting some 3D data using python. Should I use matplotlib, or a game engine, or maybe OpenGL? Each option could be too slow, even though the machine can easily process the raw data almost instantly.
userbinator 13y ago
I agree completely. Hardware has gotten orders of magnitude faster, yet the experience, as a user, hasn't changed nearly that much. You'll probably find this comparison interesting: http://hallicino.hubpages.com/hub/_86_Mac_Plus_Vs_07_AMD_DualCore_You_Wont_Believe_Who_Wins http://hallicino.hubpages.com/hub/_86_Mac_Plus_Vs_07_AMD_Dua... I think the saying that programmer time is more expensive than machine time is, like the quote about premature optimisation, responsible for promoting an inherently wasteful culture in programming when people are taught to take them at face value; looking at it another way, power isn't free, and when machine time translates to user time, then the situation definitely changes. I always keep in mind that users are using the software I create to do work, and their time is just as valuable if not more so than my own, especially if there are more of them. To me, it's a question of balancing the tradeoffs --- it's not worth spending a day to optimise software that will save a few minutes across all its users over its lifetime, but it is very well worth it to spend a week to optimise something so that it may save a year or more of its users' time. Whenever a programmer complains about certain tools (e.g. compiler, IDE, etc.) being slow, I keep that in mind to mention the next time he/she flippantly dismisses a time-saving optimisation using the "my time is more expensive" excuse. Programmers are users too. :-)
- couchand 13y ago
  Found this gem in the linked article: Windows Vista demands enough real estate on your hard drive that you could easily fit 30,000 full-length novels into it. A nitpick: a day of work, say six hours, is only 3600 minutes. If you can optimize some task to save a few minutes per user, it only takes a few thousand users to be worth it. However, I think the worst optimizations to leave on the table are in an area many developer-types won't think about: usability. We can save much more of a user's time by creating simple, intuitive interfaces than we can checking cache misses (in most modern development).
  - claudius 13y ago
    > We can save much more of a user's time by creating simple, intuitive interfaces than we can checking cache misses (in most modern development). And at least for regularly-used software, you can save even more user time by not optimising for the first five minutes of usage but for the long-term usage. Keyboard shortcuts are a good example for this: They are mostly not simple and certainly not intuitive per se (why does Alt+Tab switch windows in particular?), yet once you know them, they do save a lot of time.
bleebloob 13y ago
http://brooklynoptimist.com/2014/04/10/hacker-school-banning-feigned-surprise-is-absolutely-brilliant/ http://brooklynoptimist.com/2014/04/10/hacker-school-banning...

by krick 13y ago

narag 13y ago

Do you know what would make people instantly realise how fast computers are? Reaction: a program that reads a camera and reacts to some user action instantly moving a robot arm. Add to that an ultra-slow-motion camera so we can see what happened afterwards.

yayitswei 13y ago
Reminds me of the robot that wins rock-paper-scissors every time: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/video/2013/nov/06/japan-janken-robot-wins-rock-paper-scissors-every-time-video http://www.theguardian.com/technology/video/2013/nov/06/japa...
jordan0day 13y ago
There's a passage in Stephen Levy's book "Hackers" where he talks about a robot built by some students at MIT that could catch a ping pong ball thrown to it by a human. I don't recall what year this project was done, but I do recall what computer they used: a PDP-6. So a computer built 50 years ago is already fast enough to pass your instant-reaction test. (Well, admittedly, maybe it didn't respond instantly, but if it could catch a thrown ping pong ball, it was probably pretty quick). This comment isn't meant to scoff at your suggestion -- far from it -- I think an instant-reaction-bot will still impress most people (and rightfully so). I just wonder if we, as programmers and scientists and engineers, haven't been taking as much advantage of Moore' law as we ought to.
- narag 13y ago
  yayitswei posted a link to a robot that produces the effect I meant. A modern version of the catcher that could outperform a human would be nice too. Or the knife trick by the robot in Aliens. Also I saw some news about a spanish uni developing one robot arm to catch space debris. The thing is we still don't realize how fast they really are. We say all the time that computers are dumb. The perception is somewhat distorted for most people. Moore's law has been almost completely eaten by the screen growth. That's the easiest least imaginative way.
- joverholt 13y ago
  This demo about sketchpad is pretty impressive, too. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USyoT_Ha_bA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USyoT_Ha_bA You look at what they were able to accomplish, and it just seems like we lost a lot of steam somewhere.

zokier 13y ago

> It's year 2014 and you have to wait for your computer. It's so much faster than you, but you are waiting for it! The same is also evident on the web. In so many cases you need to wait for content, maybe couple of KB of text, to load even with our tens of Mb/s at last mile and tens of Gb/s at datacenter. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

Negitivefrags 13y ago
This is just due to the ridiculous way the development ecosystem for the web has grown. Nobody seems to care about fast languages anymore. Check out this website. http://forum.dlang.org/ http://forum.dlang.org/ Notice how amazingly fast it is. It's written in D. Oh, but I forgot, the bottleneck is in the database so feel free to waste millions of cycles every request chasing pointers around and around the vast quantities of memory that your dynamic language consumes. People don't even know what speed is anymore.
- gleenn 13y ago
  Perhaps its because some people are more productive with dynamic languages and they value productivity over speed.
  - gtirloni 13y ago
    That's exactly it (and it's a message we've been hearing over and over for the past decade at least -- "worry about being productive, if it's slow, Moore's law will fix it for you in a few years"). The thing is, in some cases, all the productivity ends up costing a lot more. For small shops it will not be evident, but for bigger ones trying to scale, it'll be a major area of improvement (to use less cycles). And that's OK... comes down to using the right tool for the right job, matching the skills of your developers with the challenge, how fast you want things delivered, etc, etc, etc. I think the major issue people see is that when all of that slow programs are looked from a 10,000 feet view as a single thing, it looks like a damn waste of resources. Thus comments like "computing (as a whole) in the last X years has been terrible", etc. We can delve into programmer culture, lack of skills, people not caring about wasting resources, etc, etc, etc. I think the solution is better tooling. Let the programmer be productive, deliver things fast, etc, but build something more intelligent that will strip it down to only the necessary bits and deploy.

fsniper 13y ago

Exactly How I feel. We are adding up abstraction over abstraction, backwards compatibility, hardware compatibility, software compatibility, unrelated ui/ux features, animations.. I believe modern computing has 80/20 rule in a bad way. We use 80 percent of the computing power to do unrelated 20 percent of the job. we need to re-find Unix philosophy for modern day computing. Software should do a single task but do it well. Also have a look at Zawinski's Law. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski.27s_law_of_software_envelopment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski.27s_law...

maxerickson 13y ago
I wonder how much of the Unix philosophy is accidental success. 'Do one thing well' is a (relatively) easy way to make something that actually works correctly, so I guess I'm wondering if doing one thing is actually important, or if actually doing something in a consistent, reliable and predictable way is the more important aspect. (Small programs that enable composition are great, but so is, for example, a program that can uncompress any format in place with only an option or two)
- valarauca1 13y ago
  The Unix Philosophy is an attitude not a philosophy. Unix doesn’t have a philosophy: it has an attitude. An attitude that says a simple, half-done job is more virtuous than a complex,well-executed one. An attitude that asserts the programmer’s time is more important than the user’s time, even if there are thousands of users for every programmer. It’s an attitude that praises the lowest common denominator • Small is beautiful. • 10 percent of the work solves 90 percent of the problems. • When faced with a choice, do whatever is simpler. Which sounds good until realize that these comments mean the exact same thing. • A small program is more desirable than a program that is functional or correct. • A shoddy job is perfectly acceptable. • When faced with a choice, cop out.
ygra 13y ago
And when you need to glue lots of things together that do just a single task, you end up spending much more (development and run) time at the joints, as in, constantly converting and parsing data again.

JoachimS 13y ago

To me, one of the really mind boogling things in terms of waste is how we today basically create piles of complete systems just to run a single application. The system used to run a single application is filled with other applications, libraries and functions that are never used. And the application being run is probably using shared lib and other complex mechanisms designed for shared environments when no sharing will in fact happen. Yes, these servers are virtual and just part of a file. But the overhead in space and energy is still mind boggling.

7952 13y ago

The computers are fast point really strikes a cord with me. Because so much of what programmers do seems to be about using abstractions and infrastructure to achieve things that are too slow when written naively in actual code. Just try plotting some 3D data using python. Should I use matplotlib, or a game engine, or maybe OpenGL? Each option could be too slow, even though the machine can easily process the raw data almost instantly.

userbinator 13y ago

I agree completely. Hardware has gotten orders of magnitude faster, yet the experience, as a user, hasn't changed nearly that much. You'll probably find this comparison interesting: http://hallicino.hubpages.com/hub/_86_Mac_Plus_Vs_07_AMD_DualCore_You_Wont_Believe_Who_Wins http://hallicino.hubpages.com/hub/_86_Mac_Plus_Vs_07_AMD_Dua... I think the saying that programmer time is more expensive than machine time is, like the quote about premature optimisation, responsible for promoting an inherently wasteful culture in programming when people are taught to take them at face value; looking at it another way, power isn't free, and when machine time translates to user time, then the situation definitely changes. I always keep in mind that users are using the software I create to do work, and their time is just as valuable if not more so than my own, especially if there are more of them. To me, it's a question of balancing the tradeoffs --- it's not worth spending a day to optimise software that will save a few minutes across all its users over its lifetime, but it is very well worth it to spend a week to optimise something so that it may save a year or more of its users' time. Whenever a programmer complains about certain tools (e.g. compiler, IDE, etc.) being slow, I keep that in mind to mention the next time he/she flippantly dismisses a time-saving optimisation using the "my time is more expensive" excuse. Programmers are users too. :-)

couchand 13y ago
Found this gem in the linked article: Windows Vista demands enough real estate on your hard drive that you could easily fit 30,000 full-length novels into it. A nitpick: a day of work, say six hours, is only 3600 minutes. If you can optimize some task to save a few minutes per user, it only takes a few thousand users to be worth it. However, I think the worst optimizations to leave on the table are in an area many developer-types won't think about: usability. We can save much more of a user's time by creating simple, intuitive interfaces than we can checking cache misses (in most modern development).
- claudius 13y ago
  > We can save much more of a user's time by creating simple, intuitive interfaces than we can checking cache misses (in most modern development). And at least for regularly-used software, you can save even more user time by not optimising for the first five minutes of usage but for the long-term usage. Keyboard shortcuts are a good example for this: They are mostly not simple and certainly not intuitive per se (why does Alt+Tab switch windows in particular?), yet once you know them, they do save a lot of time.

bleebloob 13y ago

http://brooklynoptimist.com/2014/04/10/hacker-school-banning-feigned-surprise-is-absolutely-brilliant/ http://brooklynoptimist.com/2014/04/10/hacker-school-banning...