[HN Gopher] Saving Lives ___________________________________________________________________ Saving Lives Author : compiler-guy Score : 246 points Date : 2023-08-21 15:51 UTC (7 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.folklore.org) (TXT) w3m dump (www.folklore.org) | seeknotfind wrote: | If you have to wait on a computer, it's not fast enough. | | Steve's argument here is widely used in the industry. It's almost | emotional blackmail (fail and be a killer) but classic | nonetheless. | dijit wrote: | > It's almost emotional blackmail (fail and be a killer) but | classic nonetheless. | | I read it much more as inspiring people to consider that they | have an impact on peoples lives. | | It's strikingly easy to blame the user for slow software, or | blame the PM or Org for pushing features and speed of | development over speed of the product. | | Steves mantra here is that software performance has a material | impact on daily lives. Pointing something out is not emotional | blackmail. | JohnFen wrote: | > Pointing something out is not emotional blackmail. | | True, but disingenuously implying that something like slow | boot times costs lives is. | jonny_eh wrote: | What is a life if not time well spent? | dijit wrote: | Not costing _lives_. But saving _lifetimes_ across a | population. | icepat wrote: | I can easily imagine a situation where life support | hardware needs to reboot, and taking too long to do so | would be life threatening. | JohnFen wrote: | "So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you've saved | a dozen lives." | | That's emotional blackmail. The implication is failing to | do that will _cost_ a dozen lives. It 's also incorrect. | Making it boot ten seconds faster saves zero lives. | JJMcJ wrote: | Wasting people's time. That's a good enough reason. | JohnFen wrote: | Sure, I agree. I just take issue with the framing. It's | highly manipulative. | xsmasher wrote: | This dovetails with another Jobs story - | | > After the iPad launch, Jobs supposedly walked into a meeting | with the Mac team, carrying an iPad. He woke up the iPad, which | happened instantaneously. Then he woke up a Mac, which took a | while to come out of sleep. Then he asked something like, "Why | doesn't this do that? | | Without the iPad there to show it was possible there would have | been arguments about memory speed and disk speed etc. And | faster Mac sleep/wake put pressure on Windows to up their game. | neurocline wrote: | I must have heard this story and forgot it, because I used this | argument on my team when I ran the group at Blizzard that did | installing and downloading and patching. "We have 10 million | people downloading and installing this patch, so every minute | extra we take is another fraction of a human life we're | spending". Sure, overly dramatic, and corny, but helped drive | improvements. | | The other more important metric I pushed was "speed of light". | When installing from a DVD (yeah, olden times), the "speed of | light" there was the rotational speed of the disc and so we | should install as close to that speed as possible. Keep improving | speed of operations until you butt up against whatever physical | limits exist. Time is precious, you don't get more of it. | hobs wrote: | That last part is important. I have worked with many engineers | who I would even classify as hard working, but spent little to | no time understanding the hardware they were running on and the | possibilities that it provided them. | | I have heard "that's slow" or "that's good" too many times in | performance talks that have completely ignored the underlying | machine and what was _possible_. | TillE wrote: | Learning about how the CPU cache works is probably the most | useful thing you can do if you write anything that's not I/O | limited. There are definitely a ton of experienced | programmers who don't quite understand how often the CPU is | just waiting around for data from RAM. | mcculley wrote: | It is a shame that there are not better monitoring tools | that surface this. When I use Activity Monitor on macOS, it | would be useful to see how much of "% CPU" is just waiting | on memory. I know I can drill down with various profilers, | but having it more accessible is way overdue. | arrowsmith wrote: | Okay, you've made me want to learn about it. Where do I | start? What concepts do I need to understand? Any reading | recommendations? | Mockapapella wrote: | Haven't read through it, but I suspect this would be a | good place to start: https://cpu.land/ | | HN Discussion: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36823605 | breakingrules wrote: | [dead] | tazjin wrote: | Back in the day I was hacking on WoW-related stuff like server | emulators, and it was always very noticeable how much care | Blizzard put into this kind of stuff. The (iirc) torrent-based | patch distribution for WoW etc. was really well done. Kudos, | especially in such a high-pressure industry! | opportune wrote: | I wish more engineers thought this way. As someone who works in | infrastructure it's the story I tell myself to | justify/rationalize my place in the world. When I ship big | infrastructure performance improvements it's not about the | speed or money saved per se, it's less CO2 in the atmosphere | and more human life (amortized over millions of people) spent | on something other than waiting for a computer to respond. | | We aren't doctors saving individuals' lives but what we can do | is give people fractions of their lives back. Some software is | used by hundreds of millions or billions of people, so small | changes there can save many "lives" worth of time. | llimos wrote: | > Time is precious, you don't get more of it. | | In this particular example, the time saved on the download will | go towards the noble cause of ... playing video games? Is that | _so much_ better use of time than the wait for it to download? | niels_bom wrote: | That's assuming people play more when the download is faster. | | And to answer your question: for everybody involved it's | better yes. | firebirdn99 wrote: | I didn't know this before, but it's cool that originally back | then Apple's directory explorer was still called 'Finder and it's | not changed since. | FBT wrote: | There are about half a million minutes in a year, so 50 million | seconds is a year and two thirds. At the rate of saving 50 | million seconds a day, in a year you'll have saved around 608 | years--which is only a dozen lifetimes if a lifetime is around 50 | years. Still, that's a pretty close approximation for an off-the- | cuff guess. | msephton wrote: | I'm sure he'd have planned or thought about this before hand. | | Steve's famous "computers are a bicycle for the mind" was | refined over a long period of time and countless interviews. We | only hear about the one time where he perfected it, where it | made an impression. Many other instances are on YouTube, in one | you can see him trying out different alternative lines. | jjkaczor wrote: | Well... I remember some press and discussion about "InterBase" | (now FireBase) - and it's storage/self-healing recovery model | being critical for some scenarios "back in the day", some quotes: | | "AFATDS includes 935,000 lines of Ada code, running on an HP RISC | Workstation and the Army's Light Weight Computer Units," | according to John Williams, spokesman for Magnavox Electronic | Systems Company, the prime contractor on the project. "We needed | to work with a single database that could scale and operate | across Unix and PC platforms. The product also had to install | quickly and provide high availability without monopolizing our | systems resources." | | "Decision support of this nature requires a modular and flexible | architecture that would support both distributed processing and | distributed databases. That's why we chose InterBase. It out | performed the competition and convinced us that it would be | reliable in life and death situations." | | The exact nature of the discussion was that in some situations, | the firing of the main weapon in certain tanks would generate an | internal EMP event, so systems would reboot - they had to have | extremely fast reboots and recovery-times... so they could fire | again... | alex_suzuki wrote: | I remember my MacBook booting up lightning fast in 2013 (Leopard? | Earlier? Dunno). Those days are gone. | msephton wrote: | My M1 MBP on Monterey boots in a few seconds. | zython wrote: | I never understood why people calculate time savings like this. | Similar for a developer 1 times 5 hours yields not the same | producitiy/results as 5 times 1 hours, due to "context switching | overhead" for example. | | Claiming you saved a couple of lifetimes when all you can gain is | a couple of seconds is so misleading. | [deleted] | bhauer wrote: | Programmers and engineers have to apply this thinking | holistically. The totality of waiting for slow software is | enormous. Performance needs to be given a higher priority by more | development teams. | | I don't tend to consciously sum all of the time I spend waiting | on slow software and slow services. But waiting on slow software | impacts my subconscious in the moment, making me feel | uncomfortable and frustrated with the system, as if it is | antagonistic. If I do spend any time consciously thinking about | it, I feel disdain for the engineers and project leaders who | believed that what they had produced was good enough to ship. | | With the processing capacity of modern computers, waiting for | hundreds of milliseconds for trivial requests, or much longer for | only modestly-complex requests is evidence of gross negligence on | the part of the programmers. | khaledh wrote: | Yep. Computers should wait for people, not the other way around | (unless it's a long running batch job). | karol wrote: | Nostalgia this and that... in 1983 I had a calculator and flew to | Venus... | overgard wrote: | I think about this a lot whenever I'm waiting on a long compile. | How many lives has complicated template metaprogramming in C++ | taken? | yellow_lead wrote: | I was reading this while compiling | teo_zero wrote: | Nicely played on the double meaning of "save". Couldn't be done | in every language. | stevenfoster wrote: | If only he knew how many millions of lives would be lost | indefinitely scrolling on a small sheet of glass. | titaniumtown wrote: | It's very fascinating how small amounts of time people take to | do/wait for something add up over a huge population. | DonHopkins wrote: | Back when most everybody ran Connectix RAM Doubler and Connectix | Speed Doubler on their Macs (which actually worked!), I was | praying for Connectix to release Boot Doubler, that made every | other boot instant! | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectix | | https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/RAM_Doubler | | https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Speed_Doubler | | https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/connectix-speed-doub... | | https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=31852 | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21768641 | devnullbrain wrote: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8Mc-38C88g | | A similar (fictional) sentiment from Margin Call | csharpminor wrote: | I think about this every time I see a cookie banner. It's a 1-2 | second delay that plays out millions if not billions of times per | day. How many lifetimes have been wasted since those were forced | into existence by GDPR? | hosteur wrote: | GDPR does not force those (In fact most of them are illegal | according to GDPR). Every site could avoid those banners by | just not tracking visitors. | ShinzonRemus wrote: | Cookie banners were present well before GDPR, and they are not | mandated by law. | | You can avoid the cookie banner in two ways: 1. Do not use | tracking cookies (or other tracking tools); or 2. Ask the | consensus in a non-intrusive way, e.g., directly in the page | itself. | | We know that no company wants to remove tracking cookies | because they need to "improve the service". However, there is | no reason for not using solution 2. The only reason is annoying | the user: a dark pattern to force users to accept cookies. | JohnFen wrote: | Most of them were not forced into existence by the GDPR. | [deleted] | mbork_pl wrote: | Sort of related: https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/performance- | matters/. Well, not really - that one is about saving lives with | performant software, but _more literally_. | datadrivenangel wrote: | I wish someone at microsoft would do this for o365. Losing 2-5 | seconds any time I click a link is painful. | jonahhorowitz wrote: | A story an old engineer at Apple told me: | | When working on MacOS 8.x (not sure which point release), they | surveyed users, and their number one complaint was boot time. It | took long for the system to boot (around 45s on average at the | time). They looked into it but also asked the question, why do | people care about boot times at all? At this point, the systems | were capable of sleeping, so reboots should be rare. | | They found that people were rebooting because of instability, not | just once a day or once a week. While they did improve the boot | times, they put more effort into making the OS more stable. When | the new release shipped, people stopped complaining about boot | time, but not because it was vastly improved, instead because | they were doing it less often. | | The moral of the story is to make sure you understand both what | your customers are asking for and why your customers are asking | for it. | Someone wrote: | > When working on MacOS 8.x (not sure which point release), | they surveyed users [...] They found that people were rebooting | because of instability, not just once a day or once a week. | | That didn't require a survey. The OS didn't have memory | protection and typically got patched at startup by ten or so | different extensions from both Apple and numerous third | parties. | | The rules for patching were unclear, to say the least (1), so | an extension might, for example, have a code path where it | allocated memory inside a patch to a system call that might be | moving memory around (a no-no, as the memory manager wasn't | reentrant) | | And that had to run code that typically was compiled with a C | compiler of the time, with very, very limited tools to prevent | out of bounds memory writes. | jeffbee wrote: | That certainly sounds about right. I definitely lost more time | to the fact that a Quadra would freeze with high probability | during a scan than I ever lost to intentional reboots. | pvg wrote: | Apple's customers had been screaming for better stability for | years and Apple repeatedly tried and failed to deliver a | meaningful solution. Even MacOS 8 introduced very limited | memory protection that didn't help much in most practical | cases. In context, it's really a story about an organization's | capacity and will to rationalize - this very nearly killed | Apple as a business. | ninkendo wrote: | It's an immutable law of the universe that consumer computers | will always take at least 30-45 seconds to boot. If yours is | faster, wait a few years... the developers will allow enough | regressions to slip in that it'll go back up again. | tmpz22 wrote: | > The moral of the story is to make sure you understand both | what your customers are asking for and why your customers are | asking for it. | | One reason engineers enjoy questioning the premise of a | difficult feature is to avoid the work entirely. The problem | with this is not that engineers are lazy its that the success | metrics after the goal posts are moved can be futzed in a way | that ultimately is detrimental to users. | | Did Apple really improve boot times and OS instabilities to a | complete resolution or did an aspiring PM or Lead achieve the | bare minimum of the goal to claim victory internally? | JKCalhoun wrote: | Mac OS X took time to shut down though. | | When a friend first showed my wife Mac OS X and went to shut it | down she frowned, "That's something I liked about the Mac, it | would shut down instantly." | | "You'll have to find something else to like about Mac OS," he | said. | haswell wrote: | This reminds me of the "XY Problem" framing [0], a concept that | has been very helpful over the years when communicating with | customers about feature requests. | | Many people can imagine how they'd solve an immediate problem, | but never pause to examine whether or not this solution is | ideal, or generalizes beyond a specific situation. | | Another phrase that comes to mind is "fall in love with the | problem, not the solution". If you understand the problem space | deeply, either many solutions can emerge, or one solution | emerges as clearly the best place to focus. | | In my years as a product manager, it surprised me how many PMs | don't think this way, and just tack on feature after feature, | convinced this is the best thing for the customer, when often | the thing they need is not something they know how to ask for. | | - [0] http://xyproblem.info/ | sebzim4500 wrote: | > This reminds me of the "XY Problem" framing [0], a concept | that has been very helpful over the years when communicating | with customers about feature requests. | | It also ruined stackoverflow, since replies which ignore the | question and assume that the OP really meant something else | end up being so much easier to write/vote on than an actual | answer. | jameshart wrote: | Also when, for example, someone suggests a strategy that is | useful in scenario X, but because it can be problematic in | scenario Y, they get a bunch of replies warning them about | that - even though they had no intention of advocating | applying it in scenario Y. That's also a kind of XYing - | "oh don't do that, it's bad if you re trying to Y..." when | we're not, we are trying to X. | | For example, when someone says they think the XY problem | model is a useful framing when evaluating customer feature | requests in product design, they are talking about using it | in scenario X. | | But inevitably they will attract a bunch of replies telling | them how bad it is to apply the XY problem approach when | answering questions in a technical Q&A forum. That would be | scenario Y. | yowzadave wrote: | Even if you know that the strategy is problematic in | scenario Y, other viewers of the reply may not; you are | only one of the many potential consumers of the response. | Isn't it useful to flag the potential gotchas of a given | approach for a naive reader? | | I feel like many of the complaints Stack Overflow users | come down to this: in many users' minds, the site is a | Q&A forum, while the SO team wants it to be an | authoritative repository of technical knowledge. | pierat wrote: | "You keep mentioning XY problem, but you really meant the | AB problem, and that answer is ......" | | That's it in a nutshell. And concur with this de-framing | non-answer as one of the leading causes of bad | StackOverflow solutions. | jameshart wrote: | Apparently I was too subtle so let me put a lampshade on | it. | | The replies to the post which said that the XY problem | approach is useful in product development, which are | talking about XY reframing being a problem on | stackoverflow _are XY reframing the parent post_. | | They are doing exactly what they decry. | | The smell of irony is apparently not as thick in the air | as I thought it was. | haswell wrote: | For what it's worth, I saw what you did there and | appreciated/enjoyed it. | asveikau wrote: | Stack overflow started out with a lot of Microsoft | ecosystem people, eg. Joel Spolsky. I worked at Microsoft | in 2008 and this kind of de-framing was a bit of a | corporate cultural obsession there at that time. You'd | report a bug internally and PMs would ask you what you | were _really_ trying to do ... It was frustrating when | you wanted people to just fix their shit. Instead people | would universally treat you like you didn 't know what | you were doing and really meant to ask something else. I | saw this trait a lot on SO around the same time. | [deleted] | haswell wrote: | Like anything, it needs to be applied appropriately, and I | agree that blindly redirecting every request to this | framing is not helpful. | | But the number of times that it _is_ helpful has been | pretty high for me over the years. This probably depends a | lot on the customer's own ability to comprehend the true | nature of the problem. I worked in the enterprise /B2B | space, where a significant number of requests came from | people not technical enough to fully know what to ask | without some deeper exploration. | hooverd wrote: | Agreed. But sometimes, especially if you know about your | problem domain, it feels like asking "how do a I keep | water out of my basement" and all the answers are "simply | rebuild your house at the top of the hill." | hunter2_ wrote: | It's a matter of vastly different costs, in that case: | the solution to the modified problem costs much more to | solve than the originally stated problem. The trick is | avoiding such a large gap, hopefully with a breakeven | that comes in the foreseeable future, if not immediately. | | For example: how do I repair water damage on my ceiling | in a way that's quick enough to do it after every storm? | You mean how do I repair my roof so I only have to repair | the ceiling one more time? It's more upfront cost to do | both now, but the breakeven is only a small handful of | storms away, which is palatable enough to get serious | consideration. If the breakeven was (for some reason, | hypothetically) 20 years away, actually figuring out how | to make quick work of repeated ceiling repairs might be | more desirable. | bombolo wrote: | Most people ask how to make some absurd hack when there is | an easy and proper way to solve their problem. | lolinder wrote: | Sometimes what you think is an absurd hack is still what | I want to do _after having thoroughly considered all | other options_. It 's infuriating in those cases to end | up on a Stack Overflow question where someone wanted to | do _exactly_ what I want to do, and the only answers are | redirecting them to other solutions that I 've already | considered and ruled out. | adamc wrote: | Many, many things are wrong with stackoverflow. Insisting | that every discussion be factual and opinion-free pushes | you deep into the McNamara fallacy of believing that things | that cannot easily be quantified don't matter. | | It's a site I sometimes use but dislike intensely. | spencerchubb wrote: | I don't see that as a bad thing. Stack Overflow only | wants to focus on questions that have a verifiable | answer. Other types of questions still matter, they just | don't matter on Stack Overflow. | bee_rider wrote: | This is the most techie social media site I use, and I | see constant complaints about the other techie social | media site, StackOverflow. Why doesn't someone test the | theory and come up with some competition? | | I think this is normally an unreasonable ask (when we're | complaining about, like, cars, clearly that's not in this | site's aggregate wheelhouse). But I mean this is a | website about start-ups, full of techie web-devs | complaining about a website that they all use. | seedboot wrote: | > Why doesn't someone test the theory and come up with | some competition? | | ChatGPT Has entered the chat. | sanderjd wrote: | I think the absolute hardest thing to get information on | is "I have XYZ problem, I am aware of solutions A, B, and | C. What is the best solution among these, what are the | trade-offs between them, and what solutions am I not | aware of?". Now, this is just a truly difficult question, | but Stack Overflow solves that problem by forbidding such | questions, which is understandable, but I think also a | shame. At one point in time, I thought maybe Quora would | try to fill this gap, but they went off in some other | direction that I never understood. Most other "social" | things (reddit, etc.) are discussion rather than Q&A. Or | they are blog posts, where the focus is usually on | solution A, with solutions B and C presented only for | contrast, because solution A is what motivated the author | to write the post. | | I kind of want Wirecutter, but for technologies. | adamc wrote: | Yes, that would actually be much more useful to me than | what stackoverflow is. A vast number of the questions | found that can be easily answered by RTFM and/or doing | some direct experimentation. The harder ones would be | more useful. | sanderjd wrote: | Yeah. I think it's also why chatgpt (and copilot, etc.) | actually did turn out to be a strong SO competitor, | because it actually can do a pretty good job on these | factual questions. | | But unfortunately it's pretty bad at this other kind of | judgment-based compare-and-contrast question. It's | especially bad at the "what other solutions am I not | aware of?" part, because it isn't kept up to date. | hunter2_ wrote: | Isn't Bard kept up to date? | nonameiguess wrote: | You seem to be trying to replace a basic peer-review of | an engineering design that typically involves a paid team | with advice from poorly-known, pseudonymous strangers | with reputation crowd-sourced from a web site's user- | rating system. | | Frankly, I think that's asking a bit much. If you want a | high-quality peer review of design proposals to bounce | ideas off of others and discuss tradeoffs, you need a | team. Maybe something like a meetup group or mailing list | for a specific technology, programming language, or | industry sector. But it goes beyond one-off Q&A, and I | can also understand why Stack Overflow, with a goal of | becoming a repository of perpetually useful knowledge | that is general enough to be useful for anyone into the | indefinite future, does not want to host such project- | specific discussions. | | Why not just develop in the open and collaborate | explicitly with other parties also working on the same | project? What you're asking for sounds close to something | like the various special interest groups and public | discussion of improvement proposals you see in things | like the Python programming language or Kubernetes, or | discussion on LWN about specific challenges the Linux | kernel team faces. | NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: | I don't think that's asking a bit much. | | If it were, then there'd be no reason to prohibit such | questions... people wouldn't ask them, because they would | never be answered. The only reason to prohibit them is | because they would get attention/answers where none was | desired. | | The trouble with StackOverflow, is that what the users | want and need does not match what the owners want. The | owners want something monetizable, something that can | look elegant and beautiful (hence the PR release a couple | of years ago where they were positioning it as some | "encyclopedia of computer science" or whatever). They | figured out that the users could be denied what they | want, while still (slowly) creating what the owners | themselves wanted. | | > and I can also understand why Stack Overflow, with a | goal of becoming a repository of perpetually useful | knowledge that is general enough to be useful for anyone | into the indefinite future, does not want to host such | project-specific discussions. | | I'm not sure I'd characterize them as wanting that, but | if they did... how would that be at all useful to anyone | except CS undergrads trying to get someone to do their | homework for them? Literally nothing of what people ask | there day to day will be generally useful into the | indefinite future. What do you want to ask, that will be | useful 40 years from now? Neither anything language | specific, nor anything domain specific will be relevant | to anyone not a historian. Even the cutting edge stuff | today will have long since been wrapped up into some | blackbox library that everyone will use without | unerstanding it. | | If you were correct, SO could never be anything more than | some useless little dumpster where the same 5 people | whine n about the quickest sort algorithm. | AlbertCory wrote: | All true, to which I'd add: | | It's like giving a big sales force a financial incentive: | you have to be careful because they'll just game it, | relentlessly, all day long. They won't care about your | corporate priorities -- just getting that incentive | money. | | On SO, people get "reputation points." Those "same 5 | people" game that system like salespeople winning that | prize. You answered a question? They don't want you as a | competitor, so they downvote you. You don't like _their_ | answer? Too bad, you don 't have enough reputation points | to downvote them. | | To pick another analogy: they're like high school | cheerleaders voting on who can become one of them. | IshKebab wrote: | Unfortunately the XY problem is now mostly used by know-it- | alls trying to show off. At least in my experience. | | If you ever find a question that you _think_ is an XY | problem, answer X first and _then_ say "did you want Y?". | | The _worst_ possible answer is "you should be asking Y". | haswell wrote: | While I agree that it's not useful if people are using this | to show off, I'd prefer to deal with a few know-it-alls if | it means that better product decisions are being made, and | dev teams are spending less time building things that | customers can't use or didn't even want. | | The way I see it, there are failure modes with both | extremes. I'd prefer the failure mode that involves some | occasional annoyance over the failure mode that results in | significant amounts of wasted code/effort, and a return to | the XY framing anyway when things go wrong. | | Ideally, people who are using this find a balance, and can | recognize the difference between an obviously straight- | forward request and something that needs deeper | exploration. | | It's not perfect, but I think it's a better default. | shawnz wrote: | > answer X first and then say "did you want Y?". | | That's a surefire way to cause your suggestion of Y to get | ignored and proliferate the bad practice of X. | | It's not anyone's responsibility to explain how to do | things in a way that they believe is wrong. | lolinder wrote: | If they don't want to explain how to do things in a way | they disagree with, then the appropriate response is to | not say anything at all. | | The current culture on SO is to flood questions with | "don't do X, do Y", then upvote those answers. The result | is that questions _look_ answered but actually aren 't, | so the questions stay unanswered. When I come along | months or years later having already considered all | options, I don't want to have my time wasted by a | question that perfectly matches my goal but was never | answered because it got drowned in alternative approaches | that I already ruled out. | shawnz wrote: | Isn't it the question author who gets to choose when an | answer is satisfactory or not on SO? If a question is | full of answers that aren't marked as satisfactory, then | there's still an opportunity for someone to come in and | get the points by providing a different one. What more | can they do, ban people from trying to provide | alternative solutions? Surely that is going to create | much more harm than good. | lolinder wrote: | > Isn't it the question author who gets to choose when an | answer is satisfactory or not on SO? | | This would be a fine policy if SO didn't _also_ make a | huge stink about duplicate questions. As is, there 's one | canonical copy of each similarly-phrased question, and a | re-ask that says "but for real, I actually want to do it | this way" is going to get shut down as a duplicate. | | > If a question is full of answers that aren't marked as | satisfactory, then there's still an opportunity for | someone to come in and get the points by providing a | different one. | | The system rewards being one of the first responders, not | the one who actually answers the question. This is | especially true now that they've updated the system to | place the highest-voted answer first rather than the | accepted answer. | | > What more can they do, ban people from trying to | provide alternative solutions? Surely that is going to | create much more harm than good. | | I don't know that there's anything the company _can_ do, | since it 's pretty clear that they've lost control of | most aspects of the culture. | shawnz wrote: | Fair enough, I totally agree that SO moderators are way | too overbearing when it comes to duplicates. | JohnFen wrote: | > The current culture on SO is to flood questions with | "don't do X, do Y", then upvote those answers. The result | is that questions look answered but actually aren't, so | the questions stay unanswered. | | I think this is the #1 reason why SO isn't a great | resource for me. | IshKebab wrote: | It's not anyone's responsibility to answer at all. | shawnz wrote: | Agreed! Which is why I think it's especially | disrespectful to criticize people making honest efforts | to help as being "know-it-alls trying to show off" in | cases where their idea of the ideal kind of help is | different than what the original poster had in mind. | IshKebab wrote: | It's frequently NOT an honest effort to help. It's just | "well that's a stupid question, let me show you how I | know more..." | | When you really _are_ trying to help and you think it 's | an XY you can answer politely by actually answering their | question and _then_ saying "but you may want to do this | instead". Try it. | petsfed wrote: | Indeed, a good answer to X will make clear why Y is the | better option _in most cases_. But its a thin line to | tread between subtly implying that X is bad, and saying | "only idiots do X, anyway here's how an idiot would do | X". | shawnz wrote: | You suggested that in your previous comment, and I | explained already why I don't think that's a good idea: | it's liable to cause your alternative suggestion to get | ignored and proliferate bad practices. | | If someone has a genuine desire to help, then they also | inherently have an interest in making sure people don't | continue down paths which are likely to lead to more | problems in the end. Otherwise, you might end up spending | more time supporting the follow-on issues created due to | the misapplications of your own advice than you spent | providing the support in the first place, which would not | be an efficient way of helping. | jldugger wrote: | Okay, but I've been in plenty of conversations where I | ask "I read in a book that we should be doing X, how are | people doing X?"[1], and the answers I got, _from a | community that included the book author_, were "first, | make sure you're doing A, B and C."[2] When in fact I am | doing that already. Do I have to really preface every | question with "i promise i'm not the idiot you assume I | am?" | | 1: "This book says to monitor ML systems for distribution | shifts; what tools are people using to store that data | and monitor for changes?" 2: "Make sure you're monitoring | normal SRE statistics like request failure rate" | shawnz wrote: | > Do I have to really preface every question with "i | promise i'm not the idiot you assume I am?" | | Yes, first of all I do think it's up to the person | looking for help to fully elaborate their situation in | such a way that makes it clear why the X/Y problem | doesn't apply to them, since other people with similar | issues who stumble upon your thread might not realize | that you have that additional context, and the answer is | just as much for them as it is for you (if not moreso, | since you're just one person). | | Secondly, even if you did fully elaborate your situation, | it may be that there are people interested in trying to | help who don't know the answer to X but do know the | answer to Y, and by answering Y they are still providing | more value than not answering at all. There's nothing | about answering Y that prevents X from being answered by | someone else. | dpkirchner wrote: | "Here's the answer to what I wish you asked..." | PlunderBunny wrote: | Politicians do it all the time: "Answer the question you | wish you were asked, not the question you were actually | asked." And reporters are pretty bad at taking this on. | lolinder wrote: | > reporters are pretty bad at taking this on. | | The format of a typical press conference is designed to | make it hard for a reporter to follow up when the | politician dodges their question, because the politician | usually moves on to the next reporter. If they ever get a | chance to ask a follow-up, it's after the original | context is long gone from anyone's working memory. | teddyh wrote: | If reporters really wanted an answer to the question, the | next reporter to be called on could just press for an | answer to the previous question. But they don't; in a | press conference situation, the goal of reporters is to | be _seen_ , so their fame goes up, and to avoid | antagonizing the host, since if they do, they won't be | invited to the next press conference. | lolinder wrote: | Eh, that's part of it, but it's also that the next | reporter already knew which question they wanted to ask. | They probably didn't pay that much attention to the | answer to the previous question because they were busy | formulating their own question. | teddyh wrote: | > _And reporters are pretty bad at taking this on._ | | If they do, they won't get the interview next time. | albertzeyer wrote: | The XY problem: | | > This leads to enormous amounts of wasted time and energy, | both on the part of people asking for help, and on the part | of those providing help. | | This is not really true though. | | The time spent to answer is not wasted. There are people | searching for it via Google, e.g. how to get the last N | characters from a variable, and they will find the correct | answer. | | The time spent by the asker is never wasted. I sometimes know | that this is not directly the thing I want to solve, or how I | stumbled upon this question. Still, it's a question I have | because I'm curious and I just want to know. So, in any case, | the person asking for help will learn something. | | And all other people on the Internet who stumble upon the | question are likely searching for exactly the answer to this | exact question, so they get some good value out of it. Or | even if not, it likely will have references to what they are | interested in. Those other people are ignored here. | sopooneo wrote: | For all it is rightfully derided, it is this aspect of "user | story phrasing" I find valuable. If you can politely ask | stakeholders to state their problem in the form "As a _____ I | want to _____ so that I can ______", then you can find out | that why as filled in on the last blank. And then you can use | that why to figure out the best actions to take, being | careful that you still scratch the itch the that middle blank | in that story brought up. | dgb23 wrote: | There's more general concept of perception here that is worth | thinking about. | | Users can get awfully confused by generic, misleading or | overly technical error messages. So they call/write you and | confuse you even more. | | "There is something wrong about X." Where X is some | misinterpreted partial of a message. This only gets cleared | up if you let them walk you through what happened step by | step and/or examine logs etc. | | Error messages are an important part of a UI. No matter if | they're user errors or internal errors. | | There are always errors that you don't foresee and just need | to display generic messages for. But even then there should | be a very clear, short(!) description and a unmistakable call | to action. | pixl97 wrote: | Ugh, not 15 minutes before this I was testing a new yet to | be released version of my companies software. And while | testing I get an error message like | | "Cannot do X with upload" | | Number one this is a behavior change and should not have | been changed in the first place. | | But number two, all the error had to say was "Cannot do X | with upload because application is set to Y" | | The first one generates a support ticket, the second one | gives a legitimate reason on why the failure occurred and | what they can do about it. | otikik wrote: | Trust people when they report there's a problem, but don't | trust them with the solution. | | Otherwise we would get faster horses instead of cars. | munificent wrote: | If I remember right, in "The Inmates are Running the Asylum", | Alan Cooper says there are two golden rules: | | * The user is always right. | | * The user is not always right. | | And then the explains the first point is that the user should | be treated as the authority on what their problem is. You | can't just tell them they're "doing it wrong" or rationalize | away their pain. | | The second point is that users are not designers and | shouldn't have to be. They'll often come up with ideas for | solutions, but you shouldn't take those as what needs to be | done. | Pannoniae wrote: | The first point is really common in programming. If you ask | a "stupid" question, you don't get an answer like "here's | how to do it, but by the way, you could also do this | instead" but just flame you with "you shouldn't have been | doing X". | | Good example is FTP. Obviously, for anything requiring any | kind of security, use SFTP. But I kid you not, almost all | FTP-related questions on the internet have answers like | "are you still using that INSECURE protocol in 2020??" | without being constructive at all. Even if it's just some | random hobby project. Or a legacy system they can't change. | Doesn't matter, it's more important to score points from | virtue-signaling than actually helping the poster. | biogene wrote: | That's a nice way to put it! | amatecha wrote: | Ah, funny, I just shared this link in a comment a couple weeks | ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37053941 | | It's applicable in conversation so frequently around | software/computers as it reflects a really empathic mindset that | I feel is becoming more and more rare... | Justsignedup wrote: | Errr my biggest shock and awe moment was Guild Wars 2. A bit | after launch I was playing and an update came in. "Please restart | the client now after patching" | | Okay... Let's click that button!!!! | | Game... shuts down... downloads an update... patches... starts | up... loads me back into where I was. | | All this in... 1 minute flat! Baldur's Gate 3 can't do that on | today's hardware with an SSD and a much faster processor, and 4x | the ram, compared to a game 13 years ago on significantly | crappier hardware. | | That's what solidified to me that the game was rock-freaken- | solid. | fjni wrote: | What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away. | MichaelZuo wrote: | It's a pretty good point, ordinary computers could boot up from | cold in under 30 seconds on 5400 rpm spinning rust, so why can't | they boot up in under 1 second on the latest and greatest NVMe | SSDs? | biogene wrote: | They do, on the same workload. But if you look at the virtual | memory breakdown, the vast majority of pages are non-executable | data pages. Just did a rough check with Firefox and the | executable pages are ~200MiB compared to ~2GiB of | Private+Shared Pages. So its not so much the code, its all the | data - the graphics, dictionaries, icons, fonts, textures, | cached data, etc, etc. | the8472 wrote: | Mostly a matter of software not being written to make use of | the SSD capabilities. You need parallelism or prefetching to | keep the IO queues non-empty. If you have a single-threaded | workload which interleaves blocking IO with CPU work and the IO | patterns are not amenable to readaheads the SSD will be mostly | idle. Similarly anything calling fsync or performing other file | system operations that trigger synchronous writes on the | critical path will stall the entire boot process. Due to | caching writes are fast no matter the medium as long as you | don't demand instant durability. | mewse-hn wrote: | Recently, I was able to get a NVME SSD into an old dell | (i5-4590) using a modified bios and a PCIE adapter card. It | booted into fresh win 10 in seconds. | | I think it's the old problem where the more crap windows | accumulates, the longer it takes to boot. | pixl97 wrote: | Most likely because that ordinary computer of that time wasn't | trying to bring up any network devices. | | Simply put, strip down an OS to the same feature set of that | ancient computer and the modern OS will be a lot faster. Some | of the networkless VMs I mess with boot in a second or two, but | you see we've abstracted most of the hardware away. So, mostly | the problem is a hardware one. | cocodill wrote: | my fresh PC with 64GB DDR5 takes a minute til POST. | water9 wrote: | Check bios for fast boot setting perhaps? | dist-epoch wrote: | DDR5 memory has this thing where it needs to be "trained" to | figure out the best settings for a particular | memory/motherboard combination. | | Maybe your PC "trains" the memory every boot instead of just | the first one. | | https://www.crucial.com/support/articles-faq- | memory/ddr5-mem... | fatnoah wrote: | My Windows 11 PC boots in about 20 seconds. Over half of that | time is the POST. Once that's done, I see the Windows login in | about 5-10 seconds. It's fast enough that I don't really | notice. | rocky1138 wrote: | Relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37212557 | MichaelZuo wrote: | That is speedy, 2.2 seconds on a 9.54 MHz Tandy 1000RL! | | The ~4 seconds to boot up to a GUI desktop is actually even | more impressive: | https://youtu.be/JIEPqD4luG8?si=9gVtFCIxFYma1erC&t=556 | | My top of the line i9-9880H Macbook Pro from 2019, with PCIe | 4.0 NVMe speeds, needs over 20 seconds to boot up in | comparison... | toast0 wrote: | I had a Tandy 1000 TL/2; it had a tandy specific MS-DOS 3.3 | with Deskmate setup in ROM, booted pretty darn fast; but | you had to give that up if you wanted to boot a newer dos. | A newer MS-DOS still booted quick, and there wasn't much to | the BIOS before it hit the drives, but you couldn't run | Deskmate on standard MS-DOS. | b20000 wrote: | because parts of code these days is written in languages like | java, python, etc which means at least some software runs | slower. | | add to that that people think that because machines are faster | they don't need to optimize anything. | beebmam wrote: | My PC takes about 5 seconds to boot to be usable. | jeffbee wrote: | My NUC boots Ubuntu in 3 seconds flat, including POST. | walteweiss wrote: | How is this possible? Is it super new? | jeffbee wrote: | There were two things I had to do to shave the last few | seconds, the most beneficial was disabling all the | unnecessary peripherals in the BIOS. When I looked at the | Ubuntu boot log it said it spend 1.7 seconds uploading | firmware to the bluetooth controller, which at that point | was like 95% of the post-POST boot time, and not needing | that I just turned it off in the BIOS. | [deleted] | crazygringo wrote: | Icons used to be 32x32 monochrome with a mask. Now they're | 512x512 in 48-bit color. System fonts used to have ~200 | characters, now they have tens of thousands. | | Extrapolate to everything else and it becomes pretty clear. | There's just so much more to load. | MichaelZuo wrote: | The math indicates otherwise, as another user pointed out, a | 9.54 MHz Tandy 1000RL could load to MS-DOS in 2.2 seconds | with 512 KB of very very slow RAM and a very slow 20MB drive. | | Even factoring in 100x more resource usage for a 2023 | computer to deliver all the features expected, it definitely | should be way under 2.2 seconds. | crazygringo wrote: | You've got to go way more than 100x. An 80x24 character | screen used 2K of memory. Running two 4K monitors today | uses 50MB of memory. | | That's 25,000x more usage of memory for the interface | alone. | MichaelZuo wrote: | 100x total system resource demands. | | Display memory usage made only a modest difference even | for 1989 era computers as demonstrated by the 1000RLX vs | 1000RL, which you would have known if you followed the | link in the other comment and watched the video. | | You can verify this yourself by hooking up a VGA | resolution display, the same as the 1989 1000RLX shown, | to a modern computer with VGA out and it doesn't reduce | boot times by any significant amount. | amarshall wrote: | Not every part of the boot process is bottlenecked by disk I/O. | jdiff wrote: | Every part it's bottlenecked is similarly exponentially | improved from the olden days though. | tempestn wrote: | One of the slowest parts of boot-up is memory checking, | where the speed has increased exponentially, but so has the | size. | jdiff wrote: | Maybe it's the single slowest individual item, but it's | very far from being a significant fraction of boot time. | And the capacity really hasn't kept up the way speed has. | My desktop has 24GB of DDR3 1600 and manages to post in | under 2 seconds. And that's pretty old by today's | standards. Mid level modern hardware runs at least a | circle or two around this system in terms of speed, but | in terms of capacity it's still right in line with a | higher end system today. Maybe I'm atypical but my boot | time is dominated by my OS spinning itself up, by a long | shot. | Syonyk wrote: | Complexity. Size. | | Windows 95 was about 50MB installed with most features. | | Windows 2000 fit on a CD for the install. | | Current Windows 10 installers won't even fit on a single layer | DVD anymore, and forget doing the install with a FAT32 USB | stick (some older UEFIs won't handle exFAT yet). | | The fastest computer I've ever used, perceptually, was a dual | Pentium 3 866, with Rambus, booting XP (probably SP1 or so) on | 15k U320 SCSI disk. The thing was telepathic. | morelisp wrote: | The P3 era was really a golden age. Clock speeds were still | rapidly doubling, you could get SMP but most people didn't so | everything had to optimize single-threaded perf, and likewise | "normal" memory spanned 32MB to 512MB so you could really | keep multiple programs' full working sets ready at once. | water9 wrote: | I would've said P4 era with hyperthreading opening the door | to multi-core programming paradigms. Clock speeds mostly | capped around 5ghz since that era | jorvi wrote: | I'd rather call that the Athlon era. P4's ran like | (literal) hot garbage, Athlon's absolutely crushed them. | Affric wrote: | Athlon was amazing. | cmrdporcupine wrote: | Not my recollection, TBH. Yes, my VIC-20 or C64 turned on to | immediate usability, but it had no spinning media or real | operating system. My Atari ST took quite a few seconds to spin | the floppy and dump to desktop. My next computer in the early | 90s, a 486 50 running Linux I think would seem interminably | slow to me now; Linux boot was faster than DOS/Win3.1 but still | we're talking a big chunk of time. | | Honestly, things are much faster now than they used to be. | | Plus I can shut my laptop lid, use basically no power, and come | back to my session as-is almost instantly. That's new and way | better than the 80s and 90s. Then you either had to leave the | machine on or suffer slow cold boots. | Symbiote wrote: | RISC OS, the operating system that ran on the first few | generations of ARM CPUs in the 1980s and early 1990s, was | stored on ROM chips. It booted in a few seconds, to a real OS | with a GUI etc. | | https://youtu.be/5M6OIOIND-0?t=1278 -- I think about 12 | seconds, or which 3-4 is waiting for two hard drives to spin | up. | bluGill wrote: | Which is great and fast - until you want/need to upgrade | the OS. Security hole, too bad, that is baked into ROM and | can't be fixed... | Symbiote wrote: | RISC OS could selectively replace parts of the ROM (in | RAM) with new code/data, for upgrades, new device drivers | and so on. | | (I think some viruses loaded themselves with this | mechanism. And virus checkers.) | | https://www.riscosopen.org/wiki/documentation/show/File%2 | 0fo... | bluGill wrote: | Sure, but everytime you need to do that boot time goes | down and so what was the point? | Symbiote wrote: | In practise I don't remember this being a big deal. At | some point I remember helping my dad upgrade us from RISC | OS 3.something to 3.11, by replacing the ROM chips, but | patches to the OS loaded into RAM were unusual. | | The OS in ROM was 2MiB, and looking at some module files | intended for potential loading at boot time I have in an | emulator, they are around 5-40kiB. | | The computers typically had 2 or 4MiB RAM, so there isn't | space to replace a significant amount of the OS anyway. | (1MiB or 8MiB was possible, but unusual.) | cmrdporcupine wrote: | Atari ST also booted from ROM. But it also expected a | floppy disk to be in the drive, to check for auto boot | programs, etc. So that slowed the boot. If there was no | floppy, it would hang for a while waiting for one, even. | Poor choice. | Symbiote wrote: | In RISC OS that was optional. There was a setting[1] in | NVRAM which set whether or not to look for a boot device, | and what that boot device was (floppy disc, hard disc, | network). | | I don't remember what happened if you configured it to | look for extra boot files on a floppy disc, but the drive | was empty. I _think_ it would give up very quickly (1-2 | seconds), as it was a normal way to load a program on the | earlier BBC computers -- insert the program disc, which | would be bootable, and press the key combination | (Shift+Break) to reset. | | "Podules" (expansion cards) could also map extra modules | into the OS from their own ROM, usually the required | device drivers for the card. | | [1] https://www.riscosopen.org/wiki/documentation/show/*C | onfigur... | jameshart wrote: | On those old eight bits it wasn't immediate either. You had | to wait for the memory to all get zeroed out and for the CRT | capacitors to charge. | huy77 wrote: | It's not Steve. It's the engineers who care about saving lives. I | have tried to pitch the idea of saving lives to different people. | Many of them think it's nonsense to care about other people | business. | Krssst wrote: | If this is valid, how about the countless animations everywhere | in UIs today that waste time for no other reason than looking | pretty the first hundred times? The application switcher on a | phone I use has a switch time of 0.5s-1s with animations, | practically instant without. | jdiff wrote: | There's real UX benefit to it is why. Things instantly changing | to entirely different layouts takes time to process visually, | if things lerp to their new positions then that processing time | is cut down to the length of the animation, which are usually | around a quarter of a second, not half or a whole. It might get | in the way of speedrunners and power users, feel free to | disable them, but you're not the target audience. It's the | average user who doesn't have every UI nook and cranny burned | into muscle memory. | modeless wrote: | It's a nice theory but it only works if the animations are | smooth and designed to improve understandability. The vast | majority of UI animations are pure visual flourishes that | take twice as long as they should and don't make any kind of | sense spatially or physically or improve the user's | understanding of what's happening at all. There's a lot of | cargo cult UI design out there. | | And what's worse is that most of the animations either don't | start at the initial state of the UI or finish at the final | state, or perform so badly that they hardly show any frames | in between, so you have the worst of both worlds: abrupt | jerky transitions _and_ wasted time. | | UI transitions that make spatial sense, are fast enough, are | fluid, and don't slow down typical use of the UI are rare | unicorns. | jdiff wrote: | I unfortunately 100% agree. While an amount of whimsy | should be everywhere, animation shouldn't be used as just | eye candy. Like every other aspect of UI design, it has to | be used with purpose and care. And yeah, that's way rarer | than it should be. | yomlica8 wrote: | Funny. I've had people hovering over my shoulder comment how | my PC is so much faster than theirs when it was actually an | RDP session to another PC, which seems to disable almost all | window animations by default. | lucky_cloud wrote: | A lot of software also puts in some kind of input delay/rate | limiting for no apparent reason. | | Video game console system UIs and some game menus seem to be | really bad about this for some reason. | Too wrote: | Cheap phones have terrible frame rate so they have to make the | animations long to appear smooth. | | Imagine short animation in 200ms at 25fps only gives you 5 | frames. It's going to look janky and tacky. Make it 1000ms and | it looks smooth and nice, except hopeless to use. | | (Unpopular?) solution: get an iphone. Their app switcher works | as fast as your finger moves, with no problem of delivering | consistent 60fps. | sedatk wrote: | Not all animations are useless. Actually, any useless animation | has no place in the UI. | | - Some animations can be overlapped with time-taking tasks to | keep user engaged but waiting at the same time. I think iOS | does that when switching to an app that was swapped out to the | disk. Loading takes time, so the animation compensates for some | of the delay while the app's resuming. If there was no | animation, the user could think that they didn't perform the | action correctly, and might be inclined to repeat it, causing | frustration. | | - Some animations are necessary to orient the user in UI flow. | For example, the minimization animation moves the window to the | icon that user needs to click in order to restore the app. The | animation also makes user differentiate between close and | minimize operations. | | - Some animations are necessary to give user proper feedback | while keeping the responsiveness. One example would be the | spring animation you get at the end of a list when scrolling | using a touch screen. If there was no spring animation there, | user would have no way to know that if that was the end of the | list, or the touch screen stopped working. | yreg wrote: | If you are on iPhone, you can switch | | Settings -> Accessibility -> Motion -> Reduce Motion | | The Android a11y menu probably has something similar. Try it | out and see if you like it more. | msephton wrote: | You can do it in a per-app basis. I turn it off globally and | then turn it back on for Home screen, Books, and a couple of | other apps. | jeffbee wrote: | Windows 11 takes about 12 minutes to boot from an HDD. Imagine | trying to boot it from an FDD. | | Installing Windows 11 and then waiting for all the updates to | install on a HDD takes about 8 days. | hosteur wrote: | Wow. That is outrageous. | jeffbee wrote: | I only know this because I needed to use a utility from Asus | to update the Intel ME, and it only runs under Windows. I | naively assumed it would not be that much trouble to throw a | hard disk that was laying around into that PC and install | Windows thereupon. | Knee_Pain wrote: | [dead] | gsich wrote: | Also false. | wsc981 wrote: | I fucked up the partitions on my 2017 iMac with Fusion drive a | short while ago trying to create a dual boot system and even | since my Mac was slow. | | I think from beginning of start-up to a somewhat usable system | was maybe 5 minutes? Quite long either way. | | But just last weekend got sick of the slowness and found | there's a 'diskutil resetFusion' [0] command that restores the | partitions to the default. So I ran this command, reinstalled | the OS and now my iMac is pretty speedy again. Not great mind | you, but way better then before. | | Lesson learned: dual boot on a Fusion drive is a bad idea. | | --- | | [0]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207584 | objektif wrote: | This cannot be true. | alephxyz wrote: | I have a W10 install on a 7200rpm HDD and I believe it. | justsomehnguy wrote: | Can confirm the boot time with Win10 on HDD. Can't argue | about updates, took about a couple of hours, def. not days. | toast0 wrote: | I'm kind of surprised Windows 11 allows you to install to or | run from something that isn't an SSD. Windows 7 ran just fine | on spinners, but Windows 10 is pretty bad; I'm not surprised | Windows 11 is worse, but they really should just disallow it. | soupfordummies wrote: | Maybe they shouldn't have such resource-creep that REQUIRES | an SSD. Maybe they WOULDN'T if there weren't mountains of | bloatware and telemetry bs. | toast0 wrote: | I mean, that would be great; but if nobody is holding the | line on resource-creep, as is obviously the case, and | nobody is testing if releases are acceptable on HDDs, as is | obviously the case, they should just change the published | requirements to reflect reality. | wtallis wrote: | > they should just change the published requirements to | reflect reality. | | Marketing won't let them so long as it would piss off PC | OEMs that still ship crappy systems and want to use the | Windows logo. | toast0 wrote: | Shouldn't be a hard sell for OEMs; official specs are 64 | GB is enough storage for windows 11, and I can get a 128 | GB SSD for $15 retail, whereas the lowest price hard | drive I can find is $25 retail (500 GB, but 3.5"), so if | you're a cheap PC OEM, putting in a crappy, tiny, SSD | saves money. And the only systems without SSDs I saw on | BestBuy were refurbished machines shipping with Windows | 10. | pixl97 wrote: | Why shouldn't they? People don't buy operating systems to | be slimmed down... | | If you got a computer and it didn't come with all the | needed drivers and a web browser along with most of the | functionality needed to print, you'd most likely wonder | what decade it came from. All that stuff I listed, without | the telemetry is still going to run like dog shit on a HDD. | | I honestly think users are forgetting just how badly | fragmented hard drives of days yonder used to run, and | those same spinning disks are not any faster these days. | Cutting down the OS to barely do anything still took more | time than the complete boot cycle of my current computer up | to a browser on an SSD. | toast0 wrote: | Yeah, hard drives are never going to be great (although | 15k rpm drives aren't too bad), but IMHO, the real thing | that causes perf to be awful is that windows 10 (and I | assume 11 has gotten worse) can't seem to ever stop | writing to the disk. Those writes seem to interrupt reads | enough that you never can get good sustained read speeds, | so loading anything is painful. | | I'm not going to setup a system to test, because it's too | painful, but I'm now idly wondering if you could set the | checkbox on a hard drive for "Turn off Windows write- | cache buffer flushing on the device", and if that would | help. Doing a aggregated write of a couple MB once a | minute would probably work better than doing a few KB | every second. Of course, at great risk of data loss, but | YOLO. (a smidge of research seems to indicate this is for | asking the device to pretty-please flush its internal | write cache, so that might help a bit, but probably not | very much; maybe there's a knob somewhere to tune the | system file cache) | water9 wrote: | They must have a lot of "Telemetry" to collect on you. | mixmastamyk wrote: | I thought telemetry was supposed to improve the experience. | Not make it worse? | JohnClark1337 wrote: | [dead] | lowercased wrote: | It improves "the" experience; not "your" experience. ;) | biogene wrote: | Not seeing those boot times, but I rarely reboot. I usually | reboot my W10 box once every few months or so. Our IT | department commissions our Windows PCs in about an hour. | Something seems very very wrong here, but I'm not an IT expert. | pixl97 wrote: | If you're not rebooting your W10 box every month, then every | time you do reboot you're doing windows updates. | biogene wrote: | True, but our IT only lets important/critical updates | through, so its not really a big burden. | JohnFen wrote: | > Windows 11 takes about 12 minutes to boot from an HDD. | | Mine doesn't. It takes 3-4 minutes (which can easily feel like | an hour). | hospitalJail wrote: | Try to remove Windows/Microsoft from your life, Microsoft no | longer is decent. | | We need to migrate to Linux. | 1023bytes wrote: | Come on now, HDDs aren't that bad. | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpNagBwWlNk | jeffbee wrote: | Well that is not at all what happens on my machine, which is | a Core i9 13900K with 128GiB of memory. It just grinds and | grinds and grinds for ages. | omnibrain wrote: | Why do you use a HDD? Of course, I ask in jest, but I'm | also a bit curious. | jeffbee wrote: | I have a very excellent SSD which I removed from that | system because I am certain that the Windows installer | would fuck it up, and I did not want the hassle of trying | to fix it. So I pulled it out of the box to keep it from | harm, and the only media I had at hand at that moment was | a WD SATA HDD. I thought it would be slow, not kill-me- | now slow. | | I do not "use an HDD" of course. It was improvisational. | deathanatos wrote: | The same reason anyone has always used a HDD? ... they're | dirt cheap, compared to SSDs. | | I'd consider hybrid being the best cost option, with a | small SSD backing frequently used data, like the OS. But | there's more complexity in that setup. I'm also a Linux | user, and boot times don't bother me. | pixl97 wrote: | Dirt cheap in which measure? | | I was at Microcenter and some 1TB (rather questionable) | NVMe drivers were $30 on special. Going to be difficult | to get cheaper than that. | | Now, lets turn your equation around. What is the cost per | IOPS of your HDD versus SSD? HDDs start to get expensive | very fast in that measure. | deathanatos wrote: | In terms of $/B. | | Yes, HDDs are slower than SSDs. If that axis matters to | you, you'd use an SSD, particularly NVMe. (Which is sort | of implied by the hybrid setup I suggest.) If storage | capacity matters, HDDs. You can see this reflected in | market prices, though it does look like SSDs are | surprisingly cheap these days, comparatively. | Historically this has not been the case. (I wonder if | economies of scale are now working against HDDs suddenly, | or what? There's no reason for them to cost the same or | more than an SSD -- the market would collapse. Although I | swear market pricing for many components hasn't made a | lot of sense, recently... i.e., RAM has seemed | horrendously expensive.) | toast0 wrote: | There's some sort of big SSD price drop in the past 3 | months. I dunno what that's about, but I did upgrade a | machine, so that's nice. | | There does definitely seem to be a pricing mechanic in | that hard drives never really scaled down in minimum unit | cost; the basic parts of a hard drive still cost real | money, so if you can do 2TB per platter, and a top of the | line drive has 10 platters, a single platter 2TB drive | costs a lot more than 10% of the top of the line drive. | OTOH, flash controllers aren't that expensive and/or the | cost of the controller scales with the capacity, so SSD | prices tend to be more linear with capacity. | | If you need a lot of space, $/B means a lot, but if you | just need an ample amount of space, $/device is more | important, and SSD drives have hit the point where an | ample amount of space is available for less than any hard | drive. | xboxnolifes wrote: | > they're dirt cheap, compared to SSDs. | | If you need very large (4TB+ drives) maybe, but 1-2TB | SSDs are so cheap nowadays. 2TB SSDs today are cheaper | than 2TB HHDs from 10 years ago, and the price | discrepancy is quite narrow unless you're looking at 4TB+ | drives. | | I don't even bother looking at HHDs for my own computers | anymore unless I need bulk storage for videos or | something. | XTHK wrote: | The most efficient cost option is to have one cheap SSD | for booting and a handful of apps that need the speed and | then using a HDD for storage. Been that way for 10+ years | deathanatos wrote: | ... that video really doesn't sell Windows very well. My | Linux laptop boots ~40s faster. | judge2020 wrote: | The slowness you see with NVME isn't in boot anymore - | instead it's in BIOS. As memory times get faster, it takes | longer for the motherboard to train to hit those XMP targets, | especially with memory still super far away from the CPU. For | me, rebooting has ~20 seconds of staring at a blank screen | with the Motherboard doing memory training/initialization on | 6000 MHz ram. | divbzero wrote: | This is good bullshit because it's close to the truth. Not quite | a dozen lives but order of magnitude right: | (50,000,000 seconds saved per day) / (60 seconds / minute) / | (525,600 minutes / year) [?] 1.6 years saved per day (1.6 | years saved per day) x (365 days / year) [?] 580 years saved per | year | gorpomon wrote: | I like arguments like this because it's a reminder that details | matter. I clearly see them as the manipulation they are, but I do | like them nonetheless. | | I remember watching a story about asylum seekers who had to use | Skype to dial in to get an appointment. At one point, one of them | says to the camera "I often dream about the call music." I would | be surprised if the call music isn't (at this point at least) | configurable in some way, but it's still humbling to realize that | a minor thing like a loader or sound file can represent the | entire product to someone at a very stressful time in their life. | leo150 wrote: | I recommend reading "Revolution in the valley" by Andy Hertzfeld, | who is also the author of this story. The book is a compilation | of all stories from folklore.org including more interesting | details about development of the Macintosh. | npalli wrote: | Steve Jobs would always make up stuff ("reality distortion | field") to motivate and push people. One of his famous stories | that I found very funny -- | | _According to Mike Slade, he was working at Microsoft around | 1990, and Jobs was trying to recruit him to NeXT. (Bear in mind | that Microsoft was only a few years from launching its mega-hit | Windows 95, while NeXT was struggling to sell computers.) | | During a conversation, Jobs told Slade he would find his talents | wasted in Seattle. In contrast, Jobs called Silicon Valley a hub | of excitement and activity where Slade could blossom. | | Jobs then launched into a spontaneous, impassioned speech. He | described Palo Alto, California, as a "special place" and likened | it to Florence during the Italian Renaissance. There was so much | talent in the area, Jobs said, that you could walk down the | street and bump into a scholar one moment, an astronaut the next. | | Jobs' off-the-cuff description of the place bowled over Slade. It | was a twist on Jobs' famous pitch to Pepsi CEO John Sculley. | (Jobs asked whether Sculley wanted to sell sugar water his whole | life or join Apple and change the world.) | | After the talk, Slade agreed to pack up his stuff and move to | Palo Alto. | | Jump forward a year, and Slade and his wife were eating in Il | Fornaio, an Italian chain restaurant with a location on | University Avenue in Palo Alto. | | "We were sitting there, in early '91, and I'm reading the menu," | Slade recalled. "And on the back of the menu at Il Fornaio it | says, 'Palo Alto is like Florence in the Renaissance...' And it | goes through the whole spiel! The fucking guy sold me a line from | the menu! From a chain restaurant!! Bad ad copy from Il Fornaio, | which was his favorite restaurant, right? Such a shameless | bullshitter!"_ | | https://www.cultofmac.com/573753/how-jobs-poached-a-microsof... | pokstad wrote: | This is my new favorite Jobs story. | racl101 wrote: | He sounds like a sociopath. I could believe him gaslighting | Wozniak out of the money he should've paid him for the Atari | gig. | ryandrake wrote: | Seems kind of apocryphal. You mean to tell me a smart | professional engineer working at one of the biggest and most | prestigious (at the time) companies of the world is going to | quit that job, uproot his life, and move to an entirely | different state, just from a single "Trust me, Bro, it's | awesome" endorsement from a potential employer? I'd have wanted | to at least fly down there, look at a few apartments, visit the | office, and so on, before making that kind of commitment. It | makes a cool story, but there must have been more to it. | pixl97 wrote: | Eh, at least this short story did not say that. What it | stated is the 'hook' line that got him was pulled from a | menu. Not that this guy didn't at least to go Palo Alto first | and make sure it wasn't a total shithole. | adrianmonk wrote: | Steve Jobs, whatever else you want to say about him, had | charisma. It's a big part of why he was successful. So that's | kind of the point. He had an ability to take a message like | "trust me bro, it's awesome" and say it in a way that it | would resonate, and that ability _was_ most of the secret | sauce of being Steve Jobs. | yongjik wrote: | Man, Steve Jobs' Palo Alto must have been a truly special | place. The only memorable thing I encountered in Palo Alto's | street (while working there a few years ago) was the | overwhelming stench of urine in the underpass beneath the | Caltrain Station. | shortrounddev2 wrote: | He Keyser Soze'd him | DonHopkins wrote: | I would have moved there just for Chef Cho's potstickers! | | https://www.paloaltoonline.com/blogs/p/2018/12/04/after-39-y... | | https://kellanskitchen.com/menu/chos-the-end-of-an-era/ | | https://www.masterstech-home.com/the_kitchen/recipes/Interna... | DoneWithAllThat wrote: | It's a funny story, but... yeah, the early 90s was a special | time in Silicon Valley. It was THE center of the computing | world. And you really did just randomly bump into amazing | people at Fry's or restaurants or bars or whatever. I don't | think younger people understand how much around them today, | when it comes to technology, can trace its roots to 90s South | Bay and Peninsula. | shortrounddev2 wrote: | I object to the idea that San Francisco, with its yuppie tech | culture, was truly comparable to Florence in the Renaissance. | The Renaissance produced works of culture and art in addition | to the technological advances. In that regard, Seattle | produced the best music of the decade and would be an equal | contender to the title. | pengaru wrote: | > Bad ad copy from Il Fornaio, which was his favorite | restaurant, right? | | Funny story, but I find it hard to believe Il Fornaio, with its | mediocre Italian fare, was Jobs' favorite restaurant. | | This is the restaurant we'd go to when all other options were | booked or it was too late to drive further. | elwell wrote: | Do they sell fruit? | reidjs wrote: | Just because he is great at business doesn't mean he has | great taste in Italian restaurants | pengaru wrote: | I'd actually argue there's more evidence of Jobs having | good taste in general than being good at business. | thatfrenchguy wrote: | It's really funny when you think about how underwhelming Palo | Alto is too. | [deleted] | jonny_eh wrote: | Oren's Hummus is pretty good -\\_(tsu)_/- | wmf wrote: | Radiohead even wrote a song about it. | drivers99 wrote: | I was hoping it would explain what they did to speed it up. | tpmx wrote: | I wonder what he would have said about the 20 minutes when you | can't use the computer and the 1+ GB download it takes to update | a state-of-the-art mac from macOS 13.5 to 13.5.1 that has one (1) | bug fix ("macOS Ventura 13.5.1 fixes an issue in System Settings | that prevents location permissions from appearing.") | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37206660 | | I miss having Steve running Apple. | throitallaway wrote: | Coming from the patching experience on various Linux distros | (and even Windows), I really want to know what Apple is doing | under the hood with macOS updates. Their point updates are | multiple gigabytes and often take 20-40 minutes to install. My | Arch system updates itself in a couple minutes (even if I | haven't updated for a month) and there's no "unusable" phase of | the upgrade process, other than a normal reboot for kernel | updates. | [deleted] | NobodyNada wrote: | A few years ago, they moved the OS to a "sealed system | volume" -- basically, the entire OS is stored on an immutable | disk image, signed and verified with a Merkle-tree sort of | structure. This has a few advantages: malware cannot modify | the OS, you can't brick your system by accidentally deleting | OS files, updates are far more robust (they don't have to | change files on your root filesystem), and the OS can be | stored unencrypted meaning you can boot the system without | requiring the user's password first. (And of course, there's | an opt-out if you really want to modify OS files.) | | The big downside is that installing an update means you have | to rebuild and re-sign the entire OS image, which takes | forever. When they first introduced this model, I was | surprised at this: I expected they could generate the new OS | image in the background, _while you're still using the | computer_ , then just swap over to the new image with a | single reboot, instead of requiring a ton of downtime. I | think they might finally be doing this with macOS 14/iOS 16 | -- I've been running the betas for both and noticed | restarting to install updates has become far, far faster -- | like maybe a minute or two. | tpmx wrote: | _I've been running the betas for both and noticed | restarting to install updates has become far, far faster -- | like maybe a minute or two._ | | Nice! (And thanks for the backgrounder. It's the first time | I've seen this explanation on HN.) | diskzero wrote: | I assume he would say the same things I would hear him say in | meetings where the installer team would show him the lastest | versions of the application. A special memory comes from the | time where the installer progress bar starting going in | reverse. The installer and mail teams received a lot of abuse. | It took a special person to stay motivated given all of the | challenges they faced and the feedback they got from SJ. | tpmx wrote: | As a customer (my personal computer/display/phone/etc spend | with Apple over the past 20 years or so: $25k+): I would | prefer having someone in charge who can tell/understand/sense | and say that something is clearly not good enough and then | actually getting it solved. Tim Cook does not strike me as | that kind of guy. | | The abuse isn't required though. | tpmx wrote: | (These extremely slow updates thing has been going on for | many years now. So many lifetimes wasted.) | didip wrote: | Just load an addicting easy game during boot process. Then users | won't even notice :) | msephton wrote: | Namco had the patent on that. | sbuk wrote: | Games on the Commodore 64 started doing that in the early 80s. | Loading from the cassette could take ages, so the devs would | put in something like space invaders or missile command to | entertain while the user waits for the main event. | sedatk wrote: | When our website was down due to maintenance, we used to run | JSTetris on the error page, so people would stay on the page, | and they would get redirected to the web site as soon as the | maintenance was over. | | Some people even complained that they shouldn't be redirected | automatically because they'd lost their progress :) | JJMcJ wrote: | I certainly wish Windows would do something about these endless | boot and even worse shutdown times. | | Even worse, I want to go home, not wait 30 minutes for updates to | install. | Invictus0 wrote: | I suppose this makes TV advertisers worse than Hitler | throitallaway wrote: | Correct. | huy77 wrote: | Not if the ads targeting wrong person. | varjag wrote: | This is also a great argument for power saving. Shave a Watt or | two of consumption from your mass market device or application, | and suddenly you've saved hundreds of Megawatt-hours over the | years. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-08-21 23:00 UTC)